The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “You have a beautiful voice,” Eddie said.

  “Thank you.” Bella bowed her head slightly, glancing at me. “My sister does too, only she’s shy.”

  “Really, I haven’t noticed!” He raised his brows, and the three of us burst into laughter.

  “Vhat do you sink you’re doing up zere?” Yakov yelled at Bella. “Disco, disco, disco—zhat’s vhat I hired you for.”

  “I promise, Uncle,” Bella murmured, taking a long drink of water, “that after this number, I’ll stick strictly to ABBA and the Village People.”

  And with that, Bella walked to the stage and ascended with the aplomb of a monarch, lifting her dress as though it were weighed down by a heavy velvet train adorned in rare jewels. She glanced at me from the stage, and the wink in her left eye alerted me to her next move.

  While taking a class on film noir, Bella had fallen in love with Rita Hayworth. She must have seen Gilda a hundred times, replaying the scene where Hayworth sings “Put the Blame on Mame” and strips only her gloves, her ethereal chalk body spilling from the strapless dress. Bella imagined herself as Gilda, as Rita Hayworth, endowed with her beauty and cursed with her wretched luck in love. Or perhaps she envisioned herself as Rita’s avenger, destroying men on her behalf.

  The instruments strummed together and rocked her from side to side. Her voice flowed like white silk, folding in dulcet undulations across the ceiling dome. Inside my head words broke from notes and hung in space like cryptic, solitary black marks that penetrated my thin, sentient skin: amado mio, love me forever, and let forever begin tonight …

  When the song came to its long pause to give way to the instrumentals, Bella pulled away from the microphone and burst into a tremulous dance. The slit on her dress parted to reveal a long shapely leg punctuated by a scarlet heel. The dance floor remained empty. All eyes were rapt on Bella. Her voice, like a mystical incantation, fell over the room, at once soothing and disturbing, healing wounds and then opening them up again. And I felt it too—my sister’s voice filling my lungs with air, clarity, with her bounteous courage—how I longed to sing! I jumped from the chair and leapt onto the barren floor, and the words cascaded from my mouth in slow watery cadences, swelling into one consuming, indecipherable feeling: amado mio, love me forever, and let forever begin tonight. With eyes closed, I saw us from a distance: two separate figures moving like reflections of each other on two separate stages, with only their childlike wails intersecting and tethering their hearts. When I looked up, she was smiling at me in her strange beguiling way—in gratitude, I thought.

  Although the audience didn’t seem to be familiar with the song, they clapped wildly for us—Bravo, Bravo, they screamed, Brilliant, Incredible, Magnificent, or was it, Bella, Bella, they screamed, Gilda, our Gilda!

  When I collapsed on my chair, Eddie ran a single finger along my wet neck. I caught Grandmother’s eyes upon him, but whether it was because he meant to defy her or he simply didn’t see, Eddie now circled my moist skin in long sensual strokes.

  “You were both wonderful, just wonderful!” my mother murmured in Russian, her eyes darting from Eddie’s fingers to me to Bella, “I’ve never seen a restaurant in such ecstasy—”

  “I want to sing on stage like mommy and aunt Lena,” Sirofima announced in Russian.

  “You see where these things lead,” Grandmother moaned.

  “And why shouldn’t she pursue the stage—if you want to become an actress, my darling, you’re welcome to,” Bella said.

  “We’ll see how generous you are in twenty years,” Grandmother warned.

  “Are you going to eat with us?” my mother said, looking cryptically at Bella.

  “No, I’m going back to the stage. What did you think, Uncle, can I sing it again?”

  “Only if you wear a shorter dress!” Yakov giggled.

  Igor slammed his hand against the table and shouted, “Enough, you’re not doing this anymore. Your grandmother is right, this is whoring. I have to put my foot down sometime.” But his idealized foot was in the air, levitating from joy; still, a man had to maintain his image.

