by Lara Vapnyar
After 23rd Street, he stepped forward and grasped a handle above my head. “Do you speak Russian?” he asked.
I said that I did.
He smiled.
That was it.
IT’S DECEMBER and it’s snowing outside. I open the door, shaking specks of snow off my knitted hat. He is here. There are his heavy boots, drying on the newspaper in the corner. He visits often. Sometimes he comes before me, sometimes he even comes while I’m at work, and then it’s not his shoes but only his wet dark-brown footprints that mark the newspaper on the floor.
“Vadim apologized that he didn’t wait for you. He had some errands,” my mother yells from the kitchen. Not only has Vadim acquired his own mug and his own chair, there is Vadim’s place at the table (by the refrigerator).
The psychologist’s prescription has worked. My father’s constant lying position became a sitting one—sitting at the computer, after Vadim introduced him to the Internet. He is sending e-mails to mathematicians all over the world, exchanging problems, questions, and even some obscure mathematician jokes.
It is his slouched back that I see now upon coming home. “I’ve got thirteen e-mails today!” he announces, half turning from his desk and pushing up his glasses. He reads and welcomes everything that comes to his mailbox, from breast-enlargement ads to tax-deduction advice.
“Marochka (Verochka/Genechka), guess who this is?” my mother sings into the receiver every night. She methodically repeats the calling circle of the previous months, making sure she doesn’t miss any woman she had begged to find a boyfriend for me.
“By the way, did I mention our Tanya’s new boyfriend?…Yes, he is Russian…. A computer programmer. He’s not a Bill Gates, but he is very talented. And nice too. Very nice.”
Sometimes he slips and calls my parents Ma and Pa.
“Vadim misses his parents,” my mother notes approvingly. His parents had to stay in Moscow because of Vadim’s grandfather, who’s been bedridden for years. Vadim sends them money, adult diapers for his grandfather, and sugar-free candies for his diabetic grandmother. I know this not from Vadim but from my mother’s phone conversations.
“We’re pleased. We have nothing to complain about,” my mother tells her friends.
I have nothing to complain about either. Even the sex is good—ample and satisfying, like a hearty dinner.
I don’t know why seeing Vadim’s shoes in the corner makes me recoil.
ANIMATED VOICES invade the apartment. My father’s laughter, my mother’s murmur, and Vadim’s soft baritone buzz against a background of rhythmic knocking and banging. Have they got together to play New Age music?
I make a few steps toward the kitchen and stop, half hidden, in the niche.
They sit at the table with knives and cutting boards around the crystal bowl. They are making Salad Olivier.
“No, Pa, I’m afraid you’re wrong.” Vadim says. “It’s a different salad in A Moveable Feast, not Olivier.”
“You see! You see!” my mother charges. “What I’ve been telling you! Olivier can’t possibly be without meat.”
“Okay, but I still insist that Olivier’s name was Jacques.”
They take turns emptying their cutting boards into the bowl, then the rhythmic knocking resumes. The mechanism is working. They don’t need me. I am free to go.
I tiptoe out of the kitchen and put on my hat, still wet from the snow. The door opens with a screech; I wait a few seconds to make sure that nobody heard me. A peal of laughter reaches me from the kitchen. I throw a parting look at the warped headline under Vadim’s shoes: GOOD NEWS FOR THE DIASPORA!
The snow-covered street is cold and soft. I slowly take it in, the powdered cars, the timid light of the lampposts, the naked twigs of the cherry trees. The weak and helpless snow melts on contact with my feet. It doesn’t crunch the way it did in Russia.
I shiver as the cold gets to my toes.
Without me their perfectly tuned mechanism will stop. The gears will slow down and halt. The elements will fall apart.
They need me after all, if only as a link holding them together. I take a handful of the soft feeble snow and knead it in my palms. It melts before I am able to form a shape.
I’M HERE,” I say, on entering the kitchen. I walk to the table, push my chair closer, and pick up an egg.
Luda and Milena
MILENA HAD LARGE BLUE EYES, an elegant nose, and smooth olive skin covered with a graceful network of fine wrinkles. “Her face is a battle-field for antiaging creams,” Luda said about Milena, and added that she wouldn’t want youth that came from bottles and jars. Once, Luda brought her old photographs to show that she used to be a real beauty too. The photographs revealed an attractive woman with a sturdy hourglass figure, imposing dense brows, and bright, very dark eyes. Some people saw a striking resemblance to the young Elizabeth Taylor, but Milena didn’t. Milena said that the young Luda looked like Saddam Hussein with bigger hair and a thinner mustache.
