And sometimes she laughs, and sometimes she looks straight ahead with uncertainty, and sometimes she cocks her head back and takes a long, thick dredge of Milwaukee. Soon every detail of her background will be of interest to me, soon every mannerism will be studied with the kind of microeconomic detail that would have impressed my roommate. But right now I am onstage. I am on the stage before my dead grandma Galya singing to her of Lenin and His Magical Goose. I don’t have the arrogance to say to the woman in front of me: You will love me. But I do have the arrogance to say, Why don’t you at least think about loving me?
It will take her about a year to think about it, the two of us becoming close friends first. But along with my charm I am also learning the art of desperate persuasion. To quote Louise Lasser: “You’re fake and manipulative!” And finally I will leave her no choice.
Her name is Jennifer, and her last name begins with a Z and ends in the common Armenian patronymic suffix -ian. For most of her life she goes by her initials, J.Z. Of the American names I deeply covet, ecumenical Jennifer is up there with Waspy Jane and Suze, and I’ve also adored the variations of Jenny and even the terse but lovable Jen. But there is something strong and unusual in a woman, even a woman at Oberlin, going by no more than her initials. After it is over between us and I move back to New York, I can hardly look at the subway map because of the prevalence of the J and Z trains as they swing merrily from Manhattan through Brooklyn and Queens, through all the boroughs I know and love.
J.Z. is from the northern suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. She speaks with traces of a southern accent, her parents are not academics, and she does not have easy access to money. All these many facts combine to ensure that she is different from your typical Obie.
Her friend Michael is different, too—multilingual and cosmopolitan in a way that belies an upbringing in Plattsburgh, New York, well versed in the martini shake and the use of bitters and colloquial Yiddish. Let me now expand my warm menagerie of friends circa sophomore year, 1992 to 1993. I have two new roommates. Irv (not really his name, though it kind of ought to be) has beautiful C-cup breasts and a Japanese girlfriend from the Conservatory of Music. He is stoned even more than I am and spends a good part of the day sucking with great delicacy upon his own thumb. He will approach a trio of hippie chicks in our dorm with the suave entrée “So I hear you guys are having a bit of a gang bang tomorrow night.” My other roommate is Mike Zap, who introduces me to the music and thought of the then-inflammatory rapper Ice Cube. We will begin many evenings with the rousing cheer: “Po-lice eat the dick straight up!” per Cube’s album Death Certificate. Mike is Pittsburghian by nature, covers sports for the Oberlin Review (the most thankless journalistic task in our deeply uncoordinated college), and, with his kindness and relative normalness, provides a useful compass for the rest of us freaks. When visiting his home in Pittsburgh’s Jewish Squirrel Hill I feel shades of my Hebrew school friend Jonathan, the smooth running of decent parents and functional household, here bound together by two of the most genial animals I have yet come across, a black dachshund named Rudy and a caramel one named Schultz.
The five of us—me and J.Z. and Michael and my roommates, Irv and Zap—together we are what I’ve always wanted out of life, a community among whom I do not have to feel second-rate. As in love as I am with J.Z., I am also in love with the fact that she and I share our best friends. Two weeks into sophomore year, the enormous three-foot sky-blue bong in our dorm room attracts hordes of first-year students who have heard of its legendary smoky output. The best thing about Big Blue is that it is so big it requires more than one person to operate, and, sure enough, either breasty Irv or Zap with his scruffy new beard and adorable high laugh will do the honors with the bowl and hold the “carb,” as I lean back and fill myself with laughter and lunacy. “Po-lice eat the dick straight up!” Disgusting, polluted Ohioan winds knock at the bay windows of Noah Hall, but up here we are all in this together. And then, filled with smoke and friendship, I get to shut my eyes and dream entirely of her.
I pursue her the only way I know how. Fakely and manipulatively. I insult her. Something about her upper chest being covered with freckles, freckles that I dream only of kissing. A tough southern girl, she writes me a letter short on ceremony: “… Enough bullshit! You also have some insecurities that you need to address.”
What? Me? Insecure?
