The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Tatyana was also an object lesson in what happens to perfectionists who register with finality that they are laboring toward the unachievable. It’s an all-or-nothing mind-set, and, almost gleefully, Tatyana chose nothing. Still commuting to Hunter, Irina was home the night her sister announced that she’d quit, and would never forget watching that tiny girl prepare herself a massive plate of spaghetti. Their mother was horrified, but Irina thought it was glorious, half a pound of pasta slipping strand by strand down that painfully slender throat. Tatyana had wrested victory from the totality of her defeat, overthrowing not only her mother but herself.

  She proceeded to renounce not only dance and hunger, but worldly ambition of any description. She wanted a husband, and she got one, within the year—a nice-looking second-generation Russian from the neighborhood, who worked construction. She wanted kids, and she got those, too—now ten and twelve. She wanted all the bagels, birthday cake, and borscht that she had denied herself for two decades, and had been making up for lost time ever since. Irina had always felt a little sorry for Tatyana’s husband, Dmitri, a quiet man with an air of bewilderment. His wife had leapt the species barrier—from bird, to cow.

  You’d expect the younger girl’s fall from grace to alienate their mother’s affections. Rather: whereas first Tatyana flattered by imitation, now she flattered by contrast, and was thus seamlessly stitched up as the daughter closer to her mother’s heart.

  Irina supposed that Tatyana was probably happier having turned her back on dance, as many people would probably be happier if they stopped torturing themselves with the American obligation to have a “dream.” Yet these perfectionist types never change their stripes altogether, and Tatyana had embraced domesticity with the same extremity as she had ballet. She was eternally quilting, canning, baking, upholstering, and knitting sweaters that nobody needed. Her officious conduct of motherhood gave off that whiff of defensive self-righteousness characteristic of contemporary stay-at-home moms. She was stifling, fussy, and overprotective, for if children were to redeem her existence, they would redeem it with a vengeance.

  Today’s celebration was bound to be classic: her sister would completely take over, and bustle in with an overkill of presents, side dishes, wreaths, and dopey little hats. It would have been more efficient by half had they all simply gone over to Tatyana’s rather than having her cart all the dinner things here, but she’d lately conceived a mawkish sentimentality about “Christmas at home,” at curious odds with their upbringing of third-degrees over an unwashed water glass and plate-by-plate disinheritance of that cobalt china.

  Tatyana would have been briefed on the phone—she and Raisa spoke without fail every day—so when she soldiered up the walk laden with carrier bags she wouldn’t have done a double-take on encountering Ramsey, smoking on the stoop. Immediately drafted into toting foil-covered dishes and peerlessly wrapped packages, he schlepped in silence without complaint, but his expression evidenced a growing how-did-I-get-here? dismay.

  Irina helped slip dishes into the fridge, aghast to discover that her sister had made an authentic kulebiaka, decorated with a bramble of holly leaves and berries made of dough; the complex salmon-mush encased in pastry took the better part of a day to prepare. Her personal view that a nice salmon fillet artfully underdone and sauced not only took a fraction of the time but tasted better by a yard she kept tactfully to herself.

  “Irina, I was blown away by your news,” Tatyana whispered in the shelter of the refrigerator door. “Mama may be scandalized, but I think your having finally left Lawrence is fantastic. I couldn’t say so while you two were together, but honestly, I found him insufferable. So condescending! He treated me with scorn, just because I don’t publish in the Wall Street Journal and happen to make a mean Charlotte Russe. Such a know-it-all! Always going on about some impenetrable whathaveyou in Afghanistan, when really, who cares?”

  “I can see why you wouldn’t share his interests,” said Irina cautiously. “But when he went on like that, it was because he was genuinely excited about the topic.”

  “Chush,” Tatyana dismissed. “He was a show-off. And he was cold. You’re Russian. You need to be with someone who has soul.”

  Irina had to watch what she said, after last night, and spoke under her breath. “I don’t think Lawrence was—is, since he’s not dead—I don’t think he’s cold.” (In point of fact, Irina said instead, Ya nye dumayu shto on kholodny, not taking any chances.)

