American Gypsy Read online

  I lost most of my friends, my Gypsiness proving too much of a deterrent to their popularity, and whenever I could, I joined my parents on the road. The hectic stage life never allowed much time to dwell on school politics.

  When we relocated to Los Angeles in the summer of 1990, we thought of it as another tour stop. “Here goes nothing,” Dad had said when we landed at LAX, winking like he was about to set off on some grand adventure. Never mind the fact that we barely spoke English. Since I spoke more of it than the rest, I knew that in case of an emergency, the task of communicating would fall on me. The prospect hurried my steps ahead of my parents across the crowded airport. Mom’s brother, my uncle Arsen, had assured us that he would wait outside to pick us up when she called him before we left Moscow. Nevertheless, we would have to make it from the gate to the passenger pickup without having to utter one English syllable.

  In fifth grade, my foreign-language teacher, Ludmila Ivanovna, taught our class a traditional Scottish folk song called “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” She wrote the lyrics on the chalkboard, expecting us to memorize them. Ever since then I had been obsessed with the English language, which sounded like spoken silk to me. For my eleventh birthday, I had asked my parents for a Russian-English dictionary, and I read it like a novel, though I didn’t understand most of it.

  But now that I had a chance to practice what I’d learned, I couldn’t remember a single word. It didn’t help that once outside we discovered that Uncle was not there. An hour later, at one forty-five in the morning, we were still waiting. Roxy slept slumped over the mountain of our belongings: canvas bags and leather suitcases.

  Thanks to an entire can of hair spray, Mom’s hair, also styled in the Lioness, didn’t move at all as she paced the sidewalk and peered into every passing car.

  “Should I call them? Maybe they got the dates mixed up.”

  “We’ll hail a taxi.” My father sat on the bench, smoking. He shook his head side to side, slowly. I couldn’t see his expression from under the brim of his fedora, but I heard him whisper “Hahs amareh khula (May he eat shit)” in Rromanes. Like most Russian Roma, Dad’s primary language was Russian. But when it came to swearing, he’d often make an inadvertent switch to the language of his ancestors, as if that somehow authenticated his complaint.

  At the tail end of another hour a gargantuan vehicle dawdled to a stop in front of our bench.

  Uncle Arsen lowered the passenger window and leaned out, grinning, his tall, wiry frame bent at an awkward angle, head nearly touching the ceiling.

  Moments later we were speeding down the freeway, and I was amazed that even at this hour I could see into the depths of the city, thanks to its billboards and traffic. Moscow at night had the softness of a child’s bedroom illuminated by a night-light. Los Angeles didn’t seem like a city that would ever be caught sleeping.

  “Will you help?”

  My sister’s question dragged me away from the car window. “What?”

  “To find George Michael. Will you?”

  “Go back to sleep, Roxy.”

  Outside, like a beacon in the dark of an unfamiliar ocean, the Fox Studios’ sign shone over the freeway. It was beautiful.

  “What do you think?” Uncle glanced around expectantly. “Bought it last week. It’s called Cadillac Eldorado.”

  In Moscow, where traffic rolled down the streets like mince out of a meat grinder, cars weren’t a necessity; hop a bus or a trolley, get a taxi, or use the metro that stretched below the city in a subterranean spiderweb. Dad had bought a car mostly to transport his instruments, and it was a special occasion each time we mortals could ride in it.

  “Very big,” Dad volunteered, with Mom adding “Oh yes,” as if they were speaking to a child.

  “It sure is,” Uncle said, although his shoulders had fallen in response to the thin praise.

  Uncle Arsen’s one-bedroom Hollywood apartment had no wallpaper—I was shocked, thinking they hadn’t the money to properly finish it. Later I’d learn that the spit-up color on its naked walls had a name—eggshell white—and that most dwellings in America came with bare walls and carpets stapled to the floor.

  Uncle’s wife, Varvara, met us at the door with a lukewarm smile, briefly flashing discolored teeth as she attempted to hug my sister and me.