The two women met on the first day of the free ESL class held in one of the musty back rooms of Brooklyn College. Luda was late that day. She had been babysitting her two grandchildren, and her son-in-law had failed to come home on time. Angry and flustered, Luda had to run all the way to Brooklyn College, pushing through the rush-hour subway crowd and cutting across the meat market on Nostrand Avenue, which led to the following exchange with a large woman in a pink jacket:
“Watch it, asshole!” (the woman).
“No, it is you asshole!” (Luda).
By the time Luda opened the classroom door, they had already started the introductions. “My wife and I love America; we want to show it our respect by learning to speak its language,” a short man with a shiny nose and shinier forehead was telling the class. A young woman nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. Luda guessed that she must be the teacher. Angela Waters–Angie–endji was written on the board. Luda headed toward the wall and the only empty seat, squeezing her large body between the flimsy chairs that sagged under the weight of ESL students. “I’m sorry…. Excuse me,” she said, when she brushed against somebody with the stretched-out flaps of her cardigan.
“I apologize,” she whispered to the thin, elegantly dressed older woman in the next seat. “Don’t worry,” the woman whispered back in Russian. “Actually, I was afraid they would sit some country bumpkin next to me.”
Luda was about to answer with a sympathetic smile, but the smile died in midair. Had her seatmate just expressed relief or confirmation of her fears? She couldn’t possibly take her, Ludmila Benina, for a country bumpkin, could she? You old bitch! Luda thought, just in case.
She introduced herself in rough but confident English when Angie pointed at her with her chin. “Ludmila Benina, Luda, seventy-two years old, been in the U.S. for four years. I came to this class to improve my grammar and communication skills. I am a widow, I have a daughter and two grandchildren. I used to be a professor of economics in Moscow. I have written three college textbooks. One of my articles was translated into Hindi and appeared in a magazine in India. I used to participate in conferences all over the Soviet Union, and once in Bulgaria.” She threw a side glance at her seatmate, to see if she was duly impressed. If she was, her expression didn’t betray it.
“Milena from St. Petersburg,” she said, when her turn came. Just that. Nothing else. Luda felt stupid. She wished she hadn’t brought up the conferences. It would have been enough just to tell about her professorship and her books. She could always have mentioned the conferences later, in future classes, in a casual way. Her unease lasted all through the introductions of two elderly Russian couples; two elderly Chinese couples; three middle-aged Dominican couples; one young and handsome Haitian man; one very tall, very old, and very loud Haitian woman with a funny name, Oolna; and one dark-skinned woman who spoke so fast and with such a heavy accent that nobody could understand what she said or where she came from.
Then a man who sat alone in the back stood up and cleared his throat. “Aron
Skolnik, seventy-nine. I used to live in Brooklyn with my wife. She died four years ago. Now I live in Brooklyn alone.” Luda raised her eyes and peered at Aron. The expression on his face was strange, uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure whether living alone was a bad or a good thing, as if he both welcomed the solitude and found it stifling. Luda had a sudden urge to reach over and touch the thin wisp of hair that stuck to his forehead. And Milena thought she saw a flicker of hunger in Aron’s eyes. Just a flicker, but she couldn’t be mistaken. He had nice eyes, she decided, the eyes of a much younger man. She straightened her shoulders, removed her Versace shades, shook her hair, and put the shades back on top of her head. Luda snorted and thought, Look at the old slut!
THAT NIGHT, as she lay in bed on her stone-hard mattress, Luda continued to think about Milena. There had been this moment, when Luda took off her cardigan and hung it over the chair, that Milena actually sniffed the air and moved deeper into her seat. It was true that Luda hadn’t showered in a while, but this was not because she was lazy or had a dislike of cleanliness; it was simply because she had a dislike of cold. She had always preferred hot baths to cold showers, but after being submerged in water that was warmer than air, it felt unbearable to get out. Freezing. Freezing. Trembling. Groping for a towel. Shaking. For some reason cold always filled her with panic. If only there was a way not to become cold afterward, she wouldn’t have minded taking a bath. Really. If, for example, there were somebody waiting for her with a large thick towel stretched in his arms…. She had a fleeting image of Aron standing in her bathroom, wearing his silly shorts. The image was both touching and ridiculous at the same time.
