Russian Tattoo (26 page)

Words are slipping away from Frankie's mind, strangled by the ravenous blob of cancer, by the insatiable tentacles that have all but paralyzed his right side. It is time, he tells us, to think of saying good-bye. On a late November day, when naked branches etch a filigree pattern against the frosty sky, one by one we go into Frankie's room. Heather is here, too, on an emergency Army leave. The Army physician who read her father's chart, she says, signed her documents required for a leave without asking a single question.

First Frankie's friends disappear behind the door, then his relatives from Florida, then his parents. They come out stooped and humbled, mouths tightened, eyebrows mashed together. Sasha runs out sobbing, her hand over her wet face, and I realize this is her first experience with grief. Andy goes in and stays what seems like a long time, although time has warped and become as unreal as everything else. When he leaves the room, he hurries outside, his head down so no one can see his eyes.

Then it is my turn. Frankie is half-sitting in bed, not able to say much. His language has become tentative, making every word sound significant because it takes him so much effort to produce it. How ironic, I think, that of all human faculties it is language, the only thing I know something about, that Frankie's cancer has chosen to plunder.

I have a bracelet in my hand made from honey-colored chunks of Baltic amber, one of the few pieces I brought with me when I arrived in Washington on an Aeroflot flight. I put the bracelet into Frankie's good hand, and, as he closes his fingers around it, it glows inside his palm like a tiny sun. I say it has been a privilege taking care of him. I say it was he who, in a strange way, has looked after the rest of us, his grace and dignity binding us all together.

He says, “It is what it is.”

Andy and I are in a hospice, where we brought Frankie two weeks ago. For three days now he has been in a coma, we are told; his consciousness has turned off, no longer willing to fight. We walk along a hallway glittering with shiny stars and tinsel, past a Christmas tree decorated with birds and angels. The festive lights blink on the walls, the holiday celebrating birth so incongruous with the purpose of this place.

Frankie is in an auditorium full of windows seeping in the gray light of a December afternoon, among a dozen other people reclined in wheelchairs. His eyes are closed, his head tilted to the right. Jen is standing by his side. She is wearing a coat, ready to leave, her round face resigned, her curls limp on the pink shoulders of her parka. She has been here since morning, she tells us.

We take her post and sit with Frankie for a while. His face is a mask; not a single muscle moves. His breathing is even and quiet, almost inaudible. A young man in a blue uniform asks if we want to move him back into his room; it is time for a sponge bath, or for some other procedure Frankie will not be aware of.

For half an hour we walk around, past some doors open and others closed, past the Santa Claus hunched under a glittering sack of presents, waiting for the procedure to be over.

In his room, Frankie lies on his back, sleeping. We know, of course, that he is not really sleeping, that what looks like sleep is a stand-by mode before his system shuts down completely. There are chairs on either side of his bed, and we sit down. Andy takes his right hand, and I take his left, with an amber bracelet on his wrist, his palm cool and soft and completely pliable. We sit like this for some time, holding Frankie's hands, the only way we can connect to him right now.

“Do you think he can feel that we're here?” I ask.

“Don't know,” says Andy. He has been pragmatic for this year and a half, rational and full of common sense, celebrating with Frankie's many friends the last months of his brother's life.

I think of a photograph hanging on the wall of my in-laws' apartment: Andy's young mother, in makeup and a pretty dress, with an obligatory photographic smile radiating from her face, on a 1950s couch with six-year-old Andy and three-year-old Frankie. Andy is already old enough to register the significance of the moment, so he is sitting up straight, a little crimped by his new suit, smiling into the camera. Frankie is still in the stage where conventions don't matter, so he is stretched across the sofa, resting his head in the lap of his brother.

I look at the two brothers now: the younger one in a hospice bed, in a coma; the older one hunched over, holding his hand. I see the muscles in Andy's face tighten. I tell him we should stay. He says we need to go.

The phone in our house rings at 5:20 in the morning after we return from the hospice. I know what I will hear. I try to imagine what went on in Frankie's ravaged brain. I try to imagine his body light and almost suspended, flooded with the sensation of wholeness, as if every part of him ceased being separate and coalesced into one.

Thirty-Nine

W
hen Sasha is thirteen, she takes a test and gets accepted into the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, a summer camp at Siena College in Albany, New York. Before departing for her four-week program, she bleaches her hair to the color of endive. As part of their camp experience, every participant is required to spend two hours a day at the library, in addition to a daily four-hour class on the history of philosophy. Her voice on the phone drips with sarcasm when she asks what kind of summer camp has a library, but we hear no snide remarks about the class itself. Her teacher is a twenty-something PhD whose arms are covered with tattoos from wrist to shoulder. The tattoos are called a sleeve, she informs us, hinting that she might choose philosophy as her major in college. Yet when Sasha returns home, instead of analyzing Descartes and Kant, she spends a year poring over books on tattoos.

At fourteen, Sasha secretly puts in a nose ring, judiciously hiding it when we are around. I glimpse it accidentally when she is in a dentist's chair. Strangely, the sight of her pierced nose revives the images of summers at my Russian dacha, of the Gypsy bull tied to a pole with rope threaded through a metal ring hanging out of his nostrils, which, I know, is a sad and unfair juxtaposition I shouldn't share with anyone but Andy.

