I couldn’t stand the idea of assisting Olga in any way, but as Svetlana bawled, her makeup running, she looked at me with so much desperation that I could almost feel it wrap around me like cellophane.
We drove to the deli. As I swung out of the car, Svetlana squeezed my hand and kissed it. I turned around and walked to the store with downcast eyes.
* * *
Delis are cheerful. You come in and you’re instantly enveloped by bright lights and the aroma of cold cuts and fresh bread. Not the atmosphere in which to reach over the counter and snatch a handful of the clerk’s hair.
“What can I get you?” my unsuspecting victim asked. She was so thin, probably four of her could’ve fit into Svetlana’s velour pants.
And of course she wore a hairnet.
My brain scrambled for a solution, and I was beginning to lose feeling in my tongue. “I am supposed to buy roast beef,” I finally managed.
“How much?”
“Can you show it to me?”
Ashley blinked a set of fake eyelashes before leaning over the glass case and pointing. “That one right there.”
“The one on the left?”
“No, over there.”
I shook my head in embarrassment, which, at that point, was genuine. “Very sorry. Can you show me from here? If I buy the wrong one, my mother will beat me.”
It was a long shot, but it worked. The woman looked at me strangely, then walked around the counter and stood next to me jabbing her finger at the glass. “The one that says ‘roast beef,’ right here,” she said.
“I see it. Yes. So sorry. My reading is not so good.”
A thin blond hair beckoned from her upper sleeve. I played my “creepy foreigner without a sense of personal space” card and gave her arm a grateful squeeze. “You a good deli person.” And came away with my prize, closing my hand around it.
Ashley eyeballed me while she cut the roast beef and wrapped it. I left the deli, memorizing the location to make certain I’d never shop there again.
I jumped into the backseat of Olga’s car. The interior was a nebula of smoke and I coughed, rolling down the window.
“How did it go?” my stepmother asked.
I handed her the hair along with the roast beef, a little disgusted and ashamed at the same time.
“Did she see you?” She dropped the hair into a sandwich bag and handed it to Svetlana, who rolled it up carefully.
“Well, yes, she saw me. I was buying roast beef,” I said.
“Did she see you take the hair?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.”
“Good girl,” she said, and started the car.
Only, I didn’t feel so good, not just about violating that poor woman’s privacy and subjecting her to a bout of witchery but also because Olga was driving.
Her approach was generally to go straight and turn only when absolutely necessary. Red lights were meaningless blinks in the distance. She rarely paid attention, flying through intersections, dismissing the traffic as I screamed for her to watch out, our car passing others seconds before impact.
In the midst of this madness, Svetlana turned to me.
“Wasn’t she the scraggliest thing you’ve ever seen?” she said, giving me her best sour-candy face.
“I’d rather not talk right now,” I said, wrapping my fingers around the door handle.
Olga tossed me an annoyed glance, and then patted the other woman on the shoulder. “Svetlana, don’t bother my stepchild. She’s left her sense of humor at home.”
I was holding on to the door with one hand and gripping the seat belt in the other. Another red light, another heart palpitation.
Svetlana shrugged. “What did I say?”
It wasn’t what she had said but my feeling of helplessness in the face of Olga’s triumph. She gloated over how she’d gotten me to help her.
“Okay. I did what you guys asked, now let me out.”
“Why?” Svetlana said. “Because your stepmother has such a big heart? Because she’ll do anything to help people in need, people like me?”
“She didn’t do this, I did. What if I got caught?”
“Doing what?” Olga said, driving with one set of tires on Melrose Drive and the other on the curb. “If we were in Russia you’d never complain like this. Such disrespect for your father.”
“Jesus, can you watch the road, please.”
“So true,” Svetlana said. “Kids here are so spoiled.”
Olga agreed. “It’s because of Nora. Armenians dote on their children. Had she grown up in a real Romani household, she’d learn obedience, quick.”
