“Same with the telephone,” Lida is saying, as the sewing machine hums along efficiently. “We lived in that apartment two years before they gave us our phone. Then it didn’t ring. We could only make outgoing calls. People thought we were never home.”
But Sergei, suddenly exhausted, is not listening, and the tall girl has already gone to the other side of the partition, to sit on a plastic chair and cry.
Today is Friday. Sergei runs to the liquor store for quarters. He’s thinking about the piece of paper in his pocket. He won’t look at it again yet. Not that he hasn’t already memorized the lines, even looked up one of the words in his English-Russian dictionary. He’ll wait until he has finished one more load, and then he’ll allow himself another glance at the loopy blue handwriting. But first, the quarters. It’s cold inside the liquor store. An unclean man in front of Sergei is buying something called the “Mega Millions.”
“One hundred and forty-two million,” the manager says. “I bought my ticket, alright.” He is already opening a roll of quarters for Sergei when Sergei tells him, “I will buy a ticket.”
The manager hands Sergei a long card on which there are many numbered boxes. Sergei looks at it and is overwhelmed. With the manager’s pen, he fills in a few of the boxes. He is sure he ought to be choosing his numbers more carefully but worries he is taking too much time. He does not realize that he has used only part of his card, that there are more numbers to choose from.
He turns his card in incomplete and shuffle-runs back to Sunshine Cleaners, ticket in hand, past the sign announcing HAZARDOUS WASTE DAY! On the trees that line the sidewalk, tiny retracted buds shrink back from the cold. Rich? Who said Sergei wanted to be rich? It’s a vague term, and Sergei wants concrete things: An entertainment center with surround sound. A Honda motorcycle. A pair of Ray Ban sunglasses. He would like to go to California at some point.
Val comes by at ten. “There may be some drop-offs this afternoon,” he tells Sergei. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”
Lida looks up from her sewing machine.
“More tests, huh?” says Sergei.
“More tests. We decided to postpone Foxwoods.” Val’s fingertips are yellow with nicotine.
“I bought a lottery ticket,” Sergei tells him. “One hundred and forty-two million.”
Val slaps him with approval and says, “Ivan knows someone who won.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You never know,” Val says. “Anything could happen!”
It’s true. Like Monday, after the tall girl finished crying and stood up abruptly to gather her clothes, and a scrap of paper fell out of her magazine. Sergei just watched it land on the linoleum floor beside the plastic chair. It was still there after the girl left. When Sergei got home that night, he looked up the word “abyss.”
Now, as he heads around to the front counter, he notices the way Val and Lida are speaking to each other. Why isn’t she looking at her sewing machine? Sergei finds himself wondering. Val touches her shoulder while saying something, and Lida’s eyelids drop slightly.
“I lie in this cold abyss,” Sergei thinks to himself. That’s what the scrap of paper said. Well, actually, that part was crossed out. But Sergei looked hard to figure out what was hidden underneath the scratches. After that part, he read:
The goodbye of your eyes to me in the cold bed abyss Weeks emptied of you are mountains harsh and steep Like a flower I wilt without your
That was how it ended, as if falling off a cliff. Now, Sergei notes, Val is lightly touching Lida’s elbow. She says something to him about her two tabby cats, and Val, coughing, says he would like to meet them.
Sergei doesn’t like to remember things. It’s a superstition of his. Pleasant memories—being with friends at age thirteen and laughing so hard their guts ached, or eating Turkish figs with a girl in the park in June—such memories leap past him quickly, and Sergei cannot focus enough to make the moments linger. But when the bad memories seep back, like they always do, they stick, so vivid that Sergei finds himself frightened. He is frightened that he won’t be able to get out, that he’ll blink and find himself back in some long-gone moment: shivering in front of a broken space-heater; lying on a Moscow street in a pool of his own blood, hearing someone say, “Careful with his neck.”
When this happens, Sergei shakes himself, like a dog just out of a lake. He really would not be surprised if one day such a memory, so real—the smell of the bloody pavement, of the stranger’s damp shoes, the sound of a woman’s voice saying, “Is he alive? Don’t move him”—forced him back to that midnight street, and he had to go through it all again.
