Signora Limona’s eyes crinkled with what I wanted to imagine was understanding. She said something, smiled a little, and walked away. I went inside, where the adults swarmed me with embraces and kisses—I had saved them. My grandmother stormed the kitchen and began exhuming the fridge to conjure up lunch. My gaze went past her to the windowsill. There, three perfect persimmons sat like three little Buddhas, one for each pile of leaves. Like the three golden apples Hippomenes used to seduce Atalanta. If only that were my fate.
Not believing our fortune, we went to the synagogue to hear our names. We were told we’d be leaving on a 3 a.m. transport the next morning. Spotting the man who had discouraged us on the street, my grandfather couldn’t help sharing the news. And the man couldn’t help deflating us once again. “They’re changing their minds at the airport now,” he said. “You go to the airport and they turn you back.” My grandfather had to be restrained from assault. But the words got through, our joy fell apart, and we spent the next thirty-six hours in repurposed anxiety.
When we reached the airport, we were ushered into a hall for a final roll call. As the HIAS employee went down the list, he held up a plastic bag containing the flotsam that constituted the sum of a family’s diplomatic existence: X-rays, the old white Soviet-issued identity cards, the American visas. Our surnames were the first to be called. As we approached, the HIAS man held out our packet, then asked which among us was Sofia. My grandmother raised her hand. And who was Sofia’s child? My mother raised her hand. The man took her aside.
“We made a special appeal for your mother’s condition to be ignored,” he said.
“What condition?” my mother said.
The agent stared uneasily. “Does your mother drink?”
My mother’s face blanched. This all over again. “No,” she said. “Never more than a glass of champagne on a holiday.”
“It’s her liver,” he said. “The results were quite bad. It’s the sort of thing that leads to cirrhosis. Has she ever had a transfusion?”
“She had her gallbladder replaced,” my mother said. The gallbladder my grandfather was so intent on having removed with special care that he couldn’t stop pouring cognac down the surgeon’s throat the evening before. During the operation, my grandmother had required a transfusion, though who could say why.
“We made a special appeal,” the man said again.
When my mother returned, her face had no color. She pretended it had been a formality. No one pressed her. We were leaving.
The rejections increased after that, some families remaining in their Italian limbo for as long as a year. We were part of the last wave of Soviet refugees to go through Vienna and Italy. Afterward, those who got through went by plane directly to New York. Or, just as often, Tel Aviv.
My grandmother left Italy with cirrhosis of the liver. My grandfather with blood pressure of 280 over 140, nearly earning a spot of his own in what had come to be called, at the cemetery, the Russian Corner. I left with three persimmons that I’d have to give up at American customs, and three memorized words of English. My father left with three Italian recipes, my mother with a heart broken by news of her mother’s illness. We still had the West German cobalt-blue tea set with gold trim from which we’d slurped tea on the way out of Minsk. We’d pawned everything else, and decided we’d left behind enough.
Chapter 6
Thanksgiving 1988
In one of those heavy-handed details you can’t put in a made-up story, we touched down in America on Thanksgiving Day. We had never flown other than Aeroflot down to Crimea, where the dining service consisted of pre-landing mints on a round tray; had never had the exotic experience of being served by a male steward with a close, ash-colored beard who belonged in a fashion magazine rather than balancing drinks. (My father finally had his pear nectar.) Meyer, the pleated and furrowed father of the family that had been traveling with us since Minsk, demanded an Alitalia address for a letter of gratitude, presumably to be written in the same Russian in which Meyer was now perplexing the steward. The Russian for “letter”—pis’mo—comes close to the Italian for “to pee,” so at first the steward tried to send the old man to the toilets, but when that turned out to be wrong, he disappeared and returned with two baby bottles of vodka. Then he patted the old man on the shoulder and vanished.
