30 Before 30

by Marina Shifrin

  Unfortunately, when you live in the middle of a tourist trap, friends from across the country will always want to come see you. It sucks. I love my friends, but I love my space even more. That being said, you do eventually get to an age when you have to own at least one extra set of clean sheets for visitors.

  The first time I had visitors as an adult, I was twenty-two years old and had been in New York for four months. The poorest months in my life, and two bitches from college decide to visit me? Of course, because I lived in the Big City! Sure, they were two of my closest friends and they loved me and blah, blah, blah. But you do not visit your poor friend, during one of the biggest adjustments in her life, and say, “Why not, I’m on vacation!” to the second round of oyster shooters.

  If I may address the visitor before the visitee for a moment, please follow a few rules:

  •   Do not visit for more than four days. I, myself, prefer three-day visits. If you need to stay longer, break up your stay among multiple friends or Airbnbs. Regardless of how kind and hospitable (unlike me) your friends are, regardless of how much they beg you to stay longer—everyone is relieved when their visitors leave and they can peacefully go back to their 30 Rock marathons.

  •   Be sensitive to your host’s financial situation. Maybe they just moved! Maybe they just switched jobs! Maybe they’re saving up to buy a house or make a baby. Whatever it is, people always have weird money stuff going on, and it’s none of your business. If they live next door to your dream five-star restaurant, maybe offer to take them out as a thank-you for a free stay.

  •   Pepper in some sightseeing options that your friend can politely bow out of. When you visit someone, they feel obligated to entertain you. That’s why they’re all like, “What do you want to do when you’re here!?” “I’m down for whatever” or “I don’t care! I just want to see you” is a very sweet sentiment that you can neatly fold up and put back inside your mouth. Being specific and direct with what you’d like to do when visiting a friend will help your friend with planning their days and yours.

  •   When entering a home, ask if you should take off your shoes. This might be hyper-specific to me, but I hate, hate, hate asking people to take off their shoes when they come into my house. It makes me feel like Larry David’s worst nightmare. But between my Russian heritage and Sam’s Asian heritage, we both grew up in strict shoes-off homes. Besides, shoes are so dirty and gross, why anyone would wear them inside their house is beyond me.

  •   Never come empty-handed. Russians would never enter someone else’s home without a gift. Flowers. Alcohol. Soap. When you’re visiting a home it’s appropriate to bring something for your host(s). I like to bring something related to wherever I’m living. Maybe cheese or jam from a Los Angeles–based company … At the very least, I like to bring joke gifts—toilet paper (everyone needs it), a balloon animal–making kit, a head massager, a framed photo of Ted Danson—whatever. I simply refuse to show up empty-handed.

  Now that we’ve gotten being a good visitor out of the way, you’re ready to be a good host! Which I was not when my college friends came to visit. All I had in my fridge was a half-eaten jar of peanut butter, a canister of instant oatmeal, and some whole wheat tortillas. I didn’t even have glasses for water. When my friends got to my apartment, they were shocked at the conditions I was living in. “You don’t have any food,” Meredith exclaimed. This was at a time when my office had a fully stocked fridge; my diet consisted of half a sandwich for lunch and the other half for dinner. Other nights, I stole fridge food from the family I was babysitting for. I spent about ten dollars a week on groceries and was proud of it.

  I did not, at all, contemplate that I needed to buy food for my visitors. I was already putting them up, what more could they want? “Putting them up” of course meant that I let Meredith and Kate sleep in my bed while I slept on the couch, like a martyr—especially because it was hot and the living room did not have air conditioning.

  Meredith had never been to New York before, and her first tourist activity was going to Associated Market on Fifth Avenue to buy me groceries. A weird way to start a visit to the Big Apple, if you ask me.

  “You can’t live like this,” she told me while loading cereal into a shopping cart.

