by Kalman Nadia
“Someday, he’ll come along, the man I love,” Jean sang under her breath. It was comforting to hear her own voice, not so age-ravaged yet.
Milla
Jean’s secretary called to say that Jean would be in Stamford that afternoon. To say, not to ask. Milla wondered whether she was in trouble for those phone calls to Malcolm. She’d almost stopped making them, but she wasn’t about to cease and desist entirely. If Malcolm didn’t want to be called, he should have been a better husband. That was what she would say to Jean.
She wasn’t going to put on any makeup, not for Jean. She wasn’t going change Izzy into an unstained shirt, either. Three minutes before Jean was due to arrive, she did both, and then tried to read, but couldn’t help scanning the window for the Mercedes.
Forty minutes later, a different kind of car, dark green, pulled in the driveway. “It’s a Renault,” Jean said from the driver’s seat, strapping her high heels back on, “Isn’t it sporty? Or maybe it’s too young for me.”
Izzy hugged her skinny calf as she stepped out of the car. Jean ran her fingers through his hair and dug into a paper bag. “Doesn’t this look delicious?” She presented him with a jar of mashed peas in a brand Milla didn’t recognize.
“He’s a little old —” Milla said, as Izzy grabbed the jar and rolled on the grass with it.
“It’s by special appointment to the Queen.” Jean tried to crouch down, but her narrow skirt prevented her. “Oh, well, it’s only us.” She hiked it up to the bottom of the control top of her pantyhose, and balanced with one hand on the grass. “There’s something for you, too, Milla.”
“Great.” What would it be this time — an umbrella emblazoned with the logo of a cosmetics company (Hanukkah)? The free digital camera that came with the purchase of Malcolm’s computer (birthday)? Last Tango in Paris (anniversary)? What came free with ostentatious baby food?
Jean held up a velvet box. As Milla bent to take it, Jean looked at her hand and said, “Oh — you’re not —”
Turning away slightly, Milla opened the box. Inside was a necklace with a small green stone, cut into a multi-sided sphere.
“Emeralds are the right month, right? Or no?”
“Thank you,” Milla said. Her voice sounded as if it came from a cardboard tube.
“Oh, well. I still have the receipt.” Izzy tore fistfuls of grass and rained them over himself. Was this necklace a ransom for Malcolm? Would this be the last time she saw Jean? “Are there ticks?” Jean said, “Should we go inside? Do you have money?”
“What?” Milla tried to draw Izzy towards her, but he was staring like Narcissus at the colors reflected in Jean’s shiny pantyhose.
“Malcolm can’t be sending you much.”
They thought she was some pathetic immigrant, trying to get her hands — her paws — on their money.
Jean said, “You don’t need to hide it from me. I’m a family lawyer, it’s like being a doctor. Are you getting an apartment? You’re not planning to live here forever?”
“I’ll let you two play.” Izzy and Jean stared as Milla went into the house, but they didn’t notice her looking out the living room window, past the burning azaleas that always bloomed before her birthday. Jean led Izzy by the hand around the small perimeter of the lawn. They pointed at cars — two true Americans. Jean looked more natural with Izzy than Milla ever had.
Stalina
Lev said he’d gone by the apartment where Katya and Roman were staying, but no one had answered the door. When would he try again? Stalina said.
He didn’t know, what was Stalina expecting him to do? He and Katya had barely seen each other over the past few years. He had a headache.
Fine. Stalina hung up. What use was Lev to his family, or to himself? “Unkind,” the handkerchief said. Stalina frowned into the backyard, where Osip was trying to teach Izzy to box, or perhaps only to hop. She’d gotten Katya off drugs, hadn’t she? “And then lost her to the seductions of a cavalier,” the handkerchief said. She’d gotten Milla out of bed, mostly.
