“You hear what the brakes are doing,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“That huff-huff-huff sound,” he said. “Every time that I brake.”
“I don’t know when you’re braking,” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t hear it.” She stared away at the window.
“I’ll take it in,” he said. “Though we’re well shy of a year.” He tapped the inspection sticker. “When you drive it, please—the brake goes down in a glide. Don’t jam.”
She stared at him, mystified, then looked away once more. They rode in silence.
“Did you really not know about the grass?” he said.
“No,” she said, but felt she wasn’t believed.
“Nothing’s wrong with Max,” Alex said. “It’s primitive out there, that’s all Papa meant. He’s going to roll up Max’s tent. From the floor to the ground to a haystack like a country idiot—it’s a natural progression. I’ve let my attention wander, Maya. I’ve been too quiet. I am always trying to please you.”
“So you see it the same way,” Maya said.
“For my father, there’s no gift without a con wrapped around it. You divide what he says by half and subtract, and you start getting closer. He speaks in Fahrenheit, but the truth is closer to Celsius.”
“But you don’t disagree.”
“Why don’t you disagree with him, Maya? There’s a great saying in English: ‘A broken clock is right twice a day.’ Max is what we make of him. And if there’s something sitting inside him—”
“Sitting inside him?” Maya said. “Are you really speaking that way? That’s village superstition. The same village that Eugene wants to leave behind so badly.”
“Genes are a superstition to you?” he said. “A medical worker?”
She turned away and watched the blue evening scroll by. “I wanted to live in the city, Alex,” she said.
Alex grasped the steering wheel at ten and two like a smothering pillow. “Sometimes, I think you’re my father’s child. Both of you love to panic.”
“When is it panic and when is it attention?” she said. “You’re so certain it’s nothing.”
“So we are giving it attention. We’re going to roll up the tent, and we’re going to take down all those masks. Also, it’s time to say good-bye to Oliver. I want him to have normal friends.”
She was expected to understand what he meant—Oliver had a cleft palate; for Alex, this meant that Max’s best friend was a cripple, marked by ill fortune.
“You’re his father,” she said. “Why don’t you tell him that he’s no longer allowed to see his one friend because he doesn’t look like a child in a greeting card? You want me to do it.”
“Why does our son have only one friend?” Alex said.
“Maybe he’s not normal,” Maya said vindictively.
“What does that mean?” Alex demanded, distaste in his voice.
“You said why can’t he have normal friends,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” Alex said. “He’s not normal or abnormal. He’s what we make of him. And when he goes to play with a boy who looks like a—you know, I wish Oliver all the health in the world—”
“Alex, do you really think Max will walk through the door as long as we decide to get rid of Oliver?”
“No, you’re going to find him on that bus,” Alex said acidly.
Embarrassed, Maya turned away and stared out the window. She counted the lights that craned over the roadway. The earth did not begin to rise until you got well north of Acrewood—some parts of the state rose to three thousand feet; Eugene skied there every winter, e-mailing Alex, Maya, and Max photographs of himself, ski-suited and goggled like an Austrian, and of his wife, set up by the lodge fireplace with a book and a sour-apple martini—but even in Acrewood you had an intimation of approaching foothills. The Corolla climbed a short hill; a row of streetlamps came into view; Maya counted them until the road dipped again; and they disappeared once more.
2
1992
As in all such stories, Alex and Maya almost did not meet. Alex, just a year out of college, was living in south Brooklyn with his parents. The Rubins had been in the country more than a decade, Eugene already pressing pickles and jam on the American public (these Turkish, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union two months before, the time was ripening for inroads into their former homeland). Alex was with his friend Dima, who lived on the Upper West Side, a year older and Russian, meaning not Jewish, which made Alex want to know how Dima’s family had gotten out, and years before the Rubins too, but Alex never asked. They played hockey in Riverside Park every Saturday with a spontaneous assembly of Russian programmers and restaurant Hispanics. That day, Alex watched their train roll past the 110th Street subway stop and turned questioning eyes on Dima. “I left my lucky puck at Maya’s,” Dima said idly, setting off in Alex a customary irritation at his friend for dispensing information as if to an employee. “You’ll get to meet her, finally.” Dima picked his nose.