New York in November—it wasn’t Ladispoli. A cold wind blew. The family friend meeting us—the one whose wife had sewn our names into his underwear—wrestled away the suitcase my father was holding and hurled it at the luggage cart with all the force of eight years of waiting turned to relief at finally seeing us. My mother and grandmother winced—that was the suitcase with the tea set. We exited the terminal in a single file that repeated our friend’s footsteps. A uniformed black man in a cap stopped us and said something while pointing at the luggage—we stiffened; to us this could mean only another inspection, and a black person was as unfamiliar as the language he spoke—but then our friend not only answered him in fluent English but made him laugh. This kind of ease seemed unimaginable.
At our friends’ apartment, my mother and grandmother stole off to the bedroom and, their eyes half-closed in anticipation of disaster—when they make statues of us, this will be our eternal repose—unwrapped the issue of Ladispoli Oggi they’d used to buffer the tea set. A miracle, of sorts: Only one cup and saucer had broken.
It was Thanksgiving, we were informed. Our hosts couldn’t say thanks from whom to whom and for what, but that thing was a turkey. So that was what it looked like whole instead of just wings. Otherwise, every item on the table was identical to our cooking at home. Herring in oil, vinegar, and sweet onion; “uniformed”—unpeeled—potatoes, quartered and pan-fried; slices of smoked salmon spread like a lady’s fan. And fruit, though it was almost December.
“When does your fruit start?” my grandfather asked in astonishment, even his out-of-season feats outdone.
“6AM,” our friend said, meaning the local grocery. It turned into a standard exchange. Every new arrival asked that question, and every old hand answered the same way.
None of us could put turkey in our mouths—it was indivisible from the misery of the previous weeks—so we pleaded nostalgia for home dishes. These, however, did not taste like home. The stuffed carp—here called gefilte fish—was a dense, deboned, jellied mass tasting of nothing but wet fish rather than a braised, melting wonder swimming in sweet broth. The black bread was stale, or so we thought; it had been toasted—you kept it in the freezer, then toasted it. (My grandmother was scandalized by both parts.) We ate off plastic plates, at once revolutionary and insulting, which were then thrown out instead of washed (ditto). The 6AM strawberries tasted of nothing. You kept eating them only because it was surreal to put in your mouth something that looked like a strawberry, and was three times as large, but had one-third the taste. Only Saran Wrap earned our unqualified admiration.
Over time, we understood: Here, the same food item existed in two different castes. You could buy the cheap version, made with the assistance of chemicals or lower-quality ingredients, or you could buy the expensive version, which tasted the way things had tasted at home, though there they cost ten times less. In this way, we were introduced to an American innovation that to Americans symbolized freedom, but to us seemed tyrannical: choice. If you felt financially secure, you bought the right-tasting version; if you didn’t, you bought the shit. Because there was shit on offer, new terms such as “cholesterol” entered our vocabulary, and my mother’s chemistry took on new utility. Most émigrés bought the cheap versions, then endlessly debated fat content, blood pressure, and salt intake as they never had in the USSR.
The Americans ate strangely, too. One time, while painting an apartment—it was Christmas Eve, extra pay—my father observed the woman of the house, who had mimed that family was coming, setting out tubs of what he would later learn were tuna, macaroni, and potato salads. Then a bowl of white dressing next to dwarf carrots and celery sticks, their leaves cut
away. He assumed this was the appetizer table, but it was the main event. A Soviet person would have fallen through the ground in shame before serving this and nothing else.
Some things did work similarly: You had to bribe a building super to let an apartment to you instead of another; you had to bribe the housepainting union for a spot on the rolls. You had to bribe Americans as much as the Soviets, though here, refreshingly, it was done virtually in the open and you didn’t have to invent ruses to get your taker to feel less guilty the way one had to in the USSR; here, it was my father who was embarrassed. All the same—even as we belatedly learned that the day our friend-of-a-friend’s Hallmark franchise hauled in two thousand dollars happened to fall during Christmas week—my father earned in a day what took a month back in Minsk. So, at the supermarket, Faina’s son didn’t buy the tub of fat-free—fat-free!—Breyers ice cream that we were told we must buy because it was both health-conscious and economical, but individual bars that reminded him of silver-wrapped Soviet Eskimos (vanilla ice cream in dark chocolate) or Chocolate Loaves (hazelnut-studded chocolate ice cream, ditto).