Luda groaned as she turned onto her side. “It’s Sealy orthopedic mattress, Mother, very expensive,” Luda’s daughter had said. She gave it to Luda after her husband had tried it and hated it. Luda’s apartment was almost entirely furnished by her daughter. There was a rickety kitchen table that Luda’s daughter had used when she first came to America. There was a flowery sofa that Luda’s daughter’s friends found too tacky. There was a black bookcase that appeared in Luda’s apartment after her daughter had bought a set of light-brown furniture. Only one thing was Luda’s own acquisition—a leather armchair with scratched legs and a big cut on the back. Luda had found it standing by a pile of garbage about six blocks away from her home. She called a taxi and paid a driver five dollars for delivery and another five to drag the huge thing upstairs. When they made it to her apartment, Luda felt happy and generous, so she added two more dollars and half of an Entenmann’s apple pie as a tip. The armchair had been Luda’s prized possession ever since. She especially enjoyed the low groan the armchair made when she sat down. It was the groan of somebody who was profoundly annoyed with Luda but still loved her very much.
MILENA’S APARTMENT was barely furnished at all. She slept on a narrow sofa that she had bought from her brother for sixty dollars. Her TV stood on the floor, and her video player was placed on top of it, which was wrong because it caused the VCR to overheat, as Milena’s brother repeatedly pointed out. He had sold her his VCR after he bought a new DVD/VHS player for himself, and he felt it was his duty to ensure that the VCR would be used right. Milena ignored his warning, as she ignored his offer to sell her a large chest of drawers. Her favorite pieces of furniture were her chairs, all nine of them, all different, all bought at one or another garage sale, the price ranging from eight dollars to fifty cents (that one didn’t have a seat). She used eight of her chairs as stands for her large photographs and posters, as shelves for vases, and sometimes as hangers for her dresses, because the sight of good clothes never failed to cheer her up. The ninth chair served as a nightstand. It was a wooden chair with a square seat, a perfect size and shape to hold a couple of books and a large shoebox, where she kept her pills, some squeezed-out tubes of expensive antiwrinkle cream, some of her old photographs, and a pencil sketch of the man who had been her lover for over twenty years—including several breakups, other lovers, his never-ending marriage to another woman, and her short-lived marriage to another man.
Milena opened the shoebox and started looking for her sleeping pills, wondering if Luda really used to be as famous and successful as she said. There were so many people who lied. That old Haitian hag in class said she owned a chain of expensive boutiques. A chain! Or that pathetic little man who claimed that he used to be the most famous psychiatrist in Minsk—“You won’t believe the bribes they were willing to give just to get an appointment.” But Milena didn’t really blame them for lying. Actually, when the teacher asked them to introduce themselves, Milena was tempted to lie too. Other people’s introductions made her whole life seem like a mocking string of nones, nevers, nos, and so-sos. She didn’t have a husband. She didn’t have any children. She’d graduated from a mediocre college. She had worked at the same boring job for thirty years. Once they had offered her a very promising position in Moscow, but she wouldn’t leave St. Petersburg, because her lover was in St. Petersburg, and because Moscow was known for being populated by pushy, conceited, obnoxious people. Just look at Luda, with her conferences in Bulgaria!
And then Milena remembered that she had lied in class after all. Her documents stated that her first name was Ludmila. It was her lover who had come up with Milena, claiming that her real name didn’t suit her. He saw a Ludmila as a tall languid woman with a thick braid dangling down her spine, and both Luda and Mila, the name’s usual diminutives, were too common for her. Milena sounded just right. An exotic name, light, nimble, and unique. She used to enjoy that name. She used to enjoy being a small, elegant, irritating puzzle. Now she was too tired to enjoy it. Now she wished she could slump in somebody’s arms—to be easy and reachable and to be stroked on the head with tenderness and pity.
