“I got lost, Papa. I was just looking for the bathroom.”
“Does your father look like a complete fool to you?”
I shook my head and scuffed the stairs with my shoe. We stood there looking at each other. I was deciding whether to tell him about the weird men who didn’t know who he was.
“It’s my fault.”
We jumped at the sound of Mallory Hazzard’s voice. She’d returned to the stairwell, looking radiant, like she hadn’t been crying or drinking at all. Her hair was down and her lips shone with freshly applied gloss. Papa was starstruck, stumbling backward, awed by her beauty—and her celebrity. It surrounded her like a force field. I didn’t know what she wanted to say, but I knew my heart would break if she incriminated herself to Papa.
I stepped in front of her and said, “It’s not her fault. I left because…the girls were being mean to me, and Mal made me feel better.”
But Papa barely heard me. He put a hand on the railing. “I am sorry that my daughter troubled you,” he said. “She likes to follow her own path….”
“It’s no trouble,” she said, sounding completely not drunk. “She’s a good kid.”
Then Papa smiled shyly. He pulled out the notepad he kept in his back pocket. “For my daughter—would you mind?”
“Of course not,” she said, smiling as she signed her name. Then she grabbed a scrap of paper from her bag and handed it to my father. “Would you mind? I hear you were in the Olympics.”
Papa laughed. “Well, yes, but—”
“Your daughter told me all about it.”
He looked at me like I had just won the National Spelling Bee.
“Oh, nonsense,” he said, blushing, but he signed the paper anyway. “What a day! I thank you for giving me the greatest pleasure. My daughter will not forget this,” he said, shaking her hand.
“The pleasure is all mine,” she said, tucking the page into her bag.
I stepped back, into the corner. Those two had lost something that was very precious to them a long time ago, and I couldn’t help them get it back. There was an understanding between them, and I had no business being there. Why was this day taking so long to end? The three of us regarded the stairs winding above us. The building must have had fifty floors, at least. For a moment, as Papa cleared his throat, I had the terrifying fear that he would burst into song, though he hardly ever sang, he only listened. But they just stared at each other. Papa was not unhandsome—at least he was better-looking than the dead-eyed men he worked with. His sandy hair was thick and his blue eyes burned bright.
I couldn’t stand there any longer, so I mumbled something about needing the bathroom and left them alone. I found an empty hallway and I walked on my hands from one side to the other until I got dizzy and had to stop, watching the spots flickering and flickering before my eyes until the world returned to normal.
* * *
—
I found Papa at his desk a little while later, admiring his family photo; thankfully, it was time to go. When we left the office, I saw the elevator jerks standing outside with the other “Grrrrrl Leaders!” and their dads, who were not just older than my father but fatter and uglier too. Staten Island girl was beside her dad, a big dark-haired guy holding a paper cup of coffee, and just the sight of the bitter drink made me almost gag. Papa lit up with the security guards, and while they were making small talk, I wandered away, toward the elevator-jerk group. I marched toward the head creep as the girls raised their brows at me.
I said, “My dad is Ivan Konnikov, remember? You may not know who he is, but he was the Soviet Math Olympics champion once.” I stopped and took a breath and prepared to exaggerate a bit. “He had dinner with Brezhnev to celebrate his victory. People all over the Soviet Union knew my father’s name—he was famous!” I took a step back, catching my breath, embarrassed I had said so much.
The man said, “That’s wonderful, honey. We’ll look out for him.”
They gave me these amused smiles, like I was just some dumb kid they were humoring.
“Dinner with Brezhnev, huh?” one said, nodding. “Is that him?” We turned toward my father, standing with the guards. He smiled and lifted a hand, cigarette smoke rising above him.
“Who the heck is Brezhnev anyway?” Staten Island girl said.
“That’s him, all right,” I said, ignoring her. “Ivan Konnikov. Don’t you forget it.”
I made sure I was out of Papa’s line of sight, and then I lurched slightly toward the Staten Island coffee dad and made him cry out as he spilled some of the brown slush on his sleeve, though he had done nothing to me.
Papa put a hand on my shoulder when I returned to him. “My daughter,” he said to the guards, and they smiled at us as we walked away.
In the parking garage, we waited for someone to pull our new Passat around. Most of the other cars in there were not like ours—shiny BMWs, Lexuses, and Mercedeses—because Papa hadn’t had time to make real money yet. But that day, Papa could have been going home on a parade float. When we drove off, he had this dopey grin on his face and didn’t say anything for a while. He was so happy he didn’t even complain that we spent a good ten minutes behind a fire truck, unable to see a thing. Squares of yellow light flicked on all over the city as the sun went down.
Papa said, “Today was nice, wasn’t it, Oksanka Banka? It’s not every day that you meet a star! This job has some advantages!”
“She was such a great role model,” I said, knowing this would add some pointless comfort to his day. I was getting pretty good at lying by then and wondered if it should alarm me. But why should I care if he couldn’t see who she really was—or if she really knew about his past?
“I found the woman to be quite inspiring,” Papa said.
