by Kalman Nadia
“Ideally, I’d like to work to help people, especially in my country, Bangladesh —”
“I know your country is Bangladesh.”
Pratik swiveled his head around. “Quite a few of these mosquitoes about now, perhaps we —”
Osip held up one hand and lumbered over to the bug zapper, flicked it on “high,” and returned to his director’s chair.
“In Bangladesh, your wives will sit at home, they cannot go outside without you?”
“Mrs. Molochnik,” Pratik said into the screen door, “may I help you with dinner?”
“She can’t hear you,” Osip said. “When cooking she talks to herself. Women! They are crazy! It is stupid to let them have school, yes?”
Pratik sat up straighter, huffed. Osip had finally managed to anger him, probably by mentioning multiple wives, which had made Pratik envious of his wealthier relatives and their harems.
“I must study,” Pratik said. The screen door slammed against the outside wall.
By the time Osip finished his third beer, he’d realized that this little pisher probably just had a little pisher crush on his Yana. Who could fault him that? At Pratik’s age, Osip had already had four women, whereas this boy had the aspect of one of those Komsomolsk kids saving himself for a new kind of marriage, the focus of which would be large-machine repair or hydroponics.
Bobby
Bobby Strauss was, as his wife liked to say, a man of simple tastes. Here he sat before the simplest and tastiest taste of all — a Burger Connoisseur hamburger, no ketchup, no nothing — a truly good burger did not need any condiments, he’d explained to Malcolm before they ordered — and suddenly the series of actions required to eat it seemed too complex. He needed NASA’s Command Central, he needed a wire in his ear, like Bush, he needed, well, he needed Jean. Someone besides himself should have heard this most recent of Malcolm’s surprises.
Malcolm had immediately resumed chewing away at his cheeseburger, with pickles, mustard, ketchup, lettuce, two kinds of cheese, mouth half open, like a child.
It fell to Bobby to say, “That’s wonderful,” and then, “She is going to…see it through, isn’t she?”
Malcolm paused in his eating. He couldn’t have forgotten what they were talking about, could he? “Yeah, of course.”
“Good,” Bobby said.
“I wrote a song to it already.”
“A song, well —” Bobby relaxed enough to tear off a bit of lettuce from his salad. They were back in a familiar place. “Is it going on your demo?”
“I’m not sure. I just wrote it a few nights ago, after Milla showed me the test.”
“Oh, the test? Did she take more than one? Did she see a doctor?” Jean was speaking through him; finally, he’d accessed her frequency.
“Just a test.”
“So you don’t really —”
“She’s pregnant, don’t worry about that.” The waitress was filling up their glasses during this proclamation, not that it made Malcolm lower his voice. Neither Malcolm nor his mother cared, really, who heard them. Bobby wondered again what it was like to feel so right about what you said.
He cleared his throat. “So, you’re putting that song on your demo?”
“No, I told you just a second ago.”
“Do you remember the words?” The lettuce was fresh, thank God for that.
“Let me think.” Unhurriedly, Malcolm took another bite of his cheeseburger. “Something like, ‘You are my sun, I am your moon, when all are gone, I’ll still be true.”
Bobby nodded, as if thinking deeply. “It has a certain…” Why had he asked? It was very difficult to respond to Malcolm’s music; Malcolm distrusted compliments, and debated criticisms. Perhaps simple observation would be best. “It’s simple,” Bobby said.
“I was trying to be simple.” Malcolm scratched his jaw.
Bobby had a sudden thought. “When you say ‘sun,’ — is it a boy?”
Malcolm spun a fry in ketchup. “No. We don’t know. Milla doesn’t need to get the test, because she’s so young.”
Feeling strangely competitive, Bobby said, “Your mother was young, too, when she had you. Twenty-five.” He had been thirty-five, and even at that age, which had felt so ancient at the time, he hadn’t been sure he could do it. From the minute Jean had told him, Bobby had felt like a piano had fallen on his head, just as pianos fell on the heads of people in the funnies in his childhood, and the piano had wedged there, and now he had to carry it to work, back, everywhere, every day, and not let on. And now he had to say, “Of course, I was thirty-five.”
