I’ll prove it to you, my mother whispers. And in a voice of mischief, she says, now what do you think we should get Lenochka for her birthday—a huge stuffed poodle or Anderson’s fairy tales or a set of watercolors I saw last month at Gūm. Well, I was thinking, my father picks it up, of not getting her anything at all—after all, she’s been misbehaving a lot lately. How have I been misbehaving, I jump in, and my parents break out in a laugh. Sneaky sneak, my mother says and runs to me, and lifts me in the air and throws me at my father, and I laugh and laugh, and jump up on their bed.
But by lunchtime, my mother and father can barely exist in the same room, and I can’t remember who said what to ruin our burst of bliss. I backtrack through the questions, tones, remarks, acrid glances—investigating like a detective what catapulted them from love to loathing, between sunrise and mid-noon.
First, mother asks: how are my parents?
Fine, Father replies, but already signs of irritation snake across his lips.
I don’t know what your father is trying to do, he says, but he’s putting us all in danger.
He’s gotten emotional in his older years, my mother offers, no one knows, it’s his own thing, it doesn’t involve us, so don’t worry.
Are you crazy, of course it involves us! Just saying hello to a dissident on the street is enough to get arrested but this! There are informants everywhere, the KGB are crawling out of every mouse hole, and when you’re like me, like me—a professor—they watch your every move! I watch what I say in every class I teach, every staff meeting and dinner I attend, I’m extra, extra careful but what good will it do me if your father decides to be a hero, operating of his own accord. I told him, Gregory Abramovich, you better stop your nonsense or I’ll throw you out on the street!
How could you say such a thing to him, to an old man, my mother cries.
What do you think he did, my father mocks, he laughed in my face: what—you think you’re the boss of me now! Sonya, you better tell me what your old man is doing—
I can’t tell you if I don’t know myself, she says.
You know, you’ve been in cahoots with him for years, you and he in your cry of suffocation against the Soviet Empire—are you involved in it too?
Have you lost your mind, lower your voice or we’ll be arrested on the spot!
You better not be doing anything to jeopardize our lives, my livelihood, what do you think life will be like for your daughters, I wonder?
I’m not doing anything, my mother pleads, maybe, maybe he’s at it again. Maybe Father’s having an affair.
That’s old hat, my father retorts, he’s always having an affair.
But this time, this time, my mother says nervously, it’s with a dissident woman, I don’t know her name and it’s better that way—that’s why he goes to those meetings.
For fuck’s sake, my father shouts, what meetings?
Shut your mouth in front of the child.
I don’t fucking care anymore, has he lost his fucking mind? A dissident? A dissident? Well, you can forget about your precious America, you’ll never get out with a father like that, my father says, his voice entering an ominous calm.
Mudila, that’s what you want, you want to imprison us here forever, my mother yells, but then her voice drops as footsteps thump across the hallway, near our door. Her face blanches, her hands shake.
I’m not going anywhere, I’m not leaving my country, my father says quietly, I’ve already told you.
My mother collapses her head in her hands, and through a web of fingers, looks up at him: please, Semeyon, perhaps you thought about it, perhaps you’ve understood me. Aren’t you tired of being afraid? Let’s apply for Lenochka, for our girls, for their future. She grabs both of his hands and pleads, her eyes burning like gold-rimmed sapphires, tears deluging her cheeks, muffling her speech. She drops to her knees and throws her arms around his legs, and a high-pitched cry soars from her lungs.
Sonichka, please, stop with this sentimentality, with all this melodrama, I can cry too, you know. You know how I feel. He’s pulling her up from the ground but she won’t budge. I’ve already told you, No! No, I will not submit! I will not submit to you on this. Not on this. It is too much, too difficult. You’re asking me to change our whole lives, our whole lives, my whole life, our children’s lives, you’re asking me to relinquish my mother, my culture, my tongue, my books, my friends, my ties, all things that make it a life, that make me a man, that make me human. We’ll never be Russian again, my father laments, don’t you feel Russian, don’t you feel that your soul is Russian?
Jewish, Jewish, my mother spits, rising from the ground, rage displacing sadness—my soul, my soul, she screams, is Jewish.
Jewish, Russian, my father says, what’s the difference? Who are we but Russians first and foremost—what do we have in us that is Jew, what do we know of Jews.
Blood, my mother roars, here, it lies here, she points to the breast I’d seen, in here, everything lives, breathes in here, I can’t explain—
Well if you can’t explain it, my father snaps, if it’s in your heart, how can I listen to a woman’s wild emotional fancy?
Don’t disgust me! Don’t twist my words around, don’t take what I’ve given you freely, openly and turn it ugly—
My father pleads, you’re loved by everyone here, admired by everyone; you’re the belle of the ball—an editor, a person of literary merit with such deep knowledge of the Russian language. You adore it! What will you be there but a recluse, an outsider, an alien, deaf and dumb, a mute; you’ll never speak as mellifluously in English, as brilliantly, never write with such wit, never joke as you do in Russian.
