American Gypsy (27 page)

Normally my stepmother would have a fit over the stain, but she was too engrossed in the conversation. There were too many lit fires in the room; I stayed quiet in the interest of self-preservation, hoping Cruz would, too.

Dad motioned for Igor to pour him another glass, drinking the liquor in one gulp. “Tell me this, dear wife,” he said in Russian. “If trust is so important, why do I feel that you're hiding something from me?”

“It's you who should be answering that question. You and that
manda
(pussy) across the table.” She pointed a finger at Sherri.

“Olga!” Sherri and Svetlana said in unison.

This was going somewhere I didn't want to follow. But as embarrassed as I was, I also felt relieved. My father had unintentionally deterred Olga from her matchmaking plans for me and Alan. Of course, there was something else to worry about: Cruz was the only person between Dad and Olga.

She leaned around him and shouted at my father, her arms flying in all directions. “Don't ‘Olga!' me. I know everything about you two, everything.”

Those of us familiar with my father and his wife knew not to get involved in a fight unless we desired to be flogged with curses. Among my people these fights were never mere words but carried the menace of an arrow shot from a master archer's hand. One particular curse was so feared that it was barely used among the Roma themselves: “May I see you in a coffin.” Olga and Dad passed it back and forth like a volleyball, in addition to “May you be shot in the forehead,” “May you burn in the blue flames of Hell,” and my favorite, “May your liver shrivel and fall out of your body while you're still alive.”

The entire time they argued, Cruz wore a politely blank expression, his arms crossed over his chest in a relaxed manner. But I wouldn't put it past Olga to punch him instead of Dad simply because of their proximity. A couple of times I jerked my head at the front door, a hint for Cruz to make his escape, but he only narrowed his eyes at me as if to say “Stop worrying, everything's fine.”

Dad hurled his shot glass at the wall and began to shout, accusing Olga of jealousy and stupidity and calling her a few choice names. It took both Igor and Cruz to calm him down. They dragged him outside before he broke something crunchier than glass, like Olga's ribs.

But I knew from experience, the madder Dad acted, the guiltier he usually was.

 

CITIZENS OF NO-LAND

In December 1991, a little more than a year after we'd left for good, the USSR collapsed. I was in Vegas visiting Mom and Roxy for the first time since they'd moved when the Russian cable channel we were watching made an abrupt switch from the Moscow Christmas special to the Moscow newsroom. The newscaster, a wiry man with a pink nose the size of a golf ball, announced with a startled expression that the Soviet Union was no more. Perestroika had swept the nation on waves of anxious excitement. But not everyone was celebrating. Gorbachev (the guy with the birthmark shaped like North America on his head) had planned to transform the country into a Russian version of the United States, but something went wrong and the system abruptly crumbled. The Soviets, who hated the idea to begin with, bitterly accused Reagan of filling Gorbachev's head with renegade ideas just to break up the union. In some religious groups rumors of the Western Devil tricking the unsuspecting Russian leader into a faulty contract circulated. The sales of
Faustus
spiked.

In Mom's one-bedroom apartment, Roxy and I sat on the floor with Mom poised on the edge of the couch, a soup ladle in one hand. Roxy used to ask to play with the Soviet passport Mom kept in a tiny metal safe. It was red with a golden Soviet State coat of arms in the middle. Not that Mom valued it, just figured it might come handy. “We are still USSR citizens,” she'd say. That always made me nervous. Life in America was proving to be complicated, but everything from commercials to music playing on the radio came with just enough hope to keep us going. I wanted but one thing from Russia now—the rest of my family—but it had a claim on me.

