New York Stories

by Bob Blaisdell

  The notice about the English class was printed in bold black letters on pink neon paper. The color was so bright that it arrested everyone’s gaze no matter where it was lying. Since the beginning of March, it could be seen lying anywhere in the apartment: on the kitchen table, in the bedroom on a crumpled pillow, on the toilet floor between a broom and a Macy’s catalog, stuffed under the sofa (the grandmother pulled it out from there, blew the pellets of dust off it, smoothed it with her hands, and scolded the grandfather angrily). Everybody studied it, read it, or at least looked at it. They were discussing whether the grandfather should go. He fit the description perfectly. Any legal immigrant who had lived in the country less than two years and possessed basic knowledge of English was invited to attend a three-month-long class on American conversation. “Rich in Idioms” was printed in letters bigger than the rest. “Free of Charge,” in even bigger letters. “It’s an excellent program, Father!” Misha’s mother raved at dinner, removing the bones from the catfish stew on her plate. “Taught by American teachers, real teachers, native speakers! Not by Russian old ladies, who confuse all the tenses and claim that it’s classic British grammar.” At first, the grandfather tried to ignore her. But Misha’s mother was persistent. “You’re rotting alive, Father! Think how wonderful it would be if you had something to do, something to look forward to.” Misha’s grandmother clattered dishes, moved chairs with a screech, and often interrupted this conversation with questions like “Where are the matches? I just put them right here” or “Do you think this fish is overcooked?” She was offended that nobody suggested that she go to the class, even though she knew that the words “basic knowledge of English” hardly applied to her. The best she could do was spell her first name. The last name required Misha’s help. But Misha’s mother couldn’t be distracted by the grandmother’s questions or the clattering of dishes. “You’ll begin to speak in no time, Father. You know grammar, you have vocabulary, you just need a push.” The grandfather only bent his neck lower and sipped his tea, muttering that it was all nonsense and that in their area of Brooklyn you hardly ever needed English. “What about yours and mother’s appointments?! Michael and I are tired of taking you there all the time. Right, Michael?” As she said this, Misha’s mother moved their large porcelain teapot, preventing her from seeing Misha’s face across the table. Misha nodded. It was decided that the grandfather would go.

  On the first day of class, the grandfather took one of his jackets from a hanger and put it on, on top of his usual checkered shirt. He asked Misha if he had a spare notebook. Misha gave him a notebook with a marble cover, a sharp pencil, and a ballpoint pen. The grandfather put it all in a plastic thank you bag. In the hall, he took the box with his Russian leather shoes from the top shelf of the closet and asked Misha if they needed shining. Misha did not know, and the grandfather shoved the box back and put his sneakers on. He shuffled out to the elevator, holding the thank you bag under his arm.

  From then on, two nights a week—the class was held on Mondays and Wednesdays—they had dinner without the grandfather. His absence didn’t make much difference, except maybe that Misha’s mother and the grandmother bickered a little more. It usually started with a clipping from a Russian newspaper, a big colorful ad—come TO OUR PARTY AND MEET YOUR DESTINY. PRICE: FIFTY DOLLARS (FOOD AND DRINK INCLUDED)—and ended with Misha’s mother yelling: “Why do you want to marry me off? So you can drive the next one away?” and the grandmother reaching for a bottle of valerian root drops. “I never said a bad word to your husband,” the grandmother said plaintively. “You said plenty of your words to me. Didn’t spare money in long-distance calls!” “I only wanted to open your eyes!” Then Misha’s mother rushed out of the kitchen, and the grandmother yelled after her, carefully counting the drops into her teacup: “How can you be so ungrateful! I came to America to help you. I left everything and came here for your sake!”

  Misha’s mother had come to America for Misha’s sake. She said it to him once, after she got back from a parent-teacher conference. She returned home and said, “Come with me to the bedroom, Michael.” He went, feeling his hands grow sweaty and his ears turn red, although he knew that he hadn’t done anything bad at school. His mother sat on the edge of the bed and removed her high-heeled shoes, then pulled off her pantyhose. “The teacher says you don’t talk, Michael. You don’t talk at all. Not in class, not during the recess.” She was rubbing her pale feet with small, crooked toes. “Your English is fine, you have excellent marks on your tests. You have excellent marks in every subject. Yet you’re not going to make it to the top of the class!” She left her feet alone and began to cry, her black eye makeup running around her eyes. She said to him, sniffling, that he—his future—was the only reason she came to America. Then she went into the bathroom to wash her face, leaving her rolled-up pantyhose on the floor—two soft, dark circles joined together. From the bathroom, she yelled to him: “Why don’t you talk, Michael?”

