Mother Country Read online

  “Give. Back. Bunny!” Sasha launched into a renewed scream at the top of the slide, blocking any other child’s access to its mouth. Nadia started to climb, tiptoeing her way past babies who, frankly, did not belong in this section of the playground.

  “Sasha, Sashenka,” she pleaded.

  She was about to resort to good, old-fashioned Russian tactics when a mother holding a tall, straw-colored drink rose from her bench and slowly approached the slide. She was the type of woman Nadia saw more and more in Sasha’s neighborhood, a gaunt chicness in monochromatic shirts. Her hair was slicked behind her diamond-studded ears. She wore leg-hugging pants that ended before the ankle and a pair of gold ballet flats with no arch support. The kind of clothes her Larisska used to fantasize about as a teenager, clipping pictures of them from Moscow magazines. These women didn’t walk; they glided like porpoises.

  With one fluid crook of the finger, the woman gestured for Sasha to go ahead and slide down, and to Nadia’s amazement, the girl instantly obeyed. Then the lady whispered something in Sasha’s ear, a speech so calm, and so directed, Nadia could barely see the mouth moving. How she envied this power language could wield. With each whisper, Nadia was being diminished, pushed out of sight. It was clear from the way Sasha looked back at her with newly wise eyes. Nadia was being swept aside by some higher sphere of native authority.

  As if by magic, Sasha transformed back into a calm, self-possessed little girl. The other kids began circling down the slide, the parents and nannies became immersed in their former conversations. The girl with the bunny offered no more provocation. Sasha dutifully placed her hand in Nadia’s palm.

  “Tank you,” Nadia said, but the woman barely acknowledged her. Her lips were pursed. To her, Nadia embodied nothing more than hundreds of ineffectual nannies at New York City playgrounds. What would be the point of telling her that Nadia had once served as head bookkeeper at an important gas pipe manufacturer? That she had her own family on the opposite side of the world? That her life was far rounder than the reflection in the woman’s eyes?

  “I want water,” Sasha commanded. Nadia dove into a bag filled with Sasha necessities—a hat, sunscreen, bug spray, snacks, change of clothing, princess wand, safari stickers, “organic” fruit chews. She handed over the water bottle. The morning was turning toward noon, the babies bundled back in their strollers, toddlers chasing after dogs. Nadia noticed that the water spray was turned on—way too early in the season if you asked her—and she watched in horror as kids in clinging bathing suits and wet faces ran around in twenty-degree Celsius weather. Sasha drank her water with an imperious lilt to her throat, and when she handed it back and their eyes met, it was clear she too knew that Nadia could easily be erased. That even though the girl once wept inconsolably when Nadia left for the day, and had clung to Nadia’s thighs in countless baby music classes and ran to her in the morning with joy-suffused cheeks, a wispy thread connected them that Sasha alone had the power to snap.

  “Let’s go,” she said, sighing, and Sasha complied.

  A quick backward glance told her the woman and her son had disappeared beyond the trees, the expensive shops, the clutch of chatting nannies from exotic, warm climates Nadia would never know.

  * * *

  Sasha’s mother came home at six fifteen. Every day, Regina interpreted “six o’clock” in a novel way. She returned wearing the same gym clothes from the morning and dropped a heavy canvas bag to the floor. On days like these, it was easy to forget Regina was anything but American; what Russian woman would dare dress like this in public? What Russian woman would fail to notice that her often absent husband was probably sleeping around on her and maybe she should try a little harder with her appearance if she wanted to hold on to him? That Regina was born in Moscow and emigrated with her parents when she was seven seemed only to lend her an air of general melancholy, an uninformed grasp on Russian politics, and a smattering of grammar-school Russian words she often wrested out of their proper contexts. Immigration in childhood had been Regina’s biggest trauma and Nadia sensed that this narrative shielded the woman from life’s more pressing tragedies. But she was like family now, and family was to be scrutinized under a microscope with affectionate exasperation.

  “Mommy, Mommy, you came back,” Sasha cried, leaping into her mother’s arms. Her happiness was so acute and genuinely surprised, you’d think the girl was abandoned during wartime, her mother returned from the front to fetch her at an orphanage.