He smiled again, as if all his pounding away at the computer and the hours he spent on the road that made him come home like a zombie Mama had to bring back to life were worth it after all. He turned on the classical music at a reasonable volume and drummed the wheel, staring off into a newly bright world. But after we pulled into the Holland Tunnel, I realized that we hadn’t gone back to Battery Park. I hadn’t wanted to go back there when he’d suggested it, but I suddenly felt I had missed out. I remembered the long-ago day when Papa and Mama and I had gone there for ice cream and asked a stranger to take pictures of us with the Statue of Liberty in the background. That was what we thought we did, anyway. After the photos were developed, we cracked up when we saw that we were blocking the statue in every shot. You could just barely make out her torch shining over our heads, hovering below the dirty clouds.
The word was “transient.”
“Temporary,” I said. “Fleeting.”
Mrs. Donovan sighed. We were at her kitchen table, going over my SAT flash cards for the millionth time. I tried to pay attention as I watched her neighbor tearing down his Christmas decorations through the window.
“You really don’t need me. I’m just stealing your money, kid,” she said.
“ ‘Transient,’ ” a voice said. “Also a word for ‘bum.’ ”
“They won’t use it like that on the test,” Mrs. Donovan said, turning toward a scruffy green-eyed man who wore a HARVARD CLASS OF 1993 sweatshirt. She introduced me and said he was her son, Benny, who was staying with her for a little while. He picked up my binder and studied my full name, which I had written on the top.
“Nice to meet you, Oksana…Konnikova,” he said as he shook my hand.
“Nice work,” I said. “No one ever says it right on the first try.”
“Most people don’t try hard enough.”
We stared at each other until Mrs. Donovan said, “Benny just signed on to coach the track team, so you’ll be seeing more of each other.”
“How do I hate winter track,” I said. “Let me count the ways.” This made him laugh. I said, “Did you lik
e Harvard?”
“Of course,” he said, but his voice fell flat. “I studied English like a good son.” He lifted the book he was holding, which was The Stranger.
“I love reading,” I said idiotically. “The Stranger’s one of my favorite books,” I added, though I hadn’t exactly read it. He smiled like he knew I was lying. I wanted to ask what he was doing coaching track in Edison, New Jersey, if he’d graduated from Harvard, but I didn’t want to act like I cared too much in front of his mom. He peered in the fridge as she picked up the next flash card.
“ ‘Avuncular.’ ”
It was such an easy one that I waved it away. So was the next one. And the one after that.
“The milk’s expired,” Benny said.
“Don’t just stare at it. Throw it out,” Mrs. Donovan said, but he was already walking away. She stood and poured the milk down the drain as her neighbor dragged a deflated reindeer into his garage.
“Now,” she said, returning to the table. “Where were we?”
I felt her son’s hand still burning into mine as she held up the next card. Though Mrs. Donovan had been my teacher all of sophomore year, she had only mentioned her son once. That had been a year ago, when I returned to her class after my father died. “It’s not a fair thing,” she’d said, hugging me after the other students filed out. “It was so awful when my son lost his father….” Now I wondered: How had her son reacted, and when had it happened? I was so distracted I said I didn’t know what the word on the next card meant. She gave me a puzzled look and told me the definition. I laughed because it was so easy. It was “dilemma.”
* * *
—
The next day working at the school library was slow. Mrs. Grundy was giving a tutorial to an AP bio class in the back, and people weren’t exactly falling all over the poetry display I’d spent hours perfecting. A few Korean juniors were memorizing the answers to an old calc test. They got their tests from the Korean seniors for free; I got mine from them in exchange for Mama’s sleeping pills. Mr. Ferraro stopped making new tests after his son died in 9/11 that fall.
I was working in the library when I found out about it, after Mrs. Grundy wheeled out a television with the grainy image of the burning towers on it and we heard the students with parents who worked in the city get called to the front office one by one. I tried to feel something, some kind of fear or horror for our fucked-up world, but I didn’t have any pity left for anyone outside my family. I found Mrs. Donovan after her class let out that day, and she gave me a big hug. “The world’s full of nasty surprises, kid,” she had said, and then she shrugged and added, “That’s all I’ve got.” I didn’t realize how much I missed her until that moment. I asked her to be my SAT tutor later that month, though I didn’t really need help.
It didn’t take long to find Mrs. Donovan’s son in an old yearbook, though most of the students were white back then, instead of Indian or Asian with a handful of Russians like me. Benny was in practically every picture, a smooth-faced baby. I stroked his face, wondering at the arbitrariness of time, how he happened to be born fourteen years earlier than I was. There was his pale, muscular body as he crossed the finish line in a race, his jaw clenched and his head back like he was defying gravity. The goofy look on his face as he gave a speech as student council president. The smirk in his photo for Most Likely to Succeed.
But even then there was an emptiness I recognized in his eyes, because I saw it in Mama. I wanted to own it, that sadness, to embrace it until it warmed me up and hugged me back. But I didn’t get it. What did he have to be so sad about?
The bell rang and I jumped. My boyfriend, Koz, approached the front desk. He grabbed my copy of The Stranger and my calc book, though I could have carried them myself.
“You look cute in that sweater,” he said. I was wearing one of my mom’s concoctions.
