I went home for Lariska’s wedding. My parents met me at the Pittsburgh International Airport. They looked like twins in their enormous matching parkas. It was March and cold. My father’s mustache was tinseled with ice; my mother’s hair appeared orange. I had seen them two months before, for New Year’s, but now they seemed changed and aged, and also shorter. We hugged, and they took away my bag. There was the smell of my mother’s old perfume and my father’s breath, smoky-stale. Five minutes later, we were still lumped together in this awkward three-person embrace, even as we scooted through the concourse and into the mini-train that took us to the parking area. “You’re home,” my mother said.
In the car, we listened to the radio. Usually there were tapes, Russian guitar or popular arias, but this time it was nothing but weather-and-traffic and some occasional high-pitched alerts, followed by cleanly spelled telephone numbers. When we went into the Fort Pitt Tunnel, the radio stopped. On the other side was Pittsburgh. It met us with a jolt of electricity and the wet glint from the rivers. I could never properly describe it, the way it spilled in front of you, the lighted tips of its buildings, the disco blue of the new stadium. It seemed impossible not to like it.
We drove to Squirrel Hill. My parents had a house there, a mousy, nondescript thing, brick with yellow siding, two diminutive windows peeking from above the gabled porch. Inside, the carpets had rotted, and the kitchen counters were green and scratched. They’d been renovating it slowly. Last time, it was the master bedroom: new hardwood floors, wallpaper with big glowing flowers. They wanted me to like it, but it just made me depressed.
This time, they showed me nothing. They flipped on the lights everywhere, and when I asked them if anything was new, they just shrugged, and then my father went to take out the garbage.
They put me in the guest room. There was a narrow bed and a narrow bookcase with my father’s books on masonry, pipe fabrication, and rigging of EOT crane. The wallpaper had thin vertical stripes. My mother perched on the edge of the bed and watched me unpack.
“You want some hangers?” she said.
I told her it was okay, it was just jeans and some sweaters.
“And the dress?” she said, and when I didn’t answer, she added, “For the wedding?”
“It’s not that kind of wedding,” I said.
I’d been planning on wearing a black skirt and a black button-down shirt. Synthetic, stretchy, wrinkle-free. But my mother said you don’t wear black to a wedding. “We’ll go shopping at the mall,” she said.
I said, “Fine, if you want to.”
“It’s not for me.”
She looked at me, and I could tell she was wondering what kind of person wore black to a wedding. An unhappy person.
“You want some tea?”
“I’m just tired,” I said. “Do you mind if I go to sleep?”
She told me she was utterly opposed to it. Then she kissed me and went to get some towels from the closet.
It was strange how little my parents knew about me, how little I told them. They knew where I worked, where I lived, what car I drove, from whom I bought insurance. But they’d never met my boyfriend, and they didn’t seem to know I even had one. Every once in a while they visited me in Boston. I took them to Gloucester for seafood or, if it was winter, I showed them ice sculptures at Frog Pond. We’d drive through Brookline and I’d point out Tom’s house. Tom, they always said, which one is he? And each time I’d explain that he was the friend who’d helped me pick a DeWalt cordless drill for my father’s birthday. Ah yes, they’d say. They always remembered that drill.
Part Two
They were gone when I woke up next morning. There was a note left for me on the floor: Dear Masha, There’s oatmeal in the cupboard + your special tea from the Russian store. Miss you!!! Back at 4:30. Your mother. They started early. My father worked at a steelmaking facility, and my mother was a nurse’s aide at a retirement home in Greenfield. Their days off were Mondays and Tuesdays, and except for New Year’s, they worked on all holidays. Today was Thursday.
I brushed my teeth. In my slippers and bathrobe, I shuffled through the house. I opened drawers and cabinets, I looked through yesterday’s mail, I checked my mother’s prescriptions on the dresser, rolled up and held together with a rubber band. The rooms smelled thinly of heart medicine. Nothing seemed different.
Downstairs, I poked through leftovers, which looked like small corpses encased in aluminum foil. I found a stray bag of Lipton tea. I watched two sitcoms on TV and a show about rich high school kids in California.
My mother called at eleven-thirty. She asked me how I’d slept, what I’d eaten for breakfast, and whether I’d called Lariska yet.
