The Journey Prize Stories 22 (18 page)

“But I can speak it just fine.”

“Think about your father. Tell me how he's supposed to read the letters you'll send us every month.”

“Nobody writes letters anymore, Mom. Why can't I just call?”

“Your father likes reading letters. Besides, since you want to go as far away from us as you can, I can only imagine how expensive the long distance charges would be.”

My father looks up from his newspaper, the special one he has imported from Ukraine, and shrugs. His expression confirms that things are out of his hands. Later he puts an arm around me and sighs. My shoulders are so narrow he can scratch his own chest when I'm in his grip.

I retreat back to my bedroom and stare at the
Tomb Raider
poster I have taped to the wall above my desk. “I want to be like you,” I tell it as coldly as I can manage, “but not with you.
Capiche?”

Angelina doesn't say anything back, but I know she knows that I know that somehow my hand has found its way into my pants again.

Ukrainians like doing things through word of mouth. Someone sees you purchasing boys underwear at the mall, to use an example that in no way relates to my life, and all of a sudden you're getting black lace panties and makeup kits for your birthday. All it takes is one of Mom's casual conversations with our dentist and the calls for potential tutors come rushing in.

From a list three pages long my mother chooses a woman named Alana, mostly for price and a little for convenience of location, since she lives three blocks away.

We arrive at Alana's apartment in all our finery: Mom in a floral skirt and a matching blouse she usually saves for church and job interviews, me in my school uniform – a pleated dress (shudder) and a loose-collared shirt that achieves the impossible by making it look like I actually have boobs. Mom sprays a cloud of perfume in the air and pushes me through it and into the apartment building's lobby. She presses a button on the electronic keypad and a muffled voice buzzes us into the building. Mom takes me by the shoulders and shakes me gently. “She used to be a teacher, Libanka,” she says. “Grades 1 through 6.” She picks a fluff of lint off my shoulder. “How's my makeup?”

She doesn't wait to hear the answer before making her way up to the second floor, navigating each stair nimbly, even though her heels are practically stilts. My heels are a fraction of the size and still my equilibrium's as fickle as a fish. After straightening her blouse and clearing her throat, Mom
knocks on the door. Her fist barely touches the wood when it swings open.

Alana is a spectacle the way Godzilla is a spectacle. Her jeans cling to her thighs like plastic wrap stretched over a Buick. The shirt she's wearing is plain and white, loose at the stomach and pulling at the shoulder seams. Her extended hand is attached to a wrist thicker than a shampoo bottle.

“Boje,”
I mutter to myself.

“Very nice to meet you.” Alana smiles as my mother shakes her hand.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” my mother says in a firm Ukrainian I rarely hear. “This is my daughter Libanka.”

“Libby,” I correct her.

“Very nice to meet you, Libby,” Alana says, her voice an echo. “Come in, please. I have coffee already made.” Alana uses the same formal inflections as my mother. In English, Alana says, “Libby, if you want to make yourself at home, there's a
TV
in the living room.”

“Go on, Libanka, while we talk
business.”
My mother says “business” in English and when she does I know that no matter how colossal Alana is, when it comes to money, she'll crumble like the Berlin Wall.

As they engage in the great Ukrainian pastime of haggling to the cent, I stare at the mantel over the television, where a collection of trophies are arranged in rows like little soldiers. Golden figures stand on top of wooden bases, hoisting barbells high above their heads. They look like Alana: 3-D maps of bulges, bumps where I've never seen bumps, disproportionately thick thighs and angular chins. The inscriptions are all in Ukrainian.

Eventually I get bored and watch
Springer
. Two paternity tests and one crackhead intervention later, my mother claps her hands.

“Fifty dollars a month it is,” she announces. She moves to the door. “Libanka will start next week.” She gestures to me, patting her thigh as if I were some sort of pet. It shames me that I dutifully come as told. Alana leans against the wall and smiles, folding her veiny forearms across her chest.

