American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  Besides that, his face was handsome enough to quicken my pulse. Every time he tucked his hair behind his ear, I’d get tingly and have to look away.

  “So we won’t have classes together. What difference does it make? You have Natasha.”

  He stopped, staring at me as if I had spoken in Russian. “We’re not together, are we? Why should it bother you?”

  That he chose not to deny flirting with Natasha hurt more than her bragging about it. “Forget it,” I said, hurrying across a neighbor’s lawn.

  “Okay, wait.” He caught up to me. “Let me tell you why I did it.”

  “Throw me off a cliff, won’t you?”

  Before I reached our driveway, he grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to face him. “You wanna know or not?”

  “Not.”

  “I wanted to make you jealous.”

  “Great job. First-class performance,” I said, my eyes stinging.

  He let go. “Why do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Always try to pick a fight with me. Can’t you unfreeze enough to admit that it worked?”

  Biting back tears, I finally pushed past him toward the house. “You can have your Natasha. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Whoa, Oksana. Stop. I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”

  “Believe it or not, not everyone worships at your feet,” I said. Every time I moved, he blocked my way again. “If you don’t let me pass, I’ll scream.”

  “First tell me you’re not angry.”

  “Go away.”

  Two things happened at once. He rushed me, his hands holding my face, kissing me, his lips fantastically hot. At the same time, the front door burst open, making us jump apart. Our kiss must have lasted all of two seconds.

  “What is going on here?” Olga called from the doorway. “Valerio, come. Look at what your daughter is doing on our front lawn.”

  “Go,” I whispered to Cruz, willing the world to stop spinning.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. But we had. Hanging out with guys who hadn’t been “approved” by the family was a big no-no according to my father’s rules. I still remember the fits Dad went into after catching Ruslan and me reading together. Ruslan was a Rom. Cruz, a Brazilian, stood no chance.

  My father stepped outside his house with a guitar in one hand. He’d been practicing, as he had been every day since I could remember. His scales and arpeggios drove us all mad, but we dared not interrupt.

  “What is this?” he asked, and his face hardened with disapproval. Despite wearing a pair of acid-washed denim overalls, he still managed to look intimidating.

  “Just a friend from school. His name is Cruz—”

  “This little hussy was hanging off him like a chimpanzee,” Olga crowed. “Thank God I caught them or who knows what would’ve happened next.”

  I had never been more grateful that Cruz could not understand Russian. “We’re on the front lawn, Olga. In bright daylight.”

  “I don’t want you bringing gadjen to my house,” my father said. He hadn’t acknowledged Cruz, as was his habit with all sorts of nuisances. “Send him home.”

  “But he wants to take guitar lessons,” I blurted out in English, throwing a meaningful glance over my shoulder.

  “Really?” Hazel eyes scrutinized the potential victim standing at my back. Cruz went a little pale.

  “You want play?” Dad asked in broken English.

  Cruz cleared his throat. “Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

  Had I known a useful prayer, I’d have been praying. I could only hope that vanity had not abandoned the artistic egos of the world.

  I widened my eyes at Cruz and he said, “Sir, that’s the most amazing guitar I’ve ever seen. I would be honored to learn on such a remarkable instrument.”

  There you go, I thought, as my father’s frown softened.

  Dad nodded in approval. The guitar truly was a piece of art, though I guess I’d gotten used to seeing it every day. For one thing, it had two necks, the top having four strings and the bottom nine, and its maple-and-spruce soundboard created a lush resonance. It was made by Master Krasnoshekov in 1872, and was considered a national treasure, but Grandpa Andrei had purchased it at a black-market auction before it could be transported into a government-run storage facility for safekeeping until it could be matched with a museum. Grandpa had then commissioned a local master to restore it.

  “Come inside. I let you hear,” Dad said, then shook a finger. “But you no think you play it. You play Squier.” Which, according to him, wasn’t much of a guitar at all.

  I gawked at him. Clearly an invisible barrier had been breached, and I had no idea how to feel about it.

  Olga remained on the porch and watched them go in. As I passed by she muttered, “That boy can sweet-talk the Devil. You sure he’s not Romani?”

  EXOTIC

  On the first day of my magnet classes, I came to school one hour early, excited to finally experience school the American way. I had plaited my hair into a neat French braid and put on a plain black sweater with a pair of jeans; there would be no fashion faux pas for me this time.

  I took a seat in the very back, my stomach a tight ball, watching students come in laughing and joking with each other. No one paid attention to me, and I was grateful.

  Cruz sauntered in, scanning the room until his eyes settled on me. He found a seat next to mine, dropped his backpack on the floor, and put an arm around my shoulders as if his presence there were a blessing from the Almighty.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  I was smiling, dammit.

  Lately he had been spending several days a week at Dad’s house. That first time, he walked into our living room and his eyes immediately flew to the mantel. Above it hung a poster-size image of Grandpa’s entire troupe posing center stage for a publicity photo. Dad had framed it in cherrywood, which made it even more impressive.

  The Andrei Kopylenko Gypsy ensemble, 1980. Grandma Ksenia is in the middle; Dad is to her right, holding the guitar; and Mom is on the floor, to the right

  “Who’s that?” Cruz asked.

