by Lara Vapnyar
My mother opened the door with her key and yelled to Elijah that she was here with her daughter. He said something back. Then she told me to wait in the living room while she helped Elijah get dressed. I noticed that my mother moved around the apartment with perfect ease, as if she lived there, moving chairs, fixing pillows, picking up stray items, while in our Brooklyn apartment she tended to keep to her corner, tense like an unwelcome guest. She even offered me tea.
I had imagined a tiny shriveled man, but Elijah was tall and broad-shouldered, made even bigger by his roomy corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater. He was looming over my mother as if he were shielding her, even though she was the one who supported him as they walked. She led him to a chair that faced the couch where I sat, and sat down on a low pouf so that she was kind of between us. From that position, she kept looking up at him or at him, visibly anxious that we like each other.
Even sitting down, Elijah remained imposing, his knees spread wide, his large hands spilling over the polished armrests’ edges. He reminded me of fairy-tale giants if you could imagine those giants unsteady and infirm and smelling of skin creams.
“Did your mother do all those things in your story?” he asked after my mother introduced us.
“Most of it, yes,” I said.
“Did she really boil potatoes with the immersion heater?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “And she did write the indignant letter to the factory after it broke down.”
“She is one hell of a woman, your mother,” Elijah said in his slow slurred way.
My mother laughed and slapped Elijah on the knee. Then she mimicked him: “One . . . hell . . . oooff . . . awo . . . man.”
This shocked me. My mother might have been mean, but it wasn’t like her to make fun of a disabled person. What shocked me even more was that Elijah seemed to enjoy it. More than that, he mimicked my mother in his turn. Every time my mother mispronounced words (which happened fairly often), he would laugh out loud. My mother didn’t seem to mind, which also shocked me, because she was usually very sensitive about her English. Just a few days ago, she had started crying when Len tried to correct her grammar. Both my mother and Elijah laughed at my shocked expression. Then my mother explained it to me. She said that when she first started working with Elijah, he told her that he couldn’t stand talking to his friends anymore, because they all listened to him with squeamish pity. My mother didn’t know what “squeamish” meant, but after Elijah explained it to her, she said that this was exactly how people reacted when she tried to speak English.
“So we decided to do away with pity,” my mother said.
“Your mother and I are both verbal cripples,” Elijah added with great satisfaction, “and we accept it.”
I stayed with them for an hour or so, and it wasn’t until I stood up to leave that Elijah started to talk about my story again.
He found it incredible that the English of my story was so much better than the English that I spoke. I said that this was because I read so much in English but hardly ever got to speak. He nodded and asked if it was okay to send my story to his friends at the Magazine.
I asked: “Why?”
“Because it’s extraordinary,” Elijah said. It took him a lot of effort to get the word “extraordinary” out, but this time my mother didn’t laugh or mimic him, but stroked him on the back.
On the way out the doorman asked me if I was okay.
“I’m good,” I said. “I’m happy.”
He reached for something under his desk and handed me a tissue. It turned out I was crying, but if not for the doorman, I wouldn’t have noticed.
When I came home, Len was in the bedroom, crouching in the corner with his back to me. He was trying to assemble a desk from a wide board he had found on the street and several large boxes to serve as legs. The trick was to make the structure sturdy enough so that it wouldn’t wobble, and Len had come up with the idea to hammer the board right to the boxes with large nails.
We did have money, not a lot of it, just what my mother and I had gotten when we sold our apartment, but everybody said that we weren’t to spend a cent, because we’d need it toward the down payment on our future house. Everybody insisted that we had to buy a house as soon as possible. Len would spend all his weekends building makeshift furniture so we could save money.
I said: “Len!” He turned to look at me. There was a hammer in his right hand, and a large nail in his left. There were beads of sweat on his forehead and a smudge of glue on his cheek. There was something in his eyes that startled me, or rather there was the lack of something in his eyes. The lack of affection? Interest? Care?
I told him that Elijah thought that my story was extraordinary. He was going to send it to the Magazine.
“Sounds like a long shot, don’t get too excited,” he said and went back to work.
That was when I knew that Len didn’t love me anymore. I found my discovery upsetting but not devastating, which could mean only one thing: that I didn’t love him either.
Back to my love graph. A few weeks before we left Russia, the love was definitely there. A few months after we arrived in the US, it was definitely not. We lost it somewhere between these two points.
I like to think that it didn’t survive the transatlantic flight. There is something bitterly poetic about that. The love that crumbled in the altitude. Evaporated under pressure. Suffocated because of the lack of oxygen. Got vacuum-sucked down the plane’s human-waste line into a two-hundred-gallon tank.
Human waste sounds about right. Isn’t that what love leaving a person really is?
TEN
I don’t know if it was Elijah’s praise, my discovery that Len and I didn’t love each other anymore, my growing, almost physical hatred of C++, or my mother’s resurgence from her depression that made me veer away from Len’s plan for me.
