by Ellen Litman
“You made them?” Kat asks.
“No, silly, just a woman from my floor.” Every floor of every hospital has a master weaver of this kind.
Kat spies Valentina unwrapping her presents, coming at last to the apron with the rooster appliqué. She looks at it. She doesn’t try it on or gush the way she would have in the past. “Thank you,” she says flatly. “Much obliged.” She folds it and puts it aside like it’s nothing.
They clean the table and prepare for the night. The Roshdals take over Kat’s bedroom. Misha and Kat camp out beside Anechka’s bed.
In the kitchen, while no one is looking, Kat sneaks two more glasses of champagne. Here’s to the new year. Here’s to new happiness. She shrugs and puts away her glass. Never before has she been this unhappy.
IT IS a sunny, oddly quiet morning, so quiet that at first Kat thinks everyone is still asleep. Then she sees that Misha’s mattress is gone and Anechka is sitting up in bed, drinking tea.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven. Your dad’s gone to Kuzminki.”
“And the Roshdals?”
“Packed up and gone home before dawn. Wouldn’t even have breakfast.”
“Already?” Kat says. “So early?”
“I told them, stay a while, but no, it’s the usual: Valya wants to go home. Must do what Valya wants.”
“Was she cross? Did she say anything?”
“It’s just the way she is, Kat. God forbid she doesn’t get Dad’s full attention. It’s better without her, really. Even the air’s better, don’t you think?”
Kat breathes in slowly, deeply. She doesn’t know about the air (it seems the same), but she is definitely starting to feel better. Like a criminal who’s fled punishment, a fugitive who’s reached a distant shore. Guilty, and yet undeniably better.
13
NO ONE AT SCHOOL KNOWS THE TRUTH ABOUT Anechka. A burst appendix is what everyone is told. No one mentions the play anymore. First, the costumes had to be returned. The playbill, already outdated, came down a week later. “Some people take on more than they can handle,” said Margo.
But other teachers are compassionate. “How’s your mom?” they ask when they spot Kat in the corridors. So-so, she says, and makes the sort of face that wards off further questions: So-so. Not great. As weeks go by, the teachers seem to get a little more impatient. It’s just a burst appendix, for God’s sake. How long does it take to recover from that?
And the girls—Anechka’s girls—they flutter with concern. They seek Kat out constantly, pass her their folded notes for Anechka. A smiley face scribbled in blue fountain pen. A paper rose. They tell her again and again how lucky she is to have such a marvelous mother, how solemnly and gently Kat must attend to her.
And what can she say in return? They’ll never believe it, or understand, this picture of morose, resentful Anechka, who either sleeps or smokes into the ventilation window and calls Kat a snoop when she walks in on her by accident.
“Is something wrong?” Kat asks on weekends, when she’s home, and what she means is: Are you bleeding or hurting? Or do you simply want a glass of water? A cup of bouillon?
“You’re such an obtuse girl,” says Anechka. And when she looks at Kat her eyes are scornful, as if she can’t accept that this dull, hapless creature is her daughter.
She has been cleared by the doctors to return to work. Except, it seems, she doesn’t want to. She says she can’t take being there, among those people, those walls. She finds other doctors who write her the notes she wants. She’s got migraines and fibroids, according to these notes. She’s anemic. She’s bleeding internally. It can’t go on like this, Misha warns her. She might lose her job. She says it doesn’t matter. The loss, she says. “My loss.” They can’t begin to comprehend it.
Misha’s been trying to cover her classes. He puts up page numbers on the board, which even the most diligent pupils are happy to ignore. Sometimes he tries to cram them in together with his classes. Mostly he assigns a lot of papers, which he later forgets to collect. “The Person Most Dear to Me.” “How I Spent my Winter Holidays.” Five handwritten pages on the tragedy and spiritual beauty in Turgenev’s “Bezhin Lea.” Anyone can see it’s not working. Misha is floundering under the load of grading, while Anechka stays desolate and absent, sleepwalking through her vacant afternoons.
“She needs more time,” he says.
Kat isn’t so sure. “Her doctors say she’s on the mend.”
