A Silver Willow by the Shore

by Kelli Stuart

  A dream is wandering at night,

  A nap is following his way.

  A dream is asking, “Dear friend,

  Where shall we now stay?”

  “Where the house is warm,

  Where the baby is small.

  There, there we will stay,

  Lull and hush the baby-doll.”

  “They were all making fun of me,” Annie sobbed, shaking off her mother’s gentle words. “They called me ‘Nasty.’ They said I’m a nasty girl because my name means nasty. Mama, please,” she sat up and stared hard into her mother’s eyes, the tears gleaming bright on her soft skin. “Please don’t call me Nastia ever again. I don’t like it. I don’t want that name.”

  “Okay, I will call you Anastasia, then,” Nina said with a gentle smile, but Annie shook her head.

  “No,” she replied, stubbornness setting tight into her jaw. “That name is too Russian. You can call me Annie. That’s my new name.”

  “But my darling,” Nina crooned. Annie pushed away from her mom and stood up.

  “No. My name is Annie from now on. I am an American girl, and I want an American name.” Turning on her heel, she’d run from the room, stomping up the stairs and slamming her bedroom door so loudly that Elizaveta had hurried from her own room clutching her chest.

  “Is the house falling down?” Elizaveta had asked, for of course she was always certain that doom awaited them in this adopted country.

  Pinching the bridge of her nose, Nina suppresses a smile at the memory. Her mother and her daughter share a flair for the dramatic, despite their continual insistence that they have no common traits.

  “And now you laugh at me,” Elizaveta grumbles, reaching up to smooth her silver grey hair back out of her pinched eyes. At ninety years old, Elizaveta has a weathered face, coarse and wrinkled. She bears a hard look about her, mouth drawn down and eyes constantly revealing deep sadness. There’s something hidden behind those eyes—something that Nina has spent a lifetime trying to figure out.

  Shaking her head, Nina turns back to her mother. “I’m not laughing at you, Mama,” she says gently. “I’m just...remembering something.”

  Elizaveta leans forward and slowly, gingerly, pushes to her feet. She stands silently for a moment, willing her legs to hold her broad frame steady. Her hand trembles on top of her cane as she leans heavily into the polished wood. She shifts her gaze to her daughter’s face.

  “Remembering is dangerous,” she says, her voice a whisper.

  Annie

  Annie leans her head back against the seat, her icy cold hands clenched in her lap. Toby fiddles with the radio as he navigates his car up and down the hilly back roads. He glances over at Annie and takes in the sight of her. She looks small, tucked into the ripped leather seat as though she hopes it might swallow her up.

  “You okay?” he asks. The question sounds awkward coming from him. He isn’t usually one for small talk—it makes him uncomfortable.

  “Fine,” she answers. “Just tired. And sick of dealing with my mom and crazy grandmother.”

  Toby offers a lopsided grin. “Rough morning?” he asks. He pulls out a pack of Marlboros from the console and holds the box up facing her with one raised eyebrow. Annie shakes her head, the scent of the unlit cigarettes making her stomach turn. Toby shrugs and drops the box back into the cup holder between them. His sandy blond hair falls around his ears, wet at the tips. Annie wants to reach up and run her hand through his hair, but given the new circumstances she feels awkward and uncomfortable. The secret she holds has already opened up a chasm between her and everyone else.

  “You know, mothers usually love me,” Toby says sticking a cigarette between his lips. “I could stop by and turn on the Toby charm. I bet your grandmother would dig it.”

  Annie offers him a small smile and shakes her head. “You haven’t met my grandmother,” she answers.

  Toby sighs and pulls up to a stop sign. He lights his cigarette, squinting at Annie as smoke unfurls from the orange tip. She rolls down the window to let it escape.

  “Seriously,” he says, exhaling heavily. Smoke creates a haze between them and Annie swallows hard against the bile building in the back of her throat. “We’ve been together for six months. You ever gonna introduce me?”

