Sasha: Book One

by Tonya Plank

  “Yes, yes, we will get to that very soon,” I said, speaking slowly, petting the back of her head. Her entire body was shaking. She started to talk but I told her just to be calm and have a moment of peaceful nothingness. Just be and let it out. I took her to the couch, sat with her, enveloping her in my arms, rocking her back and forth. I didn’t know what to say about her work situation except that I was sorry her boss was such a supreme asshole. He was putting her through way too much hell, and I couldn’t understand why—if he was just an obnoxious lawyer, or if something else was going on in his head. “I’m excited too,” I said when I felt the shaking subside. “Choreographing is fun.”

  She removed her head from the cocoon of my chest and looked at me. Her face was red and wet. “So you’re not mad?”

  “Of course not. It’s not your fault, Rory.” I held my arms out. She placed her left hand on the muscle of my bicep, her right hand into my left, and we started a rumba basic. “Wow, are you tense,” I said. I heard the urgency in my voice. I tried to help her shake it out a bit, arm by arm. “Try and let go of the tension of the day or you can seriously hurt yourself. It will make your muscles less flexible, make you more susceptible to injury.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “Maybe I need a massage,” she said.

  I stopped shaking her arm, released her, and stood back, looking at her. I of course would love nothing more than to run my palms over her gloriously bare skin. But no. Work beckoned. I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, I looked her straight on, unable to suppress a wily smile. I was my own worst enemy. Damn.

  “You really want massage?” I eyed the zipper of her sky blue cover-up top.

  “No,” she said flatly. But she didn’t mean it. “We need to practice and I can’t stay overnight again and that’s what that would lead to and—” She stopped to catch her breath. “I’ll unwind while we’re dancing. Come on.”

  “It’s not like we will get much done tonight. It’s so late already. It’s important for you to relieve your stress,” I said, now trying to convince both of us, though neither of us needed it.

  “No.” She grabbed me, positioned us back into handhold, and started the basic footwork, necessarily pushing me back a bit when she took a step. “I’m not back-leading,” she insisted. “I’m just trying to get you to start dancing so we don’t waste any more time and I can relieve my tension through dancing. And, so that, um, you can stop looking at my zipper.”

  I couldn’t control my mischievous smile. “What is wrong with me looking at your zipper? Does the zipper not want to be looked at? Is the zipper self-conscious?”

  “The zipper is very self-conscious. She does not want to end up in a discarded heap on the floor,” she said, trying hard, I could tell, not to crack up over our goofy conversation.

  I turned my lips down and gave her faux sad puppy dog eyes. “Oh poor zip—”

  But she cut me off. “Seriously,” she began, slapping playfully but meaningfully at my hand which was currently fingering the bottom of the cover-up. “If you touch that zipper I’m worried I’ll get no sleep, I’ll be late to work again, Gunther will get pissed, and it’ll only cause more stress. So no zipper action. Let’s dance. It’s Monday. Too early in the week for this.”

  I shot her one last cockeyed smile then sighed. “Okay, okay. Zipper will remain…unmolested.”

  “You and your words.” She smiled and shook her head at me.

  “I like English.” I squinted at her and reached for her hand.

  But then said English threw a nasty wrench into my plans for that night. As we danced, my mind grew disgusted over her supreme idiot of a boss, who was clearly too stupid to recognize her intelligence. I didn’t pay close enough attention to my words.

  “Rory,” I whispered after a few basics. “I do worry about your tension. You are so beautiful.” I briefly leaned in, breaking our proper dance hold, and ran my nose along her cheek.

  She looked prepped for a kiss.

  “You are just so, so soft, so beautiful…for this, this job you have.”

  Suddenly, she stopped midstep, and looked at me.

  “I can’t be pretty and be a lawyer? Is that what you just said? That sounded like what you just said,” she blurted out.

  I looked at her with wide eyes and an open mouth. Not what I thought I’d said at all.

  “Don’t you have women lawyers in Russia?”

