Still Here (18 page)

None of that mattered though. What mattered was that this was one of the best schools in the city—and possibly in the entire country—and the only truly democratic one. All you had to do was pass the test, and if you were smart enough to pass it, you were guaranteed a spectacular free education that led to Ivy League colleges, Ivy League graduate schools, and then unfailingly to superior lives. The problem was that admission wasn't as democratic as it seemed. Some parents could afford tutors who'd been shoving intelligence down their children's throats for years and other parents couldn't. Eden, Vica's boss at Bing Ruskin, had a son in this school. Vica had heard Eden bragging to her friend Dr. Jewell that they had spent fifteen thousand dollars for tutoring so that their son would pass the exam. “But just think how much we saved in private school tuition!” she'd said. The maddening thing was that Eden and her husband could afford the tuition. So by paying for a tutor they had robbed some equally smart poor kid of the opportunity to attend this school. That was unfair! That was so unfair! And Eden wasn't even aware of it.

Of course, if she and Sergey had enough money, she wouldn't hesitate to hire a tutor too. This would have put Eric at that same unfair advantage. It's just that Vica didn't find unfairness toward others quite as painful as unfairness toward herself.

Several years ago Eden threw a Memorial Day barbecue for all of the diagnostic radiology employees at her beautiful farm near Princeton (she had the farm in addition to her huge Manhattan apartment). Real farm—goats and all. Vica had been really looking forward to that picnic. She liked Eden. Eden was fairly young, beautiful, and worldly, and Vica really wanted to see her in a social setting; she even hoped that they could become friends. Why couldn't they? Eden was a doctor, just as Vica would have been, if she'd had the chance to finish medical school. And maybe Eric could become friends with Eden's sons.

Vica decided to create the most elegant hostess gift for Eden. She bought a beautiful wicker basket at Pier 1, fitted it with a blue and white linen towel, and filled it with the most perfect strawberries she could find in Staten Island's Stop & Shop.

She thought she looked amazing when she parked her car and stepped onto Eden's lawn. She was wearing a tight low-cut tank top, a jeans miniskirt, pink high-heeled sandals, and a straw hat with a wide pink band. The outfit, combined with her basket of strawberries, was the very picture of country chic. Then the first thing that Vica noticed was strawberry patches all over the place, thousands, millions of strawberries. Eden was very polite about it: “Strawberries—how lovely!” she said. “Ours are not ripe yet.” The second thing that Vica noticed were the beige shorts and loose white T-shirts that everybody, including Eden, was wearing. Oh, yes, and baseball hats. “Nice hat!” Santiago, who operated their C-scan machine, said with a smirk. Vica took her straw hat off and put it on a bench by the house, next to her basket.

Eden took her mostly immigrant employees on a tour of the house, a beautiful house, decorated with all the antique country stuff—there was even a collection of old irons—abstract photographs done by Eden's husband, and abstract sculptures done by Eden's sons. The boys ran in after a soccer game, sweaty, out of breath, flushed, confident, happy—and Vica had thought that Eric could make friends with them! When the tour was almost over, Vica decided to make up for her faux pas with the clothes and the strawberries and pay some amazing compliment to the house. “Eden,” she said, “your house looks just like Howards End.” Eden answered her with a blank stare. “Howards End,” Vica explained, “the house in Forster's novel.” Blank stare again, followed by a kind smile. Vica knew that before switching to premed at Harvard Eden had been an English major. There was no way that she didn't know who Forster was. Vica had read the novel in Regina's translation, perhaps the novel had a different title in English. And then Vica got it. Eden didn't expect Vica to know Forster (Vica—a simple immigrant ultrasound technician), just like she didn't expect one of her goats to bleat “Fors-ter.” Eden gave Vica a polite, uncomprehending, but approving, perfectly democratic smile specially designed for her immigrant employees—Russian, Jamaican, Filipino, or whatever else they happened to be.

To add insult to injury, by the time they emerged from the house, the largest goat had eaten all of Vica's strawberries and about half of her hat. Vica picked up her bag and the remains of her hat and decided to go home without waiting for the food.

