Oksana, Behave!

by Maria Kuznetsova

  I checked my phone, but Roman had not called. I pictured him down on his knees before his average-looking wife. I left my phone in the hotel.

  We took the bus to Chekhov’s house, a charming white building surrounded by a beautiful garden I could not have cared less about. I tuned out after the guide told us that the White Dacha had been built in 1898, six years before the author’s death. I was struck by a porcelain figurine of a dog, on the mantel over the fireplace. I wondered if it had inspired Chekhov’s story, if he’d acquired it after he wrote the story, or if it was just a decorative touch of the tourist bureau. I considered pointing it out to Baba, but she was distracted, scowling and fanning herself. The house was stuffy and I was relieved when the guide led us to the garden.

  “He planted everything himself,” the guide said. “The cherry and peach and cypress trees…A hundred years later, the garden is still flourishing. Isn’t it something? He was a master gardener. I’ll leave you to explore the grounds,” she said.

  Baba and I explored the gardens, which really were a wonder. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t.

  “Chekhov was a doctor and a writer, and he was also this amazing gardener?” I said finally. “I’m just trying to find a single thing I’m good at. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Who said anything about fair?”

  I followed her to the edge of the garden. The sea sparkled in the distance. I wished Roman was standing behind me, so I could lean back and put my head under his chin, so we could take it in together.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “I thought you realized you should follow your heart.”

  “Follow my heart, and look where it takes me,” she muttered. “You know what he told me in the morning? He’s sick again, Oksana. He’ll be dead by the end of the summer.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I should have known better. Your grandmother is a fool, just as naïve as her granddaughter….”

  “What did I do?”

  “You didn’t do a thing,” she said, shaking her head. “I know I’m hard on you, my dear, but it’s because I want to toughen you up. When you get that lost look on your face, you really do look like your father. He had that look when we got to America and he thought he would still be a physics hero—it was as if he didn’t know the Cold War was over, that no one needed him anymore. And you! You expect life to be this incredible romp, and then you get crushed when the smallest thing goes wrong. Life will throw you things harder than you’ve ever imagined, and how will you deal with them when you’re afraid of a jellyfish or a dumb bird?”

  “I’m not afraid of everything,” I said. “I’m in love with a married man. He’s leaving his wife for me.”

  Her eyes flared up. “You’re still young, why get involved in such a mess? If I were you, I would run in the other direction.”

  “But you’re not me. You don’t feel what I feel.”

  “What are feelings?” she said, swatting away the air. “Dandelion seeds in the wind.”

  I left her to visit the gift shop. I would get Roman a souvenir, just like I’d promised. I had to show him how serious I was, to let him feel my beating heart. The trinkets did not inspire me and I knew what I had to do. I made sure no one was around and snuck back into the living room. The dog figurine was waiting for me there. I hoped it would set the right tone for Roman, a souvenir from the time when we decided to be together as well as a gesture toward our future, the only new little dog he might accept from me. I stuffed the figurine in my purse. It seemed like a minor offense, considering all the mistakes I had made.

  * * *

  —

  Baba spent the rest of the day in bed, and the next morning. I stayed in bed too, turning on my phone every fifteen minutes to see if Roman had called. Anatoly Petrovich was leaving that evening, but my grandmother had already said goodbye and did not want to see him again. I told her I was going for a walk and asked if she needed anything.

  “Only peace,” she said.

  I left, knowing I could not help her with that. The day was cruelly gorgeous, and the promenade was full of happy people. I found Anatoly Petrovich on the embankment in front of his hotel, watching the water. He looked defeated, wearing a thin coat he didn’t need. I approached him slowly, not wanting to startle him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What can you do?” he said, shrugging. I knew I should have felt sorry for him, but his defeated tone annoyed me.

  “All these years, you’ve kept on pestering my poor grandmother. Even now. Why haven’t you been able to leave her alone?”

  He turned away. “If you only saw her as I first saw her,” he began. “Strutting into the auditorium holding your father’s hand. Her red hair bathed in light like she was on fire. There was nothing in her hair, child. But I just had to touch her, because I knew I would die if I didn’t.” He turned back to me and clasped my hands. “I want to thank you for the other night. Your grandmother and I made sweet, sweet love. I will never forget it.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew the situation,” I said, trying not to picture my grandmother in the throes of passion.

  I thought of what Chekhov wrote about this very sea when he had come to Yalta with sickness in his lungs, knowing death was around the corner. When Gurov and Anna are first falling for each other, they share a quiet moment staring out at the water. Chekhov described the sea before us, writing my favorite lines in all of literature, gorgeous and somber words that comforted me in dark times by reminding me of my cosmic insignificance, words that might comfort Baba’s suitor since I could not produce my own. Words I tried to quote carefully in Russian.

  I said, “The monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us.”

  Anatoly Petrovich stared at me, his mouth quivering.

  “What lies,” he said, putting his head in his hands. “I’m not ready to die.”

  I felt sorry for him, for my grandmother, for everyone who failed to love or be loved. I reached into my purse and handed him the porcelain dog.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s from my grandmother. A parting gift from Chekhov’s home.”