He would like to reverse this somehow, make the good memories stick, or to produce kinder images so strong that they might actually occur. He wants to do this but cannot. Maybe that’s why he was put off by Val’s bit of abracadabra this past Friday.
Val brought a computer to poker. He pushed the chips and card deck aside and slid a small monitor onto Miro’s table. He connected wires and even the telephone line and dialed a number. “You said you missed Petersburg!” he said happily and slapped Ivan on the shoulder. “Well, take a look here!”
Sergei stood beside Val, with Ivan and Miro looking over his shoulder. He had never seen such bright colors on a computer screen. The ones in the laundry were never on. This one had a turquoise pattern, with text in various hues. Val typed things, and the telephone rang in a muted way. “Wait until you see this.”
A photograph emerged on the screen. There was a building of some sort, with people in front. Sergei was amazed by the clarity. But it wasn’t a photograph, it moved. “Look familiar?” Val asked, turning to Ivan.
“I can’t believe it. The university library.”
“Live coverage. Some students have put a camera lens facing it. Anybody who goes in is on film. It’s for research or something. What do you think of that!”
“Miraculous!” said Miro, and Ivan said softly, “It’s like I’m right back there. For once in my life.”
“It’s on twenty-four hours,” Val explained. “The wonders of the Internet.” He smiled at Sergei and said, “Not bad, eh, Omar?”
But to Sergei this seemed somehow unfair. This satellite image, or whatever it was, it was too real. Like bad memories. They shouldn’t be able to look back at something like this, so simple and nice, and far away, so easily.
Why can’t good memories be easy like this? Sergei would like to be like Val and turn pleasant daydreams into concrete visions. When he confronts the glass-and-metal door with the “PUSH” sign every morning, he tries to imagine something other than what’s there, certain that if he thinks hard enough of what he wants to be inside, it just might happen.
Luckily, Sergei ran into Yelena’s cousin Johnny this past Saturday. Johnny is an audio technician whom the women all seem to like, and he took Sergei along to a party hosted by two Americans he works with. This was in Dorchester, with lots of beer.
A woman from Waltham paid attention to Sergei. She asked him about his back, and he told her about being mugged and left for dead.
“A couple coming home from a disco found me,” he explained. “Saved my life, probably. I was in hospital six months.”
To show that she understood what Sergei had gone through, the woman told him, “My brother-in-law fell off a roof and landed on a metal rake. He almost died. If he had landed one millimeter to the left, the rake could have gone through his heart. He’s okay now, though. You never know what’s gonna happen.”
Sergei tried to picture the man, the roof, the confusingly placed metal rake, and could make no sense of the logistics. But he took the woman’s phone number and has considered calling her sometime this week. There is a movie about female vampires he wouldn’t mind seeing. That’s how it happens, Sergei knows. You call and make your offer—a movie, a drink, maybe dinner. It happens all the time, all over, especially in spring. He is sure of that now. This morning he saw Lida standing close to Val, talking about potatoes, of a
ll things, saying she knew a recipe that he was sure to like. Val’s skin was no longer so green but instead almost rosy.
Well, Val’s heart may be getting better, but seeing him smiling there Sergei felt a cold spot in his own. Why can’t he have that? No, not Lida. Maybe with Sheri from Waltham. At any rate, it’s too soon to call, only Monday. Outside, the air is cold for April, but the tree buds aren’t yet dead, just knotted up patiently on their branches. At Sunshine Cleaners, the tall girl is standing in front of Sergei, announcing that the change machine is broken again. “Not my machine,” says Sergei.
“Well, I think you should at least write ‘Out of Order’ on it, so that other people don’t lose money trying to use it.”
“There’s a light,” says Sergei, meaning the little orange one that lights up next to the words “Out of Order.”
“The light’s not on.”
“Then it’s working.”
But the girl won’t move. “No, it’s not working.”
