by Alix Ohlin
Six months later, Maxine received a letter from Yuri. It was written on thin blue paper in blocky handwriting, just like the ones he used to get from his family. On the stamps were pictures of the crown jewels of Russia.
Dear Maxine,
How are you? I am fine. It is quite cold where I am right now. There is already snow but I do not mind it because the sun shines on the white snow and makes it very bright. I am often wearing my American sunglasses which makes other boys in my school very jealous. I hope that your mother will let you visit me in Soviet Union one day. I am still practicing my English for when I may go back to the States but I am getting worse because no one here speaks as good English as I do. I am the best. Oh well.
Love, Yuri
P.S. Tell Bat that the Russian beer is not very good, but the vodka is excellent. Ha ha ha.
In Moscow, she walked alone to the Kremlin, drifting past its spiky towers and tiers of gold domes. Among the crowds she could hear the drone of tour guides reciting historical facts in English and French. This was ten years later. Her husband, Ross, worked for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago and was allowed to bring Maxine on this business trip. The Russians were in dire need of pharmaceuticals, he said, they needed new drugs for the new Russia, and he was busy with them from morning to night. Maxine had wanted badly to come along—never having traveled much—but now that she was here, on her own, she felt listless and cold and had to fight the urge to stay in the hotel room with her work. She was in graduate school, and school was the only place she seemed to feel at home. To get herself out of the hotel she began to treat the trip as a type of class and pored over the guidebook, learning to decipher a few of the signs, memorizing random architectural details. Each day she assigned herself sights to see: museums and palaces and armories, grand old buildings with vaulted ceilings and gilded paintings and firearms.
She bought a set of nesting dolls for her mother—the outermost shell a stocky, dark-haired peasant girl, the innermost a baby so small that she could squeeze it in her palm—then walked out into Red Square. Russians strode quickly past her, their faces set, carrying plastic shopping bags. Back home, in Chicago, she had read about food lines, poverty, and political chaos, but there were few signs of this, at least in the places within walking range of the hotel. She had an uneasy feeling that things were being concealed, were beyond her reach, whether because of the country or her own failing, she wasn't sure.
She shivered in her light coat and crossed her arms over her chest. With a slightly guilty feeling she retreated to the hotel room and ordered soup and coffee from room service. She opened her guidebook to the map of Moscow, then flipped to the map of Russia. She tried to remember the name of Yuri's town, far in the north, but had forgotten it. Only Bat would remember the name. He lived in Oregon now, where he operated his own business, a company that sold hemp products through the mail. Despite their parents' fears, Bat seemed to have turned out all right; he was kind of a hippie, maybe, but he supported himself and had a small house in the woods.
Maxine stood in the chilly hotel room and looked out the window. Traffic blared below her. She and her brother hardly ever spoke, and he rarely went home to visit. She thought of his face when she and Yuri came home from the Caverns that day. He was sitting in front of the TV, drinking a Coke, and they sat down next to him, close together on the couch. Bat started to say something, but then, looking at them, stopped. At the time she wasn't thinking about Bat at all. She was too wrapped up in remembering the minutes she'd just spent, how she and Yuri had walked up the hill out of the darkness of the Caverns, his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric. They emerged into the sudden, blinding desert sun and it shocked her, as if she'd been expecting midnight.
Meeting Uncle Bob
Spike proposed to me at the bus station. It was November and we stood outside shivering and smoking cigarettes, our breath merging with the exhaust from departing buses. Spike stuck one hand in the pocket of his jeans, blew smoke, and said thoughtfully, almost to himself, “We should get married.”
“What did you say?” I said.
“On second thought, never mind,” he said. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and picked up my bag, then his.
“What do you mean, never mind?” We had never discussed marriage before. Spike smiled and put his arm around me, guiding me toward our bus. He kissed the skin below my ear.
“Maybe we should talk about it later,” he said. “After you've met Uncle Bob.”
