Mother Country Page 11

  “Speaking.” Nadia was half listening; Sasha was stalled in her progress, one arm tangled in her fleece sweater, a flash of exasperation coloring her cheeks.

  “This is a strange phone call to make.”

  “Yes, well, I’m busy right now. Can I help you?”

  “I got your number from Boris.”

  Nadia tugged at Sasha’s second arm, and stuffed it inside her sleeve. “Boris? Which Boris?”

  “You … um … came up to him at a nightclub this past summer. He said, pardon me, you were too old for him, but that you were nice-looking. You probably don’t remember the guy standing next to him. Well, with work and all, I’m only calling you now.”

  Sasha’s zipper was snagged on a butterfly appliqué, and for some reason Nadia could not pry it loose. The girl’s arms were helpless at her sides as Nadia tugged. She seemed incapable of dressing herself, as if dragging out babyhood as long as the adults in her life would allow her. “There must be some misunderstanding. You see, I was not looking for a companion for myself but a husband for my daughter.”

  “I thought you were nice-looking. Why don’t we have coffee sometime? You will like me, I promise. I’m not unattractive, I work very hard.”

  It was hard to hear him. Around her were the effusive greetings, kisses, murmurs of women. She tried to conjure the man standing next to that nightclub Romeo but the whole incident was buried so far deep inside her that she could picture only a giant ball of hair on legs. Sasha was now in full rebellion on the floor, unzipped, a furry boot pulled onto the wrong foot. Nadia transferred the receiver to her other ear and switched the boot to the proper side. “I’m very busy, excuse me, I don’t know your name.”

  “Boris. I’m actually Boris too, believe it or not.”

  “Boris. I have a very busy schedule. I work seven days a week these days. I don’t know where your young friend got the idea I was even interested in meeting gentlemen.”

  “Did you not find me attractive or what?”

  “I don’t even remember you. This was back in the summer, right? If we’re talking about the same night even.” She shimmied Sasha into her fashionable but thinly lined coat.

  “Look, how about you give me a day and time you are free. Any day you are off work.”

  Her heart pulsed painfully, relentlessly. It took all her effort to breathe. The man had a nice, educated voice with a gravelly undercurrent of normality. His directness was refreshing, flattering. When you pushed the thought of men out of your life and replaced them with work and worry, it was easy to forget that romance existed, that it was in any way desirable. She recalled it all in a flash, the way the kisses of the technolog and the dental technician before him made her insides collapse, like overheated fruit. Even her old neighbor Pyotor was able to summon a few pleasurable tremors.

  “New Year’s Eve. That and New Year’s Day are my only days off, I’m afraid.”

  “Perfect. I’ve been looking for a Snegurochka for New Year’s Eve.” He named a café, “Rendezvous on Avenue Z. Perfect for us, no?”

  She was speechless, having lost the thread of his associations. New Year’s Eve? Snegurochka? Rendezvous?

  “Get it? Because we are having a rendezvous,” he prompted with a laugh. “Let’s say twelve o’clock.”

  She hung up. Sasha was lingering by her cubby with other similarly adorned children with their own impatient nannies. Two women were trying to engage Nadia in silent sympathy in the vein of: Why is it so hard to get these children out of this chaotic Jewish school? But her own mind was riding the rough wave of anxieties.

  She had no idea how the mechanics of dating worked here, even among émigrés who brought with them the scaffolding of its former rules. Back home, it was simple: men boiled with masculinity, chivalry, anger. They presumed themselves kings, most competent of rulers. Women folded themselves up into smaller and smaller squares to accommodate them. In exchange, wives received grateful flowers on birthdays and International Women’s Day, they experienced the freedom of complaining about their husbands to girlfriends. She had escaped this dynamic by retreating into a duet with her daughter, but for that she had become the object of pity. Romance was like reading novels, an indulgence she had had time for when she was young. What was the point of traditional relationships now?

  Suddenly Sasha was next to her, a firm hand pulling her own. For a second, she thought it was Larisska’s until she heard a confident little voice say, “Shall we go, Nadia? I’m ready.”