  “Of course Mama came back, Mama always comes back,” Nadia said gaily, rising from their puppet show of animals. She gave Regina an affectionate kiss of greeting. Sasha ignored her, her usefulness concluded. She immediately started engaging her mother in English, presumably about the details of her day. She hoped the girl was leaving out the tantrum, the bunny, the haughty mother that had so swiftly altered the tenor of their relationship.

  “Oh, wonderful.” Regina nodded, clearly half listening, slipping out of her sneakers. “Sounds great, honey.” She was always, in Nadia’s view, distracted. She was a woman who never seemed to live in the present; she was like Chekhov’s “Lady with a Lapdog” without the tormented lover or decrepit husband. Her American husband, Jake, had a youthful, athletic physique, and was suspiciously good-looking and rarely at home.

  When Nadia once asked Regina what she did for a living, Regina replied that she was a “writer.” Nadia assumed this meant journalist or secretary or even a professor of literature. But Regina insisted that she wrote romany, that she was in fact a novelist for a living despite having never published any actual novels. This “occupation” baffled Nadia. As far as she was concerned, a true novelist was Tolstoy or Pasternak or Bulgakov or even, if you had to grope around for one in the present, Valery Shevchuk. Tormented geniuses huddled over their desks, pens scratching across yellowing reams of paper, or great orators performing to rapt crowds, hosts of salons where big ideas circulated along with Georgian wine. Dignified graying women with sober cropped haircuts or, at least, alcoholics. Not this anxious woman in workout clothes and hot pink sneakers, whose haircut was way too long for someone her age. Not this woman, who at forty-two was about fifteen years too old to have small children, who whiled away the day at some rented cubicle just down the street staring into a computer screen, presumably waiting for divine inspiration to strike.

  Regina sat down heavily on one of the kitchen stools, Sasha on her lap. Her stalk-green eyes settled a bit fearfully on Nadia’s. She switched over to her usual schoolgirl-level Russian. “So what happened today?”

  Nadia launched into the details of the girl’s rigorous education, feeding, sleeping, and pooping schedule, highlighting Sasha’s triumphs of good behavior while glossing over the incident at the playground. She had eaten pureed vegetable soup, almost half a head of broccoli, and one of Nadia’s famous farmer cheesecakes studded with fresh blueberries. They had accomplished some simple addition with the help of cherry tomatoes, read two Russian books, memorized half a poem, and practiced writing “Sasha” in Russian and English.

  “Nice job!” Regina said to Sasha, a bit of hollow American praise she overused. “Great, spasibo, Nadia. Sounds like a…” She searched for an appropriate Russian word. “Good day.”

  Nadia had been looking forward to an entry, a natural pause in the conversation where she could take out the letter to the senator, but Regina was already being pulled toward a game on the rug and she was left standing by the door. The letter she had drafted lay at the top of her purse’s opening, folded carefully between the pages of a book to avoid creasing.

  She considered whether to interrupt the game, to insist on Regina’s help. But Sasha had already enveloped her mother’s attention, and the tantrum was still fresh in Nadia’s mind. She slowly rose to leave, giving Regina every opportunity to encourage the little girl to bid her a proper good-bye at the door.

  “See you later,” she called out, lingering. “Don’t forget tomorrow I work at Grisha’s.”

  Bu
t mother and daughter were firmly ensconced in the living room/bedroom, the mother taking on the ludicrous persona of Peppa Pig (or Svinka Peppa, as she would only allow Sasha to watch the Russian-dubbed version of the British cartoon). Regina was emitting unfeminine snorting noises.

  “See you next week, girls,” Nadia tried again.

  “Oh, bye, Nadia,” Regina called out from the play rug, giving no indication of rising herself. Well, what did Nadia expect? Like mother, like daughter. Such a different understanding of manners here. If Regina were not so vulnerable, so easily bruised and defensive, she would have reminded her of the importance of modeling good manners.

  She had never allowed Larisska to skip the ritual of the greeting or farewell. “Say good-bye to Tyotya Olya” or “Say hello to Dyadya Yasha.” By the time Larisska was five, she no longer needed to be dragged to the door; she knew the proper way to bid someone farewell.

