by Zhanna Slor
“You definitely can’t burn my clothes,” I tell her, trying to diffuse the tension. “I don’t even have enough money for groceries, let alone a new wardrobe. This shirt is like five years old.”
“That’s my shirt,” Margot says, glancing up at my top, a dark gray v-neck with a tiny pocket. “I got it last year at Salvation Army.”
“Oh,” I say. “Well, in that case, it’s probably more than five years old.”
“It’s the only way to get rid of it! Our whole house is probably infected,” Abby whines. She looks back and forth between us with skepticism. “I can’t believe you guys aren’t more supportive.” Her lower lip, which is cartoonishly larger than the top one, so much that you could always see a stretch of cigarette-stained teeth, droops down like a permanent pout. But her eyes, they are wild with excitement. Or no, that’s probably Adderall. We’ve been ingesting a lot of that stuff lately. Half the dollar bills in my wallet are still covered with orange powder at the tips, which has made for some uncomfortable interactions with the baristas at Fuel.
“Fine, don’t believe me,” Abby sulks. “You’ll see soon enough when you wake up itchier than you’ve ever been in your life.” Then she walks off without closing the door.
I get up to close it, then Margot finally looks up from her book. She and I exchange wide-eyed glances.
“God, some people are really hard to live with,” Margot says.
“Isn’t it funny how the people who complain about you not being supportive enough are the ones who totally disappear when you need something?” I ask. “One time I called Abby to pick me up from school when there was a blizzard, and she didn’t even answer her phone. For the rest of the week.”
“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Margot says flatly. Then she goes back to her textbook, now onto Andy Warhol, the beginning of the end. When art becomes a question instead of an answer. Personally, I would prefer the latter; isn’t life confusing enough without every person trying to decide if something is transcending its own nature? A toilet is a toilet. A chair is a chair. If you think the majority of people can distinguish whether a photo or an object is successful based on the artist’s intentions, then you’ve never been to a DMV. “You know that you don’t have to be friends with everyone who asks you to hang out, right? You’re not in high school anymore.”
I ignore her. I do know that. Don’t I? Sure, a part of me will always be that girl eating alone in the art room—or, okay, the girls’ bathroom on days before the art room became an option. But that’s why I spend all my time when I’m not here in Riverwest. Riverwest is like ten blocks of people who ate lunch in their school bathrooms.
“Of course I know that. Abby has good qualities, too,” I reply, unequivocally.
“Like what?” Margot scoffs, not looking up. She is far more interested in her book now that actual skill has been replaced by a cartoonish attempt at existential thought. Andy Warhol. Jackson Pollack. Ugh. I mean, sure, paint a can of soup, but can’t you at least make it look good? “Besides her ability to find every hippie in a two-mile radius?”
“She’s sweet. She has a good heart,” I shrug. “I think she just legit has ADD.” Absentmindedly, I glance back at my MySpace messages. Nothing new, as I expected. That note from Zoya is like a pulsating neon sign in my mind. I know this woman is probably only interested in my nonexistent funds, but I can’t help wondering if there’s something else to it. I also find myself slightly jealous of her: she’s in Chernovtsy, the place I’ve been missing since I began missing things. I know this doesn’t make sense, I was only three when we moved and I’ve spent almost my whole life in Wisconsin. But sometimes being from Ukraine is the only thing that feels real to me. Even before she messaged, I was thinking about trying to go back there, maybe studying abroad or something.
“If she had ADD, then Adderall would calm her down, not make her even more restless,” Margot explains. “Not that I’m a doctor or anything.”
Before I can argue, there’s a knock on the door.
“Yes?” I say.
A pair of tattooed hands, which read Hard Rain across eight knuckles, push the door open. Our other roommate August sticks his head in, followed by the rest of his body: his long, copper-colored hair curly and matted, a dimpled grin, ropy muscles bursting out of a tight beige shirt. August looks so much like Elijah Wood’s Frodo we’ve gone as Hobbits for two Halloweens in a row. “Anna! I’ve been calling you! Your dad is downstairs.”