In reality it was the one place we officially belonged until the American government approved our applications for green cards. This was how it worked for most immigrants I knew. First a resident visa sent by a citizen or a permanent resident; then, if you behaved, a green card; and only after having the card for five years could you apply for the ultimate prize, citizenship. Most of us give little thought to the importance or the meaning of a homeland. Not until we ourselves are foreigners fighting for acceptance, stripped of all ranks and titles and viewed as inferiors, do we miss that privilege. The process of becoming a citizen is daunting. Suddenly your character is questioned and what you were as a citizen of another place is erased and must be proved all over again, even if you are ninety and have been slowly forgetting important things such as your kids' names or an impressive military career. You have three choices: stay, live as an illegal alien, be deported. For the young, the choices are made by the adults, so the effects aren't felt as much. But for everyone else this process can be tricky and laden with temptation. Some years later Vova, Dad's drummer friend, was lucky enough to get a resident visa from an aunt. He messed up when he was caught in a scam that included sleeping with single rich women and then cleaning out their houses of everything but the door handles. He was sent back to Moscow and blacklisted, meaning he could never come back to the States. Unlike Vova, it seemed, we no longer had a place to go back to in case a life of crime appealed to us.

“What's going on?” Roxy asked, frowning at the TV, then at Mom.

“You know the place you were born?” I said.

“So?”

“It doesn't exist anymore.”

Roxy jumped to her feet, following me into the kitchen, where I dumped our dishes in the sink. “Where did it go?”

“Oksana, shut up!” Mom cut in from the couch.

I leaned on the doorframe separating the kitchen and the dining-room area and crossed my arms, fingertips icy against my skin.

“So does this mean Roxy can have your passport now that we're citizens of no country?”

“What have they done?” Mom said.

The immigrants and those who stayed behind had seen change slowly chip away at the Communist ideologies as far back as the eighties. But it wasn't all good change. Food started to disappear off the shelves, paychecks shrank, and the crime rate increased. As naive as it sounds, the more enthusiastic folk believed the republics would enter into a state union, like the United States, and go on with nary a hiccup in their daily lives. These were probably the same people who thought communism should've worked in real life and not in theory alone.

I had heard my grandparents quarrel only once. It was over Grandma Ksenia's Bolshevik father, who maintained until the minute he died, in 1952, that the Soviet people would soon practice the goodness they held within them. There would be no crime, and anyone would be able to walk into a store and pick up groceries for free. Money would be used for toilet paper in a utopian society straight out of Milton's imagination.

“My father was a patriot,” Grandma maintained.

“A fool, like the rest,” Grandpa said. “Our country is no different from any other. All run by one master. Greed.”

In Mom's Las Vegas living room I heard her whisper, “I guess we're staying for good.” I was quite startled. Had she thought about returning to Russia? I never did, because no matter how complicated things were in America, to me they had seemed unbearable back home. This event tossed my family into a state of limbo for a little while, as if we were kids of parents caught up in a vicious divorce, which felt painfully familiar. I remember how awkward it felt telling people where we came from, and how my personal sense of identity, screwed up as it was already, became almost impossible to distinguish. Being a Soviet citizen was one thing I knew I was for sure. All of a sudden, even that was taken away. But it was also a cleansing of sorts. There was no going back, because the country we knew, like the family we knew, was no longer. The sole option now was to make a new home.

 

HOW MUCH FOR THE VIRGIN?

Over the next few weeks arguments between Dad and Olga escalated. Some of these had to do with the fact that she suspected him of cheating with clients, specifically Sherri; others with Dad trying to bring his parents over from Russia now that the country had fallen apart. As my Bolshevik great-grandfather once predicted, rubles now
could
be used for toilet paper. My grandparents had nothing left but their flat and Grandma's stage jewelry. Neither Roxy nor I had any contact with our grandparents, which really confused both of us, but I recall thinking that if only they moved to America, we'd come together again and rejoice. Olga had refused to even consider it.

The bulk of the problems between Dad and Olga sprouted from her inability to hold on to money. No one knew where it went, only that as soon as it appeared, it would promptly vanish. Olga claimed she was so busy guarding her husband from the female population of Los Angeles that she didn't have time to keep track of the finances.