  But that was then, of course. When the world was right side up.

  Nadia locked the door behind her and trudged down all those stairs to let herself out of the brownstone and into a Brooklyn so different from her own slice of the borough it might as well be a different nation. In this Brooklyn, the stores were not warehouses for cheap plastic junk, but elegantly and neatly presented to pedestrians. They were museums, spare and gutted of any actual wares. She loved walking into them with Sasha, inspecting wispy and decadent items. Useless frippery like soaps wrapped in twine, delicate swan-shaped moisturizer bottles, silky spaghetti straps dangling from velvet hangers. Some stores bartered only in nuts, while others churned out “artisanal” mayonnaise. She marveled at the civilized exchanges between owners and customers. No one was groping at vegetables, suspiciously sniffing them for freshness. No one was hobbling about with grim expressions, hauling cheap flowers in yellow disposable bags. No babushki sitting outside their high-rises in plastic chairs, volubly commenting on passersby—“Maybe you should put a sweater on that child before she freezes to death” or “A real man never lets a lady carry heavy bags.” On her stretch of Kings Highway, it was dubious produce and “Italian” fashion, trinkets with which to entertain children, pharmacies with their Polish creams and matryoshki and other sentimental ornaments from the former Soviet Union, nothing more than tourist bait.

  Here, no one was haggling over pennies or chastising her for asking stupid questions. No one raised their voices the way they did at her local pharmacy this morning. (The pharmacist had yelled “Get out of here, narcoman!” to a customer trying to push a prescription of Vicodin across the counter. Couldn’t she have simply said “I’m afraid we cannot fill this particular prescription”?) It was a country of too much and not nearly enough.

  And there were so many restaurants in this fake Brooklyn, people always tending to the business of eating in public. Back home, no one went out to dinner. Any Russian or Ukrainian woman worth her salt could cook a better meal than the expensive ones in restaurants. But here she saw the same people out night after night for no good reason, licking their fingers after fried potatoes, fishing into bowls of black shells with tiny forks, actually waiting on sidewalks in order to get in and be divested of their money! Passing these idlers on her way to the subway, she couldn’t help remembering that awful January in 1988, Larissa just born and refusing her breast milk, waiting two hours in line at the cooperative in case there was a single can of baby formula. No one here could grasp that kind of desperation.

  The train was predictably crowded but she could mark the exact places where it would start easing up. Carroll Street, Fourth Avenue, and the biggest exodus of all: Seventh Avenue. Women in workout clothes and comfortable shoes. Dark-skinned men with tattoos who seemed to be the only segment of the population who rose for pregnant women. Orthodox Jews. Five years before, she had never seen people like this—all these shades and religions. Back home, she had only read about Orthodox Jews and Muslims and black people and gay people, saw them on television in ominous broadcasts on life in America.

  Her first few months here, she was afraid of them all, clutching her purse tightly to her chest. Her heart raced with every stop until the scary people got off the train and she could breathe again. When someone broke out drums or begged for cash, she would find her blood pressure rising, newly alert, pepper spray clutched tightly in her fist. But after a year or two, she started relaxing, seeing a new beauty, a new collegiality with all that color. Now she rode with them backward and forward, from deep Brooklyn to la-la Brooklyn and she thought of them as private comrades in life and war.

  * * *

  The following Monday, Sasha was being obstinate by refusing to roll her Russian rs. “Tree” she kept attributing to the number three, the t way too soft, the r carpeting out of her mouth. And then, “I did it, okay? Can I have my lollipop now?”

  Nadia tapped on the blackboard with a wedge of chalk. “Try another time, yes? Odin, dva, tri. Trrrrrri.”

  The girl said something in English that may have been the word “tired” or even “buzz off,” an unfortunate addition to both of their English vocabularies thanks to an unfortunate new gift of a book. Sasha’s attention kept returning to the fire escape, where a squirrel was nibbling an acorn to shreds.

  “Tired,” she said again.

  “No tired. Try one more time.”

  “Stop? Sew dog.”

