Russian Tattoo (9 page)

Fourteen

B
eefsteak Charlie's calls and tells me to report for training on Monday.

“Does this mean I have the job?” I ask Millie.

“Yes,” she says and gives me a hug, as if I'd just received an offer to teach at Princeton.

I am not sure how I should prepare myself for server training. The only two waitresses I knew in Russia, Luda and Maya, both worked at the café in the House of Friendship and Peace, where I was the director's secretary. Serving was their profession, just as teaching English was going to be mine as soon as I graduated from the university.

Luda was thick-calved and generous, splashing rice with meat gravy when I didn't have forty-five extra kopeks to pay for the meatballs. Maya, thin and peroxide-blond, wasn't quite as friendly, the object of rumors that my boss spent more time at the café than he had to. She strutted around the dining room carrying bowls of soup, her lips arrogant and red, her lined eyes disdainful, which may have been her way of letting me know that she was able to get closer to my boss than I could ever be.

Among the group of trainees on Monday, no one resembles Luda or Maya. There are twenty-five people, mostly young women, mostly students at Trenton State College. From what I can see, none of them regards waitressing as a career. No one here seems to think—as we all thought back home—that having access to food gives you power, as if a plate of meat loaf were a briefcase with a nuclear code. I think of how everyone in Russia was a guard of what they could access, and everyone used what they guarded to their advantage. Waitresses and grocery store clerks guarded food from customers; department store salespeople guarded imported boots from fashion-starved women; professors on college entrance exam committees guarded university seats from applicants. My provincial aunt Muza was the guard of gynecological services at the clinic where she worked as a doctor, and her grateful patients brought her what they guarded: whole sturgeons and cuts of beef that never made it to store counters, sweaters they knitted for her and her husband, zucchini and cucumbers from their gardens. The only people with nothing to guard, it seemed, were my mother and my sister, who spent all their energy lamenting the absurdity of Soviet life and yelling at each other because they couldn't escape from it. Had I stayed in Russia, I would have become a schoolteacher and joined their sad, unprofitable, guard-free ranks.

Across from me sits Melissa, my fellow trainee. We both stare into menus, pretending we are customers at Beefsteak Charlie's, while the other half of our group are playing servers. The manager, Carol—the woman in a rush who gave me the application—encourages us to order as much as possible to give the servers in training a workout that will make them learn. Tomorrow the roles will reverse, with Melissa and me playing servers. Melissa glances through the appetizer section and orders stuffed clams. I don't know what stuffed clams are, as I don't know half the things that stare at me from the page. What is seafood chowder, for instance, and why in the world is there pasta on the menu?
Pasta,
in Russian, is the word for toothpaste. I ask Melissa for the definition of
pasta
,
and she looks at a loss.

“Pasta is . . . pasta,” she says, giving me an apologetic smile, letting me know that she would like to help but doesn't know how.

If I had any guts, I would order seafood chowder and pasta marinara, or maybe even something called surf and turf, but I don't want to face a dish I may not know how to approach. I imagine pasta marinara as my sister Marina's toothpaste. Surf and turf makes me think of the footpath leading from our dacha to a small beach on the Gulf of Finland, always muddy, where our feet used to sink to our ankles and make slurping noises when we pulled them up. I cowardly settle for green salad and chicken, but even this seemingly predictable choice turns out to be tricky: the freckled, lanky girl taking my order asks what dressing I would like with my salad. “Dressing?” I ask.

“French, Italian, blue cheese, Thousand Island, Russian,” recites the girl, who is obviously more prepared to be a server than I am to be a customer. I have no idea what these words mean—they're apparently adjectives to describe the word
dressing
, the meaning of which I don't know, either. I look at Melissa with what feels like panic.

“Try Russian,” she says and gives out a little giggle.

When the freckle-faced server scribbles in her pad and departs, the panic that began in my chest leaks to my arms and legs, to the ends of my fingers and toes, filling every vein with paralyzing fear.

I have memorized the entire menu, quizzing Millie about every food I didn't know; I have learned the gradations of steak readiness, from blue rare to burnt; I have committed to memory six types of lettuce that I never knew existed and added so many vegetables to my vocabulary that my head began to spin. Millie explained the meaning of the word
gratuity
. I understood it was a reward, but it still remained murky to me why you would always give someone a bonus for just doing their job.

The three of us—Millie, Andy, and I—were sitting in a booth of a restaurant called Friendly's, finishing our hamburgers and salads, when Millie took the time to explain about vegetables and gratuities to me. “I was a waitress in graduate school, you know,” she said. “The job got me through my first year. That's where I met Robert's father when his dissertation adviser took him out to dinner. We met and were living together three months later.” She gave me a smile, which made me wonder if this was what she expected me to do at Beefsteak Charlie's, look for my next husband.

I smiled politely, not knowing how to respond to this revelation.

