You Are One of Them (9 page)

“Too soon to tell if he’s got his father’s selfish streak,” said my mother as she studied the baby’s photo.

I hadn’t called Jenny since the day after Christmas—when I thanked her for the copy of her book—but I dialed her number without thinking. I needed to hear her voice. Mrs. Jones answered the phone. “Sarah? Is that you?” she said. “You haven’t been to see us in so long.”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.” I wasn’t sure what Jenny had told her mother about me. Had I become persona non grata?

“How are you doing, honey?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “May I speak to Jenny, please?”

I waited for an impossibly long time. I wondered if Mrs. Jones was talking her daughter into taking the call. I imagined Jenny rolling her eyes in protest. But when she finally came to the phone, she sounded like her usual self. Distracted, but not hostile. I stood at the window of my room, looking at her house as I talked to her.

“My dad has a new baby,” I said.

She wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl. And when I told her, she said, “So you’re his only daughter. That means you’re still special.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Don’t worry so much, Sar,” she said. “You still matter. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“You think so?” I wanted to keep her on the phone, to settle into our old habits. After just five minutes, I could feel myself starting to lean on her again.

“I’ve gotta go. Kim and I are going to Commander Salamander.”

She hung up before I could say good-bye. Commander Salamander was a boutique in Georgetown that catered to punks, and though Kim was not the target demographic, she and her friends frequented the store to buy the black rubber bracelets that were sold next to the register. Even Jenny, the girl from the heartland who wanted peace, had begun to stack black rubber bands on her right wrist. I watched Kim’s mother’s silver Mercedes wagon idle next to the curb outside the Joneses’ house. Then Jenny, swaddled in down against the February chill, was slinking to the bottom of the steps. Before she opened the back door of the car, she lifted her face in my direction, as if she knew I’d been watching the whole time.

When she died, I still had the keys to her house. I’d put them on my key chain while the Joneses were in the USSR, and they had never asked for them back. So for a whole year, even though Jenny no longer called me or invited me to swim in her pool, I kept her keys with my own. I knew that it was pathetic, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove them from the key chain. As long as the keys were still attached to mine, there was hope. Maybe she’d come back to me.

After the accident I used those keys to let myself into their house. The place was still thrumming with their presence. The remnants of a tuna-fish casserole were preserved in Tupperware in the refrigerator. A notepad on the kitchen counter—it was always spotless—revealed a grocery list in Mrs. Jones’s flowery hand:
“Tomatoes, ground beef, onions, bananas, milk, raisin bread, toilet paper, Windex.”
There
were clean plates waiting to be unloaded from the dishwasher. A tin of Mr. Jones’s shoe polish had been left on the coffee table in the family room. I knew that he sometimes brought his wingtips downstairs to shine them while he watched sports. Hexa’s water bowl was empty, so I filled it, but I didn’t see the cat anywhere. Cats were sneaky, though. Hexa had been known to sit silently in a dark corner for hours at a time.

I went to Jenny’s room one last time. Her school binder was on her desk; her Benetton rugby shirt was folded on her bed. I climbed to the top bunk, where I had spent so many nights staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. The stars were still there, but in the daylight they made a sad constellation, drained of magic. I tried to peel them off. The rings of Saturn came off easily, but my fingernails couldn’t gain purchase on the others. They were stuck firm. In Jenny’s underwear drawer, I found her diary. It was polka-dotted in pink with
MY DIARY
embossed in cursive on the front. I would have read it—death trumped privacy, I decided—but it was locked and I didn’t know where she kept the key. The photo strip of us was still on the bulletin board. In all four images, even the one in which we had decided to “be silly,” Jenny looks good. She couldn’t take a bad picture. I pulled it loose and put it in my pocket. I took the rugby shirt, too, in hopes that its coveted label would ward off attacks from the girls at school.

Jenny’s aunt flew into town to pack up the Joneses’ house and put it on the market. I watched the movers take away the furniture I knew so well. And even when For Sale was replaced by Sold, I didn’t take the keys off my key chain. The new owners would change the locks, I thought. I needed the keys for sentimental reasons.

The cameras finally pointed at me when my mother started the foundation in Jenny’s name. “We’ll keep her memory alive,” she said. In addition to her general efforts to prevent nuclear war, my mother wanted to establish an annual Jennifer Jones Prize that would send a worthy American high-school student to the Soviet Union for two weeks.

