by Irina Reyn
“How are you, Aneta?”
“How lovely of you to ask. Funny that I haven’t received any phone calls from you after I was pulled off the Grisha job.”
Never has the word “lovely” emerged so poisonously from anyone’s mouth. For a few beats, they stood there while Brezhneva mercifully sang over them.
Nadia tried again. “Family doing well? How’s your niece liking America?”
“So your Jewish boyfriend is dead and here you are shopping like nothing happened.”
It has been a while since she warred with Aneta and a protected place near her heart felt exposed, instantly wounded. “I am not shopping like nothing happened. He was not my boyfriend.”
“Probably not rich enough for you. I suppose you found some muzhik to take care of you, eh? I always suspected you were wily, a little something on the side.”
She did not expect to do it, to reach across the wheelchair, above the head of the frail dozing lady, and push Aneta. It was meant to be nothing more than a symbolic gesture, a hollow threat. She did not expect her former colleague to lose her balance so quickly, to go careening into the row of pineapples lining a cheerful yellow display promising FROM THAILAND. At first it was satisfying to see the wobble, the leg in the air, the flailing hands of shock. To see Aneta trying to steady herself on the cardboard and come flying to the ground, pineapples, placards, and all. The dieting friends were pointing, hands across their mouths, and she saw the woman at the register run toward them, a signal that it was too late to undo whatever she just sent into motion.
“I’m so sorry,” she cried, offering her hand. “Please, Aneta, let me help you up.”
“Don’t touch me, you monster. Did everyone see that? Did anyone get photographic proof?”
Aneta was untangling her sweater from the prickly skins of pineapples. She looked entirely unharmed, not that this would stop her from trying to extract a letter from some quack of a local doctor who would testify to a sprained back. Nadia really did have the worst luck.
“What the hell’s going on?” A man joined them from a set of double doors at the back wall. This manager was wearing dress pants and a tank top that hadn’t been white in years, glancing at each of them for the exact amount of time, as if implicating them all as fellow conspirators. “What happened here?”
“It was this lady, I couldn’t believe it. She seemed so normal coming in.” The register employee in the tiger print was pointing at her, a phone in her hand. Nadia burst out with excuses—her daughter was coming from Ukraine—and dashed toward the door.
“Ukrainians,” she heard the man say in his crisp Saint Petersburg Russian to the shoppers at large. “What do you expect?”
* * *
The unmarred perfection of the morning was turning humid with a gauzy slickness in the air. It was the perfect place to calm down, to regain perspective. Now that Larissa was on her way over, it felt like Aneta could pose no significant threat other than the financial. Which was not nothing, of course, but still. It was at least something she could control.
The beach was crisp and churning with refreshing wind. Brighton Beach was best in the fall and winter when all those bodies littering the beach in the high season returned to work. In the summers, she was too timid to join their ranks, all those people from the former Soviet Republics whose speech she understood too well, the black and brown people from places bewildering to her, the odd Americans planting themselves inside this beautiful orgy of foreignness. She preferred the Rockaways, where the Russians made room for you. But in the winter, she could stroll right off the boardwalk and directly onto the sand and make her way to the shoreline. From here she could imagine the approach of her daughter and the realization that the main thrust of her last seven years was dissolving. What do you fight for after your most important demands are met?
It felt good to sink inside the cold stretch of beach. To slip off her shoes and socks and bore her toes into the wet sheet of sand. A small plane created an arc across the sky, trailing an advertisement she could not understand. Now her own need to learn English would be less sharp and urgent. With the war back home deflated down to occasional sparks, the new administration revealed to be as corrupt as the old administration, empty talk about changes that will never happen, all of that would begin its slow fade. Yes, many things here would become less sharp and urgent.
She looked at her watch. Boris should be pulling up in front of her building by now, and here she was still a half hour away from her place. There was nowhere to wash off the sand and the coarse pebbly coating of it chafed her feet inside her shoes. “So live a little and take them off,” Grisha proclaimed, materializing again before her. “What are you doing wearing those ugly shoes with your elegant feet anyway? You deserve someone to take care of you for a change.”
She hurried away, running for the boardwalk. Her daughter was supposed to pass security and see her immediately on the other side of the checkpoint. She should be entirely in white, holding mangoes. Now Larissa would have to wait, wondering where her mother was, why she had failed so miserably in this historical greeting.
* * *
“We have to turn around,” she said as they screeched around the corner. She felt a thousand needles boring into her heart. “I forgot. I think I forgot my charger and my phone is almost dead. What if she’s trying to find me?”
Boris ignored her, pulling out onto the wide lanes of Ocean Avenue. “This is third time you forget something. I was here on time just like you wanted and now we are going to be seriously late.”
The car smelled of oily Chinese food, a cuisine she knew Boris enjoyed eating alone in the backseat of his car between jobs. He had recently taken to driving passengers around the city on top of his importing/exporting and other mysterious methods of employment. How could passengers tolerate this sticky smell? On her lap was a plastic bag full of mangoes and a knife. She started to wonder why mangoes had been such a priority in the first place. Well, for Larissa fruit was always a special treat; hadn’t she loved those illicit mandarins Nadia brought from the factory?