“Doctors can’t see into your soul. She might seem stronger on the outside, but you and I both know that inside she’s still in pieces. Sad little pieces barely glued together.”
So maybe it’s true and Anechka just isn’t ready. Kat misses seeing her at school. At home on weekends, Anechka is withdrawn and indifferent. Nothing helps. Not the cups of tea Kat brews, not the messages she brings from school. Anechka hardly reads them. She refuses to come to the phone, so much so that Sveta Vlasenko stops calling altogether. Soon they will all move on. They have regional exams, Komsomol seminars. Those who are graduating have college entrance to prepare for. Some are even seeing tutors, mostly in math, but increasingly in Russian literature and grammar, too. With no Anechka around, they’re forced to seek help elsewhere.
THE FIRST substitute appears in the second week of February and lasts three days exactly. She’s the school librarian. Incompetent, Kat is happy to report. The gaggle mocks her openly. She speaks softly, too softly to withstand their banter. She confuses participles with gerunds, makes two punctuation errors while writing on the board, and when at the end of the week Kat recounts these missteps for Anechka and Anechka, surprisingly, comes out of her stupor and puts through one well-timed phone call, the poor librarian is history.
“Good girl,” says Anechka, and sends Kat to buy them ice cream from the neighborhood kiosk.
Kat mimics the addled librarian: her panicky demeanor, her stuttering, her halting walk. She knows she shouldn’t. It’s cruel and unseemly. But then she is rewarded by Anechka’s laughter—the first real laughter, it seems, since her collapse. “You’re such a goof,” Anechka says, and hugs her.
“Isn’t this a bit extreme?” says Misha, when he catches the two of them whooping it up.
Anechka says, “I’m only looking out for my children.”
Yes, but must she be so gleeful? Misha shrugs and departs, lest his concern dampen Anechka’s sudden high spirits. It’s not wrong to care for one’s pupils, and if she cares so much, perhaps she will at last return to teaching.
The next substitute is not unknown to 7A. She is one of their former class matrons, a prim and gently aging woman, who favors ruffled blouses and black knee-length skirts. She is well schooled in the material, and if she makes mistakes, they are not easily discernible. Still, there are strands of old resentment between her and 7A. You can see her tense up when she walks into the classroom—stiffening her shoulders, flexing her spine, anticipating discipline problems. No one is surprised when she resigns.
“That was too easy,” complains Anechka, and Kat, not a fighter by nature, chimes in. The two of them need a good challenge. They snuggle on the sofa and watch Under 16 and Older on TV, and Kat must be careful not to jostle Anechka, who is still sore in the stomach area where her stitches used to be. She’s always been a little fragile.
THE THIRD substitute is nobody they know. She comes from outside, a lusty and bouncy young woman with fleshy arms and shoulders and healthy pink skin. Her name is Anjelika Semyonovna. Lika, for short. She actually insists they call her Lika.
“Howdy, people,” she says upon meeting them, and 7A notes it—they are not as stupid as they seem—this too-informal greeting. She perches on Anechka’s desk—which isn’t such a bright idea, given her minuscule skirt. That’s how she dresses for work: tiny skirts, floppy tops, white stockings, slip-on clogs. Plastic clip-on earrings and lots of plastic bangles, because, she tells them, she’s allergic to gold. “How freaking unlucky is that?”
“So,” she says
. “Anyway. What are you into?” And for the next twenty minutes they talk about what’s on TV and the music they listen to. “Disco’s so over,” she tells them and rolls her eyes a little. “Get with the program, people. The future is punk rock.” She has a bootleg of something called the Sex Pistols, which she promises will blow their little heads off.
The gaggle is in love. It’s pathetic, really. Give them anything trashy and sparkly, and finito—they’re yours.
“And did she teach at all?” says Anechka when Kat calls with the news.
Oh yes, Kat sighs. She taught. They did a chapter on isolated appositions.
“Lika,” Anechka says slowly, as if tasting the word. Lee-kaa. A challenge? Possibly. Though she doesn’t seem concerned.
“You’ve seen this Lika?” she asks Misha next weekend.
