American Gypsy

by Oksana Marafioti

  Olga had become a wife for the first time at the age of twelve. Granted, the groom had kidnapped her to make her his wife, and she ran away a few months later. When she started to question my own virtue, especially at my ripe old age, I didn’t know how to react. My parents were never so traditional that they made it an issue. I always knew I wasn’t supposed to have sex until marriage, but for the life of me I don’t remember how I knew it, since we never actually talked about it. Up to that point I hadn’t given my hymen much thought. Yet there was my stepmother, acting like my raging hormones were keeping her up all night. My marriage to a good Gypsy boy occupied her mind almost as much as finding a way to get rid of Cruz before he ruined me.

  * * *

  Olga invited Cruz to a dinner party one night without telling me. It was an interesting tactic along the lines of “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

  Judging by the creased slacks, button-down shirt, and pulled-back hair, the poor guy probably assumed it would be a dating interview of sorts. He might have anticipated a quiet but firm chat with my father about his aspirations and future college choices; perhaps a perusal of Dad’s own accomplishments in the form of trophies or pictures. But nothing in our family was ever that simple.

  The kitchen table was piled high with food arranged on plates patterned with flowers and bees. But pretty plates couldn’t disguise Olga’s knack for making even the simplest dishes revolting. There was an imitation-crab salad, runny because she’d left the serving spoon in it for hours, and a wilted green salad drenched in blue-cheese dressing. The roast chicken’s skinny legs inspired pity. Mercifully Olga had sneaked off to the Russian corner store earlier, coming back with homemade kotleti, mashed potatoes, and even a seventy-dollar jar of red caviar.

  Our guests were seated per the hostess’s instructions. Sherri tried to grab a chair next to Dad, but Olga directed Cruz to take it. Sherri pouted as she parked her bosom next to me.

  Svetlana and her newly repentant husband had also been invited. Whatever Olga did with Igor’s mistress’s hair and the cemetery dirt seemed to have worked, because he was admiring his wife as if she were Sophia Loren. I held the honorary place next to their eighteen-year-old son. Alan was the size of his mother, minus the hair spray and the velour suit, and smelled like a spilled bottle of Brut. Freckles dusted his cheeks and the tip of his bulbous nose. A Hawaiian shirt held on for dear life around his shoulders, but his jeans looked two sizes too large—the latest fashion trend straight out of New York, Svetlana mentioned in passing.

  From across the table Cruz made conversation with my father. A phantom of mischief flickered across his face every time our eyes met.

  “So, Cruz. I hear you are Brazilian?” Svetlana asked him. Earlier that evening my father had stated that, in honor of his student, everyone would speak English.

  “Yes.”

  Olga placed a dollop of potatoes on his plate next to a chicken leg that would make an anorexic weep with envy. “Cruz is Valerio’s best student. He wery talented.”

  “Oh, I love Brazilian men,” Sherri said. “They’re so … Hispaniol.”

  Cruz accepted the plate, smiling. “Actually, Brazilians are Latin, not Hispanic.”

  “Even better,” she gushed.

  Alan bumped his chair closer to mine and I was treated to a generous waft of his cologne.

  “They look good with each other, hey?” Olga said suddenly, nodding in our direction.

  I cringed, Olga’s plans finally hitting me full force.

  “My Alan is rolling on honors in school. I’m so proud of my baby. He will go to computer college next fall.”

  Svetlana squeezed her son’s cheek as he tried to pull away. Igor and she continued to praise their giant offspring for an hour.

  I felt a sliver of envy at the way Alan’s parents cooed over him. Nobody at that table, besides Cruz, knew about my acceptance into the magnet school. That was something to be proud of, wasn’t it? Yet here I was, hoping that he knew to keep quiet. I needed more time to find the right way to tell Dad, because I’d get only one chance to impress him. Some part of me resented feeling the need to do so.

  “Your boy make good husband, Svetlana,” Olga said.

  “Is there a girl out there good enough for him? I know not.”

  “What of our Oksana? Cruz, how you tink, don’t they look a couple?”

