The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Modern medicine had no cure for what we had, and we hadn’t been in the country long enough to mollify ourselves with shopping like the other Russians had. Although they had been in the States only a few years longer, the other Russians seemed as alien to us as the native Americans. Their memories seemed to have been wiped clean by the purchase of houses and cars, by discussions of lawn mowers, VCRs, surround-sound stereos, and annual bonuses. No one seemed to remember how they fled or why. The only things they did remember were Visotsky’s ballads and parties that lasted into the morning hours, orgiastic drinking and seducing each other’s spouses. Their primary complaint about Americans was that they were boring and inhibited, stuffed shirts who held beers in their hands and thought that dancing was a matter of swaying from side to side. Ahh, the way they had once danced, drunk, loved, recited Pushkin to their mistresses and lovers, imbibed fresh tomatoes and strawberries they had picked with their bare hands, and drunk vodka nectars from the breasts of gods. Although my mother had her own memories crowding beneath her consciousness—of the gods who roamed birch forests and the brook she swam in as a child, fried potatoes and her beloved wild mushrooms, luscious boysenberries, and red-nosed Fedya—you would never catch her mentioning the past with anything but a frown of disdain. To her, Russia was dead, along with its beauty, romance, debauchery, and wild nature.

  For the first five years, we watched other immigrants buy houses in the suburbs and endured their relentless boasting. But in 1987, my father bumped into an old student in an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant, and the man said, “Why, Semeyon Romanovich, you should really be working with your mind again.” Although this remark deeply injured my father’s ego, he marvelously recovered when this very same student, who happened to be a manager at a major bank, offered my father a whopping salary of fifty thousand dollars, an unfathomable sum in our young struggling Russian community. We thought we had been transformed into millionaires overnight. Bella was instantly enrolled in music and dance schools, and I was allowed to take art lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago, to make up for lost years. Grandmother sent money and presents to relatives in Russia who had never been very fond of her. My mother quit her cleaning job and immediately aborted all plans to rise to a full-time pedicurist at the downtown salon; she decided to decorate the house instead, which was how her passion for decorating was born. While other respectable immigrant women were moving on to more realistic careers in computer programming, engineering, hair styling, medicine, real estate, and accounting, my mother, to the shock of all who knew us, took an unpaid internship at a fancy suburban furniture store. An unpaid internship was, after all, a purely American concept.

  With each year, my father got promoted, his English improved, and the money poured into our bank account like a slowly accumulating lava that formed a divide between us and the other immigrants still paying their dues. When we bought our first house in the suburbs, accomplishing the most critical stage of the American dream, the backyard alone seemed to signal a new era of fresher air and uncharted possibilities. My father would gently murmur (out of my mother’s hearing range), “Look at our forest, it’s like we’re back in Russia.” Our rise in status was instant and meteoric, prompting rumors that we had smuggled diamonds from Odessa (even though we were from Moscow). But the simple truth was that my father had made money the healthy, old-fashioned American way: by gambling on the stock market. Ever since he had been promoted to senior mathematical analyst at his bank, helping to construct formulas for predicting the market, he itched to dip his own hand in the gold pot. He was cautious at first, investing minuscule amounts in reliable monoliths, but over time he became a barracuda, chewing chunks off his salary all in the name of the big win, losing thousands of dollars he and my mother made on their jobs, seizing on the riskiest companies, resembling the poor souls on talk shows who denied their gambling addictions, until that rather ordinary, sunless day when his investment of twenty thousand dollars in a dubious Internet company quintupled. My father strode into our house like a man who had exchanged his sanity for a gilded crown. I can’t remember how many times or in how many octaves he had sung, “I told you so,” but from that moment on, we did not question my father, and he, with great bravado, buried himself in stock reports that were now treated like sacred artifacts by my grandmother. Steadily, my father lifted us into the firmament of thickly woven millions. When our green-eyed relatives and friends watched my parents build a mansion from a mere blueprint on the prestigious Winnetka shore, with a wooden Jacuzzi, they plummeted into a depression unique to all immigrants: why them, why not us?