  It wasn’t true that he didn’t talk at all. When asked a question, he gave an accurate answer, but he tried to make it as brief as possible. He never volunteered to talk. He registered everything that was said in class; he made comments and counterarguments in his head; he even made jokes. But something prevented these already-formed words from coming out of his mouth. He felt the same way when his father called on Saturdays. Misha spent a whole week preparing for his call; he had thousands of things to tell him. In his head, he related everything that had happened to him at school; he described his classmates, his teachers. He wanted to talk about things he had read in books, about lost cities, volcanoes, and weird animals. In his head, Misha even laughed, imagining how he would tell his father all the funny stories he read about dinosaurs, and how his father would laugh with him. But when his father called, Misha went numb. He answered questions but never volunteered to speak and never asked anything himself. He sat with the phone on his bed, facing the wall and picking at old layers of paint with his fingernail. He could hear his father’s impatient, disappointed breathing on the other end of the line. Misha thought that his reluctance to talk might explain why his father had not called in several weeks.

  Now the grandfather had to do his homework too. Misha came home from school and found him sitting at the kitchen table in Misha’s usual place with his notebooks and dictionaries spread across the table. The grandfather would even cut himself little colorful cards out of construction paper and copy down difficult words from the dictionary: an English word on one side, the Russian meaning on the other. He studied seriously and couldn’t be bothered during that time. The grandmother had to go to the Russian food store alone, and she brought back smaller, lighter bags because she couldn’t carry heavy things. Nobody used the meat-grinder now. It was stored in a cupboard along with other useless things brought from Russia: baking sheets, funny-shaped molds, a small, dented samovar, a gadget for removing sour cherrystones. The grandmother wasn’t happy about this. She muttered that she had the whole household on her shoulders and threw looks of reproach at her husband. Misha’s mother said: “Please leave him alone—Father has to learn something. It’s only for three months anyway.” Misha wondered if the grandfather enjoyed his homework as much as he did. He also wondered if the grandfather cheated like he did, pretending that his homework took much more time than it really did.

  About three weeks after the class started, the grandfather made up his mind and took the box with his leather shoes down from the shelf. He went to a shoe store and bought a small bottle of dark brown shoe polish. To do that, he had to look up the English term for “shoe polish” in the dictionary. Before each class, he polished his shoes zealously with a piece of cloth. “I don’t want the teacher to think that Russians are pigs,” he mumbled in response to the grandmother’s stare. He squatted with his head down, and his face and neck became very red, as red as they were when he said that he wasn’t making enough progress and had to come for extra lessons on Saturdays. The grandmother was putting things away in a
cupboard when he said that. She shut the white cupboard door with a satisfied boom. “All that studying and you are not making progress!” One evening the grandfather got up from the sofa, put on his jacket, put some money in the pocket, walked to Kings Highway, and came back with a new shirt, a light-blue one with dark-blue stripes. “It was on sale,” he explained to the grandmother.

  “‘It was on sale!’ was all he said to me,” Misha’s grandmother announced in the dermatologist’s waiting room. “If I didn’t know him, I would have thought he had a mistress.” Her listeners, two Russian women, one wearing a thick knitted beret of a lustrous purple color and the other a plain black one, nodded to her sympathetically. “But I do know him.” The grandmother grinned and raised one brow to emphasize her words. She looked meaningfully at the women, leaned closer to them, and whispered something. “That—for several years now,” she added. The woman in a purple beret said: “But this is good, this is better.” The grandmother considered her words and said: “Yes, yes, this is better, of course.”

  Misha imagined his grandfather with a mistress, with the dermatologist’s mistress, because she was the only mistress he’d seen. He imagined his grandfather strolling with her along the Sheepshead Bay embankment with other couples, one of her hands sticking out of the shiny leather sleeve holding his grandfather’s hand, her other hand swinging car keys. Then he imagined her kissing the grandfather on the cheek and leaving a mark with her bright red lipstick. The grandfather would wrinkle his nose and rush to wipe it off, the way Misha always did when his mother kissed him after work. The image of his serious grandfather rubbing his cheek vigorously made Misha smile.

