My parents developed tics of their own. They’d never bothered me about schoolwork, but now, in a false tragedy familiar to any immigrant child, a 94 led to a crestfallen family council. What went wrong? Why not a 100? It wasn’t in them to yell, so they counted on my sense of duty, and my ear for what was meant rather than said, to make sure it never happened again. (The ability to hear that way is invaluable for a writer; they gave me my first practice.) They didn’t know how to live without expecting the worst; they’d only switched reasons.
They became obsessed with my weight. “You’ve rounded a little, haven’t you?” they began saying, trying to sound casual. But they kept putting full plates in front of me, and I kept finishing them off as they watched. So much had turned upside down; food was one of the few things that worked as it used to. The more I became the person they brought me to America to become, the less we seemed to share, and the harder all of us tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Wasting no time, my grandfather had gotten involved in some scheme that left him with tubs of pharmacy goods. Relentless offers of these replaced dinner conversation: shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, loofahs, cologne, pumices, any medication I wanted. The only medication I wanted was understanding, but this one they didn’t have. Not that I could have put it that way. But once in a while, I saw something different transpire between my American friends and their parents. Different how, I wouldn’t have been able to say—but better. For my part, I was fed.
I let my hair grow long, and once a neighboring boy played me some heavy metal, I listened only to that—Testament, Sepultura, Overkill, Suicidal Tendencies. But I kept making calls, writing letters, seducing the room, clutching my racket as the ref called match point again and again, no matter how many times I had won it—surely the only long-haired teenager in a Megadeth T-shirt in suburban New Jersey whose mother’s hand hid in his when they were crossing the street.
Part II
Chapter 7
2005
What to cook if where you’re going, they’re not going to feed you
How to cook like dancing without legs
What to cook when you’re allowed to go all the way
In a simpler world, they’d always remain apart, safe in their sense of enmity.
—Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head
Not many people visit Midwood, in south Brooklyn—even for the Dutch, it was the Midwout, the “Middle Woods” that separated the proper towns of Boswijck (Bushwick) and Breuckelen—but if you were passing through early on a blustery day in November 2004, you might have seen a woman on Avenue P, her fingers clutching the upper flaps of her nylon overcoat. There wasn’t proper nail polish on the fingers, though she came from Ukraine, where only dead women went without painted nails. And she wore no rings or bracelets, though only poor Ukrainian women went without jewelry—poor, or poor in love. At forty-four, Oksana was neither—in Ukraine, she’d left a man, a salary, and a life with nice things, though she had them only because she knew how to hustle outside the official channels.
In America, Oksana was a home aide—the person a home-care agency, contracted by the city and paid by Medicaid, sent to look after an old person with the right social benefits. At the training—it was conducted in Russian; in this part of Brooklyn, all the home aides came from former Soviet republics—the instructors had said: No jewelry. The “clients” were invalids—you wouldn’t want, as you pulled and pushed and lifted and lowered, to scrape a cheek or snag a bouffant with the clasp of a bracelet. And the aides should forget their home cooking, too—the Uzbeks with their plov and kharcho, the Georgians with their khachapuri, the Ukrainians with their fried this and that. Medicaid wouldn’t keep sending money for a dead client.
Oksana was walking down Avenue P that morning because she had a day off. But she didn’t want a day off. She called the agency to see if anyone needed a sub, and lucked out: There was an old man on Avenue P whose usual home aide was not above a vacation day. She was going to my grandfather’s house. Their encounter would lead to something neither of them could have imagined, and they would recall it often in the years to come.
Oksana carried a Tupperware filled with grechanniki (greh-CHA-nee-kee)—patties made from caramelized carrots, ground chicken and pork, and buckwheat (grechka), finished with parsley or dill. The mosaic they made in the stewing pan always transported her to her small kitchen in Ivano-Frankovsk, a midsize city in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, in western Ukraine. She was bringing her own food because her usual client wouldn’t share.
