Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  But not entirely. The next summer, my mother announces that we will be going to Cape Cod. Aware of the beet-salad connotations of any journey with my mother, I ask her if we will be staying at a fine hotel like the Days Inn or maybe even the storied Holiday Inn. If not, if it’s some kind of Russian hut with a do-it-yourself cottage-cheese station, then I do not wish to go. I can just picture walking down to the beach where all the young ladies are from decent resorts with ice machines, and me, already with my unattractiveness trailing some kind of sad buckwheat odor in from breakfast. I do not want to be both poor and Russian in front of people my age for ten entire days. I want a vacation from Hebrew School, not an immersion into Gentile School. This summer I am ready to say, Oh, hi there.

  “Better than Holiday Inn,” my mother says. “I think it’s called Hilton.”

  I sit down hard on a copy of the National Review. But how could it be, Hilton? What about baby steps? First the Motel 6, then the Motel 7, then a few years down the road, Hilton.

  We arrive on the balmy Massachusetts cape in late June. Our accommodation is a ramshackle Russian dacha, several stories of grime and peeling wallpaper, a toilet that should not really be indoors, a dinner setting of aging Odessa somnambulists shuffling down for shchi, cold summer sauerkraut soup. Am I forgetting something? Beet salad? You bet.

  “What?” my mother says. “It’s almost like the Hilton.”

  And then it occurs to me: If to my father I am an object of love-hate, both a best friend and an adversary, to my mother I am not even a person.

  It’s more than a realization on my part; it’s a realignment. My mother is from a country of lies, and I am still one of its citizens. She can lie to me at will. She can lie to me without even using her imagination. And whatever comes out of her mouth I am supposed to accept as truth, as Doubleplusgood. No, I can never trust her again. As I fume alongside the beach, and tanned kids my age gather beneath the magnificent steps of some middle-class hotel that lets out directly onto the shore—ours is up a highway—I formulate my first act of rebellion.

  The next day I pack two gigantic garbage bags with my summer clothes and my Isaac Asimovs. I tell my father to drive me to the Peter Pan bus station. I cannot remember most of the fight that takes place between me and my mother as I announce my leave-taking, except for the fact that she does not retreat one centimeter, does not even acknowledge that the Sauerkraut Arms is not the Hilton. “What’s the difference between the two?” she shouts. “Show me one difference!” It is a frightening fight, with my mother’s harshest words and her silent treatment somehow woven into one. But it’s an important fight, too. I stand my ground. I will not be lied to.

  “I’d like to see you live alone at home!” my mother says. “I’d like to see you starve.”

  “I have fifty-three dollars,” I say.

  And so my father, my partner in this particular crime, wheels me over to the bus station with my two garbage bags full of clothes and books. He kisses me on both cheeks. He looks me in the eye. “Bud’ zdorov, synok,” he says. Be well, little son. And then a sly but respectful wink. He knows I have triumphed over her.

  Only what have I done? The scenery is scrolling past me, the bridges and woods of New England giving way to the grilled-cheese patty-melt of a New York City summer. I am alone in the Peter Pan, surrounded by American adults and their Walkmans. All alone, but what else? Emancipated, liberated, giddy, with fifty-three dollars in allowance money to last me one and a half weeks.

  At the Port Authority, I scramble past the subway turnstile with my two garbage bags. By the time I reach eastern Queens, two hours and many subway trains later, one of them breaks. (Our family is not the kind to use Hefty and other premier-class bags.) I try to tie off the hole in the bag with my hands, but you have to be very handy to do this successfully, and I am, no point denying it, a mama’s boy, unable to perform basic tasks. I take some of the clothes out of the distressed garbage bag and wear them in layers around me, tying several T-shirts around my neck. Not wanting to spend an extra token, I trudge the last segment to our garden apartment on foot, sweating for about five miles in the early summer heat beneath many layers of clothing as I drag my one and a half garbage bags behind me.