I said I hadn’t.
“What are you waiting for?” she said. “She knows you’re here.”
“How does she know?” I said.
“I spoke to her mother. They’re expecting you.”
My father called an hour later.
“You’re here?” he said, as if he thought he might have dreamed my arrival last evening. “You talked to your friend yet?”
“Lariska?”
“You’ve got other friends around here?”
The answer was, I didn’t.
I’d known Lariska since our first year in Pittsburgh. Had we had other choices, we might have picked other friends, but, as the saying went, in a fishing lull, even a lobster is a fish. It was an odd sort of friendship. I was quiet, and she was brash and impatient. She always tried to cram some sense into my head, and since I didn’t think her own life was so great, I was tiring of her lectures.
She worked for a consulting firm in New York, a job I considered glamorous and lonely. Gleaming shoes, rolling luggage, sunlit airports. I, too, used to be a computer programmer. I’d worked for an insurance company, nine to five, no travel required. It wasn’t a bad job — it had its moments of creative sparkle — but I didn’t love it and I wasn’t great at it, and after five years, I stopped. I was in grad school now, at Harvard, studying Slavic Languages and Literature, surviving on loans and a small TA-ship I got for teaching Intermediate Russian Grammar to undergraduates. I was poor and my career prospects were uncertain, but I loved it. I lived in West Newton, behind a tiny movie theater. There was a fitness club across the street, and a restaurant, where I ordered big plates of homemade pasta. Tom came over a couple times a week. On Wednesday nights, he brought takeout sushi, and we ate at my tiled kitchen table, jostling and elbowing each other, and bumping our knees. On Saturday nights, we went out.
When I told Tom about Lariska’s wedding, he seemed to think it was a good thing.
“You want to come with me?”
His face blurred into something impersonal. “We had an agreement,” he said. He coughed a few times, the way he did when something made him nervous. “Maybe if this was next year.”
I gave him a look like Who are we kidding?
We’d met in a language seminar at Harvard. He was finishing his dissertation on Byzantine culture, and we’d agreed he had to focus on his work. Once he was done, we’d drive across the country; he’d meet my parents in Pittsburgh and I’d meet his in Colorado; we’d rent an apartment together, somewhere near Harvard. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. How long could it take him to finish? I figured, a year at most. We were young. Our relationship could languish for a while. But now, it had been two years and he was nowhere near being done. He needed more time. He’d lost weight, developed insomnia and maybe an ulcer. He only slept a couple nights a week.
The nights we were supposed to meet, he often canceled, and when we did meet, he was restless and distracted, and wouldn’t stay over, because, he said, he couldn’t breathe.
He’d convinced me to go to Pittsburgh. He said it was good for my work: “You’re gathering material.” He said he’d drive me to the airport. It was ridiculous: my area of study was early twentieth-century émigré literature. As far as I knew, there’d been no émigré writers in Pittsburgh. I figured he just wanted me gone. I took a cab, and called him from the airport. He was free to hole up in his poor apartment, steeped in the “second golden age” and covered with the maps of Mesopotamia.
I found Lariska in her parents’ living room, standing on a makeshift platform. She was in a new strapless gown from David’s Bridal, and her mother was crouched underneath, pinning up the hemline. I almost missed her there at first, lost in the white swirls of organza.
“Masha!” the mother said. “How timely! We decided on green for the bridesmaids.”
“Am I a bridesmaid?” I said.
“Don’t mind her,” said Lariska. “Wear whatever you want.”
Lariska’s parents lived on Monitor, in the cluttered two-bedroom they’d occupied since they’d first come to Pittsburgh. Except now they owned the whole house, renting out the second floor. Her father was still unemployed, but her mother had taken computer classes for Russians, and now had a job with Mellon Bank. Besides programming, she did something with stocks, and she wanted to buy another house. In her kid-size sneakers and slouchy pullovers, she was a tiny, flitting thing. I called her Aunt Sasha, and Lariska, who’d taken German in college, sometimes called her, jokingly, Mutter.
She finished with Lariska’s hem and stepped aside to study it. She told Lariska to stand straight.
“Does your mom have a sewing machine?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Should I check?”
“I’ll call her myself,” said Aunt Sasha. She grabbed Lariska’s cell phone and said she’d be right back.
