Here’s what isn’t confusing: Natasha is beautiful. Kind of like Tahnee Welch is beautiful in Cocoon. She even has the same short hairstyle that wonderfully exposes the slim architecture of her neck and eyes of blue that burn with pleasure as she gets ready to swing her badminton racket. She is boyish and athletic and is usually seen gliding through the Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony grounds with her brown boxer by her side. It is sad that I can no longer remember the boxer’s name, because once I knew it as surely as I know my own.
Natasha is sweet and kind and in full control of herself. She does not whine, she does not complain, and if there are insecurities about her place in the world, she deals with them elsewhere. When she somersaults or does a headstand in front of me, it is not to show off but because she is … happy? And when she’s standing on her hands, and her T-shirt succumbs to gravity, and I am looking at her tanned, brown, flat stomach, I am happy, too. She will never be my “girlfriend,” obviously, but she exists somewhere in the world, and that will be good enough until college.
By this stage everyone simply calls me Gnu (to my grandma: “Mozhet Gnu s nami poigraet?” May Gnu come out and play with us?), but Natasha always calls me Gary. I try to time my encounters with Natasha so that I am only playing every second game of badminton or Little Fool or Spit with her, but the children, especially since most of them are girls and hence smart, take notice. I am sitting at a green picnic table with Natasha, our calves touching for thirty-seven seconds (my mind: “thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, ah, she moved”), when one of the girls says, “Gnu likes Natasha.”
I start getting up, because killing myself will take some preparation, when Natasha says: “I like Gary, too. He’s my friend.” She then maneuvers one playing card on top of her pile and says to her slower adversary: “Spit!”
The cards fall on the table at great speed. And I am left with this duality. She likes me. Hence, I am likable. And not for this Gnu shit either. To her, I am Gary. But I am also her friend, and that statement is irrevocable as well.
What does it mean to love someone? At SSSQ, I am not allowed to be near the native-born girls, because I am of the dalit caste, untouchable, and my presence may pollute them. But at Ann Mason’s, as you have seen, I can touch my skinned knee to Natasha’s glowing one for thirty-seven seconds, and she will be my friend, if not more. One early summer day I am shielding myself from the sun beneath an oak tree, reading Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, sneezing from the rich American pollen and dreaming of distant allergen-free planets, when I encounter these lines in a story: “I stood up and hugged her to me in that humid darkness, running my hand along her thin back and then around to cup one little breast. ‘I love you, Jane,’ I said.” I close my eyes and picture a little bag of weight in my hand. Cup. You cup the little breast of a Jane. So this is love.
At home, there is love between my parents, and sometimes I can hear them loving each other. But love mostly means fighting. My mother has perfected the silent treatment to such an extent that she will not speak to my father for many days, sometimes weeks, even as they continue to share their mahogany full-sized bed together. When this happens, I serve as the emissary between them. My parents schedule meetings with me to air their grievances and to discuss the prospects for a razvod. And so I shuttle between them, sometimes allowing tears to strengthen my bid for them to stay together. “He apologizes, Mama. He will not fall under the influence of his wolfish relatives any longer.” “Papa, she knows she should not have been an hour late when you were picking her up, but suddenly there was extra typing at work and she wanted to earn overtime.”
Indeed, the most dangerous part of my day is when my father has to pick my mother up after work, after he has collected me from my grandma’s, so that we may all go back to distant Little Neck together in the Tredia. We wait for Mother near a subway station at the corner of Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, not far from the Queens Criminal Court. There is a 1920s statue on that corner called Triumph of Civic Virtue: a naked, well-muscled man with a drawn sword is stepping on two bare-chested mermaids who symbolize corruption and vice. “Where is she? Suka tvoya mat’!” my father cries, because my bitch-mother is late, ten minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, an hour late. And with each gradation of lateness I know the fight will ratchet right up the razvod scale.
To pass the time, and stem his anger and my worry, Papa and I play a nervous version of hide-and-seek around the well-endowed, tight-assed Civic Virtue God and his vanquished mermaids, absorbing the sickening lessons in gender relations the statue so clearly presents. (In 2012, after much outcry, the Triumph of Civic Virtue was removed to a Brooklyn cemetery.)
Finally, my mother puffs out of the subway in her rabbit-fur coat, the one indulgence no Russian woman can do without, and we pack into the car, and the fighting begins.
Suka! Suka! Suka!
Go to the khui!
In front of the child she is cursing like this. How much did you send to your relatives?
Ne-tvoyo sobache delo. It is not your dog-business.
Then where were you, bitch?
My mother is sick! My mother is dying! Ah, you wolfish breed!
And then my father to me, quietly, but loud enough for her to hear in the backseat, Other men hit their wives. But I never hit her. And look what good it did.
