Snow in May: Stories (20 page)

“Baba, you’re ruining everything,” Katya yelled.

“Shhh.” Masha picked up the candy wrappers and stuffed them into the pocket of the apron she wore over her flower-patterned housedress. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Katya, please speak Russian. You know I don’t understand.” Masha could read the English alphabet and look up words in a dictionary, but when listening she couldn’t catch much beyond “hello,” “good-bye,” “please,” and “thank you.” And “what.”

“I hate singing. I’m only good at math.” Katya took Masha’s hot, plump hand and massaged it with her icicle fingers. It was in these private, transient moments that Katya shed the mask of American coolness, which she worked so hard to maintain in front of her stepsister, Brittny. She smiled archly. “Maybe if Brittny sang with us, too?”

“Katya, don’t joke. She’s
Americanka,
how can she sing with us? She doesn’t speak Russian.”

“I’m
Americanka,
too.” Katya dropped Masha’s hand and pulled out a lollipop from the pillowy recess. Masha could never understand why Americans had to have so many pillows on their beds and couches. Katya unwrapped the lollipop and looked impatiently at her opened math books.

“You’re a different kind, Katya. You live in two worlds. Imagine, each foot standing on a globe beach ball. Remember, like we had in Yalta?”

“I’m not five years old, Ba.”

“One day, Katya, you’ll realize that there is no bigger blessing in life than an opportunity to help someone, especially someone whose blood runs through your own veins.”

“Gross,” Katya said in English and rolled her eyes.

Masha looked at Katya’s thin neck sticking out of the collar of her nightgown, the slingshot fork of her clavicle and ropy shoulder, the pollen sprinkling of freckles, like her mother’s. “Do you love your mama?” she said.

Katya frowned and sat up. “Why?”

“If you love her and want to show gratitude for all she’s done for you, sing with me.”

Katya narrowed her dark eyes.

“It will make her happy,” Masha said.

“She’s fine already.”

“Katen’ka, please. I would be embarrassed to sing by myself. You know I don’t sing well. What if I paid you?”

A flicker of innocent superiority flashed in Katya’s eyes. “Okay, Baba, okay, I’ll sing with you. I don’t know why we have to sing at all. People don’t sing at American parties. But I’ll try; we’ll be embarrassed together.”

“Everyone will be too drunk to notice,” Masha said, and Katya threw back her head and laughed, the white lollipop stick bobbing in her throat. Masha lunged toward her and pulled out the candy.

“
Bozhe moi,
Katya, you’ll choke!” She broke out in a sweat from even this small exertion. Her housedress had ridden up her stocky thighs, and her heart was pounding.

*   *   *

Masha had come to America for three weeks to visit her daughter, Sveta, for the first time. Sveta had married Brian two years earlier through a special agency and moved with now eleven-year-old Katya to Fairbanks, which in the winter turned out to be as frostbite-cold and snowy as their own Magadan.

The marriage had been Masha’s idea. She had followed the lead of a retired colleague who had married off her divorced and just as hardworking and beautiful daughter (there were so many of them!) to an American, thus, as she’d put it, fulfilling her role as a mother. Masha, too, wanted to be a good mother.

“You must get in line for luck, Svetochka. How else?” she had said to her daughter. “Under the stationary stone water doesn’t flow.” Sveta’s boyfriends after the divorce were all cheaters, alcoholics, men who disappeared for days, and the one who found it funny, when Sveta asked him something important, to reply “Yes, dear, you should buy yourself that little hat.”

Sveta crossed her arms. Her cobalt eye shadow and frosted hair made her look older than thirty-seven.

“Give me one reason why you don’t want to try.” Masha felt the familiar strain of her heart muscle in the starting blocks before a race. She could see her daughter’s success, while Sveta herself was still far from considering it.

“I am not a prostitute, for a start,” Sveta said. Her lipstick had seeped into the groove of a small scar above her lip.

“No one’s selling anyone. You’ll try to find someone decent, who wants the same as you—a companion and to make a family,” Masha said. “You can find a job at the hospital and actually get paid for it. I heard the doctors have a very good salary over there.”