“I know.”
“You feel up to it? You feel ready? Do you have anything saved up?”
“No, but you know, babies really aren’t so expensive.”
“Oh, no?” Finally, Bobby felt as if he could eat. He took a bite of his burger and it was still good, even though it had cooled. It had passed another test.
Malcolm said, “Yeah, like, we’re not going to, you know, send it to private nursery school or get it a nanny.”
“So one of you will stay home?” He was saying exactly what Jean would have said, and this would help mitigate her anger over not having been told first.
“I planned it all out already. Like, Milla will take the baby when I’m rehearsing and doing shows, and I’ll take it when she’s at work, and you guys can take it when we go out. You know what it’s like? It’s like, when he grows up —” Bobby noticed but did not comment on the “he” — “I’ll get him an instrument, if he wants to play, but I’m not going to, like, get Jim from the music store to come to his camp and play two different kinds of keyboards so he can pick the one he likes, in front of all his friends, you know?”
“You adore that keyboard.” Jean’s words, but not helpful ones. Stick to facts. “You still have that keyboard. You still use it.” After years of meditation and medication, he got angry so rarely that it took him a moment to realize. The keyboard, he’d always thought, had been a wonderful present. Rather than choose one himself, Bobby had shown respect for his son’s musicianship by having him choose, right on his birthday, which took place at camp, because why wait? It was a music camp, after all, and Malcolm should have the best equipment possible, had been Bobby’s thinking. And now he felt Jean’s voice coming through him most strongly. “So you felt embarrassed, is that it? Poor little rich boy?”
“No, it was fine. It was an okay —” the fact that Malcolm was leaning back, the fact that Malcolm was smiling, the fact that Malcolm was about to teach him something, the fact that Malcolm still hadn’t learned —
Bobby said, “Because why not send Jim away, then? Because why not give it back?”
“Dad —” Malcolm gestured with a half-eaten fry.
“Because it must have been weighing on you, all these years. The chosen unwanted keyboard.”
“It was fine —”
“You can’t do that with a baby.” There. He was done. He looked up to see what Malcolm would do next — storm out? Appease? Fight? Flight?
Malcolm was, at least in this sense, his father’s son. “No, I like the keyboard, I like it.”
Milla
Jean and Bobby had gotten tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof with some friends, and then both they and the friends had gotten incredibly busy. Would Malcolm and Milla like to take advantage? Wouldn’t Milla’s parents want to come along?
At the theater, Milla sat at the edge of their little group, in case she needed to run to bathroom. The girls who played the sisters were beautiful, so she couldn’t look very closely. (She was going to be a mother, after all.) She spent the musical thinking about a recent accounting scandal. Would she, Milla, have had the courage to send a memo comparing a company policy to group masturbation, could she have been an accountant-heroine? She worried about it through three marriages and a pogrom, knowing the answer all along: no. Malcolm would have to be the model of bravery for their child.
On their way to a steakhouse her father had chosen, her mother didn’t say
anything about peasants eating cows, which was the first sign that something was wrong.
“So,” Stalina said, as they came in, ignoring Osip’s attempt to help her out of her coat, “this Fiddler is big education for me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Malcolm said, looking for a place to throw out his gum.
“Oh, yeah.” In her mother’s accent, the phrase sounded entirely different; also, louder. “For example, I know now why American ladies say when we arrive, ‘Look, is shower,’ ‘Look, is toilet.’ Why are they telling me with such big smiles? Are they engineers who built the toilet? No, they think this is first toilet we ever see. They think we came out of shtetl fighting over if horse was mule. We were intelligentsia. We argued over religion and political life, not like here, here people say, ‘Never talk about politics or religion.’”
“That’s true,” Malcolm said, leaning in to match Stalina’s posture. He was taking a class in community journalism.