She closes with the directive “Write what you feel uncensored” next to a big heart and her initials, J and Z.
Sensing an opening, I pounce. I write what I feel. I write and I write and I write and I write and I write, a flood of lovelorn missives that will have no equal in my life, because my next relationship, a full eight years later, will already take place in the age of email. Even after we break up post-Oberlin, fourteen-page letters come sailing from New York to North Carolina and fourteen-page letters come sailing back. Hell, we write to each other while we’re at Oberlin, both of us guarded and scared of each other, neither of us used to opening our mouths and letting the emotions change the timbre of our voices. Emotions are weaknesses where we come from. And when summer puts an end to Oberlin and we are mostly apart, we write throughout our working days, me at an immigrant resettlement agency—$8.25 an hour—and her, for half that sum, behind the counter at an American automotive store called Pep Boys.
The most beautiful collection of letters and numbers I have ever seen, on a simple white envelope, about half a year into our relationship:
RESEARCH TRIANGLE AREA
RALEIGH DURHAM CHAPEL HILL
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!! 12/29/92 PM RAL NC #1
RAL NC #1. Someone from America, the real America, has written to me. In front of my parents’ house, the sparse traffic of Little Neck behind me, I open the Christmas letter, and I go deaf to the actual world. Her thin red lips are speaking to me, the noise of my parents—“Igor! Snotty! It is vacuuming time!”—so much Russian nonsense behind the drawn-out, southern cadences of her voice. I absorb the letter, the love and the angst both (for she is, like me, not altogether a happy person), while locked in the upstairs bathroom, the water running. And then with the vacuuming still undone, with my mother’s pristine floors still covered with minuscule traces of dust that upset her careful world to no end, I begin to write back.
J.Z.—
The whole idea of living w/you, working out w/you, writing poetry w/you, cooking grits and okra w/you, is just too astounding for words.
I’m making great strides in discovering what I’m all about, I’m finally being happy about being Gary, and all this has happened because I finally have a friend who I can share everything with.
I’ve had an uneasy feeling about the Bible all my life.
Doesn’t our society suck?
I HATE MY HAIR!
I look like a hunchbacked Jewish goat with a row of teeth like the Sarajevan skyline after the war.
I respect your pessimism.
Is that [North Carolina] Jason guy still bothering you? I don’t take this kissing-on-the-neck stuff lightly you know.
Why do so many men (and women) fall in love with you so quickly?
You are my greatest teacher—you’ve taught me so much of what I admire and respect about myself.
About myself, sure. I am deeply into learning, admiring, and respecting myself. But what about her? Lost in the shocking scenario of finally being a Boyfriend, constantly worried that amorous North Carolinians named Jason will keep kissing her on the neck in my absence, constantly trying to devise ways in which she can love me more, can I really see the sad, lovely girl in front of me, all five feet and three inches of her? She is the child of a shattered family, a fun-house image of what my own family might look like if the razvod had gone through. The sullen Armenian father, a genius at some branch of computer science, alone in his Research Triangle countryside ramble, goading his children to do worse. The southern mother in her little modern ranch, dividing her time between eating, sleeping, drinking down glasses of white wine, and pl
aying bridge. The cold, angry older half sister, radiating negativity out of Dallas/Fort Worth. The younger brother, who calls her Nate for some reason, lighting his farts and drag racing down the sunbaked Carolina tar.
In the mail from North Carolina, a postcard with a photo of Yoko and John Lennon’s “Bedpeace,” and in her pretty scrawl, “We’ll be having some of that soon!”
From other letters:
I look like an Armenian marshmallow.
I am just NOW starting to really trust you with everything, Gary. Parts of me which are constantly on guard are finally relaxing with you.
I am going to send you a copy of the [new] David Byrne tape.
A co-worker said to me, You mixed aren’t ya? I mean you’re not all white?
I cried on the whole way home from work … It turns out my grandfather had a heart attack. I love that old man. He really is a good person.
Gary, we’re in our prime—let’s enjoy it—Oberlin stress is bad!
I can’t believe how much your mom criticizes you. She doesn’t ever say good things, at least none that I’ve ever heard. How does that affect you?*
I wish I could fly over to the Shteyni house and rescue you.
