Oksana, Behave!

by Maria Kuznetsova

  * * *

  —

  I went to Nicole’s a few days into school to work on her campaign, with the Shoemaker twins. She lived in a mansion on the other side of town. It had a statue of a glass swan in the living room, vases filled with pastel rocks, a white carpet, and at least five bedrooms. I understood how things worked by then. If your dad was a real estate agent, you got a mansion. But my dad was just a physicist and my mom was only a part-time accountant. We lived in a condo in a building that looked like a roadside motel, with a tiny bathroom monopolized by Mama’s nervous vomiting, and neighbors who fought so hard their furniture blasted through our cheap walls. Nicole’s walls were so thick that her mom would call her on a personal landline when dinner was ready.

  “I have neat handwriting. I have the best hair. I’m nice to ugly people,” Nicole said, ticking off her positive qualities on her manicured nails. “If I can just get this speech down, I’ll have it all.” I was in charge of writing the speech and coming up with the poster slogans, and the twins with drawing the posters. Nicole did not do much herself; she was more of a figurehead.

  “You already have it in the bag,” Melinda said.

  “Definitely,” said Bridget.

  Melinda was prettier but Bridget was more artistic, and their hair was as black and shiny as the trash bags where Mama kept my old clothes.

  “It’s like you’ve already won,” I told Nicole, clarifying what Melinda said, because Nicole was not always familiar with turns of phrase.

  “You can never get too comfortable, Oksana,” Nicole said, chewing a strand of blond hair.

  Her bedroom had recently undergone an alarming transformation. She had ditched her pink wallpaper and dolls in favor of posters of Nirvana and Oasis and Gwen Stefani and replaced her princess bed with a wooden bed with plaid sheets. She’d kept the mountain of stuffed animals on her bed, which was a relief. My favorite part of her room was the bay window with a ledge covered in pink pillows. If I’d been Nicole, I would have spent all day sitting there, reading and looking out into the thick, dreamy woods across the street, woods that had a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign in front of them because they belonged to Nicole’s family. But I never saw her sit there.

  It was a good thing she had this gorgeous house and a gorgeous family to go in it, because she had other problems. She was not a bright girl; her mother regularly visited Principal Peterson to keep her out of Basic Ed, but after sixth grade, we’d be in middle school and she wouldn’t be able to stay in the regular classes forever. I was desperate for her to win the election, to trounce Isabelle Lee, though the girl was smart and regrettably even nice. But Isabelle Lee had a life of success ahead of her, while this might be Nicole’s last chance to win at anything.

  “Plus, if the speech doesn’t clinch it,” I said, “then my routine will do the trick.”

  We spent recesses tumbling in the grass, and though I had no formal gymnastics training, I had quite an impressive repertoire. Over the summer, I had coordinated a routine I would perform as Nicole finished her speech, which ended with me clapping my feet in a handstand as the audience burst into applause. My clapping feet would communicate what words could not: that Nicole was generous and loyal, that she had silenced Fat Jack the moment she saw him teasing me, that she’d helped me find matching clothes and saved my life, basically. But the twins exchanged an ominous glance when I mentioned the routine.

  “About that…” Nicole said. “I’ve done some thinking, Ox. And, well, I think we should scratch the routine. I want to project a mature image as a leader, and I think your antics may send the wrong message.”

  “What antics? It’s a highly sophisticated routine,” I said.

  “Don’t get all mopey,” Nicole said.

  “I’m not mopey,” I said, looking away. “I’m just working on your speech.”

  The twins were no help, as usual, just smugly coloring in their signs. I kept my mouth shut after that. I thought of Sammy Watts knowing my last name and wondered if my friends even knew how to pronounce it, not that I would ask them. I finished the speech and wrote down more poster ideas, which included Got Nicole? along with Nicole Summers All Year Long and Summers Is Never Over.

  Nicole’s brother, Lionel, waddled into the room as we were wrapping up. We called him “the Lion” for his mane of blond curls. He was cute, for a kid, much cuter than the devil who lurked in my mother’s womb, I was sure. The Lion was followed by Mrs. Summers, who produced a plate of cookies from the ether. She was radiant, a mom who could sell Minute Maid on TV. I only watched it at Nicole’s—Papa had banned TV from our house because he felt it was for fools who lacked imagination, though he would still play Doom II with me if he had a particularly bad day at work.

  Mrs. Summers scooped up her son and turned to me. “I bet you can’t wait to have a little brother,” she said. “Your mother, when is she due?”

  “In a month.”

  “So exciting!”

  “I can’t wait,” I said, flashing my best smile. She chased the Lion to his room, and for the first time I wondered where the baby would live in our tiny condo.

  * * *

  —

  “I only told you about nine times. I was helping Nicole work on her campaign,” I said to my parents at dinner. “Remember?” We were eating Mama’s specialty, something she called Turkish rice, which was really just rice smeared in ketchup.

  “Lovely,” Mama said, flipping through What to Expect the First Year, which was perched on her enormous belly. She was reading in English so she was speaking English, which made me cringe. “But that girl, she is as dumb as a doornail.”

