Finally, Ms. S holds up a sneaker and explains that her favorite activity is jogging.
“Pee-yooh!” a boy cries out, pointing at the sneaker and holding his nose, and everyone except me laughs a wicked child laugh. Jerry Himmelstein agoofs.
I am shocked. Here is a young, kind, pretty teacher, and the children are intimating that her feet smell. Only me and my two-hundred-pound Leningrad fur are allowed to smell around here! I look to Ms. S, so worried that she will cry, but instead she laughs and then goes on about how running makes her feel good.
She has laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!
After we have all finished explaining who we are, Ms. S calls me over to her desk. “You really wrote a novel?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It is called The Chalenge.”
“May I read it?”
“You may read it. I will brink it.”
And brink it I do, with the worried admonition “Please don’t lose, Meez S.”
And then it happens.
At the end of the English period, when a book about a mouse who has learned to fly in an airplane has been thoroughly dissected, Ms. S announces, “And now Gary will read from his novel.”
His what? Oh, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m standing there holding my composition notebook straight from the Square Deal Notebook people of Dayton, OH, Zip Code 45463, and looking out at me are the boys beneath their little flying-saucer yarmulkes, and the girls with their sweet aromatic bangs, their blouses studded with stars. And there’s Ms. S, whom I’m already terribly in love with but who I’ve recently learned has a fiancé (not sure what that means, can’t be good), but whose bright American face is not just encouraging me but priding me on.
Am I scared? No. I am eager. Eager to begin my life. “Introduction,” I say. “The Mistirious Race. Before the age of dinousaurs There was Human life on Earth. They looked just like the man of today. But they were a lot more inteligent than the men of today.”
“Slowly,” Ms. S says. “Read slowly, Gary. Let us enjoy the words.”
I breathe that in. Ms. S wants to enjoy the words. And then slower: “They built all kinds of spaceships and other wonders. But at that time the Earth circuled the moon because the moon was bigger than the Earth. One day a gigantic comet came and blew up the moon to the size it is today. The pieces of the moon began to Fall on Earth. The race of people got on their spaceships and took off. They began to search for a planet like Earth and they found one and called it Atlanta. But there was another planet named Lopez with a race of three legged Humanoids. War started soon.” Big breath. “Book One: Before the First Chalenge.”
As I’m reading it, I am hearing a different language come out of my mouth. I do full justice to the many misspellings (“the Earth cir-culed the moon”), and the Russian accent is still thick, but I am speaking in what is more or less comprehensible English. And as I am speaking, along with my strange new English voice, I am also hearing something entirely foreign to the squealing and shouting and sheket bevakasha! that constitute the background noise of SSSQ: silence. The children are silent. They are listening to my every word, following the battles of the Atlantans and Lopezians as far as the ten minutes of allotted time will go. And they will listen to the story for the next five weeks as well, because Ms. S will designate the end of every English period as Chalenge Time, and they will shout out throughout the English period, “When will Gary read already?” and I will sit there in my chair, oblivious to all but Ms. S’s smile, excused from following the discussion of the mouse who learned how to fly, so that I may go over the words I will soon read to my adoring audience.
And God bless these kids for giving me a chance. May their G-d bless them, every one.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a hated freak. But here’s what I’m doing: I am redefining the terms under which I am a hated freak. I am moving the children away from my Russianness and toward storytelling. And toward the ideology of strength and Republicanism, which is life around the Shteyngart dinner table. “Did you write anything new?” shouts a kid in the morning, a merchant’s son, renowned for his lack of basic literacy. “Will the Lopezians attack? What’s Dr. Omar gonna do next?”
What indeed? I am now so far beyond Jerry Himmelstein that I don’t even bother studying him and trying to avoid his social miscues. With my newfound lesser brand of hate comes the responsibility that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The responsibility of writing something every day, lest I fall out of favor again and be restored to Red Gerbil status.
What I need is to expand my repertoire. And that means more access to popular culture. When I’ve run out of The Chalenge to read I follow up with another fifty-pager called Invasion from Outer Space, featuring the evildoings of the Academy of Moors (Yasser Arafat has been back in the news), and that one goes over reasonably well. But what I really need is access to a television set.
Enter Grandmother Polya.
Behind every great Russian child, there is a Russian grandmother who acts as chef de cuisine, bodyguard, personal shopper, and PR agent. You can see her in action in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Rego Park, Queens, running after her thick-limbed grandson with a dish of buckwheat, fruit, or farmer’s cheese—“Sasha, come back, my treasure! I have plums for you!”—or flipping through rows of slacks at the Alexander’s (now Marshalls) on Queens Boulevard, getting Sasha ready for the new school year.
Rego Park, Queens. This is where I go after school while my parents work. Close enough to Little Neck for my father to strike with his Chevy Malibu Classic, but far enough away that I may develop my own personality. The homey, low-rise redbrick neighborhood is overshadowed by the three modernist Birchwood Towers, each nearly thirty stories in height and featuring the tackiest themed lobbies on the Eastern Seaboard — the Bel Air, the Toledo, and the Kyoto, with its marble Japanese statuette and hanging scrolls. I spot my first limousine parked in the Bel Air’s circular driveway and promise to myself that one day I will own one. Other less gargantuan co-op buildings have pretty gardens and names like the Lexington and New Hampshire House. In one of these, my grandmother, over sixty but still full of country strength, cleans toilets for an American woman.
Grandma lives at 102–17 Sixty-Fourth Avenue, a cheap six-story redbrick facing a public school that contains black children and that we circle with care. She holds court on a wooden bench outside, presenting me to fellow Russian retirees, demanding that attention be paid as she explains how I am the best, most successful grandson that ever walked the streets of Queens.