On the bus he pulled out a book, slouched down, and began to read. I looked out the window as we wound out of the city and hit the highway. The day was dense and overcast, the sky crouched down close to the earth. We passed small towns with churches and bars strung along the road, wooden steeples, neon signs. In places the road was cleft through rock, leafless trees high on either side. The bus was cold and I leaned closer to Spike, who put his arm around me but didn't talk.
His real name was Leslie. When he was ten he wanted a tougher name, so he picked Spike, and it stuck. He'd spent every summer of his life in Vermont with his uncle and cousin, and this was our first trip there together. I was nervous. I was twenty-two, about to graduate without any real plans, and Spike was the only thing in my life I knew for sure I wanted.
We stepped off the bus into a deserted parking lot. It was dark and snowing dizzily, flakes that turned red in the taillights of the bus before dissolving on the pavement.
“It looks like Uncle Bob's late,” Spike said. “He's usually late. Are you cold?”
“Very.” He stood behind me and wrapped his arms around me, his cheek against mine. This led to kissing. When Uncle Bob pulled up he honked the horn and we jumped. Spike's teeth hit my chin.
“That's Uncle Bob,” Spike whispered.
He was a pale, round-faced man with a dollop of chin, like a piece of dough stuck under his mouth. He jumped out of the truck and shook Spike's hand, then mine, and helped me into the cab.
“Heat's broken, so you two snuggle,” he said. Everybody's breath blew whitely toward the dashboard. Spike pulled me closer, and I leaned my head against his shoulder while he talked to his uncle.
“Your mother says you're thinking of dropping out of graduate school,” Uncle Bob said.
“I am,” said Spike.
“I'm supposed to talk some sense into you.”
“Okay,” said Spike. He leaned forward and looked at Uncle Bob, and both of them laughed.
Ten minutes later we pulled onto a dirt road and the headlights played uncertainly over rocks and trees and snow. The road turned out to be the driveway leading to a small wooden house. Smoke rose from the chimney and lights glowed in the windows.
“Is someone here?” Spike said.
“Miriam is.”
“Who's Miriam?”
“She's my lady friend. You get to bring a lady friend, I get to bring a lady friend.” He smiled at me and parked the car.
“I never thought of myself as a lady friend before,” I said.
“Well, you are now.” He patted my shoulder. “Congratulations.”
Spike took the bags and Uncle Bob went around to the passenger side of the truck, holding out his hand to help me climb out.
The house had been in their family for generations and was beautiful inside, small and old with hardwood floors and a stove with a pipe running up to the ceiling. I smelled garlic and tomatoes.
“This is nice,” I said to Spike. As we took off our coats, Miriam came out of the kitchen and introduced herself. She was wearing a black turtleneck and dark red lipstick and she looked about my age. Uncle Bob kissed her on the cheek, then disappeared to make drinks. I lit a cigarette and stood next to the stove; three hours of continuing cold had left an ache in my legs and arms. When Uncle Bob returned from the kitchen and handed me a glass of red wine, I took a big, grateful sip, and felt warmer and, right after that, sleepy.
“So,” said Uncle Bob. He rubbed his hands together and laughed. Ther
e was something impish about him, gleeful and young. It was hard for me to imagine him in his professional life, being competent and busy and medical. He was supposed to be an obstetrician.
We ate spaghetti and drank red wine.
“So how's Michael?” Spike said.
“Who the hell knows,” Uncle Bob answered glumly. He turned to me. “My son's a graduate student in East Asian languages. He's learning how to forget English. He only speaks Mandarin now.”
“I know,” I said. Michael had come to see Spike once. We took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he drank plum wine and refused to eat the food.
“I call him on the phone and he quacks like a duck,” Uncle Bob went on. “I'm supposed to learn goddamn Chinese to speak to my own son?” He kept looking at me. “I'm not an unreasonable man.”
Miriam leaned across the table and whispered loudly, “Michael has issues. Since his mother left.”
“He's sensitive,” Spike said.
“I'm sensitive, too,” said Uncle Bob. “I'm so sensitive I can hardly stand myself. As a matter of fact, everybody in this family is sensitive.”
