by Kalman Nadia
What do you think of the class system?
Do you think Kat’s going to be all right? Why? What are your reasons? Stalina just found that detox program on the Internet, you know, she and my dad. Do you still think it’ll be okay?
Have you had a lot of girlfriends?
Was she really great, then?
Aren’t you going to devote any of your career to creating potable water?
Aren’t we living in a police state?
Do you think I should take the job in Washington Heights? It would mean living here one more year, so I don’t know if it’s worth it. Do you think it’s worth it?
What do you think of Joe Lieberman? Of Air America Radio? Of Gandhi? Of Rumi?
One night, Yana came not with questions but with explanations: She had been drinking because it was a friend’s birthday party, a really good friend’s, Lisa’s, and Lisa was going to teach English at this school in a fishing village in Mexico. The school was called the American School, but it wasn’t an American school, really, that part was bogus, but Lisa was going because she’d grown up there. That was the kind of the thing Yana had always wanted to do, but she didn’t know Spanish, and she was happy for Lisa, but she would miss her, it was hard to find people who were real. So they’d had vodka, which she didn’t like, but she guessed she’d been trying to remind herself that she had roots, too, just not among the fishes, fishers, fishermen. She held up her hand for a high-five. You know how people said you got beer goggles? Vodka goggles were much worse, believe her.
Pratik, who had never had alcohol, nodded. He wasn’t sure of all her slang but he thought he knew the meaning. Yana spun on his office chair, trying to grab the Columbia mug on his desk with every turn. He pulled the chair back and held it until it stopped trying to move. Bending his head to a proper 45 degree angle, like a film actor, he kissed her.
Milla
Malcolm and Milla honeymooned in California, driving from town to town filled with girls who looked like cruder versions of Julie. Milla woke Malcolm up for sex every morning. Sex was an acquired taste. Julie had made her acquire lesbianism, and Malcolm would help her un-acquire it. Back in New York, where the women wore more clothing, it would be even easier.
Her body felt glazed. It was so hot. She bought a woman’s magazine featuring an article on twenty ways to make his toes curl, did four ways a day. She called Yana and talked about how much she’d grown up over the past few weeks, how mature and centered she felt. Yana told her about Katya. No one had told her at the wedding, why?
On their last night in California, Malcolm drove them down a curving road, decelerating and accelerating with each turn. “What if we just moved here?” he said.
“Here?” She braced herself against the window frame.
He put a hand on her shorts. “You wouldn’t get as many colds.”
“I didn’t know you liked it so much.”
“It’s so free — my parents aren’t here, your parents aren’t here.”
She didn’t want to be so far from Yana. “Are there jobs?”
“Listen to my girl: ‘Are there jobs?’ You wouldn’t have to worry about that. I’d get a job. I’d play piano in some roadhouse, or do carpentry.”
A few days later, having spoken with his mother for an hour and twenty minutes, Malcolm explained that if they moved into his parents’ apartment, they could save up money to eventually buy their own house, rather than dropping it into a sinkhole of rent. Perhaps it was his family origins, Malcolm said, but there was something about land-ownership that called to him. His great-grandparents had owned buildings all over the city.
Jean and Bobby met them at the airport. Malcolm and Milla’s room — the former maid’s room — had been painted in Antique Rose. That didn’t threaten Malcolm’s masculinity, did it? “Do you love balloon shades? We tried to get a bigger bed, but it just didn’t fit, so your bed is a little short, is that awful?”
“No, that’s fine,” Milla said. “I usually —” She stopped herself; it seemed too personal, but she should have known better, because now Mrs. Strauss was going to get it out of her.
“You usually what?”
Did she have time to make something up? No, it was no good. “I usually sleep curled up, around Malcolm.”
“Hmm.”
While they’d been away, the Strausses had gotten a new car. “It’s German, so I feel awful,” Jean said. “Milla, you never told me whether you love balloon shades.”
Malcolm gazed out the window, listening to headphones. Milla said, “I think they’re great.”
