Little Failure (30 page)

Indeed, the most dangerous part of my day is when my father has to pick my mother up after work, after he has collected me from my grandma’s, so that we may all go back to distant Little Neck together in the Tredia. We wait for Mother near a subway station at the corner of Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, not far from the Queens Criminal Court. There is a 1920s statue on that corner called
Triumph
of Civic Virtue:
a naked, well-muscled man with a drawn sword is stepping on two bare-chested mermaids who symbolize corruption and vice. “Where is she?
Suka tvoya mat’!
” my father cries, because my
bitch-mother
is late, ten minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, an hour late. And with each gradation of lateness I know the fight will ratchet right up the
razvod
scale.

To pass the time, and stem his anger and my worry, Papa and I play a nervous version of hide-and-seek around the well-endowed, tight-assed Civic Virtue God and his vanquished mermaids, absorbing the sickening lessons in gender relations the statue so clearly presents. (In 2012, after much outcry, the
Triumph of Civic Virtue
was removed to a Brooklyn cemetery.)

Finally, my mother puffs out of the subway in her rabbit-fur coat, the one indulgence no Russian woman can do without, and we pack into the car, and the fighting begins.

Suka! Suka! Suka!

Go to the
khui
!

In front of the child she is cursing like this. How much did you send to your relatives?

Ne-tvoyo sobache delo.
It is not your dog-business
.

Then where were you, bitch?

My mother is sick! My mother is dying! Ah, you wolfish breed!

And then my father to me, quietly, but loud enough for her to hear in the backseat,
Other men hit their wives. But I never hit her. And look what good it did
.

And I am turning in to my window, leaning my head against the cold pane, as Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from the nerd-musical
Chess
plays as loudly as it may on the car’s stereo. I picture an Asian girl beneath an enormous Thai
stupa
in some kind of silky native dress. I’m not sure what it means other than the urge to go somewhere else right now, to leap out of the car and run toward Kennedy Airport, which is not very far away.

One thing I know for certain is that my parents can
never
get a
razvod
. Why? Because we are the Family Shteyngart, population
three, and with already such low numbers we are not supposed to be apart. Not to mention that maintaining two households will mean our living standards will erode, we will no longer be middle-middle class, and we might have to give up the Mitsubishi, which I have already pointed out to my unimpressed SSSQ classmates: “Behold! The Tredia-S.” And finally, if either of my parents was to remarry (unthinkable), their American spouses would look down on my keloid scar and borrowed Batman T-shirt, and I might end up with no family at all.

Sometimes I get angry. On the school bus back at SSSQ, I find an Israeli girl—some Shlomit or Osnat—whose star shines even less brightly than my own, and I make fun of her mercilessly. She has a mustache like my grandmother’s and a training bra. I slide into the seat next to her and make jokes about her need to wax her mustache with something called “turtle wax,” an insult that I’ve overheard from another bus mate and that seems like just the right kind of topical cruelty to use on this small, dark, friendly creature. I tease her about her training bra and what I can only imagine lies beneath it. What I can’t quite understand is that I have a crush on this girl precisely because she has a mustache just like my grandmother’s, which makes me want to hug her and tell her all of my troubles. The girl informs on me to Mrs. R, the kindly educator who helped me with my shoelaces and sang
Troo-loo-loo-loo
when I was in first grade. Mrs. R takes me aside on the bus line and tells me to stop bothering the girl. Mrs. R’s gentle opprobrium, much worse than her anger, makes me so ashamed I consider skipping the school bus and walking across Queens to my grandmother’s house. The truth is I don’t even understand what turtle wax is. The truth is that if those furry lips were to graze my own, I would not turn away.

I get angry even among the peaceable kingdom of Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony. There is a new kid no one likes exactly. Straight out of Minsk or somewhere, scrawny, undernourished, weak, Belorussian.
He is with his grandmother, and we don’t know the whereabouts of his parents. He looks like a younger version of my step-grandfather Ilya—the unhappy eyes, the Leninist forehead—and that makes me hate him even more. My favorite book of the summer of 1984 and the two subsequent summers is
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. I commit the passages in which O’Brien tortures Winston to memory. When the kid is alone staring sullenly at a comic book over a picnic table, I approach him. I sit down and begin to speak in measured tones. “Power is not a means,
Vinston;
it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

I slide over to the kid. He cowers before me, which I both love and hate. He is more
slabyi
than I am, which is good. But I am about to sing from my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion at the Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, which makes me—what? A man. What would a man do?

