* * *
—
When Mama and I got home after school, I told her I had outgrown my dolls. We took all the dolls from my doll pile and tossed them in a black plastic bag. She sipped a glass of wine as we worked. She had stopped throwing up recently, so I guessed she was no longer sick.
“It’s nice to get rid of some things we don’t need, isn’t it, darling?” Mama said.
“Dolls are for idiots who want to have babies,” I said. “I don’t want a baby and I don’t want to be anybody’s mother.”
Mama laughed. “You have some time to change your mind, silly child,” she said. But when we dragged the bag to the dumpster, she looked weepy. Her hand dug into my back, making me wish I still had my mullet for protection against her touch.
“Why the rush?” she said. “I don’t want you to regret this later.”
“I won’t.”
I grabbed the doll bag and dumped it in the trash. Dust and flies materialized in its wake. Mama sank her claws into my shoulders, and her face was like the ocean at night. “I have no job. I have no country. My father is long dead and my mother is across the ocean and hardly knows who I am,” she said. “But I have you. You are my greatest achievement. Do you understand?”
“Ow! That hurts.”
“It better, little devil, it better,” she said.
As we left the dumpster, I could tell that Mama was thinking of her own mother, whom she called every week even though she had lost her mind and didn’t know who anyone was. She was nothing like Baba—she was a tiny woman who called me “darling Yaroslava” when Mama made me talk to her on the phone. I never asked who Yaroslava was, though I believed that someone who stuck in her mind like that must have been from her own traumatic wartime childhood, like Baba’s dog Syomka. She lived with us when I was too young to remember, but Mama put her in a place for senile people when she couldn’t care for her anymore. Having a mother like that seemed worse than having a dead one, but I supposed you didn’t get to choose.
When we turned the corner, a smile crossed Mama’s face. I followed her gaze to the parking lot, where Mr. Trevors was escorting Baba home. Baba still hadn’t said a word to me, though a week had gone by since our fight. They stopped near a palm tree and he backed Baba up against it and kissed her madly. Her hands were raised above her head like the talons of a pterodactyl. At some point, Mr. Trevors and Baba had become a real item. Her suitors’ letters had disappeared from the nightstand.
“Your grandmother has a zest for life,” Mama said, turning me away from this disturbing scene. “She is an inspiration to us all.”
* * *
—
The next time Papa took me for a drive, Cassandra and I were saying the Pledge to Santa Claus. We zipped past a cracked-open armadillo drowning in a puddle of its own blood and guts. When he turned down Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, I got nervous, thinking he would tell me something awful, that he was dying or that Baba was going to marry Mr. Trevors.
“Oksanka Banka,” he said. “It seems you do not hate it here after all, am I right?”
“It’s not too bad.”
“You know how when you are in a maze in Doom, you have to walk along the same wall to ensure you are moving forward? But sometimes you may find you are in the center of the maze, going in circles instead of finding a way out.”
“So what? Then you just follow a new wall,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said, but I didn’t get it. He cleared his throat. “A Jew once said, the foxes have their dens, the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
“Which Jew?”
“We are leaving Gainesville at the end of the month.”
I gripped my door handle like the car might disappear. I tasted tin. I thought of Raluca, how she must have felt when she heard the same terrible news. “Are we going back to Kiev?”
He gave me a sad smile. “We are moving to Worthington, Ohio. I found a decent job at Ohio State. The pay is not impressive, but I will not need to deliver pizza any longer.”
I kicked the dashboard and wailed. “Nobody asked me!” I said. Papa pulled to the side of the road. He gave me a Dino’s napkin and I wiped my face with it though it was greasy.
“This will be good for all of us. Your mother will be happier. We’ll have more money. I won’t have to deliver pizza. You will be happy too, in time.”
“But I’m already happy here!”
“You have to think of the good of the family, dear Oksana.”
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in dried-up flecks of pizza sauce.
“I would like to be an orphan,” I said.
