Just Call Me Superhero (19 page)

“And the coffee cake? And the coffee?” Claudia looked away as if it was more than she could handle to have to look Tammy in the eye. “Who will you put in charge of that?”

“Nobody,” said Tammy. “I’ll make it all myself. With Mama.”

“For two hundred people?”

“For a thousand for all I care.”

“Why are you guys fighting so much?” I asked in the car. I noticed that Tammy had painted her nails black today. She drove like a crazy person and I double-checked several times to make sure I had my seat belt on. I still had my whole life ahead of me. “I mean, up to now it’s been all peace and love and pancakes between you. You were so nice to each other.”

“What?” She hadn’t been listening to me.

“Don’t give my mother such a hard time, Tammy, she’s at the end of her rope,” I said a bit louder.

She bit her lip.

“I know that things aren’t so easy for you either,” I said diplomatically.

She turned her face toward the window. Given that she was going 120 miles per hour it was a bit worrisome.

“Keep your eyes on the road, I don’t want have an accident.”

“It’s not like you could get much worse,” she said.

“Go ahead and speak your mind, I don’t care.”

She turned her face back toward me. There were tears in her eyes and I couldn’t understand what the source of the tears could be. Her mother was arriving, was that a reason to cry?

“I’m sorry,” I said even though she was really the one who should have been saying that. “Why hasn’t your mother ever been here?”

Tamara didn’t say anything.

“Not even for the wedding?”

“It was a small wedding,” she mumbled.

“Why?”

“Because.”

I sighed. This conversation was nothing but a minefield. For the first time it dawned on me that Tammy’s faraway relatives might not have been as happy as I’d always assumed about her sudden pregnancy by the father of her host family. My father and Tammy had married immediately so she wouldn’t have to go back the Ukraine. Maybe my father wasn’t so thrilled about the whole thing either. Maybe he hadn’t fallen madly in love, maybe he was just doing what he saw as his duty. Maybe everything had been totally different than I had always pictured.

“I went to see my family in the Ukraine twice with Ferdi,” said Tammy.

“Does your mother know, by the way?”

“Know what? That he’s dead? Of course, that’s why she’s coming.”

“Know this.” I drew a circle around my face with my hands.

“Oh,” said Tammy. “Don’t worry about it. The world doesn’t revolve around your pimples. She’s definitely seen worse.”

W
e waited in front of the arrivals board at Frankfurt airport. My head hurt from leaning back the whole time. Tammy had snuggled up to me and laid her head on my shoulder.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Out of respect and whatnot.”

“Respect for who?” She kissed me on the cheek and then again on the neck.

“You’re a widow, Tammy.”

“Exactly.”

“So stop kissing me.”

“You’re like a brother to me.” She kissed me on the ear, and it sounded loud. “Like a cousin,” she corrected. “Without you I’d have completely lost it by now.”

She was talking like she was drunk. It even seemed as if she couldn’t stand up straight. I was propping her up. Her waist was very thin, I could get one arm all the way around it. For a second I noticed that she smelled like peonies behind her ears. Then she shoved me away with both hands and tried to steady herself on her own. She stepped on my foot with her heel but I didn’t make a sound.

“Mama,” she cried shrilly and stumbled off.

I had expected Tammy’s mother to be like her, long legs, long hair, just twice her age. Or, perhaps less likely, a little round woman with a long coat and a headscarf like I’d seen a long time ago in an article on Kiev in
National Geographic
. The last thing I had expected was that Tammy’s mother would look like a copy of Claudia, tall, disheveled hair that wasn’t blonde but red—Claudia had dyed hers the same shade a few years back. Tammy’s mother was wearing flashy glasses and had a large mouth. And she spoke English better than me.

“My mother is a professor, you idiot,” hissed Tammy in my ear as I pulled her suspiciously heavy suitcase along. I’d tried to compliment the newly arrived mother on her English.

“You could have told me,” I hissed back at her. “You don’t look anything like her!”

“Thank god.”

Somehow I now understood why Tammy and Claudia couldn’t stand each other anymore. I liked her mother. She introduced herself as Evgenija, the Russian version of Eugenia, and said her foreign colleagues called her Jenny.

