The Cosmopolitans (3 page)

“
Malcolm goes to Yale!
”

“
And he’ll keep going until he’s thirty. Those professors can tell
he’s nerazviti, underdeveloped.
”

Stalina flogged her topic. Osip tried to make the radishes into
stars, as his grandmother Baba Rufa had done, and dropped new
tissues into Milla’s lap.

“Now is time,” Stalina finally said, her English taking the
place of a concession, “for you to go upstairs and put on something
coquetlivaya
. See how I am?” Stalina passed her tiny raccoon hands
over her low-cut brown blouse. “And heels high. See how long my
legs are looking? If you just try a little bit, you can look like the
painting
Neznakomka
. You have nice cheeks and black hair like
Strange Lady in painting, but she has the style. She has little hat,
yes, Osya?”

In the end, Milla agreed to wash her face and change her clothes.
Stalina tried for mascara, was rebuffed, took it in sportsmanlike
fashion. Milla had reached the kitchen door before Osip could muster
a properly hearty, “
No more crying, or I’ll give you something to
really cry about.
”

Milla

Upstairs, Yana sat atop a pile of clothing she planned to donate
to less enlightened women, bracing herself on one foot while taking
photographs of the other. Whereas Milla, trying to save their parents
money, had insisted that state college would be fine, Yana had fought
and won herself Columbia, professors who interested themselves in
her feet.

Milla kicked desultorily at the pile until Yana looked up from
the camera. “Apparently, a skirt is the least I can do,” Milla said. She
sat on the
rug. It was the closest thing to her and she was too tired to
stand. “Is there something here that would fit me?”

Yana raised an eyebrow. Actually, she raised both. She’d been
practicing for years, but still hadn’t mastered it. “You’re just letting
her pimp you out?”

“Yes. I am just letting her pimp me out.” Milla sighed, traced
a woolen flower with her finger. Yana seemed to want a debate. “I
can’t wear my own clothes, okay? Everything I own, except for
these, I wore with Malcolm, so I can’t wear it.”

Yana half-rolled off the pile, a bubble skirt tumbling in her wake,
and sat herself next to Milla. “I know. In the middle of dinner, you
could drop a tampon. That always freaks guys out,” she said, with
the hard-bitten authority of one who’d done accidentally what she
was proposing Milla do on purpose.

Milla shook her head.

“Come on. You know Mom would be all…” They looked at
each other. It was impossible to imagine what their mother would
be like. Milla waited for another unhelpful idea to alight upon her
sister. There was something restful about watching this process cycle
through. “Hey,” Yana said, hitting her on the arm, “Now that you and
Malcolm are taking a little break, don’t worry, you’ll totally get back
together, but now, you get a chance to explore your sexuality.”

Milla nodded and tried to believe the part about getting back
together.

“You could find out you like women, or peeing on people.” Yana
crawled forward and pulled a plaid skirt, a black sweater, and heels
from the pile.

“What’s wrong with the sweater?” Milla said.

“Too low-cut. It’s all, ‘Come taste my melons, honeybees.’”
Yana pointed her index fingers at her flat chest.

Milla stepped out of her sweatpants and reached for the skirt.
Although Yana’s break would go on for another week, Milla’s ended
tomorrow. She would have to wake up at six, drive the road that for
seven months had meant returning to Malcolm. Now, it would only
mean returning to her eight o’clock auditing class. It would feel like
a road through the shadow of the valley of death, where Jesus was
supposed to be with you so you did not fear, but, being Jewish, Milla
would be alone. Would this breakup drive her to Christianity? She
should tell Malcolm: he, whose parents were such big Jews, was
responsible for assimilation. A tear, on behalf of the Jewish people,
came to her eye.

Yana put an arm around her and led her to the large mirror in
their parents’ room. They looked together into the frame. The skirt
was longer on her than it had been on Yana. Milla had been shocked
by sadness into looking like she was fourteen, a Catholic-school
girl, of the actual, not music-video, variety. Could sadness make
your ankles thicker? She could tell that Yana, inexperienced in
having something nice to say, was furiously attempting to summon
a compliment. She cried again, for Yana’s underdeveloped social
skills.

Katya

Katya was neither dyeing her hair nor shaving it off. She was
taking neither drugs nor a pregnancy test. She was not, in short,
doing any of the things her parents feared.