A few hours later, she called Lev back and said, “When you talked about Perm in your lectures, you were happy, handsome and normal, yes? Now, you don’t talk about Perm, and you can’t even go outside to get your hair cut. Meals on Wheels, like an invalid. Shameful, no?” Had she gone too far? “Isn’t it better to be happy, and handsome, and eat in restaurants?” She fiddled with her gypsy figurine. How free and brave the gypsy looked. “I have helped my girls with ‘talking-it-out,’ and now I will help you, and we will celebrate at Salvatore’s.” Salvatore’s was an Italian and lobster restaurant on the north side of town, where Lev had once spoken on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry.
“I still have that headache.”
“You know why you have headaches? I think I know. You talk about a bad smell.”
“No, I don’t.”
She didn’t let his switch to English distract her. “Does it smell like the Isolator? That’s what I am thinking. Lev. We could publish your memoirs. Talking-it-out.” Was he still there? She gave him her best insight: “Lev: you are putting yourself in the Isolator now. Now, your apartment is equal to your Isolator. Hello, hello? I criticize so you will improve.”
“I’ve already left the Party.” He meant she sounded like someone at an expulsion hearing. He hung up.
Ignoring the handkerchief’s intimations of danger in “bohemian, tubercular downtown,” she drove to Augustine Manor. To forestall its further haranguing, she tucked five dollars under the head of a man sleeping outside the convenience store before entering the lobby.
No answer. A man in a wheelchair tapped on the glass of the residents’ lounge. “Miss Patrice?” he said.
Stalina shook her head. Still no answer. She would just keep ringing. She would not let this insult stand.
Katya’s name wasn’t listed on any of the buzzers. “The eye sees, but the tooth cannot reach,” said the handkerchief and even though she knew it would find a way to follow, she threw it behind her as she closed the lobby door.
Yana
Hi, hi,
Yes, a lot of bombs went off, but only two people died, so the chances of anything happening to me or Pratik are minuscule. In the U.S., about 114 people die in car accidents every day, so.
Awakened Muslim Masses is only targeting Bangladeshis who’ve converted to other religions, Communists, Jatra dance fans, and certain lawyers. So we’re fine.
What many people abroad don’t realize is, the Awakened people are inept. Their bombs don’t explode, or if they do explode, they injure a lot more people than they kill. 500 bombs and 2 deaths. Pratik says hi.
Yana
Milla
“Eh, devka,” Milla’s mother said, handing her the tray and squeezing her shoulder-padded frame onto the side of the bed.
Milla began as usual. “Malcolm didn’t just leave me, but also, he wasn’t really there when we were married either.”
“Physically present, emotionally absent,” Stalina said, with the same relish she brought to reciting Russian translations of Shakespeare.
“Physically absent, too, though.”
“Very bad.”
“You know,” Milla said, sinking back into her pillow. “I had other opportunities.”
“Of course. All my girls have the best legs, small ankles from me and long from Papa.” Stalina petted Milla’s unshaven calf.
Milla took another bite of cinnamon cereal and started up again, reciting a fragment of an Anna Akhmatova poem, guaranteed to make her weep: “This woman is sick / this woman is alone,” but found she couldn’t go into the next part. It would have felt ridiculous. “You can go to work now, if you want.”
Her mother stared.
Milla shrugged. She was experiencing a feeling which it seemed almost too much trouble to identify. “I might be bored.” When she had said the same as a child, her mother had not been very happy to hear it. (“Maybe if we had a Blockade, you wouldn’t be burdened with this terrible ennui?”) Now, however, S
talina wiggled Milla’s earlobe and smiled like a mime.
Katya
Katya, long-time family loony-tunes, family weakling, the sickly baby, that same one, was re-tiling the kitchen floor. If they could see her now — but her father didn’t want to see her now. Not being the weakling meant not thinking about that.
“Bad-ass,” Chino said from his bed, where he was writing a birthday card for his aunt in prison.
Old linoleum: a yellowing checkerboard. New linoleum: green frogs on a shining white background. She would make sure it stayed that way. She would make everyone go without shoes. “You know I’m just renting this place, though, right?” Chino said.
