Russian Tattoo (28 page)

Forty-Two

I
n Chicago, Sasha is arrested. She calls from the police station, her voice defiant and high, struggling to speak over the background din. I feel as if someone with a big fist has just punched me straight in the solar plexus.

“We didn't do anything,” she shouts into the receiver, but I can hear her voice is cracking. “We were just standing on a lawn and holding up signs.”

I tell her to keep her cell phone on so we can call her as soon as Andy gets home.

“My phone has been confiscated by the cops as evidence,” she yells in response.

Evidence of what? I want to ask, but don't.

When Andy gets home, I tell him about the arrest and the confiscated phone. We find a number Sasha gave us before she left, a number to call in case of an emergency, in case we couldn't reach her on her own phone.

A boy our daughter's age answers, and there is a moment of silence on the other end when Andy identifies himself as Sasha's father. We wait again and then we hear our daughter's voice.

“Tell us what's going on,” Andy says. “I don't want to hear any hysterics, I don't want to hear about animal rights. Just tell us if you're all right. Tell us where you are.”

“With a friend,” says Sasha, in a voice no longer shrill but still defiant. I know that her notion of a friend is much broader than mine, allowing a dozen people into a space where I would fit only one. I try to conjure up this friend, a fellow protester with unwashed hair and tattoos. She tells us the police have released her, so she can now leave the state and come home.

Come home, I repeat in my mind, longingly. Andy and I look at each other and take a deep breath.

“So can I come home or not?” Sasha asks, her voice louder and more resistant.

“Of course you can come home,” says Andy. “But things have to change.”

“I'm not going back to school, if that's what you mean,” she snaps.

If it were I talking to my daughter, I know I would fall straight into the fighting trap again, reaching for arguments in defense of higher education that had already been flogged to near death in our kitchen. But Andy is wiser and more patient with Sasha than I will ever be.

“I can't force you to go back to college,” he says. “But if you're old enough to quit school, you're old enough to earn your own money.” He walks out of the kitchen with the phone, and I hear his voice behind the door gently arguing with our daughter.

When he comes back, he looks down and shakes his head. “I don't know how she did it,” he says. “I've just agreed to give her an allowance. But only until she starts making her own money,” he adds hastily. “Oh, and I've also agreed to pay her cell phone bill.”

A week later, Sasha is back and looking for a job. She says she will answer the phone in Andy's office, but only on a temporary basis. She is obstinate and proud, and she wants to find a real job, not a sinecure offered by her father. Andy pays her ten dollars an hour, more than the minimum wage—or any wage she would get in a job without experience—but our daughter finds this arrangement too easy and unsatisfying.

She applies to Trader Joe's and comes back from her interview with a stack of uniform T-shirts she must wear to work. I have trouble seeing Sasha in a uniform, so it is a surprise when two weeks later she is still holding the job. When Andy and I ask her about work, she pouts and says nothing. A few days later it turns out that the manager has assigned our vegan daughter to a meat locker. Sasha doesn't talk to us about work. Every morning she silently puts on a Trader Joe's T-shirt and gets into my old Volvo with a manual shift I taught her how to drive.

In May, her meat locker sentence ends when she upgrades herself to folding shirts at Urban Outfitters. At her invitation, Andy and I go to visit her at the Garden State Plaza mall, where we see her walking around the store with confidence, making sure the belts are coiled into perfect circles and the scarves are arranged in rainbow patterns. Instead of the Salvation Army sweatshirts that are still spilling out of her closet, she now wears the same outfits she arranges on the shelves with such masterful care. Looking at Sasha expertly folding a pair of jeans, I think of my daughter's room at home, pieces of clothing scattered all over the unmade bed, wet towels crumpled on the floor, and orphaned shoes poking out of the open closet door in search of their missing mates.

“You know, I respect you for sticking with these jobs,” Andy says to Sasha. She is in the living room, fumbling through her bag, getting ready to go to work. For three months, she has been packaging meat at Trader Joe's, then folding shirts at Urban Outfitters for eight dollars an hour. “But we both know this isn't going to be your life.”

“So what should my life be?” she says, the old defiance back in her voice. She lifts her chin, speaking in machine-gun spurts, as if expecting someone to clamp her mouth shut. “Do you think I should get a doctorate, like Mommy, and spend my life teaching kids who don't want to be there? Is that what you want me to do?”

“Look, you can do whatever you want to do,” says Andy. “But you can't do anything without a college degree. There's got to be more to your life than stocking shelves. A college degree is your fallback position. If nothing goes right in your career, at least you will have a higher education.”

I see Sasha turn away from him, her shoulders slumped. She looks as fragile now as she was belligerent only a minute earlier. Her hands clasp her elbows; her lower lip curls forward as it used to when she was a baby ready to start crying. “That's all you ever talk about, that's all that matters to you, that I finish college,” she says and sniffles, and even from where I am standing in the kitchen I see a tear rolling down her cheek.

