American Gypsy (9 page)

“Go to the vigil at least. We'll go together after midnight. Stepan's not even staying home tonight, but he's leaving it unlocked for visitors.”

I leaned on the windowsill, stories above the kids playing dodgeball in the yard, where spring blew kisses from tree to tree.

“No,” I said.

“Are you being such a bitch just to piss me off or what?”

“You got it. All this is for your benefit.”

After several very long minutes I felt Zhanna's arms wrap around me. She rested her chin on my shoulder.

“You can cry if you want.”

“I am,” I said.

That night I told Zhanna I was going home—it wouldn't do to have her think she had swayed me. Since Stepan's place was an hour away by metro, I took a taxi. As a rule I'd never get into a car driven by a man with a barely healed gash on the side of his face, but I honestly didn't care if anything happened to me. Nothing compared to what had happened already.

Inside Stepan's flat, the living-room furniture had been pushed against the walls. There were candles burning in large sconces, the only source of light. Normally I enjoyed the scent of candles, but that night their sinister spitting made the air too thick. From my spot in the living-room doorway I dragged my eyes to the coffin in the middle, raised up on a platform. It was dark brown with fake-silk lining that looked like frothed icing.

I came near Ruslan. So close, I saw the details of his suit, the red carnation peeking out of his breast pocket, the spattering of hairs on his knuckles, and the makeup someone had tried to cover his bruises with. They had combed Ruslan's curls straight down the sides of his head. He looked like a choirboy ready for “Ave Maria.” I unwound the scarf from around my neck and wiped down the side of one cheek, and continued until his face came alive with color, the bruises almost black in the candlelight. I never expected that the last time I'd see him would be like the first, his body marked by violence.

It was the strangest sensation to sit the night through in the presence of my first love's death, and yet I remember so little. At my great-aunt Ophelia's funeral, relatives threw themselves across her coffin and screeched at the sky for God to love her. A Romani funeral is never a shy affair. It's meant to celebrate a life lived and secure a smooth passing between two worlds. I'd heard in some countries that the Romani lay their loved ones in tombs furnished with their most precious belongings, and others bury them standing or sitting, a sign of ultimate liberty from life's oppressions. For Ruslan, songs would be sung, Christian prayers recited, and tears would flow for the next forty days, the time it takes for a soul to depart from earth.
Pominki
, memorial meals, on the ninth day and the fortieth, would ensure his safe passage.

But all this involved a crowd of people when my only wish was for us to be alone.

I pulled up a chair, adding several cushions, and sat next to him. Had I been stronger, I could've forced him into the flat, imprisoned him, and looted his pockets of the three hundred rubles. I could've flung them out the window for all the neighborhood drunks to catch.

Before I left Ruslan early the next morning, I tucked my scarf under him, but I still didn't cry.

Zhanna was furious.

“
Ti shto, s oomah soshla
(Have you lost your mind)? Do you
want
his ghost to haunt you forever?”

“It's already done.” Ask any superstitious Romani and they'll tell you that entrusting personal items to the dead or keeping anything of theirs can bring bad luck.

Zhanna shook a finger at my face. “You go to that funeral and get it back.”

But I didn't, and the scarf descended into the earth with Ruslan.

I began to ditch school and walk miles without direction, sometimes getting lost in the woods nearby until a passing hiker pointed out the correct path, and I did whatever I could to get expelled from school. My parents' influence made it tricky, but I persisted.

I stapled Ruslan's many pages in my journal and begged Zhanna to take his letters because I felt them breathing in my room at night. Besides, I had memorized the words long ago.

The necklace I kept. It carried his touch.

*   *   *

Inside Journal Number 1, I continued to make entries, careful to avoid the sealed pages but reluctant to start a different notebook. I was fourteen brooding on seventeen, my writing an abandoned land mine. On a really bad day, I spent hours in a dreamlike state in which I'd float outside my body and watch the motions I went through with detached curiosity. I called it the “Black Sleep.”