Milla tried to get her mother to move closer to the bar, so that people could more easily pass by them, but Stalina didn’t notice the people or Milla’s hand on her sleeve. “They think we are only talking spletnya, who marries who. We had bigger fish. Who is in jail? Who is losing her job? Who is expelled from party, who is making protest, who is printing samizdat? You know how we decide to immigrate?”
“Yeah, I mean, I think so,” Milla said.
“Guinness?” Malcolm asked the bartender, who raised his eyebrows in some kind of commiseration.
“To show that we are free people, and not afraid of the worst punishment. And then they take us to supermarket and expect that we will have fainting over food. Five different kinds of apples.” Her voice reached a higher pitch. “I will now give blow job to Jimmy Carter.”
Malcolm looked at Milla. And what’s that for? she wanted to say. Your mom says worse things, just without an accent. She rubbed her mother’s padded shoulder.
“Shto bilo, to bilo, what was, was, but we can still eat, right, Stalinatchka?” her father said. “Maybe you feel better if you eat.” He tried to catch the attention of the woman who assigned tables, by waving at her back. Milla wondered whether she should go try to talk the woman, but didn’t want to leave her mother.
Her mother said, “And these women, they bring me their old chulki, stockings, stretched out, torn, not washed and I am supposed to say, ‘Thank you, thank you, in Russia we had no such things, only skins of bears for legs, teeth for control top.’”
Malcolm nodded. “You wanted new pantyhose.”
“No,” Stalina almost shouted. “That’s like this Fiddler, ‘ If I were a rich.’ We never were thinking, ‘We come to America, streets are gold,’ we come for freedom, not pantyhose. I can get new pantyhose on black market.”
Malcolm nodded again. See? he seemed to be saying, with his unfolded menu, with his comfortable thighs in the barstool, it can all be easy.
“And all the time I wonder, what do they see when they hear: Soviet Union? Onion domes, maybe, icons, maybe, nuclear missiles, maybe. But no. They see little Jews in little towns with cows. I never even see a cow in my life.”
“I saw a cow in first grade, once,” Malcolm said. He was about to tell the story of how the cow had licked him up and down like a child molester.
Stalina gripped her handkerchief between her fingers. “We, we were intelligentsia, we thought we would come and tell people what it was like, we would give lectures like Uncle Lev.”
Milla had been thinking of what to say. “But, Mom, no one’s trying to give you pantyhose anymore. We’re Americans, we have citizenship, all that stuff was bad, but it’s over.” Malcolm nodded. Her father didn’t look up from rubbing her mother’s wrist.
“You think?” Stalina said. “If we are such American pies, why is no table? We are waiting already ten minutes.”
“It’s a Saturday night,” Milla said, lamely.
Osip snapped his fingers, but they made no sound. Malcolm took another sip of his beer, stood, and returned a few minutes later, “It’s all fine.”
When their waiter arrived, red-haired, casually apologetic, “Table’s almost ready, do you know what you want?” Stalina had to turn away, madly making up her stained, ruddy face, and it took three tries for him to understand she only wanted water now.
Osip
Stalina greeted their guests, “Young people in the house, a jolly group.” She hadn’t lost hope in Leonid as a potential husband, for Yana, this time. She hurried everyone out of their coats. Yana and Pratik came out of the kitchen and Katya wandered downstairs, looking sleepy. Yana looked slightly too awake. Her tee shirt had something to say about micro-loans.
Roman Chaikan came into the house smiling, stuck out his hand: a nice boy. Osip resolved to alert him, later, to the fact that his underpants were showing.
Stalina herded them to the dining-room table. Alla Chaikin sat next to Osip and talked about immigrants. “They want everything in Spanish, did we come here and speak Russian to the street signs?” Osip, who’d heard this before, and made all possible jokes, put pickled radishes on her plate.
Carrying in the roast, Stalina said, “Lenya, how’s the skiing? I see you’ve developed many muscles.”
