Oksana, Behave!

by Maria Kuznetsova

  “That’s the problem. They have so many options too. If a guy met me in a bar before phones, he’d just ask me out, but now it’s, like, should I ask her out or just message the sluts on OkCupid? You’re lucky you found someone,” she says. “How is Romey anyway?”

  Fiona has been impressed by Roman since I convinced her to come out with us in Oakland, a long, sloppy night that ended with us drinking red wine on Lake Merritt while Roman recited Akhmatova’s “Seaside Sonnet” and moved both himself and me to tears.

  “Romey’s great,” I say. “Actually doing shit he loves.”

  I show her my phone, to which Roman has recently texted a picture of Tolstoy in the snow. The count is wearing a thick fur coat and hat and his brows are covered in flakes, looking boundless and severe.

  “Now, there’s a real man,” Fiona says. “Is he single?”

  “It’s Tolstoy.”

  “So what? He looks like a boss. Not some pussy who would be like, ‘Oh, this is getting too serious’ if I tell him to go down on me more than once.”

  “The count is kind of conservative,” I say. “But I’ll ask him to pleasure you next week.”

  “About next week,” she says, meeting my gaze. I don’t like the look she gives me one bit. I know it’s bad when she puts her phone away.

  “No,” I say, swallowing hard. I throw a napkin at her. “Seriously? Et tu, Brute?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “The British travel company made me an offer this morning. I’m leaving for Edinburgh next week. Pretty cool, right?”

  “Of course it’s cool. You dumb cunt,” I say, giving her a hug. “I’ll miss you like hell, but I’m happy for you.”

  “I’ll miss you too,” she says. “You’re such a talented writer, Konnie. If Jim says no again, there are a million amazing places where you can work and finish your novel.”

  “Such as?”

  She gives me a movie-star smile. “You can go anywhere you want. You’re a unicorn, remember?”

  * * *

  —

  My brain is numb and my back and wrists are aching by the time I have to meet Jim on the Howtopia House porch; I spent the last hour reading my friend Lily’s travel blog and tinkering with my novel. Even if I’m just rewriting the scene where my grandmother’s family eats their dog during World War II, just moving the words around rejuvenates my soul and gets me ready for Jim. When I open the front door, Abigail is standing with an arm around her dad, showing him something in her camera that’s cracking him up. She pales, ashamed to be seen having so much fun with her father. When they both look up at me, I realize they have the same brown eyes. Jim chuckles as his daughter darts off to the backyard.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I say.

  “No problem. Look, Oksana, I know why you’re here,” Jim says, and I shake off the image of Abigail and jump into my spiel.

  I deserve a raise. I am the only editor who has stuck it out for over two years. Two of my articles are in the top-ten most-visited. I’ve on-boarded half the team. I reach my crescendo with, “Plus, traffic on the entire site spiked ten percent after Gawker picked up my article ‘How to Dry-Hump Safely’—”

  “I have good news for you,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

  “You do?”

  “Indeed,” he says, smiling big, and for some reason I feel dread. “All summer I’ve been thinking of what to do with you. You’ve been such a rock here, and weddings are expensive, and don’t even get me started on kids! And you’ve been such a good role model to Abigail. So hear me out,” he says, opening his mouth and drumming on his lap. “Cellphones!” he declares.

  “Cellphones?”

  “It’s happened. As of this week, over half the traffic to our site is coming from mobile users. Can you believe that? This is going to change how we write our articles, use our photos, everything. We’ll have to write with mobile users in mind first.”

  “So we’ll have to dumb everything down?”

  “Exactly! And I can’t think of a better person to put in charge of it,” he says. “You’ll take half the team and will work on mobile-friendly articles. You can test the numbers yourself. I’m talking full-time status, just like you’ve wanted. Seventy K a year and benefits, how does that sound? Of course, you’d have to come in to the office every day….”

