American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  I didn’t know what to do, what to say, if I should be mad or flattered.

  “What did he say?” I was curious. I couldn’t believe Cruz was still alive.

  “He said, ‘You keep dream, small boy,’ and then threatened to call the cops.”

  I covered my mouth. I couldn’t help it. The first giggle rolled out of me, along with some of the tension.

  He stuck his hands deep in his pockets and looked around. “I’m glad I can amuse you,” he said, trying to hide his own smile.

  I went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. I was still laughing softly, my eyes watery from it. “You are brave, small boy. Brave and completely insane.”

  “I must be.” He pulled away. “So?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t this what people do when they love each other?”

  “And then they divorce—”

  “I’m going back to Brazil for sure,” he said. “After graduation … And I want you to come with me.”

  Raindrops began to fall softly around us. Goose bumps covered my arms—whether from the sudden coolness or Cruz’s offer, I could not tell. Wouldn’t it be something, though? If I said yes, I’d be the third generation of women in our family to defy her parents and run away with a man.

  “I’ll have my own place—our place. I’ll buy you a piano and you can play for me all day.” He ran his hands up and down my arms, palms hot and so familiar. “Come on, we’ll be together and nobody will tell us how to live. I can take care of you.”

  I closed my eyes against the image. It was dangerously appealing. But could I really go from my father’s house to my husband’s? Not yet.

  “I love you so much,” I said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  I went on, despite him asking me to think about it first. “If we stay together, we’ll burn out. One day everything will spoil and we’ll hate each other.”

  “Why are you talking this way?” He shook me. “This isn’t one of your Gypsy voodoo tricks, is it? I don’t believe in that bullshit, and neither should you.”

  He caught my right hand, slipping it under his shirt to his chest, and held it there.

  I pressed my palm to his skin, our fingers intertwined. Spirals of heat tingled up my hand, his heart lunging at me. His eyes pleaded, and I begged him to let me go. Instead, he held me in tight embraces and whispers. These are the things I remember most: his lips imploring against my ear, in my hair, and the silly way I kept kissing him and pulling away at the same time.

  “It’s late,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say at that moment, but I couldn’t let him change my mind. “We should get back to the restaurant.”

  His hands fell away, carving an empty space between us. The rain fell harder. For the longest time we stood inches away from each other without touching or speaking. I hugged myself, my body shaking.

  He shook his head and walked away without a backward glance.

  * * *

  Within a month I lost more than ten pounds; scrawny did not suit me. For days I wore a shirt Cruz had left months ago under my bed. Sometimes I’d stick my nose in it and try to extract a ghost of his scent from the unwashed fibers. His absence drained every bit of fight out of me.

  At the end of the school year I found Mr. North in the main auditorium rehearsing the graduation ceremony with the senior class of 1993. The theater boomed with voices. The chatter of those waiting for their turn onstage kicked up to the rafters. Mr. North clapped the beat to “Pomp and Circumstance” for the piano player, a Korean girl whose lower lip jerked every time she popped a chord. I approached the stage, and when Mr. North saw me wave at him, he broke the melody. “Take five, everyone.”

  “Why aren’t you in cap and gown?” he asked, jumping off the platform.

  “I’m not going to the graduation ceremony.”

  He cocked his head. “You’re not?”

  “Yeah, you know, there’s so much packing to do still—”

  “You have to. What will your parents say?”

  We took two seats in the front. I hadn’t thought our discussion would last more than a minute. Who could expect a teacher tasked with organizing sex-crazed teens into model citizens to play shepherd to one?

  “My parents said they’re not coming.”

  What a gifted liar I’d become. I had never actually told my parents how seriously Americans took their high-school graduations, that they wore special gowns, and that the wimpier ones bawled, clutching beribboned scrolls to their chests. If I had, who knows, they might’ve come. But then again, neither Mom nor Dad was big on ceremony.

