New York Stories

by Bob Blaisdell

  “He took her to Aroba in November. The mistress,” Misha’s grandmother was confiding in Russian to a gray-haired woman in a blazer, sneakers, and a long skirt. “Aru-ba,” Misha corrected her mentally. He tried to read a book, but the grandmother’s excited whisper filled with fat, rich words like “Aroba” or “mistress” kept him from concentrating. Sometimes she attempted to talk to a woman in a gray beret, seated next to Misha. To do that she leaned over him, putting her heavy elbow on his knee for balance. He had to press his opened book to his chest and wait until she was through, trying to hold his face away from her mixed aroma of sweat, valerian root drops and dill. “First he went on vacation with his wife, but the mistress made a scene, and he had to take her too. They are all like that, you know.” The gray-haired woman nodded. At some point, other Russian patients moved closer and joined in the chat. “You mean Dr. Levy has a mistress?” “Yes,” the gray-haired woman said eagerly. “He even took her to Aroba.” And Misha’s grandmother looked at her with reproach, because she wanted to be the one to tell about Aruba.

  Every second Thursday after school, Misha had to take his grandmother to the dermatologist. He served as an interpreter, because the grandmother didn’t speak English. Misha didn’t mind these visits—there wasn’t much to translate. Dr. Levy, a small, skinny man with dark circles under his eyes, just glanced at the sores on his grandmother’s ankles, scribbled something in the chart, and asked: “How’s it going?” Grandmother said “Better” in Russian, and Misha translated it into English. Misha didn’t mind the eye doctor or the dentist either. He was saved from attending visits to a gynecologist by his mother and grandfather. “A nine-year-old boy has no business in a gynecologist’s office,” the grandfather said firmly, surprising everybody, because since they had come to America, it was a rarity to hear him argue, to hear him speak at all. Misha was happy—for some reason he was afraid of pregnant women with their inflated bellies, fat ankles, and wobbly, domineering way of walking. His mother had to take several hours off work to take the grandmother there. She complained about it and looked at Misha and the grandfather with reproach.

  Nobody saved Misha from monthly visits to the internal doctor. The doctor let Misha and his grandmother into his sparkling office with cream-colored walls covered with diplomas and walked confidently to his large mahogany desk. He sat there tall and lean, with a thick mane of bluish-white hair, a red face, and very clean white hands, listening patiently to the grandmother’s complaints. Unlike other doctors, he never interrupted her. Misha would have preferred that he did. “My problem is . . .,” she would begin with a sigh of anticipation. She prided herself on being able to describe her symptoms with vividness and precision. “You should’ve been a writer, Mother,” Misha’s father once said when she described her perspiration as a “heavy shower pouring from under my skin.” Misha’s mother looked lost. She didn’t know if she should smile at the joke or scold her husband for being ironic about her mother. She chose to smile. “No, a doctor,” Misha’s grandmother corrected, oblivious to his irony. “I would’ve become a doctor if I hadn’t devoted my life to my husband.”

  While she talked to the internist, Misha usually stared down, following the checkerboard of the beige-and-brown linoleum floor with his eyes, the pattern interrupted in places by furniture legs and his grandmother’s feet in wide black sneakers. Her words were loud and clear, emphasized by occasional groans and changes of tone. “I can’t have a bowel movement for days, but I have to go to the bathroom every few hours. It usually happens like this. I feel the urge and go to the bathroom immediately. I push very hard, but nothing happens. I come out, but I feel as if a heavy rock is in there inside me, weighing down my bowels. I go in and try again.” The grandmother pressed one of her feet hard into the floor when she described the “heavy rock.” Misha looked at her thick, dark stockings. She had brought a supply of them from Russia, along with an assortment of wide-striped garters. Misha felt the edge of his patent-leather chair become moist and slippery under his clutched fingers. He also felt that his whole face was blushing all over, especially his ears. He wondered if the doctor noticed how red they were. But he didn’t look at Misha; he looked directly at the grandmother with a patient, polite smile.

