The Cosmopolitans (16 page)

Katya opened her mouth, which still felt sour from the coffee,
but it didn’t matter. She sang about having all her sisters with her
and pointed her thumbs to the side, just like the Sister Sledge girls
did in the video, only there were no sisters over there.

She sang about everyone getting up and singing, and her mother
tugged her father up from his chair, and her mother’s mouth opened
to sing. Her mother would do anything the song told her to do.

The next few lines were easier, and the dancing felt more natural,
now that people in the audience were dancing, too. Milla came close
to the stage, shyly bumping hips with her new husband. Even Baba
Byata stood and clapped and nodded. The next line was about a
family dose of love, and it was telling her she’d been right to take
those pills, and the chorus rolled forth like a pill down a hill. High!
High hopes they had — for the future, and their goals in sight.

Katya wanted to say they were more than family, they were
ancient, they were powerful — “We are mastodons,” she sang, and
pointed, with both hands, at the brown bones.

“Oh, I can’t hear you now.” It was strange: singing those words
actually made it hard to hear, as if they had cast a spell. Where were
they in the music? She couldn’t really move around anymore: it was
as if she’d been transformed into that hateful fourth Sister Sledge
sister, the one with short hair who always had to dance in the back.
Her stomach felt too light, and the music stopped, even though she
hadn’t sung about feathers yet.

People clapped, but not a lot, or maybe she still couldn’t hear
very well. She tried to jump off the stage but someone caught and
lowered her down. Yana was walking over to her. Yana was a good
sister, but a bit of a narc. “Ya-narc,” Katya possibly said aloud, and
then turned around and ran away. At least, she told herself to run, but
she could still see her shoes, which suggested that maybe she was
not.

“Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” she heard Yana saying
behind her, and then she didn’t hear her anymore. Glancing back,
Katya saw that Yana had gotten tangled up in a bunch of their
grandmother’s friends. This was her chance for freedom. She’d just
begun to get her share. You didn’t always have to go to California.
Sometimes you could just step out of the wedding room, and there
would be the regular, shut-down museum, familiar whales and polar
bears, all doing their own things. It was like California had been in
the beginning, restful. The floor was clean and cool. It was calm
here — why couldn’t it be calm like this everywhere? Everything in
the room was asking her to stay.

Roman

Roman couldn’t believe that Katya Molochnik, whom he’d
thought was so cool, had just sung disco. That was almost worse than
the fact that she’d obviously been high.

Everyone else at his table of Russians had shaken their shoulders
and jutted their necks in time with the disco song. Of course, as soon
as Katya Molochnik had left the stage, they were back to business:
asking his cousin Leonid what would happen to oil prices if “we”
invaded Iraq. You’d think, if Leonid really knew the answer, that he
could just point his thumb up or down, and that would be the end of
it, but no. Leonid took his glasses off and put them on again, he shook
his head, he gazed off into the hopeful future, he talked and talked.
The only person besides Roman who wasn’t enraptured by oil prices
was a little Polish girl, who kept staring with longing at a table of
Americans behind Roman’s left shoulder.

A shorty in a
seeski
-squeezing shirt asked Roman whether he was
a banker, too.

“Construction,” Roman said. The shorty looked away as if he
were a drug dealer. “Also, DJ. Romin Tha White Russian.” He had
recently spun at a teen night at the Jewish Community Center; maybe
she had a younger bother or sister who had been there? No, she said.

“Romin is like Wu-Tang Clan. You know?” She exchanged glances
with her friend, and Roman gave up on explaining that, whereas Wu-
Tang was about Hong Kong-style martial arts, he was influenced by
the ways of the ronin.

Leonid drained his glass and began describing a recent trip to
Singapore, a place both crazy and efficient.

If all these
Molodoj
had such great lives, then why did they need to
drink? A different girl, one who was almost the bomb, asked whether
Leonid might look over her retirement plan. “I’m Audi,” Roman said,
and went in search of a place where a man could smoke.

Yana

Yana checked both bathrooms, the coat closet, the locked gift
shop (she wouldn’t put it past Katya to break in there), the Eskimo
changing room. She walked up and down the hallways, being calm
but purposeful, briefly looking people in the eyes, which was the
best way to ward off attackers, she’d learned in self-defense class. It
didn’t work very well. Her aunts tried to spray her hair. Pratik asked
her to dance again. Dancing. When Katya could be dying, or having
sex with someone really inappropriate.

