“Oh, Oksie. Can you believe this?”
“I can’t,” I said, joining her under her plaid covers.
“I knew I could depend on you. The twins—they didn’t even come. They said they had a curfew! Can you believe that?” she said, and she burst into tears at the word “curfew,” a vestige from her ordered life. I tried not to bristle when I understood she had called the twins first.
“Your parents will work it out,” I said.
“You really think so?”
“Definitely,” I said. I looked away, because I had never lied about something that mattered before. I knew she wanted more from me. “We are rogue warriors,” I told her. “Lone soldiers in the universe.”
Nicole nodded and closed her eyes, slipping deeper under her covers, and I knew she understood me this time. The Lion climbed on her bay-window nook and stared in the direction of the dark woods with his hands pressed against the glass. I moved toward him and saw that his face was filled with wonder, bathed in light—a light whose source was not the moon or a celestial being but the headlights of my parents’ fucking car. I would never be able to escape them.
Eventually, they cut the lights. Papa had his arm around Mama and they stared at the house like that alone would summon me. They wanted the world to be safe for me, and I hated them for it. I pounded on the glass to signal to them, not to say I was coming but to tell them to go away. But they didn’t see me. They just kept sitting there, knowing I would have to leave my friend eventually. Who were these people, and what were they thinking? Were they disappointed with their only child, with how their lives were turning out? What did they think I needed? Why didn’t they just leave me alone?
Papa had been the U.S.S.R. Math Olympics champion when he was sixteen, but all he’d managed to achieve was working for Goldman Sachs. He had competed all over the Soviet Union, from Tallinn to Vladivostok, and had even gotten to shake Brezhnev’s hand in a big ceremony when he won. But nobody cared about the Math Olympics in America. Mama loved to remind me of all of Papa’s sacrifices for our family and told me to go easy on him, especially when he did things that were “good for his soul,” like blasting classical music in his car as loud as humanly possible without caring about his passengers—namely, me. That morning, I massaged my temples, hoping Papa would get the picture, amazed that even classical music could be offensive at a high volume.
I ran out of patience once we hit the Parkway. I said, “Can you turn it down a notch?”
“Turn it down, rabbit? But this is the only way I like to hear it,” he said with an exaggerated frown that made him look as dumb as the boys in eighth grade. Lately he had replaced all the songs with English in them with classical music whenever he drove, and I hoped the phase would pass. But I felt guilty when he grunted and turned the music off completely.
“I’m just not awake yet,” I said.
“Here,” he said, thrusting his coffee mug at me. “This will do it.”
I was almost fourteen and had never had coffee before. I took a sip and struggled not to spit it out.
“Disgusting,” I said.
“You get used to it, like everything else,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I was skipping school for Take Your Daughter to Work Day. It had taken some wrangling to convince Mama to let me go, but Papa was excited to show me the Wall Street office where he had been working for the past few months—the reason my family had left Ohio for New Jersey. I cared more about ditching class than seeing the place that kept Papa from making it home in time for dinner or playing computer games with me. Only after I accepted did I realize I’d have to leave home at six instead of seven in the morning. I took another sip of the disgusting slush as we pulled into the garage, which was just past the twin towers. It tasted like mud. Papa put his hand on my back as we walked to his office.
We passed Battery Park, which was where Papa had taken me and Mama on our first trip to New York, when I was eight. Papa saw me slowing down and said, “We can walk around here at the end of the day. Perhaps even get some ice cream,” and I said that sounded like a good idea, though I was pretty sure you were too old for ice cream with your dad once you got full boobs. A garbage truck stopped in front of us, blocking our path. My friend Lily had told me garbage men made a ton of money, way more than Papa, but I wasn’t sure I believed her.
The Goldman Sachs building loomed in the distance like a brown cheese grater. Papa lit a cigarette as the truck roared away and finished it by the time we reached the building. He nodded hello to two of the security guards and we stepped inside. The ceilings were infinitely tall, the lobby made of shiny marble. I got a name tag at the front desk and we waited for an elevator to take us all the way up to Papa’s floor. We were let out into a room at least five times the size of my school gym. There was a table with bagels, orange juice, pastries, and coffee on it, and a few daughters picked at the food. All of the suited-up dads stood in clumps, looking considerably older and more tired than my father. The daughters giggled in a circle, and I wondered how they spoke so freely together. Papa and I looked at the people and back at each other.
“Would you like to see my desk?” he said.
I grabbed a bagel with no cream cheese and followed him. The floor had no offices at all, just row after row of desks crowded with more computer screens than I had ever seen in my life. Enormous TVs hung from the walls, and clocks showed the time in London and Tokyo. As Papa led me toward one of these rows, it occurred to me that this meant he didn’t have his own office.