“Yes, it is,” says Sergei. “See?” He walks up to the machine, takes a dollar from his pocket, and slides it into the machine’s thin mouth. He and the tall girl watch as the dollar is sucked in, and for a few seconds nothing happens.
But then the quarters begin to pour out, first into the little cup below the machine, and then onto the floor. The quarters keep coming, hundreds of them clinking out and landing in a noisy pile. Sergei and the tall girl watch together, for minutes, it seems, until the machine’s bowels have been emptied.
On the floor, the shiny pile barely resembles coins. Sergei and the tall girl just look at it for a moment. Then the girl bends down and picks up four quarters, and Sergei sees where the band of her underwear meets her skin.
When she walks back over to her dirty clothes, Sergei goes to the other side of the partition and returns with a medium-sized plastic bag, into which he begins scooping the coins. He knows the tall girl is watching. He ignores her as she waits there with her paperback, whose cover says A Woman Scorned. When he has filled the bag with all of the quarters, Sergei brings it to the other side of the partition.
After about twenty minutes, the tall girl transfers her clothes to a big yellow dryer and then sits down to read again. That is when Mr. Tyne makes his daily visit and, without saying hello to Sergei or Lida, begins his rounds, emptying the quarters from washers and dryers, one by one. After fifteen minutes or so, he progresses to the change machine, opening it up to take the dollars. He removes the bills, counts them up, and then says to Sergei, “Hey, you have any idea what’s going on with this machine?”
Sergei shakes his head.
“All the quarters are gone, but there’s only forty-two bucks here. I’ve never seen the machine empty before. You notice anything odd about it?”
“Not my machine,” says Sergei.
He sees the tall girl staring at him over her book, her hair pulled back from her rosy skin. Mr. Tyne collects his money, refills the machine with quarters, and prepares to leave. He pulls the door open and exits.
Sergei looks over at the tall girl, though he is tired and wants no more trouble; their fights can be exhausting. But he dares to look at her. Their eyes lock, her stare expectant, and Sergei thinks—with surprise, for some reason—“She despises me.”
Now that he has allowed himself to think this, Sergei cannot stand it. He must apologize to her. Not for his own behavior, which he knows will not change, and not for having taken the scrap of paper, which she’ll never know, but for whatever it is that has made her so sullen, whatever caused her to sit on the plastic chair that day and cry.
Or perhaps it was Sergei, just Sergei and nothing else, that made her cry. After all, he disgusts her.
He wishes he had not taken the money, knows that that, too, must disgust her. There must be something he can do about it, prove that he is not so disgusting. He thinks of what he can tell her, that in fact he is donating the money to the town Police Department, or to the Committee for the Elderly. Anything to stop this. How many times have they yelled cruel things back and forth? He is tired of hurting, his back and his feelings. All that incivility, what a waste of energy. That’s it: he will say that the money is going to the Hazardous Waste Board.
He takes a breath and says, “About that money.”
The tall girl says, “You hit the jackpot there, didn’t you?” This must suddenly strike her as funny. Like a rainbow or some other naturally occurring wonder, apparently shocking the girl as much as Sergei, a surprised smile breaks across her face.
“Hit the jackpot,” Sergei repeats. “That’s good. I guess I did. Something good. For once in my life.”
“Or maybe twice in a life,” says the girl, tilting her head slightly. “I’d like to think it’s at least twice.”
The Man from Allston Electric
Rhea couldn’t help but feel sorry for the man from Allston Electric. He had fiddled all afternoon at an electrical outlet in her drafty living room only to emerge rumpled and disappointed, muttering, “Can’t do it.” He found Rhea in the kitchen, where the fluorescent light turned him gray under the eyes. “Nope. Wire’s dead.” Though he said this definitively, it was clear from his tense jaw that what the man wanted more than anything at that moment was to be able to revive the wire and impress Rhea.
