Super Sad True Love Story (18 page)

While he went on in his booming voice, a vodka shot glass of some weird garage-sale provenance shaking in his troubled hand, my mother, bored, leaned over to me and said: “
Kstati, u tvoei Eunice ochen’ krasivye zuby. Mozhet byt’ ty zhenishsya?
” (“By the way, your Eunice has very pretty teeth. Maybe you will marry?”)

I could see Eunice’s mind absorbing the basics of my father’s speech (Arabs—bad; Jews—good; Chinese Central Banker—possibly okay; America—always number one in his heart), while gauging the intent on my mother’s face as she spoke to me in Russian. Eunice’s mind moved so quickly through feelings and ideas, but the fear on her face reflected a life rushing by faster than she could make sense of it.

The toast put to rest, unraveled in some happy political mumbling, we shoveled in the food without reservation, all of us from countries historically strangled by starvation, none of us strangers to salt and brine. “Eunice,” my mother said, “perhaps you can answer for me this. Who is Lenny by profession? I never can figure out. He went to NYU business school. So he is … businessman?”

“Mama,” I said, letting out some air, “please.”

“I am talking to Eunice,” my mother said. “Girl talk.”

I had never seen Eunice’s face so serious, even as the tail end of a Baltic sardine disappeared between her glossy lips. I wondered what she might say. “Lenny does very important work,” she told my mother. “It’s, I think, like, medicine. He helps people live forever.”

My father’s fist slammed the dining table, not hard enough to break the Romanian contraption, but enough to make me draw into myself, enough to make me worry that he might hurt me. “Impossible!” my father cried. “It break every law of physics and biology, for one. For two, immoral, against God. Tphoo! I would not want such thing.”

“Work is work,” my mother said. “If stupid rich American want to live forever and Lenny make money, why you care?” She waved her hand at my father. “Stupid,” she said.

“Yes, but how Lenny knows about medicine?” My father lit up, brandishing a fork capped by a marinated mushroom. “He never study in high school. What is his weighted average? Eighty-six point eight nine four.”

“NYU Stern Business School rated number eleven for marketing, which was Lenny specialization,” my mother reminded him, and I warmed to her defense of me. They took turns attacking and defending me, as if each wanted to siphon off only so much of my love, while the other could stab at the crusted-over wounds. My mother turned to Eunice. “So Lenny tell us you speak perfect Italian,” she said.

Eunice blushed some more. “No,” she said, lowering her eyes and cupping her knees. “I’m forgetting everything. The irregular verbs.”

“Lenny spend one year in Italy,” my father said. “We come to visit him.
Nothing!
Bleh-bleh-bleh. Bleh-bleh-bleh.” He moved his body as if to imitate my walking through the Roman streets while trying to talk to the natives.

“You are liar, Boris,” my mother said casually. “He bought us beautiful tomato in market Piazza Vittorio. He brought down price. Three euro.”

“But tomato is so simple!” my father said. “In Russian
pomidor
, in Italian
pomodoro
. Even I know such thing! If he maybe negotiate for us cucumber or squash …”

“Zatknis’ uzhe, Borya”
(“Shut up already, Boris”), my mother said. She readjusted her summer blouse and bored her eyes into mine. “Lenny, neighbor Mr. Vida show us you appear on stream ‘101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.’ Why do you do it? This dick-sucking boy, he makes fun of you. He says you are fat and stupid and old. You don’t eat good food and you do not have profession and your Fuckability rankings are very low. Also he says
tebya ponizili
[‘you have been demoted’] at the company. Papa and I are very sad about this.”

My father looked away in some shame, while I curled and uncurled my toes beneath the table. So this was at the heart of their anger with me. I had told them
so many times
not to look at any streams or data about me. I was a private person with my own little world. I lived in a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. I had just learned to FAC. Why couldn’t they find a better use for their retirement years than this painful scrutiny of their only child? Why did they stalk me with their tomatoes and high-school averages and “Who are you by profession?” logic?

And then I heard Eunice speak, her straightforward American English ringing against the smallness of our house. “I told him not to appear in it too,” she said. “And he won’t anymore. You won’t, right, Lenny? You’re so good and smart, why do you need to do it?”

“
Exactly
,” my mother said. “Exactly, Eunice.”

I did not tell them that I had regained my desk. I did not say anything. I leaned back and watched the two women in my life look across a glossy Romanian table groaning beneath a plastic cover and twenty gallons of mayonnaise and canned fish. They were eyeing each other with a placid understanding. Sometimes mothers and girlfriends compete against one another, but that has never been my experience. It is quite easy for two smart women, no matter what the gap in their ages and backgrounds, to come to a complete agreement about me.
This child
, they seemed to be saying … 

This child still needs to be brought up
.

