Russian Tattoo (20 page)

We stare at our daughter's eyes struggling to stay open, at her blond hairs sticking out from under the cap like corn silk.

“Ten fingers, ten toes,” says Andy. His face has a fragile, unprotected look, an expression of unguarded openness I've never seen before. “She's perfect.”

I carefully touch the baby's face, and she wiggles her lips as though she were smiling.

“The doctor did a bikini cut,” Andy says. “I insisted.”

“Bikini cut?” I say. A bikini is the last thing that comes to mind right now.

“He cut below the hairline. You'll never see the scar.”

I've forgotten all about the scar, with the nine-pound infant trying to squirm out of her blanket in the crook of my arm.

“Willful, isn't she?” says a nurse, who is doing something behind my head.

Stubborn as a goat, as my mother would say, words that in Leningrad were always aimed at me.

Thirty

F
rom the day Sasha was born, Mama never again spoke of returning to Leningrad. It was understood that she would stay where her only granddaughter was. Did we even discuss it? I had filled out a three-page immigration form, a daughter requesting reunification with her mother. She simply stayed with us, reading chapter books in Russian by the crib, embroidering kitchen towels we never dared use, making buckwheat with onions and pots of sour cabbage soup.

She never looked back, it seemed. She left her life of seventy-­four years and stayed with me and Sasha. I couldn't understand why she never expressed any regret or nostalgia for her Russian life. It had already been eight years since I moved here, and I still missed my friends, the brown serpentine of Leningrad canals, the low cotton clouds steaming over the city from the Gulf of Finland. I could still smell the salty wind that sent cigarette stubs into the courtyards and in June whipped clouds of poplar seeds into a whirlwind of summer snow.

Mama never uttered a word about wanting to go back. She had left her apartment, the city where she lived a major chunk of her life, and her colleagues from medical school who remained her friends until the end. She left her native tongue, the only language she ever knew how to speak. She left her sister, Muza, with her sprawling brood of grand- and great-grandchildren and her only remaining brother, Vova, her cousins and aunts and her six nephews. She left Marina.

For the next few years, Mama made it her goal to bring Marina to this country. She focused her energy on filling out applications for my sister to participate in the green card lottery, learning about it from a Russian newspaper published in Brooklyn, her only source of information about what life was like outside our Nutley house.

Andy finds a carpenter to frame a bathroom on the third floor of our house, and my mother moves upstairs. Every day we collide in the kitchen, where she gives me advice on grocery shopping and the benefits of soup.

“You must eat soup for the first course,” she admonishes, citing the Soviet wisdom I have heard so many times before in our Leningrad kitchen. “Soup is essential for digestion and a healthy stomach. And you must eat it with bread. Bread is necessary for proper peristalsis.” She deliberately uses a physiological term, calculating that I will not be willing to argue with science.

“People don't eat soup in America,” I snarl back. “Not like we ate soup in Russia, every day.” I have lived eight years here without my mother policing my menu, and my peristalsis is working just fine, I want to tell her. Instead, I feel like striking back at her bread argument and her praise for soup, as if they were the true culprits. I feel like telling her that the food we choose to eat needs no criticism, especially from someone who only recently arrived from the land of string bags and lines. “And why did we stuff ourselves with bread?” I ask. “Because there was nothing else to eat. Because there were six
kotlety
for the three of us that had to last for at least two days.”

My mother purses her lips, and I can see she is offended. I know it wasn't her fault that we were allowed only one
kotleta
each, but her soup and bread tirades, her incessant advice about everything I do propels me back in time. I feel like a child again, stuck in our Leningrad kitchen, the place I thought I had escaped.

Andy and I are at a new Italian restaurant that just opened a few blocks from our house. We brought a bottle of Chianti because the restaurant does not have a liquor license—the main reason we chose to go there. It is a Friday night, and Mama is at home with Sasha. Our friends with small children are envious because we have a live-in babysitter. No, I say, what we have is a live-in babushka, with all the good and the bad that it entails.

Babusya
, she calls herself, the diminutive for
babushka
we all used to call my grandmother.
Babusya
, says Sasha, who is just beginning to speak.

I know that without my mother's help I wouldn't be able to finish my doctoral dissertation about how nonnative speakers acquire English articles, all those silly
a
's and
the
's—which I haven't completely acquired myself. I couldn't go back to teaching full-time at Hudson College. I know we are very fortunate to have a live-in grandmother, but the price for being so lucky is to have my mother back, mothering.

Andy is a psychotherapist, and he seems to understand these things better than I do. “We all wish we could choose our parents,” he says. “But it's all really just the luck of the draw. You're dealt a hand of cards when you're born and that's the hand you play. You cannot change that.”