“You mean you think they’re fine. See, Bobby, we shouldn’t have gotten them for the kids’ room.”
Bobby glanced back at Milla. She wondered whether the collar of her polo shirt was still clean. “Taste is a muscle,” he said.
Lev
It seems there may be a war, but it won’t derail us. Neither Osip nor Yana could smell the smell, but that was because they sat on the couch and not in my chair. I told them that the war didn’t matter, because no one would be coming here; only some of us, and not us, would be going there.
Yana
Pratik was like a first-time chess player: all of his moves were a surprise to his more experienced opponent, that is, Yana. Sometimes that worked in his favor, sometimes not. He kissed her elbow, stuck his finger in her bellybutton. “Wow,” he said, as she held his hands above his head. Anything she did, he took as a sign of her odalisque-like prowess.
They met every night at eleven, even if they could still hear gunshots coming from the television. Yana usually came to Pratik’s room, but if he got impatient, he would come to hers, coyly peering around her doorframe as if it were a tree trunk.
“I want to say your name in the Russian manner,” Pratik said.
Yana burrowed into his quilted blanket. She tried to say it with a Russian accent, but it still came out “Yah — Nah,” which was also a summary of her ex-boyfriends’ feelings. They had thought that maybe they could love her, but it turned out…nah. It had been like that right up to the fat, uxoriously married, Difference Feminist graduate school professor who’d briefly found her “refreshing.”
“Yah-Nah,” Pratik said. She pulled the blanket up to her nose.
“You don’t like it?” He turned to face her and crossed his legs in their fuchsia pajama bottoms.
“It just sounds kind of stupid. Milla, Katya, those are so nice, I don’t know why Stalina messed up mine.”
“Guess what your Bengali name would be.”
“No.” Yana’s feet were cold and she stuck them under his legs.
“You would be Yamha, the dove.”
“Yeah, like I really have a dove personality.”
He raised a bony finger to make some point, but she put her hand, and then her mouth, laughing, over his.
Katya
Katya lay on the couch, trying to read a St. Petersburg guidebook she’d found upstairs. The letters breathed in and out, they blurred themselves, they scuttled into new arrangements. Normal withdrawal, her mother said, so fake-cheery all the time. She wouldn’t have to act so fake for much longer.
Russia was the place. How had she not realized it before? In Russia, Katya would tell people her Brezhnev voice was something all Americans did sometimes, to make fun of Communism. In Russia, they had enough problems of their own, no one looked at you except to mug you, or sell you into prostitution, and Katya was a candidate for neither, so no one would care.
Yana said from the loveseat, on which she and Pratik were sitting a careful inch apart, “Do you want to hear something great?”
Katya stared at a photograph of a golden onion dome and wished herself into its warmth. If Yana wanted to help her, she should get her a blanket and some tea, and some pills. If Yana even had a connection, which she probably didn’t.
“This’ll totally put your addiction slash identity issues into perspective.” Yana spoke with too many syllables stacked on one another, like dishes clanking together.
Yana began reading aloud from an article about a woman who loved barley. She loved to eat it, and she loved to farm it. She was very satisfied by it. She wanted her people to eat a lot more barley, to start barley farms of their own. It sounded like the barley woman had some addiction slash identity issues of her own, but Katya gathered, from the way Yana was pronouncing words like fuerte, that she was meant to be impressed.
Katya would sell her mother’s figurines to get a plane ticket. It wasn’t anything worse than what she’d already done; it was better, her family could hate her afterwards, and relax. They would regret they hadn’t just let her be.
“‘Asked about her romantic life, Yadira gives another one of her hearty belly laughs. Barley, she says, is much less trouble than a novio. Men can wait.’ Isn’t she such a role model?” Yana said, threading the fingers of her free hand through Pratik’s.
Katya raised her head. “Look at me. Do I look like I need help keeping guys away?”
Yana looked, blinked, began reading again. “‘When the hombres de Kellogg finally made good on their threat to burn down Yadira’s house, she constructed a makeshift shelter in the woods. Now, women of the village use the shelter as a refuge, and, from time to time, a beauty salon.’ See?”
