Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  “Why didn’t she sing in front of you?” he says, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

  “She didn’t want me to know she had artistic tendencies, I guess.”

  “Who could blame her?” he says, and I smack him across the chest.

  I study his greasy blond hair and neck tattoo and tattered, oversized long-sleeved shirt, and think, She would have hated you. But then I feel it, just a little bit, that old stirring, maybe even because I thought Mama would have hated him. I didn’t even think I had a real body anymore, not one that wanted things, but here I am, feeling shy all of a sudden. And who could blame me, when I spend all my time either with a baby or this fuckboy? That’s it, I decide, I need some time with Yuri before I go crazy. As soon as Stas leaves, I’ll go to the bathroom, get myself off, and forget about it. And besides, I’m pretty sure the weirdness is just coming from me, that he doesn’t think of me like that, and shouldn’t.

  He clears his throat and looks all serious and takes two steps toward me. I freak out until he picks up his phone to film me and I remember why he’s here. “Are you ready?” he says. “You’re gonna kill it, sis.”

  But I’m not thinking of Sinister Sister right then. I stumble through the audition, but I’m thinking of Mama the whole time. Why did I tell Stas about her singing to begin with? I never even told Yuri about that strange night, or what I learned about her after that.

  * * *

  —

  After Mama died, I celebrated the New Year at home with Papa in front of the TV, eating stale Russian chocolates and snacking on the blini and chicken cutlets some family friends put in our freezer after the funeral. Mama had been gone what, three weeks? A month? For the first year it felt like it had happened the day before, so it was hard to say, but it was fucking recent, our wounds were wide-open and gangrenous, and yet there we sat, Papa saying he was feeling hopeful about my college applications, though the look on his face, which was completely gray, his eyes just two swollen little mounds, did not exactly signify hope. And who was I to tell him that those apps were all for Mama, that I would turn them in just to delay the inevitable but that there was no fucking way I could make it through four years of school?

  Though I had kind of been suppressing the memory of that night on the back patio, maybe because I had convinced myself I had dreamed it or because it felt so much like it didn’t belong to this world, that bringing it up would make it combust or something, I couldn’t think of anything else to say to my father. I needed to say something, because though he had been pretty depressed since I could remember, since Mama’s death, he had reached a new low. He had stopped taking care of himself and it was amazing he had managed to grade final papers, with my help. Maybe I thought asking him about it could distract him, in a good way.

  “Hey, Papa? How come I never knew Mama was such a good singer?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I heard Mama singing a few months ago. And it was so beautiful. But when I asked her about it, she acted like I was crazy. What was that about?”

  Papa sighed and unwrapped another chocolate. “You must have been dreaming.”

  “That’s what Mama said. But I’m not crazy. I know what I heard.”

  “Your mother could sing,” he said slowly. “There was no doubt about that.” And then what he said next was so shocking that I would have been less surprised if he had revealed Mama had been a mermaid all along. “When I met your mother, she wanted to be a star,” he said. He even managed a thin little smile when he said it. “Can you believe it?” he said, and I just sat there with my mouth hanging open. “You should have seen her then—thick mascara, long flowing dresses, earrings with heavy fake jewels…” I had never seen such a photograph of my mother. All the ones I saw featured her looking stern and makeupless, her hair pulled back tightly, a matron by the time she and Papa married when they were twenty.

  Papa told me that Mama had tried to make it as a singer, back in Kiev, but it never quite worked out. That maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was just a tough business, or maybe, as she suspected, she was just too Jewish for the job, that her big nose, while I thought it was the most striking thing about her, made her look too distinct, too un-Russian, so nobody wanted to hear her voice. “But then you were born, darling, and she went to school and became an accountant eventually, and that was that. Do not feel sorry—she loved you, you were the greatest joy of her life. But when she saw you trying your acting business, well, you can imagine, she did not want you to have your heart broken.”

  “Why didn’t she just tell me that?”

  “Because you and your mother are of a kind, darling. Too stubborn for your own good,” Papa said.

  The ball had dropped while we were talking and we didn’t even notice. It was after midnight, and we both knew there would be a cold, long year ahead. I had so many questions for him, but I knew it was not the time to ask them, that there would never be a good time to ask. Maybe, even, I was better off not knowing the subtext of all my fights with Mama, who, with her stylish but conservative clothes, tamed hair, and sharp eyes, could not have seemed less like a former aspiring singer. Maybe because she had tried to seem as unartistic as possible to discourage me from trying to be anything but ordinary, to keep me from the onslaught of disappointment that would come when my big, bloated dreams fell flat.

  “Too stubborn,” Papa mumbled, his eyes growing heavy. “Too beautiful.”

  * * *

  —

  Yuri and I barely manage to make it out for our first real date night, which is, of course, at the Lair. He had some fancier ideas, but I turned him down, insisting that we didn’t need to go to some dumb new sushi place in the Village we couldn’t afford anyway; I just wanted to get out of the house, with him, and would have been happy going to Gray’s fucking Papaya. When we walk in the door, dripping with early July sweat, the scent of the Devil’s Lair takes me back to a time when I was exhausted but excited about the big, glowing world. I’d get off work at three, four in the morning, and walk five blocks home in Toms, holding my heels, feeling like I was doing something big, like I was part of something. And now here it is: the scent of old red wine and the greasy kitchen food, and then Mel, who hangs up his towel and walks over to our side of the bar and gives me a big hug—it’s only the second time I’ve seen him since Tally was born—and then shakes Yuri’s hand.

