“What did you say?”
“I said my grandma was killing me.”
She paused with her sandwich in midair, jelly dripping on her paper bag. “I didn’t think you’d go through with it. You get in trouble?”
“Had to skip dinner, but food at home sucks anyway.”
“Not bad, Okey Dokey.”
I opened my lunch box, which had a slew of items Mama put in just to torture me: crackers with cream cheese, a hard-boiled egg, and a tomato, which were nearly redeemed by a container of herring. The cream cheese was always smeared all over the box.
Cassandra peeked inside and frowned at the herring. “Meat,” she said, which wasn’t technically true but I didn’t correct her. “I never eat meat,” she said, scrunching up her face like I was involved in something truly disgusting. I was relieved when she changed course after that. “You find out how old your grandma was?” she said.
“Fifty-five,” I said, and she nodded slowly and took the last bite of her sandwich.
“My mom is forty-eight. She adopted me.”
“How old is your dad?”
“No dad, no dad,” she said gleefully, almost singing the words.
“You just live with your mom?”
“Basically,” she said. “We barely talk, because she’s always working. She sucks.”
“You’re lucky. My mom’s always home. My grandma too.”
“How annoying,” she said, biting my tomato. I dipped my finger in a smear of cream cheese and licked it up. Cassandra did the same and looked like she wanted me to keep talking.
“Mama and Baba are always home but we never do anything. When my dad said we were moving to Florida, he was all, like, ‘The beach, the beach, we’ll spend so much time at the beach,’ but we barely go. Anytime I ask they’re, like, ‘We’re too tired.’ And I’m, like, ‘What’s the point of living here if we never even go to the beach?’ ”
She nodded with great understanding. “Family,” she said, and then she shook her head like an ancient person.
* * *
—
Papa brought home an unclaimed pizza from Dino’s a few days later and set it on the coffee table. The table had come with the apartment; somebody had scratched FUK SUN BAY in its center. We ate on plates that said FAT IS BEAUTIFUL, which Baba had bought at a garage sale before she knew what it meant. We ate sitting on the floor with Papa’s three-headed sister staring down at us.
Mama poured vodka for Papa and Baba, Sunkist for me, and tea for herself. She had been throwing up for the past few mornings and said she would switch to tea until she felt better. A jar of sauerkraut appeared out of nowhere, and so did a few boiled hot dogs and sliced tomato and cucumber. The cheese pizza looked a little roughed up. I bit into my slice and spat it out when I realized it was meat. I remembered the face Cassandra had made at my herring, as if eating meat would be as bad as biting into a cicada.
“Yuck!” I said. “There’s sausage in here.”
“Since when don’t you like sausage? What you are given, you will eat,” Mama said.
“I’m sorry, darling. I should have warned you,” Papa said.
“I’ll just pick it off,” I said, avoiding Mama’s glare. “It was a surprise, that’s all.”
“A surprise?” Baba said. “Ha! You know what was a surprise? Once, when my family was starving to death after the Nazis occupied Kiev, Mama baked a delicious meat pie. My brother and I said, ‘Mamachka, what’s in this pie? It’s so savory.’ And she told us it was old Syomka, the family dog. She said, ‘Syomka is with us forever now,’ ” Baba said, laughing as she slapped the table. I spit up my cucumber.
“Oksana, behave!” Mama said. “Do not waste food.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Disgusting?” said Baba, not without glee. “It was life, dear child. We got through the war, didn’t we?” she said. “It was kind of beautiful, in fact. Mama was right. I never forgot that poor creature.”
“A touching story of sacrifice,” Papa said to his mother, forking a tomato.
After dinner, I waited for Papa to finish pasting a few more pictures of himself and his father and other long-dead relatives into his latest photo album so he could read Evgeny Onegin to me in Russian for the Mama-mandated thirty minutes and we could play Doom as a reward. We played and played, blasting every last hunchbacked monster and zombie in the dark caverns of an abandoned laboratory, until Baba said it was bedtime and I followed her into our room.