Katya thought: If you follow me to the airport, I’ll get myself killed right there. She’d make a joke about a bomb.
Milla
As usual, Milla looked at herself in the mirror on the ceiling of the Strausses’ elevator. Her face, yellow and angular in the dim light, peered back from inside a black hood. Malcolm had chosen her coat — he had said it made her look Russian, in a good way. She failed again to look as though she lived where she lived.
Opening the door, she heard Jean laughing, as Jean laughed only at Malcolm’s jokes. “Oh, oh, oh,” Jean said, from the ottoman, and stopped when she saw Milla.
“Honey, you’re home,” Malcolm said, starting Jean up again. If Jean hadn’t been there, Milla would have swooped down for a kiss.
“It’s early, isn’t it?” Jean said.
“No, I usually finish at, like, 5:30, 5:45.” Milla began sweating inside her hood.
Jean opened her mouth wide. “I’m shocked.”
“Oh,” Milla said, in what she hoped what was a polite, interested tone. She put her bag on the floor and started unbuttoning her coat.
“When I started out, I worked until ten, eleven, midnight. You do what you have to when you’re supporting a family.”
“I do —” Milla began. Malcolm held his palm sideways, like a Frisbee, and moved it down. That meant she should ease off, she already sounded angry, and didn’t she know how that stressed him out?
Milla yanked off her hood. “I actually brought some work home.”
“Oh, well,” Jean said. “Malcolm, do you want a vitamin?”
“What do I need a vitamin for?” Malcolm frowned and flexed his arm.
“This is a very special vitamin. Your uncle Jeffy swears by it. And he’s a homo.”
“So I think I’ll go work,” Milla said. She went into their bedroom and lay on their doll’s bed and wrote a letter to Baba Byata. “Malcolm’s parents feed me very well. Last night, I had dumplings, a kind of Chinese pielmenyi, and a lot of carrots.” Baba Byata was a big believer in carrots. What else could she write? “I told Malcolm’s parents you said they were very culturniye people, and they were really flattered.” Milla had done nothing of the kind. (“Culturniye, what?” she’d imagined Jean saying.)
She looked at herself in the green mirror that hung by the bed. “We can’t, I’m a married woman now,” she mouthed to a disappointed imaginary Julie.
She called Yana, who kept giggling, as someone else laughed in the background.
From outside, she heard Jean greeting Bobby: “Why aren’t you wearing your other scarf?” and then both of them asking Malcolm to play the piano for them, and Malcolm agreeing, “I have to get back to composing in a few minutes, though.” Somehow, Malcolm was able to recreate Barbra Streisand’s rendition of the Shema Yisroel, trills and all. He also, following a lengthy explanation, played them a song he’d written. Tonight, for once, he was not meeting up with friends, and his parents were so happy, so grateful, that they forgot to tell Milla when dinner had arrived. She recognized the smell of burnt broccoli — Chinese again — combed her hair, sat next to Malcolm and was quiet as his parents talked about the divorce of a famous author of thrillers featuring the Israeli Mossad (Milla had never read him? Really?), currently being mishandled by a different firm. Malcolm’s hand played piano on her leg, as it usually did when he felt like fooling around.
After dinner, he said, “I’m sleepy, are you sleepy, Milly?”
“It’s only ten o’clock,” Bobby said. “You told me you’d look at the napkin samples.”
“Bobby, you know what he means,” Jean said. She winked at Milla and Malcolm, which froze them where they stood, hands linked, for a few seconds after Jean had walked away.
In their bedroom, Malcolm said, “So.”
“So.” They sat side by side on the bed.
Malcolm put his arm around her shoulders. “I hope you’re not, like racked with disappointment, that my parents only asked for my opinion on the napkins. I’m totally going to represent both of us when I choose between the little flowers and the medium flowers.”
“I know you’ll be bringing in the rabbi on this one, too.”
“And his minyan, in a minivan.” Malcolm flopped back on the bed. “I feel like my head’s stuffed with all their minutiae. All the songs I worked on today, they’re erased.” He flipped open the Stella Adler Studio catalog he’d gotten a few days earlier. “I should just do voiceovers.”