  Sheepshead Bay was the place where the grandfather took Misha for his evening walks now. For a few weeks after the class began, they continued to go to the playground, but the Russian newspapers were abandoned. The grandfather took his colorful word cards with him instead. He spread them on the stump, securing each with a small stone to prevent the wind from scattering them. Sometimes he read the words slowly, in whispers, or with his lips moving or with his eyes. But more often he just looked around with an incredulous expression as if he were seeing all this for the first time. Then one day the grandfather said that he was going to take Michael to Sheepshead Bay to look at the ships and breathe the fresh ocean air. The grandmother protested at first, saying that it was a long walk, and it was windy there, and the boy might catch cold. But the grandfather was firm, almost as firm as he used to be back in Russia. He said that the boy needed exercise and that was that.

  On Sheepshead Bay, they didn’t stop to look at the ships. They crossed the creaky wooden bridge and proceeded along the embankment, passing fishermen, tall trees, and chipped green benches occupied by lonely-looking women. At the end of the path, they turned back and repeated their route three or four times. The grandfather walked ahead, maybe a little faster than usual, limping slightly in his stiff leather shoes. He stared ahead, sometimes turning to look in the direction of the trees and benches. A few times, Misha had the impression that the grandfather nodded to somebody on one bench. Once he slipped on a fish head on the pavement and almost fell while looking in that direction. Misha made frequent stops to look at the fishermen’s shiny tackles, the fish heads and tails they used for bait, and the insides of their white plastic buckets, which were usually empty. When the wind was so strong that it chilled Misha’s ears and tried to tear his little Yankees cap off his head, there were sharp, dark waves in the water, and Misha could see fish jumping with big splashes. He watched as somebody pulled out his fishing rod, following it with his eyes, holding his breath and licking his lips. He hoped to see a fish being caught at least once. When the grandfather’s class was over, Misha was sure that they wouldn’t come here anymore. He would have to go back to the plastic hut on the playground, which would get hot in summer and smell of burnt rubber.

  The grandmother had all her appointments written down on a big wall calendar. It hung next to the refrigerator, a bright spot on a pale kitchen wall. It was called “Famous Russian Monasteries,” printed in Germany and sold on Brighton Beach. Below the beautiful, glossy picture of the Zagorsk Monastery, with golden cupolas floating in the brilliantly blue sky, was the schedule for June. The fifteenth, the date when the grandfather’s class would end, was circled with Misha’s red marker. “See, you didn’t want to go, but when it’s over you will miss it, Father,” Misha’s mother said when she passed the calendar on her way to dump her plate in the sink. The grandfather only shrugged. He didn’t look moved in any way by her words. It was the grandmother who looked moved, even animated, every time June 15 was mentioned. The great things were to be done then. The grandmother spoke about the ten pounds of cucumbers she wanted the grandfather to bring for her from Brighton Beach. “They are twenty-nine cents per pound there! I will make pickles.” She also spoke about the plums and apricots she needed for jam, about sour cherries to make sour cherry dumplings, about little hard pears for marinating, about apples for apple pies. She threw longing looks in the direction of the locked-up meat-grinder, telling about a wonderful recipe she heard in the dentist’s office. “I’ll make zrazy. Anna Stepanovna says that they come out much better with scallions instead of onions. I’ll need a lot of ground beef for them.” Then she found a Russian travel agency, which offered discounted tours to elderly people. “We’ll go to Boston, to Washington, to Philadelphia. Women in waiting rooms talk about their trips nonstop, and I just sit there too shy to open my mouth. And you will have to go with me,” she said to the grandfather. “I won’t go alone, as if I weren’t married. They put unmarried women on bad seats in the back, next to the toilet.” Misha thought that maybe for his grandmother it wasn’t such a bad idea to sit next to the toilet, but he didn’t say anything. The grandfather didn’t say anything either. He only buried himself deeper in his textbook.

