by Kalman Nadia
Mrs. Rabinowitz wiped her mouth, re-applied lipstick, and kissed the napkin. “I’ll start slow, okay? The chuppah is that canopy?” She drew an arch in the air. Couples were coming onto the floor: Milla and Malcolm, their college friends, Mr. Molochnik pretending to drag Mrs. Molochnik by the hair.
“The friends decorate it. For my wedding, my friends hung Snickers bars on it. I said, ‘You know I’m eating these, right?’”
Now Yana was half-sitting at the very edge of a chair with the bridesmaids and a girl who looked almost like her, but not as pretty — Katya, the youngest sister, probably, opposite a sloth skeleton. Yana started to get up, and another one of the bridesmaids patted her arm, said something that made her nod and sit all the way back in her chair and take a drink of wine.
“Any questions? Am I going too fast?” Mrs. Rabinowitz said.
Pratik smiled and shook his head. He did have a question, but it bore no relation to Judaism; at least, he hoped it did not. Why didn’t anyone know how to dance? Even those guests who were in time with the music had only four or five different movements. Pratik had been only a peripheral member of the bhangra dance group at university, but even he knew twenty-six individual steps and motions. “You are being most illuminating.”
“See?” Mrs. Rabinowitz said to her husband, “I’m illuminating.” She leaned closer to Pratik, “Repeat after me: kugel…”
Perhaps he could teach his dance steps to Yana. She would wear a belt of gold coins and a red sari, she’d be sweating — but why not ask her to dance now? He wasn’t his father, shrinking behind doorways of consulates, waiting to be asked. Mr. Molochnik had dragged Mrs. Molochnik out by the hair. Perhaps that was what they liked in this family, a firm, manly approach.
Mrs. Rabinowitz said, “Sour cream, crushed cornflakes, cottage cheese, cinnamon…”
However, in all of the dancing couples, the man was taller than the woman, whereas Pratik was slightly shorter than Yana. Was it just not done here, to have a minor size discrepancy in favor of the woman? An absurd prejudice. Pratik’s own mother was a bit taller than his father, and when they were together, they looked elegant, cosmopolitan. Not that they ever danced.
“I usually serve it with pineapple,” Mrs. Rabinowitz said.
Yana was still at the table, alone with Katya. No one had invited her to dance, probably because her combination of beauty and intelligence was so intimidating. “All right, old boy,” he said to himself, assuming a hearty British accent, like that of the grocer he and his mother had visited in London.
All of us, in times of danger, call forth the songs that make us brave. Those about to be the Most Valiant Heroes of 1971 sang the songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam. Pratik, too, possessed a talisman in lyric form. He allowed his eyes to half close, and imagined Robert Plant rocking, flinging about his curly locks (much like Yana’s), singing of his quest to reach a place “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Just thinking of the song’s ending, the screaming bravado of all those oh’s, gave him the strength to excuse himself from the Rabinowitzes and make his way over to where Yana sat. He needed to think through Jimmy Page’s entire guitar riff before he was able to tap her on the shoulder.
She turned around, and he noticed that some of her mascara had leaked below her eyes. Had she been crying? Did weddings make her sentimental?
He said, “This must be your younger sister, Katya? I am so pleased to meet you.”
Katya’s eyes closed.
Yana mouthed something to him, “Can you believe it?” or “Can you see it?” glanced at Katya again, and then said loudly, “Are you having a good time?”
“It is a phenomenon of a wedding. And you, how do you like it?”
“So far, it’s been more work than my worst student-teaching day, and I don’t know what’s next. At least Katya finally got here, right, Katya?” Katya opened her eyes and nodded. “Have more coffee,” Yana said.
“Is she all right?” Pratik asked.
Yana shrugged. “All right,” Pratik said, and just stood for a moment. “What were you worrying over before?” It was hopeless: how could any of these limp queries possibly lead to dancing?
“What, now?”