Andy wraps his arms around her and pulls her into his embrace. “No,” he says softly. “All that matters to me is you.”

When Mama asks about Sasha, I say she has taken a year off to find a better school. I know my mother will accept this lie because she can relate to a search for academic excellence. I also know I should grow up and talk to her as an adult would do, as she talked to her own mother, letting my grandma in on every hurdle put up in her way by life. I can almost see Babusya's soft face behind her round glasses as she listened to Mama's laments about my father, who refused to have a child, or about my sister who refused to go to technical school because she wanted to become an actress. I know Grandma heard every intake of breath and every stumble in my mother's voice; I know she heard and understood everything. So why am I so stubborn in keeping my troubles from my own mother? Why can't I go down to her basement, sit on her bed as she watches news from Moscow, and allow her to worry with me?

Forty-Three

A
t the end of the week Sasha announces she is going back to college. She has chosen the University of Vermont, she tells us.

“Why Vermont? It's so far away,” I question feebly, suspecting it may be precisely the distance from home and from us that drives Sasha's choice of school.

“It's a good university,” Andy says, and I know I shouldn't say anything because any school, even five hours away, is better than no school at all.

In June the three of us pile into Andy's Saab and go to Burlington. Sasha has already informed us she doesn't want to live in another dorm. The dorm at Bard College was awful, she tells us. Her dorm mates spent their days guzzling beer and nights staggering aimlessly through clouds of pot. I instantly feel guilty for not having known this earlier, for not being able to rescue my vegan, teetotaler daughter from a year of social torture. I know she is as absolute about drugs and alcohol as she is about milk, and when on New Year's Eve I poured an inch of champagne into her glass, she barely let it touch her lips.

After a day of searching, we find the first floor of a house for rent on a main street, twice the size of my Leningrad apartment. The house has no dishwasher or window blinds, but it has eleven-­foot ceilings and tall, enormous windows that are certain to present us with an exorbitant energy bill from October to May. I will never tell my mother that we have put up a twenty-year-old in this grand apartment with a separate dining room big enough to give formal dinners for twelve, but we are ready to do anything to have our daughter finish college.

She has chosen sociology as a major because she has already taken enough courses to allow her to cram three years of studies into two. When she signs up, on her own volition, for an advanced Russian course, my heart seizes with joy. After the first semester, she takes two more courses in the Russian department: Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
and Bulgakov's
Master and Margarita
. I am so thrilled I am afraid to make a sudden movement or breathe audibly. I already see us strolling on Nevsky Prospekt together; I imagine her in Petersburg carrying on conversations with my friends about poetry, asking people on the street for the directions to my courtyard.

Sasha stoically struggles through the text of both novels, and I proofread her final papers to make sure she is rewarded with A's.

The fantasies of our reading Russian literature and going to Petersburg together are again premature and short-lived. Sasha, I have learned, has joined the university's shooting club and bought a gun. Andy, while not happy about it, says that owning a gun is legal in Vermont. It dawns on me that this may have been the reason she chose to study in a state so far away from home, a state so lax about firearms.

She is back in school, but she owns a gun. One step forward, two steps back—the title of Lenin's article I had to memorize for the state exam on the History of the Communist Party. I don't know why Lenin's words from my student years have floated up in my memory and are now bobbing in my head as the refrain of an annoying song.

When Lenin's quote retreats, like a fetid tide, it leaves behind the hideous knowledge that my daughter now owns a gun.

“What gun?” I ask in horror, imagining Sasha pulling a revolver out of the inner pocket of her jacket to hold up a 7-Eleven.

There is a pause on the other end. “An AK-47,” she says hesitantly, knowing that I won't take it well.

I don't.

“A vegan with a military rifle!” I moan to Michelle, whose daughter, Lindsay, and Sasha were lukewarm friends in high school. We are sitting in Michelle's marble-floored kitchen the size of our house, clutching glasses of wine. I ran into her in Whole Foods as we were eyeing containers of Ben & Jerry's frozen yogurt, and we both squealed in delight as if we were best buddies who had suddenly reunited after years of painful separation. Michelle's two daughters have both left the house for small, exclusive schools, and she no longer has anything to do but walk the dog, she tells me. The dog she has to walk is a stately borzoi with long, silky hair the color of rust parted around its sad, elongated face. Except for the sorrowful expression, the dog, whose name is inexplicably Natasha, looks very much like the owner of this stone palace.

I question Michelle, desperately and rhetorically, about why a girl raised in a middle-class, professional family would want to own a gun.

“What does Andy think?” she asks, looking up at me from the wineglass, her face framed by the golden borzoi hairdo.

