American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  But all this involved a crowd of people when my only wish was for us to be alone.

  I pulled up a chair, adding several cushions, and sat next to him. Had I been stronger, I could’ve forced him into the flat, imprisoned him, and looted his pockets of the three hundred rubles. I could’ve flung them out the window for all the neighborhood drunks to catch.

  Before I left Ruslan early the next morning, I tucked my scarf under him, but I still didn’t cry.

  Zhanna was furious.

  “Ti shto, s oomah soshla (Have you lost your mind)? Do you want his ghost to haunt you forever?”

  “It’s already done.” Ask any superstitious Romani and they’ll tell you that entrusting personal items to the dead or keeping anything of theirs can bring bad luck.

  Zhanna shook a finger at my face. “You go to that funeral and get it back.”

  But I didn’t, and the scarf descended into the earth with Ruslan.

  I began to ditch school and walk miles without direction, sometimes getting lost in the woods nearby until a passing hiker pointed out the correct path, and I did whatever I could to get expelled from school. My parents’ influence made it tricky, but I persisted.

  I stapled Ruslan’s many pages in my journal and begged Zhanna to take his letters because I felt them breathing in my room at night. Besides, I had memorized the words long ago.

  The necklace I kept. It carried his touch.

  * * *

  Inside Journal Number 1, I continued to make entries, careful to avoid the sealed pages but reluctant to start a different notebook. I was fourteen brooding on seventeen, my writing an abandoned land mine. On a really bad day, I spent hours in a dreamlike state in which I’d float outside my body and watch the motions I went through with detached curiosity. I called it the “Black Sleep.”

  I felt a deep sense of abandonment. Odd, since my parents were still together and tried their best to give Roxy and me a semblance of a normal family life. When not flinging ashtrays at each other, they were almost normal. On one of those days I heard Dad mutter, “Baba Varya’s curse is to blame for this strife, but in America everything will change. The curse can’t reach across the ocean.”

  After the interview at the American embassy, on the day our plans to come to America were finalized, I wrote my last entry: “This hurt can’t reach across the ocean. I will leave me here and find me on the other side.”

  THE CURBS OF BEVERLY HILLS

  I once heard a rumor about immigrants who, unable to read English, had mistaken cat food for canned tuna. That unwelcome image was wedged in my mind as Mom and I stepped through the sliding doors of the local supermarket on our first official shopping trip alone. When we moved out of Uncle’s, the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program brought us groceries, but their services ended after a month or so.

  “First things first,” Mom said as we pushed our cart down the bright aisles. “We need butter.” Her black pumps echoed against the canyon of freezers stuffed with food. She wore a gray dress with intricately carved silver buttons down the front. With her freshly curled and styled hair, she looked like a Mediterranean Jane Seymour. When she’d spent an hour dressing up, I had complained, worried we’d draw too much attention. I was right. People stared, not only because of her opera-ready makeup, but also because she shouted in Russian to me as if we were miles apart. The heels and the crimson nails weren’t too bad. We came from a culture where outside excursions meant people would be checking you out, forming opinions behind your back. You absolutely had to look your best. God forbid you went to the downstairs bakery in your sweats and slippers; eventually the neighborhood would learn of your poverty. Party invitations would be withdrawn and rumors of mental illness would circulate.

  It was the volume of my mother’s voice that drove me to pretend I didn’t know her that day. For the first time, I was ashamed of my language.

  “Do you see butter, Oksana?” Mom bellowed.

  Anybody familiar with Eastern European cooking practices will understand the value of good butter. If you don’t use a stick of the stuff in your recipe, you’re either a miser or a lousy cook.

  We had found the dairy section, and with it, our first dilemma: too many varieties. Butter, according to Merriam-Webster, is a solid edible emulsion obtained from cream by churning. How many different ways of churning are there? How many kinds of cream?

  I missed the days when I’d walk up to our local market’s dairy counter, ask the brightly lipsticked Elena Leonidovna for a kilo of butter, and be on my way.

  “Oksana. What does this mean?”