Katya was trying to feel happy, while simultaneously preventing
the voice of former Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev from coming
out of her mouth.

The bathroom, in which her mother had installed light bulbs
too bright for the sockets, light bulbs that fizzled in complaint and
burned the backs of your eyes, was not the best place for Katya’s
work, but she had no lock on her bedroom door and both her sisters
were home.

She turned to the shower curtain, which had a map of the U.S.
(purchased by her father: no one taught geography in American
schools) and put her finger on New York, squeezed her eyes shut,
tried to ignore the pear-shaped light-ghosts. Happiness…New
York…She was Sid Vicious’s girlfriend (Yeah, she knew he was
dead, punk was dead, so what), not one he’d want to kill, like Nancy
Spungeon, but a good one, one who’d smear oil on his face to make
the pimples come, who’d chase away the MTV magnates with an
axe. “I’m punk enough for the both of us,” she imagined herself
saying to a sniveling Sid. She was on stage, screaming out:

Fuck — memory!

Fuck — society!

Fuck — the words you say!

Fuck — come what may!

She was particularly proud of the change in meaning between
the third and fourth
fuck
s.

The crowd moshed, screaming her name. Not her regular name,
Katya, but her punk name,
Vonyuchinka
, which meant “the stinking
one” in Russian. She opened her mouth to vomit down on them
— “
Comrades, thanks to your most efficacious efforts, gross radish
production has risen by an unheard-of and heroic percentage of six
and three tenths…
” Could her sisters hear her out in the hallway?
They — or, rather, Yana — continued to talk.

She waited for it to wind down, smothering her mouth with a
leopard-spotted towel.

“It’s time to go downstairs,” Yana said through the door. “Are
you on your cell phone?” Brezhnev grunted something about
ironworks. “Are you too cool to answer?”

“Or — not cool enough,” Milla said, with a smile in her voice.
Katya, still lip-locked to her towel, felt proud to be cheering her
sister up after her breakup. It was great to be such a loser that, just
by locking yourself in a bathroom, you created a party everywhere
else.

Yana said, “Time to face Potatoface.”

Milla didn’t laugh. Ha. Yana always thought she was so funny.

Katya lifted her face from the clammy towel, watched in the
mirror as her lips finally stilled.

The first time had been at her fourth birthday party. As she
unwrapped a gigantic stuffed monkey, a man’s voice burst from her
chest, saying something about disobedience in Romania, and her
mother scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom, sat on the
edge of the tub and said, “
Moy Greh
,” and cried.

Katya had thought
Greh
meant
Greek
, and kicked a Greek girl
in her day care center for weeks afterwards. Finally, she summoned
up the courage to check the word with Milla. It turned out that it
meant sin. Milla had been nice about it; nice, but nosy. Katya had
pulled her furry hood over her face and stuffed her mouth with the
salty hairs until Milla stopped asking.

Years later, during one of her parents’ parties, she realized
whose voice it was. Everyone was drunk and trading impressions.
“
Systema-titty,”
her mother’s friend Edward had growled, in an
unmistakable tone, and everyone instantly guessed: Brezhnev, the
unwitting erotic wordsmith, “Our Nabokov.”

She bit her lip to stop remembering and took out her flask. Vodka
made Katya feel very cultural, very right. It allowed her to go to
school sometimes, to answer questions sometimes. It was, as she’d
learned in ninth grade health class, a “powerful depressant.”

Milla

Katya had escaped upstairs, and Yana had invented some task in
the kitchen, of all places for her to be. Roman, the new-immigrant
nephew the Chaikins had living with them, had been shooed by Alla
Chaikin to the den to practice his English in front of the television.

The Chaikins had already complimented Stalina’s newest Art
Deco statuette, of an Asian man in mid-twirl, hand cocked at his
side, a whip in his fist. They had enquired about her uncle Lev,
who still hadn’t left his apartment, which was crazy; and about her
grandmother Byata, who’d moved to Boston, which was equally
crazy. All the parents had agreed America would be well-rid of
Hillary Clinton, a woman utterly lacking in
zhenstvinost
, feminine
charm, as well as any genuine feeling for Israel. Having concluded
those preliminaries to their mutual satisfaction, the parents now
freely bestowed their energies upon Milla and Leonid.