Cruz turned up at every performance, as a good friend might, sometimes with Alison tailing him to make sure we spent as little time alone as possible. The girl was Marilyn Monroe to my Carol Burnett. She knew it and I knew it. After a while I desperately wanted to ask Cruz if they were together. Friends asked questions like that, right? Annie and Brandon came, too, flanked by other Goths. They intrigued me; I liked the idea of their darkness in the face of color-coded normalcy.
Secretly I’d yearned for friendship all my life.
Mom had several best friends back in Russia, and the way they brought over groceries or the latest perfumes freshly smuggled in from across the border, and assembled weekly inside our smoky kitchen, convinced me that friends are family. That was the kind of care these women put into their relationships: if you came over, my mother would have the tea brewing and the stew heating up and her ear open before you’d taken off your shoes. She got that quality from Grandma Rose, for sure.
There was this place in Kirovakan, up on a hill near the town’s rim, where people gathered to collect mineral water from several elaborate drinking fountains built on a natural spring called Sour Water, or Tetoo Dzhoor in Armenian. Grandma and I took plastic jugs up that path several times a week during my summer visits. We usually went at night, when the air blossomed inside our lungs. People made their way to the spring from all over town, the tips of the men’s cigars and pipes like a stream of lights in motion. “Just a quick trip,” Grandma promised every time. But once at the fountains, old friends and neighbors accosted us and the conversations filled hours. You’d think Grandma was everyone’s relative, not just mine. “Rosik tota. Let me help you carry the water home?” Tota in Armenian means “auntie,” and younger generations will use it as a respectful address for elders. Men call each other akhper (brother), women khirik (sister). The Armenian language is designed for kinship. I sipped the mineral water straight from the fountain and let it flow down my throat like a cool fizzy firework, and I sat on one of the many benches and waited while Grandma made inquiries of Artem Petrosyan’s legal woes, and Ani Ovsepyan’s family troubles, and Florik Mahachetryan’s ability to have that ninth kid without complications even if she was past fifty and should start thinking about herself instead of her husband’s lustful nature. She never appeared bored or impatient, her face open, voice compassionate. Grandma and Mom bickered over countless things, but maybe it was because they resembled each other so much.
My father, on the other hand? Well, most of Mom’s friends avoided him. Something about his guarded manner.
Dad used to warn me regularly against trusting the gadjen. But despite his voice of vigilance ringing in my head now, I began to open up to my new friends and crave their company.
It turned out that the house Cruz lived in belonged to Annie’s mother, Delma. She worked a night shift at a local hospital and slept most of the day, unseen until the weekends, when she’d grill steaks the size of Frisbees and sing catchy tunes in Portuguese along with Annie and sometimes even Cruz. Brandon and Alison practically lived at Annie’s, and they had free run of the house.
I knew more about Annie’s mother than I did about Cruz’s parents, but every time I asked him about them, he changed the subject. How was that fair? He asked me to relax and let him in while he kept me out. It seemed that the details he’d shared about his dad and Benedita were as much as I’d hear of his past, as if he’d left himself unguarded for that one bus ride, then barred the doors before too much escaped. Annie had volunteered some information, but nothing specific, only that Cruz had often come to stay throughout his childhood and that I should refrain from asking him about his family. But Brandon let it slip that Cruz’s mother left home when he was a little kid and that he’d been obsessed with finding her ever since.
I had plenty of time to figure out a way of making Cruz talk.
Thanks to Dad’s preoccupation with his musical arrangements, and to Olga’s disappearing acts, I finally had the freedom to come and go as I pleased. At seventeen I felt adult enough to act as irresponsibly as they did, and old enough to recognize that Dad had been wrong about friendship.
ON THE ROOF
On most days walking home from school I could hear Dad and Olga shouting, and if they caught me at the front door, they immediately pulled me into their fights. Soon I started to use my bedroom window instead of the door.
Back in Moscow when my parents fought, I became the reluctant spy. Roxy was too young, but both my parents knew that I was the right age to remember events in detail.
