And so they had a huge bowl of candy at the ready, and many bags with which to refill it. While it was still light out, Rudy grilled cheeseburgers on the barbecue on the back patio, serving Sasha on a tray in front of the TV—a World Series baseball game, which she insisted she enjoyed. The hamburger was the best she’d ever eaten, she told him. Brown on the outside and juicy in the center, with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. Potato chips and carrot sticks and coleslaw. They each sipped from beers. Sasha let out a huge sigh as she licked the foam from her upper lip. The thing she liked about the baseball game was that she could follow it in a basic sense—balls, strikes, bases, outs, home runs—but she didn’t have to concentrate on it carefully like the plot of a movie. Her mind could wander. She wished the holidays—even Easter, with the stores’ baskets and flavored lip balms and stuffed bunnies, socks and sweets which she had loved for filling Stefi’s basket—were over, and it was early summer and no one was coming to the door.
There was the crack of a baseball bat, the ball shooting straight out of the park and into the packed crowd in the seats along the San Francisco Bay. The fans cheered. Rudy and Sasha cheered. Then the doorbell rang.
“The littlest ones come before it’s quite dark,” Rudy said, wiping his mouth with his napkin and getting up from his tray to head out into the front hall. “You enjoy your supper,” he told Sasha.
But Sasha didn’t want to hide in the living room like a stowaway or mistress. She followed Rudy into the hallway, touching his elbow and putting on a smile as he scooped up the big wooden salad bowl of candy.
Their first customers were CeCe and Keira—Kiki, who was dressed in a little white lab coat.
“Scientist?” Rudy guessed.
“EnTOmoloGIST,” Kiki declared, pointing to the spiders that had been attached to her pockets, kicking up her little hiking boots, and showing off her real magnifying glass. “It’s a kind of scientist who likes bugs,” she explained to Rudy.
“Oh, right!” Rudy agreed, slapping his forehead. “And studies them. Maybe you will one day.
“Only my granddaughter,” Rudy whispered to Sasha, giggling as they headed to the kitchen for cider and Kiki’s miniature hamburger (protein, Rudy insisted!) and cake donut holes—a ritual before trick-or-treating. Kiki loved cake donuts more than candy.
“Always up to her elbows in dirt,” CeCe called after Sasha and Rudy en route to the kitchen. “In the classroom, in the yard. We’ve got an aquarium ant farm that terrifies me. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before those ants get into the kitchen and bake a cake.”
After their little supper, Sasha went with CeCe and Keira to trick-or-treat on their street. She wondered if she’d ever get used to marching up to strangers’ front doors and ringing the bell.
Halloween had been an unexpected pleasure, even though Rudy knew the lead-up had given both him and Sasha some anxiety. Halloween meant the holidays were coming. Without Bee. Without Stefi. Although these would be his first holidays with Sasha. Assuming she’d join him. For everything. He hoped she’d join him for everything. He got so anxious and worried by the idea of the coming holidays that Rudy stocked up on ridiculous amounts of candy, eating it in the evenings like a nervous squirrel. Move in with me—he’d rehearsed this plea in his mind a million times; it came to him all the time, like a song you couldn’t get out of your head. But he didn’t have a follow-up speech to back up the fact that, without a doubt, this was what Sasha should do.
They’d started sleeping together, the first time Rudy carrying Sasha from his living room when she’d nearly fallen asleep after dinner and a movie.
“All we have to do is sleep,” he’d proclaimed. But Sasha had other ideas. It was like swimming. Swimming in a stream, swimming in a pool, swimming in the ocean. His scalp tingling from the cool water, his arms and legs loosening, toes touching the bottom, coming up for air, grasping each other’s arms. Laughing.
In the morning, Sasha revealed that she was wary of invading Rudy’s former marital bed. That evening he went out and bought all new bedding. He washed and dried everything and made up the bed fresh. From then on they were lovers, bedmates, cemented best friends.
Rudy and Sasha went for walks, built fires, and cooked dinners at Rudy’s place.
“Move in with me,” Rudy finally blurted, the second week they’d shared his room. “Sell your house, live here for real. Marry me, move in with me, go to the rest home with me.”
“Polygamy illegal!” Sasha pinched the extra bit of flesh above Rudy’s boxers.
