Especially at jazz.
My interest most likely came from Zhanna’s older brother, my cousin Misha, who adored everything American. The walls of his apartment were covered with posters of Wynton Marsalis, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Penthouse models; he claimed that real musicians dated the most beautiful women, and that you found those women only in Penthouse. He was a full-time musician himself, and whenever he toured, Zhanna and their mom, my aunt Laura, would apartment-sit. Sometimes they invited me to stay with them, but I hated using Misha’s bathroom, where spread-eagled naked women pouted from every direction, even the door. Aunt Laura taped paper flowers over the more offensive spots. “These girls are too young to see what a manda looks like,” she told Misha.
On many occasions, Zhanna warned her stoner brother that God would someday punish him for his vulgar tastes, to which Misha replied that he was already being punished by having a Soviet passport and a black man’s soul.
* * *
At the end of the class period I got my chance to talk to Mrs. Maxim as she sat at her desk making notes in her student record book.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Let’s see if I can answer it.”
“This book. I read it before. Seven times.”
She took the copy, leafing through the yellowed pages. “It’s a great story. Wow! Seven times?”
“In Russian.”
“Wonderful!”
I accepted the book back, holding it to my chest like a shield. “When will my accent go away?” I didn’t mean to ask precisely that.
Maybe she sensed my discomfort, because her face remained politely amiable. “It might never go away. Why?”
“I should know English now. I should be able to read Jane Eyre; I should speak without thinking words first; should be thinking in English also, not only Russian; should—”
“Slow down. You’re upset because you think your English isn’t good enough?”
“I’m still a foreigner.”
She stood, hands on my shoulders. “There is nothing wrong with that. Our heritage is what makes us unique. As for the language, it takes time, and you are doing very well, considering it hasn’t even been a year. Give yourself a break. Recognize your accomplishments.”
A rush of despair made its way up my body. I didn’t want to be comforted just now. “Is not enough. I must learn faster. Show me how.”
“It’ll come to you eventually. Why are you in such a hurry?” When I didn’t answer, Mrs. Maxim studied me. She squeezed her fingers for a second, and then let go. “I don’t have the answers, Oksana. I can’t give you a magic formula so that you wake up tomorrow ready for Jeopardy! I didn’t say I can’t help, though, so don’t look at me like you’re ready to bawl. Let’s think about this. You’re doing great in this class, right?”
“Perhaps.”
She frowned, waiting.
“Yes. I’m doing good.”
“Classics isn’t where you start. The text is too complex; there are too many analogies, metaphors, double meanings, which may only be caught when one thinks in the language one reads. Think baby steps.” She went around the desk and, from the bottom drawer, produced a thin paperback. “Try this.”
“The Miss and the Maverick,” I read aloud. The girl on the cover wore a man’s hat and a defiant expression. In the bottom right corner, there was another image of her. Here she pretended to sleep in the grass, hair in disarray, shirt unbuttoned. A blond man hovered over her with a ravenous expression on his unnaturally chiseled face. The maverick, no doubt—whatever that meant.
“It’s a romance novel,” Mrs. Maxim said, to my perplexity. “About love. Not the most educational read, but much easier to read. You might still have problems understanding everything, but it’s less complicated than Brontë or Dumas.”
Thus began my education in the language of swoons and sighs. For the longest time, I called an umbrella a parasol, and my ideas of the American West came straight out of Linda Lael Miller’s frontier novels such as Caroline and the Raider. I even joined the Harlequin book club and squealed every time the mailman delivered the package containing four brand-new romances. Suddenly I had a goal. The soundest, the most brilliant goal: like my mother (when she first came to Russia and re-created herself), I would master English, shed the old me, and become a brand-new, all-American Oksana.
BLATNYAK
Mom passed the next couple of months adding homey touches to our place and answering the ads that promised riches for stuffing envelopes and sewing handkerchiefs. She was still on the prowl for bachelor doctors, but they were rare in our neighborhood. Ex-convicts and ex–gang members, on the other hand? You couldn’t get away even if you tried, their gallant whistles of admiration an ever present accompaniment to every trip down the sidewalk. Mulishly she held on to the big ideas concerning our future, but her drinking was starting to interfere with those. Again.
Mom’s dark secret had been years in the making, but I’d begun to notice its impact only in the months before we left Moscow. When Dad drank, it didn’t seem to make much difference in our lives. He was a man and an artist, which afforded him some kind of license to take that customary swig or ten before going onstage. Mom had always been the strong one, and when she crumbled, we crumbled, too.
One day, Mom came to my school bearing gifts of homemade dolma—stuffed grape leaves—for Mrs. Maxim. She appeared in the middle of the class, dressed up, her eyes shiny after a few cans of beer. She waved at me, grinning, as my surprised teacher ushered Mom to a chair. Mom was in that stage of drunk where she loved the world and all its fuzzy creatures. While the students worked on an assignment, she and Mrs. Maxim sat at the teacher’s desk whispering, but I could tell by my teacher’s strained smiles that she was uncomfortable.
Once at home, I confronted my mother.
She swayed into the kitchen, and my heart twisted when she pulled out a bottle of Keystone beer. As soon as Roxy saw that, she was out the door. I didn’t blame her.
