Still Here, page 16
But this time there’d been an unexpected obstacle. The wipes got stuck in their cylindrical container. She yanked at the top one but only managed to tear off a tiny piece. Now she had to unscrew the lid of the container, and for that task she needed both hands. She had to let go of Eric’s legs and, since she couldn’t really hold her breath any longer, exhale and inhale. By the time she finally got the wipes out, this was what she saw: Eric’s perfectly round face. His hand over his face. Shit squeezed in his tiny fist. Shit dripping through his fingers onto his pointy chin. Shit smeared over his mouth. Lips making smacking movements. The pensive expression on his face communicating his uncertainty as to whether he liked the taste or not.
The picture was wrong, disgusting, vile. Too wrong. Not just momentarily wrong, but monumentally wrong. It could be a reflection of everything that was wrong with her life. How they had moved from Moscow into this cold, dark, ugly, disgusting apartment in Brooklyn. How she couldn’t finish medical school. How bad her back hurt. How she was rapidly losing her looks—at twenty-four! How Sergey didn’t want her anymore. How it was a mistake to leave Russia and come here. How it was a huge, huge, enormous mistake! All of that came to her clearly in a split second. She didn’t think—she reacted. She raised her hand and smacked it across Eric’s face. The sensation of how small and soft his face was against her hand, soft and still and smeared with shit, told her that it had happened. She had just hit her six-month-old baby. And then the stunned and puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe where the pain had come from. Vica grabbed Eric, pressed him to her chest, and stayed like that, trembling. Only then did he start to cry. She pressed him harder and harder to her chest. She stroked his downy hair, she stroked the tiny hollow on his neck, she stroked his bare back and his bare butt—still dirty. She carried him to the sink and washed his face, his mouth, his bottom. She dried him off, carried him back to the sofa, put a clean diaper on, pulled his overalls down. And then he raised his arms up, reaching for her, asking that she take him. She cradled him in her arms and started to rock him, marveling at how quickly his distress changed to contentment, peace, and then sleep. He’d reached to her for comfort even though she’d been the one to hurt him. He didn’t have a choice, he didn’t have anybody except for her. She put him gently into his crib, then went to lock herself in the bathroom so that she could sob and wail as loudly as she needed to.
Even now, eleven years later, the memory of that incident made Vica wince in pain.
They were standing in line to get to the Castle, which loomed above them, leaning toward them from the horizon line. The school was actually called Sebastian Levy High School, but everybody called it the Castle. Vica wrapped her coat tighter and urged Eric to do the same. They moved slowly—a couple of steps, a pause, a couple of steps, a pause—in a long chain that stretched around the Castle’s perimeter.
It seemed that the presence of the Castle made them even colder because it blocked the sun. Although to be perfectly honest, the sun wouldn’t be much help either at eight twenty in the morning on a frigid November day. Anyway, it was hard to believe that this building was right in the middle of the Upper East Side, where endless streets stretched in all four directions, yellow cabs rushed by, and dog walkers walked whole packs of dogs.
“Are you cold?” she asked Eric. He shook his head. But he looked cold; he looked tired and a little morose. But then all the children in line looked a little morose. They all looked very young—younger than eleven. They had thin necks and funny ears: large, tiny, hairy, bent, stuck out, misshapen, glowing, red, dented by eyeglasses. About a fifth of these children would pass the test, be accepted into this school, and officially be regarded as “gifted and talented.” The strangeness of their ears would be redeemed by their genius. The rest of them would just be regular children with funny ears. Vica hugged Eric and pulled his hat lower over his ears.
Vica had to take a day off for this. Sergey had offered to take Eric to the test, but she couldn’t trust him with something that important. He might have been late, or he could have started saying stupid shit like “A good education is what matters, chum, but a good school doesn’t necessarily mean a good education.” How she hated it when Sergey called Eric “chum”!