  “You are a wonderful young woman,” he said. “I cannot thank you enough.”

  The waves crashed meanly on the shore. Anatoly Petrovich played with the figurine, turning it over and over in his hands. I didn’t know how I could replace it. I would have to find another way to show Roman how much I loved him, if he gave me the chance. I didn’t know what would happen to us. I didn’t know when he would call or what he would tell me. I didn’t know a thing. I didn’t know if this was just the beginning or if we had already reached the end.

  “Guess what I picked up this morning?” Jim says, rising from his exercise ball at the head of the table. His bald head is shining, radiating excitement, though our morning meeting has already gone on far too long. I look at the other editors for signs that we are actually supposed to guess, but no one does. “Voilà,” he says, producing a gray case from his shirt pocket. “Google Glass! One of the first hundred beta pairs in Silicon Valley. Lucky me, right?”

  Jim looks like a tool with the square glasses planted on his round face. He founded Howtopia, with its empowering slogan of HACK YOUR OWN LIFE TODAY!, a top-100–ranked company in the United States, but he still manages to be a tragic figure. He is middle-aged and shaped like a garden gnome and wears ill-fitting T-shirts and jean shorts, his wife left him for her yoga instructor and fled to Hawaii without looking back years ago, and his teen daughter, Abigail, thinks he’s a joke—she’s been interning at Howtopia all summer.

  Fiona whistles when she puts the glasses on and Jim tells her to scroll here, blink there, look over here, madly barking instructions.

  “Pretty sweet,” she says. She’s my closest work friend,
though she’s desperate to escape, using her popular travel blog to try to get a gig out of the country; our third musketeer, Gilly, quit last month, leaving behind, on top of the fridge, a family of paper cranes she made for an article. The glasses cycle through the other eight members of the editing team, most of whom are, like me, marginally employable creative types who like working from home every day except Wednesday, when we have to schlep all the way out to the Howtopia House from the more affordable crevasses of the Bay. All of them, I am disappointed to note, are impressed by Jim’s new toy. Even Josh, a permahigh long-haired poet, nods like he’s watching the world burn.

  Abigail is mesmerized by the glasses and gives her father a rare smile. This is her last week with us; soon she’ll study photography at an arts college in New York. She is as polished as her father is frumpy, sporting black jeans and tank tops and professional-level makeup at all times. She’s a decade younger than me, but, like my sixteen-year-old brother, who would kill to be leaving for college already, she knows more than I ever will.

  “Not bad,” she says, and her father beams, delighted to please her for once.

  “Such a crisp image, right? I didn’t think it would be so crisp,” he says.

  I can’t get the fucking thing to work. Jim hovers over me and barks more adamantly, but all the blinking and clicking doesn’t do anything. I’m stuck on a picture of a field of poppies.

  “It must not be my day,” I say.

  “It’s all right, Oksana,” Jim says, quickly plucking them off my face, like I’ve contaminated them. “Maybe it doesn’t recognize your face shape. I’ll customize it for you later.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I say.

  Jim walks past the fuzzy beanbag chairs and fake Pollocks and dim IKEA lamps and up the stairs with his new big-boy toy, and once he’s gone a silence falls over the room and everyone stares at me warily, as if I am tainted. No one moves either, as if they expect an explanation. The best I can do is a story. A story featuring my poor dead father—who is never far from my mind after my two-hour hell-on-earth commute to Palo Alto from East Oakland.

  “One time in high school,” I begin, “I convinced my parents to take me to this fortune-teller down the Shore. But her crystal ball didn’t work on me. She couldn’t see anything. It really freaked my dad out—it was like I didn’t exist. But I’m still here, right?”

  “Unfortunately for us,” Fiona says, elbowing me.

  “You would die without me,” I say.

  “Only a little,” she says with a wink.

  “Lovebirds,” says Josh.

  “I just hope you got your money back,” Abigail tells me before going up the stairs.

  The editors put in their earbuds and return to their private musical worlds and article lists, the Apple logos on their silver laptops glowing like the fruit of a zombie garden in the dark house canopied by palms. I put my own earbuds in and play The White Album and plop down on the zebra couch with the pink pillows that say YOU ARE A UNICORN!—which is what Jim always calls the versatile writers of the editing team. If I had unicorns working for me, I’d give them more than thirty an hour without benefits.

  Though I do make significantly more than my fiancé, who is home working on his dissertation on serfdom in 1800’s Russian literature. After I quit our PhD program over two years ago, I was pumped to write articles read by thousands a day instead of by one overworked professor, but the articles in the queue were mostly about twerking and making out instead of life’s big problems, as societally useless as exploring ekphrasis in The Idiot. Though I embellish my How-to hours to write fiction, I’ve been too drained to make progress. I’ve decided to leave this job if I don’t get a fucking raise, which is why I’ve scheduled a meeting with Jim at the end of the day.