  “Come on,” Misha thought, “stop her. There must be other patients waiting.” But the doctor didn’t move. Maybe he used these minutes to sleep with his eyes open. “When at last it happens, I feel exhausted, as if I had won a battle. My head aches, and I have a heartbeat so severe that I have to take forty drops of valerian root, lie down, and stay like that for at least an hour.” When the grandmother was through, she turned to Misha. The doctor turned to him too, keeping the same polite and patient expression on his face. Misha thought about darting out the door, past the receptionist, past the waiting room, onto the street. He thought about rushing out the window, a large clean window with a plastic model of a split human head on a windowsill. He could see himself falling into the grass, then rising to his feet and running away from the office. But he didn’t jump. He just sat there, thinking how to avoid mentioning “heavy rock” or the grandmother’s sitting in the bathroom. “Um . . . she . . . my grandmother . . . her problem is . . . she has a . .. she often gets a headache and her heart beats very fast.” The doctor smiled at Misha approvingly and wrote a prescription with his beautiful, very clean hands. “Tylenol!” his grandmother later complained loudly to the other patients in the waiting room. “Look at these American doctors! I tell him that I am constipated and he gives me Tylenol! Can you believe that?” The Russian patients sympathized eagerly. Misha hid his burning ears behind The Great Pictorial Guide to the Prehistoric World. He wished they would switch to the safer subject of the dermatologist’s mistress.

  Once they saw her. She flung the door open and walked straight into Dr. Levy’s office, not smiling, staring ahead. She was a stout woman in her late thirties, with short reddish-brown hair, in tight white jeans and a shiny leather jacket. She was clomping her high-heeled boots and jingling her gold bracelets as she walked, swinging her car keys in her hand. Everybody in the room stopped talking and followed her with their eyes, even Misha. She had a beautiful mouth, painted bright red. “Shameless!” somebody hissed in Russian. Maybe it was Misha’s grandmother.

  * * *

  AT HOME, Misha did his homework in their long white kitchen, because in his mother’s opinion this was the only place that had proper light for him to work and wasn’t too drafty. For about a year, the four of them—he, his mother, his grandfather, and his grandmother—had been living in this one-bedroom apartment with unevenly painted walls, faded brown carpet, and secondhand furniture. Everything in the apartment seemed to belong to somebody else. Misha and his mother slept in the bedroom, Misha on a folding bed. The grandmother and grandfather slept on the sofa bed in the living room. Or rather it was the grandmother who slept, snoring softly. The grandfather seemed to be awake all night. Whenever Misha woke up, he heard the old man tossing and groaning or pacing heavily on the creaky kitchen floor.

  In Russia, they’d had separate apartments. They even lived in different cities. His grandparents lived in the south of Russia, in a small town overgrown with apple and peach trees. Misha and his parents lived in Moscow. Then his father left to live with another woman. In Moscow, Misha had his own room, a very small one, not bigger than six square meters, where the wallpaper was patterned with tiny sailboats. Misha had his own bed and his own desk with a lamp shaped like a crocodile. His books were shelved neatly above the desk, and his toys were kept in two plywood boxes beside his bed. When his parents argued, they used to say, “Misha, go to your room!” But during the last months before his father left, they didn’t have time to send him to his room. They argued almost constantly: they started suddenly, without any warning, in the middle of a matter-of-fact conversation, during dinner, or while playing chess, or while watching TV, and stopped after Misha had gone to bed, or maybe they didn’t stop at all. Misha went to his room himsel
f. He sat on a little woven rug between his bed and his desk, playing with his building blocks and listening to the muffled sounds of his parents yelling. He played very quietly.