Papa pulled back on the road. “One day,” he told me, “you will get your wish.”
* * *
—
Back home, Mama was slapping herring on a Dino’s pizza as consolation; I hadn’t lasted long as a vegetarian. Baba orbited Mama, who was wiping away my tears; one of her heels crunched into a cicada. Mama said, “We already have a new home in Ohio, kitten. It’s much bigger—a two-story condo!”
“Does this mean I won’t have to share a room with Baba anymore?”
Baba looked like she was going to say something, but she turned away and put a hand to her face.
“You won’t, dear girl. Your grandmother is staying here,” Papa said.
Baba folded her arms over her chest as Papa explained that Baba loved her job at the lab and her new friend Mr. Trevors and that her independence was important to her. I looked from my parents to Baba and wondered if I factored into a single decision they made. I didn’t care if I ever saw Baba again. I would live in a gigantic room without Baryshnikov or her daughter’s dumb river painting and I would finally be happy.
“That’s fine,” I told Baba. “Because I hate you anyway!”
She didn’t seem angry—she seemed amused if anything—but Mama dragged me to my room anyway. “Oh, who was I in a past life I do not believe in?” she said. “Was I Genghis Khan? Yezhov? Nero, perhaps?” She regarded me with scorn. “Were you born without a heart? What did your grandmother do to deserve such treatment?”
I knew there was no good answer, so I thought of a bad one. “Maybe she was Stalin in a past life,” I said, and Mama slapped me.
“You, Oksana,” she said, “cannot joke about Stalin.”
“But you can?”
“I know what Stalin means. I have suffered the pain of anti-Semitism.”
“Stalin died a long time ago. What pain?”
She thought for a moment and said, “Collective pain.”
Instead of sleeping, I turned over in my head what Mama had told me. I figured a “condo” was different from a “condom,” but I pictured Mama and Papa and me living inside a giant two-story condom in Ohio. It sealed us in until we ran out of air and suffocated. I would have preferred a kingdom, but as usual, nobody had asked me.
* * *
—
I searched for Cassandra in the school parking lot the next morning to tell her I was leaving. Her mom’s Jeep pulled up by the side entrance. A dark-haired man was driving, her mom was in the passenger seat, and Cassandra was in the back with a big white dog. She was babbling and they were laughing, and it looked like even the dog thought she was hysterical and they were thrilled to be together, all of them. She had betrayed me.
Inside the classroom, there was more bad news. Officer Friendly was back and this time he was there to talk about drugs. He stood next to a big glass display of pills and syringes and marijuana cigarettes and other exciting things I hadn’t thought about putting in my body until that moment. The display was shiny and about two feet taller than I was and seemed to contain all the secrets of the universe. He tipped his hat at me and winked. He was still tall and handsome, and his mustache was even bushier.
I c
ould hardly look at Cassandra. She made me sick.
“I didn’t know you had a dog,” I snapped.
“You mean Muffins?” she said. “I love Muffins.”
“Maybe if I had a dog and a nice family, I would have given up my dolls earlier,” I said, but she just frowned and shrugged.
She smiled at Officer Friendly, with her dumb greasy hair and oversize dress, and I realized I didn’t know her or anyone in Florida at all. I understood Raluca completely. I too would disappear without telling anybody. I wouldn’t leave a trace behind.
As soon as Principal Bates got on the loudspeaker, I jumped on my chair. The students below me whispered and stared, but I didn’t care. They could have belonged to my doll pile. They were garbage now. When Principal Bates began the Pledge, I shouted:
I pledge allegiance to the butterfly
Of the United States of butterfly
One butterfly, indivisible, under butterfly
With butterfly and butterfly for all!