The difficulty I have stuffing my feet back into my heels reminds me of the time my
babusya
called me into the change room at Zellers and asked me to help her squeeze a pair of stockings over ankles swollen to the size of tennis balls. Once my shoes are on, my mother smiles at Alana and pulls me out the door. We're halfway down the hallway when Alana's voice booms. “When you come, bring something in Ukrainian.”

I stop. I don't have anything in Ukrainian.

“Don't worry,” Mom waves, dragging me towards the elevator. “We have plenty of things she can bring.”

At home, I'm handed a slim book, smudged with fingerprints. My mother holds it gingerly. “Taras Schevchenko,” she says reverently. “He's my favourite poet. You and Alana can use him.”

“You better be careful with that,” Dad laughs. “Once I bent a corner and found myself almost divorced.”

“Keep the jokes up and you still might,” Mom says. “Treat him very carefully, Libanka. This book is older than you are.”

The fact that my mother and the book of poems are on good enough terms to use personal pronouns makes me wonder what I've gotten myself into. When I read through
Taras, I start to get bored. He talks a lot about mountains. His words make me think of Alana.

The air in Alana's apartment is a strange yin-yang of smells: the steamy odour of boiled vegetables rubbing against the chemical-lemon scent of Pledge. There's some incense in there too, and hints of the perfume Alana was wearing the last time I was here. I'm sitting in a creaking couch and the cushions are swallowing me. As I fight their gravity, Alana deduces my level of comprehension. She says, “So you can speak, but not read or write?”

“I can read a little.”

“Most people who haven't been formally educated in a language can only speak, so you're ahead of the game. Here, read this.”

She takes my mother's collection of poetry off the coffee table and hands it to me. I struggle phonetically over the letters, aware that the words are poorly articulated, stressed when they should be a smooth river, soft when they should be boulders.

“Not bad,” Alana says, “though Schevchenko wouldn't have been my first choice.”

“Apparently my mom loves him.”

“No offence to your mother, but she's wound a little tight. I can see why a stuffy old nationalist poet who writes about trees and fields and potatoes would appeal to her. Why don't we try something a little more fun. Here.”

I expect a dense tome and instead get bright and colourful newsprint.

“They make these in Ukrainian?”

Alana claps me on the shoulder. It only stings a little.
“Wonder Woman comic books transcend the boundaries of geography and language. They're tough to find and most of the time I have to order them, but what the hell? If you can't read about women kicking ass in your own language, then you aren't really reading at all. Besides, the co-creator of
DC
Comics was a Ukrainian. Did you know that?”

“I had no idea.”

“A Ukrainian also made Spiderman.”

“You know a lot about comic books.”

“I was a teacher. You're dead in the water if you can't relate to kids.”

When I come home, my belly is filled with tea and
pompushki
, tasty little fruit-filled pastries that I wolfed down by the half dozen. My mind is a cross-pollinated jumble of Ukrainian and English words, fighting for elbow room with thoughts of Alana. Before I can even take off my shoes, Mom calls me over and asks me to write something.

“Anything,” Mom says. “I don't care. Just show me that I'm not wasting my money.”

I take a pen and scrawl the words Wonder Woman says whenever punishing evil-doers:
“Yisty kulak.”

Eat fist.

Sometimes I'm translating from English to Ukrainian, sometimes the other way around. Sometimes I spell things out phonetically or convert Ukrainian words, written using English letters, into Cyrillic. After that, we read together, alternating sentences. I notice that some words make Alana breathe more deeply, from the pit of her stomach instead of her lungs.
Whenever Wonder Woman says something clever before pouncing on villains, for example, she swallows gulps of air with the urgency of a diver about to break the water's surface.

The first few times, I make mistakes almost every word. By the third week I can usually get through two or three lines before running into an idiomatic phrase that makes no sense to me. The Ukrainian language refuses to flow from the page the way it does from my mouth. We go through comic books and magazines and newspapers and once even a menu from the only Ukrainian restaurant in town that delivers. The only thing we never touch is Mom's collection of poetry.

