I slide over to the kid. He cowers before me, which I both love and hate. He is more slabyi than I am, which is good. But I am about to sing from my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion at the Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, which makes me — what? A man. What would a man do?
Before he can stop me, before I can stop me, I grab his hand. I hold up my left hand, thumb hidden, four fingers extended, just like in Orwell’s book. “How many fingers am I holding up, Vinston?”
He doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t understand my English. Doesn’t understand who is Vinston. I repeat in Russian. “Four,” he says finally, his whole little sardine body trembling.
“And if the Republican Party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”
“Four.”
I begin twisting his fingers. He cries out in pain. I am bearing down on him, hating this, hating this. “Pyat’!” he cries in Russian. “Five!”
Trying to keep back the welling tears in my own eyes: “No, Vinston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”
He breaks free and runs down the vast green lawn separating our bungalows. “Baaaaa-buuuuuu-shkaaaa!”
Later, out my bedroom window, I see his old babushka talking to mine, a stooped, tired, emaciated figure confiding to a thick, voracious, quasi-American one. Now I will be punished! Now I will be punished! I savor it. I did this terrible thing, and now I will be punished. I rush out to meet Grandma. She sighs and looks at me. She loves me so much. Why does she love me so much?
“That boy’s babushka says you hit him,” Grandma says.
“I didn’t hit him,” I say. “I read to him from a book.”
“Did he do something to you?”
“No.”
“My shining sun,” Grandmother says. “Whatever you did to him, I’m certain he deserved it.”
When Grandma leaves I go to the bedroom and weep over the monster I now am, but the next day I do the same thing. And then again. And again. How many fingers, Vinston? After a few weeks the boy leaves the bungalow colony for good.
The summer sun is down around eight-thirty. Grandma is already in bed and snoring with all her might. The country folk in the Russian novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov greet each nightfall with the phrase “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!” and something similar can be said of Grandma’s worldview. I quietly pour myself out past her bed and into the new night. The stars are constellating above, and the bungalow colony is quiet, but somewhere I hear girlish giggles and the scratchy warble of Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” on a no-brand radio. The children are out bathed in moonlight and they are so happy to see me. “Gnu! Gnu!”
“Shhh, Eva … You’ll wake Babushka.”
“You shhh.”
Natasha is sitting on an Adirondack chair, wearing her favorite green hooded sweatshirt, her boxer faithfully at her feet. “Come here, Gary,” she gestures at her lap. It is not manly to sit on top of a girl, I know, but we are roughly the same height, and I do want to feel her warmth so. The boxer looks up protectively as I sit on her lap, then lowers his frothy muzzle with disregard. Oh, it’s just him. Boy George is crooning: “I’m a man (a man) without conviction / I’m a man (a man) who doesn’t know.” Natasha leans forward, and I feel her cheek, still heated by the day’s sun, against my ear. “Gnu, tell a joke,” someone says. I want to lower my eyelids and be in this moment forever, but I understand what these children want of me. I tell the joke.
* Curiously enough, she will become the novelist and essayist Irina Reyn. A graduating class of fewer than thirty Hebrew school children produced two writers, both of them from the USSR.
13. Sixty-nine Cents
Disney World, 1986. Father and son out for a spin. Mothers up and down Florida are locking up their daughters.
WHEN I TURN FOURTEEN, I lose my Russian accent. I can, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name of a Turkish politician. There are three things I want to do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understand that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl tell me that she likes me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of eating at McDonald’s often. Mama and Papa think that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street are things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate. Even my parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as only immigrants can be, cannot resist the iconic pull of Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.
And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation, two Russian families cram into a large used sedan and take I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other family — three members in all — mirror our own, except that their single offspring is a girl and they are, on the whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighs three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt grin that of a turn-of-the-last-century Jewish peddler scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney tickets are a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from Moscow?” the time-share salesman asks, appraising the polyester cut of my father’s jib.
“Leningrad.”
“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”
“Yes, mechanical engineer … Eh, please Disney tickets now.”
The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach is my real naturalization ceremony. I want all of it — the palm trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions, the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit availability of relations with amoral women. I can see myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I will have to wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends features army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach evolved enough to wave what looks like a fist at us. Scared out of Miami Beach, we decamp for Fort Lauderdale, where a Yugoslav woman shelters us in a faded motel, beach adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We always seem to be at the margins of places: the driveway of the Fontainebleau Hilton or the glassed-in elevator leading to a rooftop restaurant where we can momentarily peek over the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign at the endless ocean below, the Old World we have left behind so far and yet deceptively near.
To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel is an unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives. My father lies magnificently beneath the sun in his red-and-black-striped imitation Speedo while I stalk down the beach, past baking midwestern girls, my keloid scar, my secret sharer, radiating beneath an extra-large Band-Aid. Oh, hi there. The words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an acquisition, perch between my lips, but to walk up to one of these girls and say something so casual requires a deep rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint and freckled face. Back at the motel, the Star Trek reruns loop endlessly on channel 73 or 31 or some other prime number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar to me than our own.