Instead of the Russian grocery, my father went to a local salumeria for sweet rather than painful reminders of Italy. He spent as much time in the kitchen as my grandmother, who was washing floors and babysitting for three dollars an hour. As he walked around, he encountered a mystery: A different perfume wafted out of every home on the block. Was this what private ownership meant? The houses in America smelled like perfume! Eventually he understood that each—each!—home had its own washing and drying machine; he was smelling laundry vapor. With time, he became a connoisseur: This was a Tide home. This one was All.
Almost nothing else smelled like perfume in those first months in Brooklyn. It was ugly—squat and low-slung blocks, where we once had prospects and boulevards. There was shit everywhere—literal shit, left by dogs (or, more correctly, by their owners). The metro, instead of chandeliers and marble, had painted graffiti. After a life of Polish and Bulgarian products, we’d finally made it to a place where we could buy things that said made in america. Only nothing seemed to be made in America: It was made in China. The three-dollar slippers tore the day after you bought them; the watch died before you got home. They had street carts with frankfurters here, too, only they swam in gray water and tasted like rubber. There were forms—for credit cards, health insurance, used-car purchases—to shame Soviet bureaucracy, but these came with riders in small print that (it took us a while to gather this, because it didn’t seem possible) listed all the ways in which you couldn’t count on the thing the big print said was yours. It was the same with the ads that surrounded us like an army whose weapon was noise—there was no commercial advertising in the Soviet Union—and lied about what was really on offer. Here, these lies were called business.
My mother and grandmother were crying again, though for different reasons: Where had they brought me? Once, just back from English lessons, my mother called out a quick greeting and ran into the bedroom. I knocked on the door and opened it softly. She was wearing a knee-length black skirt, a blouse with a little bow, and one of her nicest brooches—she always dressed up for the lessons, an hour and a half each way by subway. She was weeping. I pulled her hands away from her face. “What is it?” I demanded. “I don’t understand . . . anything,” she said, and went back to crying.
Our Soviet minds hadn’t believed that the construction equipment we had sent forward to Brooklyn had been stolen—the addressee must have kept it. But then the hubcaps were taken off our pitiful Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. Our Brooklyn apartment was robbed. And then—sunny weekend day, busy street—I was. It was because of the boy I was with, who was draped with so much jewelry you could see it from a block away. I wore only a silver bracelet and necklace, even these concessions to my grandfather’s insistence on showing the world what we already had. My friend was three years older and had been studying karate, his kicks always flying very close to my face because—watch this, and watch this, and I could really fuck you up, and so on. His talent melted away before our assailant, however, a Russian man in his twenties who took the trouble to explain that he was facing prison and needed money for a lawyer.
That night, my grandfather prowled our neighborhood with a knife in his pocket—the same knife with which my grandmother had hacked off bread for me on the train out of Minsk. We still have the knife, the bevel scuffed from decades of Soviet sharpening. We did not have grindstones there: You waited till the sharpener showed up with his pedal-operated sandstone wheel, and then there were a hundred people in the yard, brandishing knives. My aunt, who cooked three times a day and couldn’t wait for the sharpener, sharpened her knives on the edge of the stairs outside her apartment.
The dread was so thick over our Brooklyn lives that it lodged in your throat. I wanted to help. When I learned that American supermarkets gave back five cents for every returned empty—some states, like the mysterious Michigan, its very name like a granite monument, gave you ten cents—I decided I would return the twenty-four Pepsi cans we’d received in some charity food bundle and give the haul to my parents. The problem was that the adults didn’t dare touch this indulgence—it was for me—but I could hardly drink it all, and it felt terribly profligate to waste it. One weekend afternoon, however, my parents and my grandfather out and my grandmother resting, I couldn’t wait any longer. Gingerly, I closed the bathroom door, opened each one, muffling the noise with a towel, and, my heart squirming, poured the contents down the drain.