  “Come on, you don’t have to defend him anymore! He treated you like a child. Telling you what to do all the time, never letting you finish a sentence. And he didn’t seem to have the least understanding of what it means to be an artist.”

  “He never encouraged me to be pretentious, if that’s what you mean.” Though it should have been heartening to garner support for her rash switcheroo, her sister’s unsuspected dislike for Lawrence was surprisingly hurtful.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet, but Ramsey seems very nice.”

  “Yes, well,” said Irina, “a lot of people think that when they first meet him.”

  “He is nice, isn’t he? You married him!”

  “Of course!” Irina backpedaled. Though if “nice” covered keeping your wife up until six a.m. with monotonous, unrelenting accusations mortifyingly audible to her mother, the label didn’t mean much.

  Once the pirozhki were browned in the oven, the two sisters, from a childhood of collusion in such matters, immediately washed and dried the pan, frantically whisked crumbs from the counter, and picked the odd flake of crust off the floor with a wetted forefinger, ensuring that none of these remnants clung to the trap of the sink. When they brought the little meat pies to the parlor on a tray, Tatyana’s two kids were perched rigidly on the edges of their seats. Subdued and overfed, the kids didn’t dare to scuff their shoes against the carpet or knock the chair legs with their heels in the fidgeting of normal children. As Raisa asked about their schoolwork, they received each question with the seized, mind-blank terror of a six-syllable word in a spelling bee.

  Dmitri had already broken out the bottle of frozen vodka that, however requisite at any Russian feast, Irina would not personally have selected for her husband’s breakfast. Moreover, Ramsey and Dmitri’s extensive parsing of the comparative merits of Stolichnaya, Absolut, and Grey Goose played to an impression whose seeds Ramsey had already mischievously sown with his mother-in-law. He was surely dying for a fag, which would drive him to knock back those shots with edgy rapidity.

  After Tatyana foisted plates of pirozhki on everyone but Raisa, she settled next to Ramsey, who promptly beelined to the one subject that the rest of the family took pains to avoid. “Irina said you was a dancer, and then turned your back on the whole kit.”

  “That’s right,” said Tatyana tightly, fussing with a crust.

  “She said as well you was dead talented.”

  “Well, that was decent of her. But I obviously wasn’t talented enough.”

  Most people would have seen a veritable sign blinking by then, SORE POINT! SORE POINT! and moved quickly elsewhere. But snooker banter excepted, Ramsey had little time for empty chitchat, and plowed determinedly on. “I didn’t get the idea that was the problem. Bristols, wunnit?”

  “Cockney rhyming slang,” Irina provided at a distance. “Bristol Cities equals titties.”

  “I suppose if I were really ambitious,” said Tatyana aloofly, “I could have had them surgically reduced.”

  “But how does it feel now you let it go? Ever kick yourself, like? How you should have tried harder?”

  “No, come to think of it,” said Tatyana, turning fully toward Ramsey at last and putting down her pirozhok. “When I gave up ballet, a tremendous weight lifted from me, and everything suddenly seemed relaxing and simple. I love the arts, but if you look at what the arts themselves celebrate, it’s often the sweetness of ordinary life. Mealtimes and children and sunsets on the boardwalk. So it stands to reason that if there’s any point to the art
s, then your life itself is the most important artwork of all…”

  Irina marveled from across the room as, egged on by Ramsey, Tatyana went on at fervid length. Christ, she usually blithered about renovations to their en suite bathroom. Finally she must have caught herself at seeming impolite, though it was clearly an effort to relinquish the limelight.

  “But Ramsey,” she said. “Tell me more about yourself. My mother says you’re a professional pool hustler?”

  “You could say that,” he said, saluting the absurd thumbnail with another shot.

  “Oh, you could not,” said Irina, crossing to their chairs. “Cut it out.”

  “I think it sounds exciting!” said Tatyana breathlessly. “You know, sort of underworld—shadowy and dark.”

  “If you’ve been getting the lowdown from Mama, you don’t mean shadowy, you mean shady. Which Ramsey is not. Look, my dear, I wish you would—”

  “The wife wants me to announce straight-out like that I’m famous. She don’t seem to twig that your proper celebrity never ponces round some punter’s sitting room and declares how bleeding famous he is. She wants me to sound like a prat.”