“That's true,” Spike said.
Uncle Bob smiled broadly. “Take my wife,” he said, “please.” He laughed and I laughed, too, just to be polite. Miriam didn't. “She was so sensitive she had to move to California.” He spoke the word California in a mincing, high-pitched tone, and he put his hands up in the air, as if he were doing a little dance in celebration of the state. Miriam put her hand on his shoulder and he took it and touched it to his cheek, a sweet gesture, I thought. “Sunny California,” he said. “Going to California in my mind.”
“That's Carolina,” Spike said gently. Uncle Bob went into the kitchen and brought a large jug of wine to the table. Miriam— I assumed it was her—had made a little centerpiece of pine branches and there wasn't space for both, so Uncle Bob threw the centerpiece into the fireplace, where the needles melted and snapped, and set the jug down instead.
“Jesus Christ, Bob,” she said.
“Oh, lighten up,” he said. He poured us all more wine. “It's a wise man who buys in bulk,” he pronounced. “Ancient Chinese proverb.”
“Ancient Irish drinking,” said Miriam.
“Shut up, Miriam,” he said.
“So anyway, Miriam,” Spike said, dropping his cigarette ash into the remains of sauce on his plate, “how did you two meet?”
Miriam shrugged. “It's a small town. Everybody meets everybody else. And you? How did you and Lucy meet?”
Spike and I looked at each other. At the beginning our relationship had been a secret, and we had discovered that's how we like it, the world it made for the two of us. He had been my TA in “The Bible as Literature” the spring before. In class he said the Bible contained the greatest and most basic stories of our culture, then asked us to put our notes aside and retell stories from our reading to the class. Tell whatever you remember, he said. He walked around the room, pacing and talking, and I thought he was sweet and fierce and slightly terrifying, like a raccoon trapped in your basement. My friend Stephanie and I used to mock him outside of class. Spike? What the hell kind of name is Spike? We imagined some foolish woman having sex with him and moaning, Oh, Spike, give it to me, Spike. Then, all of a sudden, that woman was me.
“It's a small school,” I said to Miriam. “Everybody meets everybody else.”
Halfway through the semester I came upon Spike in the quad. It was early spring and the campus bloomed sedately with the first flowers. He sat under a tree with a bottle of wine in a paper bag, smoking a cigarette.
“Ruth, right?” he said when he saw me.
“Lucy,” I told him. “My name's Lucy.”
“I know.” I realized he was referring to the story I'd chosen to tell in class, Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said to Naomi, Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. I liked that story, the devotion in it, Ruth making that permanent promise.
“Are you allowed to do that—at school?” I said, looking down at the bottle.
“School,” Spike said. “Do you want a sip?”
“Okay,” I said. “But aren't you, you know, religious?”
Spike laughed. He passed the paper bag over to me, and I sat down next to him.
“It's just a divinity degree,” he said. “Not the seminary or anything.”
I took a swig from the bag and swished it around like mouthwash and winced. It was pretty bad wine. Spike laughed and told me I was funny. We spent all that summer together. Every night we sat on Spike's porch, drinking beer and talking in the dark. I never talked so much in my life: three o'clock in the morning, sometimes four o'clock. We'd fall asleep holding hands. More than once, after we had sex I cried, from the closeness of it.
“Must have been fate,” Uncle Bob said now, “because you are such a beautiful couple.” He refilled the wineglasses and toasted us silently.
“I don't believe in fate,” said Spike. “Or God. That's why I'm leaving school.”
“Shit, Spike,” said his uncle. “Nobody believes in God anymore. That doesn't mean it's not interesting.”
“Some people do,” said Miriam. Her red lipstick had worn off, except at the outlines of her mouth, and the real color of her lips was pale. “I do.”
“Sure,” Spike said, putting his elbows on the table in an irritated jerk. He ran his hands through his hair. “And fanatics and terrorists and people who wage wars.”
“That's not true,” Miriam said.
