Super Sad True Love Story (17 page)

She was about to throw her arms around my neck in typically overblown fashion when she noticed Eunice, let out some Russian garble of amazement, and retreated inside the house, leaving me, per the usual, with the visuals of her thick gravity-pulled breasts and white little round of belly. My father, shirtless, in stained beige shorts, soon took her place, also gaped at Eunice, ran his hand against his naked muscular breasts perhaps out of embarrassment, said “O!” then hugged me anyway. There was hair against my new dress shirt, the gray carpet that my father wore with an odd touch of class, as if he were a royal in some tropical country. He kissed me on both cheeks and I did the same, feeling the flood of intimacy, of sudden closeness with a person who usually orbited so far away from me. The instructions, the Confucian-like code of Russian father-son relations, spooled in my mind: Father means I have to love him, have to listen to him, can’t offend him, can’t hurt him, can’t bring him to task for past wrongs; an old man now, defenseless, deserving of all I can offer.

My mother reappeared in shorts and a wife-beater.
“Sinotchek”
(“Little son”), she shouted, and kissed me in the same meaningful way. “Look who’s come to us!
Nash lyubimeits
” (“Our favorite”).

She shook Eunice’s hand, and both of my parents swiftly evaluated her, affirmed that she was, like her predecessors, not Jewish, but quietly approved of the fact that she was thin and attractive with a healthy black mane of hair. My mother unwrapped her own precious blond locks from the green handkerchief that kept them safe from the American sun and smiled prettily at Eunice, her skin gentle and pale, aged only around the frantically moving mouth. She began talking in her brave post-retirement English about how glad she was to have a potential daughter-in-law (a perennial dream—two women against two men, better odds at the dinner table), filling in the contours of her loneliness with rapid-fire questions about my mysterious life in faraway New York. “Does Lenny keep clean house? Does he vacuum? Once, I came to college dormitory, okh, awful! Such smell! Dead ficus tree! Old cheese on table. Socks hanging in window.”

Eunice smiled and spoke in my favor. “He’s very good, Ms. Abramov. He’s very clean.” I looked at her with endearment. Somewhere beneath the bright suburban skies I felt the presence of a .50-caliber Browning gun swiveling toward an incoming Long Island Rail Road train, but here I stood, surrounded by the people who loved me.

“I got Tagamet from the discount pharmacy,” I said to my father, taking five boxes out of the bag I’d brought.

“Thank you,
malen’kii
” (“little one”), my father said, taking hold of his beloved drug. “Peptic ulcer,” he said to Eunice gravely, pointing at the depth of his tortured stomach.

My mother had already grabbed hold of the back of my head and was madly stroking my hair. “So gray,” she said, shaking her head in an exaggerated way, as if she were an American comedic actress. “So old he gets. Almost forty. Lyonya, what is happening to you? Too much stress? Also losing hair. Oh my God!”

I shook her off. Why was everyone so concerned about my decline?

“You are named Eunice,” my father said. “Do you know where it come from, such name?”

“My parents …” Eunice gamely began.

“It from the Greek,
yoo-nee-kay
. Meaning ‘victorious.’” He laughed, happy to demonstrate that, before he was forced to be a janitor in America, he had served as a quasi-intellectual and minor dandy on Moscow’s Arbat Street. “So I hope,” he said, “that in life you will be victorious also!”

“Who cares about Greek, Boris,” my mother said. “Look at how she is beautiful!” The fact that my parents admired Eunice’s looks and capacity for victory brightened me quite a bit. All these years, and I still craved their approval, still longed for the carrot and stick of their nineteenth-century child-rearing. I instructed myself to lower the heat of my emotions, to think without the family blood bursting at my temples. But it was all for nought. I became twelve years old as soon as I passed the mezuzah at the front door.

Eunice blushed at the compliments and looked at me with fear and surprise, as my father began to lead me to the living-room couch for our usual heart-to-heart. My mother rushed over to the couch with a plastic bag which she draped over the place where I was about to sit in my compromised Manhattan outerwear, then took Eunice to the kitchen, chatting gaily to the potential daughter-in-law and ally about how “guys can be so dirty, you know,” and how she had just built a new storage device for her many mops.