Nothing Oksana did was right for that woman. There was a perfectly nice bedroom, but the old woman locked it and slept in the living room with Oksana. In the morning, she sent Oksana into the forbidden room to fix the bed even though it hadn’t been touched. Make it again, that side is not even. Make it again, I see a bubble. The woman was so frugal she wouldn’t give Oksana a dollar to wash the window curtains in the laundry room downstairs. The curtains hadn’t been washed since man touched the moon, but Oksana was too frugal to spend her own dollar and ran her hands raw in the bleach-filled sink. What was the point of painting her nails?
The “clients” were all Jews—political refugees from the USSR—and the home aides all Christian, here because the economy was dead in Ukraine. The old people didn’t speak English, and neither did the aides; they were made for each other. But it was quite a reversal for these ex-Soviet people: Christians waiting on Jews. Oksana thought maybe this was why her old woman, who was Jewish, was so rough with her—revenge, of a kind.
Oksana didn’t have to take the woman’s abuse—she wasn’t illegal. But she didn’t want to make noise. She didn’t speak English, and the Russian women who ran the home-care agency seemed decent but perfunctory in the American way. Besides, Oksana wasn’t here to make a life, only a living. She would work eight days a week if it meant more to send home. She didn’t even have an apartment. She lived with the old woman because the assignment was for round-the-clock care, and for the odd night off, she rented a cot (and a mailing address) from a friend.
One-thirty Avenue P was nearly a block long. The recessed, colonnaded entryway reminded her a little of the pastel-hued Hapsburg beauty of the central district at home. This was what passed for decorative fretting here. Surely it was different in Manhattan; she hadn’t been. On the tenant list, almost every surname was Slavic. She crossed herself and pressed 5J.
On the fifth floor, the door opened to reveal a man of medium height in a blue tracksuit, slight except for his belly, which looked like he’d eaten a basketball. Unlike Oksana, he wore lots of jewelry: a square signet ring on his pinkie, and gold on his wrist. The left hand bore a tattoo of a ring buoy, the right of a knight in panther’s skin.
“I’m your sub,” she said. “I’m sorry—I should have come earlier so as not to delay you. Is the client sleeping?”
The man laughed. There was more gold in his mouth. Gold was manipulable, did not corrode, and made a hard biting surface; half the Soviet Union had gold teeth. “‘Is the client sleeping?’” he mimicked her genially. A smile moved over his eyes. “The client is standing in front of you!” He bowed his head—a coquet.
“You’re Arkady?” She couldn’t help her own smile. “Excuse me. You’re so . . .”
“Young?” he said. “Seventy-eight.”
“I would say sixty-five,” she said without false compliment.
“Then say it; why not?” He reached for Oksana’s coat. She accepted the gesture.
She stepped into a bright, spacious living room, with its black lacquered wall-length entertainment center, though its television was a sideshow to all the crystal and china in the display cabinets: a Soviet home in absentia. The furniture set—beige leather bordered by curvaceous armrests made from expensive wood—said the same: Money had been spent on these things. The room was suffused with an agreeable warmth—the radiator clanked as if to confirm the impression. Outside, the cold sun shone on a field of low rooftops, the occasional window fronted
by a rope of late-season laundry. Those are Russian-speaking windows, she thought. She and her old woman saved another dollar by tying a clothesline to the fire escape.
Above the small dining table was a portrait of a woman with a high hairdo and over-rouged cheeks, drawn up in an uneven, scowling smile. A photo of the same woman on the entertainment center made the painting’s features seem distorted.
“I’m here just a year,” Arkady said, losing his gleam. “We had a good apartment on Eighty-fourth Street. But I couldn’t live there after Sofia . . .” He wavered.
“It’s a beautiful portrait,” Oksana lied.
“A friend,” he said. “Paints icons. All the churches want him.” Oksana nodded eagerly.