  “Dumb as a post,” I said. “Dead as a doornail.”

  “Indeed,” Mama said.

  “A corpse would make a better president than most. Andropov certainly,” Papa noted, taking a generous sip of wine from his Buckeyes mug. “When anybody chooses to be in a position of power, I am inherently suspicious.” Papa lifted a finger. “In the Soviet Union, this is something you are born knowing, like how to bribe a bureaucrat.”

  “It’s different here,” I said.

  “You can certainly trust Clinton more than Andropov,” Mama noted. “What a charming man….” She retreated to her child-rearing book, ignoring me as Papa rambled on about how he’d been lucky he didn’t have to bribe too many people because he was the Math Olympics champion in high school, which opened a lot of doors for him. Mama didn’t pay attention to this either, because she was Jewish and Papa was not, and she said that everything had been easier for him in Kiev than it had been for her. I poured water on my rice and stirred it around just for kicks. We sat under the only one of Papa’s sister’s paintings my grandmother hadn’t kept, which featured Papa’s head rising from a fruit bowl. His bulbous nose was a pear and his ears were orange slices.

  Mama looked up from her book, shook it at me, and said, “An American-born child, can you believe it? So much advice on how to raise an obedient creature! We’ll get it right this time, won’t we, Oksana?”

  “You are hard on the girl,” Papa said with a chuckle, though I didn’t see what was so funny. He stroked my hair, but it was too late.

  “What room is the baby going to stay in?” I said.

  “Pardon?” Papa said.

  “The Lion has his own room and he’s only three.”

  “If you are so fond of this zoo animal, then why don’t you move in with him?” said Mama, resting a hand on her belly. “The baby will sleep with us, and when he’s old enough—oh, who knows where we’ll be….”

  “Who knows what the world has in store for us?” Papa said. “My work at the university is temporary. A dead end, perhaps…” Papa had been interviewing for finance jobs in New York, though nothing had panned out yet.

  Mama ignored Papa’s ominous declaration about his current career. “At your age,” she told me, “I shared a toi
let with my parents and four families in a nice communalka. Each family had a cupboard with their own toilet lid in it, so we did not rub butts with strangers—it was really quite civilized. Did I ever complain, foolish girl?”

  Mama had a point. In Kiev, I never minded sharing one big room with Mama and Papa, but here it was embarrassing to not even have my own bathroom. But I would not give in to her.

  “If Kiev was so great, then why did you leave?” I said.

  “Oksana,” Mama said, putting her head in her hands. “Dearest God I don’t believe in,” she began, but she gave up on this train of thought. She settled on, “Do not suck my blood.”

  “My girls,” Papa said, putting an arm around each of us and splashing wine from his mug onto the carpet. “Why don’t we enjoy the present? We cannot look into the future.”

  “Indeed, dearest Vanya,” Mama said, looking at my father. “It is a blessing not to know what will happen next.”

  “It’s too bad,” I said. “Because I really don’t want to share my room.”

  I could only see about five minutes into the future. The neighbors were raising their voices, which meant they’d be shoving furniture into our wall in no time. Mama stopped clearing the table when the bottom of a chair leg came through the kitchen wall. White dust exploded onto the floor.

  “I really wish I could drink,” Mama said.

  “That is why I am drinking for two,” Papa said as he dumped the remaining wine from the bottle into his mug. He gave us a goofy smile and nodded at the cries behind the wall. “You see? That’s love.”

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Fat Jack taunted Kelly Watts on the bus ride home. He was yanking her pigtails like the shithead that he was. Papa always told me to feel empathy for others, and I tried to think of how much it would suck to be Fat Jack, but I couldn’t see past his looks. He was so fat it was hard to think anything else about him.

  “If you want me to stop, just say so,” he told Kelly.

  “Stop,” the girl said, very quietly.

  “I can’t hear you….”

  “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I said. “Oh, wait. There are no sumo wrestlers on the bus.”

  “Why don’t you lick Stalin’s nut sack?” he said, but Mr. Romano turned to us with a steely gaze, and the boy ceased his taunting. It was rumored that Romano had spent thirty years in prison for killing his wife, so he was not someone to mess with.

  Kelly gave me a grateful smile. But as soon as we got dropped off at our stop, Fat Jack yanked the girl’s hair again while the other kids and parents scurried away.

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll curse you with my commie voodoo,” I offered, and he snorted and snatched her backpack. He spun it in wild arcs over the water, which was suddenly a raging river instead of a charming creek where Nicole and I hunted for crayfish.

  “If you want it, come and get it,” he said.

  “Stop,” she whispered.

  “Give it back, dipshit,” I said.

  “Fat chance, commie!”

  “You’re the fat one,” I said, as Kelly began to cry. I could see I would make a terrible older sister. I picked up a big stick from the side of the road and held it up. “Give it back,” I said.

  “Or what?” he answered, having already exhausted his bully vocabulary.

  His arm was the size of my body and he didn’t take me seriously. Nobody did. Nicole thought I was a baby for wanting to do my routine. My parents only cared about my future brother and were ready to shove him in my room and maybe even toss me out to boot. I was nobody’s first choice, the Ross Perot of real life. And yet this girl was depending on me. I launched the stick toward Fat Jack, hoping to scare him away.