  Grandmother spoke with despair about jealousy. She was a great believer in the evil eye, and therefore there was an explanation behind every ailment in the family. “We didn’t knock on wood enough,” Grandmother would say, or “we should have washed our faces with urine after they complimented us.” When my mother bought a new triangular purple couch and people visited and complimented the couch, Grandmother became worried. “You don’t want to believe, but look at your mother—she looks terrible and has a high fever when only yesterday she was gorgeous and healthy. How can it be?” Jealousy and the evil eye reigned over our world, constricting our tongues, our actions, our purchases. We lived in constant fear, suspicious of Misfortune, which could strike at any moment and whose precarious laws did not subscribe to any gods, but belonged to some force wielded by human beings themselves, hating one another and sending curses on each other’s heads.

  Each year the memory of our one-bedroom apartment on Morris Lane was further blurred into unreality, a dream not unlike the dream of having once lived in Russia. We were living fully now, breathing so to speak the American life; only I could never tell exactly what we were. None of us could, except perhaps my grandmother. She, who stuffed Russian traditions down our throats, who lived as though Stalin could walk through our front door and arrest her, who spoke of Grandfather’s death as though it were yesterday, who knocked on wood religiously throughout all conversations, who never looked in the mirror while she ate, who lacked even a basic grasp of the English language and because of that never passed her American citizenship test, believed that she had always been an American in her soul. The rest of us were still stumbling to define our peculiar intersection of cultures—Americanized Russian Jews, or American Jews originally from Russia, or Russian-Americans who are also by the way Jews. As I passed construction sites about to soar into rows of houses, into future suburban enclaves, I imagined that we, the immigrants, started out as mere blueprints, then over time became the raw materials—mortar, wooden planks, steel—and eventually, brick by brick, parquet floor by parquet floor, rose into family-sized houses with charcoal rooftops and winged windows and rich mahogany doors.

  The Art of Not Offending Anyone

  The dining room in my parents’ house had never sparkled in so many festive colors as it did on the night my parents officially celebrated my engagement to Alexei Bagdanovich. Our fancy dining table was a delicate piece of Brazilian cherry wood on skinny carved legs, an antique my mother snagged for a whopping twenty thousand dollars. Grandmother said its solemnity reminded her of the war and brought out our red embroidered silk tablecloth, which my mother felt bore a stark resemblance to the Communist flag. The other colors of the evening were due entirely to Mrs. Bagdanovich’s hair. Alla had taken auburn to a new level of mauve, which she said gave her the oomph she needed to seduce her husband, Fima, a plump bald man who had long ago transferred his sexual energies to cars.

  The Bagdanoviches arrived in style, in their best jewelry—their beloved new silver Lexus that Mr. Bagdanovich purchased despite the threat of divorce. Unlike our family, the spender in their family was the father, who, they say, loved pleasure the way only a woman can. The mother was the saver, the accountant, the overseer of all things purchasable and unpurchasable, and the whip that kept the father from plunging the family into bankruptcy. It was no secret that Mrs. Bagdanovich was dissatisfied with the fact that her
perfect fingers, a pianist’s treasure, were now being wasted on cutting Russian women’s hair. Mr. Bagdanovich was happily employed as a high-tech salesman at Able-Soft, a dwindling corporate conglomerate still making Apple computers, a job at which he did not excel and that no one knew how he got (as he was neither exceptionally presentable nor fluent in English), but which had a pernicious influence on his frail, vain psyche by refocusing his energies to Armani suits, Porsches, Jaguars, BMWs, underwater watches, and full-service condominiums in Naples, Florida.

  The family was “shit-deep in debt,” in Alla’s famous words to her manicurist, and unless she squeezed Fima’s throat in her manly fist, their poor son Alexei would have to fend for himself in the world.