“But I did change it!” I say, a bit too loudly, because a woman at the next table stops poking at her salad and lifts her eyes to look at me. “I left,” I mutter in Marina's dramatic whisper. “And I was fine, for nine years. Now she's here, back to monitoring my every step. Wear a hat or you'll catch a cold. Swaddle the baby or she'll get sick,” I mock. “My mother is back to controlling my life.”

Andy is patient and calm, sipping his wine, used to hysterical outbursts in his office. “She doesn't really control anything here,” he says. “She lives with us, and she doesn't even speak English.”

“But she's learning!” I cry in desperation. “And I am the one teaching her!” A few months ago I brought an ESL textbook home from work when Mama told me she wanted to start learning English. Now we go over a unit each week, and she diligently hands me the homework exercises I assign. She writes them in her careful, dogged letters, often phonetically, not noticing that she has misspelled a word. I review her pages, writing patient comments in Russian, pointing out the errors she couldn't notice. “Do you know the joke about bringing your own rope?” I ask Andy.

I don't feel like telling jokes right now, but this one seems very topical, so I oblige.

An American entrepreneur comes to a Soviet factory where the foreman boasts that Soviet workers never go on strike. Just give me a few days, says the American, and I guarantee you a revolt. The next morning, he tells the workers that they'll all be working twice as many hours for the same pay. There's not so much as a grumble in response. The following day he tells them they'll be working twice as many hours for half the pay.
Still no one says a word. Finally, in desperation, the American tells the workers that the next morning everyone is going to be hanged. Timidly, one man raises his hand. Good, thinks the businessman—finally, a protest! Will you be supplying the ropes, asks the worker, or should we bring our own?

“Bring your own rope,” Andy says, laughing. “I like that.”

We empty our glasses of wine, grateful that we brought a whole bottle.

I know I should start figuring out how to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to me, but I can't help feeling resentment. Before we left for the evening, I couldn't ignore Mama's slant-eyed look of disapproval. “Why do you need to go to a restaurant?” she grumbled. “You have a refrigerator full of perfectly good food!” Complete with a pot of soup she made three days earlier that needs to be eaten, preferably today, I thought. “You're always running somewhere out of the house; you never sit still. Just as you did in Leningrad.” Only now you have a baby, and you leave me here to take care of her, is what she probably meant.

I feel angry at my mother for chiding me about going out on a Friday night.

I feel guilty when I think of her reading a chapter book to Sasha on the second floor of our darkened house, of her switching off the light when my daughter falls asleep and quietly climbing the stairs to her room on the third floor.

In addition to feeling angry and guilty, I also feel stupid when we leave the restaurant because I am freezing cold walking the few blocks back home. I feel like an idiot shivering in the wind that blasts into my face, reluctantly yielding to a thought that my mother may have been right about the hat.

Thirty-One

M
ama and I have just returned from our pediatrician's office. For the first time in her two-year-old life, Sasha is running a fever. Take her home and give her Tylenol, says Dr. Marcus. In a couple of days she'll be fine.

At home, I take Sasha upstairs to her room and hold her in my arms. She is a bundle of burning flesh, a hot, tiny body that depends entirely on me. I think of the time when I was little and had a bad flu. I still remember that illness as a fever dream, as being drawn into a whirlpool under the oilskin of a black river so full of silent dangers no one had warned me about. I remember the sense of coming up for air when the cool weight of Mama's hand rested on my forehead before the wet pressure of a compress lifted my face above the surface of the water. Did she sit by my bed during the whole time I slipped in and out of delirium? Did she know from the beginning, enlightened by her physician's wisdom, that my body would win the battle and recover, that the whirlpool in the black river would not be able to claim me?

I rock my daughter, hoping she'll fall asleep, but she insists on playing with her stuffed toy Puffy, a little plush dog with floppy ears and a smile my ESL students gave me when I returned from maternity leave. She wraps her arms around Puffy the way I wrap my arms around her, and I look at the three
matryoshka
nesting dolls my mother brought when she arrived from Leningrad, the smallest only an inch tall, rising up like a tiny staircase on the chest of drawers next to the crib. I think of mothers and daughters stacked up inside one another and of the three of us living under one roof, like these
matryoshka
dolls—something unimaginable to me only a few years ago, something so natural and indisputable back home.

I hear the clanging of pots in the kitchen—Mama probably beginning her predinner leftover-evaluation ritual—when Sasha's body suddenly tenses and shudders in my arms, as if from an electric shock. Puffy falls on the floor, and I stare at my daughter, motionless and still. Her eyes are closed, and her head hangs back from my elbow, no longer supported by the muscle of life. I yell her name; I shake her. She doesn't open her eyes. She doesn't move.

I shout for Mama because I don't know what else to do, rush to the kitchen phone and dial 911. The man on the other end sounds calm. How can he be speaking in such a dispassionate voice as I'm telling him my two-year-old daughter has stopped moving? The truth is I don't even know what I'm saying to him. Without any effort on my part, it seems, my mouth does its work, wrapping around screams and howls, the only sounds it is capable of making.