  Nadia sighed. Back home, kids younger than Sasha were counting and repeating and memorizing. (Praying for their lives and countries in underground bunkers! But she refused to think about that.) By Sasha’s age, Larissa could recite Pushkin’s “On Seashore Far a Green Oak Towers” or a smattering of Shevchenko. Here, on the other hand, children were passively entertained at all times; no wonder they were ill-equipped for boredom. Even the adults were untrained for the basic hardships of life.

  How often had she watched Regina lugging poor baby Sasha, her stroller, and a bag of groceries? The effort took on a comical cast, with Regina struggling with Sasha on one hip, the stroller pressed against the other, and the groceries dragging pitifully behind her. When Nadia hoisted three bags, she was able to lift the stroller under one arm, the groceries firmly in hand, and Sasha around the waist. By contrast, Regina was often overwhelmed by the smallest of domestic tasks: how to wash urine from a sheet in the sink, sew the split crotch of a pair of pajamas, scrub mold from a tub corner. It was as though her own mother had failed to teach her tools of basic survival.

  She pitied Regina for raising children in a culture that promoted her helplessness, a culture that made her doubt her own instincts, forcing her to research how to be a parent rather than boldly and unquestioningly raise her own daughter. Even Sasha’s name made no sense to her! On one hand it was a nod to Regina’s Russian heritage, but no girl in Russia would be named Sasha. It was a nickname, an affectionate truncation of Alexandra, just like Nadia was short for Nadezhda. Imagine her name being Nadia on a birth certificate! To name a child Sasha was to strip the word of any coherent connection with the past.

  When she first interviewed for the job, Nadia handed to Regina a list that summarized the correct approach to child-rearing.

  1.  The child will always be strapped into the stroller on city streets.

  2.  The child will not be given any cold beverages or ice cream.

  3.  The child must spend at least a half hour outdoors breathing fresh air.

  4.  An exception to the above rule—if the child is sick. Then all her activities must be canceled so she can recover.

  5.  Naps will be orchestrated at precise times each day so the child has a strict understanding of her daily schedule.

  6.  Nadia will puree as many foods as possible to avoid choking, and each meal will include a vegetable, a grain, dairy, and a fruit.

  7.  There will be two educational activities each day, including time for the child to play independently.

  8.  Toilet training will begin at nine months.

  The list continued in this vein, and as she read on, Reg
ina appeared both thrilled and intimidated by Nadia’s rules. It was clear that this was precisely what she was looking for, a person to bring order to a wishy-washy household, to erect strict boundaries to a formless world of self-doubt brought on by a sea of parenting manuals.

  “When can you start?” Regina had said, putting down the list. And now, three years later, they were enmeshed together in a tight cocoon of love and fear and language confusion.

  Sasha was shoving at her a red dog split at the belly because her coddled mother had no idea how to thread a needle.

  “Okay, okay, I do.” She took the disemboweled dog and reached for the sewing kit.

  Her phone rang; she put down the wounded dog and Sasha took advantage of the interruption by moving away from the chalkboard with the Russian letters and toward the dollhouse in her tiny alcove.

  “Allo.”

  “Nadia, hello.” It was Regina’s apologetic voice. Regina was always apologetic, deferring to Nadia’s competence or to Sasha’s impetuous outbursts. She acted as though she had a hard time being seen. “I’m so sorry. I forgot to mention this morning that Sasha has a playdate with this girl from her preschool, Mila. Would you mind meeting up with Mila’s nanny today? She speaks Russian too, so I thought it would be a great … plan.”

  “Of course, no problem.” She wrote down the address in clear block letters. “We go to them, yes?”

  “Oh yes, of course. There’s no room for both girls at our place.”

  “No problem. I will put on her jacket now.” She hung up, and called, “Sasha, Sashen’ka! Come here.”

  Not that she had far to walk to find Sasha, which was the reason friends were never invited here. Another thing Nadia would never understand about Regina’s life was the size of this apartment. Who ever heard of an American family choosing to be squashed like this? A little girl in a room with no door while the parents slept in a pull-out couch in the living room? Her own parents had lived better than this under communism! Her mother and Larisska lived in a much bigger apartment in Rubizhne. (If it was still intact. If they were still alive. Not now, she refused to dwell on that.)