Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  After Mama died and I dropped out of NYU, I lived with another actor for a while, kind of more of a mime-actor, then a not-funny comedian, then a guitarist, then a muralist who only painted bare feet, and then another actor-bartender who was really just a bartender. I gave these men everything, sometimes getting it back but most of the time not, spending hours fighting with them in the middle of the night, breaking mirrors and bottles and once, even a window. Then I’d flee their places to live with friends or my poor dad in Jersey City, but I’d always end up returning to them, drinking too much, having wild, sweaty sex in poorly air-conditioned studios as we’d take back everything we said and affirm how much we loved each other. Sometimes we’d even scrape together whatever money we had to take desperate vacations upstate to try to get away from it all when we were just trying to get away from each other. But then we’d come back defeated, starting the cycle all over again. On top of that, I kept bartending and auditioning and occasionally even acting, and when I thought about that lost decade after it was over, I wondered if those late-night glass-breaking sessions would have been better spent getting a bit of sleep, or even nursing a cute little baby. That was what I wanted when Yuri and I got together after my father died, well, maybe not the baby part, but just a bit of rest, and if the baby was a necessary component of that necessary peace, then so be it, I guess.

  There was just one problem.

  I never thought Talia’s arrival would solve my issues, but I thought at least there would be some indescribable bond the second she emerged, something wild and instinctive I couldn’t explain, not even to my husband. But she arrived after a disappointingly short natural birth and, well, when I held her in my arms, she was a pink, hairless, rat-faced little gremlin with enormous ears that made her look like a lost little space alien, her face angry right away, as if asking me, Why did you push me out—into this? Who could blame her for feeling that way? And who was I, her orphan mom, to give her an answer? The weeks wore on and moony-eyed Yuri and my too-old-to-really-help-out in-laws from Boston and various theater and bartending friends came over to coo at her, while all I could feel was exhausted from round-the-clock waking and holding the girl to my cracked and bloody nipples. I kept waiting for it, that feeling I had heard about, a crazy exhausted ecstasy that when described by other moms sounded like a good night onstage, when nothing else mattered, when I might as well have melted into the stage lights and exploded like a star.

  But even now, three months after her arrival, after the so-called fourth trimester has passed, when I hold Tally to my breast, I only feel like Momland, population two, is the loneliest place in the world. Like Yuri and our friends and everyone who reacts to my desperate Facebook and Instagram posts about how full my heart is are the normal ones and I’m the fucking space alien. Yuri just thinks I’m tired. He doesn’t know I’m waiting for my soul to be filled.

  When I return with Tally, the boys are doing their thing, Stas telling Yuri that Tally was a babe magnet when he took her to the park.

  Yuri: “Pick any of the ladies up?”

  Stas: “Of course. I invited my top three prospects up for dinner, I hope you don’t mind.”

  Yuri: “How will you choose between them?”

  Stas: “Who says I have to choose?”

  “You never learn, do you?” Yuri says. He only speaks this way to Stas, while being so proper with me and the rest of the world. I wish he knew I actually wanted him to let loose a little more with me too. But we hardly have time to joke around anymore because we’re too busy tracking the last time Tally was changed or napped or spit up everywhere. Now he cleans the litterbox and gets the trash together and he and Stas grab the trash and take off to get groceries and run a bunch of other errands.

  I’m alone with a whimpering Tally in my arms, and I try to rock her with one hand while checking my Insta with my other and I see I’ve gotten a few dozen more likes on my audition post, even from the Borsch Babies, and feel a little better about showing up there at all. After I prop Tally up on my lap and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to her and shake a rattle around for a while, feeling my remaining brain cells ooze out my ears, the sweet girl looks sleepy, so I take her to her crib and lower her down and by a miracle she actually settles down after a little while, just like Baba said she would. I curl up on the couch next to Sharik, resting my head near his haunches, and try to do the same, but I can’t, all I can do is wonder what Mama would think of me now, if she would judge me or praise me for auditioning when I’m at the end of my rope.