He says he has, in passing.
“And?” Anechka prompts him. She wants to know what he thought.
“Seems like a normal person.”
“Ah!” she says. “A normal person. That’s very observant of you, Misha.” She winks at Kat, which means the game is on. They’d better watch out, because, unlike the other substitutes, this Lika might be treacherous.
LIKA, LIKA, LIKA . . . She’s the talk of the school, the toast of their class. She is studied, dissected, from her bottle-bleached hair to her loose, ample breasts. Kat finds her lacking, actually. She’s got none of Anechka’s loveliness, none of her languid charm. She’s not even intelligent.
And yet Lika has found her admirers. Never mind that it’s just the gaggle—Shrew, Snake, Little Hog. They cluster around her desk after class, try on her plastic bangles. On Wednesday, when Lika walks 7A to lunch, they squabble over who gets to sit by her.
Jules doesn’t mind Lika either. People like Lika apparently excite her—bold, loud, brash, with studs and fingerless gloves and big, tousled rock-and-roll hair.
Kat tells her Lika is tawdry.
Jules says, “Don’t be a prude. I think she’s kind of cool.”
“She’s buying us off with her salacious anecdotes.”
“Salacious?” repeats Jules. “She’s just being open.”
“Nobody asked her to be open. She’s not a door. She’s supposed to teach, not spice up the material with her”—Kat wants to say “exploits,” but she sticks with a safer word—“her stories.”
“Your mom tells stories too.”
But not like this! Never like this! Anechka’s stories are appropriate. They are about prose writers and poets of the past, those flaming and gullible souls who suffered under censorship and perished in duels and purges.
Lika, on the contrary, likes to get personal: She’s married. Her husband is a rocker, which means either he rides motorcycles or he plays rock and roll. They don’t have any children. Lika has a heart murmur and a weird skin condition that can be really gross. She likes sex, and her favorite things in the world are marijuana and chocolate.
Chocolate and what? Even the gaggle is appalled. They know about marijuana from Margo. She tells them it fries your brain slowly until you are mentally warped, and the damage is irreversible.
“Baloney,” says Lika. “I’ve smoked tons of pot, and as you can see, my brain is perfect.”
“That’s up for debate,” Kat says under her breath.
“There are lots of drugs out there,” Lika continues. “And I’ve tried most of them. And yeah, some of them can be dangerous.” She tells them a long-drawn-out story about heroin addiction among teenagers in her neighborhood: how she and her husband tried to rescue them, how they almost got hurt. She could have been murdered, she says. Honest to God. 7A gapes at her, tries to imagine a pale, murdered Lika, a slash across her throat, her stockings torn.
Class is nearly over, and they’ve done nothing even remotely resembling literature.
“BE HONEST,” Kat says. “Do you like her?”
She and Mironov are in the drama room, ostensibly studying, in reality just wasting time. This quarter they’re feeling less pressure. No one is calling for Mironov’s expulsion. The faculty is taken up with new concerns. Rumor has it that the new history teacher is having an affair, and their young and much-beloved geography teacher has been seen leaving the school arm in arm with the head of orthopedics.
On these matters, Kat’s feeling is, whatever. Who cares what the teachers do in their free time? What gets her, she insists, is the hogwash people like Lika spew in class, in lieu of real education.
“What do you think of her?” she asks Mironov.
“A normal broad, maybe a little cracked—like half of them around here.”
To Kat this doesn’t seem enough. “Is that the extent of your thoughtful assessment?”
“What the hell more do you want from me, Kat? You want another fight?”
“You’ve figured it out! At last! You’re such a clever boy.”
“Uh-huh.” He grins. “Keep waiting.”
But he’s right, she is spoiling for something. In Lika’s presence she behaves appallingly—snorts at her lectures, rolls her eyes, pretends not to hear her questions.
“You really don’t like me very much,” says Lika, and Kat says, “Do I have to?”
Lika has asked her to stay after class.
“I’ve heard good things about you from the other teachers. They say you’re a serious student, intelligent, diligent, willing to help a friend.”
“I take it you don’t share their enthusiasm.”