  “My darling husband, rest assured that a little whoring never hurt any marriage,” Bella purred, and hurried off. This time she obeyed Yakov; she sang the perennial upbeat ballad of vengeance against the male race: “I Will Survive.” In seconds, women of all ages and sizes stormed the dance floor like paratroopers descending, marching, shaking, jumping at the ecstatic outpouring of angry memories. They hailed Bella as their new fair heroine. My mother, grandmother, and I, and even Sirofima, instantly succumbed to their feverish spell. The men joined the crowd as well, but they were static wooden soldiers from the Nutcracker, impervious to our unifying effervescence. Eddie danced among us, invisible at first. But then with his habitual audacity, he barreled toward my grandmother. He bowed to her and took her hand in his. She blushed but still managed to lead him in a tango waltz to “I Will Survive.” So peculiar and odd did they look that the women made room for them in the center of the dance floor. My mother and I laughed, but as the song progressed the eccentric couple remained awkwardly intact, smiling periodically at each other, and then looking away in bursts of self-satisfied introspection, as though they had each done their part in the upkeep of peace. It was impossible to enjoy the song now; their strangeness seemed to radiate from them and afflict our feet, making us linger and stumble. The muscles in my face ached from the strain of watching them. Eddie felt it was necessary, he told me later that night, to make an overture to Grandmother, to intimate to her that he was not afraid. But to no avail. “A real charmer,” she said in Russian after he had taken leave of her. “I see how he seduced you. But that doesn’t change the facts: he is not a Jew, he knows nothing about you—about us. You are ruining your life!”

  Stalin Had Been to My Grandmother’s House

  Eddie was granted the downstairs couch as a matter of principle, as the moral foundation upon which the family’s stringent boyfriend-to-fiancé rulebook resided. But Grandma had her own KGB-esque twist: despite the existence of two guestrooms upstairs, despite the basement where three couches coalesced into a triple leather threat, despite the formal living room where a postmodern triangular purple sofa resembling a spaceship could shield him from passersby, Grandmother threw my Eddie to the wolves of the family room: to be observed, in leisure, from every conceivable angle in the house, because she believed that privacy and that scourge of all unplanned pregnancies—proximity—led to sex. When I protested for the fiftieth time that I was no longer a virgin, Grandmother slathered me in her favorite balm. “You may do whatever craziness you like in New York, but in my house, you’ll be turned back into a virgin!” Like partially-boiled lobsters, Eddie and I clung to each other as we crawled into the dark, empty kitchen.

  “How long had you kept me a secret?” he asked in a whisper.

  “A long time.”

  “I meant what I said tonight—I’ll convert if you want me to—if that’s your family’s price for leaving you in peace.”

  “You’re very smart, Ignatius, did any girl ever tell you that?”

  He grinned slyly. “Nah, I always liked to play dumb—dumb banker, dumb jock—there’s only one woman brilliant enough to see through my act—”

  “Your mother?”

  He laughed.

  “But seriously, think of your mother! I can’t imagine what she’d do—to what lengths she’d go to—to ruin us … would she threaten to hang herself?”

  “Never. I assure you there’s not a single melodramatic bone in my mother’s cold body—florid language, yes, but no real, satisfying drama.”

  “Does your mother even know we’re engaged?”

  “Of course she knows. And do you know what she wants? That we get married in a church, that a priest officiates, and that you baptize our children.”

  “Don’t you care that you’d be stripped of your religion, your heritage, that she’d be horrified at the sight of a rabbi?”

  “Has it
ever occurred to you that maybe I want to jump ship?”

  “That won’t be enough for my parents—you still won’t convince them, especially not my grandmother.”

  “What if I’m not doing it to convince them—what if I’m doing this to—”

  “These are not good reasons to convert!”

  “No, but loving you is,” he said, catching hold of my hands. I sank into his embrace and buried my face in his shoulder.

  “You don’t have to do this, Eddie, you don’t have to convert. I love you as you are. And I want us to be free—of them. To live as we want.”

  “I know, but you’re close to your family, your grandmother—you’ve always told me that. And I don’t want you to lose them.”

  “Oh, Eddie, why does everything have to be so difficult? There’s something I need to tell you. I must. I must tell you this thing, this one thing, before we do anything else.”