  This would mean Roman and I could leave our cramped apartment and move closer to the lake. We could spend money on our wedding and honeymoon and the restaurants in Piedmont without freaking out. Though I would barely make it home in time for dinner most weekdays, and if I did, I would be too exhausted to go out. I regard the palm trees on either side of us, beautiful trees that make the house so dark, and find that I can hardly breathe.

  “Count me in,” I say.

  He smiles big and claps his hands. “Great, wonderful, I’ll put everything in writing over the weekend.” He shakes my hand. “Oh, one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  He hands me the Google Glass. “I tinkered with it a bit. See if it works now.”

  I put the glasses on and blink and move my head around, and it does work. I blink through a series of generic landscapes. First, the field of poppies again. Then the jungle. The desert. Then the ocean, which is where I pause. Jim’s right—it is surprisingly crisp.

  “It’s like you’re really there,” he says.

  Bright foamy water fills the screen. It crashes on a nearly white beach, and the sky above is cloudless. Sunlight kisses the waves. There are no people walking along the water or swimming in it, no logs or seaweed on the shores; not a single grain of sand looks out of place. I have never felt further away from the ocean in my life.

  “I’m so excited for you, Oksana. I see a long and rewarding career for you here,” he says.

  I stare into the nothing ocean and remember the beginning of Akhmatova’s “Seaside Sonnet”:

  It will all live longer than me:

  even the rickety bird boxes,

  and the air that makes the crossing

  in the spring from over the sea.

  I hand back the glasses and wipe my eyes, and only then can I see the ocean a little bit. Jim looks puzzled but not defeated by my display of emotion. He gives me a nervous smile, puts the glasses on, and grins wildly. The daylight is fading but he seems not to care. He is an astounding man, really. He has lost his hair, half the editors, his wife, and soon he will lose his daughter, and yet in this moment he looks as if he has everything he has ever wanted and more.

  “Just like you’re really there,” he says again, waving the glasses in the air. “Pretty amazing, right?”

  * * *

  —

  Our trip down the Jersey Shore was the last my family took before Papa died on his commute. It had been his idea, actually. It was unlike him to plan a family adventure and I suspected it was because he wanted to test out his new BMW, but I was just happy to spend time with him, even if we only spent two days in Wildwood. It had been a great trip until the last afternoon, when I convinced my parents and brother to see the fortune-teller.

  Her booth was at the edge of the boardwalk and smelled like incense and ocean water. We sat on velvet cushions and tried not to laugh at the woman with long white hair and bloodshot eyes. I faced her as she waved her hands before the crystal ball and closed her eyes, but apparently nothing happened. She tried again, frowning as she peered into the dormant orb, but it didn’t swirl or crackle or get covered in mist.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said, as if delivering a death sentence. “I’m sorry.”

  “Your equipment is broken,” Papa said, and he stormed out and we followed him.

  Mama thought it was all a joke, but Papa was melancholy as we hit the boardwalk.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Poor futureless child.” He held up a finger and said he would b
e right back, he just needed a moment.

  Mama and Misha and I stood at the edge of the boardwalk and watched Papa take off his shoes, set them down, and walk toward the water. The beach was crowded with painfully tan people, garbage, crab skeletons, and seaweed, but nothing got in Papa’s way. We were supposed to head home then. He would have to get up at five the next morning to commute to Wall Street, but he didn’t care. He gazed at the horizon, and who knew what he saw—maybe visions of the flowing waters of the Dnieper, back when he was a young and happy childless scientist in Kiev, before he’d had to sacrifice everything for his family. Papa lifted up his hands.

  Mama laughed. “Your father is such a romantic,” she said. “Look at him standing before that filthy water! As if he expects to be lifted up into the heavens.”

  “Maybe he’s thinking,” said my brother. He was three.

  “Maybe he thinks it’s beautiful,” I said.

  “A philosopher and a poet,” Mama said, shaking her head. “What did I do to deserve such children?” But she put her arms around us anyway. “Driving a nice car is not enough for your father. He wants to fly also,” she said. “Pure foolishness.”