  I run down to the Waldbaum’s supermarket and invest in forty dollars’ worth of Swanson Hungry-Man TV dinners, a half-dozen full-sized bags of Doritos, which my family never eats (my parents call them rvota, or “vomit”), and several fun-sized bottles of Coke. There isn’t a McDonald’s within striking distance, and I do not wish to try my luck with the Burger King, where I believe the basic hamburger is costlier and inauthentic.

  Back home, I take my clothes off down to my underwear and turn on the television for 240 hours. Mama, what have I done to you? I cry as the morning news turns into the nightly news and a comic show about an inventive orphaned child named Punky Brewster takes up some of the time in between. How could I have run away from you like that? Am I really any better now than this motherless Punky?

  My father calls from Cape Cod to check up on me.

  “Could you put Mama on?” I ask.

  “She doesn’t want to speak to you.”

  And I know what will happen when she returns, at least a month of silence, of doing a little whinny with her head whenever I so much as come into her line of vision, and sometimes even pushing away the air in front of her with her palm as if to signify that I am no longer welcome to share the earth’s atmosphere with her.

  But one day, deep within my ten-day escape, all alone with my science fiction and my forbidden Doritos, my ass sore from sitting on the scruffy couch for so long, my eyes television red, my mind television numb, my fifty-three-dollar capitalization reduced to a pocketful of quarters, I think to myself: This is not so bad.

  It’s actually kind of good.

  It’s actually kind of perfect.

  Maybe this is who I really am.

  Not a loner, exactly.

  But someone who can be alone.

  Prisoners of Zion: Gary and Jonathan face another day of Hebrew school.

  BACK AT SSSQ, the bodies have been piling up for years. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka. We have special presentations in the gym, a protective fortress of prayer books around us, the American flag on one side of the stage, the Israeli flag on the other, and between them the slaughter of our innocents. As I watch the ovens open and the skeletons crumble, I become angry at the Germans and also at the Arabs, who are the same thing as the Nazis, Jew-killers, fucking murderers, they took our land or something, I hate them.

  Then the other images that disturb us: Kids, white kids like us, are putting marijuana needles into their arms. They are smoking the heroin cigarettes. First Lady Nancy Reagan, standing next to the actor Clint Eastwood, a somber black background behind them, tells us, “The thrill can kill. Drug dealers need to know that we want them out of our schools, neighborhoods and our lives. Say no to drugs. And say yes to life.”

  The children of the Solomon Schechter School of Queens are scared of Nazis and we are scared of drugs. If the Jewish Week had published an article revealing that Goebbels had been dealing dope to Hitler up at the Eagle’s Nest the world would finally click into place. But for now, the sad fact is that some of us will not go on to Jewish educations. We will go to public high schools where there will be gentiles, and gentiles love to “do” drugs. And how will we be able to resist the peer pressure when those thrilling drugs come our way? Clint Eastwood, sneering: “What would I do if someone offered me these drugs? I’d tell them to take a hike.”

  I picture myself walking past the lockers of Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, the mild-mannered public school I’m zoned for. A kid walks up to me. He seems all-American, but there’s something not quite right in his eyes. “Hey, Gnu,” he says, “you want these drugs?”

  And then I punch him in his face and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike, you Nazi PLO scum!” And there’s a Jewish girl they’re trying to stick with their needles, and I run o
ver to her, fists swinging, and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike from her!” And she falls into my arms and I kiss her needle marks, and I say, “It’s going to be okay, Rivka. I love you. Maybe they didn’t give you the AIDS.”

  The other holocaust we’re scared of is the nuclear one. The 1983 ABC-TV movie The Day After showed us what could happen to the good people of Kansas City, MO, and Lawrence, KS, if the Soviets were to vaporize them with thermonuclear devices. Then there is the BBC version, Threads, shown on PBS, which is widely acknowledged to be more realistic: babies and milk bottles are instantly turned to cinders, cats asphyxiate, survivors are left to eat raw radioactive sheep. (“Is it safe to eat?” “It’s got a thick coat, that should have protected it.”) I memorize the final moments before the bomb hits Yorkshire, an exchange between two ill-prepared bureaucrats, and I chant it to myself in the middle of the sclerotic hum that is Talmud class:

  “Attack warning red!”