Lariska looked at me and frowned. “It sure took you a while,” she said. She was like a Christmas tree in that dress, with her arms spread apart and the pins sticking out. “I thought you were coming this morning,” she said. “I had to go look at flowers. I could’ve used your help.”
The key with Lariska was to always change the subject.
“Where’s your husband-to-be?”
“He’s gone to D.C. with his mother.”
“Now?” I said.
“It’s their last mother-son fling.”
“Sounds disgusting.”
“I’m kidding,” she said. “It’s actually easier without them around.”
“I thought they were supposed to help.”
She shook her head. “His folks have given us some money, which they’re not even supposed to. Anyway, my dear Mutter has it all figured out, the dress, the catering, the flowers. She’s a genius, my Mutter. And the place, wait till you see the place. We got really lucky.”
Luck wasn’t what I’d call it. She was marrying Zhenechka, her distant cousin. They’d met in Pittsburgh for the first time, and she immediately liked him. Back then, he’d been involved with someone else, but Lariska had gone ahead and briefly conquered him — i.e., she’d got him into bed — which, of course, hadn’t stopped him from sleeping around. Now, nine years later, she called it luck and fate. She’d run into him in New York. They’d been dating six months. He was finishing medical school.
“Why such a rush, is what I’d like to understand.”
“I beg you,” said Lariska. “You and everyone else. It’s not like he and I just met each other.” She jumped up and down and tugged at her neckline. “Where the hell is my mother?”
“Talking dresses, I guess.”
“Look,” said Lariska. “I’m sorry about the dress. Green’s such a weird color.”
“I thought it didn’t matter,” I said.
She made a pleading face.
“Who are the other bridesmaids?”
“You’re going to love it,” she said. “It’s Mila and Yana.”
The Donetsk twins and I had never liked each other. “Why does it have to be them?”
“What can I say,” said Lariska. “They’re always around.”
Yes, the Donetsk twins were still around, as proof that some things didn’t change. Mila had gone back to college, after a short stint in real estate, and Yana had just had a baby. They still milled about with their numerous cousins. Colleges, marriages — it was all a communal effort with them. A chance American might worm his way into their base, but the twins remained fundamentally Russian. My parents liked to mention them: how they’d seen them at Giant Eagle, how the twins had seemed polite and serious, and why did I think I was so much better than them? “Of course,” said my father, “you think you’re smarter than everyone else. You’re at Harvard!”
My father didn’t like the idea of Harvard. He lamented the loss of my old job at the insurance company. Couldn’t I keep it while doing my studies? He wondered aloud about tuition and debt. He questioned the security of academic jobs. He questioned their value. Nor did he like what I was studying. “You don’t even live among Russians,” he said.
“I used to.”
“Not in years. It’s all different now.”
I said it wasn’t what I studied anyway, and besides, Squirrel Hill never really changed. New signboards here and there. A couple of new Russian stores. Young people got married, old people got hearing aids. Every once in a while, someone’s teenager would do something extravagant, like get busted for drugs, or join the Peace Corps. Otherwise, it all remained the same: my mother’s eggplant recipe, house renovations, New Year’s parties. The safest career in Squirrel Hill was still in computer programming.
The only way to change was to escape, the way Lariska and I had escaped, to New York or to Boston. Except now, Lariska was going back. It was as if we had learned nothing. What kind of life did she imagine for herself, with her cagey, begrudging Zhenechka, his dreary friends, his meddling mother?
And as for my mother, she was already fussing in the kitchen by the time I got back from Lariska’s. My father, too, was back. We ate dinner in the living room, with the plates in our laps and the coffee table crowded with bread and herring, three cans of Old Milwaukee, and a bowl of salad. Neither of us had much to say. We swiped pieces of herring, we clinked our beer cans. The TV was on, and we watched the local news, something about a fire in Homestead. My father drove through Homestead every day, on the way to work and back. It was a poor area, mostly black. “Your friends,” he said, pointing at the TV. We’d argued in the past about poverty and race, his opinion being that the problem was people’s laziness, and that liberals like me were to blame. He didn’t like liberals. He didn’t like conservatives either.