I was used to Olga blaming the Armenian side for my every flaw, but I always believed my big mouth was a result of my Romani blood. I told her as much, at which point she stopped the car and let me out.
“I’m not done with you yet,” she said, leaning over Svetlana to glare at me.
“You should drive a flying carpet,” I said. “It’d be safer for everybody.”
She sped off, cursing the land I was born on, and I mumbled a little prayer for all of L.A.’s unsuspecting motorists and one skinny deli clerk.
WHAT’S IN THE BAG?
A few days later Cruz asked me out, as he had been doing ever since he’d given me the rose, but my big American future didn’t include a broken heart.
In a ten-dollar phone conversation with Zhanna, when I guiltily admitted that I spent hours daydreaming about a boy with green eyes, she berated me again for burying my scarf with Ruslan.
“So foolish,” she said. “It’s been almost two years, but as I suspected, he’s still holding on to you. You’re not free.”
“Of course I am!”
“Then why haven’t you gone after your green-eyed Spaniard? Why? You’re pining for him in secret but sharpening your fangs every time he makes a move. Confusing the poor gadjo.”
But the scarf was exactly where it belonged. Ruslan would never deny me happiness, even if my cousin thought otherwise. The guilt of my feelings for another, I decided, was written in me and by me. Only I could erase such nonsense, and all I needed was to figure out how.
Meanwhile, I continued to reject Cruz, difficult as it was. And yet nearly every day, he managed to find my lunch table or sneak a note during homeroom, a missive written halfway between an earnest request and a joke.
Let’s go to Pizza Place after school.
I promise, I’ll have you home by five.
Scout’s honor.
I’d write back, “Sorry, allergic to Scouts.”
If you listened to Esmeralda, flirting was a cracked window in a house besieged by a blizzard—nothing but trouble. She would know. Men tumbled back into boyhood around her, a transformation that provided hours of amusement for me and Zhanna. Not so cute were the fistfights if one date happened to cross paths with another on the stairs of Esmeralda’s building. One of her wisdoms dictated that if a woman accepts a gift from a man, she allows him to brand her. She gives him hope for something more intimate.
I badly regretted having taken Cruz’s offering, the rose that was now drying between the pages of Jane Eyre.
The only taste my parents had of Brazil was from the first soap opera ever aired on Soviet television, a telenovella about a slave girl struggling to survive in the cruel streets of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. They prided themselves on their modern-day attitudes toward interracial relationships, as long as it was a step up, not down, the social class ladder.
I knew our relationship would be doomed from the start; Mom would never let me date Cruz because he wasn’t an American doctor, and Dad because he wasn’t Rom with a prestigious family name and at least a few gold teeth.
* * *
A week after the deli trip, Olga made it known that I was to join her yet on another excursion, this time to a nearby cemetery. “Ny pryamo (Yeah, right),” I said.
The Chinese sundry market might not have been the best place for this discussion, but Olga cared little for p
rivacy, hers or others’. In the dried-seafood section she thrust a fish in my face. “Your father said you’re going.”
“You better not point that thing at me again,” I said, and called out to Dad, whose voice boomed across the store. He was telling the Chinese salesclerk about the time a Mongolian medicine man taught him the miraculous uses of black moss to cure colon-related ailments. When I called him again, Dad vaulted into our aisle, the flaps on his leather chaps beating around his thighs like bat wings.
“Can you two never leave me in peace?” he said.
A couple of ladies quickly disappeared around the corner.
“She wants me to go to the cemetery with her.”
“Ny e shto (So what)?” he said. “To translate in case she needs to speak English.”
“With whom? They’re all dead.”
Olga shook her head with a triumphant snort. “You’re going, you hear? Your father said so.”
“I won’t.”
At half past midnight Olga, Svetlana, and I parked on the curve of the sidewalk leading to the cemetery. Recent vandalism in the area had left some of the gravestones festively spray-painted with local gang signs. A guard booth had been installed at the gate, and a single light illuminated the security guard who sat on its threshold, smoking.