I liked the firm handshake that accompanied the English words I took for her expression of condolences. I liked her accent, which I would have liked to have myself. I liked the limited level of interest she showed as she looked fleetingly at my face before turning to her daughter. And I liked the way Tammy suddenly changed in her company. The tension melted from her body, she slumped comfortably at the steering wheel, her back curved, her shoulders drooped, and she talked quietly with her mother and the gurgle of their conversation sounded to me like wind chimes or the distant whoosh of the ocean. I relaxed in the backseat and kept dozing off. Now and then I opened an eye and caught Tammy’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“By the day after tomorrow we’ll have gotten through everything,” said Claudia. She wasn’t able to get up to say hello because Ferdi was asleep in her lap and Tammy’s mother had vehemently insisted that the child’s well-being came first. She ran her hand across Ferdi’s sweaty head. The dispassion of this Ukrainian granny surprised me. Of course we were the same way, but I had expected far more emotion from her. I had the feeling that there was a question in the look she gave Tammy after looking at Ferdi:
Is he really yours?

Now Tammy and her mother had disappeared upstairs to requisition another room, and Claudia was still sitting there while my little brother made rasping noises in his sleep. Claudia’s eyes kept closing, too, but she kept jerking awake.

“She’s nice, isn’t she?” she mumbled as her eyelids fluttered.

“Mama Evgenija? Absolutely delightful,” I said.

“The day after tomorrow,” whispered Claudia. “Everything will be over the day after tomorrow.”

A
t eight in the morning my phone rang. I sat up, reached out and accidentally knocked it off the nightstand, and then slid to the floor to try to pick it up. It blinked and jumped around, vibrating. I chased after it like a stork after a toad. Maybe I had gone completely nuts, which would mean I was adapting to my environment. But then I caught it and it was still ringing and I pressed it to my ear. I didn’t recognize the number in the display but I knew who it was.

I was wrong. It wasn’t Janne, it wasn’t anyone from the cripple troop. It was Lucy.

I recognized her even before she said her name. I’d deleted her number along with all the others, but the sound of her voice took me back for a second to a time that no longer existed to me. I felt the corners of my mouth forming a smile. But it withered away just as soon as Lucy haltingly offered her condolences. She sounded throaty, as if she had spent hours crying out of a false sense of solidarity.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s very nice of you to think of me.”

“I’m happy that I finally managed to reach you,” she said. I waited. I was less inclined than ever to discuss my conduct over the past year. She wasn’t stupid and understood that on her own.

“How are you, Marek?” she asked, her voice clear again, light and clear, and I could tell that one false word or a false tone would cause her to break down in tears again. I sniffed the tipping point of a nervous breakdown. Not that she was the type to fall apart, but she had her limits, and apparently I still knew her well enough to know where they were.

“How did you find out . . . ” I asked.

It was simple. She had called our house to try to catch up with me. She had spoken on the answering machine and a very nice man named Dirk had heard the message. He called her back, told her everything, and encouraged her to reach out to me, because in a situation like this I could surely use words of support from a dear old friend.

“Idiot,” I said.

She laughed. “No,” she said. “He just doesn’t know you very well yet.”

“You can drop the ‘yet.’” I said.

She said nothing and I was happy she didn’t try to engage in banter. She asked about my father, held her breath as I told her about him falling off the mountain and breaking his neck, and I heard her gulp loudly several times as I told her about viewing the open coffin. I was happy to be able to tell someone about it.

“I had no idea you had a little brother,” she said after a pause.

“I didn’t really.”

“But now you do.”

“Now I do,” I agreed halfheartedly.

“Can I come to the funeral?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Definitely not. You didn’t even know him, my father I mean.” I kept talking quickly since she wasn’t saying anything. “It’s a hole, this town where I grew up. Everything is weird here. My stepmother is a ridiculously young Ukrainian girl, and Claudia is slowly going crazy, and so am I . . . ”

“I’d love to help,” said Lucy. “At the very least I could babysit or something. Is your little brother a sweetheart?”