  “Oh, look at you, Roxy.” She smooched her lips into my sister’s cheek. “So skinny, like a stick. And Oksana. Practically a woman, isn’t she, Arsen?”

  I remembered my aunt with thin dirty-blond hair, peering hazel eyes, and an omnipresent smile at the corners of her mouth. But three years in the States had loosened her at the waist so much that she resembled a nesting doll, the kind Russians put atop their samovars. On the other hand, my two teenage cousins hadn’t changed at all. Nelly’s straight blond hair and fair complexion stood in stark contrast to her younger sister’s curly black mop and uninterrupted eyebrow.

  We stayed up all night gossiping, reminiscing, planning—talking about everything and nothing at all. The adults gathered in the tightly furnished living room, drinking cups of Turkish coffee like it was water.

  Aunt Varvara had set the kitchen table with a variety of cold dishes served in tiny crystal saucers. There was the delicious ruby-red Vinigret—a robust salad made with fresh beets, peas, and carrots tossed in grape-seed oil. A dish of homemade sauerkraut spiced the air next to a mound of shredded carrot salad sprinkled with ground walnuts and raisins. Estonian and Krakovskaya kielbasas took up the center stage like a big mama duck surrounded by her little ducklings. Though not an actual meal, the spread worked for a late-night snack when accompanied by many bottles of vodka.

  Not wanting to be disrespectful, I ate, but the lack of American food sorely disappointed me. In Moscow, before McDonald’s had officially opened their first Russian restaurant in the late eighties, hamburger stands had begun popping up all over the city because some entrepreneur believed that hamburgers equaled wealth. Young people loved the idea of trying something American, even if older folks disapproved of any influence from the evil place across the ocean. Not much to look at, the hamburger still signified a threat. But my friends and I gladly paid two rubles to sample the Devil’s treat.

  Thin buns concealed a sheet of overcooked meat smeared with some red stuff and a sliver of dehydrated pickle. It did not put fear in our hearts, and it failed to fill our stomachs. But despite its shortcomings, we devoured this poor relative of the fast-food superstar as if we’d never eaten meat and bread at the same time in our lives.

  BRINGING DOWN THE WALL

  At my uncle’s house old habits and new converged into a patchwork of delirium. I itched to learn everything at once.

  “What is this?”

  “A water dispenser. And here’s the ice maker.”

  “How come your legs are so smooth?”

  “In America, girls shave their leg hairs with a razor, and their underarms, too. No one here likes to look like a yeti.”

  “Our pillowcases don’t fit any of your pillows.”

  “That’s because pillows here are not square like in Russia. Who makes square pillows nowadays, really! That’s so seventies. Real pillows are rectangular.”

  When my cousins went to school, Roxy and I watched TV, enraptured by flawless women and men promising instant miracles during the advertisements. I hadn’t realized how many important things our previous existence lacked.

  We had owned a VCR. One had to have money to afford a VCR. Most came from Japan via the black market, and ours was a gift from a Japanese journalist who had come to stay with us for a while. Electronics equaled status; if you had them, you would never fall short of friends. But even as my parents boasted about the JVCs and the Panasonics to many close friends who appreciated all of the name brands, one huge difference set them apart from truly having it all: sixty channels of cable television.

  I can’t recall much of what my parents were up to during those first weeks in America. Looking back, I see their absence had a definite cause:
something awful had begun brewing between them. And I either chose to ignore the signs or was too overwhelmed by pepperoni pizza and Murder, She Wrote to notice.

  Truth be told, my parents’ problems had started years before our move. Back then Dad claimed he couldn’t stand Mom’s drinking; this even while he drank himself. Mom insisted that he had driven her to it by cheating on her with her friends. In Moscow, they used to get into blistering fights, too wrapped up in each other to notice the destruction they were wreaking on Roxy and me.

