Russian Tattoo (27 page)

Forty

A
ndy and I are in our kitchen, finishing a bottle of wine, which has become a routine ever since I realized that Sasha was never going to open the tomes of Russian classics weighing down my office shelves. Our daughter, almost sixteen, is at the mall with her eighteen-year-old friend Kate, who goes to the same high school and who drives. The phone rings, and from the way Andy's shoulders droop when he picks up the receiver, I know it isn't my sister from New Orleans calling to share a new recipe she has just invented.

“We'll be there as soon as we can,” I hear him say, and the worst images every parent has stored in the recesses of her mind—easily accessible at a moment like this—readily align themselves for a hideous viewing.

“She is at the Hackensack police station,” Andy says. “Arrested for shoplifting.”

None of the available images in my head carries the label “arrested,” and I feel relieved. At least, she is uninjured and alive.

Andy calls a cab, and, five minutes later, we are inside a Lincoln that smells of old, cracked leather, sailing, like a big boat, through the June dusk. A week from today, we have three tickets to fly to Paris for a week, as we do almost every year in early summer. Only this time Sasha has convinced us that she is mature enough to stay home and take care of the dog. She was so adamant in her desire to remain home and spend a week by herself that she has persuaded me to manipulate her pediatrician into writing a letter to the airline pleading a medically necessitated refund for her ticket. The letter is now waiting on my desk, ready to be presented to an Air France official at Newark Airport tomorrow.

As we walk into the police station, we see Kate, sobbing, being led by her parents to their car. Inside, Sasha is slumped in a chair, with puffy eyes and a wet face, avoiding looking in our direction.

Sergeant Dutton gets up from behind the desk to greet us. He is in his fifties, short and paunchy, his ears almost perpendicular to the graying hair sprouting out of his skull. I don't know why I notice his ears.

“Sasha and Kate were arrested in Neiman Marcus,” he says. “They stole a two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans. Kate has admitted that she stole the jeans, but your daughter was waiting outside the dressing room and agreed to hide the jeans in her backpack. That is a crime, too,” he says.

I conjure up Sasha's room, with jeans tangled in knots on the closet shelves, with more jeans strewn across the bed and rolled into balls of denim on the bathroom floor. More jeans than all the students in my whole high school in Leningrad could ever dream of. More jeans than all the actors in Marina's theater, even counting those with lucrative film careers, could manage to procure.

“What were you thinking?” Andy asks, his voice so full of anger it is almost a shout. “Were you thinking at all? In my whole life I've never been arrested.” He leans forward in his chair, his hand stabbing the air in Sasha's direction. “You're not even sixteen, and you are in a police station. What the hell were you thinking?”

Sasha folds into a ball and bursts out sobbing.

Sergeant Dutton takes a few steps in front of his desk as my daughter wails. “Since she is a minor, the case will be transferred to a juvenile court,” he says. She'll have to see the juvenile court counselors and follow their instructions.

I am grateful I have two glasses of wine in me to soften the edge of this disgrace. How could you do this? I want to ask my bawling daughter, although I know that this is a stupid, rhetorical question. Why would you try to steal what is so readily available to you? My eyes wander from the scuffed linoleum floor to the beige walls devoid of any pictures, as if the generic blandness of this police station could provide the answer.

The sergeant stops in front of Sasha, now quieted in her chair. “You know, you could have worked part-time and made the money, if you really wanted the jeans,” he says. “You could've earned the money yourself.”

Sasha sniffles, looks away, and says nothing. The irony is glaring us in the face: everyone in this room except Sergeant Dutton knows that Sasha didn't have to work. The pathetic truth is that we would have bought the Neiman Marcus jeans for her, if she had asked us. They would have been one of those dozen presents Andy still insists we get for Christmas and her birthday.

Andy gets up, and Sergeant Dutton motions for him to sign the release form. Behind the window, the headlights of the taxi waiting to take us home light up the empty parking lot.