Vica's other botched attempt to make a friend at work was with Christine, another radiology technician. Christine was older than Vica, but not by much. She was a tall woman with rolls of fat pushing against her scrubs in expected and unexpected places. Her skin was of a perfect chestnut color, and her hair, black with a touch of gray, was done in gleaming cornrows. It was Christine who made the first move, back when Vica started working at Bing Ruskin. She offered some friendly advice, which Vica gladly accepted. They started having lunch together and chatting whenever they had a chance. In addition to professional advice, Christine gave Vica a lot of pointers on child-rearing, pie baking, ordering swimsuits online (you had to order Speedo at least three sizes too large), and American ways in general. Christine's manner had always been good-natured and caring, if a little patronizing. “Oh, so you have your cool black friend now?” Vadik would tease. “Shut up, Vadik,” Vica would answer. But then things changed. The problem was that Christine took Vica for a struggling immigrant single mother. There was a picture of Eric clipped to Vica's locker, but she never talked about Sergey. Then one day somebody mentioned a cousin applying for a job at Gray Bank, and Vica said that her husband worked there too. “Oh, yeah?” Christine asked. “What does he do?” “He's a financial analyst,” Vica said. “Oh, yeah?” Christine said again, and just like that, the friendship was over. Christine's husband worked as a mechanic, Leslie's husband was a bus driver, Sheena's husband worked as a security guard there at Bing Ruskin, Rachel and John were divorced, Michael's wife held the exact same position as he did but at Weil Cornell, and the youngest technician Liliana was single—she was all about dates and parties and fun. Having a husband at Gray Bank instantly turned Vica into this fanciful white lady who chose this job for some bizarre reason. Vica remembered what Bob's daughter, Becky, said about about her job at McDonald's. She worked there when she was a junior in high school. Bob thought it was important for her to experience a “real job.” She told them how the other employees hated her, how they all gathered to stare at her getting into Bob's new Volvo after work, and how the nicer she was to them, the more they hated her. So that was how Christine saw Vica now? A spoiled rich brat who didn't really have to earn her living, who took this job just for the experience? But who in her right mind would choose to work at a cancer hospital, at a job that was both physically and emotionally exhausting, while being exposed to continuous radiation? There were times when Vica felt the urge to explain to Christine how things really stood, to tell her about Sergey's employment history, about how stupid they had been to buy that insane house that was just a big rotting piece of shit, and about how lonely she felt in the U.S. with no relatives and no real friends, just Regina and Vadik, both of whom preferred Sergey to her. But then she would remember how Regina had tried to explain to them that she wasn't really that rich, and how ridiculous that had sounded. And then pride would get the better of her. Why did Vica have to justify herself to Christine? And so they were cordial but not friendly. Certainly not friendly enough to talk about something as personal as the separation.

“Mom,” Eric said, “Mom! I'm cold.”

Vica rubbed his back. While she was doing that she noticed that Eric's glasses were dirty. She gasped and yanked them off, scratching his ear in the process. “Mom!” he protested.

“Hey! You should have cleaned them before we left,” Vica said.

She could just see how these stains on the lenses would jeopardize Eric's chances at the test. Misread equation, misinterpreted sentence, blurry expression, fatal mistake. And there was nothing to clean the glasses with. Nothing. Nothing at all. Vica unbuttoned her coat, breathed on the lenses, then wiped them with the hem of her sweater. Eric turned away, embarrassed but resigned. “Here,” she said, setting the glasses back on his face. “Thanks,” Eric said, but she thought she caught a note of sarcasm. When they were just outside of the door, she opened his backpack and did a quick check: pencils, papers, all in place. Pink slip squeezed in his hand.

“Don't drop the slip.”

“Mom, I won't!”

Okay, he probably wouldn't drop the slip. But then another horrible thought slashed through Vica's mind. Last year, when she took him out of school on Staten Island to take a test for another school for the gifted and talented (although not quite as gifted and talented as children admitted to the Castle), Eric decided to venture to the bathroom in the middle of the exam. He couldn't find it and then, once he found it, he couldn't poop right away because he was too nervous, and by the time he got back, they were already collecting the tests. He left twenty answers blank. Twenty answers blank!

Vica reached out and tapped the Susan Sontag in front of her on the shoulder.

“Do you know if they let the kids go to the bathroom?”

“Excuse me?” Susan Sontag said.

Yes, Vica knew that she spoke with an accent, but it wasn't that bad, it wasn't like you couldn't understand her. Susan Sontag's daughter (her huge ears half hidden behind her pigtails) answered for her.

“They don't! Once you hand in your pink slip, that's it, you can't go anywhere! And there are no windows in the school. Not a single one! Look, not a single one!”

Susan Sontag shushed her daughter and glared at Vica as if she had just said something completely inappropriate, had brought up a subject that should never be brought up in front of children, like sex, death, or financial troubles.

“Make sure you use the bathroom before they take your pink slip,” Vica said to Eric.

“Mom, please!”

He was already in, talking to a guard and showing her his pink slip, when Vica noticed that she'd forgotten to zip his backpack. It was too late for her to squeeze through the crowd of children and zip it, and even too late to yell her son's name. There he went, with the backpack gaping like a hippo's maw. Seeing Eric among strangers, separated from her, made Vica look at him through the eyes of a stranger, which never failed to overwhelm her with disappointment. He was not a lovely child. He was awkward. Slouchy. Pale skin sprinkled with large freckles, dull eyes, droopy cheeks. Fat. Not obese, no, and not exactly fat yet, but getting there. Soft, squashy. Helplessly soft.