  “Attack warning? Is it for real?”

  “Attack warning is for bloody real!”

  And then in the matter-of-fact tones of a BBC announcer: “The first dust settles on Sheffield. It’s an hour and twenty-five minutes after the attack. This level of attack has broken most of the windows in Britain. Many roofs are open to the sky. Some of the lethal dust gets in. In these early stages the symptoms of radiation sickness and the symptoms of panic are identical.”

  Yes, they are quite identical. I am nearly shitting my pants. The problem with Threads, shot in the washed-out industrialized colors of its locale, is that it’s often hard to distinguish the city of Sheffield before the bomb hits from Sheffield after the devastation. The raw radioactive sheep actually looks like a step up from the shelled peas they’re serving at a family dinner in the opening shots; at least the mutton hasn’t been boiled to death.

  The Day After, on the other hand, soft-pedals the devastation. The world falls apart far more brightly; how could it not with Steve Guttenberg (God, there he is again) playing one of the irradiated leads? But what I love about The Day After are the scenes of hardworking Missourians and Kansans reveling in their station-wagon lifestyles before the attack. Kids are riding their bikes through many-acred lawns, adults play horseshoes without worrying about mortgage payments, at the Kansas City Board of Trade soybean prices are up, and at Memorial General Hospital Dr. Jason Robards arranges for a patient to get his favorite flavor of ice cream. Vanilla. Whatever we’ve heard about the cost of living in Atlanta, Georgia, seems doubly true of this place. Here, my parents’ income if they don’t get a razvod—roughly $42,459.34 in 1983 dollars, give or take a cent—would make our family upper middle class. And then, fifty minutes into the film, when the enormous pines are uprooted by the nuclear blast, and the atomic flash reduces a wedding ceremony to so many skeletons, you really feel that these people have lost something special.

  For its faults, The Day After is growing up in the early 1980s. This is our vocabulary. Pershing II. SAC Airborne Command. Launch on warning. “This is the Emergency Broadcast System.” “Sir, we need access to the keys and authentication documents.” “Confidence is high. I repeat, confidence is high.” “I want to confirm, is this an exercise? Roger. Copy. This is not an exercise.” “We have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. Multiple ICBMs. Over three hundred missiles inbound now.” “Message follows. Alpha. Seven. Eight. November. Foxtrot. One. Five. Two. Two.” “We have execution from the President.” “Stand by. Unlock code inserted.” “Honey, we’re going to have to get used to things being a lot different. What matters is, we’re alive. And we’re together.” “The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.” When I close my eyes I can almost feel the eerie still as Steve Guttenberg walks down a Kansas country road minutes before the Soviet missiles reach their targets. The children’s swings are empty. A crow buzzes over the state’s ample wheat.

  My parents will buy a twenty-seven-inch salmon-colored Sony Trinitron, with a sleek remote control that would decimate the Zenith Space Command, just in time for Peter Jennings to tell us that the space shuttle Challenger has fallen into the ocean, but when The Day After comes out we have just a little nine-incher from a local dump, which we unveil for special occasions. So I start a subscription to TV Guide magazine to get a better grip on the important shows. I am not allowed to watch TV, but I am allowed the TV Guide, which we take to be America’s version of literature. The Day After, of course, is accompanied by many articles in the Guide, and I save that copy for many years to come, sometimes looking at the picture on the cover: a man shielding a boy from a mushroom cloud, the Lightman in my closet peering over my shoulder, so caught up in the horror he’s actually stroking my wounded ear. The boy will suffer flash blindness from the blast, and the thought of being alive in the post-nuclear-holocaust world without eyesight is devastating to me. The first order of business for when the Soviets attack—and I know those lying bastards, they will attack—is to get a good pair of sunglasses from the Stern’s department store in the Douglaston Mall.