Today someone at school defaces my Angelina Jolie picture and rips Marilyn Monroe out of my locker. I find her pulpy corpse floating in the drinking fountain. What's left of her bobbing face slides off the page like a snake's second skin when I try to rescue her, leaving an inky black cloud in its wake.

When I get to Alana's, I stare at the trophies on her mantel and wish the gold figures would spring to life and crush my enemies. Alana brings in a tray of pastries and plops down next to me. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail and for the first time I notice how symmetrical her face is, her high cheekbones bookending a nose that curves slightly upwards, her face a perfect combination of straight lines and parabolas.

“You're quiet today,” she says. She puts her arm around me, not behind my back but over my head, the crook of her elbow just touching my hair. Her breath is a wave of heat settling on my ears. I stop thinking about Marilyn. I stop thinking about anything, until I realize that Alana is looking at me, her head a planet tilting on its axis.

“Say something,” she says. “Silence is boring.”

I look down and clear my throat. “Did you know that if you put 23 people into a room together, 50 per cent of the time two of them will share a birthday?”

She cocks her eyebrow. “Really?”

I stare at her coffee table and notice three circular stains intersecting. “If you think about it, the number 3 is pretty important,” I continue, building up steam. “The Holy Trinity, for example. Or how our planet is the third one in our solar system. And it's the minimum number of dimensions needed to describe a solid in math.”

She looks at me vaguely and I sense I've gone too far.

“So …” I say, drawing out the word to buy me time. I consider talking about the paintings, but know nothing about art. The pastries look good but I haven't tried one yet. I look around the room frantically and find salvation in the collection of trophies. “What are those? I was looking at them earlier and couldn't figure out what sport they're for.”

“The one with the red base is my city trophy. The big one is from the national championship,” she says. “I set a national record for my body weight that time. Bench pressing twice my weight. Go to the gym and find me a man who could do that.”

“I thought only guys worked out.”

Alana laughs.
“Working out
is what frat boys do. This is weightlifting. Different thing altogether.”

I've seen my cousins lifting weights before. Mike boxes and can lift 270 pounds off the ground. I look at Alana and wonder if her arms are bigger than his. She sits next to me and stuffs a pastry into her mouth. Flecks of powdered sugar float to my
thighs like tiny angels before Alana's mighty hand sweeps them off.

“What do you do?” I ask. “Just lift the barbells over your head?”

“You've never seen a bench press? Don't they teach you that stuff in gym class?”

“When the guys worked out, we always played badminton.”

Alana looks disgusted and for some reason I feel ashamed.

“I'll tell you what. Next time you come over, bring some shorts and sneakers. I'll give you a demonstration.” She shakes her head. “It'll be a good break from all this reading crap.”

Days later I do as told, arriving in shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes that are still stiff from never being used. They squeak as I follow Alana down the sidewalk, toward the
YMCA
up the street.

I'm Alana's shadow when we move briskly to the change rooms. All around us, middle-aged women walk, breasts exposed, freckled, sagging, unashamed. I've never been in a health club and sheepishly turn away from everyone. Alana throws her gym bag next to me and peels off her shirt. She lifts up an arm and smells herself.

“Oy
boje,”
she grunts. “I think I forgot to put on deodorant.”

I tell her I can't smell anything. She peels off her bra and I can't help but look. Her breasts are like nothing I've ever seen before. They are small fists, pouches of flesh sitting atop two thick slabs of muscle. Her nipples are small and brown, the surrounding areola as vague as handprints on glass. As she bends over to tie her shoelaces, the slabs of muscle close like a vice. She catches me staring.

“They used to be bigger,” she says, stretching a tight Lycra bra over her breasts. “But I'd rather have muscle than fat any day.” She flexes her chest again, the striated muscle like outstretched fingers trying to touch.

The workout room is chaos, people in cut-off T-shirts and Nike sneakers moving from machine to machine like free radicals.

“Do you want me to watch?” I ask as Alana scouts out a bench by the mirror.