The operator interrupts. “Is she breathing?” he asks.

I look at Sasha's motionless body in my arms, her closed eyes. I don't know if she's breathing. How can I know if she's breathing? She isn't moving. She isn't responsive. I hear myself shouting into the phone again. I don't know what I'm saying, but it feels like action. It's all I can do.

“Put a spoon in her mouth,” says the man on the other end, “so she doesn't bite her tongue,” and I am not sure I heard him right because this sounds like such a bizarre instruction.

I hear the doorbell ring. I hand the unmoving body of my daughter to Mama, whose face seems as white as the sink behind her, and race to the front door. A man in his twenties, our local travel agent's son, who helps his parents in the office two blocks down the street, is standing on the porch, panting. What is he doing here? Why is there a travel agent at my door?

We don't need any tickets right now, I think, ready to sprint back.

“I am an emergency volunteer,” says the man. “I ran straight from the office, to be here before the ambulance arrives.”

I hear him speak, but the only words that reach my brain are
emergency
and
ambulance
. This is an emergency, and an ambulance is on its way. The emergency involves my daughter. The 911 operator asked if she was breathing. I didn't know if she was.

The travel agent neighbor follows me into the living room, where Sasha is stretched out on the couch. Mama is next to her, with her hand on Sasha's wrist. This is the first sensory image my body processes since my daughter shuddered and froze. The picture imprints in my mind: Sasha's blue dress on the tan leather of the couch, her tiny wrist cupped in Mama's hand.

We lean over her as she opens her eyes. She is alive.

The paramedics say she had a febrile seizure. I don't know the word
febrile
, either because I've never heard it or because my mind is short-circuited and can't connect words to their meanings. Most likely, there is no permanent damage, they say. I would prefer they didn't preface their statement with “most likely.” After we see our pediatrician, we will need to schedule an encephalogram.

It is my fault, clearly, that I didn't detect Sasha's fever earlier, that I took her and Mama to my in-laws' swimming pool this morning, allowing her to roast in the sun. There is no doubt this outing pushed her fever even higher, bringing us to paramedics in our living room and an ambulance flashing its lights outside our house. How can such complete responsibility for another life be placed on any one person's shoulders? How did Mama withstand the burden of raising my sister during the war and later me in Leningrad, practically single-handedly?

I see Andy, who should be in his office seeing patients, walk through the front door. I should be surprised by his sudden appearance in the middle of his workday, but strangely I am not.

How did you know? I ask.

He says he didn't know. He just felt he had to come home.

The paramedics tell me they are going to take Sasha to the emergency room to lower her fever. We get into Andy's car and follow the ambulance along familiar streets I don't recognize in the red and blue glow of flashing lights in front of us.

The nurse in the emergency room greets us as if we were her long-lost friends. She is someone we do know, it turns out, Andy's former colleague from Jersey City Medical Center, Ann. For some reason, I am not surprised to see her, miraculously transplanted to this hospital tonight of all nights. This coincidence is simply another bend in the zigzag line of today's warped reality.

Andy tells her about the febrile seizure, or maybe she already knows what has happened from the paramedics' report. Ann is reserved and efficient, her careful hands undressing Sasha, her eyes letting us know we are going to be all right.

The next image burned onto my brain is Sasha naked, sitting in the sink of the emergency room, seemingly dazed in her lukewarm bath. She is unusually quiet, bouncing her palms over the surface of the water, as if discovering for the first time how resilient it is, yet how yielding. If Mama could see this, she would think we were insane, bathing the child in cool water, making her sick.

I call home and tell Mama that everything is all right. The seizure was the result of high fever, I say, and now Sasha is back to normal. Mama exhales and I hear wet, sniffly sounds before she quickly hangs up.

As we wait for the fever to subside, I tell Andy what had happened before he got home. I tell him about the passionless 911 operator and his bizarre instruction, about trying to stick a teaspoon between Sasha's teeth and failing because my hands refused to stop shaking. I allow myself to utter a sentence that has been stuck in my brain like a splinter, a statement that until now I was afraid to release into the air because it seemed to have the power to jinx the outcome.

“I thought she had died in my arms,” I say, daring to validate the dark gravity of this afternoon with words. “She was there and I was holding her. She was playing with Puffy. I held her, thinking she would be there forever, and then she wasn't. She was full of life one moment and then gone from life the next.”

The words come out hard and heavy, weighted down by the memory of those endless minutes that I sense will stay with me. I hear the sounds leave my mouth, and as they emerge between us, it is clear how insignificant and small everything else has become. It is also clear how unprotective I am as a mother, how vulnerable and underprepared. I have always taken my own mother for granted, shrugging away the offered lessons. I have failed to learn the parenting rules and blithely disregarded the homework.