“People who prevent women from having abortions. Isn't that right, Uncle Bob?”
“Not everyone here is Catholic, you know,” Miriam said. “Not everyone here has to rebel against the pope.”
“What are you, Lucy?” Uncle Bob said, turning to me. I was smoking a cigarette and trying to stay out of it.
“I wasn't raised any particular way,” I said. “I'm not anything.”
“Everybody's something,” he said, kindly.
“I for one am Jewish,” Miriam went on.
“Well, congratulations,” Spike said.
Spike and I climbed the stairs to the guest room. As I went, I steadied myself against the walls with the palms of my hands. I was drunk, a lazy, liquid kind of drunk, not a loud and talking kind. I was learning to like this about drinking, that there were so many moods to it; in this it was like sex, one physical situation that could go in a million possible directions. Spike pulled his clothes off and dropped them in a pile on the floor. I lay down on the bed and watched him.
“Are you okay?” he said. I said I was. He stood looking out the window, in only his long underwear.
“How old do you think Miriam is?” he said. “I mean, she's got to be younger than I am.”
“So?”
“So I'm worried about Uncle Bob. Ever since Aunt Mary left, he's been meeting these crazy women. He's always got these crazy women up here.”
“She didn't seem that crazy to me.”
“The last one was a Jehovah's Witness,” Spike said. “She left Uncle Bob because he wanted to celebrate Christmas, for crying out loud.”
“I don't think Miriam celebrates Christmas, either,” I said, and closed my eyes.
Spike climbed on top of me and stroked my hair and kissed my forehead. I kissed him back but then stopped. I liked to drink with Spike in general and I liked to have sex drunk, too—it made everything velvet, blurred edges, smoothed time. But I was spinning.
“Sorry,” I said. “Can't.”
“Let's get married,” he said. I looked for his eyes in the darkness, hoping they would stop the spinning, but they didn't. He touched my nose, which was very cold, and then traced my lips with his fingertip.
“I don't know,” I said.
“You love me. But?”
“I love you but I wasn't thinking about getting married. I mean, not right now.”
“I love you but,” Spike said. He put the palm of his hand on my neck, moved it to my breast. I arched my back to press against it. He stu
ck his fingers into my armpit, and I laughed and clamped down my arm.
“But what?”
“But nothing,” he said, his fingertips walking along on my collarbone and down my chest. “But nothing at all, not ever.”
The bed was the worst I'd ever slept on in my entire life. Lumps in the mattress competed with broken springs to torture my back. I woke an hour later in agony, and Spike was groaning in his sleep, tossing back and forth, like a fish dying on land. My head hurt and my mouth was dry. The moon shone over Spike's face. With his eyes closed, his cheek against the pillow, he looked like a child.
From the other bedroom I could hear a bed squeaking and Miriam's voice saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
Without waking, Spike reached up and pulled me close to him, warm together against the cold air of the room.
In the morning, the house smelled of syrup and bacon. We sat up in bed and spent a while kissing. There was a holiday sort of feel to things. Downstairs, Miriam was mixing pancake batter and Uncle Bob was building a fire in the stove. He winked at us.
“You two sleep all right?” he said.
“Well, okay,” I said.
Spike collapsed on the couch. I walked through the kitchen and stepped out onto the back porch, squinting as the sun glinted against the snow. The air smelled clear and fresh, and there were no other houses in sight. The land sloped down to a rocky valley and up to a clearing on the other side. The wind rattled pine needles over the snow, and maple trees stretched their naked branches to the sky. I was only a little hungover. After a minute I went back inside and offered to help Miriam with breakfast, but she said she was all right. She hummed to herself as she stirred the batter. I poured coffee for me and Spike and went back into the living room. Uncle Bob was lighting the stove.
“So, Lucy, you didn't sleep all right?”
“I slept okay. It's just, well, to be honest, the mattress isn't very comfortable.”
“It's not? Why isn't it?”
“It's lumpy, Uncle Bob,” Spike said from the couch. I sat down next to him, and he rubbed my back.