“See?” said Andy, turning to me, his face lit with an energy that made it more handsome and tender: kind hazel eyes, pale complexion, the soft curl of his lips, one of those ironic smiles that showed his teeth. I don't know why I was staring at his lips. “See, America is the land of opportunity,” he said. I knew somehow that he was aware of my pause, of my being at a loss for what to utter next. “You can study for your doctorate, learn about broccoli, and meet your next husband, all before you serve the steak.”

Millie was the first to laugh, but I couldn't tell if behind her glasses she sincerely found Andy's comment funny. I did and was grateful to him for saving me from an awkward silence.

It is Beefsteak Charlie's grand opening, and I am standing in the ballroom of the dining room, anxious, knowing this is another chance for me to fail. But I tell myself that I'm just like Natasha Rostova from
War and Peace
waiting for her first dance, except that I am dressed in a white shirt and black pants and wearing a red apron with a large white button that says,
my name is elena. i'm gonna spoil you.
In my head the music starts when the doors open and my first customers walk in.

I am as prepared to be a waitress as I would be to teach a class in English grammar, I remind myself, as the ballroom orchestra violins in my head glide to a dizzying high note, as the hostess seats four people at my first table, three at my second, and then four more at my third and fourth. Men wear ironed shirts and expressions of anticipating a good time; women have high heels and the rich hair I envy. I take their orders, remembering to ask for the kind of dressing they want, for the degree of steak readiness they desire. I am ready to direct them to the all-you-can-eat shrimp bar—the pride of Carol and all the management way up to Beefsteak Charlie himself—when my first party decides to order something from the bar.

“I'd like a screwdriver,” says a man in a striped shirt, and I'm sure I didn't hear him right because even I know what a screwdriver is. Maybe he really said he was a good driver, but that makes as little sense as ordering a tool. Does he think you have to drive to get to the shrimp bar? I see my fingers shaking, and I clutch them tighter around the pad. The only way out of this embarrassment is to rush to the bar and repeat to the bartender exactly what I think the customer said.

This strategy seems to work, although I don't even want to know what my customers think about my sprinting off to the bar before they can finish ordering their food. Aside from a toasted almond, I realize I know nothing about American drinks. I get orders for blue whales and dirty martinis. For sloe comfortable screws and White Russians. And what is a Black Russian, for heaven's sake? Every time I race across the Beefsteak Charlie's ballroom, the bartender, Samantha—harried and raspy-voiced—listens patiently as she tries to decipher the drink from my mangled pronunciation. “Man, hat, and,” I would spit out, the three words I keep twirling in my mind as I rush from table to bar. “Manhattan,” Sam would say, with a drop of motherly guidance, as if teaching a parental lesson.

In the next week or two, things don't get any better. I feel sorry for a skinny mother with a ponytail, whose little son never gets his lemonade. I feel like hiding behind the dishwasher when a group of four men in ties send their steaks back because, failing to understand that they were joking, I thought they wanted their meat burnt to a crisp. My orders of baby back ribs sit cold on the kitchen counter, and whole families—complete with grandparents and infants—who come for Sunday dinners get their chicken and baked potatoes before they have a chance to peel the shrimp from the salad bar. I notice that other servers routinely pick up after me, as if I were a slow child who has wandered into a grown-up function. Melissa, a student of photography at Trenton State, who adopted me as her charity case during training, rushes the abandoned orders of ribs to my tables and sets them down with elegance and a disarming smile, making it appear that it has all been planned in advance. Forgotten orders of mussels and minestrone soup inexplicably find their way to my tables. In waitressing, where timing and speed trump the knowledge of linguistics, I am getting consistent Fs. To further my humiliation, the tips are pooled, so every night I leave, unjustly, with thirty or thirty-five dollars—as much as everyone else.

On a Monday evening, when we are both off, Melissa drives me to a department store, and I buy a Levi's shirt that I think Marina would like and a blue dress for my mother, the color of her eyes. While Melissa checks out a display with jeans, I buy her a set with shower gels and creams for the upcoming holiday called Christmas.

Fifteen

A
letter arrives in Millie's mailbox: a Russian square envelope with red and blue airmail stripes around the edges framing unfamiliar handwriting. I take out the letter, unfold it, and go straight to the end. It is signed Boris, the name I have never seen penned in his handwriting, the name that sucks the air out of my lungs.

Boris, with his impossibly blue eyes and hair bleached by the Crimean sun, was someone I'd diligently tucked away into my Russian past, and he has no right to cross over the border into my new American life. Besides, he had never written me a letter before. He had never moved a finger to come to Leningrad to see me after we met at the Black Sea beach, aside from his last visit to warn me against the dangers of America a week before I was to marry Robert. I was the one who had concocted plans and counted days; I was the one who borrowed fifty rubles from Nina and hopped on a plane for Moscow two months after we'd met in the Crimea, having lied to my mother that my graduate thesis professor had sent me to an international linguistics conference.

