Little Failure (29 page)

The theme of the movie is immortality. “We’ll never be sick,” the Wilford Brimley character tells his grandson before the aliens beam him up. “We won’t get any older. And we’ll never die.” As he speaks, Mr. Brimley’s character is casting a fishing line into the Atlantic Ocean while his worried grandson looks on, a sliver of a boy next to a fully formed, famously mustached mastodon of a man. As my father guides the Mitsubishi Tredia-S beneath the bright rural canopy of stars on our way home, our sedan redolent of dead fish, live worms, and male sweat, I wonder why Wilford Brimley doesn’t take his grandson with him to Antarea. Wouldn’t that mean that he would eventually outlive his grandson? Are some of us destined for a flicker of physical existence while others explode like supernovas across the cold mountain sky? If so, where is the American fairness in that? That night, as my father’s healthy snores rumble in the bed next to mine and my grandmother wanders in and out of the bathroom, sighing to the depth of her ample, peasant bosom, I consider in great detail both the nothingness to which we will all eventually succumb and its very opposite, the backside of Tahnee Welch partly shrouded in a pair of white summer shorts. I want Wilford Brimley to be my grandpa, and I want him to die. I keep thinking of what he tells his
slabyi
obsessive little grandson at the start of the film: “The trouble with you is you think too much and that’s when a guy gets scared.”

Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony lies near the village of Ellenville, not far from the old Jewish Borscht Belt hotels. It sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which there is a circular hayfield that belongs to a rabidly anti-Semitic Polish man who will hunt us down with his German shepherd if we go near, or so our grandmothers tell us. We share our meandering country road with a fading hotel named the Tamarack Lodge and a settlement of free-range Hasids who descend on our bungalows with their prayer books and forelocks, trying to induct us Russians into their hirsute ways. My mother and I sneak into the nearby Tamarack Lodge, where Eddie Fisher and Buddy Hackett once shared a stage, to witness giant, tanned American Jews lying belly up next to an Olympic-sized outdoor pool or sleepwalking to the auditorium in bedroom slippers to watch Neil Diamond in
The Jazz Singer
. After one showing we are herded into a dining room where the American Jews are served their meals—grilled chicken breasts and ice-cold Cokes!—and when the waiter comes up to ask for our room number my mother blurts out “Room 431.” Mama and I wolf down our purloined chicken breasts and make a run for it.

Back at Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony, we survive without Neil Diamond, and the pool can fit maybe a half-dozen small Russian children at a time. Ann Mason, the proprietor, is an old Yiddish-spouting behemoth with three muumuus to her wardrobe. The children (there are about ten of us, from Leningrad, Kiev, Kishinev, and Vilnius) adore Ann Mason’s husband, a ridiculous, potbellied, red-bearded runt named Marvin, an avid reader of the Sunday funny papers whose fly is always open and whose favorite phrase is “Everybody in the pool!” When Ann Mason cuts enough coupons, she and Marvin take some of us to the Ponderosa Steakhouse for T-bones and mashed potatoes. The all-you-can-eat salad bar is the nexus of capitalism and gluttony we’ve all been waiting for.

These Russian children are as close as I have come to compatriots.
I look forward to being with them all year. There is no doubt that several of the girls are maturing into incomparable beauties, their tiny faces acquiring a round Eurasian cast, slim-hipped tomboyish bodies growing soft here and sometimes there. But what I love most are the sounds of our hoarse, excited voices. The Russian nouns lacing the barrage of English verbs, or vice versa (“
Babushka, oni poshli
shopping
vmeste v ellenvilli
”
—
“Grandma, they went shopping together in Ellenville”).

Fresh from my success with the Gnorah, I decide to write the lyrics for a music album, popular American songs with a Russian inflection. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” becomes “Like a Sturgeon.” There are paeans to babushkas, to farmer’s cheese, to budding sexuality. We record these songs on a tape recorder I buy at a drugstore. For the album-cover photograph I pose as Bruce Springsteen on his
Born in the U.S.A
. album, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a red baseball cap sticking out of my back pocket. Several of the girls pose around my “Bruce” dressed like the singers Cyndi Lauper and Madonna with hopeful applications of mascara and lipstick.
Born in the USSR
is what we call the album. (
I was bo-ho-rn down in-uh Le-nin-grad … wore a big fur
shapka
on my head, yeah …)

As soon as our parents roll in from their jobs in the city, the men take off their shirts and point their hairy chests at the sky; the women gather in the little bungalow kitchens to talk in low tones about their husbands. We kids cram into a tiny station wagon and head for one of the nearest towns where, along with a growing Hasidic population, there is a theater that shows last summer’s movies for two dollars (giant bag of popcorn with fake butter—fifty cents). On the return trip to Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony, sitting on each other’s laps, we discuss the finer points of
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
. I wonder aloud why the film never ventured into outer space, never revealed to us the wrinkled fellow’s planet, his birthplace and true home.