  Papa was wearing his work khakis and a button-down shirt, his uniform no matter what day it was, a constant reminder of how hard he worked. As he stepped into the water, I could see Mama calculating whether she had a fresh pair of clothes for him for the drive home.

  My brother thought it was the funniest thing. He ran down to the water, and by the time he got there, Papa turned to him with a big smile, soaked from the chest down, and grabbed his waist and lifted him up for a little while. I wanted to run in there and join them too, and I should have, but I was sixteen and embarrassed and just wanted to go home already.

  I can still see them there, framed by the boardwalk, reaching toward the ocean on one side and a jutting mass of sandy rocks on the other, white foam frothing near my father’s waist while my brother squeals. They look tiny below the vast sky.

  * * *

  —

  The other editors have all gone home and my computer is the lone soldier stationed at the table next to a bowl of colorful erasers a techie brought back from Japan; I take a handful. Fiona has left a note on Howtopia stationery on my keyboard. It had been previously folded and I see that it came from one of Gilly’s paper cranes. Tell Tolstoy to sext me. On the other side, Josh has drawn a picture of Jim with his new glasses on. A knife protrudes from his bald head.

  As I pack up, I spot Abigail scowling into her phone by the community garden, sitting in front of the kale I have been liberally helping myself to all summer. Seeing the light falling below the pastel-colored houses and orange fence and bright porch furniture, I wish I had spent more time out here, which goes to show that if you look hard enough, there is always something about a place that you will miss. I’ll wait until Jim sends his daughter away to let him down.

  From a distance, the girl doesn’t look more cranky than usual, but up close I see she has been crying. Without makeup, she looks about ten.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “I don’t know if I want to go to New York.”

  “You were dying to go hours ago. You’ve been dying to go all summer.”

  “I just got off the phone with my roommate. She says there are rats in our dorm—rats! And that her boyfriend is basically going to be ‘crashing’ with us for a while. I don’t think we’ll be friends either. She kept bragging about how she’s already shown in galleries and everything. I don’t know if I can keep up out there,” she says, looking at the house. “I could have gone to Berkeley and stayed near my dad. What’s he going to do without me?”

  I see Jim on the porch, smiling into his new glasses like they contain a galaxy.

  I see Papa walking toward the ocean. This time, though, he keeps going until he is under the water. A wave crashes over the spot where his head had been and then there is stillness.

  “You can’t spend your whole life worrying about your dad,” I say.

  “No,” she says, sniffling a bit. She keeps staring at me, expecting more, but I’m done.

  I rip out a few heads of kale and toss them into my tote. Then I give her a hug, wondering if I will ever see her again. I don’t realize how small she is until I have my arms around her.

  “Wait,” she says, digging in her bag. “I have something for you.”

  She hands me an off-center picture of our Versailles model. In the corner, above a palace wall, I’m cracking up at something Fiona’s saying; my eyes are closed and my hair is in my face and my hand’s on my chest. I remember that day well, actually. It was the start of summer. Fiona, Gilly, Abigail, and I had ended up staying late because Versailles was taking forever, though we played Taylor Swift and danced around to get energized. I’m pretty sure I even remember what Fiona said to make me laugh, nodding at the palace: “Those poor fuckers. They thought they were at the height of luxury, but they still had to shit in chamber pots. They didn’t know anything.” Abigail had cracked up too, which is why the photo is crooked.

  She shrugs when I thank her for the picture. “For your photo album,” she says.

  “My heart will always be in San Francisco,” Beverly says. “And the rest of my body too. When I go, Rick and Julia will throw my ashes in the Bay. We’ll have a reception at the Hi Dive, my favorite bar in the world—have you been? It’s right on the Embarcadero. No funeral for me—just a party. No people looking sour and wearing black, sneaking whiskey in the bathroom. Everyone will tell stories about me and laugh and dance and get hammered. I’ve already called to confirm that we can do it, though of course we haven’t set a date. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

  Rick sighs. “If you don’t shut the fuck up about the fucking Hi Dive, I’ll blow my brains out and somebody else will have to scatter your ashes—and mine too.”

