The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  The reality of May 12 set in, the day the spring semester was over and I would be arriving in Chicago to see my family, my fiancé, and the magnificent ballroom at the Drake, overlooking Lake Michigan where our wedding was to take place. “This will only be a two-week sojourn into my family’s womb,” I explained to Eddie on the way to the airport, “a regular pilgrimage I have to make to relieve their anxiety about the perils of my sudden individualism.” “Is ‘sudden individualism’ a euphemism for fucking me?” “Precisely,” I said, chuckling with glee, “you’re my secret individualism!” He kissed me with such audaciousness in the American Airlines terminal that my fellow travelers appeared thereafter to be suspended in sensual reveries of their own.

  But the switch in atmospheres, already palpable on the plane, seemed to alter my sensitive organism. I breathed differently in O’Hare Airport than in Manhattan, walked differently, felt the relaxing retardation of my synapses, the inexplicable joy in open uncongested spaces, and the soothing kindness in the measured smiles of my old Midwestern compatriots. The sudden flood of thank-yous and excuse-mes unwound me, and I said to myself, close your eyes and taste without fear that white-processed flour and saturated fat in your chocolate glazed Dunkin Donut because life is easy, easier than you think, easier than you want to make it. Without the smell or pulse of New York, without his lips on my mouth and breasts, I could feel myself regressing to a state of pre-infancy, my embryonic brain firmly embedded in the family’s thick placenta. I felt it coming on like some abysmal incurable disease—the state of frailty and helplessness coupled with an absurd happiness that was stripped of sexuality and desires outside the family hearth. I was surprised at how simple it was to switch gears. When I violently raised my arm in the air to hail a yellow cab, preparing to push people aside as they ran to form the infinite taxi line, I halted from sudden shock: in Chicago the cabs were not uniformly yellow, no one ran or pushed each other aside, and a short, stocky man was standing at the curb, buried under a sign that said, “Elena Kabelmuffer, Velcome!” This was my father’s private limo driver, and one of the numerous family perks now bestowed upon me for staying (yes, staying!) engaged to Alex. (It was Grandmother who felt that I needed incentives not only to marry Alex, but more crucially not to sleep with the mysterious hooligan she and mother regularly questioned me about.)

  As the limo raced down I-94, I kept my eyes peeled, watching for stop signs and yield signs and sky signs as to what I should do. It seemed so obvious on the surface, obvious to anyone who did not know me, that I should run to the lover and we should flee society together and find ourselves a thatched villa on the island of San Domini. We might stay for a month, or a year, or a century on some abandoned stretch of white sand, imbibing ocean air, wine, soft-shell crabs, and freshly-caught Branzinos from the Adriatic Sea. But as I read each exit sign, I saw only this: Alex, with all his idiosyncrasies and flamboyant language and irritating views of the world, was dear to me; he was the comfort zone where I was not at war with myself. He would accept me as I was—broken, deceitful, sexually progressive, full of billowing pride; he would forgive my every inner ugliness as God’s just reward for my outer beauty and my perfect English pronunciation and my ambition to attain a statistics PhD. Alex was the immigrant in me.

  We had arrived in Chicago in July of 1982 at the height of the Cold War, when Reagan called Russia the “Evil Empire” and James Bond was battling the KGB in movie theaters. Our first apartment was in a drug zone, although we—the newly arrived immigrants—had not a clue. There was a cluster of us Russians living in an American mix of whites, blacks, and Hispanics on the North Side. Our neighbors downstairs welcomed us with tea and tales of our new motherland. The man said, “Don’t worry, this is an excellent neighborhood. At night, though, there may be some shootings, and the lady in the building right over there”—he pointed out the window—“was killed only yesterday by her husband—a spat of the most sensitive nature.” And we believed him: not that there was crime, but that there was adultery, just like there had been adultery in Russia. We took long walks, two or three families at a time, sometimes at midnight, all the way to the lake in our relentless search for fresh air. Suspicious characters were wary of us, of our boisterous voices, our irreverent mannerisms, and our foreign tongue. The lake was a sanctuary away from our congested apartment, where two broken air conditioners buzzed and puffed out warm air.