She nodded and opened the adhesive.
Chino covered his nose. Apparently, you were supposed to wear a mask, so she tied one of Roman’s undershirts over her face. Chino turned his hooded sweatshirt around.
The first five squares were perfect, flush with her chalk line. She didn’t mind, for once, Chino’s bragging about his five thousand dollar signing bonus, his oft-revealed revelation that he’d always felt like an army of one. She hummed to herself. The frogs reminded her of Amston Lake — maybe she and Roman could go there, once she started working.
The door slammed open. Katya said, “Your money or your life.”
“Jacked my shirt.” She untied it and tried to hand it to him, but his boots stepped past, over the floor she’d cleaned and sanded.
“Hey.” Her voice sounded young and surprised — not the kind of voice to make anyone stop.
He poured himself a glass of water and turned around in his own dark footprint. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She had a small advantage now. “Listen, like when I first moved back to Stamford, my parents did this like cold-turkey thing with me.” He didn’t look that angry. “Maybe you want to...it would be one thing if the K helped you, like, lighten —”
“Don’t nanny me.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a head of cabbage, tore off a leaf and chewed.
Katya leaned her hand on the floor. She couldn’t believe Roman wasn’t affected by the fumes, or maybe he was, and that was why he was saying those things.
Chino put on his sunglasses. “Later.”
“Pick me up something?” Roman said, but Katya shook her head so angrily that Chino closed the door without answering.
Roman tore off another leaf. “So I am one who needs to lighten, you think.”
She pressed another tile down. She’d gotten them out of order, and a frog was missing half its face.
“But Katya is perfect shorty, right?”
“Look, you’re the one who practically made me pee in a cup before our first date and now —”
In a deep voice, he said. “I’m Brezhnev and comrades, I must say this chickie is crazy to think she can order around a man like Roman Pitursky.”
Another square. You have to know what your energy is about.
“Doesn’t she know that everybody laughs at her cretinsky speech? Doesn’t she know how lucky she is to have a normal man?”
You have to —
“You fuck up floor,” Roman said in English.
“I should just talk like you, right, my G?” Katya said, swaying to a standing position. Why couldn’t they go outside? “The guys on your site never laughed at you? I saw them laughing.” A mistake, if she ever wanted him to go back to work, but he wouldn’t, anyway.
Roman pulled the brush out of her hand, reared back — would he hit her? “She’s just a sterva yobanaya, see?” He threw the brush in the sink.
Katya didn’t know what his words meant, but she knew what would happen next: how she would leave now, without packing, or finishing the tiles; how her mother would look behind her for Roman, and let her in; how her father would make a joke about the fall of the Roman Empire, and apologize; how Milla would try to explain something about marriage, and cry; how Roman would show up, drunk, fancying himself a Mayakovsky, only to be captured by the Neighborhood Watchers in their orange vests; how she would watch him through the window and would not jump out.
Milla
Milla stood outside Katya’s door with a cup of valerian tea. “Kat?” The door was closed and music was blasting, just like when her sister had been a teenager. After a while, she and Yana hadn’t bothered to try Katya’s door anymore. No wonder Katya had run from a house where her own sisters had better things to do than to knock and wait.
Milla said, “I’ve got drug tea.” She heard nothing in reply except a singer who wished he were a lamp. “I should never make a joke, ever. It’s not really drug tea, just valiryanka, like Baba Byata takes when she visits.”
Katya opened the door, looking as pale as she had at Milla’s wedding. Milla held out the mug, spilling tea on her hand in her eagerness.
“Do you see this window?” Katya said.
Oh, no. She would have to get their mother involved. “I do see it. This window is actually real,” Milla said. “What else do you see?” She hoped, for poor Kat’s sake, that at least she was hallucinating elves or talking flowers, and not blood-filled gasoline pumps, as in a television film about a drug-addled single mother she’d seen recently.
“What kind of asshole hung this?” Katya pointed at the window’s frame. “What kind of fucking retard doesn’t level?”