  “Now, that doesn’t sound nice at all,” Roman says.

  Roman used to be married to Beverly and Rick’s daughter, Julia, but he has been married to me for almost two years now. Once a month since he split with his wife, though, he has continued to visit his former in-laws at their home in the Berkeley Hills, but until Beverly got cancer I was never invited to come along, not that I’ve exactly been clamoring to join him. Beverly is starting chemo next week, which makes me feel silly for still being wary of her and Rick’s relationship with my husband, and which also makes it matter less that they might know I basically stole Roman from their daughter. The chemo element should also make me less resentful that I have to spend Sunday, my writing day, meeting these people, but I can only do so much.

  “I still think it’s a nice idea,” Beverly says, crossing her arms and staring off at the backyard filled with bright plants and hummingbird feeders and a pool rippling with leaves. She is a beautiful woman in a faded sun hat; her hair is wavy and golden and she looks forty though she’s over sixty, with the Bay Area glow of a person whose blood is mostly kombucha and wheatgrass and whose muscles are sinewy from decades of downward dog. She has made an absurd amount of kale chips to go with Rick’s endless supply of expensive wine, and I’ve already had two glasses of Napa chardonnay and about fifty kale chips to avoid talking. The kale chips taste like nothing, making me wonder why the woman couldn’t just eat real fucking chips since she knows she isn’t going to live all that long.

  “We’ve walked by the Hi Dive. It seems like a nice place,” I say. We’ve passed the bar on the rare times we’ve gotten Giants tickets from our lawyer friend, and with the drunk fans sitting with buckets of Tecates by the water, it hardly seems like a place to scatter your ashes, though who am I to judge? I turn to Beverly and gear up to say something that does not have to do with her impending death. I settle on, “I like your hat.”

  “Thank you,” she says, touching it, as if to check that it’s really there. “This hat is older than my children. It’s my favorite ga
rdening hat. I plan to wear it every day, once my hair goes.”

  Rick snatches it off her head. “Stop it. I’ve always hated that hat.”

  “It’s a good hat. Very slimming,” she says. “Not that I’ll need it, once—”

  “Knock it off, Bev,” he says, turning away from her. “I’ve always loved your hair. Why do you want to hide it?”

  There are tears in his eyes but Beverly ignores him. “It’s my thinking cap,” she says, victorious. Roman and I have been holding hands under the table and I have forgotten whether it started because I was comforting him or he was comforting me, but now we let go because our display of vigorous love and health and relative youth in the face of this couple’s obvious pain is untoward, even aggressive. I eat another kale chip and smile.

  “You can think just fine without it,” Rick says softly, but he plops the hat back on her head and she rubs her temples and hums while winking at him.

  “When I think of you, I always think of you in that hat,” Roman says quietly.

  “I’ll take a picture for you before they turn me to dust,” Beverly says.

  “Jesus,” Rick says, shaking his head.

  I take a sudden interest in their swimming pool, which is more spectacular than anything Roman and I can ever dream of affording; our Oakland apartment has no yard, just a tiny balcony with a basil plant on life support. Rick is a retired LinkedIn executive and Beverly is a retired elementary school art teacher and apparently an incredible painter, but they weren’t retired long enough to enjoy it before Beverly found a lump in her breast and was told she had a year to live at most. The house is close to their daughter’s in Orinda, and an afternoon’s drive away from Folsom Prison, where their son has spent the last decade for dealing. Roman is another son to Beverly, who provides the laughter and encouragement he never got at home, with parents and a sister who are so serious that it seems impossible they are related, which is yet another reason why I never complained whenever he visited his ex-in-laws.