I wasn’t really hoping that my story would be accepted by the Magazine; I wasn’t even sure that Elijah had submitted it yet—he had said he wanted to wait until his friend there came back from a trip abroad. And anyway, I couldn’t possibly imagine earning a living as a writer. But I was absolutely sure that I didn’t want to be a computer programmer, and it seemed stupid to put so much effort into learning a profession that I hated. There must be something else for me. Something that I could do well. All I needed was more time to figure out what it was. And to buy that time, I needed to find a temporary job, any job at all. The jobs advertised in the New York Times turned out to be out of my league, so I went and bought Our Brooklyn, a Russian-language weekly that advertised temporary and often illegal jobs in immigrant businesses. Most of them required skills, experience, or some special quality that I didn’t have. I had never painted a house, driven a cab, cooked gefilte fish, baked meat pies, or assassinated people. But after a while I found one ad that captured my attention: “CINDERELLA SCHOOL. Learn English to find your dream. Fast, affordable, flexible hours.” And in smaller letters, “Russian-speaking English teacher wanted.” The ad also asked for a valid English teacher’s diploma, so I took out my diploma, picked up a black pen, and carefully printed “and English” next to the words certifying that I could teach Russian language and literature. Just a few days before, Len had said that the only people who could make it in immigrant businesses were dishonest and unprofessional. According to his theory, I now had a fair chance at success.
The next day, I put the diploma in my purse, took the Q train down to the Sheepshead Bay stop, and walked up one of the side streets. Once there, I had to double-check the address, because the place didn’t look like anywhere you’d go to teach or learn. It was a regular two-story house, painted blue, with a gray coating of dirt and a white sign in front that said “Alternative and Holistic Medicine” in big Russian letters, and “Witchery and Magic” in smaller ones. Inside, I found myself in an airy waiting room adorned with many posters and framed clippings from Our Brooklyn. The largest poster showed a woman in her forties with wild blonde hair adorned with arrangemen
ts of leaves and twigs. “Evelina, the authentic witch from the woods of western Ukraine, will help you with your financial and romantic problems,” it said. The other posters were devoted mostly to the miracles performed by Dr. Solomon, a severe-looking man with a mane of ginger hair. Dr. Solomon had, he claimed, the ability to cure obesity, stomach ulcers, spine problems, and all kinds of anxiety. Penises in various stages of decline were depicted in a few of the posters. One of them was represented by a wilting daisy, another by a sad little mouse. I was about to check the address again when a blonde woman at the reception desk squinted at me through her heavy makeup and asked me what I wanted. I showed her the ad. She studied it for a moment, during which I couldn’t help but stare at her enormous breasts pushing up from the dark depths of her purple sweater. She gave me a glare and it was the glare that made me recognize her as the woman from the poster, the “authentic witch from the woods of western Ukraine.” She pointed at a door to her right. “Solomon will see you there.”
This room was small and dimly lit. The wall to my left was painted red, and a huge poster for the Kies´lowski movie Blue hung in the middle of it. The wall to my right was painted blue and had a poster for Kies´lowski’s Red. I took this for a good sign, because I’d watched each of these movies at least five times. Almost every other object was black (the leather lounge chair, the massive desk by the window, the small file cabinet, the exercise equipment), except for the collection of plastic penises on the desk. These were mostly pink, although one was cream-colored, and two or three were purplish red. I did my best to ignore them.
Ten minutes later, the door opened with a bang, and the man from the posters marched in. He wore a tweed jacket that was a little too long for him. He was stocky but short, an inch or two taller than me, and a lot shorter than Len. He was also bald. The bouncy mane he had in the posters wasn’t there.
Dr. Solomon asked if I had brought my diploma. I took it out of my bag. He put on his glasses, glanced at the diploma, then peered at me.
“I see everything that’s going on inside you,” he said, and I thought that he meant the lie I had printed on my diploma.
“Okay, tell me,” he continued in English with the thick, tense accent of someone who was trying too hard to hide it. “Have you seen Red and Blue?”
“Yes, I’ve seen them,” I said.
“Who is more beautiful, Juliette Binoche or Irène Jacob?”
I turned my head to the right, then to the left.
“Juliette Binoche,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because Irène Jacob is pure soul. Pure soul cannot be beautiful.”
He took his glasses off and stared at the posters.
“You know what?” he said, switching into Russian again. “That is an absolutely brilliant answer—a professor from an Elite University wouldn’t have answered better.”
I wanted to appear skeptical. I tried to master a look of ironic detachment, but instead I felt a smile of pure delight spread over my face.
He then told me that the system of payment was more than fair. I would get 50 percent of what my students paid, so the more lessons I gave, the more I would earn. And I could start as early as the next day, at nine.
Len didn’t like it when I called him at work, and I usually didn’t. But that day I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t even wait until I got home. I fished a sticky quarter out of the pocket of my jeans and dialed his number from a pay phone. “Do you have a minute?” I asked. He said that he didn’t. “It’ll only take a second,” I said. “Okay, I got a job, and I’ll tell you all about it when you come home. Bye.” But as I was about to hang up, I said, “It’s a very good job. Really. Bye.” We hung up. I started to walk toward the subway, but a minute later I returned and fished another quarter out of my pocket. This time I dialed Elijah’s number. “Good afternoon,” my mother said.