  Annie leans the side of her head against the seat and looks back into his bright blue eyes. He has the type of look she imagines her mom would appreciate. He’s tall and thin, clean cut, but not too pretty. He’s fiercely independent, much like Nina. He moved out of his house the day he graduated high school and has been supporting himself ever since. Of course, his lack of education is a strike against him that Annie knows can’t be overcome, and so she must protect him...protect them.

  “I...”Annie’s voice falters. She clears her throat. “I just like to keep my home life as far away from the rest of the world as I can.”

  Toby glances out the windshield, thinking briefly before answering. “Sure. Whatever.” He inhales deeply and pushes his foot down on the gas, taking a sharp turn as he crests the hill overlooking Annie’s school. He’s frustrated, and this frustrates Annie.

  “You don’t understand,” she mutters, turning her face away from him.

  “You’re right,” Toby says, pulling the car into the parking lot. “I don’t understand because you won’t explain it to me. All you’ve told me is that your mom is controlling and your grandmother is a crazy Russian.” He puts the car in park and leans back taking one more drag on his cigarette before flicking it out of the window.

  Annie closes her eyes and takes in a few deep breaths, a wave of nausea rolling over her once again. Toby narrows his eyes and shakes his head.

  “I gotta get to work,” he says. Annie pushes the door open and steps out. She watches as Toby squeals the tires and peels out of the parking lot.

  Nina

  Moscow! You, with your concrete walls;

  I hear your cry, but I cannot answer.

  Still, I haven’t forgotten.

  “Mama?” Nina calls out from the doorway. “Your doctor’s appointment is in twenty minutes; we’re going to be late!”

  A few minutes later, Elizaveta swings the door wide and steps into the hallway. Nina suppresses a cough at the intense odor of perfume as she takes in the sight of her mother. Elizaveta has put on her “going out” dress, the one she saves for leaving the house. The dress engulfs her, hanging to just above her ankles. Nina stifles a smile at the bright red flowers that adorn the dress, standing out against the dark, navy fabric. As her mother has aged, the placement of the flowers has begun highlighting her sagging chest in ways that are more comical than flattering. Nina and Annie both tried giving her different dresses, but Elizaveta staunchly refuses any offer of new clothing.

  “Psh!” she scoffed the last time Nina brought home new clothes for her to try. “Russians do not need to fill their closets the way that Americans do. I am perfectly fine with the clothes that I have. Why would I need such excess?”

  Taking in a deep breath, Nina reaches out her hand to steady her mother’s shaking frame. Grabbing Elizaveta’s elbow, Nina guides her toward the back door, her mother’s shuffled steps painfully slow.

  “I’m not a child, dochen’ka,” Elizaveta snaps, pulling her arm away. “I can walk on my own.”

  Nina drops her hands to her side. “I know that,” she says, fighting to mask the hurt in her voice. “It’s just that we need to move a little faster.”

  “Oy,” Elizaveta replies with a wave of the hand. “The doctor will wait. Americans are always in a hurry. Everyone wants to rush from one moment to the next. This country needs to slow down.”

  Nina draws in a deep breath. It’s been more than a decade since her mother moved to America, into her home, and she’s found daily reasons to complain about this new land. At first it made Nina laugh listening her rant on and on about the excessive capitalism and overwhelming American way of life, but it quickly began to wear on her patience.

  “And ple
ase do not drive so close to the edge of the road, Ninochka,” Elizaveta mutters on. “Last week, you nearly flung me off the side of a cliff when we turned a corner.”

  Nina slowly lets the air out of her lungs. Elizaveta watches her through narrowed eyes.

  “Okay, Mama.” Nina says, a forced cheeriness raising the pitch of her voice.

  As quickly as they can, the two women make it to the car. Nina helps her mother buckle her seatbelt, and then she slowly backs down the driveway. Pulling out onto the road, she takes in the sights before them. The fog lies low today, shadowing the top half of the trees. It makes the path before them look mysterious and alive, as though an adventure waits on the other side of the haze. Nina sighs happily. The view from their little home at the top of a hill never ceases to amaze her. It is a haven, an oasis after all those years growing up in the bowels of Moscow.