Back home, good apartments being hard to come by, every visit began with a tour; she wanted to give him the chance to show off. In the bedroom, a bookshelf held clowns rather than books: a jester in a two-pointed hat, a clown in a ruff astride a check-patterned clock, two others riding a bell pepper like a bobsled. “I bought one to cheer me up,” Arkady said. “Now the guy won’t let me alone—calls every time they get a new clown.” The wood of the bed was curvy and lustrous—same set as the living room. The kitchen was small, a galley with a good countertop, but the usable floor had less than two feet of width. Well, she would only be here for the day.
“Not bad for an old man,” he said. “But life alone—I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy.”
Oksana sighed. “God holds the key.”
“And you, my bird?” he said. “Ukraine, they told me.”
She nodded. “Let me put a bowl of something warm in front of you and we’ll talk. I’ll just change quickly.” She was in black dress pants and her square-heeled black shoes—the nicest clothes she had. When she arrived in Brooklyn, she thought everyone was poor, because they wore such shoddy clothes. It had been a cold, gray, humid October, the wetness so thick it seemed to hang on the trees. The train rumbled endlessly above Eighty-sixth Street, garbage piled all over, and the doorways to the Chinese fishmongers ran with fetid, off-color meltwater. The whole place was gray—even the people in their sweatpants. But then she understood that they wore sweatpants because here people felt free—the number one thing was to be comfortable.
“Is there anything you have to take care of today?” she said.
“Just food shopping,” he said.
Oksana opened the fridge. “You want to go food shopping? There’s not even room here for my Tupperware.” The vegetable crispers were full, and the shelves held a dozen plastic containers with labels from a Russian grocery—stuffed cabbage; schnitzels; beet salad. Only one item seemed homemade, though, a tall jar of chicken soup. But it looked sickly and thin.
“I’m waiting out the Chinese at the fish place,” he said. “They raised the carp to $1.99 a pound for Passover—they know the Jews are making gefilte fish. But guess what—Passover ended six months ago, and carp’s still $1.99.”
Oksana was opening and closing the kitchen cabinets. Every imaginable grain, a hundred teas for taste and for health, canned goods to survive a world war. She turned to Arkady—“You can open up your own store.”
He smiled mournfully, but not without satisfaction. “My fighting days are over.”
“How about some millet with pumpkin and dried fruit?” she said. “A recipe from home.”
He shrugged good-naturedly. “Will you help me?” she said. He seemed to perk up when he had the chance to impress her. “If you could measure out two cups of millet while I change.”
“Yes, commander,” he said. “I was in the navy—I obey orders.”
She laughed. “Today, at least, my life will be easy.”
“Why? You have a difficult client?”
“I’m grateful for what I’ve got,” she said, and thought about it. “You know how it is. Things can always get harder.”
She wasn’t sure he heard her—he was staring past her shoulder. “Junior Seaman Arkady,” she called. He shivered out of his daze. “Two cups of millet, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Senior Seaman,” he corrected her, and saluted.
While she boiled water for the pumpkin—he had never had pumpkin, but it was on sale after Halloween, so he and his usual aide had bought two, what the hell—he tried to measure the millet. She’d changed into work clothes: netted slippers; tights printed with wild patterns; a short-sleeved shirt with swirls, rhinestones, and curlicues; and a small silver cross on her neck. There was a gold Star of David around his.
Oksana had skinned the pumpkin and chopped it into small cubes and was stirring it hard—she wanted a puree. She set water to boil for the millet.
“Can you have salt?” she called out.
“Why not,” he said.
“Just a little,” she said.
She could cook from scratch quickly; if there were unannounced guests, there was something bubbling on the stove by the time they had hung up their coats. She had to set up the children with new apartments, to buy her son Misha a new car, to renovate the small country home they shared in the summer. But if something was left, and she could manage the bribes, sometimes she thought about returning home to open a little café.
The pumpkin puree went into the millet. For sugar, she substituted a cap of vanilla. She liked crystallized better than liquid—it tasted less bitter. She decided on a mix of dried cranberries and plums. She glanced over at him. “At home, if the parents like the groom when he comes asking for a bride,” she said, “they bring out the runners that we drape over icons. But if they don’t, they bring him a pumpkin.”