In that, you’re right, my mother whispers, the language I will lose, but I’ll gain freedom, passion, myself. I’ll no longer suffocate from the blackness of all this censorship, this propaganda—don’t you know what I deal with every day when hapless writers get axed and hacked and chopped, and the truth—there’s never any—just lies. And who knows, perhaps I will conquer English. I’ll work like a dog to gain eloquence!
Speak it, yes, my father says somberly, but you’ll never own it, you to whom language is like blood, like the liver and lungs and heart inside your body.
Oh, don’t you see, I don’t care, I don’t care about my insides anymore! Can’t you see the outside creeping in, corrupting our organs, our very blood—can’t you see that I’m rotting—that we’ll all rot? My mother collapses on the bed and dinner congeals into a cold mass, untouched by either parent.
I’m tired, my father says, I can’t talk about this anymore, I’m all talked out; we spend half our lives thinking and talking about leaving, about life elsewhere, instead of living our lives now. Here. Now.
I don’t want to look at you, you repulse me, my mother bristles now, her voice quiet and deadly. You’re a traitor, a snake slithering in my domain for you understand nothing! I want you out. I want a divorce and I’m taking the children with me.
I’m leaving, my father announces, leaving you! But the children stay in Russia, with me! Tears cloud his eyes.
Don’t you start getting pathetic on me, my mother bites back, always weeping like a child. Take yourself in your hands and be a man! Then she looks at me. Lenochka, why don’t you walk with your father, he needs fresh air.
So I take him to the pine forest. Do you want to pick mushrooms, I prod his solemn gaze, desperately wanting him to smile. We walk through a sandy path that leads out of the staff’s complex into an open meadow. Chocolate and lemon butterflies, wings splashed in plum and lilac flakes, zigzag over tall grass and land on wild dandelions and pansies. I dive toward them but their wings are fast and brisk, my fingers only graze their dusty limbs. My father catches one—a purple wonder with bold black loops and golden specks—and gives her to me. Grab her by the wings, he whispers hoarsely, or she’ll die. See her throat, her eyes, her stomach: don’t squeeze her there! Only the wings are ours to touch but eventually we must let go. The colors rub against my fin
gers, mottling my skin, transforming me into the insect, and the insect into me. The wings flap, loosening my grip, but I don’t let go. I breathe on it with my mouth open, with my childish hunger to possess it, to keep it forever in my palms, to watch it lose its strength, power, beauty—to watch it die. To metamorphose my own body into the butterfly, to grow wings instead of arms, silk instead of skin, to fly … always craving to fly. Let go, my father commands. No, I say, no, then I let go.
My father smiles as though he’s forgotten my mother, and he’s laughing, running after me, tickling me under my armpits, throwing me up in the air, lecturing me about the birth and death of butterflies, their quest for beauty, their counterpart ugliness like our own human nature. We all have ugliness and beauty in us, he says, he repeats himself, my father. But it is only when we reach the center of the meadow where the grass rises to my forehead, tall and thick and sharp, cutting into our skin, hiding our faces from each other, that my father’s voice breaks and he starts to cry.
How to Eat Trout Without Chewing
By the end of June I had moved into Eddie’s loft. That was the summer of media’s lustful affair with the president and his intern, when instead of health care, Medicare, poverty, world peace, world hunger, the devastated and now defunct Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and the looming threat of bin Laden, we engaged vicariously in yearning glances and sexual escapades under the Oval Office desk. We longed to hold the First Lady in our arms and murmur “c’est la vie,” without the French accent; realized that cigars, besides being cancer-causing agents, are, according to a recent study, a major source of infidelity in men; and that semen is not, as some men would have you believe, a sweet ambrosia from the gods, but a viscous substance that can ruin a perfectly conservative dress.
Eddie and I spent that summer making love and watching the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfold through our post-coital, glazed eyes. That summer, with its immodest heat and bone-baring air conditioning (for everything seemed to gaze back at us through sensual goggles), wiped Chicago from my mind. My fiancé and family grew into an undergrowth in my memory’s warehouse. Intermittently I’d see their disapproving faces catching me in the act, frazzled and in lust, and my eyes would blink, shutting them out.
Because of my abysmal record at SPASM, I enrolled in summer courses and promptly began to fail Probability and Stochastic Modeling for the second time, in spite of the endless hours I spent listening to my advisor, Professor Gerald Lee, explain such concepts as mutually exclusive events and unconditional probability. He was a serious man who noted my body-hugging turtlenecks with enough dismay to deflate any woman’s breasts. Why are you doing this, Kaulfield, he asked me one day, why are you torturing both yourself and me? How are you ever going to come up with a viable master’s thesis if you still struggle with permutations? He knew better than any of my professors that I understood squat in mathematics, that probability concepts could not be screwed into my imagistic brain, even if you were in possession of an industrial drill. He saw at once that I did not belong among the rejected geniuses of SPASM (insecure exiles from pure math and physics). But these were the glorious, affirmative action days of the nineties and, as the only woman in the department, even if I failed Probability and Stochastic Modeling for the third time, no one would throw me out.