“Maybe I don’t want to be cute.”
“Too bad, Calf. You can’t help it. Like Lito can’t help hitting the bottle between classes.”
“Shut up,” I said, but I laughed anyway.
In spite of his remedial math classes and frosted tips, Koz won me over by making me laugh on the track bus just after my dad died. I was feeling extra emo right then, reading The Bell Jar and itching to write my own moody poems, “High and Dry” on repeat on my Discman. He put on my headphones and said, “Now, that’s some music I could really slit my wrists to.” I cracked up, and by the end of the ride he had his arm around me. The only time we had spoken before was when he started calling me Calfnikova, after he saw my huge calves when the season started. As we got off the bus that day, he said, “I can tell the guys to stop calling you Calfnikova.” I said, “Don’t. I’m used to it.”
Now he said, “Did you know we’re getting a new coach? He’s Mrs. Donovan’s son.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, not sure why I was lying. He made fun of Lito some more, but I didn’t feel up for it. My brother had woken me up with his nightmares twice the past night, and I was exhausted.
We stopped outside my calc class, where Mr. Ferraro was wiping off the board, getting chalk all over his belly. This was the part where Koz and I made out, but I could tell we both wanted to skip it. I squeezed his hand and said, “See you at practice.”
* * *
—
Every season, the new runners lined up by the bleachers, shivering as they waited to get their warm-ups from Mazzo. With his gold chain and forever tan, he looked like a Seaside bouncer as he judged the new crop. He sent the black kids to sprinting, the white and Asian kids to distance, and he scrunched up his face at the Indians, like it took every brain cell he had to say, “Try mid-distance.” Someone always complained about Mazzo’s antics, but I found it hard to hate someone that simple. It was like how people got worked up about Bush. Why bother?
Koz ran by and squeezed my shoulder. “Ready for a new season, Calfzilla?”
“Born ready.”
Benny—Coach Benny—stood in the center of the track, timing 400 splits. Coach Lito, booze addled and wobbling like a bowling pin that refused to go down, was showing him the ropes. Benny nodded smugly, like being a coach was a role he was trying out. They didn’t have a uniform for him yet, so he wore the hoodie Lily had designed for our team fundraiser. It read, BURN, BABY, BURN! THE HOOVER HAWKS ARE ON FIRE! Below that, she had drawn a sneaker with red and orange flames exploding out of it, licking their way up to the top like tiny fiery tongues, consuming everything in their wake. Benny lifted a hand in my direction and I ran up to him.
“Look who it is,” he said. “My mom’s favorite student.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that. Besides, she’s not my teacher anymore.”
“I don’t care about what I’m supposed to say.”
“Good for you,” I said. We stared at the other side of the track, where Koz and Lecky were pretending to stab each other with the javelins. “Why is it so easy for some people?” I said.
“That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time, Oksana Konnikova.”
“At Harvard?” I said, trying to recover from the sound of my full name in his mouth, like he was tasting every syllable. “Was that something you asked yourself there?”
“Only every day,” he said, fiddling with his stopwatch.
“I’d love to go to Harvard.”
“Why?”
“It’s the best,” I said, knowing how dumb this was. It had to do with Papa’s idea of America. If he was going to abandon his physics career to suffer on Wall Street—just a short walk from the Towers—then it would be for the family, so my brother and I could make something of ourselves. If I went to Harvard, it would prove he had done something right. He’d worked so much that he’d spent more time driving to and from work than with his family, so if it wasn’t for us, then what was it all for? I said, “My dad…”
&n
bsp; “So you’re one of those,” Benny said, which really pissed me off.
“I’m not one of anything,” I said.
* * *
—
The night after our first meet, which we won by a hair, Koz came over after Mama and my brother fell asleep. We made out in bed for a while and then he folded his arms behind his head and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, childish idiot stars Papa had put up long after I was too old for them.
“I should really take those down,” I said.
“Maybe you should,” he said, and for some reason I was annoyed.
“I kind of like them.”
He laughed. “Suit yourself, Calf. I was just trying to be agreeable.”
“Here’s something you can agree with,” I said.
I reached into his pants and stroked his dick. Though his friends didn’t know it, Koz—a Catholic—didn’t believe in sex before marriage. He didn’t even believe in blow jobs, though Lily had given me an extensive tutorial, using a Popsicle, just in case. After I finished, we were quiet, until I felt a jolting pain in my leg.
“Fuck,” I said, and I flexed my foot and stretched forward until the pain stopped.
“Let me help,” Koz said, but I gently shoved him away. I guess I wasn’t so gentle, because he looked hurt. He said, “You all right?”
“Of course.”
I got cramps in my calves a lot, usually at night. Though Papa had barely been home during the day, I could always count on him in the middle of the night, when I’d wake up crying out, and he’d rush to my room and flex my leg until the pain went away. “There you go, my dear girl,” he’d say. “All better.”
Koz got up and zipped his jeans. “It’s pretty musty in here,” he said. “I would open up the window if I were you.”
“When it gets warmer,” I said, but he was already walking away.
Oksana, Behave! Page 7