“Here,” he said, gesturing toward a desk with only two computer screens on it. “I sit here all day long. Except when I smoke.” It looked so pathetic—hardly twice the size of my desk at school. I noticed a photo of me holding my brother just after he was born a year ago, and it made me cringe. I almost never thought of Papa when I was at school, going about my life, while he looked at this picture of my little brother, Misha, and me every single day. We idled back to the chattering daughters and dads, and I picked at my bagel until a gray-haired lady mercifully rang a bell and announced the order of events. The only thing I gathered was that some famous basketball-player lady was giving a speech after lunch. Other than that, we’d spend most of the day in “workshops.” This definitely sounded worse than school.
Only when a different gray-haired lady came over to separate me from Papa did I realize he would not be joining me—he would have to work. This didn’t seem fair. The other dads were already rushing to their desks, answering their phones. Papa lifted a hand as he backed away from me and said, “See you at lunch.”
* * *
—
“I was, like, obsessed with Mallory Hazzard when I was little,” a big Italian-looking girl from a place called “Shah-lin” was saying to anyone who would listen; it took me a moment to realize she was talking about the basketball player. The girl had curly black hair, Tiffany’s jewelry, and a perfect French manicure she’d probably gotten just for the dumb occasion. The other girls wore dresses, billowy flowery things. I wore a Spice Girls T-shirt and cargo pants that were too short, showing too much of my Skechers, which looked ridiculous in the plush conference room. I hadn’t dressed up, specifically because Mama kept telling me I should, which I figured was only because she was a real accountant now and had to dress up for work so she thought I should be fancy too. The girl rambled on about this basketball legend I had never heard of—I didn’t even know women’s basketball was a thing.
Our “Grrrrrl Leaders!” workshop was completely useless; each girl had to share some kind of “entrepreneur” idea. I didn’t know what “entrepreneur” meant and said I just liked to read, not lead, thank you, and the instructor quickly moved on. After it wrapped up, I was stuck listening to the girls comparing *NSYNC to the Backstreet Boys. It was pretty obvious they were nothing like me; they were from places like Basking Ridge and Short Hills, places where all the friends my
parents knew back in Kiev lived now, while we lived in average Edison, where Mama claimed we would “get on our feet” before we could move somewhere more stuck-up. Once we were dismissed, I followed the girls into an elevator for the next workshop. Three men hovered over us, smiling smugly.
One looked at “Shah-lin” girl’s name tag and said, “You’re not Kenny Rizzo’s girl, are you?”
“Guilty as charged,” she said, and the men got excited, introducing themselves and shaking her hand, like they had never met somebody’s daughter before. Then, because they sensed they were ignoring the rest of us, they figured out who all the other dads were, declaring, “Great guy,” “Love that guy,” “Sharpest man I know”—how many floors did this building have?—until the first man put a hand on my shoulder and said, “And who’s your father, honey?”
I swallowed. “Ivan Konnikov,” I said, standing taller.
The man frowned and said, “No, I don’t know that one,” and the others chimed in to agree. The jovial atmosphere disappeared completely, as if I had said my father was Joseph Stalin.
I said, “He only started working here a few months ago,” and then they nodded a bit more enthusiastically, grateful for this excuse. I could have told them more. I could have said he would still be a hotshot scientist if we had stayed in Ukraine, but Mama was Jewish and decided we were all Jewish refugees and made Papa schlep our family to America, where he’d hardly made a dime as a physicist, and then my brother was born and he realized he had to make yet another sacrifice for his family, so here we were. And here, I was finding out pretty fast, kind of sucked.
* * *
—
Mallory Hazzard was not what I expected. For one thing, she was white. For another, she was gorgeous and insanely tall, a specimen from an entirely different breed of woman. Her blond hair fell to her waist—I assumed she’d have it pulled back because she was an athlete. She had a big nose that was somehow perfect and an adorable gap between her front teeth. She began by saying, “I never had it easy, growing up. I lived in a dirt-poor town in West Virginia with nine brothers and sisters. My dad died in the mines when I was a kid, but he gave me my first basketball for Christmas. Shooting hoops was the only way I could get out of the sticks and help out my poor mom….”
The fathers were seated away from their daughters, on the other side of the room. It reminded me of the dances at school, girls on one side and boys on the other. Papa, who could rarely hide his emotions, had a constipated look on his face, though he stuck his tongue out when he caught me staring. If I hadn’t known there was a women’s basketball team that people cared about, then Papa probably didn’t know what basketball was. I was pretty sure the only thing he’d ever done for sport back in Kiev was shooting beer bottles in the woods—though even that pastime had been cut short after he shot his cousin in the foot. As Mallory Hazzard talked about how proud she was that her American team took the bronze in the 1992 Olympics, Papa was probably thinking this woman’s life hadn’t turned out so bad, that at least all her hard work had gotten her something she wanted.
“I’m so glad to give back to the community today and so honored to have the opportunity to speak to so many young, talented women. Maybe a few of you will be a part of the WNBA someday,” she said, and this even got a laugh. I laughed too, but not because I thought she was being cute. Though I didn’t know everything about America, I was pretty sure there weren’t too many basketball players with dads who worked at Goldman Sachs. We applauded, and then a swarm of girls got in line to get their picture taken with the celebrity and to get an autograph on the big posters of her face they had stacked up. I saw the “Shah-lin” girl up there, posing for a photo with the star, which was the first time I saw her smile, revealing big blue braces that made me almost feel sorry for her.