“Yo, yo.” She tried to ignore it, but this voice was attached to
a tattooed hand that gripped her arm. It was Roman, the Chaikins’
nephew.

“Your sister, your little —” he held his hands at waist-height, as
if describing a five-year-old.

“Where?
Gde?
”

He led her to a corner room. The lights were off, and at first,
all Yana saw was the walrus family: two parents, two children,
heteronormative to the max. A smell of vomit — Katya, eyes open,
on the floor.

Yana dropped to her knees.

Katya stirred. “Okay,” she said.

“I slap to wake her,” Roman said.

“You slapped her?” Yana said. “What the hell?” Katya lifted
her neck. “I thought you were just on pot. What is it? What did you
take? Was it E?”

Katya shrugged and almost smirked. Now Yana wanted to slap
her, too. “Try to remember, okay? It’s important to remember what
you took. Where’s your bag? Let’s go to the bathroom. I hope no one
sees us. Can you stand?”

Katya reached her hand past Yana’s shoulder, to Roman.

Pulling Katya up, he said, “You will break yourself like Chinese
cup with drugs.”

Who was this potential wife-beater and anti-Asian bigot
to lecture her sister? “Thanks. We’re good.” He didn’t seem to
understand. Yana took Katya’s hand out of his and tucked it into the
crook of her arm.

Stalina

Stalina had a stomachache. Osip made jokes, her mother
posited seventeen terrifying diseases in the space of a minute, and
the Russian Soul extolled mustard plasters.

It worsened as she walked to the bathroom — a terrible dizzy
nausea. Osip’s aunt Anastasia Arkadeyevna blocked her path, but, as
usual, just saying her name, in this respectful form, with an enormous
smile, gained Stalina free passage. Anastasia Arkadeyevna called
banalities after her, and she nodded without turning her head. She
wanted badly to lean against the wall, but kept her distance so as
not to be tempted. Her hand was damp, and slipped on the metal
bathroom door as she pushed it open.

Yana, without her gorgeous scarf, held Katya’s hair back over
the sink. Washing her face in the middle of a wedding? Katya stood,
and the handkerchief said, “
Takae blednay, takae bednay
” — so
pale, so poor. Those words were close together in Russian, and now
she saw why.

“
What happened?
” she said, jerking Yana’s shoulder, her
stomach lurching with the movement.

“She’s okay,” Yana said. “She just felt a little sick.”

Katya said. “I can sing the song again, if you want.”

“She’s okay now,” Yana said. “Mom, she always ends up
okay.”

Stalina said, “Why, Katyenok, at your sister’s wedding, a
beautiful occasion, a time for the whole family…” Most of her
words came from Anastasia Arkadeyevna, but Stalina didn’t know
what else to say. There was no point in asking why.

“
An innocent mother would ask
,” the handkerchief murmured.

“We are leopard seals,” Katya said. Her lips were beige, a color
for a couch, not a mouth.

“Is it your classes? Bad grades? Yana, what’s that look you’re
giving me?”

“Nothing.” Yana began washing her hands.

“I don’t like that look. Katyenok, I’d be so happy to help you
with your math…” Stalina bent over and put her hands on her knees
— no time to run into a stall to vomit. Nothing came. Instead, the
handkerchief, quoting both Reagan and Stalina’s father: “
Doveryay,
no proveryay,”
trust, but verify.

Katya

They were taking her back to the airport, but she was three, she had made a mistake, her father would be traveling with her. She stretched her arms up, but he backed away. She was too old. She hid her face in her hands. She was back in her childhood house, and he was carrying her after all, stooping under the stairs so she wouldn’t hit her head.

She awoke in the middle of the night and her mother was scrabbling through her backpack, robbing her. Katya told her she would give her the money if she just asked, not that she had much, but she had her return ticket. Her mother could sell it, she guessed. Her mother crawled up to the bed and tore up the ticket in front of Katya’s face. It was ungrateful and mean. She needed another pill, but fell asleep before she could find it. Cold water on her face. Was she back at camp? Was she sleeping in the park? It was still dark, and her mother was back. She tried to explain that her mother should let her alone until she calmed down and got another pill. She was still mad about the stealing. Her mother watered her with her mermaid watering can. Katya rolled onto the floor. There was her backpack, unzipped, but no, maybe her pocket? Where were her jeans? She’d told her mother to leave, she’d told her nicely.