“I wish I had a video camera to record how you act when you’re drunk,” I said.
“You’ve always been jealous of me,” Mom slurred. She unscrewed the beer cap and tossed it to the floor. Her eyes roamed the counter, searching for something that wasn’t there. “You all are. Nobody has accomplished as much, and now you all want me to fail.”
I was scared of my mother when she got to this stage, the one where her skin paled, her cheeks hollowed, her eyes sputtered rage. Slowly I moved from the kitchen doorway to the counter’s edge where she’d left her wallet. She poured beer into a plastic tumbler and tilted her head back for a long swig. I snatched her wallet, hiding it in the waistband of my jeans. But I wasn’t fast enough.
Mom slammed the cup down.
“Because of you, we divorced,” she said, grappling behind me for her wallet. I fought her off, but what I really wanted to do was to bawl. “Your father hated your guts and I was the only one to defend you. We had more fights over you than anything else.”
“Stop it, Mom.”
“No, you stop it, Gypsy slime. You know what I see when I look at you?”
“If you need more, I can get it for you, okay? Just don’t go out like this.”
I smelled her breath on my face. It isn’t Mom, I kept reminding myself. She thrust me against the wall. “You’ll never thwart my spirit. I won’t let you.”
By the time I saw her fist coming, it was too late to duck. She punched me in the nose.
“I see your bastard father in that fucking mug of yours.”
I shoved my mother back and she fell. There was a moment of shock when neither of us spoke or moved. Blood trickled from my nose.
I raced out of the apartment, leaping over the last few stairs.
“Oksana, wait!” she called after me, but I was through the front gates and around the back of the building.
Sitting on a rock covered with dried weeds, I leaned back on the wall and held my nostrils together. Mom’s favorite threat du
ring an argument was that she’d leave and never come back. And now my legs screamed to run. But if everyone got their wishes, my parents and I would be galloping off to the opposite ends of the world, leaving Roxy alone and confused. Seemed we were stuck.
Esmeralda had told me that people were both God and Devil, and I wanted to believe her. The rational part of me waited for hours until Mom slept off the booze. The God in her always returned then, and she remembered so little of what had transpired and apologized so ardently that I’d forget the Devil.
Not long after, I dragged her to see a substance-abuse counselor. It took guts for her to humor her sixteen-year-old daughter, take the city bus to Burbank, and get off in front of the building branded with a Something-or-other Rehab Counseling Services sign, but Mom was never short on mettle. That was something I’d aspired to even as we’d drifted apart.
“Ms. Polak. I no alkogolic because I can stop anytime,” Mom said to the woman, who in my opinion looked too young to have the knowledge to tell bluff from truth.
She had on a blouse with frilly sleeves and a pleated blue skirt that matched the low-heeled pumps little girls show off at piano recitals. And could one really place any trust in the hands of a woman wearing a flowered headband? But even more discouraging than Ms. Polak’s appearance was the way she conducted herself, like a kid playing doctor.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Now I will start a folder for you.” She reached from her chair to the top shelf above the desk—“Here they are”—and pulled down a beige folder, which she then opened like it was the priciest item in the office. “I will ask you some, hmm, questions. Let me see.” Her fingers plucked the blue Bic from a cup of pens. “Let me write down your name.” As she wrote, she repeated Mom’s name aloud. In fact, everything she wrote from that point on was recited aloud, even “Four bottles of Keystone a day.”
By the end of the interview, Ms. Polak had deemed my mother “Not requiring treatment.”
“Too bad you didn’t believe me.” Mom bumped me with her shoulder, kissing the top of my head as we waited for our bus.
But with each new betrayal, it was becoming harder to trust her.
Alcohol was killing what was left of my family. I began to hide the bottles and tried to waylay my mother before her now daily trips to the DollarDream. But whoever said “Where there is a will, there is a way” knew something I didn’t.
* * *
Roxy’s Spanish and Rromanes had begun to improve more than her English, in large part because she preferred to spend most of her days at either Maria’s or Dad’s. Out by the pool, she held language lessons with her best friend. Through the windows of our living room I often heard them practice.
My sister would slowly say, “Ja. Po. Carr,” which loosely translates to “Go fuck yourself” in Rromanes.
“Ja po carr,” Maria would repeat, and add “baboso,” meaning “stupid” in Spanish.
I sometimes tried to get out of spending my weekends at Dad’s house, still uncomfortable with a stepmother who called me a hussy for wearing pants—unacceptable to the Roma—but Roxy loved the visits. She and Olga would go to the mall and shop until their legs shook. Olga believed that the way to a child’s heart was through new dresses and lip gloss. At home, Roxy had to fight Mom for every cheap trinket, but Olga never said no.
My father’s house was always loud with people. Dad and Olga’s fortune-telling business had taken off despite my misgivings. On some days Olga’s clients literally lined up at the door to see her, and Dad used some of her earnings to buy new equipment. He’d started rehearsing again, and some of his new musician friends, who were mostly illegal Russians, practically lived on his couch. Soon the house began to resemble the backstage of a theater, and in many ways its busy energy reminded me of our Moscow house.