  Once when I was about twelve, I was in my bedroom, reading Russian fairy tales and waiting for my parents to stop wishing each other dead. Earlier I had made a mistake of coming out. Dad was chasing Mom with a butter knife. What he thought he could do with such a dull weapon, I can’t say. They yelled for me to get back inside my room and shut the door, and I scampered away and tried to calm my sister down while listening to the ruckus outside. Roxy kept crying, and it was well past midnight when I finally read her to sleep in my bed. My eyes drooped, but I struggled to stay awake in case I needed to call an ambulance. A terrifying silence fell and I sneaked out to make sure no one was dead, tiptoeing on the freezing parquet floor down the hallway toward the only source of light streaming from the living room. My heart galloped ahead of me. I heard voices coming from behind the cracked living-room door, and I peeked around it.

  Mom was sitting in a chair with Dad kneeling in front of her, the butter knife still in his hand. They were both crying.

  “Don’t you know I love you,” he said. “Why do you torment me like this? Don’t you know how much I love you?”

  Mom didn’t say a thing. Just curled her fingers in his hair and sobbed.

  I felt like an intruder, but after I ran back to my bed I fell asleep within moments; I had heard my father’s words, and I believed in their truth. The memory of that night had always made me think that we would be okay, even in America.

  But I was wrong. One day we were an immigrant army of four, ready to take on Hollywood; the next, my parents were lashing out at each other with accusations of infidelity and abuse.

  “Don’t lie to these girls, Nora. I never planned on staying with you.” My father had a booming voice. “You’re nothing to me.”

  Mother’s hands flew to her hips, her eyes enraged and glassy. “I’d like to know where you plan on going, then. Where? Where will you go?”

  “Oh, I’ll be taken care of.”

  Mom halted as if she’d swallowed too much water and was about to choke. And then the words tipped over. “If it weren’t for my brother sending that visa you’d be playing Moscow clubs with your drunken buddies—”

  “Your brother didn’t want us here. I know that’s why he left out that paper. They’ve always been jealous of us, your brother and his wife. It’d make them deliriously happy had we been denied the entry and stayed to rot back in Russia, waiting for them to bless us with their packages of American crap. That’s what they wanted.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw my aunt hiding behind a potted fern while she punched a number (probably Uncle’s at work) into the kitchen phone.

  “You should be thankful,” Mom continued as if he hadn’t said a word, “that I brought you here, that I didn’t leave you after the shit you’d put me through all these years.”

  My father exploded. “Thankful? You were a nobody, derevnia (country bumpkin). I showed you the world, gave you the opportunity to work onstage. I could’ve had any woman. They lined up, one knockout after another.”

  “Oh, I see now. The only reason you came with me was to bring your slut to the States. Is that it? Why didn’t you just stay with her?”

  “She’s more of a woman than you’ll ever be. Look at you. You’re nothing but skin and bones!”

  “I should’ve run away from every one of you when I had the chance,” Mom shouted, and I knew that if someone didn’t intervene soon, my parents would start throwing things. That’s what happened once Mom grouped all of us into one category. Suddenly she wasn’t fighting just Dad but the entire population of the world, her children included.

  “I gave you all my life, my youth.”

  “Stop the melodrama. What about my life?”

  “The girls are going to hate you for this.”

  “You’ve made sure they already do with all your bad-mouthing.”

  I couldn’t take it any longer and burst into the living room. Wasn’t there any love left between them?

  “Will you guys stop? Split or make up, but stop yelling. Talk like normal people, so you can hear each other for once.”

  Dad’s face turned redder than it already was. “Unless you can stop your mother from harassing me, I have no use for you.”

  “Don’t call our daughter useless.”

  “With you as her mother…” Dad shrugged.

  I stood in between them, confused; it was difficult to tell if the argument had something to do with me now or if my parents threw my name in to piss each other off. All I remember is that with each day, their arguments intensified, and consumed everybody around them.

  Apprehension pulled at Roxy and me like rubber cement. Had our family really traveled all this way just to lose one another?