  I squinted at a beige tub Mom pointed to, studying it with the curiosity of an archaeologist. “‘Fat-free.’ I don’t think that’s good.”

  “Why not? What does this ‘fat-free’ mean?”

  I envisioned a golden cloud of creamy mass floating in the sparkling sky, blobs of fat swirling around it in fancy-free abandon. “It means it has way too much fat. Fat has complete freedom. It has taken over this butter.”

  “Oh … then we don’t want it.”

  In the produce aisle I almost forgot about my mother’s vocalizations. I had never seen so much food in one place, not to mention so many off-season fruits and vegetables. The neat rows of unreasonably large strawberries and glossy apples made me think they must’ve come from a factory instead of a farm.

  We couldn’t splurge with the thirty dollars we had allotted for food that week, so we bought potatoes, bread, bologna, cheese, milk, and pasta. I did get the strawberries, but Mom drew the line at the apples, which she said smelled like candle wax. It took a good two hours, but in the end, we left with a sense of great accomplishment. And that night Roxy and I sifted sugar over our tasteless strawberry giants while I told tales of the market: not just a market but a supermarket.

  * * *

  The next task made me a bit more nervous: paying the rent. The landlady, Rosa Torres, lived downstairs in a unit tucked into the corner of the courtyard. Mom had officially elected me as her interpreter, though I could say little more than “My name is Oksana, I am fifteen years old.”

  At age twelve, with help from my tattered Russian-English dictionary, I had started writing songs with English lyrics. I performed this one at a school concert.

  Today, me not to think of in the past.

  Stars to burn how fires.

  Them show to me way

  To fairy-tale valley full happiness.

  Only when I came to America did I laugh at those lyrics. Hurriedly I’d acquired a used Russian-English dictionary from one of the workers at the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program to replace the one my dad had taken when he left. Every day I opened to a random page and scanned the words, saying them out loud, trying them on for size. The ones I found especially beautiful I wrote down in my journal. “Transparent” was the first, then “shenanigans.” I’d stand in front of a mirror and have conversations with myself in a language that still felt like a pair of new shoes. Or I’d repeat things I heard on TV, memorizing phrases like “buy one, get one half off.” In front of that mirror I interviewed Madonna. In public I stuttered while buying milk.

  “You know plenty of English, Oksana,” Mom said as I knocked on the landlady’s door, hoping for no answer. “At your age I spoke Russian with barely an accent.” Russian was the official language of the USSR, but you could tell which of the fifteen republics a person came from by their accent when they spoke it.

  I haphazardly pieced together all the useful words I could think of, and forgot them the instant the door opened.

  “Jes?” Rosa smiled at me above the door chain. Her bleached hair shrieked next to her dark, pockmarked skin.

  “Hello. We pay rent. Please. Thank you.”

  “Come. I’ll give ju a receipt.” Her apartment, rich with dark furniture against very pink walls, smelled strongly of beans, onions, and spices I didn’t recognize.

  We carefully counted out the money on top of Rosa’s polished dining-room table: $450. But we didn’t l
eave right away. One hour passed, another, and the three of us … talked. A true conversation. Rosa, an immigrant herself, had come from Mexico with her husband and daughter, Maria, six years before. Like Mom, she was now divorced. As it turned out, Maria and Roxy had met only days after we moved in and had without hesitation become best friends. And it wasn’t long before our two broken families became very close.

  Once Rosa saw the inside of our apartment she began to visit regularly. Almost every day, she walked up the stairs carrying a shiny toaster, or a chair, or some curtains for the bedroom windows.

  Mom kept refusing the gifts, uncomfortable with the idea of taking handouts—especially since back in Russia, she’d been the one handing them out.

  “Mija. This stuff is free and ju need it.”

  “Free?” I asked.

  “Rich people gets rid of things. Good things. They leave them on street in front of their houses.”

  “To throw away?”

  “Jes. But dose are good things: furniture, clothes. Expensive. I go to Beverly Hills and pick up for my garage sales.”