  “When the bombs fall, I will take my children outside so that we can die together instantly.” This is Mrs. A, a teacher of social studies and affiliated subjects. When she says that, I feel the true horror of nuclear war because Mrs. A is terribly attractive with her slim figure and bushel of kinky Ashkenazi hair, and her daughters, who attend SSSQ’s lower grades, are both similarly situated. All the cool kids and their mothers at SSSQ seem to know Mrs. A intimately, and she will often interrupt a monologue on the Suez Canal Crisis to say to her all-time favorite student, “Chava, remember when …”

  Also, she is very keen to tell us that her daughter is an amazing ballerina and how she played Lincoln Center when she was eight months old or something of the sort. This love of child makes me tear up. My father once showed up to a parent-teacher conference where one of the teachers informed him that “Gary is very smart. We hear he reads Dostoyevsky in the original.”

  “Phh,” Papa said. “Only Chekhov.”

  So, after The Day After I keep replaying the bit about Mrs. A taking her kids out to meet the mushroom cloud. How could the Soviets possibly kill Mrs. A and her ballerina daughter? What would Jewish television personality Abba Eban have to say about this? Before she made that announcement, I had not been entirely anti–nuclear war. My research indicated that two of the Soviet missiles would target JFK and LaGuardia airports in Queens. SSSQ is geographically equidistant from the two airports, and the school’s glass-heavy modernist structure would probably buckle and split into shards from the initial blasts, burning up the siddur prayer books like so many blue pancakes, and certainly the subsequent radiation exposure would kill everyone with the exception of the rotund, self-insulated Rabbi Sofer.

  So far so good.

  Meanwhile, Little Neck does not lie next to any obvious targets, the nearest one would be the Brookhaven National Laboratory in faraway Suffolk County, where my father will soon be toiling on a component of Ronald Reagan’s new “Star Wars” missile defense program, and the Deepdale Gardens cooperative is made out of millennial bricks that can withstand a heat blast up to 1,125 degrees Fahrenheit, by my sober calculations. All I need is to have my sunglasses handy and to shelter from the radiation for a few weeks. Then I will emerge into a world without Hebrew school. In this world, with my Russian accent scrubbed away, and with the superior mathematical skills I have picked up from my father’s Soviet textbooks, I will help start a new Republican civilization along with my new American best friend, Jonathan.

  That is right. I have a best friend.

  Mrs. A runs something called “Pilot Program,” which is for the smartest kids in SSSQ, a number that can fit around a small dining table. For an entire school period, we geniuses are separated from the usual debility of the rest of the school and are sent to a teachers’ lounge, where there is a refrigerator stocked with sad t
eacher sandwiches and a pall of cigarette smoke to make us feel quite adult. It is very hard to figure out what Mrs. A’s “Pilot Program” is about. It is safe to say that my father’s dream for a heavy workload in theoretical physics and higher mathematics will not come true. Activities include making caramel candies in the mold of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and discussing the TV special Something About Amelia, in which Ted Danson has sex with his own daughter. Mrs. A is a born conversationalist, and Pilot Program gives her a chance to free-associate while making baked goods. When someone mentions the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws, Mrs. A tells a fascinating story about an Israeli soldier caught in an explosion during the Yom Kippur War, who was left with nothing but three holes where his face should have been. We cautiously eat our E.T. caramels.

  There are five boys who are marginalized at SSSQ. There is Jerry Himmelstein, whose victimization deserves its own after-school special and who will transfer out of our moronic inferno by grade 6. There’s Sammy (not his real name), a slim, sad, hyperactive boy who likes to jump on us while screaming “URSH! UUUUURSH!”—some deep-seated primal scream that can be translated into neither Hebrew nor English. There’s David the Mighty Khan Caesar, ruler of the Imperial Lands of David, the main enemy and sometimes ally of my mythical Holy Gnuish Empire. David’s a smart son of a rabbi who takes out a little spaceship in the middle of class and floats it before his freckled face while humming, “Noooooo … Mmm … Woooo …,” rather similar to the aviation pursuits I enjoy with my pen. There is me. And then there is Jonathan.