I felt a deep sense of abandonment. Odd, since my parents were still together and tried their best to give Roxy and me a semblance of a normal family life. When not flinging ashtrays at each other, they were almost normal. On one of those days I heard Dad mutter, “Baba Varya's curse is to blame for this strife, but in America everything will change. The curse can't reach across the ocean.”

After the interview at the American embassy, on the day our plans to come to America were finalized, I wrote my last entry: “This hurt can't reach across the ocean. I will leave me here and find me on the other side.”

 

THE CURBS OF BEVERLY HILLS

I once heard a rumor about immigrants who, unable to read English, had mistaken cat food for canned tuna. That unwelcome image was wedged in my mind as Mom and I stepped through the sliding doors of the local supermarket on our first official shopping trip alone. When we moved out of Uncle's, the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program brought us groceries, but their services ended after a month or so.

“First things first,” Mom said as we pushed our cart down the bright aisles. “We need butter.” Her black pumps echoed against the canyon of freezers stuffed with food. She wore a gray dress with intricately carved silver buttons down the front. With her freshly curled and styled hair, she looked like a Mediterranean Jane Seymour. When she'd spent an hour dressing up, I had complained, worried we'd draw too much attention. I was right. People stared, not only because of her opera-ready makeup, but also because she shouted in Russian to me as if we were miles apart. The heels and the crimson nails weren't too bad. We came from a culture where outside excursions meant people would be checking you out, forming opinions behind your back. You absolutely had to look your best. God forbid you went to the downstairs bakery in your sweats and slippers; eventually the neighborhood would learn of your poverty. Party invitations would be withdrawn and rumors of mental illness would circulate.

It was the volume of my mother's voice that drove me to pretend I didn't know her that day. For the first time, I was ashamed of my language.

“Do you see butter, Oksana?” Mom bellowed.

Anybody familiar with Eastern European cooking practices will understand the value of good butter. If you don't use a stick of the stuff in your recipe, you're either a miser or a lousy cook.

We had found the dairy section, and with it, our first dilemma: too many varieties. Butter, according to
Merriam-Webster
, is a solid edible emulsion obtained from cream by churning. How many different ways of churning are there? How many kinds of cream?

I missed the days when I'd walk up to our local market's dairy counter, ask the brightly lipsticked Elena Leonidovna for a kilo of butter, and be on my way.

“Oksana. What does this mean?”

I squinted at a beige tub Mom pointed to, studying it with the curiosity of an archaeologist. “‘Fat-free.' I don't think that's good.”

“Why not? What does this ‘fat-free' mean?”

I envisioned a golden cloud of creamy mass floating in the sparkling sky, blobs of fat swirling around it in fancy-free abandon. “It means it has way too much fat. Fat has complete freedom. It has taken over this butter.”

“Oh … then we don't want it.”

In the produce aisle I almost forgot about my mother's vocalizations. I had never seen so much food in one place, not to mention so many off-season fruits and vegetables. The neat rows of unreasonably large strawberries and glossy apples made me think they must've come from a factory instead of a farm.

We couldn't splurge with the thirty dollars we had allotted for food that week, so we bought potatoes, bread, bologna, cheese, milk, and pasta. I did get the strawberries, but Mom drew the line at the apples, which she said smelled like candle wax. It took a good two hours, but in the end, we left with a sense of great accomplishment. And that night Roxy and I sifted sugar over our tasteless strawberry giants while I told tales of the market: not just a market but a
supermarket
.

*   *   *

The next task made me a bit more nervous: paying the rent. The landlady, Rosa Torres, lived downstairs in a unit tucked into the corner of the courtyard. Mom had officially elected me as her interpreter, though I could say little more than “My name is Oksana, I am fifteen years old.”

At age twelve, with help from my tattered Russian-English dictionary, I had started writing songs with English lyrics. I performed this one at a school concert.

Today, me not to think of in the past.

Stars to burn how fires.

Them show to me way

To fairy-tale valley full happiness.

