by Lara Vapnyar
Still, the most important parts of my life were conducted on the third floor of my Escher house. There were three bedrooms, the small one for Len and me, the smaller one for Dan, and the smallest one for Nathalie.
Most of the space in our small bedroom was taken up by our queen-size bed, and that was where I worked. Len managed to fit a tiny desk between the bed and the window overlooking the neighbors’ barbecue, but it was hard to fit a chair between the desk and the bed, and even harder to fit my body between the chair and the desk. I preferred to write on top of the bed. Cross-legged, barefoot, the laptop where it was supposed to be by definition—in my lap. “Always keep your laptop on a hard surface,” Len would tell me again and again. And I would nod, but secretly think: “Why is it called a laptop, then?” I loved it in my lap. A warm being. With all those complicated sounds, whirring, beeps, buzzing. Like something alive. Like an extension of my body. A necessary organ that was keeping me alive. I bought our quilted bedspread from a garage sale (most of our household items came from there as well). It was old, with threads come undone here and there. Sometimes my bare toes would get caught in the loops of loose threads, which resulted in cuts. Exquisitely thin cuts as if drawn on my skin by the finest of pencils. The density of the cuts depended on my concentration. The more challenging the story, the deeper the cuts. My workspace was hardly adequate, but it would have never occurred to me to complain, because my writing career was such a miracle that I half expected it to be taken away at any moment.
About three years after we moved to Staten Island, I got a letter from the editor at the Magazine, the same editor who had rejected me years ago. She had addressed it to my old Brooklyn address, and it had taken more than several months for the post office to forward it to Staten Island. The editor wrote that she had been promoted to a more senior position and had more freedom to publish less established authors. She said that my story had made quite an impression on her and she was eager to see more of my work. She included her phone number and email address. I read the letter on our patio and when I finished I started to scream so loudly that the neighbor’s dog stopped barking for the first time in her life and retreated to the far corner. Then I ran downstairs to tell my mother. Or rather I waddled downstairs, because I was eight months pregnant. Downstairs, my mother and three-year-old Dan were doing math together, counting candy like I did at his age. When I told my mother about the letter, she started jumping up and down. Dan climbed off his chair, scattering candy all over the floor, and started to jump up and down too. I couldn’t help but join in, which in my condition meant gentle squats rather than jumps. Len was the only skeptical one. He said: “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch!” He had recently bought a book of American idioms (Barnes & Noble 50 percent off sale), and was using them all the time. “Do you even have anything to show her?” he asked.
I had to admit that I didn’t. The only writing I had done in the three years since we left Brooklyn was freelance technical translation, with original work limited to the philosophy statement and some user manuals for SoftUniverrse. “That’s all right,” my mother said. “Writing is like riding a bike—you can’t unlearn it.” I doubt if that’s true, but that time I trusted my mother. I shut myself in the bedroom and devoted myself to a new story, while my mother relieved me of all household duties and took care of Dan. The only problem was that my mind was thoroughly blank. I didn’t have any ideas. I went to look through my old files, hoping to find something there. I found a few unfinished sketches in Russian that I had started back when we lived in Saint Petersburg, none of them were sufficiently inspiring. I was about to despair when I found a file with the name “The Perfect Dilemma.” I had no idea what that meant. I pressed “open” and saw the following sentence: “Two men are in love with me, one with a broken dick, another with a broken soul.” That turned out to be enough to get me going. I finished the story in a week and emailed it to the editor.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, Len told me again. But this time the chickens hatched! Three months later, my story appeared in the Magazine. The editor called me herself to tell me the news. “We have five hundred thousand subscribers. On Monday, you will wake up famous.”
That Monday morning, after Len had left for work, my mother and I put Dan and the newborn Nathalie into the family minivan and drove to the local Barnes & Noble. There it was, the issue with my story, right on the magazine rack. We decided to celebrate right there in the Barnes & Noble café with three slices of chocolate cheesecake, two cups of decaf cappuccino, and one hot chocolate. Nothing for Nathalie, but then she was asleep anyway, in the detachable car seat that we placed on top of the table. This was early morning, so the café was mostly empty save for two elderly women at the adjacent table. “Have you seen the new issue of the Magazine?” one asked. “I peeked,” the other said. “The Russian story is awful. There is the word ‘dick’ in practically every sentence.” And the first woman sighed: “It looks like the Magazine is lowering its standards year after year.”
My mother and I exchanged looks. “Now that’s real fame!” she whispered, and we both started to laugh.
The Magazine publication led to a book deal, the published book led to a slew of teaching jobs, tons of freelance assignments followed, with my mother eager to take on child-rearing duties every step of the way. A little too eager? I’d ask myself, but wouldn’t wonder for too long.