  I remained openmouthed. Of course we did. What was this about?

  “Well women can do anything we want here,” she went on. We’re not limited by stupid sexist notions that we should just sit around being soft and pretty and not destroy our fragile constitutions.”

  Was she for real? ‘Fragile constitution?’ What was that even?

  She broke away from me and stepped back, now putting her hands on her hips as if waiting for my response. “You think I’m too stupid to be a lawyer?” Now there was panic in her voice.

  How had she possibly interpreted that from what I’d said? And why did she need to insult my entire country? Russia wasn’t that backward, especially now. I was suddenly feeling weirdly defensive of my homeland.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  I put my hands on my hips and looked at her straight on. “Only if you can tell me how anything I said prompted that question. Or the insult.”

  She looked confused.

  “Of course we have female lawyers. It’s kind of a big country, and we are not Third World,” I said.

  “Well…good,” she said, eyes wandering around the room. “I, I didn’t mean to insult you. But I felt insulted by your comment that I was too pretty to be a lawyer. That…that’s a sexist thing to say.” Her voice was losing power as my pupils bore into hers.

  “Rory, I said absolutely no such thing.”

  “Yes you did. You said your job is too intense and you’re too pretty for it. Or something like that.”

  I continued shaking my head, ran my fingers through my hair.

  “You did! I heard you,” she insisted.

  “I said…well, I don’t know exactly what I said before you pounced but I meant that your job seemed to cause you a lot of distress and I hated seeing you that way. That’s all I said, Rory.”

  “That’s not all you said!” She stomped her foot, more in honest frustration than childish exaggeration. “You specifically said ‘You are too pretty to be a lawyer.’ Okay, you might have said you’re too pretty for all the tension your job creates or something like that. But it’s the same thing. It implies I can’t handle stress because of the way I look…somehow.”

  She looked around, as if she was confusing herself. She rubbed her eyes, and then I saw the dark circles. She was exhausted.

  I shook my head, trying hard to remember my exact words, which were now completely lost to me. “I remember saying you were beautiful. I remember saying you seemed tense from your job. If I made the remarks in close proximity to each other…” It was then that I realized it might have been a slippage of my English. As hard as I tried to get the right words, sometimes I used one that had a slightly different meaning, throwing the whole sentence off. I hadn’t done that in a while now. “It’s possible I used the word beautiful when I meant soft or nice, but if you heard beautiful, I believe you. And I was probably thinking you were beautiful since I…am always thinking that. In any event, I did not mean that you are too stupid to be a lawyer because you are beautiful. I would never say that.”

  She thought for a moment, then softened. “Okay, good. I’m glad you would never say that. But…do you think it? That I’m too soft to be a lawyer?”

  I shot one eyebrow up. No, of course not. She was letting her boss get away with way-the-fuck too much. But I didn’t want to say anything wrong and aggravate her further. She was self-conscious about being on the wrong career path, and I didn’t want to do anything to exacerbate her internal conflicts. At least not right now. We were both far too tired. “Rory, you can be whatever you want to be. I think
you’re a very good lawyer. As I said to you the other night, I think you are a very compassionate lawyer who sees the humanity in her clients…”

  She nodded. “Yes, I remember that.” Her voice was noticeably softer. Tears began to well on the outer edges of her eyes.

  “I just think,” I went on, softening my tone as well, “that this job is very stressful for you and you are letting it wear you down. You get worked up over Jamal’s mother hating him, you worry about Jamal’s innocence and him being locked up forever, your boss is a nightmare who makes it all worse and even makes your easier cases stressful. It seems you have to have somewhat of a hard personality to deal with these people and these situations. A hard, hard…” Now she’d made me flustered. I picked at my skin. “A hard body. Outer body. Thick skin!” I added excitedly, finally remembering the term in English.

  Now she laughed. It was a good hearty laugh. She sniffed and blinked, willing the tears away.

