by Lara Vapnyar
I chewed on my ponytail. Vera rolled and unrolled the ruble bills in her hand. We were too tired to talk, as were other people. All eyes focused on the exit door, where the happy ones squeezed by with armfuls of crunchy silver-and-yellow bags. The people looked shabby and crumpled, but the bags shone winningly in the orange rays of the sun.
“Let’s buy two each,” Vera suggested, when the line advanced to the one hundreds. I nodded. She smoothed the crumpled ruble bills in her hand. There were five of them: enough to buy ten bags of puffed rice or two bags and a round can of instant coffee in the Bigstore next door, as Vera’s mother had suggested. I thought what a good friend Vera was. Another person would’ve just spent all the money, without sharing it with me. I asked myself if I would’ve done the same thing for Vera. I wasn’t sure.
“Let’s buy six,” Vera said, when we advanced to the store doors. I nodded.
She reached with her hand and touched a bag of puffed rice in somebody’s arms. It crunched just as I’d expected.
“You know what? Let’s buy ten,” Vera decided.
I nodded.
My feet hurt and my lips were parched. But instead of craving a drink, I craved dry and salty puffed rice.
We stood just a few people away from the doors now. They’d let us in with the next batch! Only a little while longer before I could feel the crunchy surface of a bag in my hands, before I could rip it open, before I could let the golden avalanche pour into my hand. I licked a trickle of saliva off the corner of my mouth.
Then a saleswoman appeared in the doorway.
“Seven o’clock. The store is closed,” she said.
For a few moments, nobody moved. Nobody made a sound. People just stood gazing at the woman intently, as if she spoke a foreign language and they were struggling to interpret her words. Then the crowd erupted. The feeble, polite pleas grew into demands, then into curses, then into an angry, unintelligible murmur.
The woman listened with a tired and annoyed expression. She shook her head and pulled on the door. She wore a white apron and a white hat above thin dark hair gathered in a loose bun. She had a smooth, round birthmark on the right side of her chin. I’d never hated anybody as much as I hated her. My hands clenched into fists. I prepared to punch her in the face. Even though I had never done it before, I knew exactly what it would be like. I heard the swishing sound of my striking arm and her scream. I saw the thin skin of her cheeks breaking under my knuckles. I saw her blood. I saw her sink to the floor. Then I realized it was somebody else who had punched her.
Almost immediately I felt a strong shove in the back and found myself swimming inside the store. I was squeezed between other bodies and I was going in. I was going in! In! We were storming the store. Just like the crowd that was storming the Czar’s Palace in all of the revolution movies. Only now I was more than the audience. I was a part of the crowd.
There was a drunken determination on people’s faces. We crashed through the entrance and the last thing I saw on the outside was Vera, who had been pushed away.
“Vera!” I yelled halfheartedly, because in my toxic excitement I didn’t really care whether she’d make it or not.
Soon I found myself pushed to the very back of the store, next to the cracked plywood door that led to the storage area. I was squeezed in among twenty or thirty people filling the tiny space between the entrance and the back door. There wasn’t any puffed rice around, but I was sure they had more in storage.
“Bring it out, you bitch! We won’t leave,” piercing voices screamed behind me. I wiggled to turn away from the door and see what was happening.
The saleswoman had scrambled onto her knees and stood by the entrance holding her cheek. Her face flinched with a cold hatred.
“Ivan, Vasyok!” she called in a tired voice. “Where the hell are you? Call the police!”
People kept pushing. An old man to my left shoved me between my ribs with his elbow, somebody hit me in the stomach, somebody stepped on my foot, the light hair of a woman in front of me stuck to my sweaty forehead.
The excitement had faded. All I wanted was to get out. I looked for the slightest opening between people’s bodies, where I could sneak through. There wasn’t any.
Then a man appeared, either Vasyok or Ivan. He pushed through the plywood door and stopped right behind me. I managed to turn my head sideways to look at him. He wasn’t tall, rather broad and heavy like my grandmother’s commode. He smiled.