  Misha liked doing his homework, although he would never have admitted that. He laid out his glossy American textbooks so that they took up nearly the entire surface of the table. He loved coloring maps, drawing diagrams, solving math problems: he even loved spelling exercises—he was pleased with the sight of his handwriting, the sight of the firm, clear, rounded letters. Most of all, he loved that during homework time nobody bothered him. “Shh! Michael’s studying,” everybody said. Even his grandmother, who usually cooked dinner while Misha was studying, was silent, or almost silent—she quietly hummed a theme from a Mexican soap opera that she watched every day on the Spanish channel. Her Spanish was not much better than her English, but she said that in Mexican shows you didn’t need words to understand what was going on. The other thing she loved to watch on TV was the weather reports, where you didn’t need words either: a picture of the sun meant a good day, raindrops meant drizzle, rows of raindrops meant heavy rain. Misha’s mother was against subscribing to a Russian TV channel, because she thought it would prevent them from adjusting to American life. For the same reason, she insisted that everybody call Misha “Michael.” Misha’s mother was well adjusted. She watched the news on TV, rented American movies, and read American newspapers. She worked in Manhattan and wore the same clothes to work that Misha had seen in the magazines in the waiting room, but her skirts were longer and the heels of her shoes weren’t as high.

  The problem with the homework was that it took Misha only about forty minutes. He tried to prolong it as much as he could. He did all the extra math problems from the section called “You Might Try It.” He brought his own book and read it, pretending that it was an English assignment. He stopped from time to time as if he had a problem and had to think it over, but in truth he just sat there, watching his grandmother cook.

  She took all these funny packages, string bags, plastic bags, paper bags, bowls, and wrapped plates out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter, never forgetting to sniff at each of them first. Then she opened the oven with a loud screech, gasping and saying, “Sorry, Michael,” took out saucepans and skillets, put them on the stove, filled some of them with water and greased others with chicken fat (she always kept some chicken fat handy, not trusting oil). While the saucepans and skillets gurgled and hissed on the stove, the grandmother washed and chopped the contents of packages and bowls, using two wooden boards—one for meat, the other for everything else. Misha always marveled at how fast her short and swollen fingers moved. In a matter of seconds, handfuls of colorful cubes disappeared in the saucepans and skillets under chipped enameled lids. “I was wise,” the grandmother often said to her waiting-room friends. “I brought all the lids here. In America, it’s impossible to find a lid that fits.” The women agreed, something was definitely wrong with American lids.

  To make ground meat, the grandmother used a hand-operated metal meat-grinder, also transported from Russia. She had to summon the grandfather into the kitchen, because the grinder was too heavy. She couldn’t turn the handle herself; she couldn’t even lift it. The grandfather put his newspaper down and came in obediently, shuffling his slippered feet as he walked, with the same tired, resigned expression that he had worn when he followed the grandmother home from the Russian food store, carrying bulging bags printed with a stretched red thank you. He took off his dark checkered shirt and put it on the chair. (The grandmother insisted that he do that. “You don’t want pieces of raw meat all over your shirt!”) He put an enameled bowl of meat cubes in front of him and secured the grinder on the windowsill. He stood leaning over it, dressed in a white undershirt and dark woolen trousers. He had brought to America five good suits that he used to wear to work in Russia. Now he wore the trousers at home and the jackets hung in a closet with mothballs in their pockets. The grandfather took hold of the rusty meat-grinder handle and turned it slowly, with effort at first, then faster and faster. His flabby pale shoulders were shaking and tiny beads of sweat came out on his puffy cheeks, his long rounded nose, and his shiny head. The grandmother sometimes tore herself away from her cooking to offer comments: “What have you got, crooked fingers?” or “Here, you dropped a piece again” or “I hope I will have this meat ground by next year.” She had never talked to him like that in Russia. In Russia, when he came home from work, she rushed to serve him dinner and put two spoonfuls of sour cream into his shchi herself. The grandfather slurped the soup loudly and talked a lot during dinner. Now he didn’t even answer the grandmother back. He just stood there, clutching the meat-grinder handle with yellowed knuckles, turning it even faster, which made his face redden and the blue twisted veins on his neck bulge. His stare was focused on something far away, out the window. Misha thought that maybe he wanted to jump, like Misha had wanted to in the doctor’s office. But their apartment was on the sixth floor.

