American Gypsy (26 page)

Even if you pretended to be Russian, once someone checked your ID the truth came out. Soviet IDs segregated people according to their nationality. A Chukchi remained a Chukchi, uneducated and dim-witted, even if they spoke flawless Russian. An Ossetian was just the man to hire if you wished to have someone rubbed out. A Ukrainian was never quite as pure-blooded as a Russian, and so on. Even if you lived in Russia all your life, your nationality shaped people's perception of you.

No Romani in their right mind would put “Gypsy” in their documents, unless they particularly enjoyed the breeze from doors slamming in their faces. Like Romani, many Jews masqueraded as Russians, and if they could not be that, then Ukrainian, or at the very least Moldavian. We were all branded by our identities. Luckily for my family, our mix of nationalities made it easier to choose the most advantageous one. Grandma Ksenia and Dad were both Greek according to their IDs because Grandma Ksenia's father was a full-blooded Greek. And being a Greek in Russia was better than being a Roma.

The union created an amazing blend of backgrounds and some of the most beautiful people in the world. I once met a gorgeous blond-haired, blue-eyed Mongolian, and yet an American horse breeder my father once drank a toast with was considered more exotic in my country than this girl.

Who knew that people in America would think so differently? I wondered for a long time. Wondered until something so simple yet powerful became clear to me. Since perceptions are ever changing, as was the case at hand, the only thing left to do was to trust your own opinions. If you think you are something, that's what you become.

 

THE HUNT

In Hollywood High, diversity was a requirement for ultimate coolness; anyone too bland faded into the background, a yearbook picture the only trace of their existence. For the first time in my life, I flaunted the Romani Oksana, the one I had been hiding in the basement all these years. Of course I still came across the occasional look of disgust, a tightening of an arm around a purse, or train-station stories of Gypsy assault maneuvers on innocent bystanders, as if they were top-secret special ops teams, highly trained, undetectable, and unbeatable. But those reactions didn't faze me as much anymore. They were not important enough. I remember jokingly telling Zhanna about my tolerant self. “Oh, a regular Mother Teresa you are,” she joked back.

But to be completely honest, I still cared about one person's opinion very much, and having Cruz's acceptance felt like an unspoken blessing.

We were on our way home one day, face-to-face inside a packed bus, our hands gripping the railings for support. The bus lurched at every light, swinging the after-school crowd to and fro like bamboo stalks in gusts of wind.

“My father used to buy pottery from an old Gypsy man who owned a stand at the local market at Manaus,” he said. “Sometimes twenty or thirty pieces at once.”

For the first time since we'd met, Cruz was talking about his family.

“Why so much pottery?” I asked, praying he wouldn't clam up.

“My father is a river trader. He sells food and things like those pottery jugs down the Amazon. We used to work together, sailing the boat for months.”

“I didn't realize people lived in the rain forest.”

“Everywhere. The villages are built into the riverbanks over the water. The forest protects them against progress, but people seem happier and healthier. I don't know why.”

“You liked working with your dad?”

“Yeah.” He laughed quietly. “Except he's the most stubborn person I know. Once he's used to something, he never wants to change it. I say, ‘Papai, let's get a boat with air-conditioning.
Benedita
isn't going to last much longer.' He shakes his finger at me. ‘
A grande nau, grande tormenta!
' With big ships come bigger storms. We lived more on the river than the land, but he refuses to improve
Benedita
, no matter how many boat magazines I shove into his hands.”

“Does he still have it?”

He nodded. “Everyone in the Amazon knows when Papai is coming by the rattle of that damn motor.”

I wanted to ask him why he was in America when clearly he wanted to sail the Amazon, but something told me to let it go. Once again he had surprised me, and almost unthinkingly, I began to accept Cruz as someone decidedly non-
gadjo
.

Olga picked up things about Cruz and me that even I was oblivious to, and she made sure to voice her suspicions. She recognized the “signs,” she told me. “Too much laughing, eyes shiny like marbles, and he struts like a damn rooster every time you're around.” Of course, she had no proof, but not for lack of snooping. One word from her, she promised, and Dad would lock me in my room until I was married.