“Why are you standing there like an idiot?” the saleswoman screamed. “Do something! Call the police!”
Vasyok or Ivan snorted.
“Why police? No need for police.” He rolled up his sleeves and smiled again. His arms were red and perfectly round, with pale hairs scattered between scars and tattoos.
He drew some air in and huffed into my neck. His breath was hot and garlicky wet.
I screamed.
“No need for police,” Vasyok repeated, in the same calm and cheerful tone.
And then he lifted me off the ground. It was the first thing that I noticed—the sensation of being in the air, of losing control. His hands were on my chest, right there where I’d felt the precious little knobs just a couple of hours earlier. His index fingers crushed my nipples flat, while his thumbs pressed into my back, an inch away from my shoulder blades. Half crazy with fear and pain, I kicked with my knees, which was exactly what he needed. He used me as a battering ram, crashing me into the crowd to push people out of the store.
I don’t remember how long it took him to clear the room. I don’t remember at which point my feet met the ground, and whether I fell or not. It is strange, but I don’t even remember if Vera was waiting for me at the store doors or if I had to walk home alone. I don’t remember if I walked or ran.
I do remember that after changing into my pajamas that night, I took the new sweater, folded it several times, and shoved it into the garbage pail between an empty sour cream container and a long string of potato peel. And I remember thinking that I wasn’t beautiful and never would be.
Later, when I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I heard the rumble of a refuse chute—my mother was sending the garbage down. I pressed my face into the pillow and sobbed, suddenly regretting that I’d thrown the sweater away.
KATYA PEERED into her mug again. The tea leaves looked like a bunch of dead flies. They didn’t show the face of a man, nor did they give any hint of his name. If they knew something, they certainly kept it secret. Katya put the mug away and went to brush her teeth.
Salad Olivier
MY MOTHER has always removed her shoes under the table, placed her feet on top of them, and entertained herself by curling and uncurling her toes. Aunt Masha liked to scratch her ankles with her stiletto heels. Uncle Boris stomped his right foot when he argued. “I insist!” he would say, and his hard leather heel went boom! against the linoleum floor. My father’s feet weren’t particularly funny, except when he wore mismatched socks, as he often did.
We, my cousin Violetta and I, liked to spend holiday meals under the table. From there, hidden behind three layers of tablecloth, we watched the secret life of the adult feet and listened to adult conversations.
“Mm, mm,” they said, above our heads. “The salad is good today! Not bad, is it? Not bad at all!”
They champed, they crunched, they jingled their forks, they clinked glasses.
“In Paris they serve Olivier without meat,” Uncle Boris said.
“Come on!”
“They do!”—angry boom of Uncle Boris’s right shoe—“I read it in A Moveable Feast.”
“Olivier can’t possibly be made without meat!” My mother’s toes curled. “It’s even worse than Olivier with bologna.”
“Olivier with bologna is plebeian.” Aunt Masha’s stiletto heels agreed.
IF I GIGGLED, Cousin Violetta covered my mouth with her cupped hand. She had rough fingers, hardened by piano lessons. Her mother also took her to drawing and figure-skating lessons. She said that her
figure-skating teacher liked to bend the kids’ backs to the point where their vertebrae were about to break loose and scatter onto the rink. Poor Cousin Violetta. I didn’t have to take any lessons because my father was the genius of the family. “The Mikhail Lanzman,” people said about him. He used up piles of paper, covering it with formulas; he often froze with a perplexed expression during meals and conversations, and he did every simple chore slowly and zealously. When we all prepared Salad Olivier and my father sliced potatoes, he did exactly four cuts across and six lengthwise.
At that time I tried to copy him. My mother put a sofa cushion on my chair, so I could reach the table, and gave me a bowl of peeled eggs—a safer ingredient that wouldn’t soil my holiday clothes. I didn’t mind, even though Cousin Violetta had been trusted with sour pickles. I liked eggs. They were soft, smooth, and easy to slice.
