I must have two of my wisdom teeth extracted on the same day, but I don’t want to cancel my class. I never cancel classes. I am wearing a bright pink cotton dress, and my just-washed and blow-dried hair is sticking up in all directions like a cat in a cartoon that’s got its tail stuck in an electric socket. I go into the classroom biting on bloody gauze. I try to teach my lesson: the conditional. If I were rich, I would travel all over the world.
“If I were rich, I would buy a new car and bring my mother from Cambodia to America.”
As I taste the blood gushing out of the two holes inside my mouth, raw and sour, after I swallow the blood, I say, “To hell with the conditional. Why don’t we just talk about you?” They laugh and say, “Aah! Teacher say hell!”
I find out from my students that Pol Pot’s soldiers would cut out the hearts of people caught trying to escape through the jungle, actually rip the hearts of live people out of their chests, and that some of them have lost family members to that unspeakable lot. They are the lucky ones, they say. I don’t know how to end this lesson that should have been about the conditional mood. I say, “I’ve never eaten a mango fruit.” Several of them offer to bring me a mango the next day. “Mango very good fruit,” they say. I know it makes them happy to give gifts.
Sometimes I want to steal everybody else’s country and miss it. America is all about refugees, I realize. But I can’t seem to be he proper Romanian refugee and miss anything about my own country. The conversations with my parents across the ocean are strained and interrupted by long pauses during which all I can think about is the expanse of ocean that separates us. The ocean that moves in its green immensity: the fierce sharks, the silvery dolphins, the algae, and myriad-coloured fish floating in rainbows. I am startled from my reverie when my mother asks something simple like “How do you like your classes?” There is a bulky lump of something stuck in my throat. It takes me a while to answer because I don’t want to cry on the phone while I’m speaking with my mother who is probably also trying not to cry. The code question: Did you get the red shoes? which means Were you able to do anything to obtain a passport to America? receives the same whispered negative from my mother every single time.
Marta says: “Chica, you should find the Romanian church and meet your people. Talk your language, it would make you feel better, you know.”
But I want to stay away from what she calls my people, somehow fearing that if I don’t I’ll be pulled back into the vortex of my nightmares and end up stuck on a dirty Bucharest pavement staring at tractors in a store window. I tell Marta she is my people, and we both laugh.
One day I go downtown before teaching to visit Marta and Rhonda in the drugstore. But I never make it to the Walgreens at the corner of Michigan and Chicago, because as I pass by the Marshall Field’s store in the majestic marble Water Tower Place, I am suddenly drawn to the glitter of the cosmetics counters and decide to visit that section as if it were a museum. The glamorous women in the aisles trying to attract customers and sell their Clinique and Estée Lauder products look like mechanical dolls: they have perfect glossy pink cheeks, bright red lips, long black lashes that bat like confused butterflies, and hair that glistens. I feel strangely uplifted by this spectacle, as if I have suddenly entered a play, an American version of The Master and Margarita, and any minute, a gorgeous American Margarita is going to fly down in a flower basket from the golden sculpted ceiling, half naked, singing a throaty jazz song about American consumerism and her baby who don’t love her no more. But instead, one of the doll women workers approaches me and asks me if I would like to have a makeover. I stand in the middle of the store and look at her puzzled because in all of the English and American plays and poems and novels I have read, I have never encountered the word makeover and I don’t want to appear like the dumbfounded refugee that I really am.
So I say “Sure, thank you!” thinking that maybe a makeover means that they give you a bag with little envelopes filled with sample creams and perfumes for free, like I’ve seen other customers get. She takes me to the shiny counter studded with perfumes and with creams for every part of your face and with as many eye-shadow colours as there were ice-cream flavours in the gelateria in Rome where I ate my first Italian ice cream with Vittorio on the day I applied for political asylum.