Before he can stop me, before I can stop me, I grab his hand. I hold up my left hand, thumb hidden, four fingers extended, just like in Orwell’s book. “How many fingers am I holding up,
Vinston
?”

He doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t understand my English. Doesn’t understand who is
Vinston
. I repeat in Russian. “Four,” he says finally, his whole little sardine body trembling.

“And if the Republican Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?”

“Four.”

I begin twisting his fingers. He cries out in pain. I am bearing down on him, hating this, hating this.
“Pyat’!”
he cries in Russian. “Five!”

Trying to keep back the welling tears in my own eyes: “No, Vinston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”

He breaks free and runs down the vast green lawn separating our bungalows. “
Baaaaa-buuuuuu-shkaaaa!
”

Later, out my bedroom window, I see his old babushka talking to mine, a stooped, tired, emaciated figure confiding to a thick, voracious, quasi-American one. Now I will be punished! Now I will be punished! I savor it. I did this terrible thing, and now I will be punished. I rush out to meet Grandma. She sighs and looks at me. She loves me so much. Why does she love me so much?

“That boy’s babushka says you hit him,” Grandma says.

“I didn’t hit him,” I say. “I read to him from a book.”

“Did he do something to you?”

“No.”

“My shining sun,” Grandmother says. “Whatever you did to him, I’m certain he deserved it.”

When Grandma leaves I go to the bedroom and weep over the monster I now am, but the next day I do the same thing. And then again. And again.
How many fingers, Vinston?
After a few weeks the boy leaves the bungalow colony for good.

The summer sun is down around eight-thirty. Grandma is already in bed and snoring with all her might. The country folk in the Russian novel
Oblomov
by Ivan Goncharov greet each nightfall with the phrase “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!” and something similar can be said of Grandma’s worldview. I quietly pour myself out past her bed and into the new night. The stars are constellating above, and the bungalow colony is quiet, but somewhere I hear girlish giggles and the scratchy warble of Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” on a no-brand radio. The children are out bathed in moonlight and they are so happy to see me. “Gnu! Gnu!”

“Shhh, Eva … You’ll wake Babushka.”

“You shhh.”

Natasha is sitting on an Adirondack chair, wearing her favorite
green hooded sweatshirt, her boxer faithfully at her feet. “Come here, Gary,” she gestures at her lap. It is not manly to sit on top of a girl, I know, but we are roughly the same height, and I do want to feel her warmth so. The boxer looks up protectively as I sit on her lap, then lowers his frothy muzzle with disregard. Oh, it’s just him. Boy George is crooning: “I’m a man (a man) without conviction / I’m a man (a man) who doesn’t know.” Natasha leans forward, and I feel her cheek, still heated by the day’s sun, against my ear. “Gnu, tell a joke,” someone says. I want to lower my eyelids and be in this moment forever, but I understand what these children want of me. I tell the joke.

Disney World, 1986. Father and son out for a spin. Mothers up and down Florida are locking up their daughters
.

W
HEN
I
TURN FOURTEEN
, I lose my Russian accent. I can, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi there” would not sound like
Okht Hyzer
, possibly the name of a Turkish politician. There are three things I want to do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understand that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl tell me that she likes me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of eating at McDonald’s often. Mama and Papa think that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street are things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate. Even my parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as only immigrants can be, cannot resist the iconic pull of Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.

And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation, two Russian families cram into a large used sedan and take I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other family—three members in all—mirror our own, except that their single offspring is a girl and they are, on the whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighs three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt grin that of a turn-of-the-last-century Jewish peddler scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney tickets are a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from Moscow?” the time-share salesman asks, appraising the polyester cut of my father’s jib.

“Leningrad.”

“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”

“Yes, mechanical engineer … Eh, please Disney tickets now.”

The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach is my real naturalization ceremony. I want all of it—the palm trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions, the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit availability of relations with amoral women. I can see myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I will have to wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends features army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach evolved enough to wave what looks like a fist at us. Scared out of Miami Beach, we decamp for Fort Lauderdale, where a Yugoslav woman shelters us in a faded motel, beach adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We always seem to be at the margins of places: the driveway of the Fontainebleau Hilton or the glassed-in elevator leading to a rooftop restaurant where we can momentarily peek over the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign at the endless ocean below, the Old World we have left behind so far and yet deceptively near.