When the girl returned to my group, she said, “Oh my God. She was, like, so freaking nice. I can’t believe it…I’m never going to wash my hand again.” She clutched her rolled-up signed poster like it was a magic wand, but it didn’t impress me. I had stopped being scared of her once I realized “Shah-lin” was only Staten Island. While her minions cooed around her, the girl zeroed in on me, like she was wondering why I wasn’t tripping over myself to suck up to her too. But I turned away from her, toward the dads, and wondered how they didn’t suffocate after staring at screens all day in their thick, itchy suits. Garbage men were far better off, I decided; they wore comfy, loose-fitting clothes and were constantly on the move.
“Garbage men,” I said to the girl. “I hear they make a lot of money. How much do you think they make?”
Her eyes got huge. “Garbage men?” she said. “I mean, they probably make, like, minimum wage.”
“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said, backing away.
She narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out whether or not I was insulting her; I guess I wasn’t sure either. The other girls glared at me, like they had some personal biases against garbage men.
Just to cover her bases, the girl managed to say, “You know you, like, totally clash, right? Did you get dressed in the dark or what?”
“Brace face,” I managed, before fleeing the scene.
* * *
—
I wandered up and down the building for a while until I found the best view from the top floor. I looked down on the city, which was kind of gross but kind of beautiful too, with a few boats drifting into the harbor, not a cloud in the sky. Spring was all around us; the trees below had sprouted pink and white flowers. I peeked into the windows of the surrounding buildings, but all I saw were offices and more offices, and who knows what people did in any of them. One woman whose desk faced the window sat with her head in her hands. I promised myself I would never work in an office, especially not in a big room with endless desks and no barriers between them.
I didn’t want to have any more awkward conversations in the elevator, so I took the stairs. After I went down about a dozen floors, I heard a strange noise below, and I followed it down to the next landing. It sounded like…crying? Choking? At first I didn’t think it was her—for a number of reasons, like her red eyes, but mostly because her gorgeous blond hair was up. She sat hugging her legs like a child, and her big leather purse was wide open, revealing scattered makeup, some crumpled paper, and a half-empty water bottle. It was Mallory Hazzard.
What do you say to somebody famous? I scratched the back of my knee and heard myself say, “I like your hair up.”
“Thanks,” she said, giving me a small smile. She didn’t seem all that surprised to see me. I guessed that when you were famous, people were always sneaking up on you.
“Do you usually wear it like that?”
“I do. Except when I have to do this…promotional bullshit. Sorry,” she said, patting the ground. I sat down without hesitating. It was the first interesting thing that had happened all day.
“Why do you have to do that stuff?” I said.
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“You sound like my dad.”
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Oksana.”
She smiled. “Like Oksana Baiul. Nice. I’m Mal,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. It was quiet in the stairwell but not in a bad way. Did no one take the stairs anymore? “Any particular reason you’re not doing the whole father-daughter thing?”
“It turns out it’s not really a father-daughter thing. They separate you from your dad all day. And all the girls are snobs. I don’t have anything to say to them.”
“Don’t let them get to you, kid,” she said, taking a sip of her water. I tied and untied my sneaker, waiting for her to say more. She sighed and said, “I do this nonsense for the money. To tell you the truth, I don’t have much going on. I make ends meet by dealing with assholes at places like—Goldman Sachs. No offense to your old man. I’m sure he’s a nice guy.”
“He is,” I said. I searched for a way to show her my dad was special, nothing like the fools in the elevator. “Back in Ukraine, he was kind of a big deal,” I began, and her eyes widened. Telling her he was the Math Olympics champion would mean nothing; I had to think outside the box. “He was in the Olympics,” I said.
“The Olympics?” she said. “For what?”
This gave me pause. I pictured Papa, who was broad-shouldered and somewhat tall but not exactly athletic-looking, and considered the options available to the members of my track team.
“He threw the javelin,” I told her. “He was a gold medalist in javelin.”
“Seriously?” she said. “Man, what I would have given for the gold. That’s beyond amazing. You should be incredibly proud of him.”
“Oh,” I said, “I am.”
She took a sip from her water bottle and I asked if I could have some too. She said, “That’s not water, honey.”
I grabbed the bottle and took a swig anyway. It was sharp and bitter and left my stomach feeling queasy and warm. It must have been vodka. What my parents drank.
“Gross,” I said. “That’s even worse than coffee.”
“You don’t need that stuff yet,” she said.
Before I could answer, I heard a voice say, “Oksanachka? Is that you?”
“Oh shit,” Mallory Hazzard said. She snuck out of the stairwell, leaving me all alone. Papa was about ten floors down and he was coming up fast. I got up and pointlessly adjusted my shirt.
“Where did you go? I was worried you ran out to Battery Park. What’s the matter with you?”
Oksana, Behave! Page 6