  On June 2, a weather report on TV showed a neat gray cloud and dense oblique rows of raindrops. “Heavy showers,” the grandmother announced, turning the TV off and walking into the kitchen where Misha and the grandfather were doing their homework, or rather sitting with their textbooks open. “You’re staying home tonight.” The sky in the window was mostly gray with a few patches of blue. Misha looked further down. People weren’t carrying umbrellas, and the gray asphalt of the road was dry and dusty. He looked at his grandfather. The grandfather examined the sky carefully, then lifted the window up a few inches to stick out his arm. The howling gushes of cold wind dashed in, but the arm, although covered with goose bumps, stayed dry. “We’ll come back before the rain starts,” he said. The grandmother shrugged.

  The first raindrops started falling as soon as they left the building. They made dark marks on the pavement but missed Misha and his grandfather. Then a raindrop fell right on the tip of Misha’s nose. He wiped it off. Close to Sheepshead Bay, the grandfather stopped and stuck out his open palm. Some drops landed on it. “It’s not rain, is it, Michael?” the grandfather asked, turning to Misha and wiping his damp face with his damp palm. Misha shrugged. They both looked in the direction of the bay. It was very close, they could see the ships, and the dirty-gray high waves, and the tops of the trees bending low under the pressure of wind. Newspaper pages, probably left on the benches, were flying up. “It’s not a heavy rain. Let’s make one round. Okay?” Misha nodded, holding tight to his cap. They crossed the street, the only ones to walk in the direction of the park. Most people hurried out. Big round raindrops were now falling fast, hitting the pavement one after another with a smacking sound and turning small wet spots into intricate ornaments, then into puddles. The grandfather stopped hesitantly and looked in the direction of the benches. There was nobody there. “I think we’d better head home, Michael,” the grandfather said. “It’s starting to rain.”

  The heavy downpour reached them while they were waiting for the streetlight to turn to green. With all the wind’s howling and the sounds of rain, they didn’t immediately hear somebody calling for them. Or rather, Misha
heard, but he didn’t grasp at once that it was his grandfather’s name being called. “Grigory Semyonovich! Grigory Semyonovich!” Nobody had used his surname since they left Russia. A small old woman in a brown raincoat, holding a plastic bag above her head, was running to them, stumbling in black water-resistant boots too wide for her. Misha pulled the grandfather on the sleeve, making him stop and turn. “Grigory Semyonovich! Come to my place, come quickly, the boy will catch cold,” she said breathlessly, trying to position her plastic bag above Misha’s head.

  * * *

  Her place was on the top floor of a three-story brownstone across the street from the park. They walked up a dark staircase that smelled of something unpleasant. “Cats?” thought Misha, who had never smelled a cat. The woman led the way. She was still out of breath and spoke in short, abrupt sentences. “Poor boy. Grigory Semyonovich. How could you. In weather like this. I was there on a bench. But I left. As soon as the rain started. I saw you from across the street. I’m worried about the boy.” The grandfather was also out of breath, and silent.

  Inside, Misha had only a moment to notice that the apartment was very small and dimly lit before a big rough towel, smelling of unfamiliar soap, covered his face and shoulders and back. He felt the woman’s swift little hands rubbing his body. He became ticklish and wanted to sneeze.

  “My name is Elena Pavlovna. We go to school together, your grandfather and I,” the woman said after Misha and the grandfather had refused dry sweatpants but accepted dry socks and their shoes had been stuffed with newspapers and put to dry in the bathroom. They were drinking hot chocolate at the one-legged round table in the tiny kitchen. Misha’s grandfather and Elena Pavlovna had made the hot chocolate together. The grandfather poured boiling water from the kettle, holding it by the wooden handle with both hands. Elena Pavlovna put the mix into three yellow mugs and moved them closer to the kettle. They said “Thank you,” “Please,” and “Would you” to each other and smiled frequently. They spoke like characters in the Chekhov adaptations that Misha’s mother loved to watch in Russia, yet Misha could feel that with his grandfather and Elena Pavlovna it wasn’t an act. “What’s your name?” Elena Pavlovna asked. “Michael,” said Misha. “Michael?! You don’t look like a Michael. Misha would suit you better. Can I call you Misha?” Misha nodded, blowing with pleasure on his too-hot drink (at home the grandmother would usually add a bit of cold milk) and biting into a cookie with delicious raspberry jam inside. “Store-bought,” Elena Pavlovna said. “I don’t bake. Why bother when there are so many delicious things sold in bakeries? Right? But that’s not the real reason. I am simply a very bad cook.” Misha could see that she wasn’t ashamed to admit this.