From my Russian trip, I bring back a black-and-white film called
Wild Dingo,
the movie I remember from my own adolescence, thinking that actors on the screen may wield more power than pages in a book. Sasha watches it to the end, maybe because the introverted characters do not engage in a great deal of talk. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl who has trouble connecting to her mother and her friends, not being part of the collective, according to the blurb. For a day, I resuscitate my hope that Sasha will express interest in my background. Then
Wild Dingo
is tossed into the box with the rest of the books and tapes I have lugged back from many trips to Russia, a sad linguistic graveyard where the abandoned relics from my former life have been collecting dust for years.

Because I can no longer fight Sasha's rejection of my linguistic heritage all by myself, I decide to hire a Russian tutor to come to the house and inject my daughter with a weekly dose of Russian classics and declensions.

Sasha suffers through the lesson, being polite to the stoical tutor. But when we are alone, she is blunt and unforgiving. “I hate reading Chekhov,” she spits out. “I hate declining adjectives and nouns. You can't make me do what I hate.”

I grapple for an appropriate response, clutching at the few wisps of sanity I have left, trying to prop up the argument so it doesn't devolve into a shouting match, like the fights I remember so well from my own childhood. Was I as stubborn and impossible? Did my mother have a point when she yelled at me in our Leningrad kitchen?

I don't know the answer to these questions, and my fumbling for a good response to Sasha produces nothing. The only action I can think of is to retreat to the garage, where I try to shake a cigarette out of the emergency pack I have stuffed in the rafters, spilling the whole contents to the ground I cannot see. Half an hour later, when Andy comes home, he finds me leaning on the inside wall of the garage, sniffling.

A month before her fifteenth birthday, my daughter announces she has become a vegan. I am not sure what a vegan is, and she rolls her eyes and obliges to explain.

“I eat nothing that comes from an animal,” she says. “Nothing.”

“Not even milk?” I ask. “What about yogurt and farmer's cheese and the butter we buy at the Russian store in Fair Lawn? You've always loved them. And what about ice cream?” I demand, not really believing she can part with dessert.

“Nothing,” she insists, staring at me with the white, angry eyes of an annoyed true believer. “Not even honey.”

“Honey?” I say in the limp voice of someone who has just been electrocuted. “Why not honey?”

She looks at me with bemused contempt, not gracing my dense question with an answer, then walks away to release herself from the kitchen and this senseless conversation.

I start after her, as if I could keep her here, chained a little longer to all the animal protein so shamelessly exhibited on the shelves of our refrigerator, the protein, I am convinced, her body still needs to grow and form. How ironic it is, I think, that of all the ways to express herself my daughter has chosen to remove from her life the comfort of food, the most visceral thing that tethers me—and every immigrant—to my homeland. I think of all those hearty soups and stews that simmer on the stove for hours, and those countless
kotlety
from Marina's Leningrad recipe, and
syrniki
Mama molds by hand from a gooey mix of farmer's cheese and sugar. I think of the recipes from the iconic
Book About Tasty and Healthy Food,
which adorned every Russian bookshelf, the leathery navy tome we read for entertainment because none of the necessary ingredients for its recipes could be found in Soviet grocery stores. The pictures from that book rise before my eyes—whole baked bass in butter sauce, casseroles with beef goulash and lamb pilaf, rows of stuffed cabbage and trays of rabbit stewed in sour cream—all those mouthwatering manifestations of pleasure that have now turned into a wall separating my daughter and me, the highest one yet between us.

After years of my mother's unsought advice followed by fights and sulking, there finally comes a confrontation. Mama and Andy are in the kitchen, getting ready for dinner. She has made a pan of
kotlety
, oval-shaped hamburgers I remember from my childhood. One slips off the spatula and falls to the floor; Andy picks it up and throws it into the garbage. When I come downstairs, I see my mother fish the
kotleta
out of the trash, then carefully wipe it off with a sponge we use to clean the sink, and from Andy's tensed back I know what he is thinking. “No dirty, clean,” my mother says. This is not the first time she has picked the food off the floor, or reused paper napkins, or insisted we eat leftovers while fresh chicken or lettuce sit patiently in the refrigerator turning old.

Andy's eyes swim with rage. “You have to stop interfering, do you understand?” he says to her. She doesn't understand. She thinks she is protecting us from all this American waste. “
Kotleta
clean,” she says, “no dirty.”

I could step in between them as I have done so many times before, but I don't. I could tell my mother to stop saving us, in Russian. I could take the hamburger from her hands and give it to the dog. But I don't move. For the first time, I refuse to be a buffer: between my old country and my new one, between the benefit of saving and the harm of wasting, between how I was raised and how I am living now. What is happening in the kitchen has ceased to be about a dropped
kotleta
. It has crossed the border of civility; it has crossed the limit of Andy's patience.

My mother wraps the cleaned
kotleta
into a paper towel, opens the refrigerator, and carefully places it on the upper shelf. Andy grabs the pan off the stove and flings our entire dinner into the garbage. The glass top hits the wall and shatters into shards on the ceramic floor. “If you don't stop meddling in our life, I'll send you back to fucking Russia,” he yells, as if my mother could understand what he is saying.

She understands perfectly. Her mouth is pinched; her eyes fill with tears.

“I leave,” she says, sniffling, shuffling down the basement stairs. “I go soon,” she mutters, a threat I heard so many times in Leningrad.