“Did someone clean the living-room rug while I was gone?” Mom was saying one day as we entered a public banya located inside a five-story neoclassical building.
“I don’t think so.”
This particular banya, with its mermaid-themed mosaics and gigantic windows, was my favorite. When I stood in the main bathing area the size of an Olympic swimming complex, I felt like a fish at the bottom of the ocean with sunlight streaming down over me through the water.
“Oh. It looked like it was moved.”
“Dad probably used it under Vova’s drums during rehearsal.” A mistake, since Mom had forbidden my father to set up drums on the Persian rugs. We pushed our way through the busy lobby lined with kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers, shoeshine booths, and hair salons where women with rosy cheeks were getting perms.
We found our lockers and undressed, hanging the clothes on the hooks and locking the valuables behind dented doors. The banya split into two wings, men’s and women’s; inside those areas modesty was as distant a Russian concept as pay-per-view. Naked, we found our bench—one of many dotting the tiled floor of the main bathhouse—and on it our buckets, along with eucalyptus branches tied in a bunch. As we bathed, Mom fumed over the fact that Dad’s friends drank the three bottles of Armenian cognac she’d been saving to use as “gifts” for our case worker at the American embassy. I hadn’t wanted to tell her those details, but between the steam flushing my cheeks pink and the soothing murmur of women’s voices bouncing against the high ceilings, I was in a great mood, tongue unguarded.
“Just proves your father’s head is stuffed with cotton,” she said, upending a bucket of warm water she’d drawn from the raised pool nearby over the suds in my hair.
She picked up the eucalyptus branches and started to gently smack me with them, a traditional massage therapy. Combined with the steam, the minty smell of the plant was sharp inside my nostrils.
“What’s the big deal, Mom?”
“You always take his side.”
I had been so used to this kind of scenario that no way was I getting in the middle of Dad and Olga’s battle royal.
Walking up the sidewalk to our house, I heard shouting. Behind the living-room curtains, a silhouette picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. I heard Olga congratulate Dad on breaking yet another Thomasville, her tone climbing into a falsetto. Their voices lashed across the front yard, up and down the empty street.
As I passed Sherri’s Mercedes in the driveway, I slowed down. Earlier that day, I’d left her and Dad alone; Annie had invited me over to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The front door burst open and Sherri raced outside, a mixture of tears and mascara transforming her face into a Halloween mask. She was missing a shoe, and the straps of her dress hung off her shoulders like noodles. There were scratches on her arms and legs.
Olga stumbled into the doorway. “Nu pizdets tebe, suka (You’re fucked, bitch)!”
My stepmother sprinted after Sherri. I’d never suspected such agility.
As Sherri limped to her car, Olga tossed a clump of frizzy orange hair on the lawn before jumping on Sherri from behind, making her stagger backward. “This is what you get for sleeping with my husband, manda (twat). Me!”
She pulled another fistful of the woman’s hair. Sherri screamed, her hands flying to her head. “You crazy bitch!”
“I’ll have you paralyzed. You’ll be shitting in diapers when I’m d
one with you.” Olga’s threats slurred and stumbled.
“I’m a man,” my father shouted over and over again. He was outside now, a bottle dangling from his fingertips. “Let her go, Olga! I order you.”
As the struggle progressed, Dad circled around them, shouting things like “Girls, that’s enough!” and “I demand you stop!” and “I’m a man, dammit. I can do as I please!”
But they ignored him, falling and rolling on the ground like kids in a wrestling match, flinging obscenities at each other.
The three of them were so drunk that I suspected somebody would end up in a hospital before the night was over. Acting on impulse, I picked up the garden hose and turned it on, covering the nozzle with my thumb and letting it rip. The women screamed and sputtered, and let go of each other to shield their faces. I didn’t stop until the water had soaked them through.
Dad wiped at his shirt and sway-walked in my direction. “Hey, that’s Oksana.” He gave me a sloppy hug. “My daughter. Hello, daughter.”
“Dad, someone’s going to call the police if you don’t get her out of here.”
