I had been so frightened by what had happened, my understanding so limited and my faculties so impaired, that I found myself wishing, simply, to be able to turn to my parents and ask what I should do—not a wish I experienced often any longer, having had to answer not only my own questions, but theirs, for a long time. But I wanted it now. However, I knew they would become obsessed by the medicine—they thought even talk therapy was for degenerates—and, in their anxiety, unload on me their medically uninformed worst-scenario nightmares. Many parents couldn’t understand their children—but these people didn’t communicate with each other in six months as much as my family and I did in a week. I used to think that if I could just persuade them that risk brought reward, that things turned out okay now and then, I could be myself without confusing or hurting them. But their losses and shocks reached so far, they couldn’t manage—didn’t try—to let go of them. I couldn’t save them. I’d have to be content with saving myself. The most frightening thing about that winter was that it often felt like it was too late even for that.
Chapter 15
April 2015
What to cook for the family (meal)
“Misha, Sasha, Nikita.” Seth pointed around the room, as if he were naming the three musketeers. “Misha is hot station, Sasha is cold, Nikita’s the chef.”
The previous year, a Russian restaurant called Moscow57 had opened near my apartment. Manhattan was full of Russian restaurants, both classics such as Russian Samovar and new arrivals such as Mari Vanna, but the main distinction, as I saw it, was in their flavors of kitsch—puffed-up nostalgia and arriviste vulgarity, respectively. And now places like these had set up shop on my walk to the subway. I had started taking the other side of the street.
I’d been too young to say no when my family packed off to places like the National, in Brighton Beach, for somebody’s birthday, a pocket of salt in my oversize suit to ward off the evil eye. (Why did I need that if we were going to see friends? Just do it.) There, seated at banquet tables worthy of Rabelais, we gorged on sturgeon, quail, duck liver, and fried potatoes with morels and watched elaborate floor shows—dancing girls, costumes, smoke—stunned by the food and the spectacle. I had my “bar mitzvah” in one such place—the bar mitzvah portion consisting of a cake in the shape of a Torah scroll. I’d had enough for a lifetime.
But the depression meant that sometimes I didn’t have the energy not only to do things but also to not do them. Something like spring had arrived, rainy and cold. One Sunday night, a friend and I went through three rounds at a neighborhood bar and, gin in my head, I forgot to cross to the right side of Delancey Street when we walked past the restaurant. My friend was a Russian non-Russian like me, and we probably thought the same thing: Whatever affectation we’d find inside would at least share nothing with the studied scruffiness of a Lower East Side cocktail den circa 2015. Also, Russian food soaked up booze really well.
It was beautiful inside. Blood-red walls, soft light, decorative chaos: a pressed-tin ceiling, blocks of mirrors, photographs hung up with clothespins. And the menu was both familiar and not: bliny, but also cucumber-and-pomegranate salad; borshch, but also pistachio-and-fenugreek shrimp. The restaurant felt like nothing but itself, an elusive commodity in the city that has everything. To reach our table, we had to squeeze past a woman belting “Little Girl Blue” with help from a small band; when she finished, she introduced herself—Ellen, one of the owners, an American. (Her parents had run the Russian Tea Room, hence the food.) She took a swig of honey and returned to the mic. It was everything I’d always wanted to find in a Russian restaurant: warmth rather than pomp. The spring stayed rainy and cold—at the farm, I weeded and raked in two sweatshirts—but I started walking on the Moscow57 side of the street.
One night, I joked to Seth, one of Ellen’s partners, that maybe they could take me on as a waiter. He understood: In the culture we shared, so much of it defined by hunger, the experience of bringing food to another could feel satisfying enough to redeem even the indignities of a waiting job in New York. Plus, I was good with people—or had been, once. I’d do it for free. “Serve?” Seth said. “You don’t want to go in the kitchen?”