And I am turning in to my window, leaning my head against the cold pane, as Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from the nerd-musical Chess plays as loudly as it may on the car’s stereo. I picture an Asian girl beneath an enormous Thai stupa in some kind of silky native dress. I’m not sure what it means other than the urge to go somewhere else right now, to leap out of the car and run toward Kennedy Airport, which is not very far away.
One thing I know for certain is that my parents can never get a razvod. Why? Because we are the Family Shteyngart, population three, and with already such low numbers we are not supposed to be apart. Not to mention that maintaining two households will mean our living standards will erode, we will no longer be middle-middle class, and we might have to give up the Mitsubishi, which I have already pointed out to my unimpressed SSSQ classmates: “Behold! The Tredia-S.” And finally, if either of my parents was to remarry (unthinkable), their American spouses would look down on my keloid scar and borrowed Batman T-shirt, and I might end up with no family at all.
Sometimes I get angry. On the school bus back at SSSQ, I find an Israeli girl—some Shlomit or Osnat—whose star shines even less brightly than my own, and I make fun of her mercilessly. She has a mustache like my grandmother’s and a training bra. I slide into the seat next to her and make jokes about her need to wax her mustache with something called “turtle wax,” an insult that I’ve overheard from another bus mate and that seems like just the right kind of topical cruelty to use on this small, dark, friendly creature. I tease her about her training bra and what I can only imagine lies beneath it. What I can’t quite understand is that I have a crush on this girl precisely because she has a mustache just like my grandmother’s, which makes me want to hug her and tell her all of my troubles. The girl informs on me to Mrs. R, the kindly educator who helped me with my shoelaces and sang Troo-loo-loo-loo when I was in first grade. Mrs. R takes me aside on the bus line and tells me to stop bothering the girl. Mrs. R’s gentle opprobrium, much worse than her anger, makes me so ashamed I consider skipping the school bus and walking across Queens to my grandmother’s house. The truth is I don’t even understand what turtle wax is. The truth is that if those furry lips were to graze my own, I would not turn away.
I get angry even among the peaceable kingdom of Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony. There is a new kid no one likes exactly. Straight out of Minsk or somewhere, scrawny, undernourished, weak, Belorussian. He is with his grandmother, and we don’t know the whereabouts of his parents. He looks like a younger version of my step-grandfather Ilya—the unhappy eyes, the Leninist forehead—and that makes me hate him even more. My favorite book of the summer o
f 1984 and the two subsequent summers is Nineteen Eighty-Four. I commit the passages in which O’Brien tortures Winston to memory. When the kid is alone staring sullenly at a comic book over a picnic table, I approach him. I sit down and begin to speak in measured tones. “Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
I slide over to the kid. He cowers before me, which I both love and hate. He is more slabyi than I am, which is good. But I am about to sing from my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion at the Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, which makes me—what? A man. What would a man do?
Before he can stop me, before I can stop me, I grab his hand. I hold up my left hand, thumb hidden, four fingers extended, just like in Orwell’s book. “How many fingers am I holding up, Vinston?”
He doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t understand my English. Doesn’t understand who is Vinston. I repeat in Russian. “Four,” he says finally, his whole little sardine body trembling.
“And if the Republican Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?”
“Four.”
I begin twisting his fingers. He cries out in pain. I am bearing down on him, hating this, hating this. “Pyat’!” he cries in Russian. “Five!”
Trying to keep back the welling tears in my own eyes: “No, Vinston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”
He breaks free and runs down the vast green lawn separating our bungalows. “Baaaaa-buuuuuu-shkaaaa!”
Later, out my bedroom window, I see his old babushka talking to mine, a stooped, tired, emaciated figure confiding to a thick, voracious, quasi-American one. Now I will be punished! Now I will be punished! I savor it. I did this terrible thing, and now I will be punished. I rush out to meet Grandma. She sighs and looks at me. She loves me so much. Why does she love me so much?
“That boy’s babushka says you hit him,” Grandma says.
“I didn’t hit him,” I say. “I read to him from a book.”
“Did he do something to you?”
“No.”
“My shining sun,” Grandmother says. “Whatever you did to him, I’m certain he deserved it.”
When Grandma leaves I go to the bedroom and weep over the monster I now am, but the next day I do the same thing. And then again. And again. How many fingers, Vinston? After a few weeks the boy leaves the bungalow colony for good.
The summer sun is down around eight-thirty. Grandma is already in bed and snoring with all her might. The country folk in the Russian novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov greet each nightfall with the phrase “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!” and something similar can be said of Grandma’s worldview. I quietly pour myself out past her bed and into the new night. The stars are constellating above, and the bungalow colony is quiet, but somewhere I hear girlish giggles and the scratchy warble of Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” on a no-brand radio. The children are out bathed in moonlight and they are so happy to see me. “Gnu! Gnu!”
“Shhh, Eva … You’ll wake Babushka.”
“You shhh.”