Thinking of Sergey made her momentarily nauseous. Ever since they had separated Vica developed a disturbing habit of seeing strangers on the street and mistaking them for Sergey. She would feel a fleeting joy, followed by disappointment and then relief. She wasn’t sure if she missed him though. She missed the Sergey who loved her. But that Sergey no longer existed. He wouldn’t have behaved like he had if he loved her, wouldn’t have made fun of her at Vadik’s party, wouldn’t have left without a fight. Hadn’t he actually look relieved as he was leaving? So, no, she didn’t miss him. It’s just that there was this space in her body that her love for Sergey used to occupy. She imagined it as a concrete physical space, shaped like a mushroom. A huge mushroom, with the stem originating in the pit of her stomach and the cap swelling over her heart and pushing toward her throat. That space was now unoccupied, but not clean, not entirely empty. It was filled with random junk, like hurt, shame, and fear. Fear that she had made a terrible mistake.
Vica wished she could talk to somebody about it. Vadik had proved to be useless. He had neither confirmed nor disproved that she had been right to throw Sergey out. Regina? Vadik kept singing her praises about how wise she was, how full of empathy, how much she had helped him with his love problems throughout the years. But to ask Regina about Sergey? Regina, who must be gloating?
She talked to her mother.
“You’re such a pathetic idiot!” Vica’s mother yelled into the phone. Vica mumbled the same explanation she had attempted to give to Vadik: how it was getting unbearable, how both of them were on the verge of hating each other.
“Just tell me, how can this possibly be good for you?” her mother asked. “You’ll be worse off financially, you’ll have to work even more, and you’ll be all alone. Any husband is better than no husband!”
Vica’s father was that “any husband” : a quiet alcoholic who liked to sing and weep when drunk; he would sing and weep himself into oblivion until he fell asleep right at the table.
“I might meet somebody else,” Vica said.
“Good luck with that!” her mother retorted before slamming down the receiver.
Still, Vica’s worst fear was that the separation would affect Eric in some irreparable way. He seemed fine, but who knew what went on inside his head?
“Are you sure you’re not cold?” she asked Eric again. He shook his head.
“Hey, look!” Vica said. “Those dogs are funny.” A skinny girl of about sixteen was walking a pack of four dogs: a rottweiler, two golden retrievers, and a small furry dog of unknown breed. The small one must have been intimidated by its peers, so it was doing everything possible to keep apart from them, stretching the rope, making the walker stumble.
Eric looked at the dogs, then up at her with surprise, because this was something that his dad would say, not his mom. Sergey had a special bond with Eric over funny animals. He would always point them out to Eric, and Eric to him. He would send Sergey links to various photos: “Dad, look at that furry pig!” or YouTube videos: “That’s a real live killer rabbit!” And Sergey would take him to countless zoos, natural history museums, and aquariums to look at dinosaur bones, Galápagos turtles, and thousand-year-old fish. Eric had developed this passion for weird animals when he was four or five. He didn’t have many friends then. (Well, he hardly had any friends now. Just that fat freak Gavin.) It would break Vica’s heart when she watched Eric approach a kid on a playground to show him his toy dinosaur and explain how it used to be the most dangerous predator some millions of years ago, and the kid would laugh at him and run off, or kick the toy out of his hands and then run off. She always encouraged him to do sports, to play with other kids, to be more sociable, more normal. And it would break her heart to watch Eric run up to Sergey after work and tell him about the amazing discovery he had made—that dinosaurs looked just like chickens or some such—and Sergey would listen to him, as if it was okay to be interested in all that shit!
“Yeah, funny,” Eric said and turned away. He was clearly not in the mood for talking.