  It didn’t happen in slow motion—it happened fast, actually. One minute the stick was in my hand and the next it had sliced through his cheek and he was on the ground with his face in his hands. I hadn’t even wanted to hit him with it, let alone have the thing rip through him. He’d seemed so far away from me when I threw it.

  “What did you do?” he wailed. “What did you do?” I crept up to him, grabbed the bag, and tossed it to Kelly.

  “Thank you!” she said, as loudly as I’d ever heard her speak, and she ran away. Fat Jack lifted a hand from his cheek and was puzzled at the flesh that fell off it. His cheek was white in the way of skin that was about to bleed, hard, and I wasn’t going to hang around to see it happen.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you!” I said as I took off. I ran and ran until I reached my apartment and sat on the curb to catch my breath.

  Mama greeted me from the couch when I walked in; her belly looked ready to swallow up her tiny arms and legs. A cup of half-drunk tea was on the coffee table in front of her, along with some work papers and a phone she’d probably used to call her friends in New Jersey or her sick mother in Kiev earlier. The corners of the neighbors’ bookshelf and TV poked through the wall behind her, and the carpet beneath her was the same brown as the tea—you could have bled out an entire person right there and no one would have noticed. But she smiled like she was genuinely happy to see me. Mama could be nice sometimes.

  “My dear little fool,” Mama said, patting the space beside her. “I’m so glad you’re home. I was starting to worry.”

  * * *

  —

  “It won’t go on her record,” Principal Peterson assured my parents the next morning. “Like a stone dropping to the bottom of an ocean. It’s the best I can do,” he said, smiling though he was saying sad things. Papa winked at me as the principal uttered his strange turn of phrase, while Mama acted like he was being normal. He went on to say that the best he could do was kick me off the bus and give me two weeks of in-school suspension, which I’d spend in the side room by his office, completing my schoolwork and drowning in self-loathing.

  “We understand,” Mama said. She put a hand on her belly, as if to guard her unborn child from his sister’s mistakes.

  Principal Peterson was a tall man who appeared to always be on the brink of apologizing. I knew he didn’t like doling out my punishment; he seemed particularly ill-suited to be a school principal, or even to socialize at all. Based on the strange way he talked, I wondered if he had wanted to be a poet. A few students claimed to have seen him at an Ohio State game alone, which sounded like the saddest thing in the world.

  “I only wanted to scare him, not hurt him. He was going to throw Kelly’s bag into the creek,” I said.

  “Behave, Oksana,” Mama said. “This is a sentencing, not a negotiation.”

  “My daughter is foolhardy but not monstrous,” Papa declared. He had been watching two squirrels chase each other around a tree outside the window, confused about his role in this drama. Papa was my comrade-in-arms, my teammate; he did not know what to do during my punishment. The night before, he’d winced painfully when he said we couldn’t play Doom II together anymore because it was too violent.

  “I understand your daughter’s intentions,” Principal Peterson said. “Still, there’s a boy with a broken face, and something has to be done. Seventeen stitches down his cheek,” he said, and I sucked in my breath. I couldn’t believe I had done this to somebody. “I would say an apology is in order, but the boy doesn’t wish to see your daughter,” he continued.

  Though I was relieved I didn’t have to face Fat Jack, I now felt even worse. I wished Nicole or the twins would appear so they could tell me I was not some dirty criminal.

  Mama and Papa left and Principal Peterson and I were stuck staring at each other. Through the window behind him, I saw my parents walking toward Papa’s new used red Honda, his pride and joy, holding hands. Mama stopped to touch her belly and Papa kneeled, put an ear to her stomach, and kissed whatever living thing was under there. A thing too amorphous to be m
onstrous, one that they hoped would turn out better than me, a creature desperate to break out into the world, and who knew what for.

  * * *

  —

  My teacher, Mrs. Ferguson, delivered my classwork after my parents left—rather smugly, in my opinion; she already hated me because I’d complained that the books she made us read were too easy. She was the Gifted teacher, and her room was connected to Mrs. Davis’s non-Gifted class by a private bathroom the students were not allowed to use. Naturally, we believed this was the site of spectacular, wild lesbian orgies between the two teachers, which took place when the students were at recess.

  I finished my work and spent the afternoon snipping my arm hairs with my plastic scissors and reading the latest Fear Street book. The only person I saw all day was Mrs. Summers, who visited Principal Peterson for a long time to rally for her daughter. I left twice to use the bathroom and crept around like a burglar to avoid Fat Jack, even though I knew he was in Basic Ed at the other side of the school. I was already losing my grip on reality in my isolation and felt a kinship with Mr. Romano, our bus driver.

  When the final bell rang, I saw that Sammy Watts had been in another side room all along. He gave me a knowing, almost businesslike nod; he was there for cheating. He was wearing a Michigan T-shirt to be controversial.

  “You’re a hero, Konnikova,” he said. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  “I only wanted to scare him,” I said.

  “I saw him this morning,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “You did a number on him. If he didn’t look so bad, I’d hit him again.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt him.”