  “Big Mama,” he says. “How are you?”

  “Tired.”

  “Well, you look good.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Mel.”

  “I’m doing nothing of the kind, girl. I have four myself, so I know how it is,” he says to Yuri. “Drinks?”

  “Please,” I say, and then we take a seat at the bar and shoot the shit as he pours a glass of wine for me and a beer for Yuri, but Mel knows to leave us alone. I spot two regulars: Scotty, a retired elementary school teacher and alcoholic, and Isabella, who works at Yard Sale, a bar a few blocks away, but refuses to drink in the place where she works on principle. I’d been at the Lair for the last four years, and it was by far the classiest of the bars where I had worked, a place with frayed red lamps and paintings of women in lingerie and fake candles and soft pop in the background, a place to take your mistress. I got the job when I moved in with Yuri to the rent-controlled apartment he’d lived in for a decade and I never looked back. Before that, I worked at Tequila Predator in Murray Hill, a post-college douche bro bar with a table for beer pong and even an N64 setup in the back to boot, and I hated it almost as much as the endless subway ride to Inwood. But that wasn’t nearly as bad as No Satisfaction, a place true to its name in Astoria where I worked after I dropped out of NYU after one semester, where the manager didn’t care that I didn’t have my license but knew it would make it hard for me to leave and cupped my ass one too many times as a result. Compared to all that, the Lair was basically heaven. I was sad to quit when I got too pregna
nt to stand on my feet for that long.

  “This is a nice place,” I say, and Yuri laughs. “What?” I say. “I mean, it’s nice, for a bar.” When he keeps laughing, I say, “I’m sorry. We should have gone—”

  “No, no, who needed to schlep downtown? I don’t care, I just want to see you. I’m just laughing because you just said it like—like this was Versailles or something.”

  “Maybe it was, to me,” I say, though I have never been to any country but America and Ukraine. I’m already feeling the first glass hitting me, hard, and I order another round and some food because it takes about an hour to get even a grilled cheese. When I take a few sips of my second drink, the room is practically spinning, though that is likely from exhaustion and not the fact that I haven’t had more than one glass of wine in about a year.

  “Man, I am so fucking tired.”

  “Me, too,” Yuri says, cheersing me with his beer. “Though not, of course, like you.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  He sighs, looking hurt. “Hey, ouch.”

  “Ouch yourself.”

  “I just feel like I still do thirty percent of the work and am treated like I do zero.” And it’s true, he does do some shit around the house, like cleaning the litter box, hauling all the diapers to the trash, and so on, but it hardly registers.

  “I think you do twenty percent of the work and I treat you like you do ten.”

  “How about we agree I do about twenty-five percent and you treat me like I do fifteen.”

  “Deal,” I say, taking another gulp of my wine. “I can’t believe I actually thought this would be kind of like taking care of the cat. I mean, I know I wouldn’t just, like, brush her and feed her and change the litter box once a day. I’m not an idiot, but I just thought babies nap the whole time, and I don’t know, I thought I’d just get—a moment to breathe. And people are like, It gets better, it gets better, but I feel like the longer she’s here, the worse I feel, because my gas tank is running more and more empty….”

  “About that,” he says, taking a cautious sip of his beer.

  “Oh no. I should have seen this. When I said I wanted a date night, I thought you got excited because you wanted to see me, not because you wanted to have a talk.”

  “Can’t we have a date night that includes a talk?”

  “A talk on the theme of…”

  Yuri sighs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drink more than two beers in a row, so he must also be feeling it. “Look,” he says, “I don’t think it’s too late for you to go to school. I don’t mean this fall, but maybe in the spring? You’ve always loved taking care of animals and, well, I’m not saying you should go to vet school, but you can get an associate’s degree, you can work as an assistant to a vet or at a pet daycare—”

  “Why can’t I go to vet school?” I say, and he smiles, because he thinks this line of questioning, instead of What the fuck are you talking about, shows that I have some interest in his idiot plan.

  “What?”

  “You said, blah, blah, associate’s degree, so why not vet school?”

  He smiles. “Well, first you need a bachelor’s degree to apply, and then, it’s very competitive—”

  “You don’t think I’m smart enough.”

  “No, no, that came out wrong. It would just take, what, at least eight years before you made any money, and it’s a lot of long nights studying—”

  “You’re not helping your case, Shulman.”

  “Then please help me take my foot out of my mouth. Okay, forget what I said about vet school, and just listen to me. I just think it would be good for you, for us, to have another plan that doesn’t involve going back to the Lair. You love Sharik, you loved all those other pets, you even cat-sat to make some extra money in high school, no?”

  “I love the Lair. What’s wrong with the Lair? On Friday and Saturday nights, I’d walk out of here with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. And I made that and more doing voiceover work. How much does it pay to—take the temperature of some cat up the ass? Probably a lot less than that.”