Olga whispered, “You have the bags and the flashlights?” Svetlana nodded. “Good. Soon as you spot a grave with the name Ashley on it, you fill the bag quick as you can.”
To finish the separation spell that would break up Svetlana’s wayward husband and Ashley, Olga needed dirt from a grave of Ashley’s namesake in addition to the hair I’d stolen.
Svetlana unfastened her seat belt and shifted her bulk forward. “What about the guard?”
“I’ll talk to him,” Olga said, watching him closely. “But what’s this? He’s not alone.”
I squinted, and when my eyes focused enough to pick out the details of the other person’s shape, I exclaimed, “Huyovo (This is bad)!” before I could stop myself.
“You recognize him?” Olga said.
“We go to school together.”
“No matter. He’ll never know what we’re doing.” She got out of the car and approached the booth.
“Dai em deneg (Give them some money),” Svetlana mouthed.
When Olga came back, she looked cross. Apparently the guard had resisted the bribe. She and Svetlana went back and forth with ideas: climb the wall, wait until the man fell asleep or went to pee, find another cemetery that was not so heavily guarded. I made the mistake of suggesting we go home. As soon as I spoke, Olga snapped her fingers. “You go. Your friend will let us in.”
“Not a chance.”
“If you do, I’ll never ask you for help again.”
I snorted and she crossed herself. “Nu shtob ya sdokhla (May I die if I break it).”
The security guard, clearly uncomfortable, yanked his cap off his head as I drew near. Already he was waving, telling me in broken English to leave. He held, between his thumb and forefinger, a fat joint that he laid on the ground. I looked past him at the figure now occupying the chair hidden from view from the street behind the booth.
“Hey,” I said, and he jerked out of the shadows.
“What are you doing here?” I’d never seen Cruz shocked before, but even in that reaction there was a hint of pleasure, and it warmed me.
“Can you tell your friend to let us in? It’s my stepmother’s grandfather’s death anniversary.” I had to tell him something.
The joint in his hand sent wings unfurling into the air.
“Why should I?”
Not what I expected. “It’s very important.”
After a moment of consideration, he turned to the other man, who immediately began gesturing wildly at his badge and speaking in a language that sounded like a love child of Spanish and Italian.
“Não, não, não.”
“Dá um desconto, primo.”
The man gestured to all of me at once with a salacious whistle. “Você esta louco por ela, então você é estúpido o suficiente para acreditar em qualquer coisa que ela diga.”
Cruz whacked him on the back of the head. “Eu vou trazer para você um twenty-sac. Apenas faça isso por mim.”
They shook on it and Cruz swept an arm at the cemetery entrance. “Cousin Roberto says you’re free to enter as long as you go to Pizza Place with me tomorrow.”
The only thing I understood in their exchange was “twenty-sac,” a term used regularly by Dad’s rock-band associates in Russia. It was considered hip among the Soviet rockers to butcher American terms with Russian accents, therefore it sounded more like tovenysuck. But the meaning remained the same: twenty dollars’ worth of any drug delivered in a Baggie.
“Are you dealing?” I said.
“You got all that? Impressive, but all the same.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“A favor for a favor, that’s all.” Another hit and he passed the joint to Roberto, his voice strangled. “Otherwise the gate stays closed.”
As luck would have it, there were several dead Ashleys, and Olga picked the grave with a tiny statue of Jesus clutching a bleeding heart in his ceramic hands. She filled the bag, but Svetlana dropped only a handful of earth into hers before hiding it in her bra. When she saw the expression on my face, she pressed a fist to her chest. “If I keep that bitch close to my heart, my prayers will be answered faster.”
On the drive home the two women chatted excitedly about the forthcoming ritual. My only consolation was in the knowledge that the living Ashley would be unharmed. She’d slowly begin to un-desire her lover until their attraction chipped like the rouge from the ceramic Jesus’ cheeks. As always, Olga paid little attention to the road, speeding through a red signal.