Milla lay down next to him. “Did you get a chance to look at that apartment in Queens?”
The apartment was too far out, but Malcolm had met a guy named Jelani, who loved all the same music as Malcolm. They’d grabbed lunch and decided: the two of them would start a multiracial rap-rock-funk band. Jelani was a quarter black, Malcolm was Jewish, and they’d find a Latino guy to play drums and, with any kind of luck, some kind of Asian for bass guitar. The last part was a joke. But the point they were trying to make was serious. The name appeared to Malcolm and Jelani halfway through Indian buffet: Multicult. It mocked their grand ambitions of musical unity, at the same time as it broadcasted those ambitions to the world, balls out. He’d been so inspired, he’d written a new song:
All the coral mermaids broke off in my hands,
And the ocean issued its final demands,
And Landra’s gone searching for no-man’s land.
“Wait, Landra?” Milla said.
Instead of answering, Malcolm pulled her on top of him and said romantic things any decent wife would have loved to hear. Her breasts, her hair, her shoulders, her thighs, were all deemed more than satisfactory. He had her stand so they could look at themselves in the mirror, whispered, “We’ll have to get a bigger one.”
Roman
Roman knew some Russian girls, and their thing was to go into Caldor and switch a price tag or two, buy a Sex Dollz tee shirt for seven instead of fifteen dollars. To him, though, there was something anti-Russian in that kind of half-theft.
He was in the book section, where hardly anyone ever went, tucking a GED manual into the back of his jeans, when he spotted Katya Molochnik with her mother.
“Nu, vot,” Mrs. Molochnik held up an orange volume. “Go, You Girl: Eating Healthy, Getting in Shape, and Rocking the World. Okey-dokey?”
Katya shrugged and said something Roman couldn’t make out. She looked better than she had at the wedding — she was pretty again, in a blurry, bleary way, which was also how she seemed to look out at the book, her mother, the world she was supposed to rock.
He wanted to go over, would have, if not for the books and DVDs concealed on his person. Had she ever been to the Ivy, in Darien? he would have asked. A really hot club, you feel like you’re in New York. His aunt Alla had told him that Mrs. Molo
chnik was getting Katya off drugs.
Katya shuffled her feet, looking down. “I was never…” something else Roman couldn’t make out.
Mrs. Molochnik said something about eggs with tomatoes.
“Maybe just sleep,” Katya said.
“Nu, Katyenok, ‘the sun will shine also on our lawn.’” Mrs. Molochnik put her arm around her. Katya shrugged it off.
All at once, Roman was so angry he couldn’t breathe. This girl had what his mother had never had: a whole family to let her live in their house, to worry about what she ate, all that and a bag of chips, and she shrugged it off. All his mother had was him, but she didn’t, really, not until he could bring her to the U.S. and set her up right, and when would that be, idiot? He only had two hundred dollars saved so far. He was supposed to have a house for her by now, a car. At least he knew: that was how a child should treat a parent. Not shrug her off.
He tried to breathe. Chillax. She’s cute, it’s not her fault.
He crouched down farther, pretended to look at the college admissions guides. A guide for insiders, for homosexuals, for top students, for girls, for Latinas, for jocks: all these students were equidistant from him. None of them had his hustle, because none of them needed it. Katya and her mother came to a compromise — Stalina would buy the book, and Katya would try to eat at least one egg. Their voices faded. Roman straightened up and went to the men’s clothing section, hoping for a few packs of boxer shorts to resell to the guys on his crew.
Osip
Stalina had many ideas about how to make Katya better. All of them came to her in dreams, and she poked Osip awake and told him, so that at least one of them would remember. “Osya — castor oil,” “Osya — a class in something practical, “Osya — White Sun of the Desert, best comedy of any country, no?” A week after Katya had moved in, Osip bought a notebook. “Osya — sweaty yoga” — he’d scribble it down and fall back asleep, notebook on chest.