“So I am rejected?” he said.
“Some rejection!” she laughed. In the bowl, the millet was bright yellow, the flecks of cranberry and dried plum like dark little stars.
“And where’s your bowl?” he said.
“Oh, I’ll just have some coffee here in the kitchen.”
“Don’t be crazy—sit with me. You want something stronger than coffee?”
She laughed. “In the middle of the morning?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never!” he said. “Look at this.” He opened a covered section of the entertainment center in the living room: rows of bottles, shelf after shelf.
“I can’t stand a cold meal,” she said. “Eat, please. You’ll show me everything later.”
Between spoonfuls, he asked questions. Had she come to be a hamatenda? (They all said “home attendant” that way.) No, she had started out in a grocery in Detroit; she’d worked in a supermarket for twenty-seven years in Ukraine. Why that? She wanted to be a teacher, but money was short. How did she make money? Same way he did. Everything was loose rather than packaged in a Soviet supermarket, easy to siphon off and sell on the side. After 1991, the money went to shit—inflation, deflation, who could make sense of it. But the border had opened. To the Bulgarians she sold electrical equipment, stainless steel, and coffee. To the Poles, down blankets and children’s clothes. When she went to Turkey, she had to buy two tickets—one for herself, one for the rug she’d buy to resell down the line.
“So you’ve seen the world,” he said.
“From the sole of a shoe, maybe,” she said. “You’re finished?” His bowl was half-full. “Was it sweet enough? Cooked enough?”
“Good, good,” he answered vaguely, nodding his head.
Maybe he wasn’t much of an eater? But look at that belly! But she didn’t press. “You get dressed, I’ll wash the dishes.”
Ten minutes later, she was done, but he was still standing in front of his closet. It contained cashmere sweaters, corduroys, wool socks—he kept to the old ideas about dressing up for the street—but he couldn’t choose what. “The red sweater, you think?”
“He can score a twenty-four-hour hamatenda even though he’s hale as a bull,” she said, “but he needs a lady to choose his wardrobe?”
“I’m accompanying the lady—it’s no casual matter,” he said, arching his eyebrows.
She laughed. “The red one, sure.”
So she dressed him. The red one, dark-brown corduroys, and white leather slip-on loafers. When she was helping him out of the tracksuit, she saw the long keloidal scar on his chest: quadruple bypass. It made her think of her mother; she sent a prayer five thousand miles away. Arkady flashed a gold smile, looked in the mirror, flipped up his collar, and said, “Forward!”
When they got to the produce store, she understood why he had made her take a little carriage on wheels. In the fruit section, he went through the cherries one by one, boxing out an old woman shopper with his belly. “It’s okay to turn them over like that?” she said carefully.
“I buy so much here I could look through his wallet if I wanted to,” Arkady said, meaning the owner, then moved on to oranges, apples, kiwis, and strawberries.
“You already have two containers of strawberries!”
“But look at them!” he said. “Big as a finger.” But before he could finish with the strawberries, he moved, as if in a trance, toward a tray of red peppers, so red and plump they looked ready to burst. “A sin not to buy peppers like these,” he said.
He was right about the owner, who mewled “Hi, hava yoo?” when he saw the old Russian man who came all the time. It came to twenty-eight dollars and change; Arkady gave the cashier thirty, winked, and patted her hand. She tried to force change on him, and he made an insulted face. So she went to the produce aisle and returned with two heads of cauliflower. “Fresh!” she said.
“She couldn’t gift us something lighter?” he said under his breath, and Oksana laughed.
Arkady was a boulevardier, his currency goods rather than gossip. He liked having this woman half his age on his arm. Not to be mistaken for a wife—to show the local people that he was a man taken care of. So the little carriage kept wheeling toward Eighty-sixth Street, the commercial thoroughfare that runs through Bensonhurst, the subway clattering on the raised track.
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