“I’m a substitute, I’m not your enemy. And I’m not here to replace your mom.”
“I know,” Kat says, and what she means is, You never could replace her.
“Though to be honest, I do enjoy this place. Your class, especially. The girls here, there’s something true about them. I feel they understand me.”
“So you want to stay, is what you’re saying?”
“And that to you is unacceptable? What are you so afraid of, Katya?”
“Kat,” she corrects her. Everyone knows her name is Kat.
“They don’t like you, your classmates?”
Kat shrugs. “I have my friends.”
“Do you? I’m glad to hear that. You strike me as a lonely person.”
“You’re wrong,” Kat says. “You’ve been misled.”
But she fumes for the rest of the day. They don’t like her, it’s true. They never liked her, even before her parents joined the school. She couldn’t understand what caused it. Misha blamed it on the gaggle’s jealousy. Anechka thought it was because Kat was a Jew. And maybe Anechka was right. Just like her parents, Kat belonged to a different stratum—distrusted, criticized, restricted, treated like a second-class citizen. They were second-class citizens, some of her teachers pointed out. People like them became refuseniks, emigrated, traded their motherland for better realms. There was something unclean about them. They cared too much about money, the common wisdom went. Maybe that was what Lika was implying?
“She’s trying to manipulate me.”
“Or maybe,” Jules says, “she’s just trying to help.”
“Don’t be naive,” Kat says, wishing she hadn’t mentioned the encounter. What did she expect, anyway? From Jules of all people—Jules with her privileged background.
Jules goes off to brush her teeth before nap. When she returns, she’s frowning.
“Honestly, Kat, it’s getting tiresome. You think the school is full of enemies. Maybe the reason is your parents, or maybe you’re paranoid and basically unhappy, and Lika’s got it right.”
“Lika the oracle,” Kat sneers.
“There you go again, being snide.”
“Don’t you see what we’re up against?”
“I don’t,” Jules says. “Perhaps you can explain it. You act as if your parents are some kind of heroes, saving the innocent and bringing truth to the world. Frankly, I never got it. They’re putting on these little spectacles, tributes to Pushkin and other bagatelles. And that’s supposed to be subversive?”
“There’re pa
rallels,” Kat says. “Internal messages.”
“Well, I don’t get them.”
“You wouldn’t,” Kat says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jules says.
“Nothing.” Kat tries to backpedal. “You didn’t even come to the rehearsals.”
But Jules is too clever to be fooled. “Go to hell,” she tells Kat. “Go home to your precious parents.”
ANECHKA SAYS, “I think we have her,” and for a moment she looks like the head of a gang of brigands, presiding around a fire, dressed in furs and rags. In fact, she’s in the kitchen, picking at a pomegranate. There’s a large kitchen towel spread across her lap. Her fingertips are stained, her lips scraped raw from the pomegranate pulp. She’s been eating a lot of them lately; she says they’re good for the blood. Red cells or white cells, something is always off-balance.
There is a lengthy pause, and Kat knows not to interrupt her. It’s obvious she is spawning a strategy, pitting advantages against drawbacks, counting pluses and minuses. Can they defeat Lika? You bet they can!
It’s taken a substitute to rouse Anechka, but what a brilliant and furious awakening it’s been. She’s radiant. Kat comes home from school on Saturday and Anechka is not in her nightgown anymore. She’s put on a sweater and jeans and even a bit of blue eye shadow. She pats the sofa next to her—“Come sit!”—and Kat, who’s just walked in the door, joins her eagerly, not bothering to change her clothes or use the toilet or get a bite to eat. “Okay,” Anechka says, “begin.” She loves Kat’s reports. She waits for them, devours her every word. Her face goes blotchy with excitement. Not entirely healthy, of course, but still, what a difference from the glum, surly, couch-bound form she was only weeks ago. When Kat is done, she asks her if she’s hungry, and sometimes there’s supper, and other times it’s tea and bread with cheese. Later they might talk some more, perhaps about a new article in Ogonek—the cult of cruelty among teenagers, the latest exposé of Stalin and his cult of personality. Or they might stay up late to watch new shows on TV.