“I’ll give them one of my CDs,” he said.
“Great. Why don’t we go inside and I’ll make coffee. Okay?”
“Premium idea, daughter, premium idea.” He ambled toward the house.
Sherri finally managed to make it to her car and left, the tires screeching with a startled yelp. Olga refused my help as she scrambled to her feet, muttering curses in liquor-tongue all the way to the bathroom.
I took a deep breath as I went inside, locking the front door behind me. The quiet was a good sign. No sirens, no cops. I made Armenian coffee and poured it into two espresso cups. That stuff is strong enough to make the dead dance, Grandpa Andrei used to say. Dad drank his while gazing at the cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. Olga refused to come out of the bathroom. There was no point asking what had happened, not that I actually wanted to know; but judging by the worried expression on Dad’s face, it was obvious that Olga had finally gotten proof of his unfaithfulness.
When Olga came into the kitchen, my father grinned at her.
“Don’t even start.” Olga shook a finger at him.
“But it was nothing, my sparrow. I did … she attacked me, you see. I didn’t want to but—”
“You fell into her pussy, I know,” she said. “Men are dogs, only dogs don’t lie about being dogs. They don’t screw the clients, expecting their wives to say nothing.” Olga rummaged through every cabinet, huffing at all of Dad’s awkward apologies, until she found a full bottle of vodka under the sink.
I reached for the bottle and tried to pry it from her hands. “Come on, Olga. It’s late. Go to bed, okay?”
Olga spit on the floor. She then went outside with the bottle tucked under one arm, leaned the garden ladder against the back of the house, and climbed to the roof. “I’m not sleeping with that man tonight,” she shouted from above. “Throw me a blanket, will you?”
I did.
A few minutes later Dad came outside and stood in the backyard, where the grass grew in bunches terrified of all the barren spots. I think he had sobered up a little after the coffee. He looked lost—an unfamiliar sight to me.
“Stop this nonsense, wife. It’ll get cold up there,” he said.
“No colder than down there,” she said. “I’m not sleeping with you. Ever.”
Then she started to sing.
I will flee o’er the mountains
Up the path my moon has painted …
The bottle quickly emptied, giving Olga’s lungs more clout. She was a terrible singer. Multiply that by the 40 percent alcohol rushing through her system, and the result would shame a yowling cat. No matter how we tried to get Olga down, she remained unmoved. The threats, the pleas, even the bribes were cut down by ten verses and ten choruses.
Every time Dad spoke, Olga raised her voice. By three in the morning, vacillating between rage and the very real fear that I might see Olga fall, my body demanded a bed, but I settled for a lawn chair. I fell asleep to the sounds of Olga singing and cursing at the sky.
The doorbell rang at seven-thirty. It was our landlord. The neighbors had complained about the inebriated five-foot-three Gypsy woman hollering from the roof all night. Since he also owned the two houses on either side of ours, they were kind enough to call him instead of the police. The house on the right had a neat row of cannabis plants blooming on its patio, and the one on the left contained a large family of illegal immigrants.
“Mr. Roy,” Olga said from the doorway. The landlord’s name was Roy Shuck, but she always called him Mr. Roy. She had finally descended half an hour earlier. “Mr. Roy. I go on roof for count stars. Is my job. Come, I do chart for you. Only one hundred dollars. You take off rent, yes?”
Roy was a tall, sinewy man who lived in his bike shorts. I’d never seen men wear such tight outfits, except for the dancers in the Bolshoi Ballet productions, and even then they used codpieces for modesty. The first time I met Roy, I nearly lost my innocence; he showed up to collect rent in the most perversely crowded pair of animal-print Lycra shorts I hope never to see again. This time he had on a canary-yellow number.
Roy patiently explained about roofs and why tenants shouldn’t go on them. “You’re old enough to know that,” he said jokingly.
Olga took that to heart. “I no old. I wery famous psychic. Clients need hep, so I hep. On roof, inside, everywhere.”