This didn’t create the dramatic effect I was hoping for, so I knocked over the drug case. It didn’t even break. Officer Friendly’s eyes got big as he picked it up. He seemed genuinely hurt by my behavior. Billy Spencer whooped madly. Cassandra covered her face with her hands, but the officer and his case didn’t matter to me; none of it mattered. It didn’t matter that Cassandra had flapped her hands and said, “Fly away, Okey Dokey,” as Mrs. Thomas grabbed me by the ear and pulled me to the front office, where I had to sit and wait for my family.
“Shame on you, child,” Mrs. Thomas told me. “And today of all days, what will poor Officer Friendly think? This is a good school, not without its problems, but we love our country, and so should you,” she said, leaving me to await my fate. “Baby Bolshevik,” she muttered.
I sat across from the principal’s office, which had glass walls. Principal Bates was perched over a pile of papers, munching on a cafeteria pretzel. The only time I had been there was my first day of school, when Papa told me my name would be hard for people to say. “Now, you say ‘O’ as in ‘Octopus,’ ‘K’ as in ‘Kite,’ ‘S’ as in ‘Sam,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Apple,’ ‘N’ as in ‘Nancy,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Apple,’ ” he’d said before he told me to have a good day. He took a few steps away and turned around to add, “The rest will be hard too.”
Baba was gliding down the hall a while later. She wore a gold suit and her hair danced around her shoulders. She had never been inside school before and looked a little lost. She stopped and turned, talking to somebody I couldn’t see. It was Officer Friendly. I worried he’d think she was weird, but he was nice—the men usually were—and she laughed and ran a hand over his badge. He gestured toward her brooch and tipped his hat and walked off. She tilted her head and admired his butt. She was ridiculous, but I didn’t want to leave her, and I definitely didn’t want her to die like almost everyone else in my family.
She nodded at me, grabbed my hand, and marched us into Principal Bates’s office without knocking. He was a short, sad man, who watched her with his mouth open, a bit of pretzel stuck to his tongue.
“Please, have a seat—”
“That will not be necessary,” Baba said, wagging her finger at him. “What a ridiculous thing to be punished for!” She led me out before Principal Bates could respond. She spoke to me for the first time in a month when we hit Prostitute Street.
“You have another week here, child,” she said, kicking a lizard aside. “What would you like to do one last time?”
* * *
—
I got sunburned almost as soon as we hit the beach, but nobody cared. Papa blasted Dire Straits from his radio, drowning out the sounds of the gulls squawking over our heads. Mama and Baba let me build sandcastles without chasing me with sunblock. I decorated my castles with tiny pastel clamshells and we ate soggy Subway sandwiches and Papa and I kicked a soccer ball around. He’d just bought a camera and took pictures of us for a new album.
I walked to the water and looked at the horizon. The sand was warm and welcoming and I wanted to melt in it.
Baba came up behind me. “Soak it in. You won’t have water like this in Ohio.”
“There is nothing in Ohio.”
“I believe there are lakes. But you’ll have other things, child, like snow and farms and your own bedroom.” She sighed. “Of course, I could go with you. But I’m not ready to give up on myself yet. I like it here. The storms, my job, the pool, my paramour…”
“The cicadas. I’ll miss how annoying they are,” I said. A plane flew over our heads with a banner for a seafood restaurant. “I’m sorry for what I said, Baba. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She laughed. “It took you long enough! But I forgive you, dear. I know all this has not been easy for you either.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Poor girl, anyone could see that moving out here was quite a shock to your system. But you have no idea how you have lifted my spirits. All of you,” she said, sweeping her hand past me to my parents, who sat on the hood of the Mercury, drinking beers.
She had lost everything: her country, her youth, her father, her daughter, her husband, and soon she would lose us, and yet she hummed and toed the water and wiped her face and said she was going for one last swim. I watched her plunge in with her head rocking above the waves and knew she was happier than I had ever felt.
Mama lifted her beer bottle at us when we returned to the car. She was drunk and happy and didn’t look at all like she was going to be sick. “Dearest God I don’t believe in, what have I done in a past life to deserve such bliss? Was I Florence Nightingale? Perhaps Akhmatova…” She gave Papa a kiss that made me squirm.