  It wasn’t until years later that I understood what it meant to be a good host. My video had just gone viral, and I had an unexpected opportunity to go on the Today Show. My pen-pal Amy, who single-handedly coached me through my twenty-fifth year of life, offered me a spot in her apartment. When I got there, she took me under her wing like the scared baby bird that I was. She had clean sheets, an extra razor, snacks, tea, dessert, and cold vodka in the fridge. After staying with her, I realized that being a good host is a learned skill that needs cultivating. It’s more than just letting someone sleep in your house, it’s making them feel appreciated.

  Having visitors is inevitable. Believe me, I’ve tried to avoid it—but people love you, or they love your city, or they love a combination of both, and they’re going to want to come visit.

  There’s a way that you can prepare yourself and your home to not only show your visitors a good time, but also, just maybe, squeeze in a little fun yourself. Here are a few things I like to do to avoid getting all pouty and stressed when a friend comes to stay with me.

  BECOME A TOURIST TOO!

  Sam and I recently had friends visiting from Germany who were very frank about what they wanted to see. They sent us a list of desires and open-invited us to come to whatever tickled our fancy. One of the more exciting items on their list was touring Warner Bros. Studios. I love tours, regardless of what’s being toured, and had never been (despite my three years in Los Angeles). So, one Saturday morning, we all piled into a car and made our way to the lot. I was just as excited to see the Gilmore Girls set as the next guy. Overall, it was a great experience that reminded me, Hey, I live in a cool city with fun things to do. I’ve since made a list of things I’ve been meaning to see (museums, tours, hikes, beaches, shows) for when guests are in town. That way, the experience becomes novel and exciting for me too.

  SET YOUR FRIEND FREE FOR AN AFTERNOON (OR A DAY).

  That same couple had Levi’s shopping (foreigners love Levi’s) on their list. I’m not much of a shopper, so I sent them off into the world (with directions of course) to find some jeans. A lot of my friends are independent people who don’t mind exploring a city on their own. Obviously, don’t leave them high and dry, but if you need an afternoon off from playing host, by all means get down with your bad self. Chances are it will give your guest much-needed break/alone time and you the reset needed to continue being a delightful host with a cheery demeanor (even if that’s not your natural state of being).

  SUGGEST AN IN-HOME MEAL.

  The thing that stresses me out most about having visitors is that it’s expensive. I hate spending money, but don’t want my money habits to get in the way of a friend’s trip. I tend to always say yes for drinks, eats, and entertainment, which can add up over a few days. I’ve found that cooking a meal at home is a great way to take a break from the exhaustion of running around—your guests are tired too, I promise—and a good way to cut down on the cost of having visitors. Plus, if your friends are as lovely or incredible as mine, they’ll offer to cook, or at least clean.

  IT’S OKAY TO SAY NO.

  I once had a friend ask if she could crash for nine days while working on a project in LA. I knew that prolonged periods with visitors stress me out, but I said yes anyway. On her fourth day in Los Angeles, I came home to a thank-you note with a gift certificate to a local café. She said that she felt as though she’d overstayed her welcome and booked an Airbnb nearby. I was mortified. Instead of being up front and asking her to split up her visit between two spots, I made her feel uncomfortable in my home. She, a Queen-Goddess of Tact, picked up on my sour-face mood and salvaged our friendship by finding her own spot. I vowed to be up front with my guests from that day forward.


  *   *   *

  A few years ago, Meredith came to visit me in LA. Not to brag, but I had wine and a makeshift cutting board charcuterie plate waiting for her. “Where’s the half-eaten jar of peanut butter?” she asked with a smile. My evolution was splayed out in the details of my snacks. Sure, I was worried about whether or not she’d have fun, but at least I was a little more refined, a little more stable, and a lot cleaner than I had been during those early months in New York.

  I still get stressed when someone tells me they’re coming to visit, but if a friend does decide to stop by I always have snacks at the ready and vodka chilling in the fridge.