  * * *

  Rendezvous Café was one of the newer establishments in Sheepshead Bay, its exterior a long panel of modern glass and steel. She passed the entrance, stole a quick glance through the front doors, and kept moving. Unfortunately, Nadia was on time, and a woman never arrives on time for a date. At least that used to be one of the fundamental rules of Soviet and post-Soviet dating. It was imperative to make the man wait as long as humanly possible.

  Across the street, Nadia spotted a CVS pharmacy and ducked inside to pass the minutes until she could respectably materialize at Rendezvous. She wandered past the long line of shampoos she would never apply to her splitting, middle-aged ash-blond ends. Still, she enjoyed testing her English vocabulary to figure out what miracle each bottle promised. Moisturizing? Clarifying? Texturizing? She took a photo with her phone and sent it to her daughter. There was no immediate response back, not even a smiley face.

  “Did you get my last message? Are you OK?” she texted. Sometimes, on a lucky day, her daughter answered the occasional text.

  In the makeup aisle, she checked her appearance again. Her hair was carefully curled, her tiger-printed scarf complemented her hair (thanks to L’Oréal Elseve, the buttermilk Belorussian shampoos her local pharmacy stocked). The shoulder pads in her coat gave her a more regal height. She had chosen her lipstick as matte precisely for its ability to cling to her lips despite pressing them to beverage rims. The cold air gave her cheeks a pinched rose color. Her mother used to tell her that a first date was no time to assess a man. How would it matter if she liked him but he wasn’t interested? A woman’s task at the very onset was to enrapture the prey; what she would do with him afterward would then be up to her. Nadia crossed the street.

  The young woman behind the counter of Rendezvous Café had the phone pressed to her ear despite being faced with a line of impatient customers. “Nu, pull him out of that school then,” she was saying in loud Russian. “If he hates it so much. Let him feel the consequences of his actions.” She looked to be in her mid-twenties, but she spoke with the practiced cynicism of someone much older. Her brows were thin, dyed a reddish black and arched high, the severely pulled-back ponytail stretching them back even farther. The woman was dunking a tea bag in time to her nods.

  In front of Nadia stood two clearly American women who were being ignored. “Excuse me,” one of them kept trying to interrupt. Back home, the employee would have been excoriated immediately, and there would be a colorful exchange that ended in the gruff handing over of a pastry. That people attempted polite avenues of interaction first was one of this country’s more civilized qualities.

  Nadia peeked into the interior of the café. It was empty except for a big group of women, a guy in a Ded Moroz outfit, and an old man keeping aloft with the help of a walker. She hoped that was not Boris. She glanced at her watch. Thirty minutes late was a respectable time for men to wait for a desirable date. So where was he?

  The young women finally received their baked goods, unhappily brushing past her. At the counter, the employee was continuing in the same vein. “Did you talk to his teachers? Nu, what did they say about his lisp?” The doors flung open and a woman and child came in, settling in line behind her. Nadia hesitated, her mother’s voice reverberating: Buying your own overpriced pastry would send a gentleman the wrong message.

  “Look, there’s Santa!” the child was saying in English, pointing to Ded Moroz. “But Christmas is over. Why is he here?”

  She looked up from the assortmen
t behind the display case to find the Ded Moroz at her side. He pulled down his fake white moustache and beard so it dangled around his neck by a rubber band. “You’re Nadezhda, yes?” he said. He turned to the employee. “Are you going to serve your customers or are you going to chat on the phone all day? What your friend is doing with her kid is no business of yours anyway. Why don’t you put that phone down and work a little for a change?”

  The young woman was stunned into silence. “What’s it to you, Ded Moroz? Why are you in such a bad mood this holiday season?”

  He pulled up a red sleeve with its fleece lining. “We are all busy people here. Let’s start with you doing what you are paid to do. How’s that?” He took off the hat with the drooping white pom-pom to reveal a full head of brown hair eroded by gray.

  The woman sighed into the phone—“I’ll call you later”—cocked one hand on her hip. “So what can I do for you, Your Winter Majesty?”

  Ded Moroz turned to Nadia, and she managed, “That little cake over there. And a cappuccino.”

