I start getting up, because killing myself will take some preparation, when Natasha says: “I like Gary, too. He’s my friend.” She then maneuvers one playing card on top of her pile and says to her slower adversary: “Spit!”
The cards fall on the table at great speed. And I am left with this duality. She likes me. Hence, I am likable. And not for this Gnu shit either. To her, I am Gary. But I am also her friend, and that statement is irrevocable as well.
What does it mean to love someone? At SSSQ, I am not allowed to be near the native-born girls, because I am of the dalit caste, untouchable, and my presence may pollute them. But at Ann Mason’s, as you have seen, I can touch my skinned knee to Natasha’s glowing one for thirty-seven seconds, and she will be my friend, if not more. One early summer day I am shielding myself from the sun beneath an oak tree, reading Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, sneezing from the rich American pollen and dreaming of distant allergen-free planets, when I encounter these lines in a story: “I stood up and hugged her to me in that humid darkness, running my hand along her thin back and then around to cup one little breast. ‘I love you, Jane,’ I said.” I close my eyes and picture a little bag of weight in my hand. Cup. You cup the little breast of a Jane. So this is love.
At home, there is love between my parents, and sometimes I can hear them loving each other. But love mostly means fighting. My mother has perfected the silent treatment to such an extent that she will not speak to my father for many days, sometimes weeks, even as they continue to share their mahogany full-sized bed together. When this happens, I serve as the emissary between them. My parents schedule meetings with me to air their grievances and to discuss the prospects for a razvod. And so I shuttle between them, sometimes allowing tears to strengthen my bid for them to stay together. “He apologizes, Mama. He will not fall under the influence of his wolfish relatives any longer.” “Papa, she knows she should not have been an hour late when you were picking her up, but suddenly there was extra typing at work and she wanted to earn overtime.”
Indeed, the most dangerous part of my day is when my father has to pick my mother up after work, after he has collected me from my grandma’s, so that we may all go back to distant Little Neck together in the Tredia. We wait for Mother near a subway station at the corner of Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, not far from the Queens Criminal Court. There is a 1920s statue on that corner called Triumph of Civic Virtue: a naked, well-muscled man with a drawn sword is stepping on two bare-chested mermaids who symbolize corruption and vice. “Where is she? Suka tvoya mat’!” my father cries, because my bitch-mother is late, ten minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, an hour late. And with each gradation of lateness I know the fight will ratchet right up the razvod scale.
To pass the time, and stem his anger and my worry, Papa and I play a nervous version of hide-and-seek around the well-endowed, tight-assed Civic Virtue God and his vanquished mermaids, absorbing the sickening lessons in gender relations the statue so clearly presents. (In 2012, after much outcry, the Triumph of Civic Virtue was removed to a Brooklyn cemetery.)
Finally, my mother puffs out of the subway in her rabbit-fur coat, the one indulgence no Russian woman can do without, and we pack into the car, and the fighting begins.
Suka! Suka! Suka!
Go to the khui!
In front of the child she is cursing like this. How much did you send to your relatives?
Ne-tvoyo sobache delo. It is not your dog-business.
Then where were you, bitch?
My mother is sick! My mother is dying! Ah, you wolfish breed!
And then my father to me, quietly, but loud enough for her to hear in the backseat, Other men hit their wives. But I never hit her. And look what good it did.
And I am turning in to my window, leaning my head against the cold pane, as Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from the nerd-musical Chess plays as loudly as it may on the car’s stereo. I picture an Asian girl beneath an enormous Thai stupa in some kind of silky native dress. I’m not sure what it means other than the urge to go somewhere else right now, to leap out of the car and run toward Kennedy Airport, which is not very far away.
One thing I know for certain is that my parents can never get a razvod. Why? Because we are the Family Shteyngart, population three, and with already such low numbers we are not supposed to be apart. Not to mention that maintaining two households will mean our living standards will erode, we will no longer be middle-middle class, and we might have to give up the Mitsubishi, which I have already pointed out to my unimpressed SSSQ classmates: “Behold! The Tredia-S.” And finally, if either of my parents was to remarry (unthinkable), their American spouses would look down on my keloid scar and borrowed Batman T-shirt, and I might end up with no family at all.
Sometimes I get angry. On the school bus back at SSSQ, I find an Israeli girl — some Shlomit or Osnat — whose star shines even less brightly than my own, and I make fun of her mercilessly. She has a mustache like my grandmother’s and a training bra. I slide into the seat next to her and make jokes about her need to wax her mustache with something called “turtle wax,” an insult that I’ve overheard from another bus mate and that seems like just the right kind of topical cruelty to use on this small, dark, friendly creature. I tease her about her training bra and what I can only imagine lies beneath it. What I can’t quite understand is that I have a crush on this girl precisely because she has a mustache just like my grandmother’s, which makes me want to hug her and tell her all of my troubles. The girl informs on me to Mrs. R, the kindly educator who helped me with my shoelaces and sang Troo-loo-loo-loo when I was in first grade. Mrs. R takes me aside on the bus line and tells me to stop bothering the girl. Mrs. R’s gentle opprobrium, much worse than her anger, makes me so ashamed I consider skipping the school bus and walking across Queens to my grandmother’s house. The truth is I don’t even understand what turtle wax is. The truth is that if those furry lips were to graze my own, I would not turn away.
I get angry even among the peaceable kingdom of Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony. There is a new kid no one likes exactly. Straight out of Minsk or somewhere, scrawny, undernourished, weak, Belorussian. He is with his grandmother, and we don’t know the whereabouts of his parents. He looks like a younger version of my step-grandfather Ilya — the unhappy eyes, the Leninist forehead — and that makes me hate him even more. My favorite book of the summer of 1984 and the two subsequent summers is Nineteen Eighty-Four. I commit the passages in which O’Brien tortures Winston to memory. When the kid is alone staring sullenly at a comic book over a picnic table, I approach him. I sit down and begin to speak in measured tones. “Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”