Back when we still lived in Brooklyn, it was the news of my pregnancy that lifted my mother’s depression. She became active, resourceful and alert in a way that she hadn’t been since Elijah had died. She would go and study all these pregnancy books, and spend half a day exploring Brooklyn groceries, hunting for the best fruit and vegetables we could afford. She would come back loaded with bags, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling, gushing about all the things that she’d seen on the street. She was the one with the pregnancy glow, while I was losing weight, experiencing all sorts of ailments, and suffering from depression that morphed into apathy once Dan was born. I loved him so much—I loved everything about him, from his smell, to his weight in my arms, to the intensity of his stare, but the mere thought of having to get up and put on my clothes to take him for a walk would be enough to plunge me into despair. “I’ll take him,” my mother would offer, and I’d start weeping with gratitude.
And this was how it happened that my mother gradually supplanted me in all the traditional motherly duties. She was the one to wake them up before school, to feed them breakfast, to pack their CheapLot backpacks, to meet them after school at the bus stop, to supervise their homework, to teach them math and Russian. She would get very upset if I tried to “meddle” in any of that. She was a renowned educator—this was her thing! I often found that I didn’t have enough energy to fight her, but also, having the hardest and the most boring parts of the job of motherhood taken care of was too irresistible. She did all the dirty work, and I didn’t even have to be grateful.
The rest of the important parental duties were performed by Len. He provided most of our income, and supervised the kids’ hygiene. “Time to brush your teeth!” “Time to buy new sneakers!” “What are you doing wearing that shirt three days in a row?” “Is it my imagination or do you stink like a skunk?” He was also good for emergencies—always ready to take care of a sick kid in the middle of the night, especially when it was something serious, when we had to jump into the car and rush to the hospital.
So, what was my role? Oh, I was a cool parent, the kind that lets the kids stay up late, takes them to grown-up events, and encourages them to watch Pulp Fiction and Fargo. “What are you watching? Barney? Are you kidding me? Let’s watch something cool!”
Warning note to cool parents. Being a cool parent usually means that you are not parent enough.
I was also the one to handle the important philosophical issues, such as good and evil, right and wrong, and life and death. My favorite thing to do was to take the kids on long walks and talk to them about sci
ence, and the earth, and art, and the intricacies of love, and the meaning of life. Dan and I liked to explore the “secret places” of Staten Island: salt marshes, remote beaches, shipwrecks, and mysterious paths that led into wilderness, where you could encounter anything at all, like the cat shantytown we found in the middle of a forest. Nathalie and I liked to walk to Historic Richmond Town a few blocks away from home, and stroll among the pretty houses, climbing ruins, peeking into windows and hidden alleys, trying to uncover fascinating facts about the past. Two of the most fascinating facts were that the outhouse had a square hole in the seat, not a round one, and that the old inn had a rule of “no more than five people in one bed.”
I told the kids about the visits to the Kremlin shortly after my mother died. We established a routine of taking long beach walks about an hour before sundown. More often than not, we would end up talking about my mother, sharing memories and anecdotes. Once, when Nathalie was fourteen and Dan seventeen, I told them how I had vomited whipped cream all over my shoes during the performance of Swan Lake.
“Eww!” Nathalie muttered. And Dan laughed.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why your grandma wouldn’t stop me from eating all that shit.”
Both kids looked at me incredulously.
“You never stopped us,” Dan said.
“Yes, you never did,” Nathalie confirmed.
I had no idea what they were talking about.
“Remember how you used to take us to BAM to see all those foreign plays?” Dan said. “Nathalie was only seven or eight, and I was ten? We would always stop by that tiny Italian place. We would all get penne alla vodka and I would throw up when we got home. Every single time. And yet you never objected when I ordered it.”
This was true. I didn’t object. I was so happy to get out of the house, away from Len, and from my mother too, to spend time with the kids on my own, to take them someplace that I enjoyed, that I would honestly forget about the consequences. Or rather I wouldn’t let myself think about them, because I didn’t want to spoil the fun.
“But why did you order it again and again?” I asked Dan.
“Because the pasta was good!” he said. “And I was excited. I loved going to the theater. The plays were awful—all those sad people speaking foreign languages—but I liked going there, taking the express bus from Staten Island, going over the Verrazzano Bridge, looking at the ocean from there, then driving into the Battery Tunnel and emerging from there in a completely different place, with crowded streets and huge buildings and cars.”
“Yes!” Nathalie said. “I loved that too, and I loved being the youngest one in the theater.”
Dan hated the attention, but Nathalie loved it. People would smile at her and ask: “Theater lover, aren’t you?” And she would beam. And I would beam too, never questioning the wisdom of taking a seven-year-old to see Beckett or Wedekind.
“There is sand in my eyes,” I said. “Let’s go back.”
Note to parents of children. Please, think about this before you start judging your parents.
The kids knew that the three adults in the family had different functions, never confusing them. So it was always like this:
“Grandma, I’m hungry!”
“Dad, I need a new bike,”
and “Mommy, I’m scared of death.”
Sometime after we moved to Staten Island, a huge CheapLot store opened a few blocks from our house. They sold everything from furniture to toys to expired snacks. The variety of offerings reminded me of Cult Goods, the Moscow store that I’d loved as a child. My mother would go there every other week to stock up on items that would be irresistible to the kids, like toy cars, and tiny dolls, and animal slippers, and Play-Doh, and off-brand candy, and old cookies that tasted like Play-Doh. She would store all that on countless shelves in her little apartment, turning it into a Hansel and Gretel house, where she could lure the kids to trap them and teach them math. Lots and lots of math.