  “Just the coffee to go. Let’s get the hell out of here.” He parted his burgundy tunic and dug in his pants pockets for a wallet. Her stomach was starting to announce its hunger. But he was stretching out a hand.

  “Boris.”

  “Nadia.”

  “Very pleased to meet you in the daylight,” he said. “May I?”

  A paper bag with coffee was handed to her. Before she understood what she was agreeing to, a sweep of his hand produced a tiara and veil. The teeth of the tiara were being inserted into her carefully spritzed and Belorussian-swept hair.

  “I told you on the phone. You will be my Snegurochka for the day.”

  “I guess I didn’t fully understand what you were talking about.” The transparent mesh of the veil was painting the café a surreal arctic white. She was regretting this entire excursion. “Sounds like not much of a day off for me.”

  “Oh, you’ll love it. This date will be better than dinner and a movie. I promise.”

  Dating was more complicated than the old scaffolding made it out to be, not to mention in a phase of life where your personality was fossilized into something certain and inflexible. The abstract prospect of men, with their inflated conceptions of themselves, and their excreting bodies, called up little enthusiasm in her. But one was obligated to keep that option open, and anyway, a simple method of escape from this episode was not easily presenting itself.

  The car parked outside was a scraped black Buick, the entire passenger’s side streaked with some charcoal substance. Boris gallantly opened the door. She stood staring at the interior. Empty Chinese food containers were gathered into a neat pile on the floor in the back, a pile of newspapers sat on the seat as though for protective lining. Under her fingers, the brown bag was starting to leak coffee.

  “You are right not to jump in. It’s not wise for a woman to get into a car with a stranger,” Boris said. He dug into his pockets again and emerged with his driver’s license. The picture showed a round-faced man with small ears, high forehead, and a buzzed haircut. The birthday put him at fifty-three. “Here, take a picture and text it to a friend of yours. That way they know who you’re with. That is the smart thing to do on all dates. You have no idea the crazies walking around here.”

  He strapped the beard back on and waited.

  She did as she was told, sending Georgina (and her daughter, while she was at it, if only to involve her somehow in her daily life) the image of Boris’s driver’s license. The passenger seat was still open, the seat’s center indented by the shape of its former inhabitants. She thought of Grisha’s apartment building and the crumpled souls dispersed inside. She thought of the cruel and unexpected clang of the Dumpster cover. The car’s interior smelled of many competing scents, of meat and cologne and cinnamon. And it was warm where the air was biting.

  Boris heaved himself inside and adjusted his rearview mirror. “Believe it or not, I make a lot of money doing this every December.”

  “Dressing as Ded Moroz?”

  “And why not? People want to relive their old lives. The way they were back there. It’s normal.” He started the car, shimmied it from the cage of its parking spot.

  Grisha’s depressing apartment building resurfaced in her mind, all those apartments cluttered with porcelain elephants and Palekh boxes as if each inhabitant were running their own personal souvenir shop. “I don’t.”

  “Really? I find that hard to believe. I bet you used to hire a Ded Moroz for New Year’s.”

  She admitted that she had. Of course she had.

  By the time Larisska was six, she’d learned to expect Ded Moroz during the New Year’s season. The mothers in the building convened weeks before to hire the cheapest Ded Moroz they could find, along with his granddaughter Snegurochka. When the two characters arrived, the mothers gathered downstairs, passing the hired actors the gifts they’d bought for their children. The gifts themselves didn’t matter. What measly items did she buy: a pencil, a map, a stuffed bear? Nadia knew that for a child, a visitor who arrived expressly for them was a bigger treat than any present. Knowing that at any moment, the person at the door would ring the bell and inquire with the utmost importance, “Is there a Larissa Borodinskaya at home, please? My granddaughter and I would very much like to see her.”

  And Snegurochka would waft in, in her soft blue gown imprinted with snowflakes, her two white braids, hands submerged inside a white muff, her cheeks touched with its residue of pink. The snow maiden of a little girl’s dreams. Larissa would sit by the young woman the entire time, fingering the fabric of her gown, asking Snegurochka to bend down so she could touch her headdress. Snegurochka, a character plucked out of children’s storybooks and refashioned as a symbol of Soviet New Year. Snegurochka, that great invention for female identification, the eternal snowgirl on the brink of womanhood who never had to grow up, get married, or be anything other than daughter or granddaughter. Nadia felt envy for the entire myth of her innocent time-frozen beauty, the way it pulled herself, her daughter, and all Soviet little girls into its orbit. She captured that fleeting, oozing moment of youth’s peak lushness. To see Snegurochka before you as an adult was to realize that you were now on the other side of the fantasy.