I held an egg between my thumb and index finger, carefully counted the cuts. My father, who sat across from me, nodded approvingly. From time to time his reading glasses would slide to the tip of his nose, and it was my job to push them up because I had the cleanest hands. “Puppy Tail!” he would call, and I would slip off my pillow and rush to his end of the table, push the glasses to the bridge of his nose, and command, “Stay there!” But invariably the glasses slid down again, often as soon as I made it back to my place and resumed counting.
By the time I could reach the table without the pillow, my slicing zeal had cooled off. Strangely enough, it coincided with a vague suspicion that my father was an ordinary man after all. Ordinary, and maybe even boring. The puppy tail stopped wagging.
By the time we moved to America my cutting zeal had perished altogether.
“SLICE, DON’T CHOP!” my mother says in our Brooklyn kitchen. I remove the large potato chunks that I’d just put into the crystal bowl and slice them some more.
It’s June 14, our first American anniversary. We’ll celebrate it alone, the three of us, consuming a bowl of Olivier and a bottle of sickly sweet wine that rests on top of the refrigerator. We are not happy. In my mother’s opinion, it’s my fault.
“You can’t say that you don’t meet men. You work with men, don’t you?” My mother rips sinew out of the chunks of boiled pork.
I raise my eyes. I work in a urologist’s office and my mother knows it.
“Mother, the men I meet are either impotent or carry sexually transmitted diseases.” This isn’t completely true. The urologist also has two or three incontinence cases and a few prostate cancers, which I neglect to mention.
She purses her lips and starts knocking with her knife against the cutting board. She works fast when she is angry. The bits of meat fly from under her knife all over the table. I pick the bits up and throw them into the garbage, seeing a corner of the living room with my father’s small figure sprawled on the couch. His feet, clad in perfectly matched gray socks, are placed on top of the armrest. His feet are the first thing I see on entering the apartment. Sometimes he taps with them rhythmically as if listening to a sad, slow tune; at other times they just stay perched there like two lost birds.
His feet were the first thing I saw yesterday, having returned from a date that had started with my mother’s phone hunt for a “suitable boy” and ended with the “suitable boy” telling me I could be certain that he would never ever ask me out again.
“He’s not our kind, Ma. I’m sure that in his family they put bologna in the salad,” I said, trying to console her. She didn’t buy it.
THE FACT IS, Marochka, that Tanya does have suitors,” she says on the phone. “Wonderful men. But Americans! You understand me, don’t you? There are differences that can’t be resolved, different cultures and such. We want a Russian boy for her.”
I listen from the kitchen, while scraping the salad remains off the sides of the bowl.
As the call progresses, CUNY becomes NYU, the linguistic department becomes medical school, and my receptionist service at the urologist’s becomes my medical work. When she sees me look over at her, my mother throws me a defiant look.
I know, I agree. If I were worthier, she wouldn’t have had to lie.
She ends the call, with “I see,” followed by “Yes, please, if you hear anything.” The receiver falls onto the base with a helpless clunk.
Then she walks into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of currant juice. Don’t pity me, she seems to be saying, while slurping the red liquid. It’s not me who has just been rejected, it’s you. I dated enough in my time. I found a man to marry. Her black mascara melts together with tears and runs in tiny twisted streams down her cheeks.
At times I want to shrink so I can hug my mother’s knees, press my face against her warm thighs, and cry with her, wetting the saucer-size daisies and poppies on her skirt.
At other times (increasingly often lately) I want to walk up and shove her, making her spill the juice all over her sweaty neck and her stupid flowery dress.
Instead, I rise from my chair, dump the bowl into the sink, and leave the kitchen.
A BOYFRIEND had been prescribed by a psychologist we consulted after my father’s first few months on the couch.
“There is a pattern,” Aunt Masha told my mother shortly before that. “They lose their jobs, then they take to spending their days on the couch, and then a woman turns up. How? When? you ask yourself. He barely even left the couch!”
