American Gypsy (3 page)

“In America, girls shave their leg hairs with a razor, and their underarms, too. No one here likes to look like a yeti.”

“Our pillowcases don't fit any of your pillows.”

“That's because pillows here are not square like in Russia. Who makes square pillows nowadays, really! That's so seventies. Real pillows are rectangular.”

When my cousins went to school, Roxy and I watched TV, enraptured by flawless women and men promising instant miracles during the advertisements. I hadn't realized how many important things our previous existence lacked.

We had owned a VCR. One had to have money to afford a VCR. Most came from Japan via the black market, and ours was a gift from a Japanese journalist who had come to stay with us for a while. Electronics equaled status; if you had them, you would never fall short of friends. But even as my parents boasted about the JVCs and the Panasonics to many close friends who appreciated all of the name brands, one huge difference set them apart from truly having it all: sixty channels of cable television.

I can't recall much of what my parents were up to during those first weeks in America. Looking back, I see their absence had a definite cause: something awful had begun brewing between them. And I either chose to ignore the signs or was too overwhelmed by pepperoni pizza and
Murder, She Wrote
to notice.

Truth be told, my parents' problems had started years before our move. Back then Dad claimed he couldn't stand Mom's drinking; this even while he drank himself. Mom insisted that he had driven her to it by cheating on her with her friends. In Moscow, they used to get into blistering fights, too wrapped up in each other to notice the destruction they were wreaking on Roxy and me.

Once when I was about twelve, I was in my bedroom, reading Russian fairy tales and waiting for my parents to stop wishing each other dead. Earlier I had made a mistake of coming out. Dad was chasing Mom with a butter knife. What he thought he could do with such a dull weapon, I can't say. They yelled for me to get back inside my room and shut the door, and I scampered away and tried to calm my sister down while listening to the ruckus outside. Roxy kept crying, and it was well past midnight when I finally read her to sleep in my bed. My eyes drooped, but I struggled to stay awake in case I needed to call an ambulance. A terrifying silence fell and I sneaked out to make sure no one was dead, tiptoeing on the freezing parquet floor down the hallway toward the only source of light streaming from the living room. My heart galloped ahead of me. I heard voices coming from behind the cracked living-room door, and I peeked around it.

Mom was sitting in a chair with Dad kneeling in front of her, the butter knife still in his hand. They were both crying.

“Don't you know I love you,” he said. “Why do you torment me like this? Don't you know how much I love you?”

Mom didn't say a thing. Just curled her fingers in his hair and sobbed.

I felt like an intruder, but after I ran back to my bed I fell asleep within moments; I had heard my father's words, and I believed in their truth. The memory of that night had always made me think that we would be okay, even in America.

But I was wrong. One day we were an immigrant army of four, ready to take on Hollywood; the next, my parents were lashing out at each other with accusations of infidelity and abuse.

“Don't lie to these girls, Nora. I never planned on staying with you.” My father had a booming voice. “You're nothing to me.”

Mother's hands flew to her hips, her eyes enraged and glassy. “I'd like to know where you plan on going, then. Where? Where will you go?”

“Oh, I'll be taken care of.”

Mom halted as if she'd swallowed too much water and was about to choke. And then the words tipped over. “If it weren't for my brother sending that visa you'd be playing Moscow clubs with your drunken buddies—”

“Your brother didn't want us here. I know that's why he left out that paper. They've always been jealous of us, your brother and his wife. It'd make them deliriously happy had we been denied the entry and stayed to rot back in Russia, waiting for them to bless us with their packages of American crap. That's what they wanted.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my aunt hiding behind a potted fern while she punched a number (probably Uncle's at work) into the kitchen phone.

“You should be thankful,” Mom continued as if he hadn't said a word, “that I brought you here, that I didn't leave you after the shit you'd put me through all these years.”

My father exploded. “Thankful? You were a nobody,
derevnia
(country bumpkin). I showed you the world, gave you the opportunity to work onstage. I could've had any woman. They lined up, one knockout after another.”

