You Are One of Them (23 page)

“I speak a little Russian,” I said. Her eyes pleaded with me. So I began to coo, whispering sweet reassurances in the boy’s mother tongue, and he watched me, with wary, watery eyes at first and then with increasing degrees of reverence, until we reached our cruising altitude and he went to sleep.

“Thank you,” the mother whispered. She was so grateful that I was a little embarrassed. I felt like a tourist being asked for directions. I didn’t know much, but this woman was so lost that she was willing to trust my expertise.

“No problem,” I said.

“His name is Pavel, but we’re going to call him Henry,” she said. She clutched the child against her chest with the desperate love of someone who has been waiting a long time.

“Henry’s a nice name,” I said. I pulled the shade down and tucked my airline pillow against the window to cushion my head. I didn’t realize how exhausted I was.

“It’s my father’s name,” she said. “My husband wanted to name him after his father, but I said, ‘If you can’t fly over to Russia with me, you sure as hell aren’t picking the name!’ He couldn’t really argue with that.” And she kept talking, but I can’t remember what else she said, because I drifted off. I slept for the whole flight. I slept through the beverage cart’s debut. I slept through dinner and the movie. If Pavel cried some more, I didn’t hear it. When I woke up, the cabin lights had been turned back on for landing. It was afternoon, and we were making our approach to JFK. The Russians on board applauded when we touched down.

“Welcome home,” the man at passport control said to me as he stamped my documents.

“Thank you,” I said, and some mixture of jet lag and patriotism caused me to tear up a little, right there in the airport.

On the other side of customs, I found my connecting flight to Washington. At National Airport my mother pulled me into a fierce hug. She was wearing a blue down jacket and a white wool hat with a pom-pom on top, an ensemble that made her look surprisingly young. “How was the flight?” she said.

“Easy,” I said.

“You smell like cigarettes,” she said.

“Secondhand smoke,” I assured her.

•   •   •

O
N
T
HANKSGIVING
I
TOLD
my mother what I thought she needed to hear. We were in the kitchen, where she was, remarkably, preparing to stuff a turkey. She was rubbing a stick of butter over the bird, smearing its plucked, pimpled flesh with the same fretful drive she applied to everything. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her wrists were bony as a girl’s, her fingers bare—no nail polish, no rings.

“You might want to sit down for this,” I said.

“That’s what your father said when he asked for a divorce,” she said. She used the back of her left wrist to push a rogue strand of hair out of her eyes, then returned her greasy hands to the bird. “Whatever it is, I can take it standing up.”

So we were standing when I said, “I think we should dissolve the foundation.”

I don’t know what I expected, but the news didn’t send her scurrying to the bathtub. She took a moment to flip the turkey and then said, “I was afraid you were going to tell me you’re pregnant.”

“God, no,” I said.

“Well, that’s a relief. I’m not ready to be a grandmother. I don’t bake cookies. I don’t even know how to knit.”

I helped her stuff the bird. I made the mashed potatoes. Our pie was store-bought, but we cooked the rest of our dinner ourselves.

In the end she was glad to let go of the foundation. “I kept it going for you,” she told me. “Jenny was your friend.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“To be frank,” she said, “I always thought she was kind of self-centered. But she meant so much to you.”

The next day she drafted a press release. The foundation was closing its doors because in the wake of the Cold War, its mission was no longer necessary.

•   •   •

A
S FOR MY
LETTER TO
A
NDROPOV,
I read it one last time and then buried it in the Bishop’s Garden. I had new stories to tell.

November 20, 1982

Dear Mr. Andropov,

Are you going to start a nuclear war?

My mother says that after a nuclear bomb, everything will be dark. She says there will be no sun, so it will get really dark and cold. She says that there will be ashes everywhere, so the world will be gray. Colors will be erased. Everything will die. Sometimes I wake up and wonder will this be the last day? And if it is the last day, should I do something different? Something special? But in my house it’s already dark. It’s already dusty and cold. Maybe the catastrophe has already happened. Maybe you think you can destroy us, but that is not true. We can destroy ourselves.

The following works were essential to my research for this book:
Journey to the Soviet Union
by Samantha Smith and
The Spy Who Got Away
by David Wise.

I’m also eternally grateful to:

Bill Clegg, whose faith in this manuscript and brilliant notes helped me reach the finish line, and his incomparable assistant, Shaun Dolan; Andrea Walker, whose editorial insight made this book so much better, and everyone else at the Penguin Press; and Michael Cunningham, who has helped me in too many ways to count.

Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem “In the Waiting Room” inspired the title of this book.

Brooklyn College and Himan Brown, PEN American Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the
Tin House
Summer Writers’ Workshop, and the Corporation of Yaddo for support.

All the incredible writers I’ve had as teachers: Jonathan Baumbach, Charles D’Ambrosio, Stacey D’Erasmo, Joshua Henkin, Diane Johnson, Wendy MacLeod, Claire Messud, Mary Morris, Jenny Offill, Peter Rock, and Steve Yarbrough; the MFA program at Brooklyn College and my inspiring colleagues there, especially Marie-Helene Bertino, Adam Brown, David Ellis, Tom Grattan, Amelia Kahaney, Reese Kwon, Helen Phillips, Anne Ray, and Mohan Sikka.

Robert McFarlane and James Woolsey for answering my research questions; Sarah Corson for
knowing
I’d be a writer when I was in her second-grade class at The Potomac School; my former colleagues at Saatchi & Saatchi, especially Marcia Roosevelt; Hannah Tinti, Maribeth Batcha, and the whole staff of
One Story
magazine, where I learned so much about editing.

The editors of the literary magazines that have published my work:
Bellevue Literary Review
,
Guernica
, and the
Kenyon Review
, and the ones that honored my early stories with awards:
Zoetrope: All-Story
and
The Missouri Review
; Bill Henderson and The Pushcart Press; and Joel Whitney and Meakin Armstrong of
Guernica
for nominating me for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award.

All my friends, especially those who offered encouragement at crucial points during the writing of this book: Laura van den Berg (who read early versions of the manuscript), Ann Marie Healy, Kate Ryan, Meghan Kenny, Anne Kauffman, Catherine Despont, Hilary Redmon, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Colson Whitehead.

And finally, my amazing family. This book would not exist without the love and support of my sisters, Lizzie and Katie, who are both brilliant readers and generous hosts. I’m also grateful to my brothers-in-law, Will Darman and Reif Larsen; my nieces, Jane and Emma; Jonathan Darman; and Vicki Weil. My wonderful father has always believed in me, even when others doubted. And my late mother, who told me everything was material for my writing, was the one who first took me to Moscow in 1993. Thank you. I love you all.