  “Whatever it is, banish it from your head. You don’t have any score to settle with me: your past is your past. Now that I’ve met your family, I feel good, secure. I know who I’m dealing with, and I can handle it. I—we—can handle whatever comes our way.”

  “Yes, yes, we are magnificent together!”

  We kissed softly at first but I pressed into him, kissing him harder, deeper, our tongues intertwining in the warmth of intimacy. He lifted me and wrapped my legs around his torso and carried me in the darkness. He sat me down on the marble of our kitchen island, beneath suspended pots and pans, and we tore into each other’s clothes, ripping them and piecing them back together, fear of Grandmother creeping up our backs. Windows spliced by blinds, lamplight peering from the street, pots and pans clanging overhead, black leaves rustling in disapproval, the ceiling alive with sounds—all ghosts growling from the shadows, watching, reporting on us to some higher entity. We could hear my mother fussing in the bathroom, my father snoring, Bella and Igor arguing upstairs, our pulses spiking, our fingers gaining momentum, autonomy, nerve. He untied my sweatpants with such vigor I heard a tear, and then they dropped to my ankles. He spread my legs across the cold granite counter.

  “Are you crazy? If Grandma catches us, it’ll be death!” I said without releasing my hold of his buttocks.

  “How about we do it in the bathroom, for old times’ sake?” He laughed as he unbuttoned his jeans.

  “No, no, no—” came out of my mouth as I pulled him closer in.

  “Uhhhh …”

  “All right, whatever you want.” I submitted, “I’ll do it wherever, however you want—”

  “Uhhh … ahhhh.”

  “Was that you?” he blurted, jumping an entire foot away from me and zipping up his jeans.

  “I thought that was you!” I whispered.

  “Oy, gevalt, how my legs hurt,” someone moaned in Russian and I felt her, then I saw her. Grandmother’s voluptuous figure was hunched over the kitchen table.

  “Babushka?” I breathed. My sweat pants were on the floor, my ripped shirt was hanging from a frying pan, and carefully, stealthily, I reached for it like a woman in an advanced Tai Chi class, hoping not to disturb the balance of the universe and cause unnecessary banging between Grandmother’s frying pan and my mother’s wok. As I squeezed my breasts into my T-shirt, I prayed to the Lord for a miracle—that Grandmother’s head be dunked in viscous tar and cause her fleeting amnesia.

  “Babushka, what are you doing up so late?” I said, trying to rally my own indignation, an almost impossible feat while you’re still palpably horny.

  Fortunately, Grandmother didn’t remember what palpably horny looked like.

  “Couldn’t sleep—what are you doing?” she replied in the singular tense, pretending she couldn’t see Eddie.

  “Eddie and I were just about to have tea—”

  “Oh, Eddie is here,” she said with mock surprise. “Well, I’ll have some too—turn the light on already! Nothing’s better for insomnia than a strong cup of tea.”

  “Perhaps I should go—I mean to sleep,” Eddie offered, awkwardly readjusting himself.

  “No,” Grandmother said, as though she had understood him, “tell him to stay—I want to speak to him.”

  “Did you see us?” I asked her in Russian, and pulled all the light switches on simultaneously.

  “See what?” she exclaimed, her eyes shrinking from the influx of light. “That my granddaughter has no shame—in her parents’ house, of all places? But you say I’m not modern so I’ll keep my big mouth shut.” She paused for a second. “Are you living some sort of movie fantasy here? Doing it on a kitchen counter like they do in pornography?”

  “What’s your grandmother saying?” Eddie asked.

  “Only telling me what she wants in her tea.”

  “I thought I heard something about sex?”

  “You heard ‘sachar,’ which means sugar and sounds a lot like ‘sex.’”

  “Oh,” he mumbled with obvious distrust.

  “I told him you like sugar in your tea,” I informed her.

  “You’re finally getting smarter”—she offered the compliment as if it were an unsalted omelet—“but when are you going to get real smart and see people beyond your crazy desires?”

  “Tell me, tell me then what should I see?” I asked without wanting to know.