Natasha is sitting on an Adirondack chair, wearing her favorite green hooded sweatshirt, her boxer faithfully at her feet. “Come here, Gary,” she gestures at her lap. It is not manly to sit on top of a girl, I know, but we are roughly the same height, and I do want to feel her warmth so. The boxer looks up protectively as I sit on her lap, then lowers his frothy muzzle with disregard. Oh, it’s just him. Boy George is crooning: “I’m a man (a man) without conviction / I’m a man (a man) who doesn’t know.” Natasha leans forward, and I feel her cheek, still heated by the day’s sun, against my ear. “Gnu, tell a joke,” someone says. I want to lower my eyelids and be in this moment forever, but I understand what these children want of me. I tell the joke.
* * *
* Curiously enough, she will become the novelist and essayist Irina Reyn. A graduating class of fewer than thirty Hebrew school children produced two writers, both of them from the USSR.
Disney World, 1986. Father and son out for a spin. Mothers up and down Florida are locking up their daughters.
WHEN I TURN FOURTEEN, I lose my Russian accent. I can, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name of a Turkish politician. There are three things I want to do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understand that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl tell me that she likes me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of eating at McDonald’s often. Mama and Papa think that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street are things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate. Even my parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as only immigrants can be, cannot resist the iconic pull of Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.
And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation, two Russian families cram into a large used sedan and take I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other family—three members in all—mirror our own, except that their single offspring is a girl and they are, on the whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighs three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt grin that of a turn-of-the-last-century Jewish peddler scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney tickets are a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from Moscow?” the time-share salesman asks, appraising the polyester cut of my father’s jib.
“Leningrad.”
“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”
“Yes, mechanical engineer … Eh, please Disney tickets now.”
The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach is my real naturalization ceremony. I want all of it—the palm trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions, the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit availability of relations with amoral women. I can see myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I will have to wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends features army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach evolved enough to wave what looks like a fist at us. Scared out of Miami Beach, we decamp for Fort Lauderdale, where a Yugoslav woman shelters us in a faded motel, beach adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We always seem to be at the margins of places: the driveway of the Fontainebleau Hilton or the glassed-in elevator leading to a rooftop restaurant where we can momentarily peek over the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign at the endless ocean below, the Old World we have left behind so far and yet deceptively near.
To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel is an unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives. My father lies magnificently beneath the sun in his red-and-black-striped imitation Speedo while I stalk down the beach, past baking midwestern girls, my keloid scar, my secret sharer, radiating beneath an extra-large Band-Aid. Oh, hi there. The words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an acquisition, perch between my lips, but to walk up to one of these girls and say something so casual requires a deep rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint and freckled face. Back at the motel, the Star Trek reruns loop endlessly on channel 73 or 31 or some other prime number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar to me than our own.
On the drive back to New York, I plug myself firmly into my Sanyo AM/FM Stereo Cassette Player with Headphones and Anti-Rolling Mechanism, hoping to forget our vac
ation. Sometime after the palm trees run out, somewhere in southern Georgia, we stop at a McDonald’s. I can already taste it: The sixty-nine-cent hamburger. The ketchup, red and decadent, embedded with little flecks of grated onion. The uplift of the pickle slices; the obliterating rush of fresh Coca-Cola; the soda tingle at the back of the throat signifying that the act is complete. I run into the meat-fumigated coldness of the magical place, the larger Russians following behind me, lugging something big and red. It is a cooler, packed, before we left the motel, by the other mother, the kindly, round-faced equivalent of my own mother. She has prepared a full Russian lunch for us. Soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tinfoil; vinegret, the Russian beet salad, overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken served between crisp white furrows of a bulka. “But it’s not allowed,” I plead. “We have to buy the food here.”
I feel coldness, not the air-conditioned chill of southern Georgia, but the coldness of a body understanding the ramifications of its own demise, the pointlessness of it all. I sit down at a table as far away from my parents and their friends as possible. I watch the spectacle of the newly tanned resident aliens eating their ethnic meal—jowls working, jowls working—the soft-boiled eggs that quiver lightly as they are brought to the mouth; the girl, my coeval, sullen like me but with a hint of pliant equanimity; her parents, dishing out the chunks of beet with plastic spoons; my parents, getting up to use free McDonald’s napkins and straws while American motorists with their noisy tow-headed children buy themselves the happiest of meals.
My parents laugh at my haughtiness. Sitting there hungry and all alone—what a strange man I am becoming! So unlike them. My pockets are filled with several quarters and dimes, enough for a hamburger and a small Coke. I consider the possibility of redeeming my own dignity, of leaving behind our beet-salad heritage. My parents don’t spend money, because they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand, that a liver-function test will come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they will be fired from their jobs because their English does not suffice. Seven years in America, and we are still representatives of a shadow society, cowering under a cloud of bad tidings that will never come. The silver coins stay in my pocket, the anger burrows and expands into some future ulcer. I am my parents’ son.
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