American Gypsy (40 page)

Like Dad, Olga ignored my little sister, yanking at my hair once again. “What do you think you're doing?”

I twisted around, gripping her hands with mine, but no matter how I pleaded with her, she wouldn't get out of my way. When my eleven-year-old sister called our stepmother a bitch, Olga finally threw her out of the room.

Eventually the noise outside the door subsided. I crumpled up on the bed. After a while I stopped wiping away the tears and let them soak into my pillow.

When I woke up, the house was quiet. I was alone. Fear had settled inside my rib cage. Olga came in with a tray of food and set it on the desk.

“Where is he?” I asked.

She clucked her tongue with her hands on her hips. “
Ay-ay-ay
, Oksana.”

“What did he do to him?”

“Don't even think about going out that window,” she said when I moved. “We know where he lives. Trust me. You don't want your father anywhere near that boy right now. His mood is black enough for murder.” My father bellowed for her from the other end of the house. Olga answered and turned to leave. “It's obvious you're ready to marry. But now that you've lain with some
gadjo
, who hasn't as much as a decent family to his name, who'll have you?”

I smashed the tray against the door as she closed it.

For two days I was a prisoner. Dad refused to talk, wouldn't look at me. I was forbidden to go out, even to school—especially not to school. Olga created a long list of chores for me to do as punishment, and that kept me busy: scrub the floors, wash the windows, and serve as much tea as was required. On several occasions I started to explain to them that Cruz and I weren't doing anything wrong.

My only companion was Roxy. We weren't supposed to be talking, so she sneaked into my room when everyone else slept. My little sister did her best to cheer me up with stories of Vegas and her many friends. She told me about our mother building a cardboard prototype of an automated slot machine she called a “talking slut.” (I'd tried to correct her pronunciation, but I eventually gave up.) I found the idea brilliant: a customer could play with it as if it were a living person. Quite sure her invention would change Vegas forever, Mom took the talking slut to a casino manager. “He laughed at her,” Roxy whispered to me. “Told her that people don't come to Las Vegas to hear machines talk.” Several years later talking sluts popped up all over the valley, and Mom was furious enough to boycott casinos for a whole month.

“Let's play video charades,” Roxy said.

It was a game we'd made up years ago in Moscow when one of Dad's friends brought a pirated VHS tape with six hours of music videos. They'd been recorded straight from MTV, commercials and all. Roxy and I wore that tape out until we could act out every video. She loved to sit on the floor and guess which singer or group I was. I'd bound up and down as if on coiled springs and shake my imaginary skirt, singing, “Girlz jus vanna hav fu-un.” Roxy'd jab a finger at me. “Crazy lady with a partially shaved head!” Or I'd spin around with “Youspinmerountrount bround round round—” “Girlyguy!” she'd scream. “I knew that one right away!”

Our all-time favorite, now that I think back, was my rendition of Def Leppard's “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Wearing a mop head for metal hair and one of Dad's leather vests, I'd squeeze my fists in front of my face and shout, “Put that
shuba
on me.” Which literally translated into “Put that fur coat on me.”

I wished I could seize those carefree moments and play with Roxy like I used to, but I couldn't get the image of my father beating Cruz out of my mind.

“I don't even remember how to play it anymore,” I said.

Roxy frowned and then jumped off the bed to strike a pose that I immediately recognized as a move from Michael Jackson's “Thriller.”

“Chamon,” she said. “I'll go first.”

*   *   *

Three days later my sister went back to Vegas and Dad spoke his first words to me. “You've shamed this family.”

I was cutting onions for beef stew on top of the wooden counter extension. The onions intended to squeeze every last tear from my eyes, and a flood of emotion pushed dangerously against the back of my throat. “What family?” I blurted out.

His chair creaked as he leaned back. “What does that mean?”

“The family you walked out on, or the one you and Olga are doing such a great job destroying?”

“Our affairs don't concern you.”

“But they do.” I left the knife on the board and turned around to face him. “You think because we're kids, we don't understand things. We watch you people rip everything apart without a thought for what it does to us, and we can't do anything about it.”