It was my uncle Boris who’d first suggested the idea of emigrating. “A scientist of Mikhail’s stature will never be properly appreciated in Russia,” he said.
I wanted to ask if Cousin Violetta had learned how to ski. The last I heard about her was that she had moved to Aspen and was living with a ski instructor. “The snow in Aspen is as soft as a feather bed and as sweet as cotton candy,” she wrote me once. She hadn’t written or answered my calls since then.
YOUR HUSBAND and father can’t handle the pressure,” the psychologist explained. He spoke to my mother and me because my father had stormed out of his office, refusing to be treated like a madman.
“He yearns to be relieved, but in a subtle, not humiliating, way. It usually works better if he is relieved by a male child, but sometimes it helps when a daughter marries, thus finding a man who will figuratively replace her father.”
The idea filled my mother with almost religious fervor. “When Tanya finds a boyfriend,” she would start frequently, often out of nowhere. “When Tanya finds a boyfriend” signified a wonderful future, when all wishes would come true and all problems dissolve before they even developed. Not only would the boyfriend “relieve” my father, he would also explain to us all the mysterious letters we got from banks, doctors, and gas and electric companies. He would help us move to a bigger, nicer place. “Closer to a subway stop. On the other hand, no. It’s too noisy if you live near the subway.” The boyfriend, who would of course own a quiet, roomy car like the one we used to have in Russia, would take us upstate to pick mushrooms and blueberries. “Do you think he’ll like my mushroom dumplings?” my mother would ask, seeing a shadow of concern on my face.
The only problem was that the wonderful future refused to come.
By the end of our first year in America I’d met only four men who were willing to date me—one at school, the others on the subway—none of them Russian, and none of them even remotely close to the idea of an omnipotent boyfriend. I’d slept with one of them, an Armenian dancer with lips the color of plums and equally firm and smooth. I didn’t mention that to my mother.
Around June 1, my mother fished her notebook out of the drawer and planted herself by the telephone. She’d decided to take the business into her own hands.
THE PHONE CALLS from potential boyfriends were rare but consistent. Some weird intuition helped me to distinguish them from other calls by the sharp mocking sound the telephone made.
The receiver felt damp and warm, vibrating with the voice of a strange man trapped inside. The voice is wrong—either too squeaky, too nasal, or too coarse. It is the voice of a man who doe
sn’t want me, who called me because he wanted somebody, anybody—though not me—or simply because his mother made him do it.
Later, on the date, the man casually looked at his toes, but at the same time he discreetly scrutinized me, estimating the size of my breasts, the shape of the legs concealed by my slacks, trying to guess what I would and wouldn’t do, trying to guess what was wrong with me (I’d agreed to a blind date, there must be something wrong), searching for flaws, finding them, finding the ones I’d been afraid that he’d find, finding ones I hadn’t even known about.
“What is your car’s make?” I asked him repeatedly, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
It’s not true that I was not trying, as my mother said. I was trying. I arched my back, I tossed my hair, I licked my lips and crossed my legs in a modest yet seducing way. I nodded sympathetically when he talked, I laughed when he told a joke, I smiled when his shoulders brushed against mine. It didn’t help. From the very beginning I knew that eventually I’d fail. Sooner or later the disgust, the humiliation would erupt, and I would end up saying something insulting or indecent, or simply laughing like crazy, kicking with my knees and wiping the tears from my eyes, as I did when my date burped during our dinner.
“You think you’re something, don’t you?” he had hissed, before adding that he’d never ever ask me out again. “You think you’re something!”
I wish I thought that.
AND THEN, all of a sudden, I found a boyfriend. By myself. On a subway train.
It happened on a rainy day at the end of October. A man squeezed into the crowded subway car and brushed against my shoulder with his wet umbrella. I shivered. He said, “Excuse me,” walked across the car to the opposite door, and pulled a book out of his shoulder bag.
His clothes were baggy and poorly matched. He looked about six foot two, with a broad body that swayed awkwardly when the train was moving. He kept looking at me from above his book. He liked me for no apparent reason.