My mother organized a press conference. The reporters descended on our street, where she stood outside our house and sold the narrative of the Joneses as neighbors and friends. She had done her hair and put on a dress. I was impressed that she could still pull herself together, even though she was doing so for Jenny, not me.

“How did you feel when your best friend died?” the reporters asked me. I quivered, couldn’t speak. I’d waited for a chance in the spotlight, but now I was flubbing it. I felt like a fraud. I wasn’t Jenny’s best friend anymore, not really. History was being revised; Kim was written out. And I felt guilty. Guilty for all the times I’d begrudged Jenny’s good fortune. Eventually, I thought, everyone has an unlucky break. She was the pretty one, and she had an alliterative American name. But I was alive. And that was something I could never take for granted in the nuclear age.

“Jennifer Jones’s work had just begun,” my mother said. “My daughter and I are going to finish it.”

In the morning, news of the foundation made it into the
Washington Post.
There was a picture of Jenny, not my mother or me. But I was declared “Jennifer Jones’s best friend” in print. Kim no longer had any claim. On the record, Jenny was mine.

Donations to the foundation poured in after Jenny’s death, but within six months people were distracted by other Cold War stories. Nineteen eighty-five turned out to be the year of the spy. There was Yurchenko’s defection. Edward Lee Howard sold secrets to the Soviets, then escaped into the New Mexico desert. And Vladimir Alexandrov, the Soviet scientist who helped develop the theory of nuclear winter, vanished from Madrid. The Soviets claimed he was kidnapped by the CIA, but he was never heard from again. Construction on the new American embassy in Moscow was halted that year when the United States realized that the whole building was bugged. And then in 1986 the
Challenger
exploded our space program. There was no refuge from terror.

But then the disaster at Chernobyl renewed interest in the foundation. An anonymous donor sent the first American high-school student—a seventeen-year-old girl from Sacramento, who won the essay contest my mother judged—to Moscow in the summer of 1987.

Would Jenny and I have been friends in high school? Would she have been one of those girls who developed an eating disorder? There were a lot of them at our school. In the cafeteria the anorexics picked nervously at bowls of sprouts. The bulimics slithered to the bathroom after lunch and reemerged with eyes bloodshot from purging. One girl was famous for eating just one apple a day. It’s hard to picture Jenny as a teenager. Her body still held its childish contours when she died. Some of the girls in our sixth-grade class needed bras; the most advanced were already whispering about tampons. But Jenny’s skin was unblemished, her ears not yet pierced. Her mother told her that she could start shaving her legs at thirteen. She didn’t reach that milestone.

In the locker room after high-school swim practices, I tried to imagine Jenny among the other girls. There were no doors separating the showers, and so we were forced to cluster like refugees, thirty of us rotating under three showerheads, passing around bottles of Ultra Swim shampoo while the blondes among us complained that the chlorine turned their hair green. The most self-conscious girls kept their suits on and soaped their bodies under the fabric with surreptitious hands. You could tell what body part they were most insecure about: the flat girls like me kept their arms folded in front of their chests; the bottom-heavy girls kept their backs to the walls. We saw one another in swimsuits in the pool every day, but in the locker room we turned shy. Only the team captains—confident in their lean, strong bodies—had no shame. My sophomore year the captain was a senior named Miranda who massaged soap into her unruly black pubic hair in front of all of us. Her nipples were large and dark, and there was a bristle sprouting from one, but there was something mesmerizing about how sure of herself she was. I was on the abashed end of the spectrum—I kept my suit on, only rolling it down halfway so that I could clean my bare chest—but I suspect that Jenny would have been unapologetic about her nudity. She would have turbaned a towel on her head and coaxed Jergens into her damp skin while everyone else dressed in quick, furtive strokes.

After she died, I found myself writing letters to Jenny.
“How could you lie to me?”
I wrote
. “How could you leave me?”
I furrowed the words I could never say when she was alive into handkerchiefs of paper and tucked them into our old secret spot in the wall of the Bishop’s Garden. And even when I’d made new friends and discovered, in adolescence, that my sad stories were valuable currency with the skinny New Wave boys I favored, I still wrote to her sometimes. The letters became a sort of diary in which I told her what she was missing. Every new experience was muted by her absence; I needed to confide in her to make the colors pop.
“I tried pot. It made me sleepy,”
I wrote
. “I lost my virginity on a basement floor after the Super Bowl. The Redskins won.”
I wrote
, “I didn’t get into Harvard, even though I’m a legacy.”
My anonymous confessions may still be there decomposing in our dead drop.