Her bed was too close to mine; I could reach out and touch her if I wanted to. She picked up the photo on our nightstand, which showed her, my grandpa, Papa, and his sister holding baskets of mushrooms in the woods. Two-fourths of the people in the photo were dead, which I recently learned could be simplified to one-half. According to Baba, my grandpa had died of “being a Soviet male” when Papa was a teenager, and Papa’s older sister had died of a weak heart just months before we’d left Kiev.
Alla had been a painter. She had long bushy brown hair and a loud laugh and wore thick black glasses. She’d lived with my grandmother and was always painting on her balcony, with various arty friends wandering in and out of the apartment. But at the end of her life, she’d just turned into a sick woman who smelled dusty and sour, to whom I had to bring medicine in a dark, quiet room while the adults spoke in whispers. When I heard I’d have to share a room with Baba in America, I worried that she would smell like dying, like her daughter did, but she only smelled like too many flowers.
I couldn’t sleep. I hugged my doll Lacy and thought of all the dead people I had known and had not known. The police sirens wouldn’t stop wailing, drowning out the insistent shrieks of the cicadas.
“The police came to my house once,” Baba said after a while. “The secret police, in fact. This was just before the war. I was only half your age, darling. They came in the middle of the night and took my father away.”
I waited for her to tell me what happened next. It took me a moment to understand there was no more story.
* * *
—
I went on a late drive with Papa the next weekend. Our car was a brown Mercury with a tan roof with holes Mama had taped up, and Papa was proud of it. He had never had a car or driven before we got to America. He played The White Album and we zipped along the highway with the windows down, hot air blowing in our faces. We picked up two hitchhikers, a couple who said they’d just gotten married. Mama hated when he did this, but Papa said he had a car, he had gas, and goddamn it if he wasn’t going to help people go places.
“We won’t forget this,” the man said when we dropped them off near St. Augustine. We drove a little farther and parked in a deserted lot and walked across a wooden bridge toward the water. It was oily and ominous, a monster that could swallow me whole, but a dark beach was better than no beach. Papa held my hand as we passed an abandoned towel and a bunch of empty beer bottles to get closer to the shore. A bonfire blazed in the distance, the flames eating up the darkness.
“It’s not all bad here, is it, Oksana?” he said.
“I like the beach. I wish we could go during the day.”
“Soon, child. Soon.” He looked up at the sky. “My father used to take my sister and me out to the country to look at the stars, at the constellations. I have forgotten most of their names. Though there’s Orion,” he said, pointing out the archer and his belt. He lit a cigarette.
“Papa?” I said after a while. “What’s it like to have someone close to you die?”
He looked at the stars again as if they could give him an answer. The waves licked the shore and the tops of my feet.
“Sad,” he said, and then he put out his cigarette and said it was time to go back.
He drove without saying anything. The White Album finished but he didn’t turn the tape over. He spoke again when we were almo
st home.
“When you lose someone you love, they stay with you. My father and sister—they are always nearby. I can picture how they would react to almost anything, and sometimes I even talk to them. My sister loves pointing out the beauty of the landscape, and my father just says he is proud of me for plugging along in this strange land. I can conjure them up almost anytime I want. So in that way, it’s not so sad, kitten, because I am never alone.”
This made me spring up, like there was a serial killer in the back seat ready to slit our throats. Or, worse, a two-headed grandfather-aunt monster coming for us both. The hair on my arms stood up. I peeked behind me, but no one was coming for us yet.
* * *
—
Cassandra came home with Baba and me after school one day. As we walked down Prostitute Street, Baba got three honks and tossed her hair. She had started dating Mr. Trevors, but it didn’t stop her from having fun. Cassandra thought it was hilarious Baba didn’t know about Prostitute Street.
“I get younger by the minute, don’t you see?” Baba said.