  In Moscow, at age twelve, I went to my music-school graduation. Solo. Mom was nowhere to be found, and Dad was in a “meeting” bargaining down the price of a Carver amplifier. The main recital hall was a blur of festively adorned families. A music-school diploma in the former Soviet Union was essential when gaining entry to any music conservatory, my mother’s dream for me, and the administration went out of their way to show how high their diplomas measured. The room, lined with snowy-clothed tables, smelled like a bakery. Every which way you turned, another mountain of piroshki or crescent cookies soared above rosy teakettles, matching cups, and real silverware. Parents and teachers mingled over dainty serving plates. Students grinned in clusters of joy. One teenage girl with a giant red Mohawk allowed her mouth to split into a smile when her mother squeezed her shoulder at a teacher’s praise.

  I’d missed the ceremony, by the looks of it. With a pang of regret, I grabbed a potato-stuffed piroshki and zigzagged through the crowd.

  Marina Nikolaevna, the school director, saw me and softly clasped her fingers over her middle (she always made the piroshki). Her wispy blond bun toppled dangerously to one side as she most likely tried to pin a name to my face. “I didn’t see you at the ceremony, Lenochka.” And failed.

  “Mom and Dad are taking me to Gagri, Marina Nikolaevna, to celebrate the graduation. Could I get my diploma? We’re on our way to the train station right now.”

  It felt perversely satisfying to hold that little black book in my hands.

  Perhaps I should’ve insisted my parents come to my high-school graduation. I still lament not giving them a chance, as I’ve only recently grasped the significance of memory. Life is made up of sentiment yoked to flashes of recollection.

  I took first place during that year’s talent show, the last one I’d ever play. This time, as I crossed the stage to accept the trophy, my feet touched ground just fine. I gave a speech. That part is so blank, I fear it never happened and my imagination was shooting home movies behind my back. Cruz wasn’t in the audience, and so I felt unfinished. Soul-split. We should’ve talked it through, made a gentle break instead of shattering apart as if cracked by an ax. Loss scooped me out, and I bowed to my audience with grace and smiles only for the sake of my father, who sat in the front row.

  He stood up and clapped as I received the award.

  “Molodets, dochenka (Good work, little daughter)!” I heard him shout, and the pain that had been suffocating me slunk briefly into the background. His showing up was so monumental that I promptly created an imaginary future where we’d jam during family birthdays and weddings the way many Romani do so effortlessly. Not until later did it come out that Mom had threatened to report Olga to immigration if my father dared skip the concert. For days after, he poked fun at the samodeyatelnost (amateur production) of the show. No matter. He was there in the moment with me. And I finally began to accept his nature and his clumsy love.

  Later on, backstage, a classmate pressed roses into my hands. They didn’t come with a note. I hadn’t seen Cruz in weeks and so the flowers filled me with eagerness and anticipation, and I waited until the echoes inside the theater grew cavernous. He never showed. I walked through the dark hallway toward the exit where my father waited to take me home as though I were wading through miles of sand dunes. Cruz was, I was certain, too far out of reach now. But this was also a moment of clarity for me. I finally u
nderstood why I hadn’t listened to my impulses and followed him to Brazil. Even though I loved him, if I married him I would lose this freedom I was fighting so hard to wrest from my parents. Our independence, our identities, would mesh and soon nothing would be left of me or him. My American goal, I realized quite unexpectedly, wasn’t about becoming an American but about doing something I could never do as a young wife. Somewhere in this new landscape I hoped to find just one thing.

  PIECES OF ME

  The morning of my departure basked in the sublime weather that made California so irresistible. It was late May 1993. Palm trees murmured in the breeze and the distant buzz of traffic reassured all that Hollywood was being worshipped right on schedule.

  Mom was driving in from Vegas to pick me up. I had only a few more hours before I’d be gone from Los Angeles for good.

  Earlier that day Olga, the wicked witch of every direction on the compass, had tried to make conversation. She hinted that if I wanted to talk, she was there to listen. The notion of opening up to my stepmother was like eating a dish I’d never heard of. Was I famished enough to try?

