American Gypsy (22 page)

I concentrated on clearing my mind, and silently asked the vaguest question I could think up: What should I do with my life?

Immediately I pictured myself passing out drinks inside a large commercial airplane, my baby-blue uniform crisp. Flying wasn't a dream of mine, and I was surprised by the image.

The plate spelled out “fly.” I could almost hear Azhidana, Kevoidana, and Avadata giggling.

“Well?” Sherri said.

I shared, and Sherri promptly went from skeptical to leaving. She snatched her purse and keys from the kitchen counter. “I just remembered I have to buy some wineglasses for a friend's bridal shower.”

“What's wrong with you?” Olga said. “Come back. Let's ask if you'll ever get hitched again.”

Sherri rummaged inside her purse as if she'd lost a city in there. “Sorry, guys. I still don't believe any of this.”

Her departure left Olga scrubbing out ashtrays as if she were going to use them for serving plates.

Meanwhile Dad asked the guides one of his favorite questions: “Why is my life so fucked up?” By this time he'd visited several L.A. recording studios and management firms in search of work or representation, but was rejected every time even before he opened his guitar case on account of being too old and foreign.

“It is your father's fault,” the plate spelled out slowly.

“See?” He clapped his hands on the table. “Baba Varya's curse is strong. But I will find a way—”

“I don't care,” Olga snapped. I was still getting over the fact that a porcelain plate had told me to become a stewardess, when she flung herself back into her chair. “
Ya etoy suke pokazhu
(I'll show that bitch).”

“Relax,” Dad said. “She's afraid, but she'll be back.”

“Dear spirits, you saw the disrespect Elizaveta showed you. Will you let her get away with that?”

“Olga!” Dad reached for the plate, but she clawed her hands around his to keep him away.

Quickly, before he could escape her grip, Olga cried out, “Prove your power to Elizaveta!”

Dad jumped up and wrestled the board and the plate away from Olga.

“How dare you, woman. You say those words and you give them permission to harm. How fucking stupid can you be?”

*   *   *

At a little past midnight Sherri came back. She'd been crying for a while, and the sleeves of her blouse were smeared with the makeup she had wiped off. Dad led her toward the kitchen, but she refused to go in there, hiccuping uncontrollably. In the living room, Olga and I brought cool washcloths and wine while Dad guided her through a breathing meditation. It took Sherri a good amount of wine to collect herself, but even then her hands shook.

“I don't know if I've gone crazy,” she said.

“Gospodi,”
Dad said. “What happened?”

Olga didn't seem happy to see Sherri in such a distraught state. It brought the other woman in close proximity to Dad, allowing her to cling to his arm and heave a frail sigh at his reassuring words, safe from Olga's retribution unless she wished to come across as a callous harpy. Maybe I detected some guilt, a reaction so unusual for Olga that I must've imagined it.

Sherri lit a cigarette and began in a thin voice.

“After I left here I went to that shopping plaza off Cahuenga Boulevard, for the glasses, you know. I parked on the street and went inside. No more than twenty minutes and I was back.” She picked up two cigarette lighters from the coffee table and lined them up. “The red lighter is my car,” she said. “The green is the BMW parked behind me. I get in, turn on the ignition. And out of nowhere the car jerks like somebody rear-ended me. So I look back and sure enough, the Beamer is on my bumper. He backs up and drives slowly around me.” She slid the green lighter out of the imaginary parking spot and parallel to the red one. “I'm livid, so I roll down my window, waiting for the fucker to roll down his window. When we're even, I'm already cussing the roof off his convertible.”

She hesitated.

“What happened then?” I asked.

The cigarette between Sherri's lips had grown an ashen beard, but she let it age.

“Who was it?” Olga asked, perched on the arm of the couch.

“Nobody,” Sherri said. “There was nobody at the wheel! So I try to drive away, but it sits there, idling. I'm fucking pounding the horn to get anybody's attention, and then it rolls some feet ahead and parks. Like nothing happened.”

“You
are
crazy,” Olga said after a few moments. “Some kids played a trick on you,
starushka
(old lady).”

“There was nobody in the car.”