  While the food was cooking, the grandmother went to get her special ingredient, dill. She kept darkened, slightly wilted bunches spread out on an old newspaper on the windowsill. She took one and crushed it into a little bowl with her fingers, to add it to every dish she cooked. At dinner, everything had the taste of dill: soup, potatoes, meat stew, salad. In fact, dinner hardly tasted like anything else but dill—the grandmother didn’t trust spices; she put very little salt in their food and no pepper at all. Misha watched how she moved from one saucepan to another, dressed in a square-shaped dark cotton dress, drying her moist red face and her closely cropped gray hair with a piece of cloth, sweeping potato peels off the counter, groaning when one fell to the floor and she had to pick it up. He couldn’t understand why she put so much work into the preparation of this food, which was consumed in twenty minutes, in silence, and didn’t even taste good.

  Misha couldn’t pretend to be busy with his homework forever. Eventually, the grandmother knew that he was done. She watched a weather report on TV and if nothing indicated a natural disaster sent Misha to a playground with his grandfather. “Go, go,” she would yell at the grandfather, who sat on the sofa in his unbuttoned checkered shirt, buried in a Russian newspaper. “Go, walk with the boy, make yourself useful for a change!” And the grandfather would stand up, groaning, go to the bathroom mirror to check if he should shave, and usually decide against it. Then he would button his shirt, tuck it into his trousers, and say gloomily: “Let’s go, Michael.” Misha knew that after they left, the grandmother would take over the Russian newspaper. She would put her glasses on (she had two pairs, both made from cheap plastic, one light blue, the other pink), and slump on the sofa, making the springs creak. She would sit there with her feet planted far apart and read the classifieds section, the singles ads. She would circle some with a red marker she had borrowed from Misha, to show them later to Misha’s mother, who would laugh at first, then get irritated, then get upset and yell at the grandmother.

  All the way to the playground, while they passed red brick apartment buildings and rows of private houses with little boys in yarmulkes and little girls in long flowery dresses playing on the sidewalks, Misha’s grandfather walked a few steps ahead, with his hands folded against his back, staring down at his feet, never saying a word.

  Back in Russia, it was different, maybe because Misha was younger then. When he spent summers at his grandparents’ place, the grandfather took him to a park willingly, without being asked. He talked a lot while they strolled along the paths of a dark, dense forest: about trees, animals, about how fascinating even the most ordinary things that surround us could be. Little Misha didn’t try to grasp the meaning of his words. They just reached him along with other noises: the rustle of a tree, a bird’s squawk, a nasty scrape of gravel as he ran his sandal-clad toes through it. It was the sound of the grandfather’s voice that was important to him. They walked slowly, Misha’s little hand lying securely in the grandfather’s big sweaty one. From time to time
, Misha had to release his hand and wipe it against his pants, but then he hurried to take the grandfather’s hand again.

  Now, once they reached the playground and stepped on its black spongy floor, the grandfather said, “Okay, go play, Michael.” Then he strolled around the place, searching for Russian newspapers left behind on the benches. He usually found two or three. He walked to a big flat tree stump, in the farthest corner from the domino tables where a heated crowd of old Russian men gathered, and where old Russian women sat on benches discussing their own ailments and other people’s mistresses. There, for the full hour that they spent in the playground, the grandfather sat unmoving, except to turn the newspaper pages. Misha didn’t know how he was supposed to play. Three-year-olds on their tricycles rode all over the soft black surface of the playground. The slide was occupied by shrieking six-year-olds, and the swings were filled with little babies rocked by their mothers, or with fat teenage girls who had to squeeze their bottoms tightly to fit between the chains. Misha usually walked to the tallest slide, stepping over dabs of chewing gum and pools of melted ice cream. He climbed up to the very top and crawled into a plastic hut. There he sat huddled on a low plastic bench. Sometimes he brought a book with him. He liked thick, serious books about ancient civilizations, archaeological expeditions, and animals who’d become extinct millions of years ago. But most of the time, it was too noisy to read. Then Misha simply stared down at the playground that seemed to move and stir like a big restless animal, and at his immobile grandfather.