He sucked in his belly, shot out an arm to flex his fist for her. “I will crush other husband. I am number one husband.” He reached for a sip of water beside the bed, offered some to Sasha. She drank, sat up, and pulled her nightgown over her head. “Oof, must get ready for work.”
“And that’s another thing,” Rudy declared. “You choose, but I vote that you only work one of your jobs. Especially since you’re selling your house. And I’ve got more than enough of what I need for one person—enough for two.”
Sasha turned to him. Her eyebrows lifted as she pushed her fluffed hair out of her eyes.
“This is real life,” Sasha said, raising her forefinger in the air and pointing it at him. “Real life, big move.”
“Is that a yes!” Rudy was as excited as a kid. He knew life’s complications. They both did. You’ve got this, Bee had said to him his first day at the department store piano after the disgrace of losing his job. He had not lost his job, Bee had insisted, once again. He’d been downsized, with a very good package, like so many other workers in the valley. It had nothing, nothing to do with his worth as an employee, let alone as a person.
Sasha nodded so slowly it could have been interpreted as some sort of neck stretch for a crick.
“We’ve got this,” Rudy told her, touching his forefinger to hers.
She hooked her finger around his and gave him a real nod.
“We’ve got this.” She drew him in for a hug, his stubble rough against her sensitive skin—a familiar morning sensation she’d quickly grown to love. Hungary had always been home in her mind. From the time she’d moved to America. Gabor had been a winding, too-narrow road, clinging to a cliff too close to a sheer drop to the ocean. To that icy sidewalk. Like Highway One down the Big Sur coast, which he had driven frighteningly fast, a day in which she feared she might die, and honestly wondered if it would be a much-needed release from this man. But Rudy. Rudy was home. This was Rudy and Bethany’s house, yes. She realized now, however, why it didn’t matter that it had been Bethany’s home for so many years. Because to Sasha, Rudy was home.
She had heard this in an American song or movie—a person proclaiming that another person was home. Maybe in one of those cheerful show tunes. At the time, Sasha had found the notion plain silly. Another cookie-crumbles saying that she didn’t get. But now. Now she felt the truth of this and realized that it wasn’t a distinctly American feeling, but universal. A phenomenon for everyone, yet probably a sense of companionship few got to experience. For the first time since Stefi’s death, Sasha thought, I am lucky.
The next week, Rudy and Sasha chose a real estate agent. The agent seemed to sense that they were both floundering a bit when it came to making a plan, so she took over. She happened to have a young couple new to the Valley who needed to rent a place for six months until spring, when she would put Sasha’s house on the market. She would rent to the young couple for a slightly reduced price, in exchange for some light renovation: painting the walls, landscaping.
As they sat at Rudy’s dining room table going over the Realtor’s plan, the Realtor said to Sasha, “He’s blushing and you’re beaming, so I’m guessing your plan is to move in together.” Sasha giggled and Rudy coughed, and then they all sipped their water.
Next Rudy and Sasha met with a divorce attorney who drew up papers with which a process server would attempt to serve Gabor. Sasha was given a copy, too, on the off-chance she would come into contact with her husband.
The attorney insisted that all she would have to do was hand Gabor the papers. Rudy scrutinized the lawyer’s bill—which included a charge of $90 for leaving a voicemail. “We break down our hourly rate,” the lawyer told Rudy.
“Mmm-hmm,” Rudy replied agreeably. “I see you also round up, and have made repeated phone calls to a number we told you was no longer Gabor’s employer. At ninety dollars a pop?”
“I’ll take one off,” the attorney said. He didn’t say the firm had made a mistake. These lawyers never said they made a mistake. There was an attorney in Rudy’s poker group and the words “I was mistaken, I’m sorry . . .” had never crossed the guy’s lips.
“And you capitalize on others’ misfortune.”
“How about I remove the charge for the other call, too?” the attorney conceded, as though he were doing Sasha a big favor.
“Nah, leave it,” Rudy told him. “I want to be able to show people that you guys charge ninety dollars to leave a voicemail.”
