Yes, there was a time when my “opening line,” as they say, had something to do with losing Arturo. I didn’t think I could get a job without it. A mother would show me around her big sunny apartment, and I’d kneel down and greet her children, and then the mother would have to throw in some extra, like a dog who had allergies and had to be fed cooked turkey. Well then I would make my confession.
I go around all day worrying about Leah. The other husbands have arrived too, and Leah calls them bigshots, and now she calls the women longlegs. She writes,
They’ve all gone down to the salty still water. They’re all parading along the eucalyptus avenue toward the umbrella colony. If I close my eyes I can hear the sound of scuttling maids coming out from the corners, taking back the house, the loud brusque whisper that can only be the sound of sweeping. Your maid is like your garlic breath. Molly, the Thai nanny, and Eveline share a closet with bunk beds. Molly puts rice in the mouths of seven siblings in Thailand. I don’t know this for a fact but I sure can hear my mother say it. All Eveline will tell me about herself is that she hates the food in Italy.
Have you ever been to Italy? I can’t believe I forgot to ask you.
One of Francesca’s friends (Francesca, sorry: one of Mark’s old girlfriends, how we heard about these apartments) arrives from Rome to stay in the apartment upstairs from us. Her name is Giulietta, which is a whole different kettle of fish from Julie, isn’t it. Despite her name, she’s all bourgeoisie and gristle. She wears a big floppy sun hat and movie-star glasses. She brings her terrible son Brando and an American au pair from Vassar College. Why does the au pair seem more like a houseguest? Because she has some Feminist Theory 101 in her back pocket?
Last night we were hanging out on our dark lawn—Roman was waiting to catch a bat or at least hit one with the sand shovel he was waving—when a chair came hurtling through the air from the terrace above us. Brando was having a tantrum.
Mark came out of the tiled quarters. Everyone looked to him to see what was called for.
Vassar slunk down, whining, But why don’t they have shower curtains in Italy?
You lost a chair, said Mark, deadpan.
There’s a little cutout in the pine trees through which I could see the twinkling lights from boats on the water.
Al-lie? called Giulietta from the terrace above us.
Vassar shivered.
Mark laughed at her and she flickered up for attention. He said, You must be Allie. He reached out his hand for an introduction.
He said, Baths in the sea, Allie.
I happen to know he’s forty. He swings his hips when he walks, which might be embarrassing in a younger man but it makes him seem youthful.
My employer, Virginia, asks me, “Who are all the letters from, Natasha?”
She cocks her head, fleetingly curious, “I’ve never even asked you. Do you still have family in Russia?”
I look down at the letter in my hand, with its Italian stamp and Italian postmark. But my employer is not really a classy person. She works hard, she’s a doctor, but she started medical school when she was about fifteen (this is her joke, actually), and hasn’t seen the real world since then.
I am no longer in the habit of confessing anything. Oh, I’m friendly, and at once gentle and vigilant with the children. I’m always getting told by the mothers that I’m not like the stereotypical Russian nannies with spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child ideas about discipline. It’s funny because that phrase of course comes from the Bible, and wouldn’t be known to most Soviet Russians of my generation. Also, Russian mamas notoriously spoil their children. As if they had multiples, which they don’t, categorically.
I just stand in the hallway not knowing what to say to her. Which is the lesser of two evils? That I’m corresponding with one of my old children (like an affair, almost!), or that I do have family in Russia, with whom I have never, since I emigrated, exchanged so much as a sentence?
Of course, I am not, technically, corresponding.
Luckily Virginia doesn’t have the time to pursue it. She is already explaining to me some glitch in her schedule, some scheduling conflict, that is a favorite term with her, that overlaps with my afternoon off... All I can think as she’s talking is something from her boys’ swim lessons, to which I accompany them, which strikes me as very funny indeed, “bubble bubble breath,” which is Virginia talking.