We continue our discussion into the night, the stars lighting up the bull’s-eye of the anti-Semitic hayfield. Tomorrow, a long stretch of
noncompetitive badminton. The day after that, Marvin will bring out the funny papers, and we will laugh at
Beetle Bailey
and
Garfield
, not always knowing why we’re laughing. It’s something like happiness, the not knowing why.

The girl I love is named Natasha. I understand there is a cartoon show with characters Boris and Natasha, which makes fun of Russians, and at SSSQ I would never be seen with a person so named. The only girl to go out with me for the school dance is a former Muscovite named Irina,
^*
and although a part of me understands that she is a slim, attractive girl, far prettier than most of the native-born or the Israelis, most of me is upset that she is not the former or at least the latter. Up in the bungalow colony, such considerations are not valid. We are all the same, and we treat one another with surprising gentleness.

On the other hand, I am not pretty. My body and face are changing, and not for the better. Grandma’s feedings combined with puberty have given me what steroid-using bodybuilders call “bitch tits,” and these tits are straining at the already tight T-shirts donated by the SSSQ secretarial staff. Along my right shoulder there is the result of a Soviet inoculation gone terribly wrong: a giant, flesh-colored keloid scar over which I wear a king’s ransom of Band-Aids. My face, once boyish and pleasant, is acquiring adult features that make little sense. Hair everywhere, my nose beginning to hook; my father has started calling me
gubastyi
, or “big lips,” and some days he grabs me by the chin and says,
“Akh, ty, zhidovskaya morda.”
Eh, you, Yid-face. In his
Planet of the Yids
stories, being a clever Jew is good, but here I sense that he is referring to the less pleasant attributes of our race. It is very confusing.

Here’s what isn’t confusing: Natasha is beautiful. Kind of like Tahnee Welch is beautiful in
Cocoon
. She even has the same short hairstyle that wonderfully exposes the slim architecture of her neck and eyes of blue that burn with pleasure as she gets ready to swing her badminton racket. She is boyish and athletic and is usually seen gliding through the Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony grounds with her brown boxer by her side. It is sad that I can no longer remember the boxer’s name, because once I knew it as surely as I know my own.

Natasha is sweet and kind and in full control of herself. She does not whine, she does not complain, and if there are insecurities about her place in the world, she deals with them elsewhere. When she somersaults or does a headstand in front of me, it is not to show off but because she is … happy? And when she’s standing on her hands, and her T-shirt succumbs to gravity, and I am looking at her tanned, brown, flat stomach, I am happy, too. She will never be my “girlfriend,” obviously, but she exists somewhere in the world, and that will be good enough until college.

By this stage everyone simply calls me Gnu (to my grandma:
“Mozhet Gnu s nami poigraet?”
May Gnu come out and play with us?), but Natasha always calls me Gary. I try to time my encounters with Natasha so that I am only playing every
second
game of badminton or Little Fool or Spit with her, but the children, especially since most of them are girls and hence smart, take notice. I am sitting at a green picnic table with Natasha, our calves touching for thirty-seven seconds (my mind: “thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, ah, she moved”), when one of the girls says, “Gnu likes Natasha.”

I start getting up, because killing myself will take some preparation, when Natasha says: “I like Gary, too. He’s my friend.” She then maneuvers one playing card on top of her pile and says to her slower adversary: “Spit!”

The cards fall on the table at great speed. And I am left with this duality. She likes me. Hence, I am likable. And not for this Gnu shit either. To her, I am Gary. But I am also her
friend
, and that statement is irrevocable as well.

What does it mean to love someone? At SSSQ, I am not allowed to be near the native-born girls, because I am of the
dalit
caste, untouchable, and my presence may pollute them. But at Ann Mason’s, as you have seen, I can touch my skinned knee to Natasha’s glowing one for thirty-seven seconds, and she will be my friend, if not more. One early summer day I am shielding myself from the sun beneath an oak tree, reading
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, sneezing from the rich American pollen and dreaming of distant allergen-free planets, when I encounter these lines in a story: “I stood up and hugged her to me in that humid darkness, running my hand along her thin back and then around to cup one little breast. ‘I love you, Jane,’ I said.” I close my eyes and picture a little bag of weight in my hand.
Cup
. You
cup
the little breast of a
Jane
. So this is love.

At home, there is love between my parents, and sometimes I can hear them loving each other. But love mostly means fighting. My mother has perfected the silent treatment to such an extent that she will not speak to my father for many days, sometimes weeks, even as they continue to share their mahogany full-sized bed together. When this happens, I serve as the emissary between them. My parents schedule meetings with me to air their grievances and to discuss the prospects for a
razvod
. And so I shuttle between them, sometimes allowing tears to strengthen my bid for them to stay together. “He apologizes, Mama. He will not fall under the influence of his wolfish relatives any longer.” “Papa, she knows she should not have been an hour late when you were picking her up, but suddenly there was extra typing at work and she wanted to earn overtime.”