  “I so didn’t mean to upset you.” I wrapped my arms around her, and, once her face was embedded in my chest, her tears flowed again.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled into my now-wet shirt. “My sister is the smart one. And my dad always told me I was the pretty one. When he died and my mom made me quit dance, she told me to be like my sister, use my brains… I no longer had him, his support. He left me.” Now she was sobbing so hard I could barely understand. “But I’m just not smart like she is. I guess I’m just…pretty and nothing more.”

  I rubbed my hands up and down her back. “Don’t say that. Of course that is not true. You are very smart. You are very beautiful. There is no reason why the two can’t go together. You are both, to the highest extent. Rory, I hate it so much when you doubt yourself. It just, it pains me.”

  She cried for a while, until she ran out of tears, it seemed. She seriously needed to get that out.

  “Thank you,” she mumbled after several minutes, lifting her face from my chest.

  “For what?” I laughed. “For screwing up my English so that things came out horribly wrong and brought back all this painful shit for you? See how words can screw things up! Movement is so much more meaningful, so much more pure.”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. “Both are important means of communication. I guess I just rely on the former more since that’s the direction my life ended up taking. Although it didn’t have to…” The darkness returned to her eyes. Like me, her past had damaged her.

  I held her in close handhold, moved with her. “And, as you can see, the latter is more my preferred means, which makes sense since I am living in a foreign country and using a language…not my own.” My words faltered at the end. I wanted to own English, as much as Russian. Quibbles like this were proof that that would never be.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “English is still hard for me. Words come out wrong. Please understand that I’m trying. Just because I’m Russian…” I now remembered when she seemed to make a strange assumption about my whole country. It wasn’t the first time she’d made an assumption. But this one hurt, as much as I didn’t want to admit it.

  “Just because you’re Russian, what?” she asked.

  “I just want you to refrain from making assumptions about me and what I think. And my country.”

  She looked me in the eye. Now it was her turn to look stunned. “What assumption did I make?”

  “That I am backward. That Russia has no women lawyers.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean…I guess, well, I had a friend in law school. A Russian girl in my class complained to me once that all Russian men were sexist. I just thought that when you said what you said. Her words, not mine,” she added with a light laugh.

  But it wasn’t funny. “So this one girl I’ve never met makes a general statement… Where was she from, anyway, that she knows every single Russian man so well?” I could feel my jawline clench and my biceps tighten. I hated assumptions. I hated generalizations.

  “She was from Moscow. Sasha, please don’t get angry. I know she didn’t know you—”

  “Are you still friends?”

  “No, she was just in my study group. I haven’t talked to her since we graduated. I’m sorry I let her influence me. I’ll make a conscious effort to forget everything I ever heard her say.”

  I took a few full breaths to calm myself. “Okay. I will forget it, but I just ask that in the future you judge me by what I say and do and not by some stereotype someone else plants in your head.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I will. I mean I won’t. I won’t judge you by a stereotype and I’m sorry I did. Forgive me, please? Please, Sasha?” she said, looking up at me, batting her eyes playfully, then tracing a peace sign onto my chest with her fingertip.

  She was too sweet to remain annoyed with. I nodded.

  Then she laughed. “Thing is, your grammar is always so impeccable, your vocabulary is insane, and your American accent is flawless. That’s why it just didn’t seem possible that you meant something other than what you said, than the exact words you used.”

  I shot her a looped, cut-the-crap smile.

  “What!”

  “You can honestly tell me you’ve never noticed when my grammar and accent falter?”

  She looked surprised.

  “You’ve never noticed I roll my r’s?”

  Now an embarrassed smile peeked through and she burst into giggles. After her little laughing spell, she frowned and cocked her head. “Okay, I noticed those, but Sasha, I find them so sexy! Come on, you can’t be embarrassed by those!”

  I wasn’t. Not in front of her anyway. But now I was having a bit of fun watching her struggle, thinking I was mad.

  “Sasha, they’re seriously so hot. They’re so you! You absolutely cannot find anything bad about me being so turned on by those!”