The attorney stood, straightened his expensive pinstripes. Rudy took Sasha’s hand as they stood, too. In family court, your own attorney was somehow on equal footing with the opposing counsel and the judge. The lawyers, judges, and bailiffs all punched in to work together every morning. Rudy had learned this in the short time he had spent researching, interviewing, and hiring an attorney for Sasha. He knew from working with attorneys on Bethany’s estate that they could be overcharging to the point of billing you for their mistakes. From what he could tell, the family court system was a capricious cross between a Gogol short story and a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And so he felt this was the one thing in this situation that, as a native English speaker and Californian, he could help Sasha with.
Sasha quit her job cleaning the locker rooms at the club, giving a week’s notice. The ladies at the club—the women who attended regularly and some of the instructors and personal trainers—all of whom used the cushy locker rooms and formed overlapping friendships, got Sasha a cake for her last day. A friendly, artificially tanned woman made a healthy pomegranate-lemonade punch that was delicious. They chipped in and paid for another maid to work that day, and tipped her for cleaning up after their shindig. A few of the club members whispered to Sasha that she had been “our favorite” housekeeper.
They also chipped in and bought her a beautiful silver bracelet that you pinched together to expand and collapse. The top of the bracelet was woven with a braid of gold, too. Sasha couldn’t remember the last time she wore a bracelet. Bracelets bumped up against the counters and buckets as she cleaned, and against the watch case as she demonstrated her wares at the department store.
The morning after her last day working at the gym, Sasha awoke in a silly mood—giddy from being released from her cleaning job. She and Rudy talked and snuggled and had coffee and English muffins in bed.
She spun the bracelet from the ladies at the club around and around on her wrist, showing it to Rudy yet again.
Once she had put on the bracelet, she did not take it off, not even in the shower or in bed. Every day it reminded her of the celebration of her moving on in this struggle to stay afloat in California.
24
One day, Rudy opened the door to find an agitated, sandy-blond, mustachioed man, wearing a navy T-shirt with some sort of logo involving a bulldog, and blue jeans. His feet were clad in well-worn sneakers, one with the laces untied and about to fall to the ground.
“Can I help you?” Rudy did not push open the screen door.
From over his shoulder, Sasha said, “Gabor.” Her voice was not raised, but she’d moved further behind Rudy, clutching a handful of the fabric of his Oxford shirt at his waist, as though wanting to become a part of him.
“Who’s this baboon?” Gabor asked, poking a finger into the screen door at Rudy.
Sasha knew Gabor meant buffoon. He called anyone he thought to be a buffoon a baboon, insisting that this was the correct word for what he meant. While Sasha had taken English classes eight out of the ten years they had lived in America, Gabor blustered through with irrational confidence, confusing nouns in such a way that made Sasha giggle, which in turn made him simmer with anger. Carpet instead of blanket. Carpets for covers. Sasha’s vocabulary soared past his once she began working at the store, and his anger and hubris turned to cruelty, teasing her drunkenly on her “Fancyee pants English speak.”
“I’m Rudy Knowles.” Rudy pushed open the screen door. “This is my home, and I suggest you come in, as you appear to be drunk and angry.”
Sasha could not imagine why Rudy was inviting him into the house.
Gabor lifted a leg comically high and, getting tangled in the loose shoelace, stumbled and lurched through the door into the hallway. Sasha led Gabor into the combination kitchen and family room at the back of the house.
In moments, it was as if no time had passed. Gabor began a familiar circular argument: It was Sasha’s fault that Stefi had drowned.
“I would have saved her!” Gabor punched his chest with his fist. “I can swim.”
“The only thing you’re swimming in is vodka.” Sasha collapsed on the love seat in the family room and massaged her temples. “And shhh. Hush. You are making a scene.” She had wanted Gabor to appear for so long, and now all she wanted was for him to vanish. New girlfriend, new baby, divorce, goodbye.
“Oh, a scene,” Gabor said, mocking her. “At fancy new boyfriend’s fancy house.”
“Gabor, you have a girlfriend and a new baby.” It occurred to Sasha that she did not know the sex of the baby or its age. She wasn’t jealous of this new girlfriend or the baby. How could you resent a baby? She just wanted her life back—and this new life, too. Was that greedy? Gabor wanted whatever he didn’t have, unless it was vodka or beer.