  I turned to my father, begging him silently for help.

  “Olga, she’s too young to think about marriage,” he said in Russian.

  “There’s no such thing as too young,” Olga said, switching to Russian as well. “Wait too long and she’ll be plucked.”

  Heat splashed my face and I studied the salad on my plate.

  “Doesn’t Oksana have a say in who she marries?” Cruz said, his voice coming from afar. He sounded determined.

  “You gadjee and us Romani, we-e-e-ry different,” Olga said. “Give girl choice and she run with first asshole gadjo who wag finger.”

  “That’s too simplistic.”

  “Whad you say?” Olga tipped away from him, exchanging looks with her friends. Only my father continued to listen with a tinge of mirth on his lips.

  “According to you, Roma girls always make wrong choices. Is every gadjo a wrong choice?” Cruz said.

  “I no understand you.”

  Cruz shifted forward in his chair and pushed aside his plate, both elbows on the table. “I know people from back home who blame everything that goes wrong in our country on others. The rich point fingers at the poor from the shanties, saying all crime is their doing. The poor say they don’t have money to afford real houses and that the rich should share their money instead of complaining.”

  “Shto za chepukha (What’s this nonsense)?” Olga shrugged at all of us again, then back to Cruz. “I talk of girls. Gadjee make Roma girls prostitutki.”

  “It’s an excuse to isolate yourself from the rest of the society.” He caught me shaking my head ever so slightly and cleared his throat. But he didn’t back down from Olga’s flamethrower stare. “Does every Roma woman who marries a Roma man make a good match? Does no one in your culture separate or divorce?”

  “What you know about real problem?” Olga said. “You no live our life. I live with house with dirt floor when small girl, and I get water from well outside. Boy steal me when I virgin. You men only think sex.” Olga pointed at his crotch. Not much of an intellectual debater, my stepmother.

  Dad lowered the glass of Georgian Balsam he was about to drain. “Enough, Olga.”

  “I’m right, and you know it.”

  They were back to Russian.

  “What I know is that you’re a disobedient wife. Perhaps it is so because you were married so young; you didn’t have time to learn about taking care of your man.” Had my father ever called Mom disobedient, she would’ve beaten him with her shoe, but with Olga he felt justified to act superior. Come to think of it, he was becoming more and more like the rest of her family: Roma who followed a more old-fashioned code, according to which Olga was supposed to be subservient but also be the breadwinner. Grandpa wouldn’t have approved.

  “And you’re going to teach me?”

  “Premium idea. Start by learning how to budget.”

  Olga stopped chewing.

  Igor drummed his knuckles on the table and picked up the half-empty liquor bottle next to him. “Come on, brother, sister. Who’s going to toast the meeting of our children with me?”

  “Marriage is trust, yes?” Olga finally said in English, turning to Cruz. “How you trust someone from different peoples than yours? Our passports show nationality for reason—we Armenian, Uzbek, Russian, all different.”

  Sherri shifted in her seat. “They don’t do that in America.”

  Olga glowered at her from across the table. Igor refilled his glass until some of the golden liquid spilled over the edges onto the white tablecloth.

  Normally my stepmother would have a fit over the stain, but she was too engrossed
in the conversation. There were too many lit fires in the room; I stayed quiet in the interest of self-preservation, hoping Cruz would, too.

  Dad motioned for Igor to pour him another glass, drinking the liquor in one gulp. “Tell me this, dear wife,” he said in Russian. “If trust is so important, why do I feel that you’re hiding something from me?”

  “It’s you who should be answering that question. You and that manda (pussy) across the table.” She pointed a finger at Sherri.

  “Olga!” Sherri and Svetlana said in unison.

  This was going somewhere I didn’t want to follow. But as embarrassed as I was, I also felt relieved. My father had unintentionally deterred Olga from her matchmaking plans for me and Alan. Of course, there was something else to worry about: Cruz was the only person between Dad and Olga.

  She leaned around him and shouted at my father, her arms flying in all directions. “Don’t ‘Olga!’ me. I know everything about you two, everything.”