Vica raised her hand to wave to her son, but he didn't turn to look. He followed the guard and disappeared into the depths of the Castle.

“What are you feeding him? He looks awful!” Vica's oldest sister had exclaimed after she saw Eric on Skype. Their mother often said the same thing. “Let him be,” Vica's father said, but when did they ever listen to him.

Guilt mixed with anger balled up somewhere in Vica's stomach. It was her own fault. It was the general unhappiness of their family, her constant fights with Sergey, the never-ending tension, and now the separation that made Eric fat, that made him slump in front of the TV with junk food instead of doing sports. It was his sick relationship with Sergey's mother, who kept overfeeding and overpraising her grandson. Mira was a tiny, fussy, heavily made up, not very smart woman. They had arranged for her to move to the United States after Sergey's father died. Vica was hoping that Mira would sell her apartment in Moscow, but she left it to her spinster sister instead. “Maechka is so sick, she wouldn't have survived on her pension.” She herself came penniless. Sergey and Vica made sure she was getting benefits, found her state-sponsored housing in Brooklyn. But Mira wasn't adjusting to her new life that well. She was a clingy mother and a clingier grandmother. She and Eric had some sort of crazy romance going. He badly needed to be admired and she badly needed to be needed. Once Vica overheard the following exchange:

“Now, who is the smartest? Who is the handsomest?”

“Okay, okay, Grandma. I guess I am.”

It was creepy, Vica thought, but they both looked so pleased with each other. They would spend hours talking. Mira would tell him all about her life in Russia, about his genius grandfather, and about Sergey as a little boy. Eric shared some of the facts with Vica. “Did you know that Dad used to be really good at picking berries? They would go into the woods and he would fill his little basket in minutes. Grandma says I would be really good too.”

What hurt Vica the most about this was that Eric didn't have any connection with her side of the family. Her mother was very much involved in bringing up Vica's sister's kids; she considered them her real grandchildren, and Eric was nothing but a stranger whose first language was English and couldn't speak her language very well. Vica would prep him and make him rehearse some Russian phrases before their monthly Skype calls, but Eric would invariably stutter and mix up his words. “I don't understand what you're saying!” Vica's mother would say. “Better go play and put your mom back on.”

Other parents from the line were dispersing in all directions. Outer Boroughs were heading to nearby cafés, Susan Sontags were walking west, to their beautiful apartments just across the park. The time was now 8:35. She had to pick Eric up at 12:30. She'd taken the whole day off work, so she had all that time to herself. She was free to do what she wanted. Vica's plan was to have breakfast at Café Sabarsky. She had heard Eden mention that they had “hands down the best coffee in the city.” Vadik said that it was a bit pricey but a truly elegant setting. She walked to Neue Galerie, entered the museum, and stopped at the door of Café Sabarsky and peeked in. The dark wood interior was both cozy and grand. Vica loved marble tabletops and chairs with a dent in it for your butt. She took the dent as a special sign of luxury. At this hour, the café was almost empty; an old man was sitting at a table by the window with a deliciously fresh newspaper spread above his coffee cup. She would take a table by the window too. She would just order a cup of coffee and a bread basket. She would butter one of the rolls, put it on her plate, take a selfie of herself enjoying “the best coffee in the city” in “a truly elegant setting,” and post it on Facebook. Let them see! Let them see that she was perfectly fine about her separation, happy, in a good place. She wasn't sure who “they” were, however. Her sisters? They didn't really use Facebook, preferring the Russian social media site VKontakte. Her coworkers? Yeah, why not? Regina and Vadik? Definitely! Sergey himself? Sergey had never been a fan of social media—what an irony that he was so obsessed with that app!—but if he ever happened to browse and see her photo, Vica wanted to make sure that it would send the right message. Vica was about to enter the café when her eyes fell on the menu clipped to the door. Seven dollars for coffee. Eight dollars for a bread basket with jam. That would be eighteen dollars with tax and more than twenty dollars with tip. She could afford it, but twenty dollars for bread and coffee! When she could buy a bagel from a breakfast cart for just a dollar! No, that was ridiculous. Vica turned to leave, then hesitated. What about her Facebook photo? Vica, smiling, relaxed, sipping her seven-dollar coffee as if it were perfectly natural? No, she decided, it wasn't worth it. She wouldn't be able to drink that coffee without constantly running the price through her head. So the picture would come out as anything but natural.