  “My family.” I stared right back at him as he raised his eyebrows and crossed the room for a closer look.

  “That looks like you, a few years older.”

  “That’s my mom.” Patiently I waited for him to ask about the origin of the costumes.

  My father walked in with a pipe in one hand and a rolled-up newspaper in the other, meaning he was on his way either into or out of the bathroom.

  “Eh,” he exclaimed. “Beelo vremya kogda mi bili ochen znamenitimi Tziganyami (There was a time when we were very famous Gypsies).”

  Cruz turned, eyebrows so high I thought they might fly right off his face any minute. “Ciganos? Gypsies?” he said, and when my father nodded, he turned back to the picture. “Awesome!”

  My expectations of Cruz running at the first mention of anything Gypsy were kind of deflated. But that also got me thinking. Perhaps it was time to stop hiding and follow through on the message I chanted in front of my mirror.

  The way Cruz reacted to the picture made my father even more affable, but I still expected him to wake up and realize he had opened the doors of his studio to a gadjo. While waiting for that moment to arrive, though, I utterly enjoyed listening to Cruz pretend to be a good student. He’d been playing guitar for more than ten years when Dad started teaching him the names of all the guitar parts.

  During the first lesson, my father whipped out the flash cards he’d made himself.

  “This note G,” he said, holding up the one with the appropriate sketch.

  Cruz’s fingers hovered over the strings, lips moving silently, eyes determined to find that G string, as if he’d never seen one before. He bullshitted through that hour and kept coming back for more.

  For his instructor’s sake, Cruz missed just the right number of chords and hand positions to appear in need of constant supervision. In essence, Cruz was making the l
essons all about my father and his pride. Naturally he proved to be a quick learner, and Dad attributed this remarkable progress to his own brilliant teaching methods. I thought surely Dad would figure it out eventually, even if he missed the gadjo part. Or maybe Cruz would realize that he didn’t actually have to take lessons, that he said what he had said on that lawn only to prevent a massacre. But they got along so splendidly that neither seemed in a hurry to change things.

  Olga was surprised at Dad’s behavior, but she had a ready explanation. “He treats that gadjo like an offspring,” she once said. “It’s just sad. Maybe I’ll do him a favor and give him a real son or two.”

  In the ESL program, too afraid to reveal my Romani side, I had remained an Armenian, a face in a crowd of similar faces. But like Cruz, the American kids were different. The majority of them were uninformed of life outside their own country, and yet they seemed more accepting than any other group of kids I’d ever met. They didn’t know enough to judge me, and their ignorance provided me with a road map to individuality; I could take any direction I wished. I was grateful to retire from my school-fighting career.

  A classmate once asked me what part of South America I came from. “You don’t look Mexican,” she noted, studying my face with interest. We sat a desk apart, waiting for our Shakespeare teacher, Mrs. Peacock, to make a uniformly late appearance. I was the only foreigner in the class and must’ve been completely mad for assuming I could handle Shakespeare. Nevertheless, I mulishly trudged through his works that semester just to prove to myself that I could. All the while, the students stayed at a respectful distance from me, guarded yet curious. But once we began to write our own plays and work together to direct and perform, it was clear that we had many things in common, like a knack for over-the-top Shakespearean parody. When Donna asked me that question, I found I wanted to give her a real answer. It came like a well-lathered ring off a swollen finger. I told her about my home, about the Romani who coiled their skirts onstage while I sat eating my dinner—kielbasa and cucumber sandwiches—behind the curtains. Exotic, she said. That’s what she called me. I had added that word to my list of favorites, and it had an entry of its own in my journal: exotic—strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously unusual. Me.

  * * *

  Growing up, I had never felt striking, exciting, or mysterious—just weird.

  In primary grades, before Nastya began to plot my annihilation, my classmates had nicknamed me “Rice,” a term used for Asians. It didn’t bother me. My own grandmother looked at me sideways, so how could I expect anything less from strangers?

  Years passed and my growing resemblance to Grandma Ksenia finally put all paternity questions to rest. We had the same pronounced cheekbones, full lips, almond-shaped eyes. She accepted me into the fold, something Grandpa Andrei had done much earlier. Much later I found out that my father was one tenth Mongolian. It still did not make me exotic.

  Back when I went by “Rice”

  Dozens of nationalities lived in Russia, but unless you were actually from Russia, you were often treated like a lower life-form—a relic of an attitude we had inherited from that first generation of Soviets and the time when Lenin and his comrades lassoed fourteen countries to create a union governed by Russia. The USSR was like the modern European Union, only with one ruling nation, Russia. The new country prospered with thousands of jobs, new roads, and markets full of foods from every season, with schools for kids who’d never seen a book before. Not since the Roman Empire had the world witnessed such an undertaking. There remained two problems: (1) although the union comprised fifteen republics, fourteen were treated as slightly substandard; and (2) even as the most reluctant of Soviets had never had it better, there was the small matter of freedom. No republic had the choice to secede if things didn’t work out.

