“Marochka (Verochka/Genechka), guess who this is?” my mother sings into the receiver every night. She methodically repeats the calling circle of the previous months, making sure she doesn’t miss any woman she had begged to find a boyfriend for me.
“By the way, did I mention our Tanya’s new boyfriend?…Yes, he is Russian…. A computer programmer. He’s not a Bill Gates, but he is very talented. And nice too. Very nice.”
Sometimes he slips and calls my parents Ma and Pa.
“Vadim misses his parents,” my mother notes approvingly. His parents had to stay in Moscow because of Vadim’s grandfather, who’s been bedridden for years. Vadim sends them money, adult diapers for his grandfather, and sugar-free candies for his diabetic grandmother. I know this not from Vadim but from my mother’s phone conversations.
“We’re pleased. We have nothing to complain about,” my mother tells her friends.
I have nothing to complain about either. Even the sex is good — ample and satisfying, like a hearty dinner.
I don’t know why seeing Vadim’s shoes in the corner makes me recoil.
ANIMATED VOICES invade the apartment. My father’s laughter, my mother’s murmur, and Vadim’s soft baritone buzz against a background of rhythmic knocking and banging. Have they got together to play New Age music?
I make a few steps toward the kitchen and stop, half hidden, in the niche.
They sit at the table with knives and cutting boards around the crystal bowl. They are making Salad Olivier.
“No, Pa, I’m afraid you’re wrong.” Vadim says. “It’s a different salad in A Moveable Feast, not Olivier.”
“You see! You see!” my mother charges. “What I’ve been telling you! Olivier can’t possibly be without meat.”
“Okay, but I still insist that Olivier’s name was Jacques.”
They take turns emptying their cutting boards into the bowl, then the rhythmic knocking resumes. The mechanism is working. They don’t need me. I am free to go.
I tiptoe out of the kitchen and put on my hat, still wet from the snow. The door opens with a screech; I wait a few seconds to make sure that nobody heard me. A peal of laughter reaches me from the kitchen. I throw a parting look at the warped headline under Vadim’s shoes: GOOD NEWS FOR THE DIASPORA!
The snow-covered street is cold and soft. I slowly take it in, the powdered cars, the timid light of the lampposts, the naked twigs of the cherry trees. The weak and helpless snow melts on contact with my feet. It doesn’t crunch the way it did in Russia.
I shiver as the cold gets to my toes.
Without me their perfectly tuned mechanism will stop. The gears will slow down and halt. The elements will fall apart.
They need me after all, if only as a link holding them together. I take a handful of the soft feeble snow and knead it in my palms. It melts before I am able to form a shape.
I’M HERE,” I say, on entering the kitchen. I walk to the table, push my chair closer, and pick up an egg.
Luda and Milena
MILENA HAD LARGE BLUE EYES, an elegant nose, and smooth olive skin covered with a graceful network of fine wrinkles. “Her face is a battle-field for antiaging creams,” Luda said about Milena, and added that she wouldn’t want youth that came from bottles and jars. Once, Luda brought her old photographs to show that she used to be a real beauty too. The photographs revealed an attractive woman with a sturdy hourglass figure, imposing dense brows, and bright, very dark eyes. Some people saw a striking resemblance to the young Elizabeth Taylor, but Milena didn’t. Milena said that the young Luda looked like Saddam Hussein with bigger hair and a thinner mustache.
The two women met on the first day of the free ESL class held in one of the musty back rooms of Brooklyn College. Luda was late that day. She had been babysitting her two grandchildren, and her son-in-law had failed to come home on time. Angry and flustered, Luda had to run all the way to Brooklyn College, pushing through the rush-hour subway crowd and cutting across the meat market on Nostrand Avenue, which led to the following exchange with a large woman in a pink jacket:
“Watch it, asshole!” (the woman).
“No, it is you asshole!” (Luda).
By the time Luda opened the classroom door, they had already started the introductions. “My wife and I love America; we want to show it our respect by learning to speak its language,” a short man with a shiny nose and shinier forehead was telling the class. A young woman nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. Luda guessed that she must be the teacher. Angela Waters — Angie — endji was written on the board. Luda headed toward the wall and the only empty seat, squeezing her large body between the flimsy chairs that sagged under the weight of ESL students. “I’m sorry…. Excuse me,” she said, when she brushed against somebody with the stretched-out flaps of her cardigan.
“I apologize,” she whispered to the thin, elegantly dressed older woman in the next seat. “Don’t worry,” the woman whispered back in Russian. “Actually, I was afraid they would sit some country bumpkin next to me.”
Luda was about to answer with a sympathetic smile, but the smile died in midair. Had her seatmate just expressed relief or confirmation of her fears? She couldn’t possibly take her, Ludmila Benina, for a country bumpkin, could she? You old bitch! Luda thought, just in case.
She introduced herself in rough but confident English when Angie pointed at her with her chin. “Ludmila Benina, Luda, seventy-two years old, been in the U.S. for four years. I came to this class to improve my grammar and communication skills. I am a widow, I have a daughter and two grandchildren. I used to be a professor of economics in Moscow. I have written three college textbooks. One of my articles was translated into Hindi and appeared in a magazine in India. I used to participate in conferences all over the Soviet Union, and once in Bulgaria.” She threw a side glance at her seatmate, to see if she was duly impressed. If she was, her expression didn’t betray it.
“Milena from St. Petersburg,” she said, when her turn came. Just that. Nothing else. Luda felt stupid. She wished she hadn’t brought up the conferences. It would have been enough just to tell about her professorship and her books. She could always have mentioned the conferences later, in future classes, in a casual way. Her unease lasted all through the introductions of two elderly Russian couples; two elderly Chinese couples; three middle-aged Dominican couples; one young and handsome Haitian man; one very tall, very old, and very loud Haitian woman with a funny name, Oolna; and one dark-skinned woman who spoke so fast and with such a heavy accent that nobody could understand what she said or where she came from.
Then a man who sat alone in the back stood up and cleared his throat. “Aron Skolnik, seventy-nine. I used to live in Brooklyn with my wife. She died four years ago. Now I live in Brooklyn alone.” Luda raised her eyes and peered at Aron. The expression on his face was strange, uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure whether living alone was a bad or a good thing, as if he both welcomed the solitude and found it stifling. Luda had a sudden urge to reach over and touch the thin wisp of hair that stuck to his forehead. And Milena thought she saw a flicker of hunger in Aron’s eyes. Just a flicker, but she couldn’t be mistaken. He had nice eyes, she decided, the eyes of a much younger man. She straightened her shoulders, removed her Versace shades, shook her hair, and put the shades back on top of her head. Luda snorted and thought, Look at the old slut!