When Sasha recently came home for a holiday recess, Andy suggested she take lessons at a local shooting range. As long as she has a gun, she should know how to handle it safely, he reasoned. He called the Bullet Hole in Belleville and paid for a day of classes and target practice. My daughter came back with a paper target of an outlined torso and hung it on the wall of her room. All twenty-five shots were clustered within a two-inch-wide circle in the middle of the paper chest. I didn't know how to feel because two incompatible emotions rose inside my own chest almost simultaneously: nausea and pride. It made me feel sick that my daughter's long, exquisite fingers—the fingers I had hoped would make her a pianist before she refused to continue playing at thirteen—pressed the trigger of a gun, releasing deadly bullets into a paper target; yet her accuracy impressed me and made me proud.

My laments about Sasha's love for guns seem to inspire Michelle, and she gets up and walks around the table. “And I cannot even imagine what you must think of those tattoos,” she says in a voice both concerned and catty. “They are all over Facebook, Lindsay tells me.”

I feel like someone hit me in the chest with a four-by-four, crushing my lungs so that for a moment I cannot breathe. I turn away to face a wall and steel myself because I don't want to fall apart in Michelle's perfect kitchen. I gulp down the remnants of wine in my glass as my cluelessness comes into focus, like a photograph in a developing tray. How could I not have questioned all the long-sleeved sweaters Sasha wore on ninety-degree summer days, all those times when she refused to go to the beach with us?

“All over her arms,” says Michelle, dragging her manicured fingers from her shoulder to her wrist.

I mutter something about having to grade papers for tomorrow's class, then get up and stagger to my car. The inside of my Volvo is airless and stale, but it is all irrelevant now in the shadow of such monstrous news. The AK-47, with all its hideousness and its hazards, has instantly retreated to the rear of possible threats: no matter how much my daughter loves it, its metal barrel or its trigger or its handle of polished wood will never fuse into her skin and mar her body for the rest of her life.

I turn the key to the Volvo and back out of Michelle's endless driveway, then pull over in the middle of the block and switch off the ignition. I sit in my car and breathe deeply, as if before a plunge underwater. Although my mind registers the surroundings and my eyes pass the images to my brain—a patch of lawn in front of a wrought-iron fence, a line of cement squares called a sidewalk—none of them seems to fit into this new reality. Next to my car is a pole with a No Parking sign.
s
treet weeping
, says the sign, the only part of the landscape that makes sense—until I see that the letter
s
in the second word is hidden behind a bolt holding the sign to the pole. Nevertheless, with the encouragement from the parking regulation, I open the window and do some street weeping of my own, grateful to the darkness and the late hour and the suburban emptiness.

When I am finished, I decide I am not going to upset Andy if he doesn't already know about Sasha's tattoos. What can we do now anyway, when she has already done what she has done? I think of the time when she had chicken pox at five, when she accidentally pulled a scab off her forehead and I felt desperate because I thought she would be scarred for life. Is it my fault that she now feels a need to scar herself, to brand her body with a permanent mark—of what? Of my rejection? Of my impossible demands? Of her failure to be Russian enough for me?

It makes me nauseous to think that my daughter is just like all those miscreants in Soviet jails we used to despise back home, those societal dregs who couldn't string words into a grammatical sentence or find Europe on a map. When I was eighteen, my friend Roman and I took an overnight train ride from Arkhangel'sk to Leningrad, a ticket with the unbelievably low fare of five rubles. As soon as the train departed, it turned out that the car we were in was full of convicts being moved between prisons, and I spent the entire night facing the wall on the upper berth, a threadbare blanket pulled over my head. All I saw was a man snoring on the berth across from mine, his bare arm hanging off the side, skin full of blue anchors, smudged lines of sailor wisdom, and naked women with balloon-like breasts.

At home, I go straight to the computer and try to get onto Facebook to see Sasha's pictures, which I dread even to imagine. I know nothing about Facebook, but I realize I need to make up a name to become my daughter's friend. “Chekhov,” I type frantically, as if she wouldn't figure out instantly this friend seeker's deafening identity. I hunker down in front of the computer screen in a feverish effort to channel my desperation into the vacuity of busywork, of senseless key striking that leads to nothing. I am a failure, again, already rejected by Sasha as a mother and, now, as a Facebook friend called Chekhov.

At night I dream that Sasha has tattooed her face. I don't know that I am only dreaming, so in my mouth it tastes like gall. She is outside, tall and leggy in her skinny jeans, standing with her back to me. When she turns, I see that her beautiful face is branded with wiggly blue lines and dots, the permanent scars no time will be able to erase.

I dream—a dream I've had several times in the past—of getting on an Aeroflot flight to Leningrad. There is always a ticket waiting for me, even when I call only a few hours before departure time. Both my passports, Russian and American, are in order, and the cabin of the plane is luxurious, vaster than any airplane I have ever seen. The flight attendants disperse un-Russian graciousness, their faces lit with seemingly genuine smiles. We eat and drink and languish in the splendid lounge, but no matter how long the jet flies eastward, I never arrive home.