“You sure?” Dad said.

“After all the noise I made, a guy runs out of the store and he's waving his arm in the air. I roll down the passenger window, and he starts yelling, ‘Who stole my car?' I point to the demon BMW and he just stands there with his mouth open. How do you explain that?”

After taking a few drops of valerian, she went into a coma-like sleep on the guest-room futon. Dad and Olga stayed up until four in the morning, Dad lecturing his wife on the etiquette of channeling and Olga looking like a kid caught stealing.

My question had been answered. But having a medium for a father didn't end our tribulations in the strange country we now called home.

 

BLACK MAGIC

Dad's gigs did not turn out as much cash as Olga's readings. He refused to read tarot cards or palms; those things are done primarily by women. Instead he started to get deeper into the occult. My grandfather called it
chornaya magia
(black magic), though not everything occult is black.

For the longest time I didn't understand his aversion to metaphysical practices, but one day I came across my grandparents' photo album, where I found a picture of a young girl laid out for a funeral viewing. When I asked about her, Grandpa got so upset he locked the album in his desk drawer. Years later, Mom told me the story behind the girl's image.

When Grandpa Andrei was thirteen, Baba Varya traveled to the southern outskirts of Kiev to see a local soothsayer named Fokla, a blind man of indeterminate age. He lived in a hut with a dirt floor, surviving on the townsfolk's charity.

Baba Varya had come to Fokla hoping for guidance in a difficult situation. After her husband had died, she was barely able to keep her family from the streets. Baba Varya practiced magic by then, but like the majority of practitioners, she lacked the capability to foretell her own future.

She brought her children with her to the hut: Andrei, Boris, and Anna, the oldest at eighteen. But when they stepped inside, Fokla ordered the eldest two to wait in the yard.

Grandpa Andrei wished he could wait outside with them. Some claimed that Fokla had made a pact with the Devil: his sight in exchange for precognition. Looking around a room that he said smelled like a raw grave, Grandpa Andrei couldn't help but believe those rumors.

The old man rested on a sagging cot, both hands on top of an intricately carved cane. Grandpa Andrei, who was already into wood carving, said the cane was unlike anything he'd ever seen, especially the knob, the head of a roaring bear.

After a respectful greeting, Baba Varya placed her offering—a sack of freshly picked beans—on the kitchen table and then lowered herself into a chair across from the soothsayer. She said nothing else. No one came to Fokla with a list of questions. Instead, like Agrefina's, his gift consisted of sporadic visions of the future, and the client had to wait quietly in order for the old man to “see.”

Fokla raised his head as if coming out of deep slumber. “The two outside will die young,” he told Baba Varya, unprovoked. His milky eyes settled on Grandpa Andrei. Pointing an arthritic finger at the boy, he added, “But this one will accomplish much, and be the one to bury you.”

Within five years Boris and Anna were dead of pneumonia.

On the day of Anna's funeral, Andrei sneaked into the soothsayer's hut through the cracked window in the back, stole his cane, and burned it to ashes in the stove, along with as many of his mother's magic books as he could carry. When he went back for more, Baba Varya was waiting on the basement stairs.

She beat her son senseless and, from that day on, kept her books locked in a giant lacquered bookcase.

Baba Varya died in 1961, age ninety-seven, and Andrei did indeed bury her.

It wasn't until 1973 that he decided to destroy the boxes full of his mother's belongings. Mom was there that day. She told me that Grandma Ksenia sat at the kitchen table the entire time, cracking roasted sunflower seeds between her teeth, and it was Mom—belly full of me—who braved the steps down to the basement that morning to help her father-in-law erase his mother's frightening legacy.

“Ksenia is afraid,” Grandpa told my mother. “But I don't blame her. It took my mother very long to die, you know. She writhed on her deathbed for days, covered in blisters and sores.”

“What caused them?” Mom asked.

“Nobody knows. They spread and oozed pus over her skin one day. She carried the notion that the Devil kept her from dying because of all the horrible things she'd done, so she sent for a priest. To him she confessed every hex. Two days later she passed. And at her funeral not a person spoke, terrified that her restless spirit would shoot down their mouth and possess them.”

