Later that night, my brother cried out and I ran to his room. The blanket Mama made was soaked and Grisha the hamster was agitated, banging into his wheel. My brother read more books than any almost-five-year-old and was full of knowledge about presidents and dog breeds, but he didn’t know how to stop wetting himself. I cleaned him up and took him to my bed. He only let me take care of him after his nightmares now, which had started after Papa died. Me, I never remembered my dreams. I would have traded with my brother in a heartbeat.
“Papa got stuck on the train tracks and I couldn’t pull him off. You should have seen his face. He looked so sad,” he said.
“His face was like that because you’re sad, Mishka. But he’s not sad. He’s somewhere up there, laughing at us.”
“Up with your glowing stars?” he asked, nuzzling into me, his voice thick with sleep.
“Higher than that, silly,” I told him, tossing a semen-stained tissue in the trash. “He’s up there with the real stars.”
* * *
—
I was late for gym. Lily had me trapped by her locker, rambling about her latest fight with her boyfriend, Vinay. She was saying, “The fuck is his problem? If he wanted to date somebody who gave him head all the time, then he should get with a white girl…no offense.” I wasn’t offended. I was mostly counting down the minutes until practice. I did find it funny that a Korean girl was telling me white girls were slutty when she was the one who wasn’t a virgin.
I only realized I said what I was thinking when she said, “What’s the matter with you, OxyContin? You think you know everything now?”
“All I know is I’m late for gym.”
“Whatever,” she said, nudging me as she slinked off to the art wing. Lily never stayed mad for long. I speed-walked down the hall until I heard a voice behind me.
“Oksana Konnikova.”
I moved into the dark, narrow corridor that led to the auditorium stage, until there was just an arm’s distance between me and Benny. He grabbed the ends of my scarf, pulling me closer. Static jolted from it and I could feel my hair flying up. I tried to smooth it down but it only crackled more.
“Cool scarf.”
“My mom made it.” I felt dizzy and short of breath. “She made me, like, five this month alone. The only thing she does anymore is make scarves and mittens and sweaters for me and my brother. You’d think we live in Siberia or something….” He smiled like he knew I was rambling.
“It’s all right,” he said, dropping the ends of my scarf. “I like hearing you talk.”
“I finished The Stranger. I mean, I read it again. It’s pretty dark.”
“Is it?” He scratched the back of his head and gave me a grown-up smile. “You ready?”
“For what?”
“To kick South Brunswick’s ass tomorrow.”
I considered jumping into coach-athlete banter, but I knew it wouldn’t impress him.
“Not really. But it doesn’t matter what happens. I can win or lose, and it won’t make a difference. I just run so I don’t sit at home and go nuts.”
He smiled. “That sounds about right to me.”
The final bell rang but I didn’t move. I was embarrassed about talking so much. I said, “Can you write me a pass?”
“I’m not a teacher.”
I walked away holding the ends of my scarf, feeling the heat on the back of my neck. I studied myself in a display of football trophies in the lobby and barely recognized the girl with the rumpled hair who felt wild in front of her teacher’s son.
The 9/11 memorial was next to the trophies, showing a picture of Ferraro’s son along with ones of two dads of kids I didn’t know. Every few weeks, Mr. Ferraro would cover the memorial with NEVER FORGET posters, which the administrators usually tore down. His son stood on a porch wearing a plaid shirt and a dopey smile that seemed inappropriate for such a solemn display. In the picture his father chose to represent him, taken who knows how long before he jumped out of his building to avoid getting burned alive, the man looked almost lovesick.
* * *
—
I spent lunch helping Mrs. Donovan grade sophomore quizzes on The Odyssey. The final question was: How many years went by before Odysseus returned? Someone wrote, two thousand light-years, and she chuckled as she drew a red line through his answer.
“Benny seems to be doing well,” she said, studying my face.
“He’s great,” I said. “The team loves him.” This wasn’t strictly true, but it was better than “Everyone thinks he’s stuck-up but I might be obsessed with him.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, smiling big. She hummed to herself, not even caring when her kids had clearly not done the reading.
When she taught The Odyssey last year, she once stepped away from her desk to stare out a window during a discussion. “Penelope’s one lucky broad,” she had said. “She got her man back.” Then she stared at us, bewildered, as if we could relate. I didn’t know when her husband had died, but I loved her even more after that.
“I’m so glad,” she said again. “I was so worried. I just want—I want to make the world safe for him, but there’s only so much I can do, and it terrifies me.”
“There’s no need to worry.” She didn’t look convinced, so I changed the subject. I said, “What is a light-year, anyway?” I didn’t hear her answer, because I saw Benny walking down the hall, looking at his stopwatch like it could tell him something important.
* * *
—
Plainfield was a joke. I placed first in the mile by five seconds. Misty O’Farrell, Plainfield’s blond elf of a miler and one of the only white girls on the team, normally put up more of a fight. Plainfield was the only school around in shittier shape than ours. Cracks ran through the track like varicose veins.
Koz was doing his comedy act on the ride home. As we passed a water tower, he said, “Why do they put the water up so high? So nobody steals it?” The guys cracked up, but Benny interrupted him before he had a chance to riff.