Sitting at the nicked kitchen table, which she’d turned into a computer desk for the day, Rhea felt a small rush of pleasure. She was grateful for any admission of failure. She was tired of everyone always saying, Of course it can be done, Rhea, of course your love life can be renewed, your career saved. All around her the facts screamed: No! Yet even her closest friends at first remained hopeful after learning that Gregory had moved out. Though they saw for themselves that his dented Civic was no longer accruing tickets at the curb outside, and that Rhea no longer wore the little green-beaded bracelet he’d given her, they passed along books with titles like When Love Isn’t Enough and spelled out names of therapists who had saved various relationships—or at least prolonged them for months, sometimes years. Rhea’s mother, meanwhile, insisted that Rhea would find someone better, as if Gregory were a vacuum cleaner that had stopped working.
Rhea never allowed herself to say to her, What if nothing gets better? She woke up every morning at seven o’clock in the pale yellow bedroom she had once shared with Gregory, and wished for good news. It wasn’t a conscious wish, more like a vague hope that was there when she awoke and gradually diminished as the day waned. Mornings seemed to hold possibilities, the way the light shone in through the little window across from the bed, tattooing slant rectangles on the wall where Gregory’s desk had been. His chess magazines, Rhea realized months after he moved out, still sat in a little pile in the corner. One day Rhea would bring them downstairs to the recycling bin; she knew this. But she also knew that she could not do it yet, though the magazine pile was gauzy with dust.
The living room, on the other hand, no longer showed any sign of having been inhabited by anyone other than Rhea. Her fiberboard bookshelves and filing cabinets cluttered the side of the room ruled by her large oak desk. Atop one of the shelves, tucked in an oversized manila envelope, was the wad of dissertation—on apostrophe in the Petrarchan sonnet—that she had completed a year earlier. Though it had won her much praise in her department, no one seemed to want to publish it. The library had a typed copy that no one would ever read. Rhea had received numerous direct-mail offers to have her work bound in book form, with an engraved leather cover. The mailings kept coming, like those twelve-CDs-for-a-dollar music clubs.
Each day Rhea sat in front of her hand-me-down computer writing job applications, query letters, and proposals for postdoctoral fellowships, all the while listening to the classic rock station on the radio. When advertisements came on, she grimaced at the mottoes of the world: Be all that you can be! Just do it!
For this reason it was a relief to see the man from Allston Electric standing in her kitchen doorway, his worker’s hands shoved shamefully into the pockets of ac
id-washed jeans, explaining that he couldn’t do it, that no one could, that the power line was broken somewhere behind the wall, irreparable. “Problem with these prewar buildings,” he went on. “I can see they haven’t kept this one up too good.”
Rhea nodded and took a bite from a ripe pear. She was constantly hungry. She had, for the past year, been snacking nearly every hour (bananas, peanuts, Swiss chocolates on sale that week) and felt heavy with extra pounds, though she hadn’t actually gained weight. In fact she was skinny, as she always had been. It had crossed her mind at one point that perhaps she had a worm of some sort, but she knew deep down that this wasn’t so, and that it would, like everything else in life, pass. She looked at the man, of whom she had been only vaguely aware since telling him, two hours earlier, the whole little story, complete with sound effects, about the lamp she had turned on, and the hissing noise, and how she used that outlet all the time, since it was the only other one where she could plug in her computer, which had a cord with three prongs, and on which she was revising her doctoral dissertation.
The man from Allston Electric had looked straight into her eyes as he listened, frowning at appropriate moments. He then lowered his chin to his chest and said gravely, “We can’t have this interrupting your career.”
He had approached the outlet with vigilance. But now he looked let down—let down like no repairman Rhea had ever seen. The old building was in poor shape; for the consequent affordability Gregory had selected it, and for this reason Rhea was able to continue renting the apartment alone now that Gregory was gone. The landlord hadn’t visited the place in years, and appliances were often keeling over in melodramatic ways. One day the oven spontaneously caught fire; a sudden flame like a blow-torch scorched a loaf of zucchini bread Rhea was baking. When the smoke subsided, Rhea saw that an entire section of the oven was nothing but ash. In the “Description” column of the receipt the next day, a repairman scrawled “exploding oven” as if it were a common occurrence.
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