I look again at my phone but don’t see any missed calls. He leans into the room more, followed by a pleasant musty smell combined with bicycle grease from the shop where he works, or possibly one of the fixed gear bikes he’s repairing at home. “He seems really annoyed. He hates me, Anna.”
“He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t even know you,” I explain. “He just doesn’t like that you’re not the same gender as me.”
“Come on, Anna. Dude is scary. Wasn’t he in the KGB?”
“No, he had friends in the KGB.”
“Whatever. I’m not going back out there until he’s gone.”
“All right. I’m coming, I’m coming,” I tell him.
“Has Abby started herself on fire yet?” Margot asks him with a laugh.
“Not yet,” he answers, shaking his head. “I told that crazy chica to stop snorting so much shit up her nose, but she never listens to me.”
“That’s not limited to you,” Margot grunts. “I don’t think she listens to anyone.”
“I heard that, you fuckers!” Abby’s voice yells from the other room.
I smile at August, then turn back towards the computer. No new messages. And why would there be? I never responded to Zoya and all my friends are currently within ten feet of me. Satisfied, I close Zoya’s message and log out of MySpace.
ANNA
________________
CHAPTER SEVEN
August is right; my dad is annoyed. Not that he tells me why. He doesn’t say a word the entire drive, which is fine, I guess, because it’s not as if I particularly want to talk to him. When he’s not actively telling me to get my life together and be more responsible, he’s thinking it silently. I guess it’s not enough I stopped painting so I could get this generic college degree, I have to be totally miserable while doing it.
A mere five blocks later my dad pulls into the parking lot of my grandparents’ subsidized apartment complex and double parks. Without looking up he asks, “Can you get them? Try to make it quick.” He starts typing something on his phone, a new “smart” one that is almost a computer. He’s like a little kid with a new video game, the way he hovers over that thing. I don’t know why but it’s embarrassing. I mean, who does he need to email so urgently anyway? With the exception of CIA agents, who does anyone need to email that urgently? Maybe he is a CIA agent? That sure would make me like him more.
“Quick?” I ask him, with exaggerated shock. “Have you met your parents?”
“I said try.”
“There is no try, only do,” I say in a gravelly voice, then laugh. It forces my dad to look up and attempt a smile, but only for a second. Immediately after, he starts typing again. It makes me a little sad. We watched that entire movie series together, and now his phone is more interesting to him than me.
At least my dedushka is happy to see me. He is always happy to see me. Sometimes I visit just for a hit of his unconditional love to get out of a bad mood. “What brings you here?” he asks when I get upstairs. Confusion wrinkles the brows behind his thick, clear glasses, then quickly turns to excitement. “It’s so late.”
“What? It’s only five. We go to that party at Marik’s,” I explain in broken Russian. “Why you aren’t wearing clothes?”
Instead of answering my grandpa happily pulls me into the apartment, where the television is blasting Russian news. He struggles with the remote, pressing at least five or ten buttons that I can tell even from here do not control the sound, if it’s the right remote at all. I wal
k over and press the power button on top.
“So. What’s new in Putin-land?” I ask, jokingly, when it’s quiet.
My grandpa—a man who has survived a concentration camp, the Russian army, and entire decades of near starvation—shrugs now in the face of Russia. “Oh, who cares? It’s not our problem anymore,” Dedushka says. Then why are you always watching the Russian news? I want to ask, but don’t. He looks behind him toward the open doorway to their bedroom, a small barrier of wooden beads hanging over the tiny hallway.
“Mila! Anastasia is here!” He tells me to sit down—“sadeece, sadeece”—and points at the couch. But for the last decade and a half, the couch has been covered entirely by various old, itchy rugs they’d, like nearly everything inside, brought with them from Ukraine. I do not particularly enjoy sitting on twenty-five-year-old rugs, especially when they are being used as couch covers. Instead, I choose a chair by the small dining room table, the granite top cluttered with white doilies and crystal bowls also brought over from Ukraine. I drop my winter hat and coat on top of a pile of unopened mail, a stack of photos that came from one of my cousins. Because she has so many siblings, my grandma has many nieces and nephews, and they are all starting to have children, a fact she never lets me forget for a moment, even though I’m barely nineteen and very single.