  29

  VISIT RUSSIA

  In the early hours of the late afternoon, James, a short boy with chipmunk cheeks and a White Sox hat, screamed “Communist!” at me until the veins in his neck began to bulge. The insult was as surprising as it was confusing. I’d heard many jabs in the twelve years I’d been alive, mostly from my parents, but none as topical as this one.

  I was in sixth grade, months into my leather-jacket phase, an awkward anamorph trapped between girl and woman, and James just handed me yet another thing to add to my list of insecurities.

  When it comes down to the bevy of pejoratives you can call an immigrant, Communist isn’t all that bad. It even feels a little retro-punky. Still, I didn’t like James or his tone, so I pulled my collar to my mouth and ordered a KGB operative to “visit” his house.1

  Even if I’d wanted to serve up a worthy retort to his historically relevant affront, I had no concept of communism, or Russia in general. My parents’ stories made it seem like everyone spent their free time standing in never-ending lines, waiting for nondescript goods, while icy rain shards cut up their cheeks. Our life before America was shrouded in mystery, almost like it never existed.

  When it was time to leave Russia, Olga and Vladimir packed hundreds of photos into two boxes and shipped them to my Uncle Alan in Chicago. Photos of me as a newborn, of my parents when they were young, of my grandmothers who passed before I was born, and of my grandfathers who loved them. Each photo contained a little memento of my past, which made it particularly devastating when both boxes got lost in the mail.

  So many questions disappeared with those boxes. What did my mom look like when she was pregnant? How did my dad wear his hair in his twenties? Did our apartment have carpet? Or rugs on the walls? Were there trees in our yard? Did I look like my grandmothers?

  We only had a handful of pictures, all taken right before we immigrated. In one, everybody is ecstatically envisioning the promise of a better future, but that excitement is hidden under a stern layer of closed-mouth smiles. The sad eyes and straight lips are what I imagined all of the people in Russia looked like. A culture too somber to be happy. Too tough to grin.

  “The post office people were jealous of us,” my mom once told me. “They lost those photos on purpose.”

  This sour and suspicious tone coated all of my parents’ anecdotes, the few that they shared. There was the time my mother’s tonsils were removed without general anesthesia. “They put a metal pipe in my mouth so that I couldn’t close it during the surgery,” she casually told me in the ice cream aisle of the grocery store. We were buying Breyer’s for my little brother who’d just had his tonsils out. Or the time my twenty-seven-year-old dad watched paramedics load his mother into an ambulance. “Oh god, what if I don’t survive this?” my grandmother said as they closed the door. She didn’t.

  I am the young boy in the middle.

  My mom was even younger when her mother died. She returned from summer camp only to find out that her mother had unexpectedly passed away. My mom was thirteen. No one told her about her own mother’s death because they “didn’t want to ruin her summer vacation.” Death was just a minor inconvenience when compared to its burdensome predecessor: life.

  Despite all the negatives, I had a gnawing pull toward the mother country. A pull that turned into an all-out yank when the country became relevant again for the first time since the Cold War. Headlines of hacking, sanctions, golden showers, and other incendiary rumors circling the 2016 presidential election were bleeding into my daily life. I became an unwilling cultural ambassador to a country I hadn’t been in since birth. Coworkers, friends, and casual acquaintances bombarded me with questions about Russia, questions I hadn’t the first clue how to answer.

  One morning, shortly after yet another news story of rising United States–Russia tensions broke, I bought a ticket to Moscow. Curiosity is the catalyst of growth. Minutes after sharing my news on Facebook, three friends requested that I not “get kidnapped.” I couldn’t figure out whether to be amused or offended.

  I landed in Russia in the afternoon on a Friday in July. I wore a green flannel shirt, black jeans, dirty Vans, four pearl necklaces, and the unmistakable stench of someone who had been crammed inside a metallic cylinder filled with 402 bloated strangers for twelve hours.