“Oh, I see now. The only reason you came with me was to bring your slut to the States. Is that it? Why didn't you just stay with her?”

“She's more of a woman than you'll ever be. Look at you. You're nothing but skin and bones!”

“I should've run away from every one of you when I had the chance,” Mom shouted, and I knew that if someone didn't intervene soon, my parents would start throwing things. That's what happened once Mom grouped all of us into one category. Suddenly she wasn't fighting just Dad but the entire population of the world, her children included.

“I gave you all my life, my youth.”

“Stop the melodrama. What about
my
life?”

“The girls are going to hate you for this.”

“You've made sure they already do with all your bad-mouthing.”

I couldn't take it any longer and burst into the living room. Wasn't there any love left between them?

“Will you guys stop? Split or make up, but stop yelling. Talk like normal people, so you can hear each other for once.”

Dad's face turned redder than it already was. “Unless you can stop your mother from harassing me, I have no use for you.”

“Don't call our daughter useless.”

“With you as her mother…” Dad shrugged.

I stood in between them, confused; it was difficult to tell if the argument had something to do with me now or if my parents threw my name in to piss each other off. All I remember is that with each day, their arguments intensified, and consumed everybody around them.

Apprehension pulled at Roxy and me like rubber cement. Had our family really traveled all this way just to lose one another?

 

CROSSFIRE

We had been in America for two months when a recurring dream of drowning in a churning black ocean began to chase sweat down my back at least once a week. I flailed in the howling charred waves, skyscraper-size with ashen tips foaming, but I always woke before the ocean claimed me.

A very bad sign.

One morning Roxy and I woke up and Dad was gone.

“Where did Papa go?” Roxy asked, rubbing her eyes and climbing on Mom's lap.

“Good morning,
sladkaya
(sweet),” Mom said.

I said nothing. A few minutes earlier, I found a pile of photographs in the garbage can under the sink. I picked up one of Mom, Dad, and me taken in a studio when I was three. We were dressed up, our hair all the same length, just above the shoulders, and I was holding a stuffed rabbit in my hands. I think I was smiling in that picture, but I couldn't tell. Dad had cut out my head along with Mom's.

Not long after, Aunt Varvara demanded we leave her house.

Aunt Varvara was the only woman I'd ever known whose brows furrowed even when she was playing patty-cake, but still, until the day she ordered my uncle to fetch an apartment guide from the gas station a few blocks away, I loved her. The rest of the world might not have seen past her brusque exterior, but as a kid I listened to her recite children's rhymes from memory, convinced that she was a fairy with the power to bring them to life.

When Uncle came back, he tossed the magazine on the table and walked out of the house again, mumbling, “I don't want to get involved in women's business.”

Even years after the incident, the two women kept the reasons behind the falling-out to themselves, but it must've been something worse than cancer or world hunger, because within a few days Mom, Roxy, and I were gone.

My sister and I had expected our movie-star mansion at last. But when I saw the building and the neighborhood that was to be our new home, I almost dropped my canvas bag of clothes. Lexington Avenue was more concrete than grass. More sickly palm trees and dilapidated housing than the expected year-round California perfection. It looked as if a hurricane had barged through and no one had bothered to pick up. Our first American apartment was located on the second floor of a very noisy complex, a two-story dove-gray structure with a gated pool shaped like a cashew in the middle of a cement courtyard. Music spilled out of the windows, unfamiliar melodies bouncing off one another in decidedly non-American flight. Bars covered the windows, and graffiti crawled in bold strokes along the walls. I told my mother I had never imagined living somewhere identical to Butyrskaya Tyurma (Butyrka Prison) back in Moscow. “At least it has a roof,” my mother said as she squeezed my shoulder and bravely passed through the front gates.

Uncle Arsen had arranged for the deposit and first month's rent. He hardly said a word as he helped carry the suitcases up the stairs. Mom unlocked the door and swung it open so that he could walk inside without bumping into her, which he did with tight lips and long strides. He dropped our things in the corner and went back to his car for more.