Only when I came to America did I laugh at those lyrics. Hurriedly I'd acquired a used Russian-English dictionary from one of the workers at the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program to replace the one my dad had taken when he left. Every day I opened to a random page and scanned the words, saying them out loud, trying them on for size. The ones I found especially beautiful I wrote down in my journal. “Transparent” was the first, then “shenanigans.” I'd stand in front of a mirror and have conversations with myself in a language that still felt like a pair of new shoes. Or I'd repeat things I heard on TV, memorizing phrases like “buy one, get one half off.” In front of that mirror I interviewed Madonna. In public I stuttered while buying milk.

“You know plenty of English, Oksana,” Mom said as I knocked on the landlady's door, hoping for no answer. “At your age I spoke Russian with barely an accent.” Russian was the official language of the USSR, but you could tell which of the fifteen republics a person came from by their accent when they spoke it.

I haphazardly pieced together all the useful words I could think of, and forgot them the instant the door opened.

“Jes?” Rosa smiled at me above the door chain. Her bleached hair shrieked next to her dark, pockmarked skin.

“Hello. We pay rent. Please. Thank you.”

“Come. I'll give ju a receipt.” Her apartment, rich with dark furniture against very pink walls, smelled strongly of beans, onions, and spices I didn't recognize.

We carefully counted out the money on top of Rosa's polished dining-room table: $450. But we didn't leave right away. One hour passed, another, and the three of us … talked. A true conversation. Rosa, an immigrant herself, had come from Mexico with her husband and daughter, Maria, six years before. Like Mom, she was now divorced. As it turned out, Maria and Roxy had met only days after we moved in and had without hesitation become best friends. And it wasn't long before our two broken families became very close.

Once Rosa saw the inside of our apartment she began to visit regularly. Almost every day, she walked up the stairs carrying a shiny toaster, or a chair, or some curtains for the bedroom windows.

Mom kept refusing the gifts, uncomfortable with the idea of taking handouts—especially since back in Russia, she'd been the one handing them out.

“
Mija
. This stuff is free and ju need it.”

“Free?” I asked.

“Rich people gets rid of things. Good things. They leave them on street in front of their houses.”

“To throw away?”

“Jes. But dose are good things: furniture, clothes. Expensive. I go to Beverly Hills and pick up for my garage sales.”

That weekend Rosa talked Mom into going to Beverly Hills with her. Roxy, Maria, and I piled into the back of Rosa's purple 1978 Buick Regal, with Mom and Rosa in the front. We drove past unremarkable houses, but as the neighborhoods changed, those houses blossomed.

“Maybe my George lives here,” Roxy said, staring out the window in fascination.

“Or not,” I said.

“You're such a grump, Oksana. We should ask somebody.”

We stopped at our first curb, where cardboard boxes overflowed with clothes and vibrant fake flowers. Rosa kept the car running. She tossed the boxes in the trunk and jumped back in, driving away quickly.

“It is okay to take them?” I asked. The process felt too much like stealing.

“Is fine. They jes don't like to see us do it.” While Rosa stuffed the car with merchandise, I admired the grandeur of the impeccable lawns and the plentitude of Mercedes-Benzes. This, I thought, was the America I'd expected. Unfortunately, I was scavenging from its garbage.

We went to Beverly Hills regularly, raking in carloads of stuff Rosa later sold. Each time her Buick passed the Beverly Hills sign, we entered a universe most people glimpsed only on TV. On both sides of the spotless streets, beautiful palms swayed their model-thin necks. The houses lay scattered about like multicolored beads. Everything here glimmered with that special, extra-golden sunshine. And for the few hours a week we spent ragpicking, we, too, got to bathe in its rays.

 

A PREMIUM IDEA

Dad called our apartment a week before Christmas. Several months had passed since the last time we'd heard from him, and during that silence I'd tried to make sense of his actions. What did Roxy and I do to make it so easy for him to abandon us? Why did he never try to help?

Roxy had picked up the phone first, and we took turns talking to him in hushed voices while glancing in the direction of the kitchen, where Mom was battling with her hand-cranked meat grinder.