“Before I saw you, it looked like you wanted to stand up, and then your friend eased your worry.” Pratik realized he was pretending to pat Yana’s arm as her friend had done. His hand hovered above her warm skin.
“You were watching me?”
“I was watching the room around, the exhibits are interested, interesting.” How he hated whatever it was that made his English abysmal just when he needed it most.
“Okay.” Yana looked back at her plate, which was almost empty. Such a strong, healthy girl, so different from the sticks in his graduate program.
Led Zeppelin had promised: many dreams come true.
“Perhaps after you’ve eaten, you will like to dance?”
Yana shook her head.
He sagged. “No problemo.”
“No, I was just surprised. Sure, if you want to dance, we can dance. I’m not really a dancer.” Pratik bit his lip to prevent himself from saying he already knew that, he had guessed, but he would teach her, for hours if necessary. “I might have to go, like in the middle of the dance, if there’s some emergency.”
“All right,” Pratik said, almost breaking into laughter, wanting to dance right there, a courtship dance from the Bollywood movies of which his father disapproved.
Yana stood: so it was going to happen that very moment. He followed her, eyes on the slim trail of hairs at the back of her neck, until they were in the very center of all the dead beasts.
She stood back, looking at him. The band began playing a fast song, something Latin. Pratik had never danced to this kind of music: perhaps the keyboardist was to blame. He didn’t know — was he supposed to take her in his arms? Would a double kick-clap be apropos?
Before he could decide, Yana said, “I took merengue for my fascist Movement requirement.” She stepped forward, her lips at the level of his eyes. “You step back.”
As she pushed him this way and that, his eyes told her lips that he would always do what she said, even if it meant separating himself from her, and pleaded that she never ask such a thing of him. The dance sped up, and she breathed with her mouth: a smell of fresh fish, beloved by both their cultures, poured forth like a promise.
Katya
Katya may have been out of it but she wasn’t too out of it to know what she saw when she looked at her sister and that Indian guy. The way he looked up at Yana was the way no one would ever look up at Katya unless they were her children, and then it would only be because they were hungry, her children would be hungry, of course. Although it was a fast song, she was not happy like she had been once in a while at raves. Which was a good thing, of course. At least now Katya could drink some champagne. Before, Yana had covered her glass when the waiters came by.
Her father was looking at her. She smiled and twirled her fingers around the sides of her head like “pa-aarty,” but he frowned. She rested her chin on her clasped hands like Audrey Hepburn as a waiter filled her glass. If that didn’t reassure him, nothing would. Who wouldn’t want Audrey Hepburn for a daughter?
Yana pinched her shoulder. She must have fallen asleep again. “You’re up next,” Yana said. “All right?”
“Oh, I feel very restored now,” Katya said, because it was an Audrey Hepburn thing to say, and because she did feel all right. She mounted the stage, almost bumping into the cute, cute! keyboard player. “Let’s go, boys.”
As the music began, Katya saw her mother, standing in a little circle of her own, staring at Katya as if Katya were her Barbie Dream House, her mansion. And when her mother saw that Katya saw, she smiled and began shrugging her shoulders in jerky little motions.
Katya opened her mouth, which still felt sour from the coffee, but it didn’t matter. She sang about having all her sisters with her and pointed her thumbs to the side, just like the Sister Sledge girls did in the video
, only there were no sisters over there.
She sang about everyone getting up and singing, and her mother tugged her father up from his chair, and her mother’s mouth opened to sing. Her mother would do anything the song told her to do.
The next few lines were easier, and the dancing felt more natural, now that people in the audience were dancing, too. Milla came close to the stage, shyly bumping hips with her new husband. Even Baba Byata stood and clapped and nodded. The next line was about a family dose of love, and it was telling her she’d been right to take those pills, and the chorus rolled forth like a pill down a hill. High! High hopes they had — for the future, and their goals in sight.
Katya wanted to say they were more than family, they were ancient, they were powerful — “We are mastodons,” she sang, and pointed, with both hands, at the brown bones.