Could you have Nina [my mother] pray for my grandfather?
Can you imagine our wedding? Jews, Armenians and Southerners.
Dude, there is no jokin’ around about the Mississippi River!
I love you, Gary.
I feel that I must type that last one over again, because when I first read those words, they were not read only once.
“I love you, Gary.”
The plane touches down in Raleigh-Durham. Early summer, just a few weeks after Oberlin has closed for summer fumigation and ideological reset, but we cannot wait to see each other a day longer. I’m covered in a plaid thrift-store shirt, très Keep Cottage, where we first kissed, which I wear all the time because it makes me feel loose and boyfriend-like. There’s a string around my neck with a single marble-like blue bead that I don’t dare take off, even in the shower, since it is a gift from her. For the next half decade, whenever I am anxious, I will spin the bead between my thumb and index finger. Even when she is gone. Especially when she is gone.
I’ve had three Bloody Marys on the plane because that’s what LaGuardia-Raleigh jet-setters like me are keen to do. And also because by this point in my life I can’t survive a few hours without a drink. Outside I can already sense a different world, her world. Looking out the plane window, I see nothing but North Carolina green. Forest upon forest, blessed by the mellow local sun, cut apart by small rivulets of sprawl that the migrating Yankees are said to be bringing with them as they take over the college towns of Durham and Chapel Hill and beyond.
There she is past baggage claim, my pale half-Armenian marshmallow now made slightly red by the aforementioned sun, just as I’ve been reddened by the aforementioned vodka. (I am now twenty-one, and my bingeing is legal.) She is wearing the vintage green-and-gold, vaguely Asian-styled silk shirt that I bought for her twentieth. I hug her. Boy, do I hug her.
“Easy. Easy there, Shteyni-dawg.” Shteyni-dawg is my nickname, used not just by J.Z. but our friend Michael, Breasty Roommate Irv, and Kind Rapping Roommate Zap.
And I think:
Oh, my God, I am not alone.
So many miles from my parents, and there is my girlfriend in my arms, and scattered across the Eastern Seaboard, with a brief jaunt into the Pennsylvania hinterlands for Zap, are my friends.
Easy there, Shteyni-dawg.
She has an Oldsmobile 88, a big red southern monster, and as she drives I lean over and kiss her neck. She is wearing the lavender perfume we bought from a street vendor near Fourth Avenue. I am covered in Drakkar Noir or Safari for Men or a cologne of equally debilitating pungency. Something, after all, has to announce the fact that I am still a Russian immigrant.
Or am I?
When I walked into the Sheep Meadow in Central Park after my first day of Stuyvesant, I thought a part of me broke. A connection to the past. A straight shot from Uncle Aaron’s labor camps and the bombs of the Messerschmitts to the wield of my father’s hand and the lash of my mother’s tongue to the boy who writes “Gary Shteyngart” and “SSSQ” on his Hebrew school assignments. Maybe the connection didn’t break. Maybe it just bent. And now in J.Z.’s car it is bending further. The past, which stretches indefinitely behind me, and the future, which stretches for another fifty years at best, are evenly matched. Nothing in the genetic program I’ve been given has prepared me for someone like her, for the unconditional warmth of her interethnic nose, for “Dude, there is no jokin’ around about the Mississippi River!” Nor for the deep existential melancholy that weighs us both down like the hot and wet southern summer around us.
Her mother’s home, unlike my mother’s, is unkempt, the heavy furniture sunk into carpets, every square inch haunted by a furry beast of a corgi named Tally-Dog, which, when confronted by my Drakkar Noir stink, knows only one mode: bark. To my greatest horror, three minutes into the visit, I pull an albino roach out of the sink by one of its antennae, thinking it is one of my own hairs gone prematurely gray.
But her mother is sweet and interested in me, staring out from her large golden glasses with good cheer and an early evening buzz. She is a big woman prone to the colors purple and lavender, often layered together. And from the moment I cross her threshold, it is clear that I am welcome here, and welcome to her daughter’s love.