With A-student diligence, Masha studied the success stories in the pamphlets and translated with a dictionary the letters from potential suitors. They found that decent person in Brian, a high school history teacher—an employed nonalcoholic with no criminal record. What more could one ask for? After months of correspondence and a few linguistically trying phone conversations, Brian traveled to Magadan to propose and to explore nearby Gulag ruins. He was a Russian history buff.

“And you? How are you going to be here, all alone?” Sveta said, when she was almost convinced.

“You can send for me when you’re a citizen, Svetochka. They have what is called ‘reunification of the family.’ You don’t worry for now. I’ll finally have time to read all of our World Literature series and organize those boxes of photographs,” Masha had said, already feeling the pleasurable pain of a lucrative sacrifice.

*   *   *

As Masha was acclimating to the cluttered, overheated house in Fairbanks, an inkling of unsettlement lodged into her, and the more she tried to tease it out, the deeper it burrowed, like a fractured splinter.

She observed Sveta’s new family. There was Brittny—with the stylishly misspelled name (Masha was told)—Brian’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who was so developed, blond, and luminescent in her health that it hurt Masha’s eyes to look at her next to Katya. Her own granddaughter was still a closed bud of a girl. Her skin yellowish from a sickly early childhood, her hair mousy. Her cunning, olive-dark eyes were her liveliest feature—the sole inheritance from a father she didn’t remember.

Yet Masha considered a motherless fate more tragic. She sympathized with Brittny, who had lost her mother to cancer at five, and tried to surround the girl with wordless care. In return Brittny, strawberry-lipped and breathless, looked at Masha with amused condescension. She stepped around her as though Masha were a stranger who had fallen on a busy sidewalk and spilled the embarrassing contents of her bag.

Then there was Brian. Though his belly had extended several centimeters forward and his graying hairline had retreated several centimeters back, he looked much the same as when Masha first met him: tall and solid, with bright blue eyes, like Brittny’s, straw-colored brows and mustache, and ruddy dimpled cheeks. The perfect American. Masha quickly remembered his irritating habit of pulling on his nose when he spoke.

Sveta and Brian treated each other as though the other were a sick, sensitive child. Brian discouraged Sveta from doing any housekeeping, although Sveta cleaned houses part-time with Lizochka, the Russian wife of one of Brian’s teacher friends. Several times Masha saw Brian turn off the faucet when Sveta was about to wash the dishes. He snuck up on her, a superhero in a tucked-in flannel shirt and sweatpants, when she was folding clothes in the laundry room. He tore anything weighing more than three kilos out of her hands. He allowed Sveta to cook Russian food only; the rest he made or brought home himself. He closed her textbooks—Sveta was studying to confirm her medical degree—walked her over to the squashy couch in the living room, and massaged her shoulders and feet.

Sveta played her part of damsel-in-domestic-distress with gusto. She shut her medical textbooks, sighing every time as if this was the relief she’d been secretly hoping for, only to continue her studies into the night, long after Brian had gone to sleep. In fact, she accomplished most of what was needed to run the household while he was at work or sleeping. She packed Russian-style sandwiches for lunch, with butter and kielbasa. She laundered, ironed, folded, and rolled things up. She cleaned. She even started making special low-sodium meals for Masha’s high blood pressure, until Masha convinced her to stop fussing and took over the kitchen.

It was the spectacle of their selective, almost aggressive care that made Masha suspicious of its sincerity and, by extension, the sincerity of the whole marriage. Of course, it was preposterous to think of the situation in these terms. Sveta’s marriage to Brian was never meant to be entirely sincere.

Yet, all the advantages of America now paled in comparison with the look in Sveta’s eyes: half the time glazed, and the other half tense and calculating. Nothing like the bored contentedness Masha had hoped for.

One night in the second week of her stay, Masha had made tea and sat Sveta down at the kitchen table. Brian was at his favorite café, grading midterm papers.

“Svetochka, what is this circus you and Brian are putting up? You can tell me what is happening. I’m your mother, I’ll understand everything.”

Sveta looked betrayed, as though Masha were a teacher who had intercepted a love note and read it to the class. Then she smiled toothily—the American way—and said, “You mean the dishes? Brian thinks a woman like me shouldn’t have to do housework.”