  * * *

  —

  A few months after Mama began chemo, I woke up in the middle of the night to this beautiful singing. I thought I was still dreaming, or that Papa was listening to Pugacheva or something, but it was four in the morning, so I went downstairs to investigate. We lived in a cramped condo but it had this big wooden patio that faced the woods where Mama liked to sit with her morning coffee. And that was where I found her, bald as a gosling in her bathrobe, with the sliding glass door open. It was a fall night, and pretty cold, and I wanted to throw a blanket over her like she always did to me, to tell her she would catch cold, or to beg her to go back to sleep—the chemo had exhausted her—but for some reason, I just stood there. She was singing a song I had heard before, one of the Soviet ballads Papa would play on his record player during their occasional date nights, filled with longing and darkness, a song by Lev Mishkin from his album Heartsongs for the Drowned, a song I had seen her rocking her head to but never, ever singing. But there it was:

  My heart bleeds for you, darling

  Rivers of the blackest blood

  It bleeds so sweetly, my darling

  The world is a wild, mad flood

  My heart is torn open for you, darling

  My flesh has been chewed right through

  My body has been ravaged for you, darling

  My soul is mangled, ancient, and blue

  But I don’t care because I want you, you, you

  The only thing I want is you

  You, you, you, darling

  The only thing I need is you.

  I knew it was something I wasn’t supposed to see, like the time I walked into my parents’ room when I was in elementary school and understood that they were having sex, that the strange grunting and sweating shadowy shapes belonged, crazily, to my parents, so there I was, unable to turn around, but knowing I couldn’t announce myself, until I slowly backed away. My relationship with my mother hadn’t exactly been healed by all the chemo and in fact had gotten steadily worse since earlier in the fall, when I sat my parents down and explained that I would not be applying to colleges, that I would move to the city to be an actress after my senior year was over. Papa was upset but not surprised and didn’t put up much of a fight, but Mama had been livid. “Are you trying to kill me even faster?” she had said. “You’re not thinking clearly. Life is long, child, or at least it should be, for most. You can go to school and try this actress business on the side, but do not bank your life on it.” “But I know what I want,” I said to her. “I don’t want to spend all day in pointless classes.” She didn’t speak to me for a week after that.

  So there I was, listening to my mother sing in this gorgeous voice filled with dark passion and love. I had never heard my mom sing a single note before. Even on lame family vacations when I was a kid, sometimes Papa and I would sing to the Beatles or whatever he put on, and Papa was terrible and knew it, and I was just slightly above average, but Mama would sit in the passenger seat with this pained little smile on her face, which I thought was just because we were not very good at singing, but then I saw it might have been more complicated.

  I moved forward, toward my mother, without even realizing it was happening. It was breezy out and Mama’s robe and the trees in front of us were rustling. If she still had her long flowing hair, it would have danced in the wind. Mama turned around
, looking absolutely horrified, far worse than I imagine she would have looked if she knew I caught her and my dad fucking when I was a kid. Her eyes were wild and she looked absolutely mad but also beautiful in her white robe, her head completely bare and her eyes black and slick and her collarbone sticking out in a not-unstunning way, my mother even when she was dying.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I didn’t know you could sing.”

  “Go to sleep, darling. You were just dreaming.”

  “I heard you—”

  “You are mistaken. Go back to your room. You have school tomorrow.”

  “But it sounded beautiful,” I said. “I didn’t know—”

  She grabbed my wrist, hard, and looked like I had let her down worse than I ever had with all the boys or the drinking and skipping school or even the whole no-college thing, all of it, as if it had somehow snowballed into this one moment on the patio, when I was pretty sure that I hadn’t done anything wrong, for once. If anything, I was trying to be nice and get to know my mother before it was too late.

  “You didn’t hear a thing. Now, leave me alone. I just need a bit of peace.”