  I imagined I was born there, at the tender age of nine, in a one-bedroom apartment that our uncle Yakov had chosen for us because we did not speak any English. Mother and Father slept in the living room, while Bella, Grandmother, and I shared the bedroom, staring out of two small windows truncated by steel bars. Our kitchen was a narrow windowless hallway, darkened by grimy lamps and overhanging oily brown cabinets. It was partitioned from the living room by a row of white colored bars, closely spaced together, smacking of a prison cell. The walls were spotty with fingerprints and grease. When the moon shone meekly on our linoleum tiles, cockroaches emerged from caves under our carpet and held banquets on the kitchen counters. The view from the eating area was of the garbage dump and a parking lot with a predilection for criminals. When I pressed my face hard against our steel-barred window, I could see drug dealers cashing in on the lucrative cocaine buzz of the early eighties and sometimes, to my great joy, getting arrested by fancy-looking police officers who looked astoundingly like the ones inside our television screen.

  Telling people you were Russian resulted in a variety of patriotic responses such as “Are you people really KGB spies? When my mother told a waitress in a pizza restaurant that we were from Moscow, the waitress never returned with our pizza and eventually, after waiting for two hours, we left.

  My mother’s English was a complicated amalgam of Russian and English adjectives and nouns, with very few verbs which resulted in communication disasters with the well-meaning Midwesterners. My father’s English was superior to my mother’s, in that he spoke in a British dialect and was arrogant enough to believe he was on the brink of fluency. But in reality, he spoke a language that was at best a distant cousin of English. He blamed his inability to understand Americans on their pedestrian usages of grammatical structures and their constant reliance on slang, and glibly argued that their uncomprehending faces were typical American reactions to a sophisticated British accent. But it was Grandmother, while staunchly remaining “non-fluent,” who alerted us to the serious anti-Russian rumblings in our building. There was the family upstairs, a divorced mother with two teenage children, who advised us to go back to Russia and periodically dumped reeking garbage at our doorstep. There was the lonely widow next door who hid her cat inside her shirt upon seeing us, fearing that we might contaminate it with our foreign eyes or perhaps eat it. And there was the crazy old man downstairs who literally thought we were aliens descended from Soviet UFOs and waved cardboard sabers at us if we happened to cross his path.

  I understood early on that the only way to camouflage myself was to eradicate all traces of Russia from my tongue. I was only nine, but like a dedicated investment banker, armed with three successive editions of Oxford dictionaries, five grammar textbooks, and countless English-Russian tapes, I embraced the American work ethic: keeping insane hours, drinking caffeinated pop sodas, and abnegating all childish pleasures such as doll-playing and cartoon-watching. I fell asleep with headphones wrapped around my head repeating such words as “theological,” “thespian,” “realignment,” and “insurmountable,” words whose meaning escaped me, but whose sounds reverberated in my ears and mangled my tongue and jaws, forcing Russian out of my dreams and replacing it with the male monotone from the tape recorder that over time resembled a lullaby of “th’s,” “l’s,” and “r’s.” I pored over impervious vocabulary lists and constructed sentences with my new triumphs: “Will you please alleviate me of my elocution?” or “Didn’t I discern you a fortnight tomorrow?” Nor was I shy about sharing my knowledge with my elementary school classmates, who received me as any s
ane children might in the early 1980s, as a Soviet humanoid sent to entertain them. But their mockery only fueled my resolve. “I will become fluent, I will become fluent, I will become fluent,” I chanted in my head as they laughed at me. Within two years, my Russian accent vanished and I began to pass for an American, even before I changed my name to Emma Kaulfield, before I stopped wearing all my Russian clothes, before I knew any slang. And even though fellow Russians stopped recognizing me as one of their own—the highest form of achievement for an immigrant child—I felt as if my world had been splintered, my mind lost to the incessant dance between two languages and two cultures. When accompanied by my family, my tiny victories felt like betrayals; waiters in local diners and fancy restaurants alike engaged only me in their long summaries of specials and jotting down of orders, their eyes conspicuously avoiding my mother, grandmother, father, and even my sister. Behind their painfully cheerful veneers, I could see mockery and dread of meeting the eyes of the unspeaking—the aliens pattering in some unfathomable tongue.