Sveta had gained some weight since Masha last saw her. Sveta’s face had softened, and the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth had filled out. She wore less makeup now, usually just lip gloss, and let her golden brown hair grow long and natural. Looking at her daughter, dressed in loose blue jeans and a T-shirt, and with her hair in a ponytail, Masha had an irksome sensation that she had been transported to the past, to Sveta’s medical school years, but now the role of Sveta was played by an older, skillfully deceptive actress.

“I thought such men existed only in fairy tales,” Masha joked. “Besides, you work as a housecleaner—”

“That’s different, Mama. I know what you’re thinking: if he’s such a knight, why does he procrastinate over doing the housework himself? He also could be more strict with making the girls do their chores.” Sveta rubbed her fingers. “Right now is the time for the girls to concentrate on their education. There will always be dirty dishes and smelly socks, whereas the young mind won’t absorb knowledge like a sponge forever.”

This seemed to Masha a Potemkin speech, prepared especially for her visit.

“If there is another car, why does he drive you to the store for tampons? You were a professional in Russia. You saved lives.”

“He’s trying to help the only way he knows how. I can save a lot more lives if I keep off the icy roads. Besides, I didn’t save lives, you know that. With all the shortages at the hospital—no supplies, power outages—it was mostly the talking cure.” Sveta giggled, but it felt mechanical. When she belittled her own achievements, she stripped away at the coating of pride that kept Masha going through the most difficult and lonely times of their separation.

“Everything is somehow not right,” Masha said, staring at her daughter’s fingers. They had retained their original childish shape, now even more pronounced because of Sveta’s weight gain: plump bases tapering toward the tips, dimples on her knuckles. Masha wanted to shake her. “Do you want me to talk to him? I’ve been learning English. Maybe I can—”

“Mamochka, don’t.” Sveta folded her hands under her chin. “Everything is good. He’s been very nice to us. He never even raises his voice. If you like to slide, you must like to pull the sled, as they say.”

“He doesn’t have the right to interfere with your studying. You didn’t come here to die a housecleaner.”

“He doesn’t. I am lucky to stand a chance of translating my profession. Lizochka used to be a chemical engineer, but she can’t work now the way she worked in the Union. It’s all different here. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll send Katya to a special boarding school for math and science. And if she does well, she might get a scholarship to one of the best colleges, like Harvard or Princeton. Scholarship means studying for free. Good education is very expensive here. From Magadan to Princeton, can you imagine?” Sveta’s face finally brightened and relaxed.

Masha nodded and got up from the table. She tore off a paper towel, softened it in her hands, and blew her nose.

“
Nu,
if you’re happy, I’m happy.” She wondered how many times she would have to repeat it to herself to make both parts feel true.

“Come.” Sveta took Masha’s hand. “I want to show you something.”

She led Masha to the master bedroom, on the second floor, next to Katya’s bedroom. The room was hot and smelled of vanilla. Masha began to perspire. Sveta got out a key from the back of a desk drawer and unlocked the double doors of a tall oak cabinet.

“Brian’s treasures,” she said and opened the creaky door.

Books about the Soviet Union occupied the top shelves. Reproductions of campaign posters for five-year plans and movie playbills were pinned to the back of the middle section. Several more stood rolled up on the bottom. Plastic boxes with pins and military patches, commander watches, and several generations of Soviet and Russian money filled the middle shelves.

Next to a crowd of traditional
matryoshkas
and
matryoshkas
with faces of Russian politicians and American sports stars, Masha noticed a box from the porcelain tea set that she and Sveta had bought together in Magadan.

“
Docha,
why is our tea set locked up in this cabinet? You don’t want to use it?”

“I thought it was too nice for every day. I’m saving it. Maybe to give Katya for her wedding.”

“The future is an interesting thing. During the Soviet years we sacrificed for the future—”

“Mama, don’t start on that.”

Sveta squatted down and pulled out a cardboard box from the bottom of the cabinet.

“Fragile,” she translated the word handwritten on the top. She lifted the cover to reveal a drab olive-colored backpack with a faint red cross etched on the flap.

Sveta sat down cross-legged on the floor, and Masha settled next to her, her knee joints cracking. She was still surprised at how quickly she’d gained weight after she was laid off from the Aviation Administration, despite the general hunger of the post-Soviet years; how fast she’d developed high blood pressure.