  “Strength, real strength! Is he strong enough for you? That’s the question you should ask yourself. For married life is made of ugliness too. What would happen if he found out what lies you’re capable of—does he know about Alex?”

  “What are you saying, Grandma, that I should tell him the truth?”

  “God forbid,” she said, “no, no, I’ve never been an advocate of airing a woman’s secrets to a man. But here’s the question—can he handle a lifetime of you—of us—of all this?” She spread her arms and motioned at the black window as if it alone contained all our unplumbed depths.

  “Do you think my father has handled my mother?” I asked.

  “Do they have a happy marriage?” she countered.

  The kettle whistled on the stove and I poured scalding water into our brass teapot over Russian Caravan leaves. Grandmother and I sipped our hot brown liquids from tall glasses (never mugs for the rims were always too thick, too uncouth for the nuanced pleasure of drinking tea). And in the silence she left me, I imbibed doubts with each scalding sip, tasting the acidity—the ugliness—surfacing between us. I didn’t dare look at Eddie, knowing that his shirt was crooked, the top three buttons and belt buckle were undone. But he couldn’t fix himself because from the corner of her right eye, Grandmother was watching him.

  “My grandmother wants to tell you about Stalin,” I improvised, turning to him with a forced smile. If there was one thing that Stalin was good for nowadays, it was a glitch in the conversation.

  “I’d love to learn more about Stalin,” Eddie joined in, happy for a tidbit of English.

  “Eddie says he is really interested in hearing about your life under Stalin,” I told Grandmother.

  “Oh, that, what can I say about Stalin that hasn’t already been said,” Grandmother muttered, feigning indifference, but I could see her brightening.

  “He’s really fascinated, Grandmother,” I egged her on.

  “Well, it’s nothing to be fascinated by!” she began.

  She settled more comfortably into her chair, took another gulp of tea, and began to speak. And I began my juggling act—of translation—throwing one language up and then another, twirling them up in the air, scavenging my mind for synonyms, idioms, roots, multifarious meanings, until sentences landed on my tongue and I was able to weave a story, hoping to foment a friendship between Grandmother and Eddie, the two most important people in my life.

  “We were people just like anyone else and Stalin was loved by us all. No one knew what he was doing to the people. Oh, the things I saw as a young girl, the things I witnessed … I was only eight years old when the insanity started—when they started taking people away.”

  Every time she to
ld this story, no matter what year, what month, what hour, she would stop and let the tears swim in her eyes.

  “Kollektivizatsiya—have you heard of it, Eddik?” Grandmother asked, but she didn’t wait for his answer. No matter what you once were, you were turned into a peasant. And we were starving—that’s what equality meant—starvation. No one was better than anyone else, all starving equally—that was Mother Russia.

  “It was 1928 when my father was taken away. I never saw him again—men were being arrested left and right, carted off like hens in cages to their slaughter. No one knew who had ratted on him. Rats everywhere in those years.

  “We were kulaki—we owned land, lots of it, and five buildings, an entire block. But Stalin, that thief, stole everything. The NKVD moved seven families into our house, and forced us, the owners, to live in the upstairs attic, while the peasants, who used to work our lands, now roosted in our palatial bedrooms, slept on our silk sheets, and ate at our oak dining table under our gold chandelier. Have you heard of The Three Bears, Eddik, that was us! The attic had been abandoned, cold, moldy, no heat, nowhere to sleep, except a few piss-stained old mattresses and one bathroom for the nine of us. Because there weren’t enough mattresses, the men slept on the cold cement floor. Russia taught you lessons the way no parent ever can—Stalin was our father, our mother, the whip at our backs teaching us the meaning of za-im panyimaniye.” I translated the phrase in my head: a co-understanding, a so-called mutual regard.

  “Now our masters were our peasants. They couldn’t stand the fact that not only were we rich but we were Jews. Like acid on an old wound. People thought Jews were slimy merchants but we were—we”—she pointed at her heart—“we were aristocrats, Jewish blue bloods with fancy china and diamonds, and emeralds the likes of which you’ve never seen. As a child I wore dresses made from real lamb’s wool—well, everyone in school stared at me with envy.”