Boris holds Baba’s ashes and gives a short speech, and then he turns to my brother and me. “Though Kiev was Sveta’s home, America treated her well,” he says. “She loved her years in Florida and said her days at the beach with her family were some of her happiest. To that end, she’d like her ashes to be scattered in the Florida ocean, though she specified that she’d like them to be on the Atlantic side, not the Gulf, so the waves will carry her away.”
I realize this is my cue to take the urn and I do, so stunned I don’t even worry about dropping it.
I tell Valentin I will see him later. Maybe the line I have been tiptoeing on is not the telephone wire from “Dark Is the Night” but the state of Florida; I am Baba’s granddaughter, after all, and if I were tiptoeing across the long state, I would prefer to fall to the Atlantic side over the Gulf too.
As the van takes Mama and Misha and me back to Baba’s, my brother turns toward the window with his arms crossed.
“I won’t sing,” he says again.
Mama’s eyes are fluttering shut; she has had more than she can take—and she knows what I have done, though she will never mention it—so I am an unlikely person to give him a pep talk. I don’t have the leverage to tell him to make this small concession for his family.
“If you sing, I’ll take Baba’s ashes to Florida myself,” I say. “Seems like a pretty good deal, don’t you think?”
“What makes you think I don’t want to take her ashes to Florida?”
I shrug and say, “All right, then.” But I’m weirdly pissed he wants to go, not because that was my gambling chip, but because I don’t want him to encroach.
I don’t realize Mama has been listening until the van drops us off back at the apartment. “You think you two will truly go to Florida? With the baby on the way?” she says. “You don’t have to let your grandmother boss you around anymore, you know. Dearest God I don’t believe in,” she adds, “what have I done to deserve such sentimental children?” She goes inside, and my brother and I remain standing under the awning, facing a row of poplars.
“Don’t sing for Baba,” I tell him. “She’s not here.”
“I know, I know,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Do it for the living, right?”
“No, no,” I say. “Do it for yourself. You don’t want to regret it later.”
We tilt our heads and stare at the tall, funny-looking leafless trees I am convinced contain part of my grandmother’s soul, something I refuse to dismiss, even if I don’t believe in an afterlife. My brother squints at the trees and I imagine what he sees. Tyrannical bastions. Sad attempt to counteract climate change. Row of cocks. I put an arm around him.
“So fucking pretty,” he says.
* * *
—
I call Roman before the reception and he has good news: Right after he finished his interview in Boulder, he received an offer from Florida State. He told the University of Colorado about the offer and by the time he got off the plane in Iowa, he had an offer from them too. Hearing him say my name and discuss these normal matters makes me want to stab myself a little bit for what I’ve done. I eat my creamy strawberry yogurt instead.
“Can you believe it?” he says. He sucks in his breath, awaiting my verdict.
“Which one do you want more?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and he runs through the pros and cons again, ending with the fact that Florida was kind of a dump.
“I’ve never been to Colorado,” I say.
He laughs. “I knew you would say that.”
“But I have fond memories of Florida…” I say. I consider mentioning Baba’s ashes, but I suppose that shouldn’t be a deciding factor, or even a selling point. “I guess it doesn’t really matter,” I say.
“Not as long as we’re together.”
“I love you,” I say. “You decide.” Then I add, “I can’t believe it. Our kid will grow up in Florida or Colorado.”
“She’ll still be a Russian girl at heart,” he says, switching to Russian. He almost never uses his Romana voice when it’s just us, and it makes me choke up. He has a deep, commanding voice in English, but he sounds like a little bitch in Russian and we both know it.
I see how absurd it is to think that he and I can pass our language down to our child. Why should we bother—how can I expect to teach a child to live with a Russian soul when I don’t even know all the words for dying? Us teaching someone Russian is as bad as Abram singing Pavarotti to Sara.
“I guess you’re right,” I tell him in our first tongue. “I guess he will be.”
“A Russian girl at heart,” he says again.
* * *
—
The reception is at a restaurant a few blocks from Baba’s, a place where I had attended her seventieth-birthday celebration. That evening, she had worn a glittery silver pantsuit and danced the night away, dragging her friends and relatives and me onto the dance floor. She had even tried to set me up with one or two of her Toastmasters, but they didn’t hold a candle to Valentin. “My Oksana is a writer,” she had said, whipping me around, sloshing cognac on my dress. “Coming all the way from America to see her grandmother! Tell them about your stories, dear girl!”
I’ve changed into a more vibrant blue number Baba would have approved of because it shows a bit of my now-impressive cleavage—I left her urn in her living room and patted the top before we left like she’d been a good, good girl. I walk to the restaurant with difficulty, because Mama said the shoes I had planned to wear were too casual even for a pregnant woman; my swollen feet were too small for Baba’s heels, but I squeezed into them anyway. The hall is crammed with chilled appetizers and guests speaking in hushed tones and a table near the bar with a picture of Baba—on a Florida beach, wearing a visor—in which she is positively smirking, getting one over on all of us.
Behind the table, there’s the small stage where the men will perform. Uncle Boris has cornered my brother and is gesturing wildly, but I do not rescue the poor boy. Instead, I listen to about a dozen people I have never met or only vaguely recognize praising my grandmother and finally manage to escape outside with Mama, who has suddenly decided to take up smoking.
“What’s this?” I say.
