American Gypsy (33 page)

At Dad's, things were getting out of control. Not only did Olga keep magically disappearing when she came into money; she now disappeared with it for days at a time. The longer she was gone, the more he practiced his guitar, playing scales and riffs until my eardrums felt blistered. To stay out of their way I did all of my own practicing at school. I composed an instrumental song for the concert as I held together the pieces of enthusiasm I'd started to feel weeks earlier.

Still, I couldn't become invisible. Dad revealed to me his theories about Olga's whereabouts, expecting me to pitch in on the investigation, until one night Olga got caught in the web of her own deception.

It was two in the morning and I was about to go to bed when the phone rang. Dad was eating lunch with the phone at his elbow (he usually got up at four or five in the evening, so this was typical for him). He answered promptly, his scrambled eggs momentarily forgotten. He must've said “What?” at least twenty times before he thrust the phone in my hand, ordering me to take down the address the person on the other end of the line would give. As I did, I watched him stuff the half-eaten eggs down the garbage disposal, cursing them to Hell. The call had come from a Chinese gambling hall where Olga apparently had had a scrap with one of the poker dealers. “Gambling,” he shouted. “Can you fucking believe it? If she thinks I'm gonna stand by and watch her shit away all our hard work, she doesn't know me. I'll divorce her in a fucking wink.”

In the old country, the trains we rode teemed with quick-fix gambling houses. No cops patrolled the locomotives, which made a train compartment the perfect place for setting up card or dice tables and picking wagers out of the crowded, smoke-filled cars. During the stops, a couple of guys kept watch and whistled a warning if a guard boarded. My father participated in his share of all-night betting. “But I was young and money was no problem,” he rationalized. “Your stepmother doesn't realize that dollars are much harder to come by than rubles.”

We drove through slumbering Los Angeles in the direction of Chinatown. My father never stopped talking about his nerves wearing thin. I almost laughed because he reminded me of Mom. In the past, it was she who rode countless taxis around Moscow, searching for Dad in the local bars or bailing him out of jail. Before Roxy was born, I remember riding through the bitter cold often, all the while dreaming of the cozy bed I'd been forced to leave. Once, we found Dad at a nightclub just as he was ambushed by several members of a notorious Ossetian gang. Dad, drunk enough to insult one of the men's mistresses, hadn't expected such a severe retaliation. When Mom and I showed up, one of them had my father in a chokehold, a curved blade at his throat. The place swarmed with patrons trying to flee a potential crime scene. My mother got on her knees, begging him to let go of her husband. She was seven months pregnant with my sister.

It turned out to be a long ride before Dad and I came to a stop in front of a peeling two-story building on the outskirts of Chinatown.

From the outside it looked abandoned. The shiny black windows gave no indication of activity.

“Check the address again,” Dad said.

I looked at the napkin where I'd written it down. “It matches.”

We parked and got out. Dad knocked on a glass door with dark curtains pulled tight, and for a few minutes nothing happened. I walked up and down the sidewalk. He knocked again. The curtains moved this time to reveal an eye.

“Oh,” Dad said. “Hello. I here for Olga. What? No. O-l-g-a. Long-hairs Gypsy vooman.”

The eye was joined by a finger, which pointed to an alley on our left.

The back door cracked only wide enough to let us pass. Inside, cigarette smoke substituted for air. I followed Dad down a narrow hallway, both of us behind a balding Asian man who said nothing but nodded in the direction of a door on the other side of the poker tables. The place was jam-packed. The color red prevailed here—red lights, red carpets—and walls with giant mirrors multiplied us by the dozen. The music was an unrecognizable jumble nearly drowned out by voices and chips clinking in chorus.

My stepmother slept on a maroon couch in the owner's office. The look on his bulgy-eyed face suggested horrified alarm as he begged my father to keep the lady away from his establishment. He didn't want police involvement on account of it being illegal.

“Your wife is a menace,” he said. “She terrorizes my patrons and employees, demanding back money she lost, accusing everyone of cheating. I think it would be better for all of us if she come here no longer.”