  I didn’t fight her, for once. I went back inside and grabbed a blanket, but Mama looked so fragile and ghostlike on the patio that no blanket could warm her up, that it would only make her more angry and would invade her privacy even further. I had already stopped her from her beautiful singing, which seemed like the worst crime of all, and I knew then, standing by the sliding door with a scratchy old blanket my grandmother had brought from Kiev, that Mama was not long for this world, that she had one foot out of it already.

  I was right. Though I thought maybe if I could bargain with God, not that I believed in that kind of thing, if I promised to be a good girl and stopped driving down the Shore with older boys in the middle of the night, if I stopped popping the Xanax I got under the bleachers after school in exchange for blow jobs, if I ate my dinner and didn’t skip class and even got B-pluses in English and history classes and even Spanish, and forced myself to apply to college and tough it out for four fucking years, then maybe God would let Mama live. Of course the big joke was that, for once, I was acting like the good daughter Mama had always wanted, but it was too late.

  She hardly noticed that I went to school and stopped talking to boys and wearing the short shorts and tanks with exposed bra straps that had gotten me sent to the nurse to change into my gym clothes on a weekly basis. She barely cared that I even filled out applications to Rutgers and NYU and Marymount though I made a point of doing them at the kitchen table, but none of it did any good. Mama quit chemo after Thanksgiving and died, fittingly, just before the New Year, which had been her favorite holiday, the only time she got dressed up and festive and hung out with the other Russians, sometimes even hosted them, and stayed up drinking and laughing until the sun came up, but no, not that year, which me and my poor father had to face on our own.

  * * *

  —

  The hopeful trill of Skype from my laptop wakes me from the thin sleep I managed to get after I stopped thinking about Mama. I check the clock and see I’m half an hour late for our meeting and Baba has grown impatient. I run a hand through my hair before I answer, trying to look marginally presentable, to brush away any lingering thoughts of my mother for the moment.

  It’s already evening in Kiev, and the kitchen lamp shines over my grandmother’s long silver braid. As long as I have known her, she has kept her face plain and put on the same pearl earrings, but I have always found her long braid extravagant. Though my grandfather was one of the most well-known and wealthy men in Ukraine, she doesn’t act like it: she insists on public transportation, refuses help around the house, and wears the plainest clothes. And she wants me to be the same way, which is why she doesn’t spoil me and hasn’t even floated the idea of giving me a cent of the profits she’ll get from selling her furniture, though she’s been this way for so long that I’m not mad about it, most of the time anyway. I’m just happy for her company.

  “You look exhausted,” she says, peering at me.

  “That’s because I am.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Where’s the girl?” she asks triumphantly.

  “Sleeping in her crib, as a matter of fact.”

  “Your grandmother knows best, doesn’t she?”

  “On occasion,” I say, and I even have it in me to laugh a little.

  I miss her so fucking much, right then. Her firm hugs, her unshakable confidence. How she always made me feel like everything was going to be just fine, that I was getting all worked up over nothing. I haven’t seen her in real life since last summer, when I visited her and Grandpa in Kiev just before I got pregnant. When Grandpa died, I was too far along to visit and help out. Which was devastating, because he had been so good to me, in his way. Since I was Antigone in seventh grade, a pretty morbid role for a kid, Papa made a habit of filming me performing and sending the tape to my grandparents. My grandmother would tell me I was stunning, but Grandpa would give constructive feedback in the short letters he sent me: You overdid the theatrics at the beginning. But it was the opposite problem later on, child, I hardly felt your love for your dead brother, you were like a cold fish, he wrote. This progressed all the way to the last thing I did, my three seasons on Seeing Things. You didn’t pause for long enough when you discovered that the coroner was the murderer. You needed to let it sink in. And later, you lingered too long when you were making a joke. It’s all in the timing, dear, he had written. “Thank you for the advice,” I would tell him over the phone. “I’ll think about it next time.” “What else is a grandfather for?” he would say with a chuckle. I was not offended; Papa said I was perfect and so did Baba, and Yuri didn’t really have a critical eye, and I appreciated it. He was passionless when he said it, like he was just examining a model of a bridge for defectiveness, and I could see why he was so good at his job. And the thing was, he was usually right. He could see things clearly. Which made me wonder, sometimes, if he knew about how much I drank or the losers I dated, or how hard I fought with Mama, or even about my grandmother’s seaside flings; how could he not?