They joined the crawling cars on the highway. Before them snaked a long line of flashing red lights. The squat homes peppered into rows were witnesses to their misery. Boris impatiently jerked his foot on and off the brake. “We should have left sooner. Where did you disappear to?”
“I had a million things to do.”
“Like what?”
“You should have helped me with all the errands, you know.” She felt guilty about flinging her guilt back in his direction. This was between her and Larisska.
They slid through the mystery borough called Queens, a series of car repair shops and fast-food restaurants and cemeteries. Billboards and houses stacked next to each other. A mustard brick sameness to the architecture. If Yulia saw it, she would remind her of their night at the Kiev Opera House where even poor people could immerse themselves in opulent luxury.
The time for Larisska’s arrival came and went, and Boris was banging his palm against the wheel, jutting his foot against the brake, the horn sounding like an angry whine.
* * *
The last time she’d stood in this very same airport was upon her own arrival. She knew she’d hardly had the look of the grateful immigrant. Her clothing was disheveled, hair sticking out of her pins, wet with perspiration beneath a too warm sweater. Dragging two suitcases in each hand, one of them entirely filled with albums and useless gifts for her sister from Ukraine. Psyanka cookies she would find out later littered Brighton Beach like musty, undesirable mementos. Her sister looked shocked at her wild appearance, but tried hiding it under a stream of empty chatter. Yasha tugged her luggage across the linoleum floor. As they traversed the terminal, Olga kept blathering about how wonderful it would be here, the opportunities, why didn’t she move to Cleveland, how she bought entire gallons of blueberries at some great supermarket called Costco.
“Why is that so great? Why do you even need so many blueberries?” Nadia wonde
red. But Olga waved her away, chuckling at her naïveté. Of course they did not need the blueberries, but they ate them anyway. That was the entire point! Just the other day, she brought home an entire crate of mangoes she did not need. She bet Nadia had never even tried a single mango but in fact they were delicious.
What did she care about mangoes? Just fifteen hours before, she’d walked into her daughter’s room for the last time. Larissa was completely shrouded by her duvet cover, back turned to the door, face almost entirely pressed against the wall. Hair coiled around her neck. Even breathing, whether real or manufactured, was making her shoulders rise and fall. Nadia wanted to drop her bags right there, climb into the bed with her daughter, and tell her she would never leave without her. She wanted to curl behind her, feel the soft downy hairs of her arms, pile her head on top so they lay ear to ear. Their separation was temporary, she reminded herself. Together, they had already been on the waiting list for so long, Larissa would probably be placed on some short, expedited line. They would come together again as soon as the paperwork came through. “Laris, wake up. I have to go, you know.”
“Poka,” her daughter’s voice replied. “See you later.” It was clear, unblurred by sleep. It was a voice that was modulated toward indifference, toward causing pain.
“Larisska, get up. Say good-bye properly. What kind of farewell is this? Were you raised by wolves? Didn’t I always teach you to say good-bye properly, at the door?”
“Obviously I was raised by wolves.” Her daughter remained in position, her face more fully tucked into the crevice of her own arm.
Nadia shook that shoulder with more energy. “You are not a little girl anymore and yet you are being petulant and silly. How is this a way to behave? What about coming to the airport and seeing me off?”
“I’m working today, I told you.”
“You couldn’t switch, you couldn’t call in sick.”
“No, I couldn’t. It’s a new job, you know. Can’t make a bad impression.” Larissa finally sat up in bed and tossed off the covers. A ghostly light shimmered up the blanket toward her veiny legs, the translucent skin Nadia kept trying to expose to as much vitamin D as possible.
“All right then. Next time I see you, we will be reunited in New York.” Nadia’s pain was pressing against her side with so much force, it took all her effort to lend her words the perfect casual lilt. She bent over to hug the girl, and in response she received a tiny press of the arms, a vague feeling of obedient hands sweeping along her back.
“Fine, see you then.” I will not forgive you.
She could feel all that anguish spilling over, self-pity mingled with hopeless love and guilt and horror at what she was doing. But her child was technically an adult, and everyone assured her that what she was doing in the short term would be the best thing in the long term. The Orange Revolution had turned out to be a disappointment. Nothing changed, just a steady rotation of corruption. Ukraine was a land parceled out to rich cronies, nothing left for hardworking citizens. And how many stories had she heard, the meteoric rise in fortune of immigrants in America? It was the only story she ever heard.
So why was every step out that door so impossible? Yulia and her mother basically carried her out to the car, transported her to the airport. Her mother’s embrace could squeeze the life out of a person, full as it was of worry and a resigned grief. The plane window was misted over with morning dew, another frozen, dull day. Her sweater was barely keeping her warm here. Every few minutes during the flight, she would startle, sure she had forgotten something crucial, left a vital body part behind. All she wanted was to remain in one whole piece.
And in the airport, her sister going on and on about mangoes. How juicy they were when they were ripe, how exotic. And Nadia finally snapping, “Can’t you shut up for a minute. I don’t give a fig about mangoes.”