  As Boris directed the wheel onto Ocean Parkway, he explained how the Ded Moroz business worked in present-day America. The parents clicked their wish lists on Amazon, shared the lists with him on an app, and Boris purchased the items more cheaply from his contacts at toy distributors and tacked a service fee on top.

  “I can get items in bulk even cheaper. You’d be surprised how many people buy exact same present each year. Imagine! In Soviet Union we all had same things because we had no choice and here, people want same things on purpose.”

  “Amazing,” Nadia said, watching the familiar blocks blur as they moved north. Avenue U turned to T, then to P.

  Along the narrow strip between highway lanes, despite the biting cold, chess players huddled over their boards. Orthodox Jewish boys kicked a soccer ball around. The palatial houses of the Persian Jews gleamed with their beveled gold front doors.

  Boris talked and talked. A long string of jobs ensured he was never bored. He worked simultaneously as limousine driver, car salesman, vitamin importer. As she had assumed, he emigrated from Tbilisi in 1992. He was Jewish. His relations with his ex-wife were warily friendly, but his thirty-year-old daughter was a constant source of disappointment. She came here with them at the age of twelve, had learned English fairly quickly, so her lack of professional and personal success was mystifying to him. He blamed it on his ex-wife, who endorsed mediocrity in others to feel better about her own paltry achievements. Don’t get him started on his brother, who called him three times a day asking for money. His brother seemed intellectually and constitutionally incapable of turning one dollar into two.

  She nodded. An entire, exhausting life was unspooling before her. She had only signed on for a quick coffee but was discovering a full cast
of characters: a “dull-witted nephew who stopped by unannounced to devour the contents of the fridge,” a “lesbianka cousin, if you can believe such a thing even exists,” a gaggle of untrustworthy acquaintances. Entering into a relationship at this age was like being handed all of Tolstoy and being casually told to familiarize yourself with the man’s work. What was the point of starting now? Either you’d read him already or you hadn’t; after a certain age, it was better not to even begin. By now, she should have thanked this Boris politely and returned to her apartment to call her mother and Larisska and get the news on the Donetsk airport, the latest location of the fighting. Then she would get ready for Georgina’s New Year’s party. What the hell was she doing on Ocean Parkway in a car with a red-suited man so easily disappointed by a child who committed the crime of not becoming a millionaire? The car stopped.

  “Here we are,” Boris said, planting the Ded Moroz hat back on his head. They pulled up alongside parked cars, the hazard lights turned on. She climbed out, relieved at least that the journey would be quick, the car not even ensconced in a legal parking spot. Boris unlocked his trunk. Inside were two black garbage bags, the very kind that Grisha’s neighbors threw out every night. But poking through the corners of the plastic were the outlines of toys.

  “I think I should go home,” she said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We are about to have better grub than anything inside that overpriced café. Don’t forget your coffee.”

  * * *

  The apartment building they were entering resembled Grisha’s and so many that lined Ocean Parkway. They were all like a gaggle of Sasha’s kindergarten friends you couldn’t tell apart. This one was yet another brick high-rise of middling height, a hyperbolic name stenciled into cement over the front archway: THE POSEIDON. The lobby was decorated in a cheap simulacrum of luxury, tufted benches peeling fabric, the gold mailboxes overseen by a uniformed man lost inside the world of his cell phone. She and Boris stuffed themselves into the mirror-paneled elevator, the two of them and the bags taking up the entire space. Boris adjusted the pillow that served as his stomach, grinned a flash of tightly wedged gold teeth, and despite herself, she could imagine reaching toward the sturdy wall of chest underneath all those layers, sliding her fingers inside the white fur of his collar. He reached over and folded the veil back over her eyes until she could see him in gauze, his brown eyes turning a less precise color.