“Definitely,” my friend said. Baba pinched Cassandra’s cheeks and declared her a good influence.
Every morning, as sad Principal Bates said the Pledge over the loudspeaker, Cassandra and I held hands and said the Pledge to the butterfly. Sometimes we would mix it up and say the Pledge to the pumpkin instead, since it was October. Mrs. Thomas would roll her eyes and say, “Silly hippies. Flower children,” but she didn’t punish us.
When Cassandra entered my room, she sneered, and I thought it was because I shared it with Baba, but it was because of my dolls.
“Dolls are stupid, Okey Dokey. They’re just there to make you think all you’re good for is having babies. That’s what my mom says.”
“I thought you don’t care about your mom,” I said. I saw this was the wrong answer and said, “Yuck. I hate babies.”
“Do you even know how babies are made?” she said.
“Duh.” I said a man and woman get naked and roll around under sheets and moan sometimes because it hurts. I didn’t mention the kingdom, because I didn’t know what the man put it on for.
“The man puts his thing in the woman’s hole and squirts into it,” she said.
I gasped and put my hands to my private parts. I would never do something so disgusting. I slowly released my hands and the world came into terrible focus. I saw all the deflated balloons on Prostitute Street in a more sinister light and understood what they were for.
“The man puts a kingdom on his thing if he doesn’t want to make a baby,” I said.
She snorted and patted my arm. “That’s called a condom.”
“A condom?” This sounded less magical. I liked “kingdom” better—a word Raluca had taught me—a mystical gateway between man and woman and family. After that, I pretty much waited for Cassandra to leave. I was tired from knowing how everything worked.
* * *
—
By the time Cassandra and I were saying the Pledge to the turkey, the lab where Baba worked mornings offered her a real job. This was apparently a cause for celebration, though it meant she would no longer pick me up from school; Mama would. This was slightly better but still annoying.
“A nice surprise,” Baba said, putting on lipstick in the hallway mirror.
“We’re very happy for you, Svetlana Dimitrievna,” Mama said, not without bitterness. Her own job search had not been fruitful.
Dimitry was the name of Baba’s father. It seemed unfair to me that she had to carry his name for her entire life, though he had died when she was a child. Papa’s name was Ivan, but Mama only attached it to mine if I was in trouble.
“We must go out!” Papa said, clapping his hands and interrupting this train of thought. They decided on the Outback, because it was supposed to be nice and was close by. Baba put on a sparkly dress and curled her hair. As they got ready, I noticed that nobody had told me to change.
Mama said, “Do you really want to come, kitten? We may be there awhile.”
“We’re getting blasted!” Baba announced. “Surely you are not interested.”
“Of course she should come,” Papa said.
“I want to stay here,” I said. If they didn’t want me, then I didn’t want them. Besides, I had never been alone in the apartment before. In Kiev, Mama and Papa left me home when they went to the movies sometimes. I would stage plays with my dolls and do all their voices.
“We will not be long,” Papa said, squeezing my shoulder.
“We’ll bring something back for you,” said Baba, but she hardly cared; she was looking in the mirror.
“Goodbye, little idiot,” Mama said. The door slammed shut behind her. I was glad to be rid of them and began doing all the things I could not normally do.
I danced around in my bikini. I blasted Ace of Base. I ate cold nacho cheese with my fingers, which was much better than cream cheese. I finished a Boxcar Children book in the bathtub. I tried to read a few pages of Baba’s romance novel, but I didn’t understand what was going on. I did a few cartwheels. I jumped on Mama and Papa’s bed. I pulled three cicadas out of the carpet with Mama’s tweezers and flushed them down the toilet. I drowned the ants by the sink. I touched all five of Papa’s sister’s paintings with my hands.
The darkness crept in. It was windy out and a tree branch scraped against the balcony. It sounded like a person. I played Doom but it only scared me, all those cretins bursting out of the darkness to destroy me. I grabbed my Amy doll from my doll pile and hugged her hard. The noises grew louder, and I was certain someone was coming for me. I decided it was one of Papa’s dead. I would be smothered. I called Cassandra so she could calm me down.