  During the holidays, we suffered from nostalgia. We had lost all of our Russian holidays and knew nothing about American ones, so we existed primarily as observers, outsiders passing by windows with giant dazzling Christmas trees and stately menorahs. We discovered that Americans believed in a being called God and spoke to Him at every turn, thanking, blessing, demanding things of Him. “This is called freedom,” my father explained to the family, “the freedom to be real Jews.” “And who were we before?” Grandmother snapped. My parents enrolled me in an Orthodox Jewish school, not because they wanted me to learn about our religion, but in order to avoid sending me to a drug-infested public school in our area. God appealed to me instantly, replacing the omnipotent red-haired, half-balding Lenin with a more ambiguous though still theoretically human visage, featuring prominent Roman features and a magical silver hairdo. And I brought Him home with me, lecturing Mom and Dad and Grandma on the do’s and don’ts of our new identity, pointing out that being Jewish isn’t just about anti-Semitism; it is also about not eating pork hot dogs, not combining turkey and cheese in the same sandwich, and praying to this new God daily out of simple gratitude, a concept so foreign to our hyper-critical existence that I was instantly subjected to my father’s personal take on his beloved Karl Marx: “Religion is for people with underdeveloped left brains.”

  But by the time I reached adolescence, the strict religious tug of Judaism lost its grip on me, and pop culture beckoned—with its incessant whir of eighties music, movies, fashion, and neon-infused coolness. The greatest sign of my Americanization became my quick sexualization. By the time I reached eighth grade, I had already made five separate announcements that I had no intention of “waiting” till I was married, that this was a “dumb” idea, and that sex was out there to have, to partake in, to enjoy as though it was a hot red borscht. Much of this rhetoric, I admit, I stole from soap operas, which Grandmother and I watched religiously, and which contributed to much of my phraseology in English. Although Grandmother was wary of soap operas, wary of their high sexual content symbolized by red lingerie for women and muscular chests for men, she nevertheless demanded that I translate for her, and thus inadvertently sped up the maturation of my raging hormones. While none of us spoke English, we understood that the color television, yet another hand-me-down from my uncle Yakov, was a box filled with sexual secrets that like a magnet drew us—the unsuspecting immigrants—into its force-field.

  From our TV I learned that sex was a long, tongue-involved kiss between two tan blond human beings, preferably well-oiled, or just plain wet. And as I was meticulously honest—a Communist value I had dragged with me to the States—I informed my mother and grandmother that I needed to get kissing over with, considering my pitiful age: fourteen. Grandmother warned that kisses led to terrible things, foremost of which was sex, and sex inevitably led to eternal slutdom. And as I did not want to be doomed to eternal slutdom—all I wanted was to interlock tongues with John Stamos or Jack Wagner or that pure fount of sensuality, Prince—I settled for a substandard kiss in a roller rink with a guy whose face I can no longer remember and whose name I never knew, but whose slobbering tongue has remained embedded in my memory, reminding me that my transformation into a true American had to start there—at the moment when Grandmother’s advice on kissing lost its effect on me.