She says, “Your grandmother did it right. She started to slow down and decided that was it, she wouldn’t be a burden to others. If I smoke a bit, drink even more, walk a little less, you’ll be lucky to find yourself in the same situation one day. I refuse to go out like my own poor mother. I promise you won’t be schlepping to the nursing home to see me drooling in diapers, no sir.” I consider mentioning that hopefully Sergei will be by her side but don’t bother. The women in our families have always outlived the men.
“That is extremely comforting,” I say.
“As it should be, little idiot.” I start to tell her we’re moving to Colorado or Florida over the summer, but she is distracted. “Your grandmother was a clown, but she had a big heart,” Mama says. “Even that Sappho business—she was just hurt because I was not spending more time with her.”
“She could have phrased it a bit differently,” I say, but I don’t disagree.
“Yes, well, she had her way of doing things.” Mama looks around to make sure we are alone. “Imagine if she had lived to learn the truth about your brother,” she says. “She would have gotten a kick out of it, I think.”
I watch her cigarette smoke drifting into the sky so I don’t fall over.
“You mean—”
“Your mother is not blind.”
“You should talk to him.”
“Oh, he will talk to me eventually….” A fog has settled over the street and I can’t see a thing. Mama looks toward the hall, where the voices grow louder, more reckless with drink and memory. She says, “I could have given you more love, but it wasn’t easy, not when we were all under one roof.
The two of you in the house, draining my energy, laughing everything off and doing whatever the hell you wanted while I was trying not to blow my brains out! It was too much for me. You were like two drops of water; it was unbearable.”
“Me and Misha?”
“No, no, silly one. You and your brother are not alike—he’s a sensitive creature. You and your grandmother. It was awful—the two of you are exactly the same, don’t you see?”
“I do,” I say, though I haven’t considered it until now.
“Two stubborn comedians,” she declares. “Desperate for love.”
I have more questions for her, but then my brother steps out and shakes his head at us for avoiding the festivities. He takes a drag of our mother’s cigarette before extinguishing it with his shoe. In his dark suit and combed-back hair, the dear little idiot looks wildly grown up, even a bit tired of living already. He doesn’t care to stand with Mama and me and contemplate the cold foggy street of our former home; he’s fussing with his suit, though it fits him perfectly. Then he clears his throat, preparing to sing, and nods at the restaurant. Come on, let’s go, he says as he guides us to the door, come inside already, come on, everything’s about to start.
To my parents
I must have done something really extraordinary in a past life to deserve knowing so many incredible people in this one.
First, my teachers. My high school teachers Carolyn Green and Bohdanna Vitvitsky showed me what books could do. My college professors Christina Askounis, Faulkner Fox, and Melissa Malouf made me think pursuing a career as a writer was not completely insane. At UC Davis, Pam Houston, Lucy Corin, Lynn Freed, and Yiyun Li took my fresh-out-of-undergrad work seriously well before anyone should have, and continued to help me years after I left their orbit. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Paul Harding, Ethan Canin, Charlie D’Ambrosio, and Sam Chang challenged me with good cheer. Sam also convinced me to drop everything and move across the country to Iowa City, which changed my life forever and made this book possible.
Oksana would be helpless without my classmates at Iowa. Claire Lombardo read far too many of my pages outside of class and encouraged me to keep going. Jason Hinojosa asked hard questions. Mack Basham read my prose with a poet’s eye. Regina Porter made one statement—about Oksana being like her grandmother—that made me see my book in a new light. Lindsay Stern helped me put Oksana in the right hands and was a stellar friend, reader, and human being.
Other shout-outs: To John Lescroart, for your generous funding and belief that I was capable of writing a novel years before the fact. To Jan Zenisek, Deb West, and Connie Brothers for everything you do for the Workshop. To Amanda Kallis, for those glamorous author photos. To Adam Eaglin, who advised me every step of the way when I tried to introduce Oksana to the publishing world. To friends who have given insightful feedback on my earlier work and made my life so much richer: David Owen, Ashley Clarke, Richard Siegler, Noah McGee, and Megan Cummins.
My agent, Henry Dunow, has kept me afloat with his jokes and keen eye, and found my book a warm home at Spiegel & Grau. My editor, Cindy Spiegel, asked questions that made Oksana and her family come alive. Janet Wygal made sense of Oksana’s trajectory, and Mengfei Chen was always there to answer my questions.
Many thanks to the editors who took chances on Oksana chapters early on: Emily Nemens at The Southern Review, Nyuol Lueth Tong at McSweeney’s, Olivia Clare and Adam Clay at Mississippi Review, and Caitlin Horrocks at The Kenyon Review Online.
My family has been supportive far past the point of reason. Thank you, Mama, Papa, and Andrew, for your endless encouragement and cultural fact-checking—I’m pretty sure our happy family is not like any of the others. My grandmother Svetlana Yelchits believed in me while always giving her honest opinion, and I wish I could have heard her criticize this book. Wherever you are, Baba, I hope the cognac meets your high standards.
No words can express the love and gratitude I feel toward my husband, Danny. You make me feel like this is still just the beginning, in the best possible way.
MARIA KUZNETSOVA was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the United States as a child. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Oksana, Behave! is her first novel.
mariakuznetsova.net
Twitter: @mashawrites
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Oksana, Behave! Page 22