Tossing book after book into the furnace, Mom told me she fought the urge to keep at least one—a curiosity that she reined in perhaps out of respect for the man who had accepted her as his daughter. Mom helped him empty each box while he told stories from his childhood of the mother whom he loved and feared. Only one book escaped their notice, and it was now in my father's possession.

Grandpa was never sure if Fokla had indeed predicted his siblings' death or cast an “evil eye” and somehow willed them to expire. He feared either truth. When he found out that Dad had Baba Varya's book, he offered to buy it back for two hundred rubles, just to burn it.

“I won't sell it,” my father said.

“I tell you, son, the Devil never gives without expecting profit.”

“Don't you think I know better than to deal in hexes and bloody rituals?” Dad said.

“What I know is that the more you practice, the less of yourself you keep.”

“What if I can fix it? Did you think about that?”

“You're not a practitioner,” Grandpa said.

“Not yet.”

As always, my father had taken the path staked by his own father with “No Trespassing” signs.

I knew that Grandpa Andrei had been right. My father soon forgot that he started practicing to rid his family of Baba Varya's supposed evil, infatuated as he was with the idea of tapping into a parallel world, of linking with beings that had chosen him as a receptor of their graces. He didn't have as many clients as Olga, but those who came to see him cared little for entertaining tarot spreads. I was chilled every time one crossed the living room on the way to the séance room. Often they left an unsettling impression after they'd gone, an invisible but heavy residue that made you eager to step outside and gulp sweet air into your lungs.

 

LEAVING LEXINGTON

Mom came back from Las Vegas three days later, the bags under her eyes and the crumpled clothes suggesting she had slept little. We were still poor, but she smiled more than usual and kept hugging us tightly. I'd missed her more than I'd expected, despite the unceremonious dumping of us at Dad's. Our apartment, ratty as it was, felt somehow cleaner, and I breathed easier as soon as we walked inside.

Roxy and I had tons of questions about Mom's trip. In Russia people who saw Vegas held a unique status, as if they'd had tea with the queen of England. Sure enough, the things she told us about the buffets, the beautiful uniforms, the twenty-four-hour life, and the machines that could make a millionaire out of an ordinary person all sounded like pure fantasy.

“Did you win lots of money?” Roxy asked, breathless.

“Better. I decided that we will move there.”

My sister and I exchanged surprised looks.

“We're gonna live in a casino?” Roxy asked. Having heard things about Vegas from travelers back in Russia, we knew that it was in the middle of a desert where nothing but cacti survived.

“Don't be dumb,” I said. “They probably fly people in for work and take them back later.”

“Girls. Nobody has to live in a casino, and we're definitely not flying.”

“Why?” I said, resisting the answer I already suspected.

“I didn't immigrate to America to live off charity. In Vegas, I will finally get my chance to start a booziness!”

Before we were granted permission to leave Moscow, Mom had been scouting the city for a potential site of a nightclub she'd designed on sheets of graph paper she pinched from my school folder. “In case we end up stuck here,” she said. So close to the fall of the USSR, smaller businesses called “cooperatives” started to pop up, though still heavily regulated by the government or the mafia. Mom's dream had always been to be a business owner. It had lain forgotten under the pall of divorce and welfare checks until Shubi, the Indian woman at the DollarDream, suggested Vegas as the place with high enough salaries to save up for a down payment on Mom's nightclub.

“But what about school?” I asked.

“You'll transfer.” Mom's initial excitement ebbed a little. “What are you so worried about? I'm telling you, this will be great.”

As soon as she mentioned the word “transfer,” I panicked.

“You mean kids live there?” Roxy asked.

“Lots. And you know what else? You'll have all new clothes and toys, and loads of new friends. We'll have more money, too.”

“Wow! Will we get to win a million dollars on one of those machines?”

“No, silly. I found a job. The manager at our motel was Russian, and her sister works at the Gold Coast Casino. She's in charge of
sluts
there—that's what you call those machines. I told her about our situation, you know, the real version. And she said, ‘If you're good with money, I'll have my sister give you a job.'”