The more conventional Romani parents think of unmarried girls as a commodity, especially if they are virgins. Once, Dad, Roxy, and I met a Roma family in one of the downtown swap meets, this one a multilevel warehouse of clothes wearable only until that first washing. Right away, I could tell that they were more traditional than we were. The females, even young girls, wore long flowery skirts and scarves around their heads. The men, in crisp white shirts, slacks, polished shoes, and fedoras, looked like door-to-door salesmen.

The eldest man exchanged a greeting with Dad in Rromanes. “You a Rom?” “Yes, my brother.” After that the conversation picked up, and a few minutes later, the man nodded in Roxy's direction.

“I need a wife for my oldest. Are you looking?”

There was a good reason he had skipped me. At sixteen, I was practically a spinster. Roxy and I exchanged looks—mine framed by a wicked frown and Roxy's filled with alarm. At ten she had a reason to worry. But my father could navigate blindfolded among Romani. He bowed slightly. “Thank you, brother. I am honored. Your son looks like a strong young Rom. But she's too young.”

“Sure, sure, I understand. I meant no offense, brother.”

Olga had become a wife for the first time at the age of twelve. Granted, the groom had kidnapped her to make her his wife, and she ran away a few months later. When she started to question my own virtue, especially at my ripe old age, I didn't know how to react. My parents were never so traditional that they made it an issue. I always knew I wasn't supposed to have sex until marriage, but for the life of me I don't remember how I knew it, since we never actually talked about it. Up to that point I hadn't given my hymen much thought. Yet there was my stepmother, acting like my raging hormones were keeping her up all night. My marriage to a good Gypsy boy occupied her mind almost as much as finding a way to get rid of Cruz before he ruined me.

*   *   *

Olga invited Cruz to a dinner party one night without telling me. It was an interesting tactic along the lines of “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Judging by the creased slacks, button-down shirt, and pulled-back hair, the poor guy probably assumed it would be a dating interview of sorts. He might have anticipated a quiet but firm chat with my father about his aspirations and future college choices; perhaps a perusal of Dad's own accomplishments in the form of trophies or pictures. But nothing in our family was ever that simple.

The kitchen table was piled high with food arranged on plates patterned with flowers and bees. But pretty plates couldn't disguise Olga's knack for making even the simplest dishes revolting. There was an imitation-crab salad, runny because she'd left the serving spoon in it for hours, and a wilted green salad drenched in blue-cheese dressing. The roast chicken's skinny legs inspired pity. Mercifully Olga had sneaked off to the Russian corner store earlier, coming back with homemade
kotleti
, mashed potatoes, and even a seventy-dollar jar of red caviar.

Our guests were seated per the hostess's instructions. Sherri tried to grab a chair next to Dad, but Olga directed Cruz to take it. Sherri pouted as she parked her bosom next to me.

Svetlana and her newly repentant husband had also been invited. Whatever Olga did with Igor's mistress's hair and the cemetery dirt seemed to have worked, because he was admiring his wife as if she were Sophia Loren. I held the honorary place next to their eighteen-year-old son. Alan was the size of his mother, minus the hair spray and the velour suit, and smelled like a spilled bottle of Brut. Freckles dusted his cheeks and the tip of his bulbous nose. A Hawaiian shirt held on for dear life around his shoulders, but his jeans looked two sizes too large—the latest fashion trend straight out of New York, Svetlana mentioned in passing.

From across the table Cruz made conversation with my father. A phantom of mischief flickered across his face every time our eyes met.

“So, Cruz. I hear you are Brazilian?” Svetlana asked him. Earlier that evening my father had stated that, in honor of his student, everyone would speak English.

“Yes.”

Olga placed a dollop of potatoes on his plate next to a chicken leg that would make an anorexic weep with envy. “Cruz is Valerio's best student. He wery talented.”

“Oh, I love Brazilian men,” Sherri said. “They're so … Hispaniol.”

Cruz accepted the plate, smiling. “Actually, Brazilians are Latin, not Hispanic.”