TEMPERANCE, CHARITY, FAITH, HOPE

FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

JUNE 25

EUNI-TARD
TO
GRILLBITCH:

Hi Precious Pony,

Sup, meathole? Oh, man. Or, “oy, man,” as my Jewish boyfriend would say. I’m feeling so weird these days. Wish you could fly over and we could go to Padma and get our hair done. Mine is getting so long and freaky looking. Ugh. Maybe I should get one of those ajumma perms like our moms have, you just blow dry them in the morning and they settle into a helmet. I’m also getting those famous ajumma hips too! Great, huh? I look like my aunt Suewon crossed with a duck. And my ass is SO FUCKING HUGE it’s getting bigger than Lenny’s, which is one of those crushed middle-aged asses, not to gross you out again. See, we’re perfect for each other! Just call me Fatty McFatty, okay?

Oh, Pony of mine. What am I doing with Lenny? He’s so, like, brain-smart, it’s intimidating me. I was intimidated by Ben in Rome because of his looks and I never felt super-secure in bed because of that. With Lenny it’s easier. I can be myself, because everything he does is so sweet and honest. I gave him a half-gag CIM blow job and he was so grateful he actually started to cry. Who does that? I guess sometimes I just want to want him as much as he wants me. He’s already talking of marriage, my darling little dork! And I just want him to relax and maybe not always be so cute and caring and trying to please me, so that maybe I can pursue him a little myself. Does that make any sense?

So I went to Long Island to meet his parents. He basically guilted me into going. His dad’s weird and hard to understand, but I like his mom. She doesn’t take crap from Lenny or her husband. We even talked about ways Lenny could dress better and be more assertive at work, and she actually kissed me when I told her I was taking Lenny shopping for breathable fabrics. She’s so emotional, which kind of reminds me of Lenny. Um, what else? They live in a pretty poor house. It looks like the kind of place my dad’s Mexican patients used to have in L.A. Remember Mr. Hernandez, the deacon with the gimp leg? They’d invite us to their little teensy house in South Central after church. I think his daughter Flora died of leukemia.

Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn’t SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don’t mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it. I was going to teen my sister but I was so embarrassed I just stood there and watched him read which lasted for like HALF AN HOUR, and finally he put the book down and I pretended like nothing happened. And then I snuck a peek and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading (I guess it figures, cause Lenny’s parents are from Russia). I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolsoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was almost finished.

And he’s too nice and humble to flaunt the fact that he knows so much, so it’s not like I’m getting it in my face, but sometimes he’ll talk about Politics or Credit or something and I’m like what? I’m just DREADING the day when I have to see his Media friends and they’ll all be talking like that, even the girls. I guess if I went to law school like my mother wants I’d learn to be like that too, but who the hell wants to go to law school? Maybe I should go back to doing Images like I did at Elderbird. Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class said I had “super talent” and even at Catholic the nuns all freaked out over my “spatial skills.”

It’s weird because things are so nice with Lenny, but a lot of the times I feel like I’m alone. Like I have nothing to say to him and he just thinks I’m an idiot behind my back. He says I’m smart because I learned Italian but that wasn’t really so hard. It’s just memorization and then copying the way Italians act, which is easy to do if you’re from an immigrant family, because when you go to nursery school for the first time and you don’t speak any English it’s all about copying what others do. I know it’s still sweet of Lenny to try to build up my self-esteem by saying I’m smart, but sometimes I just want to get out of his life and move back to Ft. Lee where I belong and try to help my family, so it’s not all just Sally and my mom dealing with that black hole in the living room a.k.a my dad. Oh, and if Lenny mentions meeting my parents ONE MORE TIME I swear I’m going to nunchuk his ass. He just doesn’t get it sometimes. And he doesn’t WANT to get it, which is why I get so angry at him. He thinks we’re both from “difficult families” as he likes to say, which just isn’t true at all. I’ve met his and there’s just no comparison.