“Oh, I can’t hear you now.” It was strange: singing those words actually made it hard to hear, as if they had cast a spell. Where were they in the music? She couldn’t really move around anymore: it was as if she’d been transformed into that hateful fourth Sister Sledge sister, the one with short hair who always had to dance in the back. Her stomach felt too light, and the music stopped, even though she hadn’t sung about feathers yet.
People clapped, but not a lot, or maybe she still couldn’t hear very well. She tried to jump off the stage but someone caught and lowered her down. Yana was walking over to her. Yana was a good sister, but a bit of a narc. “Ya-narc,” Katya possibly said aloud, and then turned around and ran away. At least, she told herself to run, but she could still see her shoes, which suggested that maybe she was not.
“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” she heard Yana saying behind her, and then she didn’t hear her anymore. Glancing back, Katya saw that Yana had gotten tangled up in a bunch of their grandmother’s friends. This was her chance for freedom. She’d just begun to get her share. You didn’t always have to go to California. Sometimes you could just step out of the wedding room, and there would be the regular, shut-down museum, familiar whales and polar bears, all doing their own things. It was like California had been in the beginning, restful. The floor was clean and cool. It was calm here — why couldn’t it be calm like this everywhere? Everything in the room was asking her to stay.
Roman
Roman couldn’t believe that Katya Molochnik, whom he’d thought was so cool, had just sung disco. That was almost worse than the fact that she’d obviously been high.
Everyone else at his table of Russians had shaken their shoulders and jutted their necks in time with the disco song. Of course, as soon as Katya Molochnik had left the stage, they were back to business: asking his cousin Leonid what would happen to oil prices if “we” invaded Iraq. You’d think, if Leonid really knew the answer, that he could just point his thumb up or down, and that would be the end of it, but no. Leonid took his glasses off and put them on again, he shook his head, he gazed off into the hopeful future, he talked and talked. The only person besides Roman who wasn’t enraptured by oil prices was a little Polish girl, who kept staring with longing at a table of Americans behind Roman’s left shoulder.
A shorty in a seeski-squeezing shirt asked Roman whether he was a banker, too.
“Construction,” Roman said. The shorty looked away as if he were a drug dealer. “Also, DJ. Romin Tha White Russian.” He had recently spun at a teen night at the Jewish Community Center; maybe she had a younger bother or sister who had been there? No, she said.
“Romin is like Wu-Tang Clan. You know?” She exchanged glances with her friend, and Roman gave up on explaining that, whereas Wu-Tang was about Hong Kong-style martial arts, he was influenced by the ways of the ronin.
Leonid drained his glass and began describing a recent trip to Singapore, a place both crazy and efficient.
If all these Molodoj had such great lives, then why did they need to drink? A different girl, one who was almost the bomb, asked whether Leonid might look over her retirement plan. “I’m Audi,” Roman said, and went in search of a place where a man could smoke.
Yana
Yana checked both bathrooms, the coat closet, the locked gift shop (she wouldn’t put it past Katya to break in there), the Eskimo changing room. She walked up and down the hallways, being calm but purposeful, briefly looking people in the eyes, which was the best way to ward off attackers, she’d learned in self-defense class. It didn’t work very well. Her aunts tried to spray her hair. Pratik asked her to dance again. Dancing. When Katya could be dying, or having sex with someone really inappropriate.
“Yo, yo.” She tried to ignore it, but this voice was attached to a tattooed hand that gripped her arm. It was Roman, the Chaikins’ nephew.
“Your sister, your little —” he held his hands at waist-height, as if describing a five-year-old.
“Where? Gde?”
He led her to a corner room. The lights were off, and at first, all Yana saw was the walrus family: two parents, two children, heteronormative to the max. A smell of vomit — Katya, eyes open, on the floor.
Yana dropped to her knees.
Katya stirred. “Okay,” she said.
“I slap to wake her,” Roman said.