  * * *

  —

  I finish “How to Be a Mime,” text Roman about our save-the-dates, and move to the upstairs lounge, where Abigail is taking photos for Josh’s “How to Make a Paper Boat” article. The five steps of the paper boat are lined up in a row, starting with a flat piece of paper and ending with a crisp paper vessel. I settle at the teal worktable, which still holds a matchstick model of Versailles that Gilly and I helped Fiona make for an article. The palace is huge but not so impressive, just a few tan rectangles and a gate, though I am told the inside is where the extravagance lies. Beside it is a stack of alpaca hats a techie who works in the house next door brought back from Peru, alms for the poor editors. I already took four home.

  Abigail tilts her camera to show me the finished paper-boat series.

  “Not bad,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes. “Not exactly inspiring. Four more days and I can take pictures of whatever I want.”

  “You’ll miss it here, at least a little bit.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “You’ll miss your dad.”

  “No chance,” she says. “In New York I’ll actually find people I have something in common with. Everyone in Shallow Alto is so fucking vanilla. I’m talking to my new roommate today—she’s a painter.”

  “Good for you,” I say.

  After she uploads the photos, she takes actual photos of finished items out of her bag and tapes them to the walls: among them, a flower crown made by yours truly, a friendship bracelet made by Fiona, a pumpkin with a cat carving made by Gilly, and a horse hand puppet made by Josh. This is kind of sweet, Abigail’s concession that her time here has not sucked.

  “Photos were as modern as my dad would go,” I say. “TV hurt his eyes. He never had a pager or cellphone. I can’t imagine what he’d think of Howtopia—Google Glass would make his head explode. When I was a kid, he loved sitting down with his photo albums, pointing at grim sepia-toned Russians and explaining how each one had died in the war, repeating, ‘No future without history!’ I was bored out of my mind then, but now I’m glad he kept a record of it all.”

  “Your dad and I would have gotten along,” she says. “I have a million albums at home. My dad’s always posting family photos on Facebook—it’s mortifying. Do you make albums too?”

  “Sometimes,” I say, though this isn’t exactly true. She gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe me, and I don’t try to convince her otherwise.

  I write “How to Be a Stenographer” next. And by “write” I mean look up twenty articles on the subject, cite them, add bullshit of my own, write a bunch of steps and sub-steps with detailed examples, and request artwork from people in the Philippines who get paid a dollar a day. Then I log the hour it took me to write the article plus an extra thirty minutes, which I devote to looking at wedding dresses and centerpieces on Pinterest and ending an email fight with Mama, who keeps trying to add more random Russians to our guest list though we’ve only got three months until the wedding. I keep telling her that the farm we booked in Davis won’t be the fancy Russian community’s idea of a good time anyway, but she won’t be deterred. I should be nicer since she and my stepdad are paying for so much of it, but she doesn’t make it easy.

  Jim struts in, looking potbellied and proud, even more sweaty than usual because he is fresh from the tread desk, dumb glasses clipped to his T-shirt collar.

  He grins at me and nods at his daughter. “My little jet-setter,” he says. “Just yesterday she fell off the monkey bars and got a concussion. And now—”

  “Dad,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Please.”

  Upon closer inspection, Jim seems less jolly than usual, his face a bit worn, no doubt upset about giving up his only child to the clutches of the East Coast. I hope this means he will be more vulnerable, instead of firmer, when I ask for a raise. Maybe I’ll even try the I’m-the-loyal-daughter-who-isn’t-leaving-you angle, though that may be a bit cruel. I have already asked about every six months since I started working here and have only gotten a five-dollar raise and an occasional bonus in response, so he knows wha
t’s coming.

  “End of the day, right, Oksana? I have to run to Mountain View for a bit,” he says. He says it instead of saying he’s visiting Google, the way some say they “went to school in Cambridge” instead of just fucking saying they went to Harvard. He reaches over to stroke Abigail’s hair, but she flinches.

  “Seriously,” she says. “Come on.” If her dad wasn’t there, I would smack her.

  “So sensitive,” he says, holding up his hands, but he’s still smiling, proud of his darling. He spots her photos on the wall and gives her a thumbs-up, adding, “Very cool,” but she just shrugs. He puts the Google Glasses back on and his face glows. He taps the side of his toy and says, “Soon enough, everybody will be walking around in these things. I just know it.”

  * * *

  —

  “Ready for your big chat with Jimbo?” Fiona says. We have taken our fifteen-dollar lunch allowance from Jim and are at our usual spot, a French bistro called La Boulange, which we boycotted for about three weeks when we found out it was owned by Starbucks. We sit in the sunshine and pick at our Niçoise salads while Fiona swipes through her phone.

  “I guess I’m ready?” I say. “If he says no again, I’ll just look for another job. But what am I supposed to do? What if anything that isn’t writing fiction crushes my soul?”

  “Girl,” Fiona says. “This is your time. You’ve been here forever. Plus you can pull all that ‘I’m getting married and need money’ shit. Meanwhile, I can’t even get a date.” She holds up her phone to show me a shirtless man grinning on a rock. “What about this one?”

  “Such a crisp image,” I say, and she kicks me under the table. “He’s cute. Why not?”

  She sighs, spitting an olive pit into her napkin. “I don’t know why I bother, honestly.”

  “But you have so many options.” I don’t bother pointing out that she is a stunner, all legs and luscious red hair that falls to her waist.