I’ve been told many times that I am too forgiving. Of the college friend who started sleeping with my boyfriend, of the boss who presented my ideas as his own, of the lover who made so many promises he couldn’t keep. “You’re too forgiving,” they say, as if it’s a character flaw. But I’m not sure I’m forgiving enough. And I have come to believe that forgiveness is the key to survival. It does no good to see everything as a struggle between opposing factions. Few things are that simple.

During my first month in Moscow, I visited Khrushchev’s grave. The headstone is half black, half white, a compromise reached after Soviet leaders couldn’t decide whether his tenure had been good or evil. It’s a narrow marble monument, toweringly literal, with a bust perched on top. It is in Novodevichy, the same cemetery where Chekhov and Gogol are buried—along with countless other artists capable of nuance that Khrushchev was not—and on that October day there was already snow on the ground.

It would be a long winter.

Here’s what there is absolutely none of in Moscow

Privacy

—
Kay Thompson,
Eloise in Moscow

J
ENNY WAS MET
at Sheremetyevo Airport with smiles and flashing bulbs. But my arrival was more typical: I emerged from customs into a room of cold, leery eyes. Moscow was a furtive city. People were as closed and guarded as fists. Their faces hardened against possible scrutiny. The crowd lapped the door, waiting for arriving family members and friends, sizing up each passenger through a film of cigarette smoke. Being watched made me jittery, but the stares passed through me like X-rays. I was inspected and shunted aside. I wasn’t the one they were looking for. I felt like a minor cast member exiting the stage door, ignored by the crowd waiting for the ingenue.

It was the middle of September. It took longer than expected to get my Russian visa, so I had spent the summer after graduation in my old attic bedroom where the garret window looked directly at the house that had belonged to the Joneses. An older couple lived there now, and I would see the wife in the front yard in the mornings, pruning her garden in yellow clogs. In June she tended roses and hydrangeas. As the summer ripened, she focused on the annuals, heliotrope and impatiens. I worked as a barista at a local coffee shop, and while I perfected the art of latte foam, my mother made lists of things I’d need for my trip. Traveler’s checks. A tetanus booster. An HIV test. (The Russian government required proof that you weren’t HIV-positive before you were allowed into their country.) My mother filled Ziploc bags with Band-Aids, vitamins, water-purification tablets. My visa was good for sixty days, so I’d be back home in time for Thanksgiving. But my mother was still anxious. She paced my bedroom while I packed.

“Even the icicles in Moscow are dangerous,” she said. “I’ve read about it. Long icicles like daggers hanging off ledges of buildings. They fall and kill people. It happens all the time.”

“I won’t walk under any ledges,” I said.

“The rates of HIV infection are alarmingly high,” she said. “Lots of intravenous-drug users sharing needles.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I said. I feared losing control so much that I never did drugs. I didn’t like altered states.

“Thank God you’re not flying Aeroflot. Their safety record is deplorable.”

I said nothing.

“And the radioactivity levels . . .”

“Mom!” I said. “Breathe. Do your relaxation exercises.”

I had my own packing list, and in addition to the obvious necessities (passport, visa, long underwear), it included Svetlana’s letter and Jenny’s book. I couldn’t bring my full Jenny archive, but I took a few photos and clippings. I sealed them in a clear plastic sleeve and stowed it in my suitcase beneath my sweaters. By the time I set out for Dulles Airport in early autumn, most of the flowers in the Joneses’ old yard were gone. With my mother’s reluctant blessing, I finally boarded a Finnair flight bound for Moscow.

During my layover in Helsinki, I curled myself into one of the chairs near the gate and tried to sleep. I wrapped the strap of my carry-on around my leg, so that a thief couldn’t wrest the bag away without disturbing me. But I couldn’t drift off. It was the middle of the night to me, but it was morning in Finland, and the airport was stirring to life. I could hear the grind of espresso machines and the click of flight-attendant heels on the polished floor. The Finnair flight attendants impressed me with their efficient cool. On my flight from New York, their brisk offers of
“Kahvi? Tee?”
had the ring of commands. They had none of the painted-on charm I was used to seeing on the American airlines. I’d traveled a lot during college. I spent a year in Rome and made the requisite Eurail journey across the Continent that summer, bunking at hostels and awaiting mail via poste restante along the way.