“The elevation makes it flow into the pipes.”
“Right,” Koz said, offended. “Thanks for the pro tip, man.”
We passed Bollywood Cinema, formerly Hollywood Cinema. They still had movies for white people, but they served samosas along with popcorn. I liked samosas better than popcorn anyway, but Koz didn’t like going there anymore. I expected him to complain about it, but he just shook his head and let go of my hand. I pulled out my SAT book and refreshed myself on geometry, or, as Lily called it, “white-people math.”
The bus passed the front of our school, a two-story slab of cement that looked like a mausoleum. I was glad Papa wasn’t buried, that he was in an urn in our living room, though I didn’t like how it was above the TV Mama got after he died, because he hated TV and found it far inferior to the stereo. The inside of the urn looked like the jar where he threw his cigarette ashes.
“What does the school look like to you?” I asked Koz.
“I don’t know what the right answer is, Calf. It looks like a fucking school.”
“There’s no right answer.”
“Is that right,” he said. “Then why do I feel like I keep getting everything wrong?”
He tried to get me to go to the Rutgers food trucks, but I passed, though he was my ride. I waited outside for Benny to leave his office and asked him to take me home.
“Your boyfriend can’t take you?”
I shrugged. My hair flew up in the wind. My sweat had cooled, making me shiver.
“All right, kid. Get in.”
I climbed into his musty car. “I looked you up in the yearbook,” I said. “You had everything back then. What happened to you?”
He laughed. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“What happened to you?”
“Why do you care? Wh
at, you’re worried you’re going to lose it too?”
“Maybe I already have.”
He drove out of the lot as I told him where I lived. And then, in a monotone he could have used to tell me the distance workout for that day, he told me what I wanted to know. At Harvard, he’d spent all his time reading, didn’t see the point in going to class. In high school, there had been too much noise for him to see that. He said, “The edges blurred. It wasn’t anything romantic. I broke down during my senior year and went away for a while. I spent most of the time reading, really. I read all of Proust. The pills helped a little. I finally graduated and moved to the city and tutored rich kids. But last summer, I got tired again, so I moved back in with my mom. She thought it would help to get me back here, to remind me of my glory days….”
I waited for him to mention his dad, knowing he must have played a hand in all this. I wanted to ask when he’d died, but instead I said, “Is it helping?”
“I’m not you, all right? You’re just a kid. I know you love the fucking Bell Jar, but you’re gonna be fine. Trust me.” I turned toward the window, and he squeezed my arm. “Most Likely to Succeed,” he said. “More like Most Likely to Smoke Weed.”
“How about you get to know me before you tell me who I am?” I said. I hadn’t meant for it to come out so mean. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me that he didn’t know about my dad, that this fact that dominated my existence wasn’t written on my face, that his mother hadn’t mentioned it.
He parked in front of my house. “You’re right,” he said, resting his hand on my thigh. “I do want to know you. I’m just—trying to keep my distance.”
My brother stood at the kitchen window, watching us. His blond curls were getting really wild. I would have to give him another haircut soon.
“That’s my brother,” I said. “And my mom’s probably on the couch, watching Law & Order and knitting more shit I don’t need.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Papa died a year ago,” I said as my brother pounded on the glass. “Or maybe it was yesterday.”
* * *
—
Mama was on the couch as I predicted, under a blanket she had made, watching Law & Order. Papa’s sister’s painting of his head rising out of a fruit bowl hung behind Mama; before, I’d just thought it was kind of weird, but it seemed to mock us now. There were spools of yarn at Mama’s feet. She was knitting, always knitting—something she never did when Papa was alive, when they spent evenings drinking wine and listening to Soviet music. I would give them their privacy, but sometimes I’d walk by and see Papa saying, “Shhh,” and lifting a finger when he heard the raspy croon of Vysotsky or the tortured howls of Viktor Tsoi, as if he were in the presence of something holy, and Mama would dutifully listen to whatever melody delivered him to this sacred state. Now she just came home from her accounting firm, freed the sitter, flicked on the television, and picked up her yarn; she was like Penelope, except the shroud was for herself, there was no chance her husband was coming back, and there were no suitors. Her best friend, Valentina, kept trying to set her up with random Russian bachelors, but she said it was too soon.
My brother came in from the kitchen. As I kicked off my shoes, he said, “That was a Nissan Sentra.” This made Mama perk up.
“Who took you home in a Nissan?” She knew Koz drove a Ford. I told her it was a friend from the team and she went back to knitting.
Mama used to be a real person, with friends, a job she actually cared about, and a sense of humor. She would worry about me and my brother getting cold, as Jewish mothers do, as if that was the only thing left, her covering us in layers of wool, as if the warmth would fix everything. The last time I saw Mama’s mother before we left Kiev, when she was already deep in her dementia, her remaining concern had also been keeping me warm; her parting words to me had been, “Bundle up, darling Yaroslava.” Mama returned to Kiev to bury her soon after Misha was born, and though I knew it was too early for her brain to follow suit, it worried me. It made me wonder what would be left of me if I fell apart. Would I spend my days holed up with a book? Running laps? Studying until I went blind?