The thrill of being the only woman left in an all-male program, ignited by my mother, was steadily dissipating. Homework induced epic REM sleep and lectures gave me a chance to sketch profiles of comatose students. During my free waking hours I roamed the city streets, wondering how I would swallow this career for the rest of my life. The notion that each step, each job, each human interaction was to revolve around graphs, survey questions, formulas, hypotheses, geo-sexual-social-medical predictions brought on waves of nausea. Was I in fact only doing this for them, the endemic plural of my singular family? Was this just another circuitous route to unceasing praise and syrupy ego-stroking, case in point, my love of Grandmother’s cry: “Our Lenochka is studying matimatiku!”
But I couldn’t please them anymore, not because I didn’t want to, but because it was impossible. I had finally acknowledged that my brain was an average Joe, a lowly agent in a hierarchical, genetically preordained structure, a lonesome warrior fitfully groping in eternal darkness. Welcome, the brain seemed to blare, to the abyss of your stupidity!
Failure grew into an all-consuming, obdurate reality. I had striven and lost. I was a pathetic truant, a rare gem from the Idiots-Incorporated Collection, and all at once my straight A’s, honors, scholarships, accolades were drowning like shit in the proverbial toilet. I had no idea what to do with my life if I pulled statistics out of the equation. For a person who was always sure of her step, confident in her brain—this new ambiguous era signaled a full-scale immersion in Russian hell, Ad as it was once conceived by Dostoyevsky.
One night Eddie came home at midnight (a regular hour for us) to find me sprawled on the kitchen floor, statistics texts tucked under my buttocks, graphs staring out of wrinkled open notebooks at my dejected face. I was wearing his oversized Columbia sweatshirt and his boxer shorts (my own clothes were overdue for an emergency visit to his very own washing machine). I looked at him with my wet, self-pitying eyes and, without speaking, leafed through the notebook pages, where superimposed upon graphs and plausible survey questions were driblets of black acrylic paint strung in random patterns that resembled hideous faces.
“This—this—this—is—shit—this shit is what I’ve been doing instead—instead of—” I gasped out, adding hiccup after hysterical hiccup.
“Calm down, calm down, Emma.” He put his briefcase down and, crinkling his black pinstriped suit, lowered himself to the floor next to me. “We’ve been through this before. How many times have you told me that you’re unhappy in your program?”
“Many,” I replied like a child being tested on her basic developmental skills.
“And what have I told you?”
“To quit.”
“And what have you done?”
“Not quit.”
“You act like such a baby sometimes,” he said. “Listen: you have to treat yourself seriously. You have to take your desires seriously. You talk of feminism, but I don’t see it—‘a woman in her own right, a woman exercising her own free will’—where is she?”
“Don’t you see, that’s exactly what I’m doing—statistics is my ticket to financial freedom! But with art, where will I be? I’ll never make it—and then I’ll be dependent upon my family for the rest of my life—or worse, dependent on some man.” I remembered my half-baked plan to start painting full time after I married Alex and gave birth to our first child.
“You can make money as an artist—it’s possible. You can get an MFA in art, meet people in the field, make connections, get a job in a gallery, work as a graphic designer—”
“I don’t want to be a graphic designer or a cartoonist or a beggar. I want to be a real artist—I want to see my work on display—I want to create—oh fuck, what does it matter what I want!”
“Or—or—or I could support you,” he offered tentatively.
“And where would that get me—from one man’s pocket to another’s! Oh, who cares, why are we even having this conversation? I’m not good enough to make it as a ‘real’ artist!”
“Are you actually asking me this? Because you know what I think—”
“Tell me again, please.”
“I’ve told you before—your work astounds. You’re the real thing, Emma, the genuine article. You can’t keep second-guessing yourself if you ever hope to make it. You have to know the way I know—in your gut—that you have the gift. You know you have it. You suffer because you can’t escape the pull—”
“To paint, constantly, relentlessly—”
“But you have to believe in yourself.”
“Where do you get such incredible confidence, why can’t I have it, feel it?” I wanted him to teach me the way one might a child.
“The only reaso
n you doubt yourself—as an artist—is because you don’t know if you have what it takes to sell yourself. You have to promote your own work nowadays—”
“No, I never think of selling. I doubt myself because there’s an inner critic inside my mind that constantly barrages me with notes and points out my flaws—flawed technique, flawed color, not enough depth, tells me I can do better or, when it’s more deadly, tells me I’m not good enough.”
“You have to battle this inner critic, silence him. Understand—believe—what talent you have! Your work can extract a drop of blood from your viewers. Your work will make them cry—I’ve cried.”
“You’ve never cried—don’t flatter me!” I laughed through tears.
“I did too—the first time I came to your apartment and you showed me those muddy children—”
“You mean my Prehistoric Children under a Bludgeoned Sky?”
“That piece belongs on a gallery wall, not under your bed.”
“Oh c’mon, you’re just buttering me up—”
But his expression altered, his eyes swam to me. “When I saw that painting, I became so nervous, I thought—I thought you were so, so talented. I thought: who am I—what can I offer her?”
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 18