A shadow of sadness flitted across my father's face before it hardened. “Don't try to manipulate this conversation. It won't work. I'm an adult and I know more about such things. Young guys like that have only one thing on their minds.”

The floodgate inside of me had been opened and I couldn't contain the stuff spilling out. “All this time you're too busy to talk about anything. You let Olga plan out my life, and now suddenly you have wisdom to share?” I couldn't believe I was talking like this to my own father. He looked as surprised. “I didn't do anything wrong,” I said.

“If you think sleeping with some nameless
gadjo
is right, then I should've listened to Olga a long time ago and married you off.”

“He's not nameless,” I said. My ears burned with humiliation. “You taught him, remember? You, who never let me touch that guitar unless I'm polishing it! I didn't sleep with him. And he's not a
gadjo
, he's Brazilian, and I love him!”

“He's a bastard asshole motherfucker. If I see him again I'll snap his neck like a pretzel.”

“Why, Dad?” I sat down across from him. “Why can't you see all the good things I've done? Why is it so hard for you to trust me, to believe I'm smart enough to make the right choices?”

“You're a girl.”

“I'm your daughter.”

“And your mother's daughter.”

“And
your
daughter,” I repeated.

“A daughter who disobeys at every turn.” He sighed. “Would it be asking too much to have had just one boy?”

“I can do as well as any boy. Look. I found a job, on my own—”

“A job I forbade you to keep.”

“—and I got into magnet school without any help—”

“Yet another thing you did behind my back.”

“—only because I wanted you to be proud of me,” I said.

“Where does the lying end, Oksana? You ask me to trust you. How can I trust a child who cares nothing for my opinion? What else don't I know?”

“You don't know how much it hurt when you didn't come to last year's talent show. I got a personal note from the principal herself, you know. You were supposed to be there.”

“Is this what it's all about?” He slapped his knee. “A high-school talent show? That was months ago. What's the use bringing it up now?”

I reached out and covered his hand with mine. His skin was rough, sprinkled with coarse hairs, his fingers square-ended. A tattoo of a lute, hand-poked many years ago, had faded into gray.

“Trust me, Dad. I've got a good head on my shoulders. Even when I argue with you, I still understand that you want the best for me. Everything you say counts. But I'm not going to live your life, or Mom's life. You guys had your chance.”

“But you must accept our guidance. You're a girl, and there's an army of assholes out there.”

“I will make mistakes. Please, let me. I do love Cruz but I won't act stupid just because of it. And I'm playing this year's show, and I want you to know that if you don't come it's okay. I might even end up working at some Vegas casino for the rest of my life. But that would be my choice. Isn't that what you always wanted from Grandpa?”

With an overcast face, my father stood up and walked away.

Cruz kept calling, but I could never get to the phone before Olga snatched at it. When Annie called I was allowed a five-minute supervised exchange.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Fine. You guys?”

“Cruz is going fucking berserk here. I haven't heard so much dirty Portuguese since Cousin Roberto's jail stint two years ago.”

The phone clicked and bumped.

“Do you want me to come get you?” Cruz's voice. “It's my fault. So fucking stupid.”

But I knew if fault were a name tag, it belonged on my chest. No amount of running could separate me from having kept a secret I knew would crush my father.

Dad and I didn't speak to each other for days, and I didn't dare see Cruz. But then one evening Dad called me into his studio. The sun crested the horizon, and the gold-threaded curtains sparkled in its rays. Dad sat at his desk, flyers spread over its surface like a lettered tablecloth.

“I've decided to stop the exorcisms,” he said. “You think I should call the newspapers first and change the ad, or reprint the flyers?”

“There's a copier I can use at school on lunch breaks,” I said cautiously, and he handed me the master file.

 

SIGNS

With only two months of school left, Mom began to call more frequently than she had during the entire two years we'd been apart. Every phone conversation, she turned Rumpelstiltskin on me. “Now give me what you promised, little princess!” I think what she enjoyed even more than my impending move was my father's failure to bring me over to the dark side. But she had one, too.