She starts cleaning my face with cotton balls and different stinging lotions and then applies layer upon layer of creams and foundation and blush and eye shadow. I relax; the girl’s slow movements on my face get me all stirred up like I haven’t had the time or disposition to be in a long time. It strikes me that I haven’t had sex with anyone in ages, I am not having sex with anyone, and it doesn’t look like I will have sex with anyone anytime soon. I am alone in this cubist city and nobody loves me. Mihai’s languorous face, the way he always looked at me after we made love, with strands of black hair falling over his forehead and the glitter of a smile in his eyes, appear to me from behind the watery surface beneath which I had pushed him long ago, on that afternoon in Rome when I had my hair cut by the Italian hairdresser.
An overpowering longing takes over me until I start shaking. The Clinique and Estée Lauder products sway in front of me, and I feel a pang of terror at the thought that this sophisticated makeover operation will cost me all the money I have in the bank till the end of the month. There are sudden and continuous streams of tears streaking down my thickly made-up cheeks, and the doll woman stares at me aghast because I have just destroyed her half hour of assiduous work on my face.
I manage to produce an almost inaudible whisper to ask: “How much?” The makeover specialist answers that it is free. I can’t control the flood of tears damaging the makeover job on my face, yet I am ecstatic at the sound of the word free. I want to buy one product to show my appreciation for the kindness of this woman and of Marshall Field and Company. I can’t decide on the product, my mind is painfully moving from one cosmetic product to the next, and I find it impossible to choose. Rivers of foundation and mountains of coloured eye shadow are dancing in my head until my eyes fall on a bottle of foot cream. It costs fifteen dollars, which is still more than I can afford, but in my happiness that I won’t have to give my entire monthly salary for the makeover, the amount seems almost irrelevant.
I rush out of the Marshall Field’s store holding my package like a trophy. My chest is heaving like a pump and strange wheezing sounds are coming out of my throat. Marta and Rhonda take turns holding me and making me drink little sips of ginger ale that I spit right out. I miss Marta and Rhonda, too, although they are right here next to me. I miss Mexico and Laos and Vietnam and all the Indo-Chinese mountains and jungles. I see Mexican minstrels with red scarves around their necks, playing languorous songs on their mandolins while the hearts of Cambodian children are hanging like peaches in the trees of the jungle.
I find myself in my apartment, burning with fever and coming in and out of something that feels like slumber. At some point there are tractors in my room staring at me with huge black, silent eyes. I am floating somewhere across the green ocean and am just about to drop inside its roaring waters and be eaten up by sharks. The remains of my body will be scattered into little pieces among multicoloured fish. Somebody is feeding me chicken soup. I think it must be Rhonda who keeps calling me honey. It’s the only word I seem to understand. Honey, honey, honey! Everything has turned into sweet, creamy honey, and I am drowning in it.
Maybe I was never born in Romania, and I just imagined it so, after reading about Romanian culture in a book I had once bought at Barnes and Noble. Maybe I am actually Mexican from the sunny side of Mexico City, where the streets are lined with white stucco houses and cacti in bloom. Marta was my next-door neighbour, and we grew up playing hide-and-seek behind cacti and red bougainvillaea. Maybe I grew up in Nairobi amid millions of clashing noises and colours and women selling brightly painted baskets in the marketplace. I go into a dark tunnel filled with saxophone music, and then I come out of the tunnel and am floating on the river
Nistru singing Beethoven’s “Für Elise”. I am sitting in the nook of a tree and watching the dirty waters of the river rush by me, counting the hours that I have left to live.
My mouth is parched, and I am drinking cold water from a porcelain cup. Slowly, the contours of my room start to take shape, and I remember that my name is Mona Maria Manoliu, that I was born in Bucharest on a summer day, and that this is my rented room in Chicago, which is now my home. I remember that I love Chicago. Marta and Daniela are sitting next to me on the bed. Rhonda is coming from the kitchen with a bowl of soup. I ask where is my foot cream, and Daniela hands it to me and says: “Here it is, Tía Mona.”