My grandpa, his bald forehead now perspiring from sweat, yells for a second time, “Mila, Anastasia’s here!”
“Dedushka, we have to go. Why aren’t you ready?”
My grandma finally waddles out in a paisley robe, looking half-asleep and smelling like old unwashed clothes. She sits down on the rug-covered couch and immediately asks me when I’m going to get married. Her thin white hair is matted, as if she just woke up, which can’t be true, at five PM. “I want grandchildren!” she says, melodramatically.
“You have grandchildren,” I say, pointing to myself.
“I’m old! I’m going to die soon!” my grandma says.
“You’re not going to die soon,” I say in English. My babushka has a penchant for languages, knew five of them before moving here, and now she’s the only one in the family above fifty who can technically understand me though most of the time she chooses not to. “I’m not going to start having babies with random people because you have a headache or whatever.”
“Did I say random people? You should only marry a Russian Jew,” Babushka continues to lament. This part she emphasizes as if she hasn’t been telling me the same thing my entire life. I still can’t understand why it’s so important to her. They may have a mezuzah next to their door now, but we don’t even celebrate Hanukkah. I find the concept of religion very creepy. Who needs more orders, let alone from made-up things who live in the sky? I have enough people telling me what to do, thank you very much. Unless it’s coming from Leonardo DiCaprio, and the order is to kiss him, I prefer to make my own decisions about whom to date.
“Leave her be!” my grandpa says, sitting down on the couch beside her.
“Did we move to America just to marry Russian Jews?” I ask, switching back to Russian, which gets better and better as it approaches a subject that it is so familiar with. “Why didn’t we stay in Chernovtsy, then?”
My grandpa starts to laugh but then stops himself when he sees my grandma’s face. She continues along in her speech, now on the part where everyone hates the Jews. It’s some version of this rant every time I see her. “Everyone. They all want us dead. Believe me, I know.”
“For the millionth time: this is America,” I sigh.
“It’s all the same everywhere,” my grandma continues, shaking her head. “Oh, you’ll see one day, Anastasia. Just because no one is trying to kill us now doesn’t mean they won’t again.” She stands, looking suddenly agitated, but doesn’t go to her room. Or take any clothes out of her closet. I am starting to see why my dad sent me up here instead of going himself. “Not that it matters to me. I already have one foot in the grave...but for you…”
“Mila!” my grandpa yells. “Enough!”
“It’s okay, Dedushka,” I sigh. “She’s allowed to have her own opinions.” It’s true, but I have wondered how their opinions could diverge so much on the same issue. Is my grandmother more stubborn, or does she merely have a better memory? My grandpa escaped a concentration camp on his own two feet, after watching his entire family die. Baba Mila spent most of the war hiding in a farmer’s shed. Not that it’s so much better to sleep on a pile of hay and wait anxiously to be caught, but you’d think of the two of them, my grandpa would be more pessimistic. The only reason for the disparity I’ve come up with is that maybe some people choose to hold on to their traumas while others throw them out like a worn-out coat. Maybe you can decide between it making you weaker or making you stronger. Or maybe the decision gets made without your input at all, and you have to live with that. The most traumatic thing that ever happened to me was moving to America, which is nothing in comparison. I don’t even remember it. Just the shadow of a feeling I can never put my finger on.
Babushka turns back to me, ignoring her husband of over fifty years. “Have you spoken to your uncle Pyotr lately? I’m supposed to be buried right next to my brother Nikolai, and he’s trying to take the spot from right under my nose. My own nephew!”
“That can’t possibly be true, Babushka,” I say. I stand up, and look towards her bedroom door, hoping she will get the hint. When she doesn’t, I take off my coat and place it on the chair. It’s close to eighty degrees in their apartment, so I might as well not pass out from heat exhaustion.