  One had to admit that Alla Bagdanovich was a selfless mother. When Harvard called to say that Alex had been accepted to their PhD program in physics (as did Cal Tech and MIT), Mrs. Bagdanovich thought she had gone to heaven and returned to earth in a diamond choker. “If you don’t go, then you’re a fool,” she told him, sacrificing, like all good Jewish mothers, her own well-being and sanity. “What do you want to be for the rest of your life—a buzyman?” She said the word “buzyman” as though she were describing a garbage collector. When Alex protested on account of his parents’ financial crisis, she protested back: “Fima and I are done for, our lives are finished; we now live for you.” She also spoke of true Greatness with a capital G and universe-altering scientific discoveries. “What if you’re going to uncover the mystery of quantum physics? Do you want to lose that chance? Or teach the world about time travel?” Such things did not fall flat on Alex’s egotistical ears. When he quit Norton, he felt fully empowered by his mother and even sang to her in a middle C: “Mamochka, I just sent forty-five dollars to HARRR-HARRR- HARRR-VAAAAAARD.”

  The joy unleashed in the Bagdanovich household seeped through their walls into their neighbors’ ears and down the wide highways that led to the houses of their Russian compatriots, their fellow sufferers in the struggle to reach the apotheosis of American success. Having appealed to the universe, claiming that the survival of the human race hinged on Alex’s Harvard PhD (MIT and Cal Tech were unilaterally dismissed on account of other Russians’ greater familiarity with Harvard), Mrs. Bagdanovich felt that she had personally succeeded. Her suffering as a hairstylist and part-time piano teacher—as a “nobody”—her nostalgia for the art of performing (straightening her broad back, arching her imperious brows, assuming an expression of godliness as she crinkled her skirt on the stage before settling at the piano), and her year after year exhaustive rush to churn out meat blintzes for Alex’s finals were at last justified. Happiness palpitated like a warm fuel in her heart.

  My father rose warily from his chair, and fixating on Mrs. Bagdanovich, proclaimed: “To our two children, may they bring us nachas and lots of grandchildren!” Then he clinked his glass against Mrs. Bagdanovich’s, and the two immediately exchanged a knowing smile, one that promised an ongoing flirtation into old age.

  “Yes, to our children,” my mother added, “may you love each other wildly, passionately, honestly, and remember: the most important thing in marriage is the implicit understanding between two people.”

  “Very well stated,” Igor announced in a somber tone. Bella was seated next to him in a gold shimmery dress, holding five-year-old Sirofima in her lap and feeding her blinchiki. (Bella and her husband and child lived on the third floor of my parents’ mansion, separated from Grandmother by a large sitting area, a quasi-balcony that featured stacks of romance novels and a miniature refrigerator, because as Igor pointed out, “Why spend unnecessary money on our own house when your parents’ house is so big!”)

  Alex and I nodded with exaggerated enthusiasm, and Fima Bagdanovich cried out, “Touché, touché,” like a demonstrator rallying for the eternally misunderstood.

  Everyone clinked glasses with one another and reached over the appetizers to make sure that no glass was left un-clinked.

  A moment for heroism presented itself. Alex couldn’t reach my grandmother, so he rose gallantly from his chair and, circling the table, sidled up to my grandmother’s outstretched arm. As they clinked glasses and beamed at one another, I saw Grandmother’s mind, that complex organ of pristine virtue and flawed logic, zeroing in on a joyous, palliative thought: all her devotion to my moral upbringing had not been in vain.

  “Well, well, well, Sonichka,” Mrs. Bagdanovich exclaimed, taking a considerable helping of Olivier salad and stewed eggplant, “you really didn’t have to go all out on our account. We just wanted simple tea and dessert, but this looks wonderful.” Alla Bagdanovich was a plump woman with excessive layers of bright pink lipstick on her thick emotional lips and globs of mascara, a gold choker of a necklace, and that fashionable black dress meant to pinch fat into submission. She had once been a beauty, it was said, but overeating and nerves over her failed career and her husband’s insolent spending habits had caused wrinkles and puffiness around the eyes, so that now only makeup could retrieve her features. Still, she accepted her corpulent figure, with its rolls of fat across the entirety of her back and her constantly deepening, fluid cleavage, the way only a Russian woman could: with pride and majestic deportment. (At times, one hoped for a little less pride when she wore skin-tight black dresses and pressed her bosom ardently into the dinner table.)