Vica decided to study the parents in the line. You could easily divide them into two categories: Susan Sontag types and Outer Borough types. Vica knew who Susan Sontag was from Vadik’s Tumblr. He once posted her photograph with a quote: “ ‘The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.’ ”
Here, in the Castle line, the Sontag types were all about fifty years old, wore no makeup, had various amounts of gray in their hair, and had roughly the same amount of intellectual flair. Their clothes looked elegant yet comfortable, a sure sign that they were very, very expensive. Some of the Sontags were beautiful, others were not; a lot of them were Asian; a few of them were men. The Outer Borough types wore puffy jackets and knitted hats. There were a few more men among them: the non-white men were wearing suits under their jackets and dressy shoes, while the white men were wearing jeans and work boots, unless they were Russian—then they were wearing the same clothes as the non-white Outer Borough men. The phrase “deep social divide” darted through Vica’s mind, but she was too tired and sleepy to think it through or even to use it in a complete sentence. Vica herself wore a fuchsia-colored puffy jacket, but that didn’t mean that she belonged with the Outer Borough types, and the fact that she lived on Staten Island didn’t mean anything either. It wasn’t her fault that she lived on Staten Island. Vica’s personality was pure Manhattan. It’s just that her financial situation wasn’t.
Although to be perfectly honest, Vica didn’t belong with the Sontag types either, not because she lacked the intellectual flair but because she was only thirty-five years old and didn’t have any gray in her hair.
None of that mattered though. What mattered was that this was one of the best schools in the city—and possibly in the entire country—and the only truly democratic one. All you had to do was pass the test, and if you were smart enough to pass it, you were guaranteed a spectacular free education that led to Ivy League colleges, Ivy League graduate schools, and then unfailingly to superior lives. The problem was that admission wasn’t as democratic as it seemed. Some parents could afford tutors who’d been shoving intelligence down their children’s throats for years and other parents couldn’t. Eden, Vica’s boss at Bing Ruskin, had a son in this school. Vica had heard Eden bragging to her friend Dr. Jewell that they had spent fifteen thousand dollars for tutoring so that their son would pass the exam. “But just think how much we saved in private school tuition!” she’d said. The maddening thing was that Eden and her husband could afford the tuition. So by paying for a tutor they had robbed some equally smart poor kid of the opportunity to attend this school. That was unfair! That was so unfair! And Eden wasn’t even aware of it.
Of course, if she and Sergey had enough money, she wouldn’t hesitate to hire a tutor too. This would have put Eric at that same unfair advantage. It’s just that Vica didn’t find unfairness toward others quite as painful as unfairness toward herself.
Several years ago Eden threw a Memorial Day barbecue for all of the diagnostic radiology employees at her beautiful farm near Princeton (she had the farm in addition to her huge Manhattan apartment). Real farm—goats and all. Vica had been really looking forward to that picnic. She liked Eden. Eden was fairly young, beautiful, and worldly, and Vica really wanted to see her in a social setting; she even hoped that they could become friends. Why couldn’t they? Eden was a doctor, just as Vica would have been, if she’d had the chance to finish medical school. And maybe Eric could become friends with Eden’s sons.
Vica decided to create the most elegant hostess gift for Eden. She bought a beautiful wicker basket at Pier 1, fitted it with a blue and white linen towel, and filled it with the most perfect strawberries she could find in Staten Island’s Stop & Shop.
She thought she looked amazing when she parked her car and stepped onto Eden’s lawn. She was wearing a tight low-cut tank top, a jeans miniskirt, pink high-heeled sandals, and a straw hat with a wide pink band. The outfit, combined with her basket of strawberries, was the very picture of country chic. Then the first thing that Vica noticed was strawberry patches all over the place, thousands, millions of strawberries. Eden was very polite about it: “Strawberries—how lovely!” she said. “Ours are not ripe yet.” The second thing that Vica noticed were the beige shorts and loose white T-shirts that everybody, including Eden, was wearing. Oh, yes, and baseball hats. “Nice hat!” Santiago, who operated their C-scan machine, said with a smirk. Vica took her straw hat off and put it on a bench by the house, next to her basket.