I can see how furious Andy still is. I feel the same disappointment and humiliation sloshing inside me, overpowering the wine. “This is it,” he says, facing Sasha, drawing the confines of the imminent punishment. “Don't say a word, not a single word. You are going with us next week. Do you understand, young lady? You're going to Paris!”

I know how ridiculous this must sound to a stranger. Our daughter's punishment for shoplifting, a trip to Paris. As we walk toward the door, I pass Sergeant Dutton, whose features have scrunched into a confused, bewildered look. I don't even dare to imagine what he must think of our parenting skills, or our sanity.

Sasha is seventeen, and her hair is now in dreadlocks. One look at her should be enough to banish my fantasy of our traveling to Petersburg together, yet I attempt what I think is my last pitch in favor of learning Russian.

“Someday you'll be glad you can speak another language,” I say. I know I sound like my mother, but I cannot stop because I pushed off the top of this slope a long time ago and am now sliding down, pulled by the force I can't control. “You'll have so many opportunities others don't. You already have the base. Now it's just a question of not losing it. It would be such a shame to lose what you already know. Look at me: I struggled through two years of German at the university, and now I can't say a word.” I deliberately speak rationally and calmly, so that the logic of my arguments will be so obvious even Sasha can't dispute it.

“I am not you,” she spits out, and no matter how hard I search for an appropriate parent-like response, I know there is nothing I can say to contradict her.

She is succinct and to the point, my daughter. She is just as ruthless and honest as I used to be. Isn't this what I said when my mother bought me a flowery polyester skirt I called provincial; or when I applied to the English department of the university instead of medical school, as she had insisted; or when her face froze in panic as I announced I was going to marry an American?

I feel hopeless and old. How can I possibly know anything about raising a child when I still live with my mother? The mother I have always kept at an emotional distance, rarely telling her anything of any importance; the mother who followed me to a different hemisphere to keep an eye on me, to make sure I was all right. Is this what has made me so myopic and inept: remaining a child, never having to grow up?

I am as disconnected from my daughter as I have always been from my mother. We speak different languages: Mama does not know English and Sasha does not know Russian, all because I have been unable to teach them.

Forty-One

A
fter her freshman year at the small liberal arts college in upstate New York, Sasha drops out and spends the fall driving cross-country with a couple of tattooed friends we never met. They are defending animal rights, she says, and I imagine young men in baseball caps with blue and red dragons on their biceps loading signs and posters into a car trunk. She doesn't really need college, Sasha tells us on the phone. She can learn everything she has to know without going to school.

Andy carries on long phone conversations with her, and I can only envy his patience. He offers evidence in defense of higher education, so obvious it makes my ears wilt, arguments Sasha resolutely refutes with examples of friends we don't know who have done just fine without school.

She calls us from Pittsburgh, then Detroit.

“You need to be careful with what you're doing,” Andy says into the receiver. “You know you're breaking the law.”

I hear Sasha's angry voice on the other end. “It isn't
my
law that I'm breaking,” she yells.

“Whether it's your law or not your law”—I hear Andy's voice climb higher—“it's your ass, and they're going to throw it in jail. And when they do throw you in jail, I won't be able to help you.”

“You're right, it is my ass, and no one is going to throw me in jail for protesting cruelty to animals,” she shouts, self-righteous and angry. I imagine her furiously clutching the phone, her hazel eyes narrowed to slits. “And anyway, all we're doing is standing on lawns and holding up signs.”

“And just whose lawns are you standing on?” Andy asks.

“If you must know, we stand on the lawns of the corporate presidents and the scientists who kill dogs and cats to test for hair color or some bullshit. Isn't it obvious to you
this
is what the real crime is? Isn't it painfully obvious, even to you?”

“What's painfully obvious is that we have a nineteen-year-old daughter who dropped out of college,” Andy shouts back. “With one arrest already under her belt and now going for number two.”