When my parents first decided to move from Riga to Moscow, Mom wanted to buy a condo, but Dad insisted on a house that would provide space and privacy for nightly rock-band rehearsals. They blasted Rolling Stones and Eagles out of their speakers night after night, shaking our beds as if an earthquake were rolling beneath us. I loved falling asleep to the riffs of electric guitars.
Every time one of my parents’ acquaintances or relatives came to the city, they ended up sleeping on our couches. Once, a couple of circus animal trainers stayed with us along with their seven poodles. At another time, we welcomed an acrobat family with two of the most fascinating teenage boys I’d ever seen. They crossed the entire length of our house on their hands alone, and wrapped their legs around their necks, resting their chins on their butts. The only kind of sport I excelled at was shooting targets with retired army rifles that our PE teacher used for the Russian version of ROTC.
The house was often cramped, but I loved listening to conversations inside our smoke-filled kitchen, finding surprises in little details revealed by the guests coming briefly into my life. That’s how I found out I had a half sister.
A girl of about sixteen came to visit once. I was twelve. She was cool. She had black spiky hair and a mouth that never slept.
The first time I saw her, she was in the living room with Dad, and they were exchanging chords on their guitars. Instantly I felt jealous of this strange girl who had Dad joking, treating her like family.
“So what’s your name?” I asked when I caught her alone, smoking out on the veranda.
She flicked the cigarette and hopped on top of the squat stone partition that separated the veranda from the backyard. “I’m your half sister. Katia.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Dig your watch.”
I held out my wrist, forgetting for a moment the hostility I’d meant to sic on her. “It’s from America.”
“Ni huya sebe (Well, I’ll be goddamned)!” She grabbed my hand and tapped the plastic Mickey Mouse dial. “Hey. You know how to moonwalk?”
Katia stayed with us for two weeks, and I spent the entire time as her shadow. She was a full-blooded Romani—her mom had been a dancer in Grandpa’s band before my parents met—but she acted like no Gypsy girl I’d ever met: supermodern with her views and completely disregarding her roots. Her guitar repertoire consisted of blatnyak, a genre of crime-themed music you’d hear at an illegal poker game or in jail. The songs were very popular in the USSR, but not something a decent Roma girl should like to sing.
Eh, dengi, denzhata
Ya znayu s vami ray
Eh, dengi, denzhata
Bez vas hot pomiray
Vy dlya menya kak deti
Dorozhe vseh na svete
Ey slysh bratok poday
Day-day-day-day.
Eh, money, money
With you I am in paradise
Eh, money, money
Without you I could just die
To me you are like kids
Most precious thing there is.
Eh, listen, spare some change
Oh, give, hey, give, just give.
She refused to cook, an art most of our girls perfected at her age in hopes of attracting the best mate. She could break-dance like she was born twirling her legs in a windmill, but that style would never make it to Grandpa’s stage. She wore black leather pants and studded boots, and hung out with kids who got high to Black Flag and the Germs. There was freedom in her eyes and in the way she spoke about the world, which I had not thought a Roma girl could express.
Mom made delicious meals and asked Katia a throng of questions about her family and future plans now that she was out of school. I never detected a drop of jealousy. “Your mother must be beautiful,” she said, “to have such a daughter.” Dad seemed satisfied that Katia wasn’t asking for money and had come only to reconnect with the father she hadn’t seen in years. This elevated her in his eyes from a child of one night of passion to a respectful daughter. Had she been a boy, he probably would’ve worked her into our lives, but he all but forgot her once she was gone.
I tried to keep in touch, but I never could find where she stayed because she move
d all over the USSR, crashing with friends instead of her strict Roma family. We never saw each other again, but every time I felt uncertain about making my voice heard, I thought of her.
I missed those days, and I might’ve enjoyed Dad’s new house if it weren’t a reminder of everything that had gone wrong in mine. Living with Mom was like holding a sputtering firecracker. Not a glorious sparkly one, but the kind that blows up in your hands unprovoked. I couldn’t seem to stop her from self-destructing. Now she was the one hiding the wallet from me.
THE MAVERICK
The thing I remember with most clarity about that April is the rain: the raindrops on the backs of my legs as I ran the three blocks from the bus stop to the school, the misty air opening my lungs with restoring breaths, the way it transformed Hollywood into a fairy-tale kingdom of fog, sunlight, and bobbing umbrellas.
On one of these magnificent days Cruz cornered me in the hallway between ELS and choir.
“For you,” he said, holding out a red rose. I instantly forgot my squishy shoes and the fact that, yet again, he’d caught me fresh from the downpour outside.
“Why?” I said.
“Do I need to have a reason?”
I shrugged.
He took one step closer, hair dripping from the rain, the bottoms of his jeans soaked. “A late Valentine’s Day present. How about that?”
“Surely you jest.” I must’ve picked that one up from King’s Man, my latest Harlequin.
“You offend me,” he said with one hand over his heart.
Now we both sounded like transplants from a romance novel.
He had the most expressive face, but I’d always been wary of people who seemed like they had nothing to hide. “Never trust anyone” was the motto my Roma family lived by.
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