On the previous summer’s visit to Little Neck, J.Z. accidentally breaks my mother’s desk lamp, for which we are promptly billed eighty dollars by my no-nonsense mater. (We split the eighty, not a trifling amount for two financial aid students.) That, and the sight of my father walking down the stairs in his tight soccer shorts, his shining testicles spilling out of both sides, provide J.Z. with a quick but potent overview of Shteyngart family life in medias res.
Down here, testicles are kept away from public sight. In fact, there is a southern rule that a man must keep one foot on the floor when inhabiting a room with a woman of tender age. It is the most wonderful rule in Christendom, this tense little caveat, because when the house is cleared of her mother, J.Z. and I run for the bedroom and collapse into each other, disappearing our ugly Oberlin clothes in just a few simple motions, as David Byrne starts singing:
And she was lying in the grass.
And she could hear the highway breathing.
And she could see a nearby factory.
She’s making sure she is not dreaming.
I know he’s singing about J.Z., about the rosiness of her body, the hard dough of her shoulders, the seriousness of her eyes. He’s singing about her and not me; he’s letting me leave myself and be with her. And she was.
After we shower off a little in the cramped bathroom and rejoin the Carolina humidity, we talk about death. For my twenty-first birthday, upon my request, J.Z.’s mother has given me a book called We Don’t Die: George Anderson’s Conversations with the Other Side, a tender little bit of hucksterism about a medium who communicates with the deceased. Ever since my first breathless encounter with asthma I have sensed that the curtain between our world and nonexistence is as thin as a kopeck. But now that I have found a pair of depthless brown eyes to stare into mine on a frilly bed in North Raleigh, the thought of departing this earth truly breaks my heart. “I don’t want to leave you,” I say to J.Z., meaning that I don’t want to leave her in five days, when I will have to go back north. But what I really mean is that I don’t ever want to leave her, or to leave the pleasures we just had, or to leave the strangeness of David Byrne’s voice, or to leave the memories that we are putting together every day. After college we will move to New Mexico, we decide. Smoke pot and make love amid the cacti. She wants to become some sort of healer. I already know that I want to write.
Her granddaddy is southern through and through, courtly and folksy—“He’s more nervous than a cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs”—with a deer hanging in his smokehou
se in Fayetteville, with enough authority to command the head of the table at his daughter’s house, and with the kindness to let a perfect stranger from New York sit by his side and be treated like an old friend. He says grace over the food, mentioning Jesus Christ, Our Lord, at which J.Z. and I give each other curt Oberlin smiles. Granddaddy, he’s Jew-ish.
But after dinner Granddaddy comes over to the kitchen and says, “That’s a fine division of labor you have here. She’s washing the dishes, and you’re drying them. You two are good together.” Right then and there I want to marry J.Z., marry her whole family, lighted farts and all. And when her grandpa dies of a heart attack a few years later, I will feel her pain, feel it as an extension of my own hurt, because my own grandmother is so very sick.
We fight. The truth is I don’t know how to do anything—drive a car, fry an egg, be a man—and as progressive as we are, she still wants me to be strong for her. Eventually, when we drive from North Carolina to her sister’s house in Dallas, Texas, she will order me behind the wheel, and, somewhere in Alabama, I will drive the Oldsmobile 88 directly into the wall of a Shoney’s franchise. J.Z.’s favorite phrase, spoken with a well-practiced scowl, those dark Armenian eyes sheltering a yellow flame: “Well, that’s ridiculous.”
But instead of being contrite, I go on the offensive. I’m a New Yorker. Why shouldn’t I be able to drive an Oldsmobile from Raleigh to Dallas without hitting some disgusting southern chain restaurant? Even if they did reward my vehicular assault on their dining room with a signature Monte Cristo sandwich (“Y’all must be tired”). Wasn’t she there with me and her friend Michael when we watched Woody Allen’s Manhattan together? Didn’t she guzzle down Michael’s martinis and whiskey sours as he and I cracked Jewishly about the artist Sol LeWitt? Isn’t this the life she signed on for with a New York intellectual in the making?
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