So I had lunch and went Real Time Shopping with Sally and now I’m kind of worried for her. She has this like blank stare and everything I talked about she was like “uh-uh.” She has, like, no idea who she is. On the one hand she wants those Saaami nippleless bras and on the other hand she wants me to go to some stupid church group at Barnard. And she gained a lot of weight, not just the freshman fifteen, and she looks sad and dumpy with her weight on, so I told her she better watch what she eats, and she just looked at me like I wasn’t there. The only thing that floats her boat is Politics. She and these other fat girls are all into protesting and talking about Rubenstein and how we’re not a free country anymore. And when I remind her how she’s supposed to be religious not Political she just says that Christianity is an “activist’s creed.” I think I want to meet whoever told her to say that and punch him in the face. I love her so much, Precious Pony, I think next to mom she’s the most important person in my life, and I don’t know how to help her, because it’s not like I’m some great role model myself, right?

Anyway, I went with Sally to this really pretty park in the East Village called Tompkins Square and there are all these Low Net Worth Individuals there and they’re camped out with all their dirty things and they don’t have food or clean water and they have all these really old computers they try to boot up but really they have no Images or streams. So after Sally left I ran home and got all my old äppäräti and I gave them out to a bunch of people in the park, so maybe this way they can look for jobs or contact their families. They were so happy to have my old ghetto stuff that it made me sad because this is what their lives have become and just last year some of them worked in Credit or were engineers. There was this one man who was actually quite handsome, tall and Germanic-looking, but he didn’t have all his teeth. He was in the National Guard and they sent him to Venezuela and when he came home they didn’t pay him his bonus. His name was David. He was really nice and he hugged me and said we were all in this together. And I thought, I wish things were better for you, but we’re not all in this together. Then when I was leaving I saw this old fountain that had like a gazebo with four corners and on each there was a word, “Temperance, Charity, Faith, Hope.” And I don’t know why but something about those words made me think of my dad and how when I was young he used to put bandaids on my knees with those big thick fingers of his and say like he did to his patients who were children “All bettah now, all bettah now,” and I just started to cry like an idiot. And then I thought of Lenny and this elephant we saw in the zoo and how I kissed his big nose and the look on his face. The look on his face, Pony! I don’t know about temperance or faith, but what about charity and hope? Don’t we all need that?

Ugh, why am I always whining to you? Sorry for being so down. When I see you I’m going to give you a big, big kiss right between your little titties, my one and only cum-slut, princess of all that is good and right in the world!

GRILLBITCH
TO
EUNI-TARD:

Dear Precious Panda,

Waka-waka, ass-sucka! Whut-a-happenin? Sorry, I’m a little hungover and depressed myself. I went to a party at Ha Ng’s, that cute Vietnamese girl from Catholic who had her stomach stapled. We got wripped on Mai Tais and this flip girl from UGuangdong-Riverside threw up on herself. NASTY! So why I’m depressed is because I think Gopher is having an affair. And not with Wendy Snatch either, but with this Mexican betch that I saw blowing him in his car at this fish taco place in Echo Park. Yeah, I followed him, and then I figured out his password on Teens (it’s “PORKadobo” in case you want to stream all his shit, ha ha!) and they’ve been sending each other these illeterate love notes for three weeks now. He calls her chuleta and all she can say in English is “Hi, babee.” So I went on this new Teens site called “D-base” where they can digitize you like covered in shit or getting fucked by four guys at once and I sent Gopher all these Images of myself getting fucked by four guys at once. It’s like you said, I’ve got to own my feelings about Gopher and that’s the only way he’s ever going to respect me and not fuck around with some gross illegal immigrant fuck-tard who probably rates 300 on a Credit Pole. I hope they deport her ass soon. Anyway, he came over to my parents house and fucked me in the ass, which I guess is a good sign because we haven’t done that in a while, and then it’s been three hours since he’s responded to that bitch on Teens, so all I’m doing is staring at my äppärät waiting for some more incriminating shit to pop up.

What’s wrong with us, Precious Panda? Why can’t we find guys who are just right for us? At least your Lenny loves you so much he’ll never ever cheat on you. I can’t understand why you’re feeling so insecure about him. So he’s brain-smart. Who cares??? It’s not like he’s some superstar Media guy or VP at LandOLakes. So he REALLY, REALLY READS instead of scans. Big whoop. Maybe you guys can read to each other in bed or something. And then you can sew your own clothes. HA HA HA. Anyway, looking good is the new smart, and I don’t think you should have kids with him because you’ll have really ugly children.

I’m sorry you saw some poor people in the park, my sweet, sensitive panda, but you’re right we’re not all in this together. I think what your sister is doing is cool though. Someone needs to stand up and say something to these dumbasses in charge of everything. You go, Sally! Oh, shit. I gotta subtract. Why does alcohol make you go so much? Is that a scientific thing?