  Those of us familiar with my father and his wife knew not to get involved in a fight unless we desired to be flogged with curses. Among my people these fights were never mere words but carried the menace of an arrow shot from a master archer’s hand. One particular curse was so feared that it was barely used among the Roma themselves: “May I see you in a coffin.” Olga and Dad passed it back and forth like a volleyball, in addition to “May you be shot in the forehead,” “May you burn in the blue flames of Hell,” and my favorite, “May your liver shrivel and fall out of your body while you’re still alive.”

  The entire time they argued, Cruz wore a politely blank expression, his arms crossed over his chest in a relaxed manner. But I wouldn’t put it past Olga to punch him instead of Dad simply because of their proximity. A couple of times I jerked my head at the front door, a hint for Cruz to make his escape, but he only narrowed his eyes at me as if to say “Stop worrying, everything’s fine.”

  Dad hurled his shot glass at the wall and began to shout, accusing Olga of jealousy and stupidity and calling her a few choice names. It took both Igor and Cruz to calm him down. They dragged him outside before he broke something crunchier than glass, like Olga’s ribs.

  But I knew from experience, the madder Dad acted, the guiltier he usually was.

  CITIZENS OF NO-LAND

  In December 1991, a little more than a year after we’d left for good, the USSR collapsed. I was in Vegas visiting Mom and Roxy for the first time since they’d moved when the Russian cable channel we were watching made an abrupt switch from the Moscow Christmas special to the Moscow newsroom. The newscaster, a wiry man with a pink nose the size of a golf ball, announced with a startled expression that the Soviet Union was no more. Perestroika had swept the nation on waves of anxious excitement. But not everyone was celebrating. Gorbachev (the guy with the birthmark shaped like North America on his head) had planned to transform the country into a Russian version of the United States, but something went wrong and the system abruptly crumbled. The Soviets, who hated the idea to begin with, bitterly accused Reagan of filling Gorbachev’s head with renegade ideas just to break up the union. In some religious groups rumors of the Western Devil tricking the unsuspecting Russian leader into a faulty contract circulated. The sales of Faustus spiked.

  In Mom’s one-bedroom apartment, Roxy and I sat on the floor with Mom poised on the edge of the couch, a soup ladle in one hand. Roxy used to ask to play with the Soviet passport Mom kept in a tiny metal safe. It was red with a golden Soviet State coat of arms in the middle. Not that Mom valued it, just figured it might come handy. “We are still USSR citizens,” she’d say. That always made me nervous. Life in America was proving to be complicated, but everything from commercials to music playing on the radio came with just enough hope to keep us going. I wanted but one thing from Russia now—the rest of my family—but it had a claim on me.

  In reality it was the one place we officially belonged until the American government approved our applications for green cards. This was how it worked for most immigrants I knew. First a resident visa sent by a citizen or a permanent resident; then, if you behaved, a green card; and only after having the card for five years could you apply for the ultimate prize, citizenship. Most of us give little thought to the importance or the meaning of a homeland. Not until we ourselves are foreigners fighting for acceptance, stripped of all ranks and titles and viewed as inferiors, do we miss that privilege. The process of becoming a citizen is daunting. Suddenly your character is questioned and what you were as a citizen of another place is erased and must be proved all over again, even if you are ninety and have been slowly forgetting important things such as your kids’ names or an impressive military career. You have three choices: stay, live as an illegal alien, be deported. For the young, the choices are made by the adults, so the effects aren’t felt as much. But for everyone else this process can be tricky and laden with temptation. Some years later Vova, Dad’s drummer friend, was lucky enough to get a resident visa from an aunt. He messed up when he was caught in a scam that included sleeping with single rich women and then cleaning out their houses of everything but the door handles. He was sent back to Moscow and blacklisted, meaning he could never come back to the States. Unlike Vova, it seemed, we no longer had a place to go back to in case a life of crime appealed to us.

  “What’s going on?” Roxy asked, frowning at the TV, then at Mom.