“A total sweetheart.” Suddenly I got angry at her. I couldn’t believe she was using the circumstances to slime her way back into my life. She’d found a moment of weakness, a moment when I had the feeling that things could perhaps be like they used to be. I thought it was insidious, and if anyone had said she meant well it would have just made me angrier.

“He’s very sweet, but you’re never going to babysit him, Lucy.” I heard the way she was taken aback by my change in tone—she hadn’t reckoned with such a rejection after I’d sounded so promisingly open,
almost like it used to be
. I could sense how her breathing changed at the other end of the line. I didn’t think she deserved any better.

“Don’t you understand that I feel guilty,” came blurting out of her. “Can’t you get it through your head that I was there, too? That nothing will ever be the same for me either?”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” I said wearily. She’d already made this case in countless tiresome letters. I didn’t need her feelings of guilt. I didn’t have any choice then and couldn’t do anything differently now. “I didn’t step between you and the animal because I’m so unbelievably chivalrous,” I said. “You can call me a superhero for all I care, but just bear in mind that I never was one. You’re confusing me with somebody else. It was first and foremost a reflex, and secondly an accident. I was shitting myself and often wished afterwards that I hadn’t done it, in which case it would have been you instead of me. That’s why I don’t want to talk to you, Lucy. I don’t want to have to keep thinking over and over again about deciding between my face and my honor.”

I didn’t hear her crying, but I knew she was, and it pissed me off.

“I’ve told you once and for all that I don’t want to see you anymore,” I said. “Never again. It’s nothing to do with you, I just don’t want to see anyone. I don’t exist anymore, get used to it. My other friends already have. Don’t call me anymore and have a nice life.”

She hung up without answering and I threw the phone against the wall. It popped apart into two pieces, the battery fell out. I shoved all the pieces under the bed and lay back down under the covers. Then I thought of Janne again. I would have talked to Janne because she was different from Lucy. She didn’t come from the world of the undamaged. She was marked like me. You didn’t have to explain things to her. I wanted to talk to her, see her, kiss her. But she didn’t call. Maybe she was trying at this very moment and couldn’t reach me. I got up again, put my phone back together, and turned it on. But it didn’t ring.

T
here’s going to be a Ukrainian funeral reception,” said Claudia to me when, a little later, I came downstairs staggering slightly as if I were drunk. I sat down on the couch, put my feet up on the ugly two-level glass side table, and listened to the menu. Chicken soup, pierogis with fish, some slimy oatmeal kind of thing, and a never-ending supply of vodka.

“Very nice,” I said.

“It’s heartwarming,” said Claudia. “They have written a shopping list and are off to buy everything in a few minutes. I thought perhaps you would like to accompany them and help them carry everything.”

“Nothing I would rather do,” I said, taking my feet off the table. Then I exploded. “Why would you say that,
perhaps you would like to accompany them
? I don’t have the slightest desire to, and you know that. If you want to ask me, if you expect it of me and insist on it, then put it that way. I’m sick of all the sugarcoating.”

“It’s the downside of functioning in polite society,” said Claudia unmoved. “To give you another example, I’d love to smack you right now but I’m not going to do so out of the same considerations.”

“Me? Smack me? Why?”

“Because your self-absorption and that look on your face that says I’m-so-superior-and-sick-of-it-all gets on my nerves,” said Claudia flatly.

“That’s not the look on my face, it’s just the way it was sewn together.”

“Don’t talk to me about your face,” said Claudia. “I know it a lot better than you at this point.”

We had to break off the conversation because Evgenija popped in with the shopping list, the length of which made me woozy. She sat down with Claudia and they both went over the list and conferred about a few items. I listened to them in amazement. They really looked like sisters. And what exasperated Claudia about Tammy’s plan yesterday was no longer an issue today. The reception didn’t seem to bother her at all even though yesterday she’d said that normal people in Swinehausen hired a caterer, a specific caterer, one who had specialized in such things for generations. The town was aging, lots of people died regularly, and if you wanted to belong you didn’t break ranks when it came to the funeral arrangements. Now Claudia voiced nothing but enthusiasm for putting together the food, and she seemed to be sincere—I recognized the tone of her voice.