By this time, I had no doubt that Mom was an alcoholic. Roxy often called me in the middle of the night to report Mom's activities, which included hiding out on the balcony in the middle of the night with a snifter and a cigarette. But I could tell Mom wasn't all right, even over the phone. Not only did she slur through the majority of our conversations but her personality changed faster than I could keep track of. Within five minutes Mom could go from loving and enthusiastic to bitter and detached.

My mother had been my idol when I was a kid. Spirited and fierce in her love for her family, the woman could do no wrong, and anyone who claimed otherwise faced my wrath.

“Your mother came home at four in the morning,” Grandma Ksenia once said, batting at the flies with a rolled-up newspaper as she, Zhanna, and I walked home from the farmers' market one morning. “She was doing figure eights down the sidewalk. I hope none of the neighbors was awake to see it.”

At twelve, I'd grown skin thick as an elephant's as a defense against Grandma's cutting remarks. But telling me I'd have better luck acquiring a well-paying profession (a city bus driver, for example) than a good husband was very different from criticizing my mother's walking, or drinking, habits. Only I could do that.

“She must've tipped at least two bottles of vodka.”

“No, she didn't. She made borscht this morning,” I said, because no one in their right mind would set out to create Grandpa Andrei's favorite dish while nursing a hangover.

Grandma paused and clucked her tongue at me, then switched the sack from one hand to the other, fanning herself with the same newspaper she'd bullied the flies with.

Zhanna, routinely at the edges of these kinds of conversations, looped her arm through mine and tugged, an intervention she'd attempted too often for someone so young.

“Mom's fine, and maybe you shouldn't spy on people at four in the morning, Grandma.”

“She's an alcoholic, that's what she is. That's a sure way to lose a husband. My Valerio could've found himself an actress from the Bolshoi if he wanted to. With a stipend and a vacation dacha out by the lake.”

“You're jealous because everyone in the band likes Mom more than you,” I said.

“Oh, look, a pigeon.” Zhanna tugged harder, but I resisted.

“Your tongue is a kilometer long. Just wait until I tell your father how you disrespect your elders. See if he won't take away that blasted jacket of yours. See if he won't.”

For two years, I'd waited for Mom to discover she hated passing out change in casinos, but as the end of the school year approached, I saw that she had no intention of returning to Los Angeles. I felt guilty even considering going back on my word and worried about her, but I despised the idea of moving to Las Vegas, away from everything I'd come to love.

Then I received a letter of admission from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. My parents, busy reconstructing their own lives, didn't get involved in my college selection, so the decision was left up to me. UNLV was the only place I'd applied because I had no idea you could apply to more than one school, and I didn't bother to ask a counselor. But maybe on some level I always knew I'd end up in Vegas.

Annie and Brandon were starting general courses that fall at Pasadena City College. Suddenly, we were all growing up.

One evening, in celebration of our imminent descent into adulthood, we went out for sushi. Annie picked a tiny place hidden in the basement of the only apartment building on the block, the rest of the street lined with sagging and decrepit houses.

Cruz came, too, wearing a pair of black slacks and a merino V-neck that matched his eyes.

The atmosphere at the table felt vaguely tense and uncomfortable. We talked about the weather and our Shakespeare teacher, who always smelled of pot. And about our American history teacher, who had asked the question “Is life fair?” on a test, and had taken points off for everyone who answered “Yes,” noting “How about now?” in the margin.

Cruz joked around in his easygoing way, but he had bags under his eyes and kept making excuses to leave the table.

Ever since I had told him about my letter of acceptance, he'd acted more withdrawn. We were still together, though we made sure my father had no way of finding out. It wasn't so difficult because Dad now spent so much time in his studio writing depressing love songs and horror-film scores, he wouldn't have noticed a tornado ripping by. Cruz and I avoided many things during those last few months of school. I think we both felt something bad coming. When I brought up Vegas, he'd make a phone call to Pizza Hut and get all buddy-buddy with the person taking the order, or walk out of the room, claiming a headache.