  “You know the place you were born?” I said.

  “So?”

  “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Roxy jumped to her feet, following me into the kitchen, where I dumped our dishes in the sink. “Where did it go?”

  “Oksana, shut up!” Mom cut in from the couch.

  I leaned on the doorframe separating the kitchen and the dining-room area and crossed my arms, fingertips icy against my skin.

  “So does this mean Roxy can have your passport now that we’re citizens of no country?”

  “What have they done?” Mom said.

  The immigrants and those who stayed behind had seen change slowly chip away at the Communist ideologies as far back as the eighties. But it wasn’t all good change. Food started to disappear off the shelves, paychecks shrank, and the crime rate increased. As naive as it sounds, the more enthusiastic folk believed the republics would enter into a state union, like the United States, and go on with nary a hiccup in their daily lives. These were probably the same people who thought communism should’ve worked in real life and not in theory alone.

  I had heard my grandparents quarrel only once. It was over Grandma Ksenia’s Bolshevik father, who maintained until the minute he died, in 1952, that the Soviet people would soon practice the goodness they held within them. There would be no crime, and anyone would be able to walk into a store and pick up groceries for free. Money would be used for toilet paper in a utopian society straight out of Milton’s imagination.

  “My father was a patriot,” Grandma maintained.

  “A fool, like the rest,” Grandpa said. “Our country is no different from any other. All run by one master. Greed.”

  In Mom’s Las Vegas living room I heard her whisper, “I guess we’re staying for good.” I was quite startled. Had she thought about returning to Russia? I never did, because no matter how complicated things were in America, to me they had seemed unbearable back home. This event tossed my family into a state of limbo for a little while, as if we were kids of parents caught up in a vicious divorce, which felt painfully familiar. I remember how awkward it felt telling people where we came from, and how my personal sense of identity, screwed up as it was already, became almost impossible to distinguish. Being a Soviet citizen was one thing I knew I was for sure. All of a sudden, even that was taken away. But it was also a cleansing of sorts. There was no going back, because the country we knew, like the family we knew, was no longer. The sole option now was to make a new home.

  HOW MUCH FOR THE VIRGIN?

  Over the next few weeks arguments between Dad and Olga escalated. Some of these
had to do with the fact that she suspected him of cheating with clients, specifically Sherri; others with Dad trying to bring his parents over from Russia now that the country had fallen apart. As my Bolshevik great-grandfather once predicted, rubles now could be used for toilet paper. My grandparents had nothing left but their flat and Grandma’s stage jewelry. Neither Roxy nor I had any contact with our grandparents, which really confused both of us, but I recall thinking that if only they moved to America, we’d come together again and rejoice. Olga had refused to even consider it.

  The bulk of the problems between Dad and Olga sprouted from her inability to hold on to money. No one knew where it went, only that as soon as it appeared, it would promptly vanish. Olga claimed she was so busy guarding her husband from the female population of Los Angeles that she didn’t have time to keep track of the finances.

  Just as she couldn’t prove my involvement with Cruz, she kept missing the opportunities to catch my father cheating. “How is it that you have so many female clients?” she would ask. “Because women are more prone to demonic influences,” he’d answer. “Their mind is not as strong as a man’s.” Olga was also busy sneaking out of the house and behaving suspiciously herself: a trip to the bank, for example, at eight in the morning when Dad snored the loudest. (Much later I’d glimpsed the name of this “bank” on a crumpled-up receipt: Big Papa’s Pawn.)

  Equally bereft of evidence, they yelled at each other instead, both having something to hide and someone to blame. The “honeylambshank” and the “little sparrow” were replaced by huesos (cocksucker) and padla (whore).

  On January 14, the day on which many Eastern Europeans celebrate the departure of the old year, pagan-style (another excuse to get drunk, some say), Dad and Olga laid down their weapons in a temporary cease-fire. Christmas trees remain decorated until this time, and on the evening of the fourteenth, a table is set, toasts are given, and people share memories of the previous year, which they hadn’t given much thought to until that fifth or sixth drink.