Lariska’s parents were the same. We used to call it the immigrant mentality. But now Lariska was changing, becoming more like them. She had her Zhenechka. They were planning to move back to Pittsburgh. She’d already spent a good hour today talking to me about taxes and property values.
My mother asked me if I liked Lariska’s dress.
The dress, I said, was preposterous, and so was the whole idea of the wedding. Like most Russian men, Zhenechka had antiquated views of family. He’d cheated on Lariska, and he would cheat on her again. For a person of his background, cheating was normal. “I give it six months,” I said.
My father said, “Like you know.”
“I know enough to avoid the Russians.”
“Sure,” he said. “You just study them in college.”
He collected our plates, stacked them on top of the dishwasher. “I’m going to take a nap,” he said. “I recommend you do the same.”
It went like this every time I came home. I’d learned to keep quiet whenever he tried to provoke me, but it didn’t always work. The last time, he said I was intolerant. I’d gone to a New Year’s party with them, but I wouldn’t dance or play my mother’s parlor games. “When did you get so boring?” said Borya Rivkin. He was one of my parents’ friends. “Girls your age shouldn’t be so boring.” His own daughter, Vika, was eight years younger than me and engaged. The wedding would be in October.
“Don’t let them get to you,” Tom said. “Don’t let them trample your accomplishments.” He was extra gentle with me after the New Year’s break. He took me ice-skating at Frog Pond, and then we went out for crepes. There, wedged in a row of small breakfast tables, we sat holding hands, and he told me that one day we’d have a home of our own.
Part Three
Next morning, my mother and I went shopping. She’d called in sick at work, and my father had said I could take the old Ford, which he’d been keeping for my mother, even though they both knew she would never touch it.
“Does it still run?” I said.
“Flies like a bird.”
It didn’t fly, but it got us to Ross Park Mall, and my mother did a commendable job navigating. I was wary of being alone with her. I thought she might ask if I was seeing someone, and then I’d have to lie or give her my usual answer — that she’d know if there was something serious going on. Tom and I didn’t seem very serious now. After the day at Frog Pond, he’d all but disappeared in his work. We fought a lot, and admittedly I was the one who started it. It was as if I wanted to upset the balance. I didn’t think the balance worked.
We fought the last time we’d gone out. We’d had a dinner with our friends from Tom’s department. They lived in Cambridge, in a beautiful house, with shiny wood and built-in cupboards and shelves full of sculptures and books. They’d been married awhile, and I’d always admired them. The way they listened to each other. The way they worked in their adjacent studies, taking breaks to make love or have supper. Their names were Jim and Marla, and at dinner they announced that Marla was expecting their first child.
It didn’t go well with me and Tom. Before the party we’d gone to our favorite cheese-and-wine shop, where we spent half an hour selecting wine and tasting samples. We’d spoken in fake French accents and acted like snobs. But then there was the telltale pause at the checkout when we glanced at each other and reached for our separate credit cards. Though what really ticked me off that night was John and Marla’s announcement.
On the way back, I said, “What are we waiting for?”
Tom was driving. I knew he’d drop me off and then go home to Brookline.
I said, “By the time you get done with your work, there will be nothing left of us.”
He said, “You’re just making it worse.”
My mother asked me nothing. Because it was March, the stores were carrying their summer inventory. There were halter dresses in “cyan,” front-twist dresses in “gumdrop green,” and swirl-print dresses with large geometrical patterns. There was nothing in there for me. My mother was starting to say that perhaps we should try David’s Bridal, and I was thinking that Lariska would have to do with two bridesmaids instead of three. But then, at last, we found it. It was in the back of a smaller boutique. Draped neck, flutter sleeves, crinkled silk. The color, pearly and elusive, was listed as “tossed leaf.” It was about twice as much as what I’d budgeted.
“Don’t worry,” said my mother. “It’s on me.”
“Did you get rich all of a sudden?”
But she’d already got out her checkbook.
“Dad will kill you when he finds out.”
We were at the register now, my mother double-checking the name of the store, tracing out her signature, logging the amount.
“I work too, you know,” she said. “It’s not just your father.”