Can’t play hockey without pucks. Alex had played once in Minsk using a rubber ball, which bounces rather than slides, becoming much easier to miss, but the aluminum hockey stick keeps slicing through the air until its toe lands in Alex’s astonished mouth, excavating two incisors, leading Alex’s mother, Raisa, to burst into the bathroom, where Alex stands under a hot shower tonguing the new grooves in his mouth, and demand to know whether the boy who hurt him was Jewish, and only upon being told yes he was Jewish does she relent and return to the kitchen to cry into her fist instead of rushing into the yard to avenge her son. And Alex understands for the first time, a six-year-old, the value of pragmatic deceit, for the boy was not Jewish but he had hardly designed to hurt Alex.
Outside, in the yard, where older boys sometimes appear demanding last names, which helps them determine who to beat on for sport, Alex must pretend he isn’t a Jew. He has a Russian Orthodox last name ready just in case, and God help his friends if they raise their eyebrows when he offers it. Meanwhile, here in the apartment, Alex must lie in the opposite direction and insist to his mother that those who abuse him out there are Jews, so she doesn’t embarrass him by flying outside with a broom. These are important, heavy, turgid lessons for a six-year-old mind. The two front teeth grow back, though one grows back crooked, and sometimes Raisa props open her son’s mouth so that she can try to force its edge straight with the pad of her thumb, saddling her son with a complex—otherwise he grows up to have white teeth, veined arms, perfect skin—until Maya Shulman tells him that it is her favorite part of him, that one renegade tooth in pursuit of its own ends, and when she learns the English word snaggletooth, it becomes her nickname for him, which annoys him because it highlights the flaw, so she gives it up.
A puck—it is nothing, but to Alex it is a lead pulley on his heart, the things that lovers leave in each other’s homes to say: Part of me lives here now. And so Alex declines to accompany Dima upstairs, to press his face even more tightly against the window of the joy in which others live; it is enough to hear his mother wonder when a girl deserving her Alex will finally appear in his life, which is an acceptable way of asking Alex when he will finally bring home a girl deserving of his mother’s attention. Alex is all of twenty-three. His American friends are at work on their careers, or on the girls who frequent their neighborhood bars, but none have marriage in mind. But Alex—Minsk Jew, a Rubin, only son—checks a different timetable.
Dima badgers his friend to come upstairs. His friend says that if he joins Dima, Dima will take forever, but if he remains downstairs, Dima will feel guilty for staying upstairs too long. But if you stay downstairs, I might get distracted by my girlfriend and stay even longer, Dima says, emptying another vial of despair into Alex’s heart. Dima’s girlfriend, Maya, is hosting some kind of dinner—she cooks, that’s her thing, she’s always at the stove, dipping and measuring—and so she’ll be busy, in any case. It’s freezing out here. Come on.
As Alex walks with Dima in
to the vestibule of the building, the lead pulley briefly lets go because how can Dima abscond to a hockey game if Maya is in the middle of preparing a dinner? Is Dima not expected at dinner? Is Alex to take this as a sign of intimacy (Dima and Maya are so flawlessly united that they hardly have to perform kindnesses for each other), or of subdermal friction? Alex notices himself wishing for the latter despite never having met Maya.
As they ride the elevator to the sixth floor, the smell of urine filling their nostrils, Alex observes that Dima’s girlfriend did not have to leave Kiev if she wished to live in a building whose elevator smells like urine and rumbles like it is about to snap off its cables. Dima reminds his friend that his girlfriend doesn’t have a father in imports; she’s in the fourth year of a four-year college visa, and her parents are now jobless because what was up is now down in Kiev, Ukraine, two months after the Soviet Union’s offed itself. Her father has found several hours a week tending a boiler in the basement of an infectious-diseases hospital—that’s it. Chastened, Alex asks informational questions: How old are her parents? What will Maya do when the school year is finished? Dima shrugs: Go home. She can’t obtain a visa extension? Alex insists, his sympathy now engaged alongside his guilt, a powerful pairing. Dima shrugs. He hasn’t thought about it, it seems, and again Alex marvels at his friend.