It would take at least a year and a half until she tasted an actual mango. A few of them were lying in a bowl on Regina’s table and it was her third week of work so she called to ask her permission to consume one. Regina sounded circumspect (was she a crook who could not be left alone?), but said, of course. At first she tried biting into it, but when that proved untenable, she scraped the skin and pared off a piece with her knife. As her sister promised, it was like nothing she’d ever tasted. It was mushy and sweet and stringy. By then she had learned to appreciate the splendor in foreign flavors, and eventually she bought a few of her own.
Now, she was the moron slapping around an airport with a bag of mangoes, inserting herself into groups of blond people that could have come from her homeland and asking each one, “Ukraine?” No, they said. Sweden or Finland or some such nonsense. How did anyone ever meet up before phones? Oh, this was not at all the greeting she envisioned. After the disorienting encounter with Aneta at NetCost, it turned out she was wearing the furthest thing from white, her black scalloped sweater and an old pair of itchy wool pants.
She squinted at the board for the flight from Kiev. It was complete chaos with drivers accosting passengers, calling out deals on drop-offs with their stenciled signs. Unclaimed bags were piled high, a security guard standing over them with a walkie-talkie. In a whirl, she passed a group of college kids, a pregnant woman dragging a suitcase across the floor, a loud family arguing about taxis. She heard “Mama,” but it was coming from an unexpected direction, from an area she had recently scanned and abandoned.
“Mama,” it said again.
The word was coming from the mouth of the very pregnant lady with the bag, and on closer inspection the pregnant lady was Larissa. “You ran right past me,” she said. She was unrecognizable even from Moscow, even from Skype. Her face full and even more freckled than before, her hair natural and blond and thick down her back. The constellations around her eyes were slightly deeper.
“Oh my dearest girl.” Larissa was pregnant? She groped for air, for some solid surface. Her first thought was diabetes, the high risks her daughter must be facing. They would have to go to the hospital at once! Her second thought was about the father, his identity. But then something else overtook her, a feeling so tender and caved in, so sweet and briny. Her daughter was going to be a mother; there was a baby cleaving to Larissa right now. She and Larissa were both mothers. She and Larissa were, like her own mother, single mothers.
“I’ve been here forever. I thought you got the dates wrong.” Larissa said this peevishly, but then noticed her mother’s scrutiny over her belly. “I know. I should have told you.”
She had remembered language, that it was made up of words. “Of course you should have told me. Why were you saving this for a surprise?”
“I don’t know. I was paranoid. That they wouldn’t take me or not let me leave. That I’d lose it. That you’d be mad.”
Larissa was not holding her gaze steady but flinging it around the terminal, toward the loud drivers barking names, the cabs pulling up outside the tinted automatic doors where Boris was circulating to avoid security. It looked to Nadia like a means to escape. She forced her brain to work, to put the baby into the proper category.
“Aren’t you going to say something? I was too scared to tell you.”
Her daughter was finally staring directly at her, a look all muddled by fear and knowledge of a parent’s wrath and the steel gate of self-protection. It would be so easy to say the words that easily presented themselves to her tongue. But her daughter was scared and angry, and she was the cause. Nadia had to select them with care.
“Are you well? Have you received good care? How’s the diabetes?”
“Glucose under control. I’ve got to take more insulin. There’s a risk of preeclampsia, they say. It will probably be a C-section, but I was prepared for that.”
Nadia remembered the mangoes. Suddenly they didn’t seem like a good idea. She hid them back in her bag.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Come here.” She stretched out her arms. Then she said something she heard all the mothers saying again and aga
in on the Brooklyn playgrounds, something not as casually woven into the Russian vocabulary. Just two years ago, she thought the sentiment vapid and too easily spoken, but now mastering it felt like the only way forward with Larisska. “I love you.”
She prepared herself for the pushing away, the rejection, or for the mealy hug of her departure. But Nadia realized that Larissa was hugging her back. Actively, shyly but with intent. She understood then in a single breathless moment: her daughter was almost thirty. She was separate from her and that would be something to get used to.
Suddenly Nadia didn’t care if the child was that terrible Slavik’s. Or even that Sergei’s, who, it was told to her secondhand, never loved her daughter but had plucked her daughter’s vinok out of the water to make the girl who looked like Yulia Tymoshenko jealous. Or if that meant that they would now have to put his name or some other name on a list and wait seven more years until the number of the father of the child came up. She supposed the baby would delay Larissa’s ability to work and Nadia would have to stay employed at Regina’s and VIP for the foreseeable future. None of those details were important now.
All that mattered was the breathing body between her arms and now, amazingly, the breathing body inside that body. It was unharmed and it had the capacity to love.
Would Nadia forget the completeness of this moment and would life once again splinter into a thousand mundane pieces of work and its ticking clock of boredom, into petty grievances and a million new bureaucratic forms and the never-ending scraping for a little bit of savings? She had no idea. It would be everyone getting to know each other again, feeling gingerly around the new, redrawn borders of their love.
As she and her daughter stepped out into the icy flat air of New York City, she craned her neck for Boris but his car was not there. She felt a mild panic at the omission, an instant mistrust. Could he have just left? Where was Boris, for God’s sake? And her phone almost depleted of its charge.