Just as she couldn't prove my involvement with Cruz, she kept missing the opportunities to catch my father cheating. “How is it that you have so many female clients?” she would ask. “Because women are more prone to demonic influences,” he'd answer. “Their mind is not as strong as a man's.” Olga was also busy sneaking out of the house and behaving suspiciously herself: a trip to the bank, for example, at eight in the morning when Dad snored the loudest. (Much later I'd glimpsed the name of this “bank” on a crumpled-up receipt: Big Papa's Pawn.)

Equally bereft of evidence, they yelled at each other instead, both having something to hide and someone to blame. The “honeylambshank” and the “little sparrow” were replaced by
huesos
(cocksucker) and
padla
(whore).

On January 14, the day on which many Eastern Europeans celebrate the departure of the old year, pagan-style (another excuse to get drunk, some say), Dad and Olga laid down their weapons in a temporary cease-fire. Christmas trees remain decorated until this time, and on the evening of the fourteenth, a table is set, toasts are given, and people share memories of the previous year, which they hadn't given much thought to until that fifth or sixth drink.

“Oksana needs a husband,” Olga had told Dad a few days before the Old New Year's celebration. She had decorated the Christmas tree herself a month back, and ever since then it had remained in the throes of a most festive death, choked with garlands and drowning in tinsel.

“No, I don't.”

“Be quiet,” Olga said. “Nobody's talking to you.”

“Stop pestering me, woman. I still have three song arrangements to finish for the Bobrov wedding,” Dad said.

“She won't stay a virgin forever.”

“Shut up, Olga. I'm not marrying anyone to make you feel better.”

Mom had always voiced her gripes with arranged marriages. Had she stayed in Armenia, she told me, her own engagement probably would go something like this:

A boy in town fancies her. His parents pay a visit to her parents and they discuss the advantages of their offsprings' union while they drink coffee and eat Belgian chocolate. Mom's parents pry about the other family's financial stability, and in return the boy's mother inquires after the regularity of Mom's menses to assure favorable childbearing genes. All the while Mom makes, pours, and takes away coffee. Mom's parents ask for several days during which to consider the offer, and then they decide. Without Mom.

I never thought that could happen to me because my father, happy not to be in charge of much, agreed that an arranged marriage was out of vogue. Until Olga started to whisper her fiendishly outdated notions into his ear.

“Our reputation is all we have, Valerio,” she said. “God only knows what Nora's doing in Vegas. Probably teaching Roxy about grubbing for tips and dressing in casino uniforms. If you ask me, Roxy's place is here, where we can raise her properly.”

“Don't you think I know that?” Dad said. “But she won't budge. What am I supposed to do?”

“Do something for Oksana before it's too late. Make her obey me. I can teach her the trade. Then pick a family who can provide a large bride-price. Svetlana just bought a brand-new Nissan, you know. You could use new recording equipment.”

That bitch, I thought. Diverting attention from herself by plotting my downfall, using the promise of a TASCAM multitrack recorder to reel my father in. My protests were ignored. Dad listened to her suggestions; his plan for fame involved a recording studio and major CD distribution of original music he liked to call “smooth Gypsy jazz” or “Gypsy fusion.”

A few days later Dad asked me to set the New Year's table, telling me what an important night this would be. Then he disappeared into the back of the house again to practice, while I felt a cold dread settle deep into my bones.

Clearly January 14, 1992, was a poised guillotine. As I watched our guests arrive, the beginnings of a migraine thrust through my head. They took plates and exchanged jokes. I could well be married by the end of the month, hitched to a freckled Gypsy computer geek with strange body odor.

While everyone was catching up on the neighborhood gossip, I sneaked away and knocked on Dad's studio door. He opened it only far enough to see who it was and stood in the doorframe, one hand around the doorknob. Behind him a drum machine clipped away at a waltz.

“Tell Olga I'm almost done.”

“Dad—”

“You need to learn to listen. Nobody says you have to marry the guy, but talk to him.”

“I don't want to talk to him. He smells. And I don't want to be like Olga, telling fortunes for money.”

“It might do some good, learning the craft. Not like you have so many options. What else are you going to do with your life?”