Unfazed by Olga’s indignation, our landlord insisted that from now on all stargazing and client support be done from inside the house. They finally agreed, but according to Olga, only because she’d needed to pee since four in the morning and no longer wished to talk to the idiot in yellow underwear.
KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN
As a child I remember reading an article in one of Moscow’s trendier magazines about 7-Eleven stores. It was like peeking into a world in the distant future, created by Jules Verne himself. The glossy photos depicted grinning workers surrounded by brightly colored food and sodas and the kinds of gizmos one might expect to see in a sci-fi movie.
The article described the daily tasks the 7-Eleven employees performed, their lunches, their uniforms. If only I had the opportunity to work at such a marvelous establishment!
By the time I decided to search for my first job, I’d seen plenty of 7-Elevens, and I’d learned that not many people worked at convenience stores by choice; it was a transitional job reserved for those on the way up or down. But I so wanted to work. Mom and I talked a couple of times a week and our phone conversations were chock-full of praise for a steady paycheck. We both knew being a cash person in a casino wasn’t a dream career, but Mom’s friends were American, her regulars were American, her life was sprouting Americana like a Chia Pet.
She and Roxy drove down to see me one day. They picked me up after school in a powder-blue 1971 Oldsmobile that Mom had bought for five hundred dollars. The body had rusted, the passenger-door handle keened in agony when used, and the plastic air-conditioning vents had breathed their last. Mom called the car her tank. “You’ll see,” she said as I got in the front. “If we’re ever in an accident, there won’t be even a dent, but the other car will fold like an accordion.”
We ate lunch at the Pizza Place, in the same booth where Cruz, Natasha, and I had had our first date. Mom went on about the perfection that was Las Vegas.
“One of my regulars owns houses in Italy and France. She vacations there during summers because Vegas gets so hot, but I love the weather.”
“I don’t love it at all,” Roxy complained.
Mom went on. “I have another client who buys everything with plastic and credit.”
“I want plastic, too,” Roxy said.
“It’s for grown-ups only.”
I bit into my pepperoni slice, cheese stretching like lace. Pizza was now my favorite food, though I’d never tasted it in Russia. I picked the cheese between my thumb and forefinger and stuffed it into my mouth. “Are you saving money
, like you said you would?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“You keep it in the bank, right? One of those special accounts?” Earlier that year Annie explained to me the workings of the American banking system, and I sent Mom the instructions in a letter.
Mom took a long sip of her soda. “It’s like you’re my mother instead of the other way around,” she said. “I needed the car, and this trip is not free, you know. Plus, I’ve been winning at the slots. You won’t believe it, but every time I spend, I end up getting it back. It’s like I walk inside the casino and I can feel which machine’s about to spill.”
“Mom. Tell Oksana what we wanna get her. Tell her, please, please, if you don’t I will.” Roxy bounced in her seat. Grandpa Andrei used a special Ukrainian expression to describe this: shilo v booley, or awl in the ass.
Mom clasped her hands with a euphoric smile. “We’re going to the mall.”
Roxy took a gulp of air and opened her mouth, and Mom immediately covered it. “Don’t you dare. It’s a surprise.”
Inside the mall, we dashed through the throng of shoppers. Patience was not one of Mom’s virtues. If she had an idea, she lit up like a dynamite fuse. We finally stopped in front of Bob’s Music World, where keyboards covered the sales floor.
“May I help you?” said the salesman. He wore ironed slacks, a starched white shirt, and a tie with piano keys on it.
“I like to buy my daughter keyboard.”
“Really, Mom?” I was stuck to the floor. “But what about the money?”
“I make money now from a real job, not a room in the back of my house, so I can get credit.”
What a feeling it was to test those keys, knowing I’d have one of my own. I was already picturing myself inside my room, composing until dawn.
Once I picked the instrument, I hugged my mother until I could force myself not to cry. Roxy hugged the startled salesclerk, who quickly ran Mom’s name and gave her a two-thousand-dollar line of credit. My new keyboard was about five years old (ancient in technological terms), and it came with a metallic stand painted black but chipped, shaky like an old man’s legs. My own tank.
American Gypsy Page 23