At the end of my trip, I spent a few days in London, where my father and Phillipa were installed in a large house in Holland Park. It was my first visit and the first time I’d met Sebastian. He was ten. They called him Sebby.

“Why does my sister have an American accent?” he asked our dad. We were in the breakfast room, and Sebby was spreading Marmite on his toast.

“Because her mother is American,” my father said.

“Because
I’m
American,” I said.

“So you are,” my father said, as if this were news.

“I’ve been to America,” said Sebby.

“Have you?” I said, and realized I was picking up their British inflection. My father had never mentioned bringing his son to the States. I’d seen my father just three times in six years. Business took him to New York sometimes. During college I met him once in Boston, when he shuttled up from La Guardia and took me to dinner at the Ritz Carlton, and once for a weekend in Manhattan, where he put me up at the Harvard Club. These visits retained the formality of job interviews; my father asked me questions, and I tried to come up with the most impressive answers. During one dinner I ordered a steak and he said, “You’re not a vegetarian anymore?” But I was never a vegetarian. He had me confused with someone else.

“We went skiing,” Sebby said. “On holiday. In Vail.”

The girls at my school skied in Aspen and Vail; they’d return from Christmas and spring breaks full of stories of running into each other on the slopes. I’d never been to Colorado.

“There are no direct flights from London to Denver,” I said.

“No,” said my father.

“Did you fly through New York?” I said.

“Yes,” said Sebby. What kind of name was Sebby anyway?

“I could have met you in New York,” I said. “I could have gone skiing with you.” I was not a good skier, but I wanted to be. Good skiers weren’t afraid of speed. I was so nervous that I made wide, slow turns down the mountain.

“I didn’t want your mum to worry,” my father said.

“I’m in college,” I snapped. “I don’t live with Mom.” I was startled by the anger I heard in my voice. I was tired of being lumped together with my mother in the same fearful box. I felt trapped.

My father registered surprise at my outburst, but his upper lip remained stiff. We hardly knew each other. “How’s your mum’s foundation?” he said.

The sneer in his voice made me jump to my mother’s defense. I knew he thought her efforts were misguided, but I wasn’t about to let him insult her. “Great,” I said. “
Washingtonian
magazine profiled her on the fifth anniversary of Chernobyl.” I didn’t mention that the profile was really just a paragraph and that in the intervening four years there’d been no press coverage at all. The foundation hadn’t sent an American student to Moscow since 1991.

“She’s always chasing ghosts,” he said.

“What kind of ghosts?” said Sebby.

My father ignored him. “Your mother does love a memorial. She would have set up a foundation for your sister if she could have done. If she hadn’t been such a wreck.”

“Do I have another sister?” Sebby said. It was the first time he had looked directly at me. I noticed that he and I had the same eyes.

“No,” I said. It was astonishing to realize that my father had never told him about Izzy. I wasn’t about to tell him; I didn’t want to share anything—even my grief—with him.

“Do I have another sister, Dad?”

“No, Sebby, you don’t,” my father said.

My father had always been generous: he paid all my tuition over the years, and he never failed to send alimony. He didn’t make it to my graduation because Phillipa had a riding competition, but he sent me a check. He was so enthusiastic about my plans that it was clear he was giving me money only because I was going abroad.
“You’re young; you ought to be exploring the world,”
he wrote to me. It was the first letter I’d received from him in years.
“Don’t let your mother keep you at home. You’ve got to live your life.”
The check was for ten thousand dollars. All summer it lay on top of my dresser, pinned in place by a snow globe. An elementary souvenir from my first trip to New York. I still liked to stir the storm, watch the flakes fall over the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t want my dad’s money. It made me think of Phillipa, who inserted herself into everything with the determination of a tapeworm. I couldn’t bring myself to cash the check until the day before I left for Moscow. I deposited it in my savings account. In Russia I vowed to use only my own hard-earned cash.