I washed each can as if it were a newborn—water, soap, swish, repeat. I didn’t know how stringent the inspectors would be—I would give them no excuse. I dried the cans with my mother’s hair dryer and restacked them carefully in the case. However, I couldn’t help catching a whiff of the Ivory soap that—fool!—I had used; we bought the cheapest, and it smelled that way. The apartment ticking with a weekend afternoon’s silence, I crept into my parents’ bedroom, where, on a lacquered tray, my mother kept her single indulgence: a bottle of Climat perfume from Paris. I tiptoed to the bathroom and sprayed the Climat twenty-four times, into twenty-four Pepsis.
My heart beat so hard when I stole out of the apartment, my grandmother snoring lightly, that I don’t remember the walk to the supermarket. I do remember the lines—the Italian mothers of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, were doing the week’s shopping. When my turn came, I gazed at the cashier with helplessness and preemptive resentment. Please, I thought. Please. She ran the cans through the scanner with all the ceremony of, well, a bottle return, and handed me a dollar and four nickels. I don’t think she looked at me once. I stood there, vibrating slightly.
The English that didn’t matter in Ladispoli seeped in so quickly I didn’t notice it happen. The forms with riders went to me. So did the bills with inexplicable taxes and surcharges, the calls to dispute this or that, the letters of complaint and appeal to all the imponderable American institutions gouging us, we knew, because we were immigrant rubes. Now I was the first to speak when we appeared before some plenipotentiary, our fate in her hands; into many rooms—interviews, mixers—I was sent by myself, my mission to seduce those present with charisma and wit so they’d give me—us—what they had the power to give. I passed my days feeling a mix of the terror and ecstasy you feel at match point. But this match point went on for days, weeks, months, and years.
Eventually, I came to know how to feel little else. Everything felt like the end of the world, every resolution a miracle. Terror and ecstasy, with nothing between. When I think of my first years in America, I see a quartet of tight, anxious faces awaiting my verdict as I emerge from the bedroom, from the privacy of which I have been making an assault on some inexplicable letter or scandalous charge. “I did it,” I tell them, and they swarm me the way the American football players on television—baffling sport, but sometimes I steal my mother’s shoulder pads and run around the living room with a tiny plastic football in my hands—swarm the guy who caught it forty yards out. I am the king
. The mighty and petrified king.
Outside our home, I am not even a plebe. I am the boy with the barbaric name, the freak who got an 85 on his spelling test without knowing any English, the boy in the very strange clothes, the one with the deadly part in his hair. They call me Commie and tell me to go back to Russia. They throw a football at my head when I am not looking. After Diana Gencarelli (not her name), she of the cascading black hair and Neapolitan fuzz on her lip—in another life, we could have been hirsutely non-Anglo-Saxon together!—finally relents and agrees to sign my autograph book at the end of fifth grade, her message advises me to go and learn the facts of life. So in school it is petrification as well, only for the opposite reason, for how much tighter can I be holding on to the facts, Diana? I am clutching them in my fist, so the others can clutch onto me. Given a tube of strange Pez-like mints at school lunch one day, I . . . shit my pants. I defecate in my pants, like an infant. I sprint home, three blocks away, but I don’t cry. It doesn’t occur to me to cry. I fix it, and start over.
Of course, I didn’t understand what all this meant, the oddity of losing oneself even as one “took control,” a mask settling before anything had cohered underneath. That it was so odd—I was out front, after all; the adults did what I instructed—only helped to conceal that loss, as did the urgency of my desire to help, perform, meet the goal, ease the set of their jaws. But other parts of me noticed. For a while, before going to sleep, I took to barricading my bed with our high-backed kitchen chairs; couldn’t say why, just wanted to. Then I began to feel a siege of invisible lines of yarn, which I had to keep to the right side of or I would be struck by terrible luck. I was always twirling my hands and feet, hoping no one would notice.
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