THE INTERNATIONAL FEAST, Angie wrote on the white board the next day. “We’re going to start this Friday, and then we will have it every week.” She had a large blue marker stain on her cheek, but this didn’t prevent her from looking enthusiastic. “We’ll create a wonderful informal atmosphere, so you all can improve your conversational skills and get acquainted with your diverse cultures. You don’t have to bring expensive or complicated dishes, just something simple, something typical of your country.” Luda wrote it down: Fris, feast. Bring Rus. food. Diversity. Culture. Simple. She looked over Milena’s shoulder and saw that Milena had put a fat red star over Friday in her calendar. Of course, Luda thought. An International Feast with all its food, culture, and informal atmosphere was a perfect opportunity to get a man to notice you, and Milena knew this as well as Luda.
On Friday, they pushed some of the desks to the wall to create a makeshift informal space, and put the foil, plastic, and paper containers with food on the teacher’s desk in the center. The diverse cultures were represented by fried plantains, duck gizzards, pastelitos, tostones, corn fritters, shrimp spring rolls, two kinds of Russian potato salad, a pack of hard, ring-shaped Russian pretzels, and an extra-value meal from McDonald’s brought by the couple who wanted to show their respect to the United States by learning its language. “Our country is America now, we eat American food,” the man explained, with the same proud expression. But Angie wouldn’t allow her students to start eating. “Mingle, guys, mingle, you have to mingle first,” she kept saying. So they all crowded around the desk, sipping soda from plastic cups, trying to ignore the food and make conversation.
Luda studied the room, trying to think of a way to approach Aron through mingling. She was wearing a bright scarf pinched a day before from her daughter’s drawer and dark lipstick found at the bottom of the same drawer. “Wipe it off, Grandma,” her six-year-old granddaughter had said. “You look stupid.” She was afraid that her granddaughter might have been right. Another thing that made Luda uneasy was that she couldn’t figure out how to mingle with her classmates. The two Chinese couples wouldn’t mingle with anybody but themselves, Dominicans clearly preferred other Dominicans, and the two Russian couples stuck together, with the wives expressing visible dis
pleasure whenever Luda tried to approach them. She had experienced this kind of displeasure before. Her very presence seemed to irk married women of her age, and this was not because they saw her as a threat but rather because her widowhood and loneliness reminded them that they could soon end up like that too. They looked at Luda with wary squeamishness as if she were a scabby dog. Oolna was the only person who didn’t mind talking to Luda, but she was too old, and Luda didn’t want to appear old by association. As for Aron, he clearly preferred the company of Jean-Baptiste, the handsome young Haitian, seeing kinship in the fact that they were the only two single guys in class. “So tell me, Jean-Baptiste,” Aron asked. “Do they try to fix you up? They try to fix me up a lot. But I don’t know, I don’t know. You know what they say, marry a dancer when you’re in your twenties, a masseuse when you’re in your forties, and a nurse when you’re in your sixties. But what about me, my friend? I’m seventy-nine.” Luda sighed. There was no way she could break into this conversation.
Milena wasn’t mingling either. She had flitted in like a summer breeze, put a pack of square Russian biscuits on the table, and sat down on the edge of one of the desks, not looking at anybody, one leg over the other. Summer breeze with creaking joints, Luda thought, but she was worried. One passing look from Milena told her that she did appear stupid in her scarf and her caked lipstick. Luda knew that look very well. Mocking, condescending, sometimes pitying. She had seen it all too often on the faces of her husband’s countless secretaries, all attractive single women.
Milena smoothed the folds on her skirt and looked out the window. She thought she’d just sit and wait until Aron noticed her. “Impress and ignore” had been her strategy for years, but she wasn’t sure if it still worked. It had been awhile since she’d lost her ability to turn heads, and sometimes she thought that the saddest thing about it was that she couldn’t say exactly when it had happened. Men used to look at her, and then they didn’t. Something used to be there, and then it was gone; it was as if a part of her died and she hadn’t even noticed when. Still, Milena couldn’t think of any other strategy. She knew that trying to approach other couples was pointless—married women of her age looked at her as if she were a disease. Their warning stares reminded her of the expression on the face of her lover’s wife in the photograph he kept on his desk. Every time Milena happened to see it, she felt that the wife was staring directly at her, at times begging her to leave her husband alone, at other times threatening. Luda looked a little like her. The same heavy features, the same stupid scarf. Respectable, boring, the very picture of righteousness.