  “Definitely less, but it’s a path to a more stable future. Do you want to work at the Lair when you’re fifty?”

  “I would fucking love nothing more than to work here right now, instead of changing diapers and getting my tits ravaged,” I say, and my voice is so loud that Mel even raises a brow. “And I can always do voiceover work.”

  “When you can find it.”

  I close my eyes, willing myself not to cry. So fine, The Americans is over, and nobody else has been begging me to speak Russian in the background of their show for thirty bucks an hour, but I’ll get another break eventually. I think of my poor mother again, singing in the fucking backyard during her last months on Earth. And then I think of Stas, who is back at home while Tally is sleeping. He would never tell me to clean cat shit for a job.

  “I know you’ve given up on me having a career,” I say. “But I haven’t, all right? I’m just in a low period because of the pregnancy and the baby, but I’m not ancient yet.”

  “I didn’t say I’ve given up. I believe in you. I’m not trying to be the bad guy here. But I’m just saying—think about it, all right? If not this year, maybe the next, when things are more stable with Talia?”

  “Sure,” I say, hoping my eyes communicate how pissed I am, because I don’t want to make a scene. “I’ll think about it.”

  He gets up to go to the bathroom, knowing I need to be left alone for a minute, and I really do, I need to remember why I’m on this fucking date to begin with, remember why Yuri is the love of my life, instead of just someone who seems to want to bring me down, to turn me into some boring person I didn’t sign up to be. How did this happen?

  * * *

  —

  Yuri had been about as far from my life of acting and bartending as you could get, a physicist, a former student of my father’s and his favorite companion. They went fishing together on Lake George during the summers, fucking fishing, a weird, boring-seeming activity I didn’t criticize because it gave my depressed father a kind of peace, because he would come home after these trips looking a bit lovesick, so why make fun of him? Papa made courtship-related hints about Yuri, though he was aware he was not exactly my type; it was obvious Yuri had a crush on me, that anytime we made eye contact, he would blush and stutter and once, when Papa invited him to dinner and even made an elaborate lasagna to try to stimulate romantic feelings between us, Yuri clinked his wineglass so hard with mine that it shattered, shards scattering into the meal and dispelling any potential love feelings on my end, though I did feel plenty of pity. But on the afternoon of Papa’s funeral reception, when I saw this actually quite handsome man in his ill-fitting suit approaching me with love and pity in his sweet eyes, it was like stepping into a warm lake after spending decades getting manhandled by tidal waves.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he had said, extending a bouquet toward me. “Your father was an incredible man. I wouldn’t have survived graduate school without him.”

  “I wouldn’t have survived—well, anything, without him. Though I guess I have to now,” I said, feeling awkward for some reason, though I never felt awkward around Yuri before, I always saw him as a cousin, someone I could go braless around. Maybe it was because he was dressed up, I don’t know. Maybe because I was at the beginning of a life without my dear father. My poor bumbling father, whose hand I could still feel at the top of my head, sometimes.

  “I can help you, you know. If you need someone to—take you back to your place at the end of this,” he said.

  I paused, impressed by his boldness. Finally, some life! Was he really hitting on me at this moment? But he tried to walk it back.

  “Only to help with the flowers, of course,” he said. “I don’t mean to say that I was trying to, well—look, I know what you think of me, of
course I’m not attempting anything, what I mean is, you have a lot of flowers here and I know you don’t drive and I’m sure you’ve had a very long day….”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said, “you know what I think of you. I myself may not be so sure.”

  He looked stricken for a hot second, but then he smiled and said he’d find me later. It had been a year or two since I saw him. Now he was a real professor at a community college in the Bronx. He just got a tenure-track job, which was impressive, according to my dad, who never got tenure, in the end, and maybe this made old Yuri more self-assured. Hours later, he did drive me home, all those flowers in the backseat of his little Buick, which was not fancy but clean and respectable. And he stayed for a while, we even drank some wine. I knew he was a proper man, that he would not come on to me after my father’s funeral, so I had to do all the fucking work. So when we drained the bottle, actually a very nice bottle I had been given by the unfunny comedian as an attempt to patch things up after I complained he never spent any money on me, I forced myself on him, kiss-wise, and he gave in to it, and it was a nice, chaste but not unpleasant kiss—if his Buick could kiss, that’s what it would have felt like.

  He said good night after that like a proper boy, but he asked if he could take me out when I was ready. I remembered something Papa said about Yuri dating a nice Jewish girl, though I might have imagined it, but when I asked if he was seeing someone he said he was not. I called him a week later, and he continued to surprise me with his wit and sexual competence and sweetness throughout the impressively long—for me—one-year courtship that led me to move in with him, the longest I had ever dated anyone before moving in. A year after that, we were married, and then three years later, which was the longest I could stave Yuri off, I got pregnant with Talia at thirty-six. So after all the fighting with Mama and the drummers and musicians and older men I would torture her with in high school and the binge drinking and everything else, I was married to a respectable university professor and had a daughter on the way, living the life she would have wanted for me, and it was too bad she wasn’t there to say I told you so.