I would come home after work and see my kids through the open door of my mother’s apartment, sitting at her table with their math books, enacting yet another math problem with their toy cars and tiny dolls, the floor littered with candy and cookie wrappers, which would make me feel simultaneously:
1. Angry—with my mother for feeding my kids crap.
2. Jealous—of my mother for replacing me and spending time with my kids.
3. Jealous—of my kids for replacing me and spending time with my mother.
4. Grateful—because I could sneak past them and go write in peace.
5. Guilty—for feeling all of the above.
So that was how our Escher house functioned. Wait, I almost forgot. There was one more space. A small backyard, muddy, overgrown with weeds, and isolated from the rest of the house. There used to be a wooden staircase leading there from the patio, but it got destroyed in one of those fall hurricanes that tend to batter Staten Island worse than other boroughs. The contractors said that they couldn’t fix it unless they replaced the entire patio, and quoted a price that was so insane that we decided to forget about the staircase.
Without the staircase, the only way to get to our backyard was through the back door of my mother’s apartment and down the narrow path dividing our house from the neighbors’ territory. The path was flooded most of the time; you had to wear rubber boots to get to our backyard, and nobody considered it worth the trouble, except for my mother and me. She planted a puny apple tree in the corner, which didn’t bear any fruit but still reminded us of our Moscow gardens. We would bring a pair of folding chairs out there and some tea in a small thermos, and we would sit under the apple tree together and talk about our life in Sevastopol, and Moscow, and Brooklyn, or make fun of Len’s parents and sometimes even Len himself.
Did this happen often? No, not really. I couldn’t help but feel resentful of my mother for stopping me from leaving Len while I still could.
THIRTEEN
I don’t remember being baffled or intimidated by negative numbers. My mother taught me about them when I was eight or nine, and I grasped the concept right away. But while it wasn’t baffling to me, it was terrifying. My mother used a large pot and a wooden ruler to explain the concept to me. She half filled the pot with water, then put the ruler in. She made a mark on the ruler where it touched the surface of the water. That would be zero, she said. Above zero there were your regular numbers. Below zero was your negative space; that was where your negative numbers lived. I could barely see the ruler underwater; it looked distorted and scary. I thought of negative space as some sort of dark underworld, and it was right here in the middle of the kitchen, on the table where we ate, in the pot that we used for making soup.
“Let’s do some sums now,” my mother said. And that was probably the scariest thing about the negative numbers, that you could add them up and even multiply them, making their negative value even more negative, which brought you deeper into the underworld.
I had avoided having anything to do with negative numbers for most of my adult life, until Yulia suddenly reappeared in my life with her own take on the concept. This happened in 2006, right after I published the piece about my wedding dress in the Important Fashion Magazine. Yulia said that she read the magazine religiously and it was quite a shock for her to see me there. The last person you’d expect to see in a fashion magazine! Yulia worked as a main media liaison for an international media conglomerate. She used her connections to find my new address, and here she was sitting across from me in a sleek downtown restaurant with a copy of the magazine in her lap, shifting her eyes from me to the photo of me in the magazine and laughing. “Now I understand the magic of retouching!” she said at one point.
Yulia herself looked well, thinner than ever and dressed in an expensive ensemble in different hues of green, including enormous shades in green frames.
Yulia was on her third husband and couldn’t believe that I was still married to Len. No, she didn’t have any kids. No way! Thank God!
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br /> She refused to talk about Sasha, but was more than happy to talk about her career. She had gotten a degree in psychology, and worked as a family therapist for a few years, but then she got sick of it all and moved to London. Her current job was amazing. They had already launched a glamorous print magazine and even more glamorous social media club, and a radio broadcast and a TV channel were in the works The entire thing was called the Résistance—spelled the French way.
The name made me laugh.
“Laugh all you want,” Yulia said, “but we are going to topple Putin one day.”
The Résistance was funded by exiled billionaire Nikolay Kotov and had the goal of connecting super-rich and super-successful Russians living all over Europe. The idea was that armed with so much money and brainpower, the opposition would finally have a chance, and Kotov would be the one to head it. Or at least this was how the project was being sold to Kotov. I remembered that Sasha had mentioned the Résistance once. He said that all the talk about forming the opposition was pure bullshit, and a more apt name for the magazine would be Asshole Monthly.
I had to admit that the issue that Yulia gave me as a gift confirmed Sasha’s assessment. I opened it on the bus back to Staten Island and saw nothing but the usual glamorous fluff.
The first piece that caught my eye had the headline “Marusya Keeps Stumbling.” The piece detailed the myriad problems experienced by owners of fashionable teacup pigs. The main problem was that Moscow winters were too harsh for these animals, and it was impossible to find warm pet clothes that would fit a teacup pig, and so people were denied the biggest pleasure of teacup pig ownership—the ability to walk them down Moscow streets on a tiny leash. The photo featured the most adorable teacup pig, her minuscule legs clad in human baby booties. I doubted that Marusya could topple Putin, especially if she kept stumbling.