Now, standing in that kitchen, where I had made my leaden legs walk despite the dread that kept me up half the night, the cooks turned around to assess the flotsam before them. The shortish young man at the hot station was frying a wheelbarrow’s worth of what smelled like mushrooms and onions. His hair was so translucently blond, it was a history lesson—the Vikings were here—and he was so lean and muscled that the veins stood out on his arms like blue cables. The young man at the cold station had hooded eyes and a limp body, and below a shapeless black T-shirt he wore what could only be described as capri pants. The tips of his fingers were burgundy from dicing beets. A small radio behind him pumped out trance, as awkward in that silence as a loud fart at a dinner party. Nikita, the chef, had a cherubic round face and more Viking hair, his sprouting from his head like a hedgehog’s.
In the cast of their faces, the hue of their skin, the shape of their bodies, they were implacably Russian, obviously all recent arrivals, and not from the big cities. I was startled to realize that I was probably older than all of them. But for the rest of that spring, I would be their bitch, and that prospect made me lonesome and frightened, as if I’d wandered into an establishment I shouldn’t have, on a street that wasn’t for people like me, in a city where I should have been more careful.
But they didn’t know that. They saw the same age disparity that I did, the non-Russian cast of my face and hue of my skin, the American clothes and posture, the thousand little things that allowed us to recognize a person as “one of ours”—or not—on any street in the world, and concluded that I was one of the potential investors for whom the kitchen staff were trotted out like horses getting their teeth checked at my grandfather’s Minsk prewar bazaar.
“Boris is going to be interning in the kitchen,” Seth said, correcting their impression. “He’s a writer. Anyway, let’s go, I already have someone at the bar.”
I experienced a great wish to follow Seth back out to the front room. Sasha, Misha, and Nikita continued to stare at me.
“So, like what, you’re writing a book?” Nikita said.
I shook my head. I thought about telling them the truth, but saying I was there to get my mind off heartbreak would have been like telling them I was transgender. I didn’t have the energy for all that anyway. Every time I recounted my story to someone, I sank a little deeper into its mud. “Just—learning how to cook, I guess,” I said. “I’ll do anything you need.”
“So, like, for free?” Nikita said, his sweet round face turning dark and confused.
I shrugged. His expression said, Well, here’s some kind of fucknut. A practical person—a Russian person—would have been smart enough to pretend he was writing a book.
I went downstairs, changed into a cook’s apron, parked myself at the prep station, and waited for instructions. But the instructions didn’t come. By five, everyone was in the thick of prep, chopping salmon for tartare, making the pistachio-based sauce that went with the shrimp, and skewering sliced vegetables and cubes of lamb or chicken onto kebabs. But even tasks that a child could perform—resupply from the basement walk-in refrigerator, dicing vegetables—Nikita assigned to Misha or Sasha, even though they were doing something else, and I continued to stand there in my spotless whites like a wraith. I tried to wash some of the dishes piling up in the sink, but then the dishwasher showed up and I was relieved of that task as well. I was reminded of making borshch with Oksana—she had to make me feel like I was doing something, but that something had to minimize my involvement so I could screw up as little as possible. Huge smiles and nods of acknowledgment came my way every time someone passed me, but our interaction ended there.
At six, the ticket machine began to whir with new orders. “Poshla khuyachina,” Misha sighed. “And the fuckness begins.”
Misha, who was from Russia, d
idn’t join the others for smoke breaks; he’d installed a pull-up bar over a doorframe in the basement and heaved himself up and down until he heard the order machine croak to life, whereupon he told the machine to go fuck its mother and reluctantly relinquished the bar. With swearing he was as profligate as he was chaste about the rest.
Sasha was different: Ukrainian, dark-haired, and he didn’t curse at the order machine. I thought Sasha and I could be allies because his soft-spokenness meant he was the butt of the kitchen’s vitriol. On my first evening, as I listened to Nikita haranguing him because it was almost seven and Sasha still hadn’t finished a new round of a beets-and-herring nostalgia dish, I proposed to peel and dice some of the beets to help out.