On the couch, my father draped his arm around my shoulders—there it was, the closeness—and said, “
Nu, rasskazhi
” (“So, tell me”).

I breathed in the same breath as he did, as if we were connected. I felt his age seep into mine, as if he were the forward guard of my own mortality, although his skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and he bore an odor of vitality on his skin, along with an afterthought of decay. I spoke in English with the tantalizing hints of Russian I had studied haphazardly at NYU, the foreign words like raisins shining out of a loaf. I mentally recorded some of the harder words for consultation with my non-digital Oxford Russian-English dictionary back home. I spoke about work, about my assets, about the 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars I owed Howard Shu (
“Svoloch kitaichonok”
[“Little Chinese swine”], my father rendered his opinion), about the most recent, fairly positive valuation of my 740-square-foot apartment on the Lower East Side, about all the monetary things that kept us fearful and connected. I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone.

He held up the pendant of my new äppärät. “How much?” he said, turning the thing over, varicolored data pouring over his hairy fingers. When I explained that the device was gratis, he made a happy snort and said in pure English: “Learn new technology for free is good.”

“How’s your Credit?” I asked him.

“Eh.” He waved the thought away. “I never go near those Poles, so who cares?”

The floor beneath my feet was clean, immigrant clean, clean enough so that you understood that somebody had done their best. My father had two old-fashioned
televizor
screens stapled to the walls above my mother’s fanatically waxed mantelpiece. One was set to a FoxLiberty-Prime stream, which was showing the growing tent city in Central Park, now spreading from the backyard of the Metropolitan Museum, over hill and dale, all the way down to the Sheep Meadow (
“Obeyziani”
[“Monkeys”], my father said of the displaced and homeless protesters). On the other screen, FoxLiberty-Ultra was viciously broadcasting the arrival of the Chinese Central Banker at Andrews Air Force Base, our nation lying prostrate before him, our president and his pretty wife trying not to shiver as a bleak Maryland downpour scoured the heat-cracked tarmac.

When I asked my father how he was feeling, he pointed at his heartburn and sighed. Then he began to talk about the news on “the Fox.” Sometimes when he spoke I surmised that, at least in his own mind, he had already ceased to exist, that he thought of himself as just an empty spot cruising through a ridiculous world. Speaking in the complicated Russian sentences that English had denied him, he praised Defense Secretary Rubenstein, talked about all that he and the Bipartisan Party had done for our country, and how, with Rubenstein’s blessing, SecurityState Israel should now use the nuclear option against the Arabs and the Persians, “in particular against Damascus, which, if winds are properly positioned,
s bozhei pomochu
[‘with the help of God’], will carry poison clouds and fallouts in direction of Teheran and Baghdad,” as opposed to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

“You know I saw Nettie Fine in Rome,” I told him. “At the embassy.”

“And how is our American mama? Does she still think we are ‘cruel’?” He laughed, somewhat cruelly.

“She thinks the people in the parks are going to rise up. The ex–National Guardsmen. There’s going to be a revolution against the Bipartisans.”

“Chush kakaia!”
(“What nonsense!”) my father shouted. But then he thought about it for a few moments and spread his arms. “What can be done about someone like her?” he finally said.
“Liberalka.”

I felt my father’s breath against my cheek for twenty minutes as he talked about his complex political life, then excused myself, unwound from his humid embrace, and went to the upstairs bathroom, as my mother shouted to me from the kitchen: “Lenny, don’t take your shoes off in upstairs bathroom. Papa has
gribok
” (“athlete’s foot”).

In the contaminated bathroom, I admired the strange blob of plastic with wooden spokes that kept my mother’s serious mop-collection in ready-to-access mode. Although my parents never had a good word to say about HolyPetroRussia, the hallways were hung with framed sepia-toned postcards of Red Square and the Kremlin; the snow-dusted equestrian statue of Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy, founder of Moscow (I had learned just a bit of Russian history at my father’s knee); and the gothic Stalin-era skyscraper of prestigious Moscow State University, which neither of my parents had attended, because, to hear them tell it, Jews were not allowed in back then. As for me, I have never been to Russia. I have not had the chance to learn to love it and hate it the way my parents have. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