There is an angry exhale on the other end, then a loud intake of breath. “Oh, I was just waiting for you to bring that up. I was fifteen when that happened. And it wasn't even me who took the fucking jeans.” Sasha is screaming now, so I can hear every word. “I knew you were holding on to it, waiting to use it against me as ammunition.” There is a pause, and I can sense my daughter is reloading her own weapons. “I hate you! And I never want to talk to you again,” she yells, her voice precise as a well-aimed gun.

In the evening, Andy and I sit in the kitchen and stare into our glasses of wine.

“I really blew it, didn't I,” he says in a quiet voice. “I shouldn't have brought up that stuff about her arrest.”

He walks over to the phone on the wall and I know he is dialing Sasha's number. He waits as I hear the rings, then a voice-mail recording.

“Maybe I should tell her about my lab assistant job in Leningrad,” I say. “Then she will hate me, too, and will never want to talk to me again.”

As a university student, I worked in Mama's anatomy department at the time when the Soviet Union launched one cosmonaut after another into space and we were required to produce research on weightlessness. My fellow lab assistant, Luba, and I pulled rabbits out of their cages in the basement, strapped them to a centrifuge, and spun them at a speed that blurred the rabbits into circles of gray and white. If they were still alive after the centrifuge stopped, we had to kill them with ether, because the researchers needed the rabbits' spinal cords. We had to carefully break the vertebrae, remove the soft cord of spine in one piece, freeze it, and then slice it into thin translucent chips that would fit under a microscope. I hated holding a rag full of ether to the rabbits' faces, while Luba hated breaking the vertebrae, so we delineated the labor in a mutually agreeable way.

“Our humble rabbits from the anatomy department basement sent many humans into space,” I tell Andy to make him smile because I see that his eyebrows are still knit together in one droopy line.

We both know, of course, I will never repeat any of this to Sasha; I will never initiate that battle. I wonder if there are any battles I am prepared to fight with my daughter. I fought so hard for her to get A's in algebra, to finish her papers on time, to memorize irregular verbs in French. I confiscated the phone line she used to connect to the Internet and chat with friends instead of researching literary lives or the dates of important historic upheavals. Before she took the practice SATs, we hired a geometry tutor, who sat with her at our dining room table every Thursday solving three-­dimensional problems that thirty years earlier I could never understand myself. During the year of real SATs, we saddled Sasha with a three-month course of make-believe test taking, driving her twice a week to a sad-looking brick building in the center of Ridgewood, where I sat in the car waiting for her stooped figure to emerge from the back door.

It was at the end of that year when I saw a mark on Sasha's hand, a small purple circle that looked like a cigarette burn. Andy told me what it was, but I didn't believe him. “Why would she do that?” I asked. “Why would she scar herself?”

“She's under too much pressure,” he said, “and she wants us to notice the pain she's in. She burned her hand just below the sleeve line, just where we would see it, to let us know she's on the verge of breaking.” We were sitting in our living room, an absurdly bright day streaming through the windows, and Andy said we had to back off and no longer push her.

We stopped urging Sasha to revise papers or enroll in AP classes, and yet, in the pit of my soul, where no one could see and instantly condemn me, I still couldn't understand what made her feel so pressured. She had a sharp mind, a house full of books, a school that taught world history and looked like a French château. She had a pair of relatively normal, sometimes overly protective parents, usually calm and sober. Her mother didn't demand that she become a doctor, and there was no older actress sister to dread and envy. Her father was alive and well. All Sasha had to do was turn off instant messaging.

During my first spring in the United States, I was insanely envious of the eighteen-year-old Russians in my SCS Business and Technical Institute class, those lucky immigrants who had so many American universities still ahead of them, spread at their teenage feet. They compared the scholarships they had already been offered and casually gabbed about premed studies at Columbia or fine arts programs at NYU. Fine arts, I repeated in my mind, a field whose name alone made me melt.

Now, almost three decades later, I don't understand what Sasha is thinking. I don't understand how anyone could reject a chance to study at a school where no one makes her drill the tenets of Scientific Communism or History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I don't understand anything, it seems, and this makes me feel like an outsider in my daughter's life, an ignorant and clueless immigrant, again.