“You slapped her?” Yana said. “What the hell?” Katya lifted her neck. “I thought you were just on pot. What is it? What did you take? Was it E?”
Katya shrugged and almost smirked. Now Yana wanted to slap her, too. “Try to remember, okay? It’s important to remember what you took. Where’s your bag? Let’s go to the bathroom. I hope no one sees us. Can you stand?”
Katya reached her hand past Yana’s shoulder, to Roman.
Pulling Katya up, he said, “You will break yourself like Chinese cup with drugs.”
Who was this potential wife-beater and anti-Asian bigot to lecture her sister? “Thanks. We’re good.” He didn’t seem to understand. Yana took Katya’s hand out of his and tucked it into the crook of her arm.
Stalina
Stalina had a stomachache. Osip made jokes, her mother posited seventeen terrifying diseases in the space of a minute, and the Russian Soul extolled mustard plasters.
It worsened as she walked to the bathroom — a terrible dizzy nausea. Osip’s aunt Anastasia Arkadeyevna blocked her path, but, as usual, just saying her name, in this respectful form, with an enormous smile, gained Stalina free passage. Anastasia Arkadeyevna called banalities after her, and she nodded without turning her head. She wanted badly to lean against the wall, but kept her distance so as not to be tempted. Her hand was damp, and slipped on the metal bathroom door as she pushed it open.
Yana, without her gorgeous scarf, held Katya’s hair back over the sink. Washing her face in the middle of a wedding? Katya stood, and the handkerchief said, “Takae blednay, takae bednay” — so pale, so poor. Those words were close together in Russian, and now she saw why.
“What happened?” she said, jerking Yana’s shoulder, her stomach lurching with the movement.
“She’s okay,” Yana said. “She just felt a little sick.”
Katya said. “I can sing the song again, if you want.”
“She’s okay now,” Yana said. “Mom, she always ends up okay.”
Stalina said, “Why, Katyenok, at your sister’s wedding, a beautiful occasion, a time for the whole family…” Most of her words came from Anastasia Arkadeyevna, but Stalina didn’t know what else to say. There was no point in asking why.
“An innocent mother would ask,” the handkerchief murmured.
“We are leopard seals,” Katya said. Her lips were beige, a color for a couch, not a mouth.
“Is it your classes? Bad grades? Yana, what’s that look you’re giving me?”
“Nothing.” Yana began washing her hands.
“I don’t like that look. Katyenok, I’d be so happy to help you with your math…” Stalina bent over and put her hands on her knees — no time to run into a stall to vomit. Nothing came. Instead, the handkerchief, quoting both Reagan and Stalina’s father: “Doveryay, n
o proveryay,” trust, but verify.
Katya
They were taking her back to the airport, but she was three, she had made a mistake, her father would be traveling with her. She stretched her arms up, but he backed away. She was too old. She hid her face in her hands. She was back in her childhood house, and he was carrying her after all, stooping under the stairs so she wouldn’t hit her head.
She awoke in the middle of the night and her mother was scrabbling through her backpack, robbing her. Katya told her she would give her the money if she just asked, not that she had much, but she had her return ticket. Her mother could sell it, she guessed. Her mother crawled up to the bed and tore up the ticket in front of Katya’s face. It was ungrateful and mean. She needed another pill, but fell asleep before she could find it. Cold water on her face. Was she back at camp? Was she sleeping in the park? It was still dark, and her mother was back. She tried to explain that her mother should let her alone until she calmed down and got another pill. She was still mad about the stealing. Her mother watered her with her mermaid watering can. Katya rolled onto the floor. There was her backpack, unzipped, but no, maybe her pocket? Where were her jeans? She’d told her mother to leave, she’d told her nicely.
Pratik
A week after the wedding, Pratik heard a brass-knuckled knock on his bedroom door and opened it to Yana. She said:
Why did you come here?
What are you studying?
Isn’t industrial engineering just another way for the rich to plant their boots on the necks of the poor?
When were you born?
What do you think of the dowry system?