  That weekend Rosa talked Mom into going to Beverly Hills with her. Roxy, Maria, and I piled into the back of Rosa’s purple 1978 Buick Regal, with Mom and Rosa in the front. We drove past unremarkable houses, but as the neighborhoods changed, those houses blossomed.

  “Maybe my George lives here,” Roxy said, staring out the window in fascination.

  “Or not,” I said.

  “You’re such a grump, Oksana. We should ask somebody.”

  We stopped at our first curb, where cardboard boxes overflowed with clothes and vibrant fake flowers. Rosa kept the car running. She tossed the boxes in the trunk and jumped back in, driving away quickly.

  “It is okay to take them?” I asked. The process felt too much like stealing.

  “Is fine. They jes don’t like to see us do it.” While Rosa stuffed the car with merchandise, I admired the grandeur of the impeccable lawns and the plentitude of Mercedes-Benzes. This, I thought, was the America I’d expected. Unfortunately, I was scavenging from its garbage.

  We went to Beverly Hills regularly, raking in carloads of stuff Rosa later sold. Each time her Buick passed the Beverly Hills sign, we entered a universe most people glimpsed only on TV. On both sides of the spotless streets, beautiful palms swayed their model-thin necks. The houses lay scattered about like multicolored beads. Everything here glimmered with that special, extra-golden sunshine. And for the few hours a week we spent ragpicking, we, too, got to bathe in its rays.

  A PREMIUM IDEA

  Dad called our apartment a week before Christmas. Several months had passed since the last time we’d heard from him, and during that silence I’d tried to make sense of his actions. What did Roxy and I do to make it so easy for him to abandon us? Why did he never try to help?

  Roxy had picked up the phone first, and we took turns talking to him in hushed voices while glancing in the direction of the kitchen, where Mom was battling with her hand-cranked meat grinder.

  “You girls okay?” he asked in Russian. “How’s school?”

  I cupped the phone with the palm of my hand. “Everything’s fine.” He didn’t need to know that although Roxy had been going to Marshall Elementary for the past month, I had refused to enroll in the local high school. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Are you coming home?” Roxy interrupted, sticking her face into the receiver and fighting to grab it as I pushed her away.

  I hadn’t asked him that question because I knew better. When I’d heard him tell Mom that he loved her that night in Moscow, I’d believed he’d always live by those words. Yet he’d walked away from us as if our family had been a temporary arrangement. Some part of me wanted him back, but the stubborn me refused to let him know that.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call you on your birthday,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him how he had ruined it for me. “No big deal,” I said.

  I’d turned sixteen a month earlier, in October. Mom had made brownies from a box. We’d never heard of brownies before, and she wanted to surprise me with an authentic American dessert. She’d ended up burning the mix into the pan. After dinner we scraped the remains off the sides. They tasted like dried fertilizer, and my birthday wish was never to have to eat brownies again.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Is your mother there?”

  I turned to check and found Mom drilling holes in me with her eyes. “Who is that?” she asked, but the question sounded more like “It better not be who I think it is.”

  Roxy jumped up and down in the middle of the living room. “It’s Papa. It’s Papa!”

  Mom flew out of the kitchen, hair bouncing. She yanked the phone out of my hand, ordering us to leave the room, and shut the door.

  Roxy and I ran to the bedroom and then listened with our ears pressed against the wall.

  Growing up, I suffered from what I now call a split nationality disorder, never quite sure if I was Romani or Armenian. I was an impostor; a half-breed trapped between two vibrant cultures, never allowed a choice without guilt. My parents’ breakup was feeling eerily familiar. I didn’t know whose side to be on, and they made sure I couldn’t choose both.

  After some customary bickering my parents finally came to an agreement on the subject that was the reason for Dad’s call: the holidays. The winter season ranked high for both sides of my family, and even the worst rivalries were often temporarily put off to celebrate it. Roxy and I would spend Christmas with Dad, and New Year’s at home with Mom. A truce, however shaky.

  The following day, Dad picked us up in a dark blue van with pictures of howling wolves on its sides. No surprise there. When I was nine, he’d painted eyelashes around the headlights of our Volkswagen Beetle and a tail in the back. Mom had refused to get in when she saw what he had done, but I’d thrown my arms around it and called it Sipsik, after my favorite stuffed toy.