It’s all about the women, here, Natasha. The men are spoiled and paunchy, spreading out in the vacated cities, sleeping late, earning money to pay the nannies. There was one flashbulb of awareness when they were teenagers, and the rest of their lives they try to get back to it. Their bodies were strong, a sheer drop. Their hair was black, they drank black coffee and liquor indiscriminately. The only consolation now is to make mad money. Yes, Mark has gone back to New York for a week in the middle of his vacation to make money.
And no, Mark isn’t paunchy. He’s spoiled; but he’s the only one who really pays me any notice. He watches me with Roman and Felix. I figure he’d say something if he didn’t like the way I was treating his heirs. They really look like him rather than Emmie. Mark says that one way to travel is to love everything, revere it. I tell him I think the sunbathers on the rocks look like browning dumplings. I tell him I love to watch the family picnics beneath the pine trees. He smiles as if I’ve just said something very esoteric and he alone understands it.
I don’t think she can see it coming. I don’t think she’s old enough, or pretty enough, to see it coming.
And if I wrote her?
I laugh at myself harshly. I’d disappoint her with my old woman’s voice, I’d hurt her with my lack of belief in her beauty.
This Mark, her professor’s husband, will come back from his business having justified it to himself—every man can justify it—and Leah will be a bird in the hand before she’s even sited properly in the binoculars.
I take my afternoon off in Central Park. The commuter rail is empty at one o’clock on a Wednesday, and so I have the sense of swooping silently upon the city. I take a little picnic, and Leah’s most recent letter. After I finish eating, I wander around for a bit until I find a nice shady rock to sit on—private but not too private—and listen to the xylophone of bird voices. When I close my eyes for a moment, they seem to be elongated, like raindrops, and when a gust of wind comes up, there is a sudden discordance as if the notes are all struck together.
Dear Natasha,
I’m on the lawn again, looking through the keyhole of hedges to the marine blue (today) Mediterranean. Felix is sleeping. Roman is watching the idiot box with Lorene’s kids; Hedwig’s husband has actually taken his boys out fishing, so that he won’t have to do another thing with them all of August. Everyone else (if I say “the others” it will really sound like a novel, won’t it) is out on the count’s sailboat. Breezing along the Mediterranean in their sexy skins beneath their sexy sail. Molly and Eveline went into the town—I offered to watch Eveline’s charges. I could have taken Felix in his carriage. To town. But I thought I might get points from Emmie for reaching out to Eveline. Ah! I feel like the Christian fundamentalist in an apron and a bonnet making quilts past the year 2000. Life is a sacrifice of the soul; children are the refining fire. Mark said that, with a half smile.
I really can’t say you shouldn’t have left, Natasha, because that’s worse than underpaying, or paying for a single doctor’s visit instead of health insurance—you can be sure my mother’s all over labor violations. I can’t say you shouldn’t have left, because it sounds controlling. But when is love not controlling?
Here comes Mark. Ah! It seems like he’s smiling in spite of himself, you know? Like he genuinely likes me.
Yes, I’ve been to Italy. My husband took me, and Arturo, when Arturo was a ten-month-old baby. There was a great hassle about my passport. I had been planning never, ever to leave America. That was my thinking. But with the problems at the consulate, my husband began to suspect me of a covert Russianness.
“One thing,” he said. “If you’re my wife, you don’t draw this kind of attention.”
We fought all the way to John F. Kennedy Airport. Arturo wailed in the backseat and I twisted around to look in his wobbly eyes. I reached my hand back to his soft knee and he hiccupped. I looked in his wet light eyes and thought to myself that there was no reason under the sun, as they say, why he should stop crying. I knew that things were never going to be good between me and his father. Indeed, Arturo began to wail with renewed passion.
“Oh you’re a good a mother!” my husband shouted.
I was always the crazy one, as if it had to be one of us. My husband said he should have seen it. He claimed that I mumbled certain things in my sleep.
Indeed, whenever we fought, my English failed me, as did the entire body of my psychologist’s training. This fight was something to do with the way I’d left the apartment. I hadn’t tidied up sufficiently. I hadn’t put away the clean dishes from the previous night’s dinner, for example. My husband was suspicious of everyone and everything, and he somehow thought the likelihood of our apartment being broken into—by the police, that is—was greater because I’d left it in shambles. I knew a little bit about the drugs, but I never said anything.