  I’d packed my two suitcases with Olga’s help, which consisted mostly of her conducting and talking a mile a minute from the edge of the bed as if we were BFFs. I guessed it was her way of putting me at ease. Too bad she’d picked that particular day, though, when I could manage only short, simple responses without bawling like a seven-year-old whose bike has been stolen.

  “All those ripped jeans. So unfashionable.” She scrunched up her face at a pair of bell-bottoms I’d placed in my suitcase. “You’re a grown woman now.”

  “I’m moving to Vegas, not Milan.”

  “It’s a classy place. Here. I want you to have these.” She shook out a pile of clothes she’d brought in earlier. There were a lot of shiny things with bells and sequins and golden thread. “Look. This one’s gorgeous. I got it on sale in Beverly Hills.” It was a dress covered entirely in metallic print.

  I chuckled, probably for the first time in weeks. “I swear you were a freaking crow in your past life.”

  “If you must know, I was a Hindu prince with impeccable taste.”

  “I thought you were a male dancer, or was that in a different lifetime?”

  She shrugged and dangled the dress in front of my face as if it were a chocolate bar, and wiggled her eyebrows. “Come on. You know you love it.”

  I shook my head and stuffed a Slash T-shirt inside my suitcase.

  My stepmother looked disappointed, but only for a moment before grabbing something else, a deep blue skirt with splashes of gleaming beads. “What about this one? The color will look amazing on you.”

  “Maybe,” I said carefully, because Olga was being way too nice and I wasn’t used to it.

  Pressing it against my waist, she said, “You can wear it when you go out to some fancy restaurant with your rich casino-owner husband.”

  That was a stab in the gut. Immediately the light mood evaporated and I was back to scowling.

  She sat back down, hands in lap, mouth pursed. “You can always stay here with us, you know.”

  After a period of silence, I joined her on the bed, exhausted from thinking heavy thoughts.

  “I saw him in the cards, you know,” she told me. “Right after he started taking lessons from your father.”

  “You did a reading on him? You never told me that.”

  “Well, I did one on both of you. It’s a professional habit.”

  I didn’t want to ask, and started to get up in order to resume packing.

  Olga squeezed my hand, urging me to stay. “You did the right thing, lambkin. He has a long journey ahead of him, and he must make it alone. Believe it or not, your destiny is in Las Vegas.”

  “Right. That’s why you were trying to marry me off to a nice Roma boy.”

  “Never hurts to try,” she said, waving it off like it hadn’t created a near disastrous standoff between us. “But this. Yes, I see it so clearly. You will dream about it first.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Olga wouldn’t tell me, claiming she had to set the table for when Mom got there. She had a truce in mind and acted as if she were preparing her home for the queen herself.

  I finished packing and came out of the bedroom. Dad was smoking on the living-room couch, staring out the window with a faraway look. Gray peppered his temples and beard more than ever. While studying his profile, I noticed how much he reminded me of Grandpa Andrei. I wondered if he noticed the resemblance when he looked in the mirror or noisily slurped his tea, or when he lectured me on tradition. Did it bother him to be so much like the man with whom he thought he had nothing in common?

  Countless times I recall Dad breaking his father’s staunchly conservative rules. When he tried, during one rehearsal, to incorporate an electric guitar into his act, Grandpa Andrei shouted from his seat in the empty theater, “Next thing I know, you’ll be wearing blue suede shoes, gyrating your ass, with grease dripping off your hair.” My grandfather’s biggest gripe was how quickly the young generation was drifting away from Romani ways, and if this complaint sounds familiar, it’s because it binds every culture like twine binds a broom.

  Grandpa Andrei in one of his last performances

  My father strayed, and I after his example, only we did it at different speeds.

  Life had a strange sense of humor.

  When he heard me come in, he turned. “Ready?”

  “Dad, I need to ask you something important.”

  He patted the couch and I sat down next to him.