But then Dima’s face casts aside the heaviness forming between them. “You’re such a burden of gloom, Rubin,” he says, a loving sneer on his face. “Don’t make me regret asking you up.” And as the elevator completes its ride to the sixth floor, its bell emitting a tired, old-fashioned peal, Alex thinks that this is why he keeps close to Dima, even if Dima doesn’t know it and even if there are things about Dima that set Alex on edge—he envies the way Dima can gently unburden any load (onto the ground, onto Alex’s shoulders). And just walk off. And just walk on.
On Maya’s landing, they are assaulted by a screech from somewhere on the floor, adding to Alex’s sense of having left Manhattan for a dismal high-rise in a muddy Ukrainian city. Alex is hard-pressed to name the animal; the cry is strangled, a last appeal from a besieged corner. A half minute passes and they hear it again.
“They raise parrots for kid parties,” Dima nods across the hall, then shoulders open the door to 6E.
Following Dima, Alex steps from a cold, dusty stairwell with a burned-out lightbulb into heat, aroma, and light. The aroma is familiar: Alex’s Belarus and Maya’s Ukraine cook the same things, only call them by different names. Alex makes out onions, garlic, vegetable oil. He even sees a cloud of steam roll out of the kitchen doorway as if belched by a dragon. He thinks uncomfortably of the parrot once more, and as if on cue, another shriek—drawn-out, lordly—reaches them from the hallway.
Even though the hallway is lit up, the kitchen is dark, and from its doorway Alex can make out only the silhouette of the girl at the sink, her ear jamming the crescent of a telephone. She wears black gym shorts and a man’s A-shirt, Alex jealously wondering is it Dima’s, and only one of her feet is solid with the floor, the other inclined as if she is about to lean for something. Znayu, znayu, she says to the other end of the line, stifling irritation—“I know, I know”—as the pot in her hands bangs the walls of the sink. The kitchen has been ravaged: Every inch, including the floor, is taken up with used pots, used cooking utensils, used cutlery. As Maya talks, a cigarette finishes smoking itself in a tin plate on the windowsill. The window is cracked open, and the cold air eats a little ash off the cigarette with each gust, scattering it on the linoleum. Alex wants to walk over and ash the cigarette.
On entering the kitchen, Dima heads for the fridge without even greeting Maya. Alex’s heart swells at this encouragement: There is distance between them. But then Maya, also not turning to face them, in fact initiating a new round of assurances of the person on the phone, snaps her fingers by the back of her thigh, where Alex is only happy to look. There, on the edge of the kitchen table, between an enamel bowl and a cutting board heaped with what looks like cured pork, he sees two sandwiches and a thermos. Despite her chaos, Maya has made them food and something warm for after the game. Alex’s heart falls. She and Dima do not even need to say hello, they are so close with each other.
But Alex also feels an agreeable warmth: Twenty minutes before, when he was hurtling uptown in a subway car, when Dima’s girlfriend Maya was as meaningful to him as a deli cashier, her mind was on him as she fixed him a sandwich. No, not him—some friend of Dima’s named Alex—but that was him too, wasn’t it?
Dima knocks over his daydream: He walks to Maya, palms the sandwiches, leans down to kiss the back of Maya’s thigh, and, still not having exchanged a direct gaze with his girlfriend, brushes past Alex on his way out of the kitchen.
Alex’s discouragement is so absolute that he is surprised even more than Dima when he says, to Dima’s back, “We should stay.” In the hallway, Dima hoists his hockey bag back onto his shoulder and gives his friend a confounded look. Alex repeats, his heart pounding: “She needs help.” Dima regards Alex impatiently. “Let’s go,” he says. “We’ll be late.” “Dima,” Alex savors his objection. “She needs help.”
Maya has clicked off her call, and listens to their conversation with amusement, a little insolent like Dima’s. “So help,” he hears Dima say in exasperation. “I have a hockey game.” And with that Dima waddles through the door, the hockey bag banging the doorjamb, and Alex and Maya are left alone.