“Is Uncle gonna help hang my posters?” Roxy asked. Once inside she had immediately unzipped her bag and pulled out the rolls of George Michael posters she had brought from Moscow.

“No,” Mom said.

“But why? He's a boy and you said only grown boys like Papa are allowed to touch nails and hammers and Papa's not here and when Uncle leaves who'll hang them then?”

Mom stood over the threshold peering into the courtyard.

“He's not a grown boy yet,” she said.

Uncle left with a soft “Bye” and a softer “Sorry.”

I almost immediately caught my little sister trying to grab a cockroach in the palms of her hands. “Ew, Roxy, let it go!” I shouted. The creature dashed in crazy zigzags toward the fridge, disappearing under it.

After the initial shock and much frenzied clothes-shaking and closet-inspecting, we finally felt safe enough to hang up our things and put away the linens. We tried to make it a home over the next several days, all the while wondering if we had actually moved to Los Angeles or had somehow landed in a third-world country.

Despite my anger at the way we'd been treated, my yearning for friends brought me back to my cousins' house. Basically I chose to ignore the tendency that life has to cuff you in the face. I would walk the four blocks between our places almost every weekend, expecting Aida or Nelly to be as I remembered them, but they never answered the door even if I could see them tiptoeing behind the curtains.

Once Aunt Varvara actually opened the door and thrust a plastic bag at me. “Here,” she said. “I don't want anything of your
alcgolichka
(alcoholic) mother's in my house.”

I obediently brought the bag home. When Mom opened it, I saw the silver coffee set she had given Aunt as a gift upon our arrival. She had to pay the customs officer a nice sum for letting it pass the gate. Mom stuffed the set back in the bag, hands shaking. “Take it back and tell her it was a gift.”

I did, three more times: a reluctant messenger caught between two emotionally charged alphas.

“I said I don't want it.” Aunt Varvara's slitted eyes narrowed at me. She took up most of the love seat. Cousin Aida came into the room and somehow managed to squeeze in next to her mother. Aida used to read during her meals. Growing up, I thought it was a sign of great wisdom. That day, I felt sure that she'd talk sense into both our mothers. Then she put on her best foo dog grimace, and I blanched.

Aunt ordered for me to sit down and folded her meaty arms across her meatier chest.

“We have allowed you into our home, found you a place to live, done everything to make you comfortable. Tell me, why is your mother so ungrateful? Does she think just because she's family it's okay to bring her problems here?”

Her words froze my insides. “What are you talking about?”

“Don't act stupid, Oksana. I shouldn't be surprised, now, should I? That's what your mother gets for marrying a Gypsy. Did you know we had to keep him secret from our friends? For years! She didn't really believe they would have a normal life together, did she? Arsen was right not to want you people here in America, with us. He warned me you'd be trouble.”

A cold weight pressed down at my heart. Had my father been right about Uncle Arsen intentionally leaving out the most important document in the visa application? Aunt Varvara went on. “They thought because they lived in Moscow, and because they were artists”—this last she spit out like bad tobacco—“that made them better than us. But because your mother knew all these important people didn't make her better than us. We actually had to work for a living!”

“But you never worked,” I almost pointed out, then decided this was unwise.

“I told Arsen not to send that visa. I knew you'd be a burden, an embarrassment! We can barely make it here as it is without more people to take care of.”

Aida, my cousin, my friend from childhood, and the one person I believed to be unshakably good, said, “Grandmother took such good care of you half-breeds when your spoiled parents went off on their tours. She made sure you got the best caviar and the biggest birthday parties. But we are her grandkids, too.” Her eyes shot resentment. “Didn't we deserve caviar, Oksana?”

Grandma Rose, a matriarch of my mother's family, had risen above poverty after being orphaned at the age of three and became a successful accountant. She had made one great mistake in her life: she had allowed her kids to think she owed them something. Every time one of them found themselves in trouble, Grandma came to their rescue. With time, they grew to expect it.