Arturo was just beginning to walk at the time of the trip to Italy. My husband was very proud of him. My husband wanted to take him out and show him on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, as a son of Italy. We visited various cousins of my husband, and my husband always pulled Arturo away from me and presented him as if he belonged solely to my husband.
The last three days of our vacation we spent on the Mediterranean. It reminded me of the Black Sea, where I’d been as a child: so calm, like a bathtub, families like porpoises picnicking on the rocks, riding bicycles down piney paths, eating late and lavishly. We went to the shale beach in the afternoons and my husband would swim out to the boats while Arturo clapped and paddled in the shallow water.
Our last afternoon there was a terrific thunderstorm. As I remember, there was an ominous warning rustle through the pines and in a matter of seconds the sky was cracking like ice on a river in springtime and the air was throwing off shards of electricity. I could see my husband’s slick black head dipping way out in the water and I began waving frantically. Then the sky dumped out its buckets.
What should I do? I tried to shield Arturo, but I had nothing on but a bathing suit. I’d left our clothes and towels at the hotel, in the midst of another fight with my husband. The rain was surprisingly cold and hard, like one of those “massaging” showerheads. Arturo began to whimper.
Just then, a teenage boy appeared at my elbow. How can I describe it? He was like a courtier in a castle, he had that air of grave attendance. His hair was jet and he had a low forehead and fluted nostrils. His gaze was intent, as if I were the sole reason for this moment. His tanned body in a swimsuit was strangely flat, almost one-dimensional. He held out his big towel. I nodded gratefully and wrapped up Arturo. My baby’s slightly droopy eyes, one was what they call “lazy,” his copper hair like mine in a delicate ridge over the crest of his head (now darkened with water), his soft bare body...
“I am Seryozha,” the teenage boy bowed to Arturo. Arturo smiled from beneath the towel.
“Come on!” He gestured for us to follow. He pointed to a big pine on the beach of which one half was charcoaled, branded by lightning. “That was last summer,” said Seryozha, by way of a warning.
He herded us along the path. Lucky it was wide, because you could hardly see past the curtain of rain in front of you, and I was sure I would have stumbled with Arturo. When we got to the little hotel where we were staying, I held Arturo away from me to unwrap the towel and return it. Seryozha shook his head vigorously. “Tomorrow.”
This seemed at the time the kindest thing that anyone had ever offered. He bowed again, and disappeared into the rainstorm.
I’m sorry, Natasha. This has nothing to do with you, really, I mean you shouldn’t be concerned for me like my mother.
Maybe you’re my conscience, actually. Did you get the letter where I said you were my mother’s? I admit I was kind of proud of myself for figuring out that little piece of psychology.
I admit it’s kind of funny to keep writing to someone who doesn’t write back to you, but in a way it reminds me of some art project sanctioned at my college. Anyway, feel free to destroy these letters. I certainly never want to see them.
Last night we went to a Medieval town about an hour’s drive away for a late dinner. Francesca had recommended the restaurant, with outdoor, torch-lit tables in a cobblestone chasm walled by stone churches. Emmie and Mark had a bad “row,” as Hedwig calls it, beforehand, so Emmie stayed behind with Felix. Mark wanted to take Roman. Hedwig and Lorene urged me to come along in order to help Mark with Roman. I would have stayed home out of loyalty to Emmie, I know I would have. Ah! Could you see this coming? Please tell me you couldn’t. Have you ever felt like all that was surreal in the night is a curse in the morning?
It was in the car on the way home. We took a different car from Lorene and Hedwig & Co. because of Roman’s car seat. It was with our clothes on. I kept thinking of that diamond-shaped view of the ocean through the hedges, and our keyhole of nakedness. I said, Please don’t tell Emmie. And Mark laughed, Emmie and I tell each other everything! The kind of slippery teasing that writes a reprieve for everything. That covers all its bases. Do you know what I mean? I know my mother would say that’s not teasing, Leah, that’s an abuse of power. Can you just hear her?