  Even if you pretended to be Russian, once someone checked your ID the truth came out. Soviet IDs segregated people according to their nationality. A Chukchi remained a Chukchi, uneducated and dim-witted, even if they spoke flawless Russian. An Ossetian was just the man to hire if you wished to have someone rubbed out. A Ukrainian was never quite as pure-blooded as a Russian, and so on. Even if you lived in Russia all your life, your nationality shaped people’s perception of you.

  No Romani in their right mind would put “Gypsy” in their documents, unless they particularly enjoyed the breeze from doors slamming in their faces. Like Romani, many Jews masqueraded as Russians, and if they could not be that, then Ukrainian, or at the very least Moldavian. We were all branded by our identities. Luckily for my family, our mix of nationalities made it easier to choose the most advantageous one. Grandma Ksenia and Dad were both Greek according to their IDs because Grandma Ksenia’s father was a full-blooded Greek. And being a Greek in Russia was better than being a Roma.

  The union created an amazing blend of backgrounds and some of the most beautiful people in the world. I once met a gorgeous blond-haired, blue-eyed Mongolian, and yet an American horse breeder my father once drank a toast with was considered more exotic in my country than this girl.

  Who knew that people in America would think so differently? I wondered for a long time. Wondered until something so simple yet powerful became clear to me. Since perceptions are ever changing, as was the case at hand, the only thing left to do was to trust your own opinions. If you think you are something, that’s what you become.

  THE HUNT

  In Hollywood High, diversity was a requirement for ultimate coolness; anyone too bland faded into the background, a yearbook picture the only trace of their existence. For the first time in my life, I flaunted the Romani Oksana, the one I had been hiding in the basement all these years. Of course I still came across the occasional look of disgust, a tightening of an arm around a purse, or train-station stories of Gypsy assault maneuvers on innocent bystanders, as if they were top-secret special ops teams, highly trained, undetectable, and unbeatable. But those reactions didn’t faze me as much anymore. They were not important enough. I remember jokingly telling Zhanna about my tolerant self. “Oh, a regular Mother Teresa you are,” she joked back.

  But to be completely honest, I still cared about one person’s opinion very much, and having Cruz’s acceptance felt like an unspoken blessing.

  We were on our way home one day, face-to-face inside a packed bus, our hands gripping the railings for support. The bus lurched at every light, swinging the after-school crowd to and fro like bamboo stalks in gusts of wind.

  “My father used to buy pottery from an old Gypsy man who owned a stand at the local market at Manaus,” he said. “Sometimes twenty or thirty pieces at once.”

  For the first time since we’d met, Cruz was talking about his family.

  “Why so much pottery?” I asked, praying he wouldn’t clam up.

  “My father is a river trader. He sells food and things like those pottery jugs down the Amazon. We used to work together, sailing the boat for months.”

  “I didn’t realize people lived in the rain forest.”

  “Everywhere. The villages are built into the riverbanks over the water. The forest protects them against progress, but people seem happier and healthier. I don’t know why.”

  “You liked working with your dad?”

  “Yeah.” He laughed quietly. “Except he’s the most stubborn person I know. Once he’s used to something, he never wants to change it. I say, ‘Papai, let’s get a boat with air-conditioning. Benedita isn’t going to last much longer.’ He shakes his finger at me. ‘A grande nau, grande tormenta!’ With big ships come bigger storms. We lived more on the river than the land, but he refuses to improve Benedita, no matter how many boat magazines I shove into his hands.”

  “Does he still have it?”

  He nodded. “Everyone in the Amazon knows when Papai is coming by the rattle of that damn motor.”

  I wanted to ask him why he was in America when clearly he wanted to sail the Amazon, but something told me to let it go. Once again he had surprised me, and almost unthi
nkingly, I began to accept Cruz as someone decidedly non-gadjo.

  Olga picked up things about Cruz and me that even I was oblivious to, and she made sure to voice her suspicions. She recognized the “signs,” she told me. “Too much laughing, eyes shiny like marbles, and he struts like a damn rooster every time you’re around.” Of course, she had no proof, but not for lack of snooping. One word from her, she promised, and Dad would lock me in my room until I was married.

  The more conventional Romani parents think of unmarried girls as a commodity, especially if they are virgins. Once, Dad, Roxy, and I met a Roma family in one of the downtown swap meets, this one a multilevel warehouse of clothes wearable only until that first washing. Right away, I could tell that they were more traditional than we were. The females, even young girls, wore long flowery skirts and scarves around their heads. The men, in crisp white shirts, slacks, polished shoes, and fedoras, looked like door-to-door salesmen.

  The eldest man exchanged a greeting with Dad in Rromanes. “You a Rom?” “Yes, my brother.” After that the conversation picked up, and a few minutes later, the man nodded in Roxy’s direction.

  “I need a wife for my oldest. Are you looking?”

  There was a good reason he had skipped me. At sixteen, I was practically a spinster. Roxy and I exchanged looks—mine framed by a wicked frown and Roxy’s filled with alarm. At ten she had a reason to worry. But my father could navigate blindfolded among Romani. He bowed slightly. “Thank you, brother. I am honored. Your son looks like a strong young Rom. But she’s too young.”

  “Sure, sure, I understand. I meant no offense, brother.”