  My poor grandfather. He was stern but innocent, and I loved him like crazy, though I know Baba did, too, in her own way. It killed me that I couldn’t help Baba bury him, that though she had a bunch of Institute lackeys arrange the whole thing, I could not be there to comfort her.

  And now I’m the one who needs comforting. Though she keeps telling me she’s too old to travel, I think I can wear her down. “If you visit us, you can see Talia firsthand,” I try.

  My grandmother snorts. “And do what with her, discuss economic affairs?”

  “Don’t you want to see your family?”

  “Foolish girl,” she says. “I’m seeing you right now.”

  “It’s not the same and you know it,” I say, my voice cracking.

  “You poor thing,” my grandmother says, and this makes me choke up, because there’s nothing I hate more than pity, and because she’s the one who is all alone, not me, though anytime I ask her how she’s doing she just says, fine, fine. She moves closer to the screen, like she’s inspecting my pores.

  “Do you remember that rickety old wooden bridge in Mariinsky Park, the one overlooking the ravine?”

  “Of course,” I say, unsure of where this is going.

  “When your father was a baby, I would take him for a stroll there almost every morning. I would look down and oh! It was such a welcoming abyss. I wanted to throw myself off every time for the first two years at least.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “One of those mornings, as I was standing on that damn bridge, we got caught in a thunderstorm and I had to push the stroller home like a maniac. And I thought, Well, the gods should take me now. I am ready to go—I can’t go on anyway. But I saw your father and his
needy, shriveled-up face in the stroller, and I thought, No, no, they can’t have me, this boy would be lost without me, I guess I’d better just go on and live.”

  “Did Grandpa know you felt that way?”

  “Every woman feels that way!”

  “I think some feel better than others,” I say, though I don’t feel better than that, not at all. But I don’t have a large sample size or know a ton of moms except my friend Stephanie, who seems to be doing just fine, though she’s rich now and that can’t hurt, though she’s always been the kind of person who doesn’t get wet when it rains, nothing can bring the girl down. But I don’t want to dwell on this shit any longer. I want to hear my grandmother’s story, even if I’m not sure why I’m so desperate for it right now, why I finally got tired of doing my hair next to my ancient photograph of my great-great-grandmother without really knowing why she ended her own life.

  “Anyway—” I say.

  “Of course. Where were we?”

  I smile. My grandmother is just faking it. She knows exactly where she left off, but she wants to build up the drama.

  “You were leaving Kiev at last,” I tell her anyway.

  “Indeed,” she says, but she seems distracted, giving me this odd little smile.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all. For a moment there—it was the strangest thing. You looked exactly like my sister.”

  PART II

  Sinister Sister

  Larissa

  My family stood in our courtyard in the early morning with our suitcases, waiting for the Orlovs’ car to take us to the station while my sister scurried around like a maniac, trying to summon her beloved stray cat, Timofey. The night before, she cried madly when parting with the three vapid indistinguishable brunette friends I called “the three Annas,” had a prolonged goodbye with Stella and Ella, the mother and daughter who lived in the room to our left and put makeup on her face when Mama wasn’t looking, wept when saying farewell to our groundskeeper, Maxim, and she even shed a tear when Aunt Mila and Uncle Igor Chernak, the cranky retired engineers in the room to our right, gave us marmalades as a parting gift. Minutes earlier, my sister put a hand to her heart when the Kostelbaums, the Jewish family with six children who only communicated with us by pounding on the ceiling with a broom when we were too loud, pounded on it one last time as we left, this time in valediction. But these goodbyes were not enough for Polina. She would not feel complete if she did not see her mangy black cat, a foul creature who regularly stalked our balcony in hopes of her lavishing him with love and milk. Like many of the world’s common fools, Polya had a soft spot for animals, though she could hardly be bothered to be polite to her own sister.