  To calm her mother’s frayed nerves, Nina pushes play on the stereo system and the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin fill the car, the soaring vibrato of the soprano singing the famous Letter Scene snaking its way beneath Nina’s skin. She glances at her mother and observes the way that Elizaveta’s eyes close and her mouth moves with the words. Whenever Nina questions her mother’s ability to love, she simply plays Tchaikovsky and reminds herself that somewhere under Elizaveta’s tough exterior is a woman who feels deeply.

  The car ride is short, and they soon arrive at the doctor’s clinic nestled in a long strip-mall. Nina slows to a stop, parking in the closest open spot. She takes in a deep breath and checks herself quickly in the rear-view mirror before pushing open her door and walking to the other side of the car where Elizaveta sits quietly in her seat, eyes still closed, a small smile having turned up her thin lips.

  “Mama?” Nina asks, touching her mother lightly on the shoulder. Elizaveta jumps and turns to look at her daughter.

  “Do not scare me like that!” she exclaims. Nina bites back a laugh. She reaches in to help her mother stand, but Elizaveta refuses to take her daughter’s hand. She slowly pushes to her feet, gripping the side of the car. When she finally straightens up, she looks up at Nina proudly. Nina steps to the side and lets her mother shuffle independently to the front door. The two women walk into the waiting room, and Nina approaches the front desk.

  “We’re here to see Dr. Shevchenko,” she says. The receptionist glances up, peering out at them through black lined eyes. Her hair hangs long and shiny over slender shoulders. She’s wearing a tank top that reveals a large tattoo covering her shoulder. Elizaveta clucks her tongue.

  “Mama,” Nina whispers. She offers a small smile to the girl behind the counter.

  “He’ll be right with you,” the girl answers with a slight roll of her eyes. Nina bites her lip to keep from clucking her own tongue.

  Elizaveta shuffles to a chair in the corner and sinks into it. She rests her hands on her cane in front of her while staring at the receptionist.

  “Why does she paint on herself like that?” she asks. “It’s crass. And what is it supposed to be? Is it a flower? Or is it a clown? I can’t tell.”

  Nina picks up a magazine and tunes Elizaveta out. She pretends to read, but really she’s thinking about all the years she spent trying to understand her mother. They were years of silence in a world that bustled with energy. Staring at a picture of some movie star whose name she doesn’t care to remember, Nina lets her mind drift back to the day she told her mother she was moving to America.

  “You will end up begging for food on the street,” Elizaveta had sniffed the morning that Nina had informed her of the decision to marry an American man and leave the country of her youth. “That man will abandon you, and you will have to live alone under a bridge. With the cats.”

  It was 1985, and Nina was twenty years old. She’d met Andrew when he visited Moscow as a student from an American university. He was a teacher of Slavic history in America, so he’d come to Moscow with a language immersion program. Nina was also a student at the university, trying hard to wrap her mouth around the English language, the beautiful, round sounds so different from her native dialogue. When Andrew showed up with his bright blonde curls and perfect white teeth, something stirred inside Nina, something that she realized later had been there all along, waiting for her to discover it. She suddenly felt a deep desire for adventure. While she’d always been curious about America with its endless supply of blue jeans and glamorous movie stars, she really knew nothing about the strange land across the ocean.

  “Capitalists are not trustworthy,” she’d heard all her life. “They worship money, and this makes them greedy, self indulgent, and dangerous.”

  She heard whispers on the street, the wagging tongues of the generation before her hissing out stories of traitorous Soviets who immigrated to America only to be robbed and left for dead under bridges. “You go to America, and you will die sad and alone,” they whispered, eyes darting left to right as they acknowledged the one thing that wasn’t to be mentioned, the stain running through the undercurrent of the Soviet utopia—people were leaving.

  That defectors would die sad and alone was the caution she heard most frequently from the suspicious elders on the streets. Even her mother whispered the words when they were home alone, as though the walls had ears and would squire her forbidden warning into the public square for all to hear. Her mama liked to add on the part about cats, as if somehow that would make the American experience so much more demeaning.