How could it be that one petite female had managed to bully a roomful of hardened gamblers? I'd imagined, based strictly on my cinematic experience, that the muscle at such a place could easily drop-kick a troublemaker. Yet here stood a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown because of my tiny stepmother.

Dad agreed to keep Olga away, and hauled his wife out to the van while I followed timidly behind. At one point she woke up long enough to demand he take her back so she could finish her hand. He promised her that if she ever stepped into that place again, he'd send her back to the cold, vermin-infested village of Konotop from which she came. Unfortunately he failed to forbid her from going to the dozens of other underground gaming halls in the Los Angeles area.

After this humiliating experience, Olga put her gambling on hiatus, concentrating instead on clients (good) and on my still unattached state (bad). She plotted or sabotaged, or found a way to sabotage while plotting. As losing money at the tables was no longer an option, she began to lose it to her second favorite vice: alcohol.

Alcohol consumption is woven into the very fiber of Eastern European culture. (In Russian, vodka means “little water.”) People make peace while drinking, forge business deals, talk politics and philosophy. If you were a businessman and you didn't drink, you'd be the only one at the table not making progress. But wisdom held that if you drank alone, you had a serious problem.

Olga stashed her alcohol supply far away from wandering eyes. She'd be all right in the afternoon, but by midnight we'd have to drag her from the ladder before she started mewling on the roof again.

It seemed the one thing holding Dad and Olga together at this stage was their business. In the same way that Olga tried to give up gambling, Dad agreed to try to behave around women. Money still poured in, so they patched up the leaky roof of their relationship for the sake of luxury and status. Where I made five dollars an hour, they raked in anywhere from two to ten thousand a day. For a simple love spell, Olga charged at least five hundred dollars, but since most of my father's clients had bigger problems than a fizzled relationship, he accepted what a client could afford. Sometimes it was one hundred dollars, other times a fruitcake.

When not in deadlock with each other, Olga and Dad greatly enjoyed their new lifestyle. Olga purchased diamond rings for each finger. Soon she sparkled like a disco ball.

Dad booked more gigs, playing jazz, rock, and jazz-rock fusion. He had little desire to play only Gypsy music, maybe because he was finally free to choose. After the shows he sold his home-cooked CDs for five dollars apiece. “If only your grandfather could see me now,” he'd often say. Even though he didn't make as much money as Olga, he was really starting to enjoy himself. His one regret was that stardom still eluded him, though he was convinced it would not be long before the Grammys called.

He made sure to remind me daily that I could live in the same exciting manner if I changed my conformist ways. The only problem was, his idea of following my dream involved performing an occasional channeling and, let's not forget, settling down with a nice Romani boy.

 

THE WEDDING

Not long after our two a.m. Olga roundup, we were invited to a wedding. It was going to last for two days: a grand affair, Romani-style. According to tradition, the first day of celebration takes place at the groom's house, while the second continues at the bride's.

I can't say I willingly put on the sequined peach monstrosity Olga called a dress, but she'd paid for it, and she was acting like this wedding was a really big deal to her, so I obliged. Afterward, she made me turn in front of her bedroom mirror, exclaiming that I resembled a budding rose. Some sparkly jewelry followed, except for a heavy, solid gold bracelet—a gift for the newlyweds—which she carefully placed inside her purse. To crown it all, Olga orchestrated a hair-tease that created a halo on my head reminiscent of the long-gone Lioness. My hair was now almost to my waist—not because I wanted the trademark Gypsy locks but out of superstition. I'd heard Esmeralda say that the longer you grow your hair, the more patient you become, and with Mom practicing her plastic powers in Vegas, and Dad and Olga doing everything they weren't supposed to, I needed all the patience I could get. Even Roxy was in on it with me, both of us growing our patience inch by inch.