“You were holding this for a long time, as if your life depended on it,” adds Marta. Everybody in the room starts laughing, and I actually feel myself laughing, too.
Dancing with Tom
A FEW YEARS into my American life, the dream I once had while watching The Master and Margarita in a Bucharest theatre starts to become reality as I pursue graduate studies in theatre at a sumptuous university by Lake Michigan. I learn about lighting systems and sound systems. I learn a whole new language for creating shimmering worlds on a stage, dialogue and movement, universes of feeling and gestures in violet and yellow hues. Fade in, fade out. The sound of storms, of dripping water, ringing telephones, a crying baby, a mewing cat. I can do anything. I can bring life to a dark, empty space, make the world, and then poof! Unmake and remake the world over and over again. With every new thing I learn, I am telling myself that it was all worth it; I am making it count.
I meet Tom McElroy at the library’s circulation desk as he is borrowing Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. He has a handsome profile, an aquiline nose, dark hair combed straight back, and a sexy moustache. He turns and looks at me as we wait for our books to be stamped. I notice the colour of his eyes: so blue, almost dark blue. There’s a playful gleam in his eyes. I’ve never started a conversation with a stranger before, but this time I give in to my impulse.
“I love The Brothers Karamazov. It’s one of my favourite books.”
“And I love Western theatre,” he says, glancing at the book I’m taking.
We talk for a while at the circulation desk, about Russian literature, heatedly, excited that we both know the same books. The woman at the reference desk is listening to our conversation. He says there’s a party tonight for incoming and new students. I hadn’t heard about it. I didn’t know there were such parties. He asks, if I don’t already have a date, would I want to . . .?
“What’s a date?” I ask.
“When you go out with someone you like for the first time,” he says, smiling. “Or the second time, in fact.”
I’m relieved he doesn’t say anything about my accent or ask me where I’m from. I ask if he plans to ask for a second date. He starts laughing, and then I’m laughing because he’s laughing. The woman behind the desk scowls.
At the new students’ party, I dance with Tom for hours, like I haven’t danced since Mihai and I danced on New Year’s Day at Radu’s house as the snow was falling relentlessly outside. My body is full, alive, and Tom’s arms and chest are solid and comforting as he swings me to the different rhythms: rock and roll, salsa, reggae. This music beats through my body and makes me forget my worries. I realize I’ve been craving this for so long, to be held and swirled and held again, and Tom McElroy is just the man I need. He likes Russian literature, he hasn’t mentioned anything about Dracula or Nadia Comaneci yet, he loves to dance, and he holds me as if he could hold me for ever. He is getting his PhD in psychology and works part-time as a high school counsellor as part of his training.
Within a month, I move into Tom’s one-bedroom apartment in a redbrick building on the North Side of the city, on a quiet residential street lined with maple trees. Near our street there is a small green area that Tom calls a park, with large wooden structures for children to play and climb on. I like our Chicago street and our next-door neighbours, a Puerto Rican family with a five-year-old boy who always says Hola señora and then giggles.
By the end of the year, we’ve decided to get married in the spring. It’s the mid-eighties, one more year and I can apply for my American citizenship. I feel comforted and content for the first time in a long while, maybe ever. I start wearing men’s blazers and black tights, as if I’ve stopped caring about being feminine. I adopt the self-assurance and nonchalance of a man, an American man. I experiment with this new American me: boyish, shaggy haired, irreverent, and careless. I stuff Mihai’s image deep down into the cellophane-wrapped keepsakes in my mind, where I cannot see his green eyes shaded by the longest eyelashes in the world. He is all squished up at the very bottom of the package where I keep my Romanian past.