“I don’t know…what kind…” Milla put the tea on Katya’s desk.
“Do you want to know how crappy this frame is?”
In the weeks that followed, the house became increasingly noisy. Sometimes, Katya asked whether the noise was bothering Izzy, but most of the time, she didn’t. She never asked whether it was bothering Milla, Stalina or Osip; perhaps she imagined they felt grateful at the reminder of her ongoing fixes to what, to them, seemed unbroken. On weekends, Osip was driven before the force of Katya’s improving will, looking back over his shoulder, with confusion and longing, at the television. On weekdays, Milla tried to assist her, but Katya could be very snappish. Sometimes, Milla wanted to say, “I have a child, you know,” or, “I’m going through a divorce, you know.”
One day, while Katya was at Home Depot and her parents were at the Chaikins’, Milla called Theandra Carlisle and invited her out for a quick coffee, and offered to drive into Park Slope to meet her.
Roman
Roman opened the door. The television screamed, “My baby needs milk —”
“Cartoons,” Roman said, but Chino shook his head.
An old man, bleeding, unbandaged, clothes torn, stood in a line in the sun. Behind him, a woman waved a bruised arm from her wheelchair. Roman’s mother could have helped them. She tied her arm, nurselike, unafraid, her needle shone.
“I’m a U.S. citizen,” said a woman in her underpants on the side of the road. Someone else in a wheelchair, head covered with a flannel shirt, brown-blue feet in plastic sandals. A stadium without water, shit on the floor, locked in, not even the babies allowed to cross the road to Wal-Mart.
“Shut up,” Chino said.
A helicopter approached two boys and an old woman sitting on a roof. It poked its nose at them like a dragonfly. The boys got up and waved, but the woman knew better. The helicopter flew off.
Chino said, “You want some stuff, I know you steal it anyway. Here, just shut up.” Water, gelatin.
A roof with an American flag, an inscription: “The water is rising please.”
“I’m telling you,” Chino said. The camera pulled back from the roof, back, back, and the people disappeared, and the roof, and all the roofs, disappeared into gray and black. Chino pushed him out the door, so he could disappear, too, to the house of the Molochniks, where all his problems had begun.
Buses swept exhaust back and forth before the library, and he gave the bus driver eleven dollars and a bonanza of change and the driver yelled because he didn’t understand.
No one was home, the key was in the mezuzah: signs that he was doing what was right.
Upstairs, he took off his socks, stood in the bath, opened the faucet
. Then he remembered the Molochniks’ vodka and got out, splashing the tiles with his bare feet. He dried the floor with a bit of toilet paper: she’d never be able to say he never cleaned up.
He hefted the bottle upstairs and emptied the last of Chino’s K crystals into it. Chino would understand. Roman had never liked the taste of vodka, but had been able to conceal this fact, and now would carry it to his grave.
He folded his Masta Killa tee shirt. Maybe Izzy would want it when he grew up. He put his underwear in the trash (and here he heard himself speaking, as if to an audience, voice reverberating, “A man should not leave his dirty underwear behind.”)
He found Louisiana at the bottom of the geographical shower curtain and touched his finger to the green finger of land that poked from it. If only he could help. He wished them all well. What a thing: to lie down in water. Water made a bed for you, water received you when no one else would. The drain tried to take all the water but there was too much.
He held the vodka above his head and poured it into his mouth, gangster style. After a while, his mother’s body floated towards him, bloated, scarred. Roman covered himself and shifted his legs to make room.
Osip
In the car going home from the supermarket, Osip and Katya listened to people asking for water on the radio. It felt strange to be driving in a car filled with food.
The telephone rang. “Yanushka,” Osip said. “Nu, how are you?”
But Yana wanted to speak in English, her language of argument, about New Orleans. “This is your Bush,” she said as he steered one-handed.
“Bush didn’t build —” he had to switch to Russian — “the levees, that’s engineers.”