“It is true. You don’t care. You’ve forgotten all about us.”
“I didn’t forget,” I interject.
“Yes, you did. You’ve forgotten us old people. You’ve forgotten Russia,” she complains. “Good luck to you, devotchka. It won’t work. It’s in your soul forever, it doesn’t matter where you go. You may be in America now, but you cannot merely cut off your roots and continue to walk.” She looks away into nothingness then starts shaking her head in disbelief. I don’t entirely disagree with her on this point, so I stay silent. “In Russia, I was so happy. I had my whole life ahead of me. Now I just sit around waiting for death.”
The way she emphasizes the word death—smerta—makes me start laughing, I don’t know why; it’s not like I haven’t heard it before. I’ve heard it all before. I simply never realized how funny it is. I laugh so hard tears rush from my eyes. Only then do I remember I’m still a little high.
“Oh, she’s laughing at me now!” Grandma Mila says, staring straight ahead. “Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. I’m funny to her.”
“What a funny shootka, Baba,” I say, laughing even harder.
“I’m a joke now?” she asks, slowly, looking at my grandpa.
“No, Babushka, I said you made a joke. It was funny.”
“I’m a joke, she says.”
“That’s not what I said.”
My grandpa claps his hands together. “Mila, come on. Let’s get dressed.”
“Yes . . . I was happy in Russia,” she continues. “Even with Stalin, and the war, and all the lines.” She sits back down, swaying forward and backward, almost as if the last conversation didn’t even happen.
“Are you really missing Stalin, Babushka?” I’ve heard this all before, but I never fully considered what she was saying.
“Of course she isn’t,” my grandpa says, gruffly, no longer looking at either of us.
“We all thought he was a great man,” Baba Mila is saying, a hint of pride in her eyes.
“But you know that he wasn’t, right?” I ask, incredulous. I may suck at history, but they lived through this. Shouldn’t they remember?
“You wouldn’t understand,” she says, with a brief, disapproving glance at my unwashed hair and ripped jeans. “You weren’t there. You never had to wait in line for bread.”
“Mila,” my grandpa snaps. “Enough already!”
“You’re not happy here?” I pre
ss on. Sometimes I don’t know what she wants from me, except maybe to go back in time and be my age again. I’m sure it doesn’t help that they never leave their apartment and have nothing to do now that we don’t need them anymore. “You’d rather have Stalin?”
“Phoo. I’m not talking about Stalin,” Baba Mila grunts, even though she was indeed just talking about him. “You’re too young. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“When I was your age, I didn’t believe the old people either . . .” she says.
“Who did you know in the USSR that was eighty?” I’m no history buff, but I know it’s very unlikely she knew many people above sixty; not in her time anyway. Most who survived the war still died young from so many years of starvation and stress; and in our family, hardly anyone survived the war.
Babushka shakes her head. “Now I have one foot in the grave...”
“Mila!” my grandpa yells.
“What! We’re not newlyweds anymore, skipping down the beach!” she says.
Dedushka starts to laugh. “Ha! You, skipping down the beach? That’s something I’d like to see.”
I look at my grandpa. “Dedushka, are you not happy here?” I ask, suddenly really wanting to know.
He waves a hand in my direction, as if to say how can we be happy sitting around in this small, stinky apartment all day? But this blasé reaction doesn’t match what he says, which is, “Of course we are. Don’t listen to your grandma when she’s in this kind of mood.” Then he chuckles a little. “Stalin. Now that’s a name you don’t hear much anymore.”
“You don’t…” I search my brain for the right Russian vocabulary. “Prefer another city? Not here?”
“Where else would we go?” he asks, grinning again.
“Back to Ukraine?” I ask, even though this is a dumb question. I know that there is no going back to Ukraine, not the one we left anyway. That place no longer exists. The Soviet Union is gone. For as long as I could remember, home was a street I could never reach, other than in my dreams.