Eden took her mostly immigrant employees on a tour of the house, a beautiful house, decorated with all the antique country stuff—there was even a collection of old irons—abstract photographs done by Eden’s husband, and abstract sculptures done by Eden’s sons. The boys ran in after a soccer game, sweaty, out of breath, flushed, confident, happy—and Vica had thought that Eric could make friends with them! When the tour was almost over, Vica decided to make up for her faux pas with the clothes and the strawberries and pay some amazing compliment to the house. “Eden,” she said, “your house looks just like Howards End.” Eden answered her with a blank stare. “Howards End,” Vica explained, “the house in Forster’s novel.” Blank stare again, followed by a kind smile. Vica knew that before switching to premed at Harvard Eden had been an English major. There was no way that she didn’t know who Forster was. Vica had read the novel in Regina’s translation, perhaps the novel had a different title in English. And then Vica got it. Eden didn’t expect Vica to know Forster (Vica—a simple immigrant ultrasound technician), just like she didn’t expect one of her goats to bleat “Fors-ter.” Eden gave Vica a polite, uncomprehending, but approving, perfectly democratic smile specially designed for her immigrant employees—Russian, Jamaican, Filipino, or whatever else they happened to be.
To add insult to injury, by the time they emerged from the house, the largest goat had eaten all of Vica’s strawberries and about half of her hat. Vica picked up her bag and the remains of her hat and decided to go home without waiting for the food.
Vica’s other botched attempt to make a friend at work was with Christine, another radiology technician. Christine was older than Vica, but not by much. She was a tall woman with rolls of fat pushing against her scrubs in expected and unexpected places. Her skin was of a perfect chestnut color, and her hair, black with a touch of gray, was done in gleaming cornrows. It was Christine who made the first move, back when Vica started working at Bing Ruskin. She offered some friendly advice, which Vica gladly accepted. They started having lunch together and chatting whenever they had a chance. In addition to professional advice, Christine gave Vica a lot of pointers on child-rearing, pie baking, ordering swimsuits online (you had to order Speedo at least three sizes too large), and American ways in general. Christine’s manner had always been good-natured and caring, if a little patronizing. “Oh, so you have your cool black friend now?” Vadik would tease. “Shut up, Vadik,” Vica would answer. But then things changed. The problem was that Christine took Vica for a struggling immigrant single mother. There was a picture of Eric clipped to Vica’s locker, but she never talked about Sergey. Then one day somebody mentioned a cousin applying for a job at Gray Bank, and Vica said that her husband worked there too. “Oh, yeah?” Christine asked. “What does he do?” “He’s a financial analyst,” Vica said. “Oh, yeah?” Christine said again, and just like that, the friendship was over. Christine’s husband worked as a mechanic, Leslie’s husband was a bus driver, Sheena’s husband worked as a security guard there at Bing Ruskin, Rachel and John were divorced, Michael’s wife held the exact same position as he did but at Weil Cornell, and the youngest technician Liliana was single—she was all about dates and parties and fun. Having a husband at Gray Bank instantly turned Vica into this fanciful white lady who chose this job for some bizarre reason. Vica remembered what Bob’s daughter, Becky, said about about her job at McDonald’s. She worked there when she was a junior in high school. Bob thought it was important for her to experience a “real job.” She told them how the other employees hated her, how they all gathered to stare at her getting into Bob’s new Volvo after work, and how the nicer she was to them, the more they hated her. So that was how Christine saw Vica now? A spoiled rich brat who didn’t really have to earn her living, who took this job just for the experience? But who in her right mind would choose to work at a cancer hospital, at a job that was both physically and emotionally exhausting, while being exposed to continuous radiation? There were times when Vica felt the urge to explain to Christine how things really stood, to tell her about Sergey’s employment history, about how stupid they had been to buy that insane house that was just a big rotting piece of shit, and about how lonely she felt in the U.S. with no relatives and no real friends, just Regina and Vadik, both of whom preferred Sergey to her. But then she would remember how Regina had tried to explain to them that she wasn’t really that rich, and how ridiculous that had sounded. And then pride would get the better of her. Why did Vica have to justify herself to Christine? And so they were cordial but not friendly. Certainly not friendly enough to talk about something as personal as the separation.
“Mom,” Eric said, “Mom! I’m cold.”