  But Andrew changed all that. He was strong and self aware, completely confident in himself in a way that was different from the boys she had grown up with. Nina would steal glances at him when she thought he wasn’t looking, the sight of this tall American so strange against the backdrop of her university. He stood out against the cracked walls like a vision of perfection in a flawed painting. Nina stared furtively at him, trying to be discreet, and marveled at the way he worked to speak and understand her language. He seemed genuinely interested in learning the nuances of this foreign land, and when he spoke, she felt her heartbeat quicken as he tried to pull together his Russian sentences with the proper case endings. For weeks after he first arrived, Nina was careful to sidestep him and the other Americans with him whenever they happened to share a corridor. She tried to be invisible, a silent observer of the foreigners that she was supposed to fear, but instead found fascinating.

  Ultimately, her attempt at invisibility failed due to Andrew’s natural curiosity and her paper-thin shield. It was the magazine Noviy Mir, New World, that brought them together, or it was the appearance of Noviy Mir at any rate. The quintessential Russian journal read by Soviet students was ultimately, and perhaps ironically, the catalyst for shooting her life onto a brand new trajectory.

  Nina was leaning against the wall that day as she waited for her friend Tamara after classes and had pulled out the latest, tattered issue of Noviy Mir, slowly opening it up so that she didn’t give away what was hidden. Tucked inside the journal was the real magic, the secret she and several of her friends were concealing. The pages were worn, the print small, but Nina didn’t care, because those words made her feel truly alive. On that particular day, Nina was reading Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift. Tucking the printed pages into the magazine was the perfect ruse, sure to keep Nina off the radar of sharp-eyed teachers. So many of them were sold out to the Soviet cause, completely unaware that she and her peers were looking beyond the propaganda and seeking out answers to life beyond what had been drilled into them.

  It wasn’t her first banned book. Nina had recently finished reading a tattered copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and, completely baffled by the confusing and wild tale, found herself with an appetite for more. Nina wanted some justification of love, since her mother insisted that such a thing was only a flighty instinct that chased the uneducated. After a morning spent translating passages from her Russian textbook into English, sweating over the declensions, and trying once again to remember what constituted a present perfect participle, Nina found
solace in this simple act of rebellion.

  She whispered Nabokov’s words that morning, letting them glide over her tongue as she attempted to understand and dissect their meaning. She had never been the smartest in her class, constantly a disappointment to both her teachers and her mother as she received only average marks in school. Nabokov’s prose didn’t make sense to her, but there was something magically romantic about it, and so she read the sentences over and over, hoping someday to tap into the hidden meaning that eluded her.

  “I didn’t realize Noviy Mir was so compelling.”

  She’d jumped at the sound of his voice, nearly letting the magazine slip from her hands.

  “Yes,” she answered, almost in a whisper, the word feeling as foreign as it sounded slipping past her parted lips. She fumbled with the pages, slamming them shut and pulling the magazine to her chest, squelching the forbidden words, holding her secret close.

  Andrew smiled, and Nina’s knees shook. “I’m Andrew Jamieson,” he said, reaching out his hand. She stared at it a moment before slipping her hand into his in an awkward shake.

  “Nina,” she replied. And that was the beginning. It was innocuous and small, not at all glamorous like she imagined interactions must normally be between worldly-wise Americans. But it was the beginning, and it was a nice beginning as stories go.

  For two weeks it became their unspoken habit. Nina stood in the corridor pretending to read Noviy Mir, and Andrew walked by, pretending that it was a coincidence to run into her. Finally, he asked her if they could take a walk outside the grey walls of the foreign language university. He asked, and Nina’s heart soared, but then it sank. To walk on the streets with this man, this American man, was not something that would be looked upon favorably. She could just hear the tongues of the babushkas on the sidewalk clucking as she walked past with the tall American and his perfect teeth, voice a little too loud as he tried to carry on a conversation in Russian. She’d looked into his eyes in that moment, at war with herself for both wanting and fearing being alone with him.