  “Can I have Grandpa’s photo album?”

  My father yanked me to him and wrapped his arms around me as if I were about to go off to war. When he let go, I saw that he was crying.

  “You don’t have to give it to me. It’s not that big of a deal. Really.”

  His shoulders shook.

  “Everything’s okay, Dad,” I said. I had no idea what had brought him to this state, or how to bring back the pigheaded, wisecracking man I was used to.

  He shook a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose into it. “It’s that blasted mattress. Digs into my back every night and keeps me awake. Might as well sleep on top of a porcupine.” He pushed off the couch, stuffing the handkerchief back into the pocket. “I’m fine. Just gonna lie down in my studio for a while. By the way, I left something for you in the kitchen. On the table.”

  It was the album, tattered and faded to a watery green. I took it back to the bedroom that no longer belonged to me and sat on the floor in the same spot Cruz and I had stood the night I told him I loved him. The album lay open in my lap. My grandparents’ faces peered up from a black-and-white photo taken on the set of a film they were shooting. Dressed in period costumes, they looked regal, immortal. And in a sense they were.

  With my heart’s hand I scooped up the memory of every memento of my remarkable grandparents, and I ran my fingertips over their images before closing the album and laying it on top of my purse with much care.

  I left the bedroom when I heard voices, one of them my mother’s. All morning, Olga had fluttered—dusting, basting, picking the right dress to wear—in preparation for Mom’s arrival. The richest of clients could not bring her to whip out her best china. Not even Grandma Ksenia had kindled such tribute.

  “My baby!” Mom waved me over and tugged me onto her lap. When I was little, her bony thighs provided comfort against every little thing that was wrong with the world. Roxy came scurrying over.

  “I’m the baby,” she said.

  She threw her arms around my neck in that clumsily rough manner kids acquire at the foot of adolescence. Already she stood nearly tall as I did—a legacy of our grandfather, no doubt—but she still smelled like my little sister, of baby powder and bubble gum.

  It was mind-boggling to see Mom drinking coffee at the same table with Dad and Olga. No one was fighting. They talked, laughing like the friends they used to be before the affair a
nd the divorce.

  “You best take a week off, Nora, ’cause I’m coming to Vegas,” Olga said, turning over an empress card and poking at it with a confident finger. “You see?”

  Dad propped up on both forearms to peer at the card spread. “What? All this time you’ve been shitting away your money in the wrong place?”

  “Don’t fret yourself,” Mom said. “This time she’ll have help. It’ll be over before you have time to wheedle some unsuspecting lounge manager into letting you on their stage.”

  I never found out what happened to strike peace between the three of them, but I admire my mother for it the most. With dignity, she’d accepted the past. With grace, she’d pieced us together to resemble a family, fragmented as it would remain. For many years the three of them would remain close. At least once a year, Dad and Olga visited us in Vegas. Olga and my mother perfected the art of losing money at slots, and my father now had two women to drag out of casinos in the middle of the night.

  Soon it was time to go.

  I tossed my stuff in the back of my mother’s tank and turned to hug my father.

  “If you don’t like Vegas…” he said, shrugging.

  “I’ll visit this Christmas,” I said, abruptly attached to the house I’d never paid much attention to before.

  I held my grandfather’s album in my lap and looked back. Dad and Olga stood on the sidewalk, waving. I waved, too, trying to memorize the picture they made together—a giant and a midget huddled close in a way they hadn’t in months.

  When we passed Annie’s house, I watched it with a stab of longing, half expecting Cruz to rush out and say goodbye. But I was lying to myself. Cruz had stopped staying over at Annie’s, and after graduation no one knew of his whereabouts. Brandon and Annie avoided me and I them, probably as much for my own benefit as theirs. Of course, I didn’t expect them to abandon their loyalty to Cruz, but my eyes stung from crying all the same.

  I took mental Polaroids of the entire neighborhood.

  And from a distance I noticed someone standing at the corner of our street and Hollywood Boulevard.