“I’m home alone,” I said. “I’m freaked out.”
“Your family left you?”
“Not for good, just for dinner. They’ll be back.”
“Too bad,” she said. Then she added, “That’s not normal.”
“It’s not?”
“Not really. But it doesn’t matter. Who cares if they don’t love you? Fly away now,” she said, and then she said she had to go. I heard laughter before she hung up; I still hadn’t been to her house but figured the only laughter there came from TV.
I didn’t know how to fly away. I flipped through the photo album Papa was working on, thinking it would put me to sleep. It started off boring, with pictures of Papa onstage singing in the Kiev children’s choir and receiving boring math awards, but then I found a photo that filled me with revulsion and horror. Papa was my age, and my grandpa was pretty young. They stood in a field of tall grass in their underwear, holding sickles. I searched my grandfather’s face for signs that he would die soon but could find none. What I did find were the outlines of his and my father’s bulging things, things I now knew had brought Papa and then me into being. I slammed the album shut and screamed. I screamed again and clutched my doll but nothing happened, nobody came, not the regular police or the secret police, not the neighbors, not my grandfather, not Cassandra, not Raluca. I cried until I tired myself out and curled up on the couch, and a million years later the key was scraping in the lock.
“What’s wrong, little idiot?” Mama said, putting a hand in my hair.
Papa and Baba emerged behind her. They were happy and red faced.
“I got scared,” I said, sitting up. “I heard noises. I thought a robber was going to kill me.”
“You are safe now, poor creature,” Papa said.
“If you do not want to be treated like a child, then do not act like one,” Mama said.
“Besides,” Baba said, “if a robber broke in, what would you expect us to do, infinite fool, fight him off?” She didn’t care about my suffering. She didn’t care that I hadn’t asked to get born or to be all alone one day, after everyone in my family died.
Before I could answer, s
he put a hand on my wrist. “You should have seen the waiter. As handsome as a young Baryshnikov! And on the way home, a man rolled down his window and told me I was beautiful.” She pranced around like she was queen of the world. I couldn’t be near her anymore.
“Those men think you’re a prostitute,” I said.
“What?” Baba said.
Papa froze and Mama dropped her purse.
“Main Street is Prostitute Street,” I said. “Everybody knows.”
“Well!” Baba said, clutching her necklace. She looked from me to my parents, who looked at the floor. “Of course it is, you little idiot,” she said. “Of course it is. Of course I know that. You are a devil,” she said, and she walked slowly toward the patio like a doll running out of batteries. Papa didn’t look at me as he followed her. Did she already know, or was she just faking it so she wouldn’t look stupid? I remembered how idiotic I felt when I realized I didn’t know how babies were made.
Mama smacked me. “Are you happy now?”
“Delighted,” I said.
Mama was so upset she didn’t even lecture me. Baba returned eventually with a splotchy face. She said, “Until you apologize, I am not speaking to you, do you understand?”
“Works for me,” I said, and she went to the kitchen to pour herself a drink. I watched her back as she swirled her cognac around, and I did feel a little bit sorry for her then. It wasn’t the end of the world to be young and clueless, I guessed, but there was something depressing about being old and clueless. That didn’t mean I felt sorry enough to apologize, though. I didn’t think she’d be able to last long without talking to me.
I stayed up reading until Baba entered, carrying her heavy perfume scent. It was a cognac night for her, and she sipped from her glass for a long time while staring at her daughter’s painting of the river, as if she wanted to drown in it. Then she got under her covers and turned away from me, coughing a phlegmy cough, making no mention of oblivion. Was she getting ready to die? Her back heaved and I remembered how her sick daughter had smelled and wondered if Baba had smelled like her all along, if she had just used perfume to cover it up.
Oksana, Behave! Page 2