  “What’s a prat?” peeped Nadya, the ten-year-old.

  “A pillock,” Ramsey explained. “A wanker. A complete and utter donut.”

  “How do you sound like a donut?” asked Nadya. “They don’t make any noise!”

  “Oh, yes they do!” cried Ramsey, reaching over to swoop the little girl out of her chair before she knew what hit her, dangling her over his head. “They say, ‘Oi, I’m a top-sixteen snookers player, mate, you better treat me like I’m important!’ ”

  A shock wave went through the room—unaccustomed to the intrusion of a little life—as Ramsey twirled the girl overhead so that her legs spun out, coming perilously close to the samovar. Nadya laughed—a sound that, from Nadya, Irina may never have heard before. Irina smiled; she knew what it was like with those long fingers braced around your ribcage, dangling two feet off the floor. It occurred to her wistfully that Ramsey would make a good father.

  But the boisterousness was bound to read to her mother only as proof that Ramsey was getting drunk. Which, come to think of it, he was.

  “Right, you lot,” Ramsey announced to the kids, taking charge. “Let’s us open a few prezzies, hey?” Before anyone could stop him—the initiative was literally out of order, for in the McGovern tradition they did not unwrap gifts until after the meal—Ramsey had reached for a box under the tree and thrown it to the boy. Looking about himself for permission but on the spot, Sasha began to nervously peel off each piece of tape one by one.

  “Fucking hell!” cried Ramsey. “Sasha my lad, what po-faced tosser taught you to open parcels like that? Your sister wants to know what’s a prat, well that’s how a prat goes at a prezzy. You’re meant to rip the thing to shite!”

  Not yet apprised that this family always smoothed and refolded wrapping paper for reuse next year, Ramsey proceeded to demonstrate, until Sasha got into the spirit and together they shredded the glossy paper and threw it in the air. Alas, in his abandon, Sasha knocked one of the bowls of sour cream off a side table, and it landed sour-cream-side-down on the royal-blue carpet.

  “Never you mind that, mate,” said Ramsey, scooping the sour cream into the bowl and sucking the side of his hand.

  Tatyana was already streaking to the kitchen, shouting with unconvincing gaiety, “I’ll get it, Mama, don’t worry! It’ll come right up!”

  “Sod the sour cream, love!” said Ramsey, pulling a silk handkerchief from his pocket and soaking it with vodka to give the stain a cursory wipe. When Tatyana beavered back with a host of sponges and spot-removers, Ramsey rolled his eyes, clearly not worried that Raisa would notice. She noticed.

  The present Sasha had unwrapped was from Ramsey, a Sony PlayStation and a copy of Sony’s “World Championship Snooker 1999” video game. Since the software included the entire tour’s calendar of ranked events—starting with the Grand Prix and concluding, of course, with the World—Ramsey had just given Irina’s family an animated guide to his whole life. Although Sasha and his sister seemed delighted with the PlayStation, they huddled over their only video game in crestfallen befuddlement. Frowning at the box in his lap, Sasha whined, “What’s snooker?”—thereby unwittingly announcing the whole visit’s running theme.

  “Snooker”—Ramsey knelt at his chair—“is the best game in the whole world.”

  “Nobody at my school plays that,” Sasha said sulkily. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Bloody hell,” Ramsey muttered. After standing and pouring himself another shot, he turned back to the kids with the hyperactive desperation of a children’s TV presenter confronting an unusually sullen audience.

  “Right, we can start with a song, hey? Fancy learning a new song? Whilst we get this bugger up and running? Snooker loopy nuts are we! / Me and him and them and me…! ”

  The fact that the kids merely cowered encouraged Ramsey to belt out his Christmas carol of choice at an even higher volume. “For the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black!” As instruction booklets and connection cables spread at the pace of potato blight across the carpet, Tatyana frantically stuffed scraps of wrapping paper and cellophane into a carrier bag from the kitchen. “We’re all snooker loopy…!”

  “Irina.”