My husband roared at me, “You left me in a thunderstorm!” Oh, I needed to laugh. What a baby my husband sounded like. What a stupid baby. It came to me that I would not tell him about Seryozha—whose name couldn’t, I realized, possibly have been Russian.
I suppose it was in that moment that I knew I was leaving.
Here is the truth, Leah. I would be the crazy one if crazy was what it took to get free.
I told myself that I did not want to “go down” with my husband, certainly that was his slang, and again I needed to laugh at the evocation. For example I had not the least intention of being at home when the police arrived heaving with petty resentment at having to climb four stories. Ours was a walk-up, just like yours, Leah. I would not pretend I wasn’t terrified of those black-nosed German Shepherds, police dogs with thick muscular tails used, like kangaroos, for superior balance.
“Where was I supposed to have thought you’d gone, Natalie, Moscow?” my husband shouted.
Yes, I called myself Natalie then. Assimilation. I thought it sounded odd, harsh, nonsense, but that’s what I thought a professional immigrant would do. Not a housecleaner or a nanny.
When I take too many painkillers now there’s a side effect of my uterus contracting, and I think, mincing down the stairs to Virginia’s children from my attic, that children are truly our penance for being, once, ourselves, children. But then I think, why should you, Leah, have to pay for being Leah?
The storm cleared and my husband said he would take Arturo to the town center where there was an arcade with many small shops, cafés, and a fruit market. They would spend the afternoon making friends with the shopkeepers. Fine, I said. Goodbye, Arturo. I had to kiss him in my husband’s arms although I did not want to go near my husband.
I allowed one moment of silence in our little hotel room.
When I think about my son now, it’s not the way I knew him, held him, and held onto him when he was a baby. I try to imagine him as a grown man, that he’s tall and kind and handsome, that he’s been a good son to his father and his stepmother, that he’s gone into the tile business or gone to college, that he says with curious pride he’s half Russian. Even if he doesn’t, that maybe he thinks it’s his secret.
I must add that as far as I know he has never tried to find me.
No, I never allow myself to think of him like that—in my arms, on the beach of the Mediterranean, in a wild thunderstorm. Because in that moment, I was sure S
eryozha (and I know I didn’t hear Sergio) was our guardian angel. I was sure he was a sign. That this was the beginning. The cleansing rain, the hotel room with its welcome, stuffy warmth, Arturo’s eyes gleaming with excitement at our rescue.
THE OTHER WOMAN
My mother played piano, oldies and Chopin. Twice a year she played Happy Birthday, once for me, once for my brother. She woke up early for it—the one day she could wake us up early without risking her life, she said. Hah. You weren’t allowed to kill your mother on your birthday.
Did we happen to know that Happy Birthday was the first song ever transmitted back from a spacecraft? This was exactly the kind of stray-dog fact her boss brought home, and my mother couldn’t get over how every ugly mutt of information looked purebred in the light of the university. She laughed, wheezed, pretended she wheezed on purpose. My brother wanted to know what model spaceship, trying to impress her, and my mother said, “That would not be the question, genius.”
Affecting the fatigue if not the vocabulary of the educated classes, my mother elaborated, “You get a blob of information, Zack, and the question you don’t ask is, What’s this fucking blob of information?”
I gave him a glare; naturally I agreed with our mother.
Drama. My mother stepped back to make room for her declaration: “The question you ask, Zack, is the why question.”
Professor Shemaria, aforementioned “boss,” saw the world through why-colored glasses. Professor Shemaria connected everything, in her classroom and her research, through why questions.
“What do you think I do all day,” said my mother, “empty wastebaskets?”
My mother was on the custodial services payroll. My brother stroked his chin. “Is that a why question?”
“Smartass-holery,” said my mother. “Why do I work? So Zack can eat donuts.”
Clothed, Female Figure Page 4