  I forced myself to quash my cocky grin.

  She threw her hands up. “Your accent makes you different. It makes you stand out. Why are you so self-conscious about anything that makes you look the least bit Russian?”

  “Because I want to stand out for things I excel at. Like dance. Not for something I can’t control, like where I happen to come from.”

  “Sasha! You do stand out for your dancing! Duh!” She rolled her eyes and threw her hands up again.

  I could no longer hide my sly smile. I felt it spreading slowly across my face. But now she didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Okay, why don’t you teach me some Russian? I’m sure I’ll sound horrible, and then you can crack up over my attempt at grammar and pronunciation.”

  Teach her Russian? No American had asked me to do that. It seemed so strange that someone would want to learn Russian. And I was hardly a linguistics teacher. “What would be the point of that, of my laughing at you?”

  “I made you feel bad. So now you can laugh at me.”

  “I don’t want to laugh at you, Rory.”

  “Come on, Sasha, I really want you to teach me some Russian! Just one thing. One little phrase.” She playfully punched my bicep and bounced on her heels.

  “Why? I don’t understand.” I frowned but then couldn’t help smile at her excitement.

  “Because I want to learn your language! Come on, just one sentence!” She bounced higher.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, giving in, still not sure why she wanted to learn Russian. It was a language with hard edges, with a kind of strict, scolding, acerbic quality. Maybe because I associated it with being loudly yelled at by my always angry father, right before he took a hard-knuckled swipe at me. Or being blamed by my mother for something. Or feeling as if I was being threatened, however indirectly, by my uncle. English was much lighter, more fluid, more sweet, in my mind. More like Rory.

  “Thank you!” She rubbed her nose softy along my cheek.

  I forced myself to shake off my memories and fill my thoughts with beauty, innocence, love. “Okay, ya umnaya ee krasivaya zhenshchina.”

  “That’s huge!” she shrieked.

  “No.
It’s very simple sentence. We’ll take it in parts. Repeat after me.”

  “Okay, I’ll try. Your language is a lot more complicated than mine,” she said.

  “It’s really not,” I said firmly, but still laughing. Americans had no idea how hard their language was. But we were playing now. I knew she was just giving me a hard time for the hell of it.

  “Ya,” I began. “Come on, that’s easy. It’s the German word for ‘yes.’ Russian for ‘I.’”

  “Okay, ya.”

  “Umnaya.”

  “Unmaya.”

  “No, the m is before n. Umnaya.”

  “Okay, umnaya.”

  “Ee. That’s just the word for ‘and.’”

  “What are you having me say?” she asked.

  “Not yet, just repeat.”

  “Eeee.” She said, apparently having fun elongating the vowel.

  “Krasivaya.”

  “Krasss…”

  “Ivaya. Krasivaya. I know you can say that.”

  “Krasivaya,” she said, trying to roll the r like I did. And failing. I laughed.

  “Good. Zhenshchina.”

  “That’s a hard one.”

  “No, it’s not. Zhen-sh-china. Just take it one part at a time.”

  “Zhen-sh-ch?” she questioned. “The consonants sound off together.”

  “Yes, Zhen-sh-china.”

  “Zhen-sh-china.”

  “Good, now put it all together. Ya umnaya ee krasivaya zhenshchina.”

  “I am never going to remember that long sentence without writing it out.”

  “No! I don’t want you to do that. Feel the way it sounds on your tongue.”

  “Back to feeling and not seeing again,” she said, teasingly.

  “Yes, that’s my point. You use one sense way more than all the others. Way more.”

  She rolled her eyes, which I took to be a concession. “Okay, ya umnaya eee…”

  “Krasivaya zhenshchina,” I said, finishing.

  “Ya umnaya eee krasivaya zhen…”

  “I know you can do this,” I said, hearing the frustration begin to taint my voice. She was bright. It wasn’t that hard. If I could learn English, she could learn to say one sentence.