Leonid blushed. “I don’t get to do it as much as I want, since my promotion.”
“Again a promotion!” Stalina said. Alla smiled, listening.
“I will carve?” Pratik said, and took up the knife. Osip nodded his agreement, although Pratik had never before asked to do that.
Alla said they’d recently been to Boston, demonstrating against the estate tax. “I have to tell Stalinatchka — but she’s busy — we had dinner with the Nudels.”
“Okay,” Osip said. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, Alla was so jubilant in sharing this news about his wife’s former lover. Even here in the U.S., where his name sounded funny, and where he’d immigrated at an age when right-thinking people retire, Nudel had somehow scraped together a big lab.
“They couldn’t go on the march, his gout…but anyway he said he got a grant and could triple Stalina’s salary if she joins his lab.”
“How does he know what my wife makes?”
Alla’s orange eyebrows shot up and she took in a mouthful of pickles.
Leonid told a long story about a malfunctioning ski lift in Germany, and the amusing questions his buddies had asked the operator.
Pratik, whose talents did not lie in carving, said, “I personally do not need any kind of machine to climb a mountain. In Bangladesh even small children climb mountains without any machine.”
“In Russia, too,” Roman said.
“Yes, it is not difficult at all,” Pratik said, attempting to saw through cartilage.
Yana smiled strangely.
Leonid returned to his colloquium with Stalina, who admired his charms in an increasingly loud voice.
Having reached the conclusion that the Molochniks, like many reasonable people, preferred her son to other conversational topics, Alla spent the rest of the dinner happily and productively.
Katya
While their families shouted and laughed around them, Roman was asking Katya, “What’s your big secret? I know you have,” which no one had asked before.
And Katya was saying, to her own vast surprise, like one of those cartoon characters crawling across the desert, moaning for water, suddenly handed a pogo stick, an oasis in a single bound! — “Another voice comes out of me sometimes.”
Jean
When she was pregnant, Jean had moved furniture in and out of their new summer house. She’d applied for, and won, a position at a prestigious law firm. She’d gotten a part in the annual New York Bar Association show, a roast of an Italian attorney general, playing the part of his young, expectant mother. She’d danced across the stage holding a salami and singing about how her son would be “an attorney, in general.”
So when Milla stood in the entrance to Jean’s office, waiting for the world to offer her a chair, and said, “Maybe today’s not the
best? I feel a little…” Jean had no patience.
“Don’t you want to be prepared for your baby?” she said.
Milla nodded dumbly.
“Sit. Please.” Jean had to finish filing or she’d never remember where she’d left off, but she was so flustered by the sight of this gormless child about to bear a Strauss, it took so long to remember where everything was, that in the end she just left it like that, saying, “In an hour, I’m taking a deposition, so we have to be very efficient, don’t you agree?”
Milla said, “Sure.”
As they walked, Jean told her about a fabulous brand of baby food they were selling in the department store just a few blocks away. It was organic, of course, but everyone was saying their products were organic these days. Did Milla know about the different types of organic produce?
No, she did not, so Jean had to explain about genetic modification and heirlooms. It was all hazy in her mind — she was recalling facts from an article she’d read last month. Milla, as a prospective new mother, should have known more about these matters than Jean did. Jean did not know everything; however, she read. Before she could catch herself, she was asking Milla, “Shall I get you a subscription to Town and Country?”
This offer gave Milla, magna cum laude alumna of Southern Connecticut State (please!), the chance to say, “I don’t really read magazines?” and smirk when she thought Jean wasn’t looking. “Could we walk a little more slowly, please?” Milla said.
“Of course.” Jean looked down at their feet. Milla’s were barely visible, but Jean saw enough to realize she was wearing her eternal penny-loafers. Some women thought pregnancy gave them a free pass on footwear. Jean didn’t believe in free passes. Her shoes were heels, four inches. Her feet inside them were gnarled trolls. “Have you finalized a name?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Oh? Oh.” Malcolm hadn’t said anything.