So why is he writing to me now? I said good-bye to him more than eight months ago, on a freezing March night, on a Leningrad sidewalk near Theater Square when the city looked its worst, just beginning to emerge from under five months of winter that, as always, had overstayed its welcome. I was shivering in an unseasonably thin jacket, which I wore because it looked so much better than my padded winter coat, and my feet were wet and frozen as we'd been walking through a porridge of dirty snow. I said good-bye, but I really meant farewell, and everyone knows that a farewell is a good-bye forever. So I stand in the middle of Millie's kitchen, on the other side of the life in which Boris belongs, trying to decide whether I should even turn the page over and read the letter with its words slanted to the right as if they were ready to fall off a cliff.

Lenochka
, it starts—a diminutive of my name, a dangerous opening.

I skim over the words, searching for those few that would let me know why I am having this ghostly visit from my Russian past.

I hope your life now is good, better than I said it was going to be . . . I'm sorry if I said things that upset you back in March when I came to Leningrad. . . . You may think that after my trip I went back to Kiev and forgot about you. I was hoping I would. But it didn't happen.

I know you may not want to read this.

Damn right, I don't want to read it, flashes through my head, and I realize that the words that have meteorically risen in my mind have arranged themselves in English.

If your life in America is not what you hoped, if you ever think of coming back, I'll be here waiting for you.

I quickly fold the letter and stuff it back into the envelope, as though not seeing these words will make them disappear. I go up to my room and slide the envelope into the inside compartment of my Russian suitcase and zip it up. That's where it will stay: in the dark, devoid of oxygen, slowly withering away. It will share a space with the skirt my sister sewed for me, the one that made a perfect Gypsy costume during Halloween in Texas.

Tonight Melissa is studying for a test, so I am on my own. Two of my tables have been pushed together for a family celebration, and I am standing with a pad and pencil in front of eight festively dressed, happy people. Green salad, Italian dressing, onion soup. Two martinis, dry—I now know what a dry martini is. “Another salad, dressing on the side,” says a balding man with a heavy face the color of brick.

Dressing on the side? I repeat in my mind, wishing that Melissa would pop out of the kitchen magically but knowing that she won't. On whose side? I wonder frantically, imagining a splash of oil and vinegar dripping down the side of the man's expensive suit. I think of being stripped of my apron and my button, with its impossible “I'm gonna spoil you” promise, and being deported for waitress failure.

“On the side?” I repeat in a feeble voice, hoping I didn't hear it right.

“Where are you from?” asks the man, his voice fringed with impatience.

“Russia,” I say. “My husband is a graduate student at the University of Texas.” I add this for no reason, hoping, perhaps, that having a husband in pursuit of a PhD would somehow excuse my inadequacy.

As I wait for the two dry martinis by the bar, Samantha explains dressing on the side to me. She demonstrates it by putting the olives on a little plate next to the glass.

I think of the time when I was eleven and kicked out of the district pool for swimming with my head out of the water. I think of the nauseating feeling of shame when my ninth-grade literature teacher tore apart my essay in front of the whole class because I made a noncritical reference to life in the United States.

But what I really think about is the letter I got from Boris, the letter I zipped into the most inner compartment of my suitcase, leaving it to suffocate in the dark. I think of what I don't want to think about—those things that I promised myself would never scar my mind. What if I did go back? What if I packed my suitcase, with the letter from Kiev tucked safely inside, and got on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, with a quick connection to Leningrad? Back to the city that Robert pointed out was truly mine.
Grad
means city, he said when we first met, and
Lenin
—the possessive form of Lena. This is literally Lena's city, he said, smiling at his own clever manipulation of Russian grammar.

What if I went back to my courtyard, where every grain of dirt is familiar, where children from my nursery school at the end of the quad still crouch on the ledge of the sandbox in the summer? Where in the winter, which has already started there, they coast down the iced surface of the tall wooden slide standing up, just as I did, with arms stretched out, like awkward airplanes, their faces whipped by freezing air? What if I could stand on my apartment's balcony again, with waves of roofs rolling toward Theater Square and the Kirov, with the gray cupola of the only synagogue rising like a buoy in the restless tide of the city?

Then my mother would be right, once and for all. Dean Maslov, who warned me against America with its lack of pensions, would be right, too, telling everyone at the university about the former graduate student who crawled back home from the mouth of the shark. Back home, from darkness to light, back onto the threshold of our shining future.

I try to think of something promising that would help keep me here, that could counterweigh the slippery gray thoughts of going back, but for some reason I can conjure up nothing except Andy's face. The image makes me feel warm inside, as if I had gulped down one of those martinis I've been balancing on my tray all evening long. It helps me tuck Boris back into the past, where he belongs, along with my mother's kitchen, my university dean, and my Leningrad courtyard with all its poplar trees and grainy memories of childhood.

I bring the check to the festive table when they're done with their all-you-can-eat shrimp and filet mignon and strawberry shortcake. The table is littered with empty dishes and half-eaten desserts I should have taken away a while ago.

“Thank you very much,” I say to the man with a gold chain and a brick-colored face, placing the check before him.

“Never been to Russia,” he mutters. He is a little tipsy from the martini and the wine I've been bringing, and he motions with his hand for me to lean closer toward him.

“Listen, girl,” he says, reaching for his wallet. “My advice to you—go back to your husband in Texas.”