“Even better,” she gushed.

Alan bumped his chair closer to mine and I was treated to a generous waft of his cologne.

“They look good with each other, hey?” Olga said suddenly, nodding in our direction.

I cringed, Olga's plans finally hitting me full force.

“My Alan is rolling on honors in school. I'm so proud of my baby. He will go to computer college next fall.”

Svetlana squeezed her son's cheek as he tried to pull away. Igor and she continued to praise their giant offspring for an hour.

I felt a sliver of envy at the way Alan's parents cooed over him. Nobody at that table, besides Cruz, knew about my acceptance into the magnet school. That was something to be proud of, wasn't it? Yet here I was, hoping that he knew to keep quiet. I needed more time to find the right way to tell Dad, because I'd get only one chance to impress him. Some part of me resented feeling the need to do so.

“Your boy make good husband, Svetlana,” Olga said.

“Is there a girl out there good enough for him? I know not.”

“What of our Oksana? Cruz, how you tink, don't they look a couple?”

I turned to my father, begging him silently for help.

“Olga, she's too young to think about marriage,” he said in Russian.

“There's no such thing as too young,” Olga said, switching to Russian as well. “Wait too long and she'll be plucked.”

Heat splashed my face and I studied the salad on my plate.

“Doesn't Oksana have a say in who she marries?” Cruz said, his voice coming from afar. He sounded determined.

“You
gadjee
and us Romani, we-e-e-ry different,” Olga said. “Give girl choice and she run with first asshole
gadjo
who wag finger.”

“That's too simplistic.”

“Whad you say?” Olga tipped away from him, exchanging looks with her friends. Only my father continued to listen with a tinge of mirth on his lips.

“According to you, Roma girls always make wrong choices. Is every
gadjo
a wrong choice?” Cruz said.

“I no understand you.”

Cruz shifted forward in his chair and pushed aside his plate, both elbows on the table. “I know people from back home who blame everything that goes wrong in our country on others. The rich point fingers at the poor from the shanties, saying all crime is their doing. The poor say they don't have money to afford real houses and that the rich should share their money instead of complaining.”

“
Shto za chepukha
(What's this nonsense)?” Olga shrugged at all of us again, then back to Cruz. “I talk of girls.
Gadjee
make Roma girls
prostitutki
.”

“It's an excuse to isolate yourself from the rest of the society.” He caught me shaking my head ever so slightly and cleared his throat. But he didn't back down from Olga's flamethrower stare. “Does every Roma woman who marries a Roma man make a good match? Does no one in your culture separate or divorce?”

“What you know about real problem?” Olga said. “You no live our life. I live with house with dirt floor when small girl, and I get water from well outside. Boy steal me when I virgin. You men only think sex.” Olga pointed at his crotch. Not much of an intellectual debater, my stepmother.

Dad lowered the glass of Georgian Balsam he was about to drain. “Enough, Olga.”

“I'm right, and you know it.”

They were back to Russian.

“What I know is that you're a disobedient wife. Perhaps it is so because you were married so young; you didn't have time to learn about taking care of your man.” Had my father ever called Mom disobedient, she would've beaten him with her shoe, but with Olga he felt justified to act superior. Come to think of it, he was becoming more and more like the rest of her family: Roma who followed a more old-fashioned code, according to which Olga was supposed to be subservient but also be the breadwinner. Grandpa wouldn't have approved.

“And you're going to teach me?”

“Premium idea. Start by learning how to budget.”

Olga stopped chewing.

Igor drummed his knuckles on the table and picked up the half-empty liquor bottle next to him. “Come on, brother, sister. Who's going to toast the meeting of our children with me?”

“Marriage is trust, yes?” Olga finally said in English, turning to Cruz. “How you trust someone from different peoples than yours? Our passports show nationality for reason—we Armenian, Uzbek, Russian, all different.”

Sherri shifted in her seat. “They don't do that in America.”

Olga glowered at her from across the table. Igor refilled his glass until some of the golden liquid spilled over the edges onto the white tablecloth.