  By that time Bella was in college, leaning toward economics, a major so practical and noble that Grandmother conveniently forgot all of my sister’s sexual escapades and saw her as a newly minted saint, while I had metamorphosed into a lascivious devil in the garb of a teenager. Grandmother tried to keep me away from R-rated movies once she figured out what R-rated stood for, and if we happened to be in one, she’d reach over with her large palm and block my eyes. But nothing could stand between me and gratuitous 80s love scenes; when confronted with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe buck naked in red candlelight and a plethora of sexual positions in About Last Night, I almost ate Grandmother’s hand in an attempt to catch every last scintillating detail. When Grandmother grew particularly worried about me (this occurred on average three to four times a week), she’d sacrifice her own enjoyment of soap operas for my moral benefit. Whenever Dynasty was on and Alexis was luring a man three times her junior into her sagging arms, or oily sex was being simulated on General Hospital, or Rachel Ward was struggling to free herself from Richard Chamberlain’s arms as part of their inevitable beach-inspired sex on the peerless Thorn Birds, Grandmother would splay her body across the television screen and yelp in horror: “Pornography! Obscenity! Smut! Uzhas! This is what they’re teaching children these days—that’s why there are so many teenage pregnancies in this country!” “Please, please, I can’t see, move away,” I’d plead. But she only moved when a commercial went on. Grandmother knew better than anyone else in the family that these shows were the root of my libidinal yearnings—the founding mothers of all my sexual fantasies—and to bring an end to them, she had to be forceful, persistent, and most importantly (as is true of all educational endeavors) repetitive.

  Yet despite all of my vocal mutinies, I was a very obedient teenager and remained a virgin far longer than anyone in the family expected. I attribute my heroic effort to the guilt I felt on account of the aforementioned God and, naturally, my family members, whose suffering during those early years preyed on my conscience like a debilitating odor, obfuscating my desires and guarding my vagina with the will of the entire Russian emigration. For to be an un-virgin was to throw yourself in the cage of the “many,” as in “how many men have you been with?” and whether there were only two or twenty, I knew that in our world the collective opinion would not be merciful or kind. In my virgin state, I believed that sex could surface on your face like leprosy and thus out you to the entire Russian community, forcing my parents to endure yet another bout of public humiliation.

  It was enough that they embraced their “new careers” with all the indignity of people who had become inexplicably blind. My professor father was now moonlighting as a gas station cashier, driving cabs, and lecturing us about how much he loved “working with his hands.” “Sure, they complain I go too slow,” he would say of his customers, “but they know when they’re with me they’re not going to get hurt.” My father was terrified of oncoming traffic, so he always drove too close to the curb, or to other cars, which resulted in one side of his cab having long, ugly scratch marks. The drivers honked and gave him the finger as they passed him, and my father responded with his new affinity for Russian swearing. “Go to the dick,” or “Go to the ass” he would say with a belligerent smile, and I would know at once how much he missed his old sedentary, intellectual life.

  My literary mother threw herself into manual labor without the slightest pretension of having any useful skills other than those that required scrubbing and nodding: she was now cleaning toilets at the local high school and making beds at a nearby Holiday Inn. She was also taking classes in manicures, pedicures, and hairstyling, the preferred
profession of intellectual Russian women who had once been doctors, dentists, engineers, pianists, and linguists. If you did not speak English and were not willing to return to medical school, cutting people’s nails and hair seemed like an excellent alternative to cleaning, washing, making beds, and wiping the asses of rich crippled ladies. My mother did a great deal of cleaning in our apartment as well, as if her job did not sufficiently satiate her soul. A stench of piss and mildew emanated from our mysterious beige carpet and my mother scrubbed it with Comet. The skin on her soft, aristocratic hands crinkled and cracked, and her eyes watered and reddened from the blue particles in the air. She preferred the stench of liquid soaps and chlorine to the grime and insects that crawled under our feet.

  We always had the feeling of being watched. It was one of those things you import from Russia, like decayed Beluga caviar, or a moth-eaten cashmere sweater. My grandmother always locked the doors twice: the first time to pay homage to an old habit, the second to confirm it into fact. It was a case of divine intervention that Chicago apartments had front and back doors: Grandmother was now locking us in four times. My father periodically checked our phone to see if it was tapped, although with him it was more an act of nostalgia rather than fear of KGB infiltration. When my mother raked her fingers through the carpet hairs, I used to wonder if she was checking for wires.