“Nah, everything’s normal,” Sasha said phlegmatically as a bunched hand towel hit his face from the other side of the kitchen. “Well, what the fuck,” he said matter-of-factly. If Misha was irritable and combative, Sasha moved as viscously as the dressing he dolloped onto the Esenguly salad (dates, Napa cabbage, carrots, orange slices, scallion, and pistachios; Nikita’s grandparents came from Central Asia). But they all swore. They were united in swearing.
A restaurant kitchen is a place of great, joyous hate. Hate for the owners, who don’t understand what the cooks need. Hate for the servers, who always show up at the wrong time. Hate for the diners, who have the temerity to actually order. And hate for one another—for Sasha, who never defended himself when Nikita and Misha flung insults and towels; for Misha, who seemed maniacally focused when it was busy and simply uptight the rest of the time; for Nikita, who failed to understand how lucky he was to have the sous-chefs he did. Only I didn’t seem worth hating. I knew enough to know that a new body in a kitchen is welcomed by fire: You’re abused and, if you last, you become family. I had feared, but expected, the abuse. What I didn’t expect was that being the Writer would render me ineligible for it. I was steered clear of, and even that without hostility. Perhaps for the first time in the history of restaurant shifts, I spent ten hours without a bead of sweat forming anywhere on my body.
That night, instead of crashing to sleep the usual way, I stared at the ceiling. I had even more lead in my legs when I went back for my shift the next day. I was there at two, as I had been told to be; Sasha and Misha came at three (big, dutiful nods) and Nikita (firm handshake) at four. By five, the previous day was repeating itself. Then something occurred to me: Was I being avoided not because I was The Writer, but because I was A Russian who had become An American? Not because they imagined I could offer little, but because they didn’t feel like they could tell me what to do? I was frightened of them. But they were frightened of me.
So I used the authority vested in me by the United States of America. On that second day, Nikita yelled at Sasha to get him peppers from the downstairs walk-in, even though Sasha was moated by mounds of cucumber and pomegranate seeds for the Shirazi salad (cucumbers, pomegranate seeds, grapes, honey, and hot pepper flakes, tossed with lime sesame oil). “I will get the peppers,” I said loudly. No one said anything—didn’t even look up. I turned around and sprinted down the stairs to the walk-in before anyone changed his mind. And when the machine spat out “potato pancakes,” I’d watched Misha make them enough times—and made them enough times with Oksana—that I was upstairs with the ingredients (two potatoes, one onion, one egg) before he’d had a chance to get to it. I nodded at the bowl, which he understood correctly to mean Okay? He shrugged: Why not. And so I grated and mixed them before handing the batter to Misha, though I was trying so hard that I shredded my knuckles on the grater and had to finish the job one-handed while my left knuckles bled into my jeans pocket, where no one would notice. Next time, Misha didn’t have to ask, and I didn’t tear up my knuckles. I knew how to make quite a few of the dishes, in fact—I’d learned them from Oksana. So that when a borshch order came in and the vat of borshch in the walk-in was discovered to have been there too long to pass muster, I said: “I’ll make the borshch.”
“Borshch umeyesh?” Nikita said skeptically. “You can make borshch?”
“Umeyu.” “I can.” (My heart beat madly all the same.)
“What else do you know how to make?”
“Bliny,” I said. “Yeast or no yeast.”
“Honey cake?” he said.
“If you show me,” I said.
“Nu, tak, svoi chelovek,” Nikita said, his face broadening into its giant-baby smile—“So, one of ours”—and my heart nearly flew out of its cage. That night, I soaked through my apron and the shirt underneath it before dinner rush had even gotten going.
Cooking food in a restaurant is not that different from cooking at home, except for the speed with which you must do it while minding a slew of other time-sensitive tasks, all in a very small, very hot kitchen. But that difference was my salvation. From 2:00 p.m. to midnight, my brain powered down to survival mode. Just as at the farm, the kitchen wasted my body but loaded my mind with a numb stillness. The restaurant entered the week’s rotation: Wednesday and Thursday there, Monday and Friday with Oksana, the weekend at the farm, and one slow day I killed waiting for the others to start.