My brother opened his book on the presidents. He could already name all the states and capitals. And fifty breeds of dogs, every car that passed our house, the trees and plants in the woods; in the summers, he sat by the creek out back, naming all of the fish and even the rocks. Where had he come from? When I was his age, I was always running, running, running. Next year, he’d go to kindergarten, leaving Mama alone.
I pulled him up and said, “Let’s get some air. We have an hour before dark.”
“Be careful out there, little fools,” Mama said, but she didn’t mean it. The worst thing had already happened, so she didn’t really need to worry anymore. We kissed her on the forehead before stepping out into the cold.
A few boys played basketball at the park; one kid shot and missed wildly and the others cracked up. When we got close, my brother dropped my hand.
“Did you know that William Howard Taft was the fattest president?” he said.
“That’s quite an honor.”
“He once got stuck inside the White House bathtub even.”
“How did they get him out?” I asked as we reached the frozen creek. Scraggly trees swayed behind it and my brother’s face clouded over. He didn’t like not having all the answers. “What a thing to be remembered for,” I said.
As we turned back, I saw that even the laziest people had stripped their homes of holiday decorations. Which was too bad, because the strung-up lights made the town look almost pretty.
Neel Shah was playing piano in the house across from ours. Papa had loved hearing the boy play. On one rare evening when Papa was home early, our family stood outside Neel’s house, listening to song after song. We went back inside after I said I was tired, which was something that kept me up at night a few weeks later, after Papa’s brand-new BMW was crushed by a Dodge Neon during his morning commute. Would it have killed me to stay out a bit longer, hear a few more notes, give Papa another moment of peace? I couldn’t forget the look on his face as he put an arm around me and my brother and said, “That, my dears, is the sound of perfection.” I nodded, though I’d never understand why it made him so happy. It just sounded like a lot of noise to me.
* * *
—
I sat in the car Mama let me borrow, in the junior lot after the next meet, not ready to go home. It had been an indoor meet and my lungs burned from running through the thick dead air. I don’t know how long I was sitting there when Koz tapped my windshield.
I rolled down the window. “You scared me,” I said.
“My bad.” He still wore his jersey, and the white-blond hairs on his arms pricked up from the cold.
“Where’s your coat?” He shrugged and I said, “Get in. I don’t want you to freeze to death.”
“That’s the most you’ve cared about me in a while. Ever since your coach showed up,” he said, though he did get in, pushing aside my mostly unread copy of Swann’s Way.
“Stop it,” I said. “He’s practically twice my age.”
“That’s what makes it so fucking gross.”
Koz’s minions walked by, humping the air when they saw us. I honked and they jumped away. I pulled out of the lot, and the remaining cars receded in my rearview. We cruised down Tingley Lane, passing the strip of tired restaurants by the fire station.
“Did you see that?” Koz said. “They’re tearing down Carmine’s for another Indian restaurant. Fucking A.”
“Carmine’s was kind of gross anyway.”
His lips got tight. Carmine’s was where we’d gone on our first date. After we’d split a giant bowl of tortellini he’d said, “Big calves, big eyes, big appetite. I like it,” and I heard myself telling him how Mama joked that I had big calves because I always stood on my to
es around Papa to try to be as tall as he was when I was little. I don’t know what I had against Carmine’s all of a sudden.
“There’s something you should know,” he said. “Lecky’s cousin went to Harvard with Coach Benny, and apparently he, like, went psycho there. You know what he did?” I put a hand on his shoulder but couldn’t stop him. “He jumped on a table in the dining hall and started shouting at the top of his lungs. Took out a knife and started carving up his neck. Blood was spraying all over the place. They had to drag him away—”
“That’s bullshit,” I said, braking hard at a stop sign. “He doesn’t have any scars.” I tried to focus on the road. There were piles of snow on either side of it, already black and slushy.
Koz’s voice shook. “You and me have something special, Ox. I don’t want you to get caught up with—someone dangerous.”
“That’s sweet of you, but I can hold my own. I’m a big girl.”
“I don’t want you to think you’re invincible. I love you.”
“Stop,” I said, but the look in his eyes was so helpless that I squeezed his hand. On his street, the snowbanks were cleaner than on the main road. The snowman on his neighbor’s lawn was melting, flashing a demented smile. I saw his tiny mother in the kitchen, making dinner for her husband and only son. The American flag Koz’s dad had put up after 9/11 flailed in the wind.
“Here we are now,” I said. “America.”
Koz dropped my hand and said, “I want you to know who I am.”
“What?”
“That’s what he kept shouting,” he said as he opened the door. “Over and over and over.”
* * *
—
“Would you like a hug, sweetie? A Xanax?” said Mrs. Donovan, peering into me.
I was at her kitchen table, suffering through a passage about “The Hollow Men.” I knew Benny was there because I smelled pot.
“I’m just nervous,” I said, after too long. “Just a month to go before the test.”
Oksana, Behave! Page 8