Sasha could swim. Gabor never came with her to Stefi’s Saturday morning lessons. And once she got the job at the fancy California club, the one free staff class she’d signed up for was mommy-and-me swimming lessons. “Watch me swim!” Stefi had begged her father at home, doing the breaststroke on the kitchen floor before her father. But Sasha knew from experience that there was no point in reminding Gabor of any of this now, especially in his current state.
Right now, Sasha wanted to go swimming. To dive down to the bottom of the ocean until she couldn’t hear the drunken voice of her husband. She wanted the water to be clear and thin, not thick and murky and heavy and green-gray. She wanted to swim to the bottom and pick up a rock that was smooth in her hand. Then shoot to the top, water rushing in her ears. Pop through the surface and spray water out of her mouth and throw the rock as far as she could. She wanted to take Stefi back to mommy-and-me swim class, save her from drowning. She could have saved her.
Gabor sat beside her now on the love seat, erupting in spurts and fits like the geysers they’d seen at Yellowstone.
“Yes, I have son. But I miss my daughter. I miss my daughter!” Gabor’s voice was getting louder. The tone-deaf repetitive rants of a drunk.
You left us, Sasha wanted to remind him. But it had been a relief. Instead, she said, “And what would be her school lunch? Hunh? When you forgot to pack her lunch or give her lunch money? Would she eat leaves while other children unpacked sandwiches from home?”
“I want . . . I want,” Gabor sputtered.
“You want whatever you don’t have.”
“You think you’re so smart because you have job.” Gabor lowered his head, trying to meet Sasha’s gaze, as she sat bent over, clutching her head. “I want to get job. I want to be working. You think I don’t want to be working? I want two jobs and boyfriend with fancy house.”
“Listen to yourself. You want a boyfriend. And two jobs. Okay. I’ll introduce you to my HR manager at Nordstrom.”
“Yes, I want to sell devil’s timepiece jewels to bored rich people.”
Laughter burst between Sasha’s lips in a spitty gust and then she was crying. There was no arguing with a drunk. There was no arguing with an ex.
“I want to eat coffee and
cake in break room with my girlfriends.” Gabor’s red-eyed gaze shot around the room now. This was how the let’s-find-more-booze march started, looking around the room as though there might be a tap in the wall. “I want to get out of this computer engineer hell with no work. I want them to stop hassling me, unemployment office. I look for job! I want to get out of this place! I want to take Stefi and go home, like we never came to this place! I want to braid her hair!”
Sasha’s laughter gave way to tears. That had been the one thing Gabor could do—braid their daughter’s hair. Both a single braid down her back, and pigtail braids, parted neatly with a comb. He had never actually driven or walked Stefi to school or packed a lunch. But he had braided her hair, and Stefi loved it when he did. He made her giggle and laugh, her fine, blond-white hair slippery and straight; Gabor saying, Hold still. Then he’d tickle her and she’d giggle and squirm and he’d repeat, Hold still! Finally, they’d get down to business, Stefi holding her head still—with sweet, almost grown-up straight posture—her face assuming a serious look. When Gabor was finished, Stefi loved to examine her hair with the hand mirror in the medicine chest mirror.
Look, Mama! she’d insist.
Sasha knew that grief boiled within him, as it did her, but she hadn’t had the luxury of not working, of being an unreliable employee—drunk or sober. And now Gabor acted like it hadn’t been a sign of strength and perseverance to keep going. Still, Sasha thought, standing behind Rudy at the refrigerator now as Gabor carelessly rooted through the shelves, no doubt looking for alcohol. She did not want to let Gabor go just yet. She needed to give him the divorce papers to really get away from him.
She followed him to the kitchen island, where he had taken a seat, cracking open a beer he’d scored.
“Gabor. I want my daughter to come with me to work on Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” she told him in a low stern voice. “I want my daughter to ask me to tie her shoes again. I want my daughter to beg me to sing one last verse of a made-up song to her before bed. I want my daughter to correct me on my English, and to give her ten kisses for every time she does, smart girl whom I love. I want my daughter to have maple syrup on her chin so that I can lick my thumb and dab it off. I want my daughter to start piano lessons. I want to have to remind my daughter to practice her piano scales, to pull up her kneesocks, to be nice to old ladies.”
Me for You Page 21