A paunched, goateed muzhik in a camouflaged helmet scanned my äppärät with an unhappy display of teeth and a gust of morning breath that had lasted well into the afternoon. “Malicious pervision of data,” he barked at me in an accent that I placed somewhere between Appalachia and the deeper South, the word “data” now a three-syllable wonder. (How did this faux-Kentuckian become a New York National Guardsman?) “What the heck, son?” he said.
I deflated immediately. The world momentarily retreated into its contours. More than anything, I was scared to be scared in front of Eunice. I was her protector in this world. “No,” I said. “No, sir. That’s being fixed. That’s a mistake. I was on a plane from Rome with a seditious fat man. I told the otter ‘Some Italians’ but I guess he thought ‘Somalians.’”
The soldier held up a hand. “You work for Staatling-Wapachung?” he asked, mispronouncing the complicated name of my employer at at least four junctures.
“Yes, sir. Post-Human Services division, sir.” The word “sir” felt like a broken weapon at my feet. Again I wished my parents were nearer to me, even though they were less than two miles away. I thought of Noah for some reason. Could he really be collaborating with the ARA, as Vishnu had suggested? If so, could he help me right now?
“Deny and imply?”
“What?”
The man sighed. “Do you deny the ex-istence of our conversation and imply consent?”
“Yes. Of course!”
“Fingerprint here.” I grazed the pad of his thick brown äppärät with my thumb.
A flick of the wrist. “Move along.” And as I did so, a legend on the armored personnel carrier caught my eye: “WAPACHUNG CONTINGENCY EQUIPMENT LEASE/OWN.” Wapachung Contingency was the frighteningly profitable security branch of our parent company. What the hell was going on here?
We took a cab to my parents’ house, passing various examples of modest two-story capes covered with aluminum siding, New York Yankee pennants streaming from every other door-the kind of striving neighborhood where all the money goes into the forty-by-hundred-foot lawns, which even in the overripe heat of the East Coast summer bristle with carefully cultivated greenness. I felt a little embarrassed, because I knew that Eunice’s parents were much better off than mine, but I was pleased at how things had worked out with that twanging National Guardsman, at the appearance of power and grace that had been bestowed upon me as an employee of the mighty Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, which was now apparently arming the National Guard. “Were you scared back there, Euny?” I asked.
“I know my kokiri isn’t some deviant criminal,” she said, rubbing my nose and leaning forward so that I could kiss her brow, celebrate the fact that she could make jokes in these difficult times.
In a few minutes we reached the corner of Washington Avenue and Myron, the most important corner of my life. I could already see my parents’ brownish half-brick, half-stucco cape, the golden mailbox out in front, the faux nineteenth-century lamp beside it, the cheap lawn chairs stacked on the island of cement that passed for the front porch, a black horse-and-carriage motif across the steel screen door (I do not mean to besmirch their taste; all this junk came with the house), and the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel billowing in the hazy breeze from two flagpoles. The flavorful husk of Mr. Vida, my parents’ neighbor and my father’s best friend, waved from the porch across the street, and shouted something encouraging at me and possibly salacious at Eunice. Both my dad and Mr. Vida had been engineers in their homelands reduced to working-class life: big callused hands, small horny bodies, clever brown eyes, a thickly landscaped conservatism, and striving, hustling children, three for Mr. Vida to my father’s one. His son Anuj and I went to NYU together, and now the little bastard was a senior analyst at AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup.
I took Eunice’s arm and led her over my parents’ pristine lawn. At the door my mother appeared in her usual outfit-white panties and utilitarian bra-a woman who since taking her retirement had committed herself to intensive housebound living and whom I haven’t seen in proper dress for years.
She was about to throw her arms around my neck in typically overblown fashion when she noticed Eunice, let out some Russian garble of amazement, and retreated inside the house, leaving me, per the usual, with the visuals of her thick gravity-pulled breasts and white little round of belly. My father, shirtless, in stained beige shorts, soon took her place, also gaped at Eunice, ran his hand against his naked muscular breasts perhaps out of embarrassment, said “O!” then hugged me anyway. There was hair against my new dress shirt, the gray carpet that my father wore with an odd touch of class, as if he were a royal in some tropical country. He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the flood of intimacy, of sudden closeness with a person who usually orbited so far away from me. The instructions, the Confucian-like code of Russian father-son relations, spooled in my mind: Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can’t offend him, can’t hurt him, can’t bring him to task for past wrongs; an old man now, defenseless, deserving of all I can offer.
My mother reappeared in shorts and a wife-beater. “Sinotchek” (“Little son”), she shouted, and kissed me in the same meaningful way. “Look who’s come to us! Nash lyubimeits” (“Our favorite”).
She shook Eunice’s hand, and both of my parents swiftly evaluated her, affirmed that she was, like her predecessors, not Jewish, but quietly approved of the fact that she was thin and attractive with a healthy black mane of hair. My mother unwrapped her own precious blond locks from the green handkerchief that kept them safe from the American sun and smiled prettily at Eunice, her skin gentle and pale, aged only around the frantically moving mouth. She began talking in her brave post-retirement English about how glad she was to have a potential daughter-in-law (a perennial dream-two women against two men, better odds at the dinner table), filling in the contours of her loneliness with rapid-fire questions about my mysterious life in faraway New York. “Does Lenny keep clean house? Does he vacuum? Once, I came to college dormitory, okh, awful! Such smell! Dead ficus tree! Old cheese on table. Socks hanging in window.”
Eunice smiled and spoke in my favor. “He’s very good, Ms. Abramov. He’s very clean.” I looked at her with endearment. Somewhere beneath the bright suburban skies I felt the presence of a.50-caliber Browning gun swiveling toward an incoming Long Island Rail Road train, but here I stood, surrounded by the people who loved me.
“I got Tagamet from the discount pharmacy,” I said to my father, taking five boxes out of the bag I’d brought.
“Thank you, malen’kii” (“little one”), my father said, taking hold of his beloved drug. “Peptic ulcer,” he said to Eunice gravely, pointing at the depth of his tortured stomach.
My mother had already grabbed hold of the back of my head and was madly stroking my hair. “So gray,” she said, shaking her head in an exaggerated way, as if she were an American comedic actress. “So old he gets. Almost forty. Lyonya, what is happening to you? Too much stress? Also losing hair. Oh my God!”
I shook her off. Why was everyone so concerned about my decline?
“You are named Eunice,” my father said. “Do you know where it come from, such name?”
“My parents…” Eunice gamely began.
“It from the Greek, yoo-nee-kay. Meaning ‘victorious.’” He laughed, happy to demonstrate that, before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow’s Arbat Street. “So I hope,” he said, “that in life you will be victorious also!”