Soon I was assigned to the family meals for the staff at shift’s end. It felt like a lovely, accurate term for people who were swearing at each other just moments ago, but who also shared an intimate duty. I joined the family in other ways: Nikita asked me to rewrite the menu; Sasha asked me to find him a bride; and when, one night, I greeted the first chirp of the ticket machine with a distracted “Khuyachina!”—Fuckness!—the entire kitchen (even Misha, who was last to let go of his suspicions of me) broke out in a roar of banging tongs, knives, and spatulas, the Haitian dishwasher staring at us with confusion and pity. No, Nikita and I probably wouldn’t have much to say over a beer in the backyard of the new suburban house he had just so proudly bought in New Jersey in anticipation of his first child. But that moment, then—that, no one could deny us as equally true. You did not have to go all Russian or all American. You could pick and choose. Notably, the iPhone doesn’t have an emoji for “chagrin,” but all the same, I wrote Alana—she who had insisted on the validity of picking and choosing her Judaism all those years ago, to my fundamentalist condescension—and she had the graciousness to be happy for me.
I began to sleep deeply, but this wasn’t the obliterating unconsciousness of before. Every night, my brain sent up dreams my analyst laconically announced we could spend a year taking apart. By then, like consecutive life sentences, we’d racked up enough year-worthy dreams to take us through two lifetimes. Maybe he kept forgetting that he’d already said that; he was no longer very young, and half our appointments began with his surprise at seeing me on the other side of his door. But the other half went well past the end mark without his resort to the false apology of “I’m afraid time’s up.” He was the only therapist I’d ever met who did not do it by the book, and even if, by his own admission, he had a liability—“I get parental,” he said—arguably it was exactly the sin that I needed. (It was with him that I understood about Yvonne, about Amy.) A surrogate mother in the form of my grandfather’s home aide; a surrogate father in my semi-senile analyst; and three demented stepsiblings in a hot Russian kitchen—I was finding my way to some kind of new home.
Chapter 16
May 2015
What to cook when your son is making a mistake
The restaurant had music every night. On Thursday nights, the same young woman sang “Miss You” and “Valerie” and “Ooh La La,” refitted for a lounge setting. She was dishearteningly attractive, and I wanted to be different about all that, so I just hid out in the kitchen and snuck looks through its porthole windows, though I wouldn’t let anyone else take the trash out on Thursdays. (You had to walk through the restaurant, as there was no back entrance.)
Several months had passed since my lowest point: I could pound out two ten-hour shifts in the kitchen, then spend the weekend at the farm tearing up weeds using a manual antique Amish plow and crawling around
for hours in the rising heat, planting two thousand lettuce heads. And the things that hadn’t gone back to normal felt just as important: I was less garrulous, in that performative way I had been; my views on what made friendship friendship had changed and stayed that way.
As these blasts of self-illumination arrived, as often in the kitchen as in the analyst’s office—and often in the kitchen as a delayed reaction to what had been discussed in the analyst’s office, and vice versa—suddenly scales that had been up for decades fell away. I heard myself, in real time, trying to make Nikita laugh, though my heart wasn’t in it; trying to get the analyst to agree; trying to be good at something I didn’t care about.
It seemed important that, throughout this time, I had not thought of women. (Other women; Amy never left my thoughts.) Perhaps noticing the singer was progress—I was ready to meet someone new. Except that I was noticing her for the same old reasons—she was attractive, and therefore someone to impress. Even I had gained enough self-understanding to notice myself starting to perform in moments like these, to understand that being attracted to and being interested in someone—an elementary, obvious distinction that had taken an eternity for me to grasp—were different things. I hung in this ambivalence, taking the garbage out on Thursdays far more often than necessary and then scurrying back to the kitchen.
One Thursday, I wasted a bag-half-full garbage outing—she wasn’t even in the dining room. But that was because she was outside, talking to Seth’s partner. He called me over, and I made the approach that I always want to make to an attractive woman—in a cook’s apron smeared with entrails and a garbage bag filled with a restaurant’s worst.
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