  “Lenochka, which of these delicious dishes did you cook?” Mrs. Bagdanovich inquired.

  “I—oh, I don’t know how to cook—” But before I could finish my sentence with “Russian food,” my mother valiantly interceded: “Our Lenochka is concentrating on her mind now—cooking will come later.”

  “A woman must be able to do everything well,” Mrs. Bagdanovich observed.

  “So must a man,” Bella snapped.

  “Our Sashenka is full of hidden talents. Just the other day I discovered what a wizard he is with the lawnmower. Fima couldn’t make heads or asses—excuse my language—out of our broken lawnmower, but Sashenka with his excellent knowledge of physics and mechanical prowess immediately saw that the problem was with the motor and threw it out, announcing that it was unsalvageable.” His mother gazed wide-eyed at her son with the sort of admiration that could make a rock blush. Alex remained unperturbed.

  “I told you hundreds of times that we needed to get rid of that piece of shit,” Fima barked at his wife, “but no, you have to save everything. Do you realize that my wife”—he turned to my grandmother as if she was the only authority on lawnmowers—“has kept not one, not two, but three old couches in our basement in case all our mishpucha drop in from the motherland and where will they sleep?”

  “Where will they sleep?” Mrs. Bagdanovich broke in with passion.

  “Not to mention all the drek we’ve kept from Russia—torn seventies shmatas! The basement is our oyster—let the damn rats eat the cashmere already!”

  “Must you embarrass me everywhere we go?” Mrs. Bagdanovich sniped.

  A traumatic pause invaded the dinner table, and Alla Bagdanovich blushed a deep pink that matched her mauve hair.

  “Sasha tells us that your daughter has extreme ideas about feminiiiism,” Fima said, addressing my mother in a formal tone. “There’s nothing wrong with a woman having a strong opinion per se, as long as she doesn’t try to push it down a man’s throat.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said my father.

  “Are you implying that our daughter is pushing feminism down your son’s throat?” my mother exclaimed, then, twisting her neck in hatred at my father, added, “and you’re agreeing with this impudence!”

  My father’s eyebrows rose to his hairline and he only managed to produce, “Ah, what?”

  “You’re misinterpreting me, Sonichka.” Fima came to my father’s rescue. “I was speaking about American women who have clearly had a pernicious influence on this country.”

  “I, for instance, do not in the least agree with feminism,” Mrs. Bagdanovich exclaimed, even though she worked after Alex�
��s birth, was a wizard at plumbing, packed, carried, and lifted all their Soviet suitcases supposedly on account of Fima’s bad back, and oversaw all the money transactions. Although it was socially promiscuous for a Russian woman to support feminism in public, in private, feminism was alive and kicking, in the form of criticizing, emasculating, and manipulating any random male.

  “And thank God for that.” Fima nodded at his wife, then turned a stern eye in my direction.

  “Americans have stupid views: they think if you give a woman equal pay she’ll turn into a man. But that’s just idiotic! Consider the Bible, which says a woman came out of a man’s rib, that’s why she has weaker muscles and could never be a plumber or a car mechanic or bricklayer. Give me one example of a woman we know who’s a bricklayer!”

  “Wonderful point, wonderful logic, you’re my hero, Fimochka!” Alla cried out with emphasis on “hero.”

  “You can’t argue with biology!” Fima said.

  “Sure I can.” I almost leapt out of my chair. “According to your biology we were once savages who tore animals apart with our bare hands, ate with our fingers, slept on the ground, lived in caves, died at the age of thirty, beat our children and wives with sticks, and ate each other if survival demanded it! We outgrew barbarism, although that’s still debatable, and now it’s time to outgrow chauvinism.”

  “My dearest Lenochka,” Mrs. Bagdanovich said with a suspicious smile, “there’s no need to get so excited. Men will always be animals, who will never voluntarily wash their dirty paws before dinner unless you nag. And, of course, impotent men will always be asserting their superiority over women. Be smart, Lenochka, speak in a softer tone—apply soft pressures to the man’s insecure brain.” Bella winked at me. She, too, had caught the word “impotent,” and with an irreverent laugh downed her vodka.