When police lights flashed behind us, she pulled over in disbelief. The officer sauntered over and asked to see our documents, capturing the interior of the car with one expert glance.
“Sir,” Olga said, digging in her purse, “I do no wrong. Yes? Just drive like all peoples drive. You know I can see you hav big arms like Hercules.”
The man took Olga’s ID and gestured at the console. “What’s in the bag, ma’am?”
I sank into the seat, wishing I could disappear.
“Dirt,” Olga said, smiling.
The officer didn’t reciprocate. “Please step out of the car.”
We did, just as another police cruiser drew near. There were moments of confusion, and I did get to translate, as Dad had said I would. The cops were convinced that no sane person would be driving around at two in the morning with a Ziploc bag full of dirt. They took us to the station, where a Russian-speaking officer gave us the “all bad cop, no good cop” routine.
“What’s really in the bag?” scrawny Officer Popov said. The only thing of substance about him was his belly. He could have been a proud mama carrying twins.
“Zemlya,” Olga said.
“You know, jail is no place for Russian women.”
“But it’s dirt, I swear. Taste it and you’ll see.”
With a grimace, Popov made a ceremony of taking the bag to get tested. Sometime later he came back.
“What were you doing with a bag of dirt at two in the morning?”
Olga told him everything except where the dirt came from, stating she had collected it in Griffith Park. Once the man heard the words “Gypsy” and “spell,” he got this shriveled-up look on his face, the one people get when they hear someone say, “I’ve been to jail, but I’m a changed person now.” Regardless, he had no choice but to let us go with nothing more than a speeding ticket and another for running a red light. Olga took the steps to the parking lot as if she wanted to trample something solid and breathing. She wasn’t upset over the tickets; six hundred dollars to her was the change you find inside a kid’s piggy bank. But before letting us go, the Russian had confiscated her bag of dirt, advising Olga to start doing something more useful with her time. I would’ve thought the loss of
the most important ingredient to Svetlana’s happiness would upset her, but she merely put her arms around Olga’s shoulders and led her away in case Popov rearrested us out of spite.
It wasn’t until we had lost the police station to miles of paved roads that Svetlana freed the stash from her bosom.
JUST HAVING TOUCHED
I was eight the first time I performed onstage. I remember being in the wings of a theater somewhere in Russia, the waxy scent of old makeup with a hint of powder, violets, and roses teasing my nostrils. Dancers had rushed by me into the golden spotlights of center stage in a flurry of bright, ruffled skirts, women shining with jingling coin necklaces, men beating a rhythm with their tap shoes. I was so nervous that I froze on the spot. Then I saw my mother onstage, beckoning me to join her. It was enough. My skirt was midnight blue with sequined yellow flowers all over, and the blouse with slit sleeves was the color of honey. I remember holding up the edges of my skirt with both hands, letting the material fan out at my sides, and dashing into the spotlight, an open-winged sparrow.
It had been almost a year since I left the old country, and I was starting to miss the Romani of my childhood more than my one-page list could fit. I longed to hear their songs again and to feel the pulse of their performance beneath my feet.
At the end of the school year I signed up for my first recital, which also served as a rehearsal for the big year-end talent show that attracted talent scouts from all over L.A. I picked Mark Edwards’s “Just Having Touched,” your standard ballad heavy on cheesy heartbreak and sentimental lyrics.
Grandpa’s famous dancers, St. Petersburg, 1974
More than anything you do, having touched my life with you,
Just having touched your love will be enough for me.
I did what my parents had done so many times: I replayed the tape over and over and scribbled down the words. I learned the melody by ear, practicing in the music room during lunchtime. The recital was coming up fast, and I knew I had very little time to get back into shape. In Russia I had finished the preparatory music school and, had we stayed, most likely would have applied to a conservatory. As it was, though, neither Mom nor I mentioned continuing formal training in America. We were too busy surviving.
American Gypsy Page 14
