I listen from the kitchen, while scraping the salad remains off the sides of the bowl.
As the call progresses, CUNY becomes NYU, the linguistic department becomes medical school, and my receptionist service at the urologist’s becomes my medical work. When she sees me look over at her, my mother throws me a defiant look.
I know, I agree. If I were worthier, she wouldn’t have had to lie.
She ends the call, with “I see,” followed by “Yes, please, if you hear anything.” The receiver falls onto the base with a helpless clunk.
Then she walks into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of currant juice. Don’t pity me, she seems to be saying, while slurping the red liquid. It’s not me who has just been rejected, it’s you. I dated enough in my time. I found a man to marry. Her black mascara melts together with tears and runs in tiny twisted streams down her cheeks.
At times I want to shrink so I can hug my mother’s knees, press my face against her warm thighs, and cry with her, wetting the saucer-size daisies and poppies on her skirt.
At other times (increasingly often lately) I want to walk up and shove her, making her spill the juice all over her sweaty neck and her stupid flowery dress.
Instead, I rise from my chair, dump the bowl into the sink, and leave the kitchen.
A BOYFRIEND had been prescribed by a psychologist we consulted after my father’s first few months on the couch.
“There is a pattern,” Aunt Masha told my mother shortly before that. “They lose their jobs, then they take to spending their days on the couch, and then a woman turns up. How? When? you ask yourself. He barely even left the couch!”
It was my uncle Boris who’d first suggested the idea of emigrating. “A scientist of Mikhail’s stature will never be properly appreciated in Russia,” he said.
I wanted to ask if Cousin Violetta had learned how to ski. The last I heard about her was that she had moved to Aspen and was living with a ski instructor. “The snow in Aspen is as soft as a feather bed and as sweet as cotton candy,” she wrote me once. She hadn’t written or answered my calls since then.
YOUR HUSBAND and father can’t handle the pressure,” the psychologist explained. He spoke to my mother and me because my father had stormed out of his office, refusing to be treated like a madman.
“He yearns to be relieved, but in a subtle, not humiliating, way. It usually works better if he is relieved by a male child, but sometimes it helps when a daughter marries, thus finding a man who will figuratively replace her father.”
The idea filled my mother with almost religious fervor. “When Tanya finds a boyfriend,” she would start frequently, often out of nowhere. “When Tanya finds a boyfriend” signified a wonderful future, when all wishes would come true and all problems dissolve before they even developed. Not only would the boyfriend “relieve” my father, he would also explain to us all the mysterious letters we got from banks, doctors, and gas and electric companies. He would help us move to a bigger, nicer place. “Closer to a subway stop. On the other hand, no. It’s too noisy if you live near the subway.” The boyfriend, who would of course own a quiet, roomy car like the one we used to have in Russia, would take us upstate to pick mushrooms and blueberries. “Do you think he’ll like my mushroom dumplings?” my mother would ask, seeing a shadow of concern on my face.
The only problem was that the wonderful future refused to come.
By the end of our first year in America I’d met only four men who were willing to date me — one at school, the others on the subway — none of them Russian, and none of them even remotely close to the idea of an omnipotent boyfriend. I’d slept with one of them, an Armenian dancer with lips the color of plums and equally firm and smooth. I didn’t mention that to my mother.
Around June 1, my mother fished her notebook out of the drawer and planted herself by the telephone. She’d decided to take the business into her own hands.
THE PHONE CALLS from potential boyfriends were rare but consistent. Some weird intuition helped me to distinguish them from other calls by the sharp mocking sound the telephone made.
The receiver felt damp and warm, vibrating with the voice of a strange man trapped inside. The voice is wrong — either too squeaky, too nasal, or too coarse. It is the voice of a man who doesn’t want me, who called me because he wanted somebody, anybody — though not me — or simply because his mother made him do it.
Later, on the date, the man casually looked at his toes, but at the same time he discreetly scrutinized me, estimating the size of my breasts, the shape of the legs concealed by my slacks, trying to guess what I would and wouldn’t do, trying to guess what was wrong with me (I’d agreed to a blind date, there must be something wrong), searching for flaws, finding them, finding the ones I’d been afraid that he’d find, finding ones I hadn’t even known about.
“What is your car’s make?” I asked him repeatedly, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
It’s not true that I was not trying, as my mother said. I was trying. I arched my back, I tossed my hair, I licked my lips and crossed my legs in a modest yet seducing way. I nodded sympathetically when he talked, I laughed when he told a joke, I smiled when his shoulders brushed against mine. It didn’t help. From the very beginning I knew that eventually I’d fail. Sooner or later the disgust, the humiliation would erupt, and I would end up saying something insulting or indecent, or simply laughing like crazy, kicking with my knees and wiping the tears from my eyes, as I did when my date burped during our dinner.
“You think you’re something, don’t you?” he had hissed, before adding that he’d never ever ask me out again. “You think you’re something!”
I wish I thought that.
AND THEN, all of a sudden, I found a boyfriend. By myself. On a subway train.
It happened on a rainy day at the end of October. A man squeezed into the crowded subway car and brushed against my shoulder with his wet umbrella. I shivered. He said, “Excuse me,” walked across the car to the opposite door, and pulled a book out of his shoulder bag.
His clothes were baggy and poorly matched. He looked about six foot two, with a broad body that swayed awkwardly when the train was moving. He kept looking at me from above his book. He liked me for no apparent reason.
After 23rd Street, he stepped forward and grasped a handle above my head. “Do you speak Russian?” he asked.
I said that I did.
He smiled.
That was it.
IT’S DECEMBER and it’s snowing outside. I open the door, shaking specks of snow off my knitted hat. He is here. There are his heavy boots, drying on the newspaper in the corner. He visits often. Sometimes he comes before me, sometimes he even comes while I’m at work, and then it’s not his shoes but only his wet dark-brown footprints that mark the newspaper on the floor.
“Vadim apologized that he didn’t wait for you. He had some errands,” my mother yells from the kitchen. Not only has Vadim acquired his own mug and his own chair, there is Vadim’s place at the table (by the refrigerator).
The psychologist’s prescription has worked. My father’s constant lying position became a sitting one — sitting at the computer, after Vadim introduced him to the Internet. He is sending e-mails to mathematicians all over the world, exchanging problems, questions, and even some obscure mathematician jokes.
It is his slouched back that I see now upon coming home. “I’ve got thirteen e-mails today!” he announces, half turning from his desk and pushing up his glasses. He reads and welcomes everything that comes to his mailbox, from breast-enlargement ads to tax-deduction advice.