  Raisa’s summons was quiet. But for Irina it had a distinctive timbre that would pierce the roar of throng—recalling as it did the countless glasses of milk she had spilled as a girl, the vases she had shattered.

  Standing from her throne-like chair, Raisa continued, “Pazhalysta, uymi svoiyevo muzha.”

  “I doubt I could control my husband even if I wanted to.”

  “Snooker loopy nuts are we…!”

  “Irina, ya dumayu shto nam nado pogovorit.”

  Mother and daughter repairing the short distance to the kitchen was a formal exercise in privacy only; everyone in the parlor was bound to hear anything above a murmur. As for Raisa’s discreet switch to Russian, even the children were fluent, and if she feigned to spare Ramsey’s feelings she knew full well that he was sure to demand an account, and that her elder daughter would soon occupy the no-win position of either injuring her husband or lying to him.

  “It is only two in the afternoon,” said Raisa po-russki. Though the translation that Irina would later provide Ramsey would be heavily edited, she would try to get across that, in Russian, Raisa was acidly articulate. “And that man is already drunk.”

  “It’s Christmas, Mama,” said Irina, conceding to Russian as well.

  “He has been drinking nonstop since he arrived here. Believe me, in Brighton Beach you develop an eye for it. This is not an inability to take ‘stress’”—she used the English fad word—“due to meeting his new in-laws. This is not making a special exception for the holidays. That man is a lush.”

  They stood with the kitchen table between them, Raisa’s hands resting with their bright red nail polish on the back of the end chair; Irina gripped the chair opposite.

  “He rarely drinks during the day, and he ordinarily holds his liquor very well—”

  “Too much is too much, and no one holds it ‘well.’” (With a load of balls and a snooker cuuuuuue! pierced the kitchen from the parlor.) “Irina, I have tried to hold my tongue and to respect the fact that—at least you claim to have married him. But I cannot understand what possessed you. Lawrence, as far as I could tell, was very good to you. He was faithful, thrifty, and considerate. I didn’t always understand what he was working on, but it was obvious to me that he did—whatever it was—that he worked very hard. He was abstemious. He would never have crawled onto the floor singing silly songs with a bottle of vodka.”

  “I can see how Ramsey might not be making the best impression, but you won’t let him. You’ve made no attempt to get to know him—”

  “I don’t need to,” Raisa announced. “I know the type. I recognized what he was the moment he walked in the door.”


  “Oh?” asked Irina archly. “What type is that?”

  “He is a taker,” said Raisa readily. “He will get away with as much as you let him, and then a little bit more. Inside, he is a bundle of self-indulgence and childish desires and bad habits. The fact that all this selfishness and greediness and vice is cloaked in charm makes it all the more dangerous. Men like that don’t last, and men like that take you down with them.”

  “I’m amazed you’ve garnered so much insight into my husband, given that you’ve hardly talked to him.”

  “I could tell you a great deal,” said Raisa, rearing her shoulders with her trademark imperiousness. “Not that I expect that you want to hear it. Can you imagine that a man like that will be faithful? Oh, this sort can turn up the magic like a spigot—or like a thermostat. They can seem so interested, so caring. You saw what he did with Tatyana. You saw her light up. The poor girl runs herself ragged for her family, and no one ever pays her that kind of attention—”

  “What kind of attention?”

  “You know exactly what kind of attention. Of course she melted. It sickened me to watch. Don’t you think he turns on the same oh, you’re so fascinating and beautiful with other women behind your back?”

  “No, I don’t.” Irina wanted badly to charge, but didn’t dare, that Raisa seemed mostly affronted that Ramsey had declined to turn that “kind of attention” on his mother-in-law.

  “Honestly, Irina, what were you thinking?” Raisa relinquished the chair and began to roam, with the same air of just getting started that had made the bottom of Irina’s stomach drop out the night before. “Were you thinking? Or did you let what’s under your skirt get away with you? Oh, I grant he’s not a bad-looking man. But do you think even that face will last, assuming that you don’t get tired of it first? He is dissipated, and too old for you. Even if they stick around, men like that die on you, and leave you to get old on your own with no money.”