•   •   •

I
T WAS EARLY
AFTERNOON
when my plane touched down in Moscow, and the Russians on board—many of whom had been drinking heavily throughout the flight—burst into boisterous applause. The clapping terrified me: celebrating the routine as miraculous didn’t bode well. Inside, the airport was eerily quiet. I followed the mass of passengers down a flight of stairs to passport control. Outmaneuvered by seasoned Russians, I found myself at the back of an interminable immigration line. It must have been two hours before I reached the front. The officious woman who inspected my visa proved to be the warmest person I encountered that first day. At baggage claim I was amazed to see people smoking, flicking the ash from their cigarettes onto the floor and the rubber luggage belt. We waited for what seemed like an hour for the carousel to crank into action, but in the end our bags were carried in, two at a time, by a disgruntled handler.

“I hope you put a lock on your suitcase,” I heard an American man say to the woman next to him. “They rifle through the bags, you know.”

Thanks to my mother’s precautions, my suitcase was locked. I retrieved it and made my way through customs. I had nothing to declare.

Sam’s cousin Corinne was supposed to meet me at the airport. I finally identified her in the throng. She was the only one who didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth. “Everyone smokes here,” she said. “Even in the office. It’s like living inside an ashtray. I quit after college, and now the smell of smoke makes me sick. I come home every day and have to wash my hair, like immediately. Otherwise my pillow
reeks.
”

“I’m Sarah,” I said.

“Right. Welcome to Russia.”

The arrivals area was clogged with people. All the men wore either Adidas tracksuits or leather coats. Most of the women were holding bouquets of flowers. Corinne threaded her way through the crowd. I followed her out to the curb and into the back of a gray Toyota Land Cruiser. “The magazine has a car and a driver. This is Boris,” she said, gesturing toward the driver’s seat.

The man behind the wheel turned around and smiled at us. There were dark, empty spaces where teeth should have been.

“He used to drive Brezhnev,” said Corinne. “He pretends not to speak English, but I think he understands everything I say. I’m sure he was a spy. Maybe he still is.”

Corinne was tall and broad-shouldered. Her eyebrows had been plucked in a severe angle that gave her face a merciless cast. She had wavy auburn hair and wore bright lipstick that exaggerated the downturn of her mouth. She was sheathed in black, with pointy heels. I soon learned that she always wore black. She said any other color was impossible to keep clean in Moscow. The whole city, she said, was coated in grime. I said she seemed young to be an editor, and she laughed. “I’m older than I look,” she said, “and this place ages you fast, let me tell you. The pollution is doing a number on my skin. God, I miss New York.” She grew up in Manhattan, then went to college at Vassar, she said. She studied Russian language and literature, then got her start as an editorial assistant at
Harper’s Bazaar.
“I was the only person in the New York office who spoke Russian, so when they decided to launch the magazine here, they offered me the job.”

As she talked, I could see Boris watching me in the rearview mirror. The car lurched onto the highway, and I looked up to see a giant billboard. It was the only brightly colored thing in an otherwise grim landscape, and its presence was so jarring it was as if it had been Photoshopped into frame.
said the sign. I sounded out the word: “Pepsi.”

“The choice of a new generation,” said Corinne. “Pepsi was the first foreign brand in the Soviet Union. They’ve been here since like 1970. Cut some kind of deal with Stolichnaya: vodka in stores in the U.S. in exchange for Pepsi here.”

“Huh.”

“It’s a good thing you can read Russian. It’ll make getting around a lot easier.”

“I’m rusty,” I said. “I can only read really slowly.”

“As long as you know the alphabet.”

“Do you mind if I open a window?” I said. “I get carsick.” The numbing exhaustion of jet lag combined with a mounting headache from all the smoke in the airport made me feel like I was going to throw up. I cranked open a window, but the air that rushed in wasn’t fresh. I coughed.

“Terrible air quality here,” said Corinne. “Whatever you do, don’t go running outside.”

What struck me on the forty-minute ride into the city was how run-down Moscow was. It was hard to believe that a country with such exhausted infrastructure was ever considered a superpower. The margins of the city were dotted with sad Soviet apartment blocks, trapped in a 1960s version of the future. The avenues were dirty—not with litter but with actual dirt, as if the entire city needed a good scrub. And our car was one of the few on the road that wasn’t leaking exhaust. We were surrounded by ancient Ladas, some of them seemingly stapled together. “This is where the world’s cars go to die,” said Corinne.