Alex’s mind rushes to take hold of the events just elapsed because he has been no less of a bystander to them than Maya. In better light, she is pretty, but not so pretty that Alex must hide his crooked tooth while speaking. Her face is young, too young for twenty-two, two little coals blinking out of it with mockery and surprise, two brows that would make an Armenian girl proud, one pigtail. Typically, the Russian girls to whom Alex is introduced by his mother cause a mixture of itchiness and despair, so why this behavior now? For Maya is one of them—the enamel cooking bowls, the row of house slippers by the front door, the grandparent photos on the living room mantel all prove it. But the Russian girls Alex has met have been brought to him by his mother like a bird dog trudging back with prey in its mouth. This girl Alex has found on his own. But he didn’t find Maya on his own. She’s Dima’s girlfriend. He remembers Dima—when he walked out the door, he walked out of Alex’s mind—and a sweat starts at his hairline.
Maya breaks through the glazed silence. “They say the mark of a professional chef is not the food that he makes, but how many dirty dishes he leaves,” she says. She flicks an empty measuring cup off a chair, flour scattering from its edges; plops down so that Alex sees her thighs flutter in answer, a long blue vein running down one of them; plucks the cigarette from its tin nest on the windowsill, and draws hungrily only to find it long dead. She waves it at him and nods cynically: See? Even the cigarette’s dead.
“Well, you’re not a professional chef,” he says, meaning to soothe.
“Oh, no?” Maya says, stretching out her legs and wriggling her toes. He marvels at her lack of self-consciousness in front of a new person. “That was the idea.”
Alex stares, puzzled. “You’re in college,” he offers hesitantly as evidence.
She confirms this with a dark dip of her head. The pigtail slides over her shoulder. “I’m in college,” she affirms. “But I don’t want to be a doctor in Kiev. I want to be a cook in New York.”
Alex isn’t sure what to say. Short, stubby, smiling Mexicans cook; the Hispanics with whom he and Dima play hockey cook; not underweight girls. He imagines telling his parents that he is dating a girl who cooks on a line, sweat on her neck and grease on her forearms.
“A cook of what?” he inquires. “Ukrainian food?” he jokes.
“Why not?” she says, and Alex gets his first glimpse of Maya sans playfulness. “To us it’s familiar, but the Americans don’t know it. There are two Ukrainian restaurants in Manhattan, both like you’re eating boiled shoe lost in corn oil. Imagine a place with a cool f
eeling, like a lounge instead of your grandmother’s house, cool art, like maybe Gogol’s face in neon. Café Gogol.” She lets this sink in, then adds: “Maya Shulman, chef.” She is so taken by the fantasy that the distress temporarily vanishes from her face and she snatches up the used cigarette and tries to smoke it once more. Once more apprised of its uselessness, she flings it into the sink with a bruised irritation that makes Alex want to touch her shoulder. Suddenly, Maya throws herself to the linoleum and starts sweeping up ash and flour with the side of her palm. Somewhere beyond the front door, Alex hears the parrot again.
“So you’re not going back when the school year is over?” Alex says hopefully.
“I can stay for one extra year,” she says from the floor, “but only in my major. In a medical job.”
Alex can’t quite make sense of the information. Café Gogol? Setting aside the visa issue, where does she plan to get the money for something like that? A café, like a seedy boulevardier in a second-rate town in southern Russia, whiling away the day between too many coffees and too many cigarettes at a front table done up in fake marble in pathetic imitation of a Parisian café? Actually, for a man, the role is more or less imaginable, but for a woman? Alex smiles at Maya in embarrassment, hiding his thoughts. He feels relief, too: This silliness makes her less daunting. Then Alex chides himself: She is new to the country, how can she know? Wanting to be kind, he changes the subject.
“So you keep cooking, and I’ll clean,” he says. “What’s the occasion, anyway?”
“Are you hungry?” she says.
“It’s true, he left with both sandwiches.”
“Let me show you the apartment. I can’t show you the other girls’ bedrooms, but the living room has nice windows.”
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