We drove to the groom's house through the hills of Glendale, Dad and Olga up front and me budding in the backseat. The sun had long since gone down, and darkness gathered like a cape pinpricked by the streetlights. My stepmother prattled on about the bride, who supposedly had such an enormous nose that her parents, also Olga's good friends, had no choice but to come up with their own
kalim
. A
kalim
is an offering of gold customarily given by the groom's father to the bride's father after they have worked out the wedding details. I didn't believe a word of it. First, Olga liked to exaggerate. And second, we lived in the twentieth century, where no self-respecting girl would allow her parents to settle her future over a handful of precious metals. The family had come to the States recently, but surely the girl had speedily grasped the disadvantages of ancient customs the same way I had.

Before we even saw the house, we heard the music. My heart tightened at the familiar sounds of Romani melodies.

“We're late,” Dad said. “I told you we should've gone to the service.”

We parked two blocks away; cars already lined both sides of the street all the way up the hill.

“I don't think they've started yet,” Olga said, pointing out a stream of guests winding up the street to the house. “See? Everybody's still outside.”

We joined a crowd of people gathered on the front lawn, stark against a house so lit up with Christmas lights that it looked like the sun had taken residence.

“Isn't that dangerous, all the lights turned on together like that?”

“
Gospodi
, Oksana. Only you'd notice something so trivial on a night like this,” Olga said.

And maybe she was right.

The air hinted of roasted meats. Men, including my father, had brought their guitars, fiddles, and accordions. Many likely never left the house without them.

I stood there, breathing in the crisp air and the music, thinking, How could anyone not be moved by this?

Some of the neighbors had come out, watching us as if we were a circus pitching tents. Meanwhile the guests made small talk in Rromanes, Russian, and even English. Some shook hands, others embraced. Even if many of these immigrants didn't live a traditional Romani life anymore, they happily returned to it for special occasions.

“Why is everyone standing out here?” I asked.

Olga took the pipe Dad had lit up. He had bought it off a Hindu man who'd promised that it improved health. She puffed, her eyes half-closed, the smell of cherry tobacco kissing my nose. “The newlyweds will sit at the head of the table first, before anyone's allowed in. Then”—she pulled out the golden bracelet from her purse—“the gifts, and
then
we celebrate.”

Finally the doors opened and the father of the groom invited everyone in to begin the celebration.

Two sets of long tables ran parallel to each other, from the living room through the French doors and out to the backyard. Another table was set at the back of the garden, creating the shape of a Russian
П
. That was where the bride and groom were already receiving gifts.

We stood in a slowly moving procession as if to meet royalty. When it was our turn to congratulate the bride and groom, I couldn't stop staring at their faces, flushed and shiny-eyed. They radiated an inner dazzle that had nothing to do with the wedding. The evidence of their love was almost tangible, and I imagined wrapping myself in it, letting its bliss tingle against my skin.

Once people delivered their presents and felicitations, they sat according to gender and age: men took the right side, women the left; the oldest sat closer to the head of the table, the youngest at the ends. This was done so the young would always be ready to refill glasses or fetch a shawl. In Romani culture, the elder generations enjoy almost unlimited power, and it's a great offense to slight them in any way.

The din in the room fluttered out the windows, but I picked up snippets of conversation here and there. Most guests spoke Russian, and they did so with their hands as much as with their mouths. To a
gadjee
it might have appeared as though the wedding guests were ensnared in some mass disagreement, when in truth they were just having a friendly chat.

A little girl dashed across the floor and into the arms of a woman several seats to my right. The kid's curls bounced, gold earrings twinkling from her tiny earlobes as she jumped up and down to get her mother's attention away from the animated discussion the latter was having with her neighbor.

“Well, here's my Ninochka,” the woman said, embracing her daughter. She caught the pink bow suspended from the tip of one dark curl and quickly reclasped it at Ninochka's temple. The other woman, hair in a loose bun, bejeweled and heavily shoulder-padded in a dress that could've been made out of Liberace's cape, clucked her tongue and said in a voice rough as sandpaper, “What a beauty, what a beauty. Watch out, Alla. Ten more years and you'll be beating away suitors with a broom.” She reached out and squeezed the little girl's chin with plump fingers.