We go to blues bars in hidden buildings on the South Side of Chicago, gritty and exploding with life and rhythm, and to rowdy Irish bars, because Tom is Irish and proud of his heritage. I prepare Romanian dishes for us, inventing as I go along, discovering almost with apprehension domestic pleasures I had never experienced before. In our chase for rationed flour and sugar, in the shadow dance with the secret police, domestic life in Romania was improvised and chaotic, swinging from the monotony of the same unsatisfying meal for the fifth time in a week to the intense joy of having found something new after queuing for two hours: two hundred grammes of cheese, a can of sardines, a kilo of peaches. Then there were the holidays, when the entire family mobilized to spend days in a tangle of queues winding through the city, just to accumulate enough ingredients for a Christmas dinner or a birthday party. Tom loves everything I make. He prepares dishes sometimes, casseroles from cookbooks and recipes his mother sends, or a special Irish bread named potato farl that is golden like the Romanian mămăligă. Between my theatre classes and teaching job, the inebriating rhythms of the blues and the modest excitement of chopping up green peppers and tomatoes side by side with Tom, I feel my little stringy roots spreading out, taking hold with a ragged determination like a stubborn plant sprouting through the Chicago pavement.
Tom and our graduate student friends teach me how to smoke marijuana and educate me about everything that is bad about America: the capitalist imperialism of great oil companies, hatred and inequalities based on race and gender. They tell me that freedom of the press is an illusion. Sure, you can swear at the president in a public square, but so what? You can’t change anything, because the media is owned by the big corporations anyway. I discover the music of Bruce Springsteen and Sting.
One night at a party when I’m high on marijuana I do a headstand in the middle of a room full of people, my blue satin skirt billowing over my face. My gestures seem discontinuous, syncopated, like the movements of a marionette, like I’m seeing the seconds and the minutes unfold in separate streams, like the eight o’clock flower on my grandmother’s grave blossoming with a pop. A vision of me as a child sitting with my mother on the Ferris wheel in the park with swans where we went the day the Russians invaded Prague passes in front of my eyes like a film clip. We keep going round and round on the Ferris wheel, which is moving faster and faster. Other such film clips pass by me, but the one I keep rewinding over and over again is one of Mihai driving a white car to meet me in Bucharest in front of the enormous white building called Casa Scînteii, the headquarters of the Romanian newspaper called Scînteia, the Spark, House of the Spark. This is the main Party newspaper that my father says is filled with lies, one bloody page after another. I am standing in front of the enormous white building wearing a yellow polka-dot dress that is too short and too tight, and Mihai keeps driving in circles by me without stopping, just waving a red scarf out of his car window. I hate the House of the Spark and I stand in the middle of the street, trying to make Mihai stop, but he is still driving in circles around me waving his red scarf, and then the film clip starts over in the room with people talking about President Reagan.
I love the song “Hungry Heart”, singing it upside down as blood rushes to my head, because I have the hungriest heart
you’ve ever seen, like Lady Lazarus in Sylvia Plath’s poem – I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air. I will eat all the flowers in the neighbourhood, like when I was seven and I vomited my lime-coloured bile, and I will eat the bad capitalists and the imperialists and the dishonest reporters, and I will vomit them all back out with my green bile, like the Big Bad Wolf in the story. Tom says we have to go home, that I’m not feeling well, but I say I’m feeling just fine, and can we hear that “Hungry Heart” song again?
Naturalization
IN THE SIXTH year of my residence in the United States I get to appear for my naturalization interview, in order to become an American citizen. I am wearing my best dress, a red-and-blue paisley silk dress that I bought at Carson Pirie Scott on State Street before Tom and I went to a wedding party. I figure I must look good and prosperous for my interview, to show that I am worthy: a respectable permanent resident. Tom offers to accompany me to the immigration office in Daley Center, but I ask him to let me do this on my own.
As I am sitting before the immigration officer, suddenly my aunt Ana Koltzunov comes to mind. The wild green Black Sea, on that stormy summer afternoon when we got lost, bursts in front of my eyes right here at the table where I’m being naturalized. The officer has just asked me something from the very end of the questionnaire, about whether I would fight in a war should the United States go to war.
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