  It felt like years instead of months since I’d last seen Dad. He wore a leather jacket and pants, and had dyed his long hair to cover the gray. We managed a clumsy hug. Dad was never big on affection. Also, neither of us knew how broken families were supposed to act. Roxy, as always, had too much energy to be awkward. She jumped into Dad’s arms and gave him two sloppy kisses on each cheek. “Papa, can I show you my George Michael book?” She reached out and grabbed a handful of Dad’s ZZ Top beard.

  Divorce was the new “empowered,” or so my mother had been trying to convince me. But the moment I saw him, it became clear that we’d been lying to ourselves. I was glad to see him and mad at myself for being glad. On the way to his West Hollywood house, Dad made conversation as if nothing weird had happened, and even though I felt betrayed by his actions, I was happy to have him back.

  “Girls, I have great news,” he said. “I’ve got a few gigs booked for next year. What do you think of that, eh? Your old dad, back on top.”

  “You bought new equipment?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said, and I knew I shouldn’t have asked that question. He grew quiet, shaking his head. “Remember my Gibson? Now, that was an instrument to befriend the Devil for. No other guitar had such a juicy sound, like a ripe watermelon in July. Scored it off a Finnish tennis player.”

  “I know, Dad.” A twinge of sadness made me want to wrap my arms around his neck. Before leaving Russia, Dad had sold everything except for his father’s guitar. He had moped around for days as if he’d lost his entire family. And now he had, by his own choice.

  He slapped a hand on the wheel. “No matter. I found a way to make extra cash. It’s a premium idea. If everything goes well, we’ll be rich by spring. I had a dream.”

  Here we go again, I thought. Dreams were my family’s version of the Farmer’s Almanac.

  Every morning in Moscow, after Dad had dragged his feet into our kitchen, his hair Einstein-wild, he’d sit at the kitchen table, sigh, and complain about his insomnia, and then proceed to tell Mom about his dreams.

  “I’m a spider,�
�� he once said. “Inside that new restaurant on Arbatskaya. And I’m biting my legs off. Then I see Elvis. He’s a spider, too, except instead of legs he has guitars. And he’s calling me to follow him onstage. Now, what do you think it means?”

  “You should cancel that gig,” Mom said, and then added as an afterthought, “Thank God you didn’t listen to Elvis.” Everyone knew that if you followed the dead in a dream, you’d soon perish.

  There in the van, I didn’t know what to say. Both my parents had hatched their share of ingenious plans that often backfired. Like the time Dad convinced Mom to sell homemade oladushki (pancakes) on the side of the Medvedkovo metro station. At first Mom laughed. “Why would people pay extra for our oladushki when they can make their own?” “For convenience,” Dad said. We learned that Russians still preferred their own pancakes to those of strangers.

  For this reason I didn’t ask about Dad’s latest scheme or the dream that had inspired it. Better not to encourage him, I thought. Roxy, on the other hand, began to list dozens of luxury items she would need Dad to buy with his millions. Even at a young age she knew that every courtship must begin with toys. Surely George Michael would not be able to resist a pink fairy bicycle with a matching helmet.

  Immaculate houses lined both sides of Dad’s street. This neighborhood was a galaxy away from ours.

  “It’s no Beverly Hills,” Dad said, “but it’s all I can afford right now.”

  On the outside, the house had a flat-roofed Spanish design, but once you stepped across the threshold, it resembled the interior of a traditional Romani wagon. Richly hued rugs swallowed every inch of the floor, some even continuing up the walls and to the ceiling. Everywhere I looked, I found yet more rugs and wall hangings. It would be very difficult for one to get hurt surrounded by so much wool. Red-and-gold shades predominated; there were burgundy-framed pictures, red statues of Hindu men on top of gold-colored elephants, and a number of bright-red pieces of furniture. I tried not to stare at the garish decor, but my eyes would not obey as they attempted to find a moment of peace.