  CROSSFIRE

  We had been in America for two months when a recurring dream of drowning in a churning black ocean began to chase sweat down my back at least once a week. I flailed in the howling charred waves, skyscraper-size with ashen tips foaming, but I always woke before the ocean claimed me.

  A very bad sign.

  One morning Roxy and I woke up and Dad was gone.

  “Where did Papa go?” Roxy asked, rubbing her eyes and climbing on Mom’s lap.

  “Good morning, sladkaya (sweet),” Mom said.

  I said nothing. A few minutes earlier, I found a pile of photographs in the garbage can under the sink. I picked up one of Mom, Dad, and me taken in a studio when I was three. We were dressed up, our hair all the same length, just above the shoulders, and I was holding a stuffed rabbit in my hands. I think I was smiling in that picture, but I couldn’t tell. Dad had cut out my head along with Mom’s.

  Not long after, Aunt Varvara demanded we leave her house.

  Aunt Varvara was the only woman I’d ever known whose brows furrowed even when she was playing patty-cake, but still, until the day she ordered my uncle to fetch an apartment guide from the gas station a few blocks away, I loved her. The rest of the world might not have seen past her brusque exterior, but as a kid I listened to her recite children’s rhymes from memory, convinced that she was a fairy with the power to bring them to life.

  When Uncle came back, he tossed the magazine on the table and walked out of the house again, mumbling, “I don’t want to get involved in women’s business.”

  Even years after the incident, the two women kept the reasons behind the falling-out to themselves, but it must’ve been something worse than cancer or world hunger, because within a few days Mom, Roxy, and I were gone.

  My sister and I had expected our movie-star mansion at last. But when I saw the building and the neighborhood that was to be our new home, I almost dropped my canvas bag of clothes. Lexington Avenue was more concrete than grass. More sickly palm trees and dilapidated housing than the expected year-round California perfection. It looked as if a hurricane had barged through and no one had bothered to pick up. Our first American apartment was located on the second floor of a very noisy complex, a two-story dove-gray structure with a gated pool shaped like a cashew in the middle of a cement courtyard. Music spilled out of the windows, unfamiliar melodies bouncing off one another in decidedly non-American flight. Bars covered the windows, and graffiti crawled in bold strokes along the walls. I told my mother I had never imagined living somewhere identical to Butyrskaya Tyurma (Butyrka Prison) back in Moscow. “At least it has a roof,” my mother said as she squeezed my shoulder and bravely passed through the front gates.

  Uncle Arsen had arranged for the deposit and first month’s rent. He hardly
said a word as he helped carry the suitcases up the stairs. Mom unlocked the door and swung it open so that he could walk inside without bumping into her, which he did with tight lips and long strides. He dropped our things in the corner and went back to his car for more.

  “Is Uncle gonna help hang my posters?” Roxy asked. Once inside she had immediately unzipped her bag and pulled out the rolls of George Michael posters she had brought from Moscow.

  “No,” Mom said.

  “But why? He’s a boy and you said only grown boys like Papa are allowed to touch nails and hammers and Papa’s not here and when Uncle leaves who’ll hang them then?”

  Mom stood over the threshold peering into the courtyard.

  “He’s not a grown boy yet,” she said.

  Uncle left with a soft “Bye” and a softer “Sorry.”

  I almost immediately caught my little sister trying to grab a cockroach in the palms of her hands. “Ew, Roxy, let it go!” I shouted. The creature dashed in crazy zigzags toward the fridge, disappearing under it.

  After the initial shock and much frenzied clothes-shaking and closet-inspecting, we finally felt safe enough to hang up our things and put away the linens. We tried to make it a home over the next several days, all the while wondering if we had actually moved to Los Angeles or had somehow landed in a third-world country.

  Despite my anger at the way we’d been treated, my yearning for friends brought me back to my cousins’ house. Basically I chose to ignore the tendency that life has to cuff you in the face. I would walk the four blocks between our places almost every weekend, expecting Aida or Nelly to be as I remembered them, but they never answered the door even if I could see them tiptoeing behind the curtains.