My bedroom was nearly empty; all the traces of my habitation, the posters and little bits of crap from my travels, my mother had stowed away in carefully labeled boxes in the closets. I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house, the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naïve again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. I cannot begin to tell you how much the purchase of this house, of each tiny bedroom, had meant to my family and to me. I still remember the signing at the real-estate lawyer’s office, the three of us beaming at one another, mentally forgiving one another a decade and a half worth of sins, the youthful beatings administered by my father, my mother’s anxieties and manias, my own teenage sullenness, because the janitor and his wife had done something right at last! And it would all be okay now. There was no turning back from this, from the glorious fortune we had been granted in the middle of Long Island, from the carefully clipped bushes by the mailbox (our bushes,
ABRAMOV
bushes) to the oft-mentioned Californian possibility of an aboveground swimming pool in the back, a possibility that never came true, because of our poor finances, but which could never be decisively put to bed either. And this, my room, whose privacy my parents had never respected, but where I would still find a summer’s hot sanctuary on my glorified army cot, my little teenaged arms doing the only nonmasturbatory thing they were capable of, hoisting aloft a big red volume of Conrad, my soft lips moving along with the dense words, the warped wood-paneled walls absorbing the occasional clicks of my tongue.

Out in the hallway, I caught sight of another framed memento. An essay my father had written in English for the newsletter of the Long Island scientific laboratory where he worked (it had made it onto the paper’s front page, to our family’s pride), and which I, as an undergraduate NYU English major, had helped to proofread and refine.

THE JOYS OF PLAYING BASKETBALL

By B
ORIS
A
BRAMOV

Sometimes life is difficult and one wishes to relieve oneself of the pressures and the worries of life. Some people see a shrink, others jump in a cold lake or travel around the world. But I find nothing more joyful than playing basketball. At the Laboratory we have many men (and women!) who like to play basketball. They come from all over the world, from Europe, Latin America, and everywhere else. I cannot say I am the best player, I am not so young anymore, my knees hurt, and I am also pretty short and this is a handicap. But I take the game very seriously and when a big problem comes up in my life and I feel like I do not want to live, I sometimes like to picture myself on the court, trying to throw a ball from a great distance into the hoop or maneuvering against an agile opponent. I try to play in a smart way. As a result, I find that I am often victorious even against a much taller or faster player, from Africa or Brazil, let’s say. But win or lose, what’s important is the spirit of this beautiful game. So if you have time on Tuesday or Thursday at lunchtime (12:30), please join me and your colleagues for a good, healthy time in the physical education center. You’ll feel better about yourself and the worries of life will “melt away”!
Boris Abramov is a custodian in the Buildings and Grounds division
.

I remember trying to get my father to take out the part about being “pretty short,” and the bit about the pained knees, but he said he wanted to be honest. I told him in America people liked to ignore their weak points and to stress their incredible accomplishments. Now that I think about it, I felt guilty about being born in Queens and having lots of nutritious food on my plate, food that allowed me to grow to a semi-normal height of five feet and nine inches, whereas my father had barely scraped the five-and-a-half-foot mark. It was he, the athlete, not I, the soft and stationary one, who needed those extra inches to sail the basketball past some Brazilian pituitary giant.

The familiar cry of my mother resounded downstairs:
“Lyonya, gotovo!”
(“Lenny, dinner is ready!”)

Down in the dining room, with the shiny Romanian furniture the Abramovs had imported from their Moscow apartment (the totality of it could be squeezed into one small American room), the table was laid out in the hospitable Russian manner, with everything from four different kinds of piquant salami to a plate of chewy tongue to every little fish that ever inhabited the Baltic Sea, not to mention the sacred dash of black caviar. Eunice sat, Queen Esther–like in her Orthodox getup, at the ceremonial end of the table, upon a fluffed-up Passover pillow, frowning at the attention, unsure how to deal with the strange currents of love and its opposite that circulated in the fish-smelling air. My parents sat down, and my father proposed a seasonal toast in English: “To the Creator, who created America, the land of free, and who give us Rubenstein, who kill Arab, and to love which is blooming in such times between my son and Yooo-neee-kay, who [big wink to Eunice] will be victorious, like Sparta over Athens, and to the summer, which is most conducive season to love, although some may say spring.…”