We picked up a hitchhiker on the way back, and Mama didn’t complain. He was young and limp-haired and he bobbed his head like he was listening to a secret song. I sat between him and Baba in the back, and she kept reaching over to squeeze his biceps. He told us to drop him off near Flagler Beach, and when we got there Papa made us all get out on the side of the road and asked him if he would take a picture of us; it was our last trip together. My face burned from the sun as we posed. Then I asked the man if Flagler Beach was where he lived and he laughed and said it wasn’t, but maybe it could be, and he thanked us and walked through the brush to the ocean.
Back in the car, Papa put on “Ticket to the Moon,” and as Mama and Papa and Baba sang wildly with the water brimming around us, I knew I would never have a family of my own. I would never be able to carry the weight of other people’s pain or get to the bottom of it. One day they would all be dead and I would make sure I felt nothing. When the song ended, I closed my eyes and imagined I was drifting up into the sky, and by the time I opened them we were almost home.
“I need your help, Konnikova.”
Until that morning at the bus stop, I didn’t think Sammy Watts knew my last name, let alone how to pronounce it. We had developed a kind of mutual respect on the bus since he and his sister had moved to Worthington last year, but he had never asked for my help before. We were unlikely allies. I was in Gifted and he was a jock whose second home was Principal Peterson’s office. It was rumored he’d gotten held back twice in his old school in Cincinnati, which was why he looked much older than the rest of the sixth-graders. He approached me holding his kid sister’s hand, looking like he meant business.
I hoped he didn’t have some kind of tutoring in mind, because frankly, my final year of elementary school was shaping up to be quite packed. For one thing, I was running my best friend Nicole’s presidential campaign, and for another, there was a baby ready to burst out of my mother’s vagina at any moment, and I would be expected to help out when he did.
“What can I do for you?” I said, studying my nails.
“I need you to look after my sister.”
He told me he needed someone to keep an eye on her on the afterno
on bus rides because he’d be at football. Kelly Watts was a scrawny girl with a teddy-bear backpack and a persecuted look. She orbited around her brother while holding his hand and wouldn’t look at me.
“What’s in it for me?” I said.
He laughed. “I guess I’ll have to think of something.”
Sammy’s arms were bulkier than I remembered and his mushroom cut had grown out and his hair fell into his eyes like a derelict Taylor Hanson’s. We didn’t have anything else to say to each other, so we kicked rocks toward the creek. The creek had a bridge over it; to the right of the bridge were the crappy apartments where I lived, and to the left were the still-crappy-but-less-so houses where Sammy lived.
Fat Jack approached from the less-crappy side. He gave me the finger. Seeing him was a comfort, in a way. When I’d moved to Ohio in the middle of third grade, he’d called me “Commie” and “Russian Spy,” but he’d lost all power over me long ago, when Nicole had taken me under her wing. Now our spats were more of a formality. I almost enjoyed them.
“Hey, Big Red.”
“That’s what you need to chew, because your breath smells like dog shit,” I said.
“Fuck off,” Sammy told him, and Fat Jack gave him the finger too but did what he was told. “You see? Threats everywhere. Do we have a deal?” Sammy said.
“I’ll think about it.”
“It’s gonna be a long year, Konnikova,” he said, letting go of his sister’s hand.
“The years are long, but life is short,” I said.
It was something Papa said and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it made Sammy laugh. The bus finally pulled up with old Mr. Romano, a hardened ex-con, behind the wheel. Sammy took out a Polaroid and snapped a photo of his sister standing in front of the bus as the students filed on. She looked desperate and paper thin, her skin nearly translucent in the morning light. Sammy waved the picture to make it develop faster and I didn’t see why he was in such a rush to see the sad image of his little sister, but I supposed this was something I wouldn’t understand until I had a sibling of my own.
Oksana, Behave! Page 3