  It was odd wearing four pearl necklaces. Three necklaces are understandable, but the fourth made it feel like I should have a cocktail in one hand and a vacuum in the other. The necklaces were gifts from my father to his cousins. He insisted on keeping their price tags on so that “your aunts know how much they cost.” I also had: Crest 3D white strips for my cousin who wanted “white teeth like an American,” one of my dad’s oil paintings, an iPhone 4S, a jump drive with footage of my grandpa and his brothers, some tank tops sporting the California bear, four hundred dollars in cash for my mom’s sister, a purple tween purse filled with glow-in-the-dark stars, and Ghirardelli chocolates. When immigrants return to their birth country they become pack mules. Distant relatives and friends burst into their lives asking for various parcels to be delivered on their behalf. All sorts of odds and ends are methodically shoved inside belongings, until one doesn’t even know what’s in her suitcase anymore. Apologies, TSA.

  I adjusted my pearls, as if arranging them neatly would make me less likely to incur an import tariff, and got in line for immigration. Greeting your birth nation for the first time is like tasting a long-forgotten dish your grandma used to cook. It’s a little bit of déjà vu mixed with nostalgia for something you’ve never really known. My restless attention wandered to the other people in line: the old women with long earlobes—stretched from the strain of heavy jewelry; the little girls with hair in thick, perfect braids, their stern mothers hustling everybody along. Hearing strangers speak a language that I had previously only heard among family members made me feel a contrived sense of connection to everyone around me. Immediate guilt followed. It felt like I was disrespecting my parents by returning to the country that had stripped us of our birthright, citizenship, and family simply because we were Jewish. Olga and Vladimir had clawed their way out of Russia and here I was … on vacation.

  When I got to the immigration window, the woman stared at me to make sure my face matched my passport. Her deep navy suit starkly contrasted her faded skin, and my entire body itched to smile at her, launch into the Russian I wasn’t able to use in America. But instead I stared back, with a glare just as intense. I grew nervous. Should I greet her in English? Or maybe I should speak Russian?

  My dad warned me against speaking Russian. “They don’t like the people who got out,” he told me shortly after I bought my ticket. “They’ll hear your accent and arrest you.”

  “Keep your mouth shut,” my mom yelled from the kitchen.

  Worried that my sunny Midwestern disposition would make me stand out, I bought a small phrase book titled Just Enough Russian: How to Get By and Be Easily Understood. In the “Meeting People” section you learned how to offer a drink, a cigarette, and a cigar—all before learning how to introduce yourself.

  When the colorless agent finished staring at my face she begrudgingly hit her computer keys and printed a small slip of paper. She shoved it toward me and made an X near a line. “Sign,” she said in English. She made a second X. “Sign,” she said again. That was the end of
my first interaction with a Russian person on Russian soil. “Sign. Sign.” I didn’t even have a chance to offer her a drink.

  There’s an addictive rush to landing somewhere you haven’t been before (or at least in twenty-seven years). Being on foreign land comes with new rules and customs. The social pressures typically towering over every interaction are lifted, giving you the freedom to act in innovative ways. “Oh, unapologetic camel toes are very trendy in Los Angeles,” I’d say, tugging at my crotch. Traveling allows you to temporarily try on a new persona. It’s invigorating.

  Endorphins coursed through my body as I stepped out of customs. My second cousin, Ilya, was already waiting for me at baggage claim. Ilya, a short dude with a bouncy gait and a nervous laugh, carries himself with confidence and mischievous magnetism. He has some important job where he makes a lot of money charming rich people into giving him more money. His livelihood depends on his charisma and it shows in all of his interactions.

  “Welcome home,” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist and drawing me in for a kiss. I pursed my lips together in anticipation, but his kiss adeptly landed on my cheek. My childhood was strung together by an endless series of cheek kisses, but I’d fallen out of the habit after college. I had forgotten how adult and feminine it made me feel.

  Before I realized what was happening, Ilya dove toward my luggage, ripping my bags from my hands. This was the first of many reminders that Russia is a heavily patriarchal society where women should never be burdened with the literal or metaphorical weight of life. Too tired to assert my independence, I peeled the pearl necklaces off my oily skin instead.