“Mom, it’s me!” I said. “I got a job!”
My mother actually screamed.
On my first day, I had a group of four women between the ages of thirty and sixty. They said that they liked the idea of flexible hours, because they worked as live-in nannies for other Russian families, and couldn’t attend classes with a strictly set schedule. None of them had come to the US to stay. Most were immigrants in a precarious legal situation, with husbands and children waiting for them back home. They had come to the US to earn money for their struggling families. They needed English so that they could defect from their Russian employers to American families, who allegedly paid more and lacked the guts to abuse their nannies. We spent the first lesson studying basic introduction skills, and their stories all sounded more or less the same. “My name is Marina. I’m from Moscow. I’m forty-seven years old. I have a husband and two sons. My youngest son won the interschool model-building contest. I used to work as an engineer. I sleep on a mattress on the floor of the baby’s room. I have high blood pressure. I’m going crazy with the baby’s screaming all night long. The little shit gets his rest during the day, but I have to cook and clean the house.”
These women paid eight dollars each, so I ended up making sixteen dollars that day. Len earned $140 per day, but the disparity didn’t discourage me. I was sure that I would find a way to get more students.
As I was leaving, I heard a muffled conversation coming from Dr. Solomon’s office. “Your penis becomes big and hard . . . and stays that way,” he was saying. “You’re strong. You’re powerful. Nothing frightens you. Nothing intimidates you. Big and hard. Big and hard.” I stood and listened, hardly breathing, until Evelina spoke to me.
“Here is your money,” she said. I saw that she noticed that I fell under the spell of the penis mantra and despised me for that.
I spent the next couple of days preparing a special course for the nannies. We studied the names of body parts, children’s toys, cooking utensils, cleaning products, and, most importantly, ways to ask for a raise. At the end of each lesson, we watched a scene from a movie. I brought in a large box of videos and asked the nannies to choose. They picked Working Girl and Pretty Woman. This was their favorite part of the lesson. I asked them to listen to the dialogue and try to repeat the lines, and sometimes they even improvised. Where the Pretty Woman said simply, “You work on commission, right?” Marina said, “You bitches work on commission, right?”
Thanks to word of mouth, by the end of the month, I had four groups of nannies and eight students who came for private lessons. On Mondays, my first class started at eight thirty, and Len and I left for work at the same time. We ate our cereal leaning against the kitchen counter, dressed in a hurry, and ran to the Q stop together. Len took the steps down to the platform for the uptown train, and I crossed the street to get to my downtown Q. Often, if the trains didn’t come right away, we’d wave to each other from opposite platforms. It felt great to be going to work at last, just like Len, just like everybody else.
Gradually, I was getting to know the inner workings of our office. Evelina was the first to arrive, and the last to leave. She usually sat behind the reception desk, but sometimes she would retreat to a special room to see her clients. She had a long dark room, decorated with a human skeleton, black candles, a crystal ball, and a large Orthodox icon. I knew this because she would sometimes invite me there to have lunch with her. We would eat our sandwiches right at her “magical” round table and gossip about people in the office. Or rather she told me stuff and I listened, because I didn’t have anything to share.
Most of Evelina’s clients were women with love misfortunes. Some asked her to find them a man; others asked for help keeping the one they’d already found. One woman asked for help getting back the husband who had beaten her unconscious and run off. The men who came to see Evelina looked down on her female clients. They were serious and pragmatic, and couldn’t care less about the problems of the heart; they paid Evelina to take care of their businesses. They’d ask her to come and bless their new office space, or to put an evil eye on the competition, or to get rid of the evil
eye that somebody else (or possibly Evelina herself) had put on them.
The men who came to see Solomon were different. They were shy and compliant, and seemed plagued by either guilt or shame. They all complained about spine problems when they called. “Spine problems. Right!” Evelina would say after she’d hung up the phone.
Some of these men followed me with their eyes when I passed them on the way to class. Their stares were full of timid longing mixed with resignation. I imagined that they saw me as somebody young, vibrant, and light, an elusive object of desire, and it made me feel vibrant and light and elusive.
Solomon looked at me too, in a different way though. When I came to the office for my afternoon classes, I often found him smoking on the porch, leaning over the railing, his jacket clinging listlessly to his back. Sometimes he would look up at me, and the desire I saw in his eyes was certain and urgent and anything but timid. This frightened and excited me at the same time.
“There is this witch,” I’d tell my mother and Len. “She works with Orthodox icons and black candles. Uses both God and the devil!” I talked about the nannies, and their vile employers, and how much they loved my lessons, and how their eyes filled with tears when they watched Pretty Woman. My mother asked me for more details, and I’d talk and talk and inevitably end up talking about Solomon, Solomon’s office, and Solomon’s movie posters, and Solomon’s plastic penises, and Solomon’s patients. I noticed that Len was getting tense. I was aware of his disapproving smirks, but I couldn’t stop talking.