She bought me the dress, and I took her out for coffee and ice cream, the proper kind. The menus were done in Italian cursive and listed no prices. The servings were tiny. The ice cream came in shiny metal cups. My mother dunked each spoonful in her coffee. She called it café-glace. As a young girl, she used to order it in small basement cafés in Leningrad. Later in Moscow, where she’d moved after she’d married my father, she taught me to make a home version. It involved instant coffee and a brick of plombieres for forty-eight kopecks. But it was never as good as in Leningrad.
“Remember how good it was?” she said.
She looked well. Her face had filled out, assumed a warm, complacent color, and I could see none of the little red spots that appeared around her eyes after one of her headaches. Her depression was under control. The only thing was, she felt hot all the time, a sign of menopause. She’d already taken off her parka, and now she was unbuttoning the top of her cardigan.
“I’d like to live somewhere that’s not so hot,” she said.
“Pittsburgh is hot?”
“In the summer. And in the winter it’s all ice and snowstorms.”
“Where would you go?”
She shrugged and looked into her coffee cup. “We don’t talk like we used to,” she said after a pause. “You don’t confide in me.”
I said, “I don’t confide in anyone.”
“I know. It must be lonely.”
“Maybe a little,” I said. “But basically I’m fine.”
For a moment I thought I might tell her the truth, but then the impulse passed.
“And you?” I asked. “Dad’s bullying you like always?”
She smiled. “We have our problems.”
In the evening, we ate toasted sandwiches and watched a James Bond marathon on TV. I was supposed to call Lariska, but the thought of going back there, to the house teeming with her relatives and Zhenechka’s relatives, was more than I could handle that day. She called me herself, at seven. “You’re coming over?” she said. It was her last night as a single lady, and the Donetsk twins were bringing tequila and pot. “Come on,” she said. “Make an effort.”
It felt more important to stay with my parents. Despite what my mother had said, they didn’t seem unhappy. They were a little gentler with each other. They yelled a little less. If my father saw a good joke on the Internet, he’d show it to my mother; if she was playing solitaire on her computer (the easy kind), he’d stand behind her chair and tell her which card to pick up next.
I thought we would spend our evening together, doing some family thing, playing hangman, or watching the “Song of the Year” tape, or maybe catching the rest of the James Bond marathon. But after dinner, my mother went upstairs to lie down. My father said it was my fault: what was I thinking dragging her from store to store? And the coffee, didn’t I know that coffee was bad for her? Or did I do it on purpose?
The two of us were on the porch, in our coats and slippers with socks. My father was smoking.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re wrong and you know it.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m wrong. Your mother’s wrong. Your friend is wrong for getting married. How can it be that everyone is so wrong? Or maybe it’s the other way around, ah? Did it ever occur to you? Maybe it’s you who’s wrong? Maybe that’s what you should think about.”
I told him to leave me alone.
“You’re already alone,” he said. “You can’t even talk to your parents. Is it the Russians’ fault? Is it their fault you’re not good enough for Americans?”
I said it wasn’t true.
My mother came downstairs to check her blood pressure. She was in a nightgown, but she claimed she felt better. Instead of going back to bed, she settled in an armchair in the living room.
“Let’s have a drink,” she said. “The three of us.”
My father said, “Not with your headache.”
I said I wasn’t in the mood.
We had stopped talking altogether. We watched the local news. That morning, a woman and a dog had been killed on a highway. They’d been asleep in their car, parked in the dirt patch that separated traffic on 79, and it looked like they were maybe homeless. In the morning the dog got out. When the woman awoke, she saw it was dead on the side of the highway. She went to get it, and a pickup swiped her too.
My father said the woman was an idiot because you never walk across a highway.
“That’s what you’re saying now,” said my mother. “You’d do the same thing.”
“Never,” he said.
“Not even to save your dog? Or a child?”
“It was dead! Dead!” said my father. “There was nothing there to save.”
Part Four
And what if my father guessed the truth? What if there was something faulty in me that made Tom reluctant? I watched CNN, I ate out, I read American books. I’d quit my job and gone back to school, which was something most Americans admired. But I lacked their boldness and fluency, their flippant resistance to gloom. My father said I’d never be quite like them.
It was the morning of Lariska’s wedding, and it seemed like I hadn’t slept at all. I felt emptied and beaten and left with an old broken trough, like the greedy old lady from one of Pushkin’s fairy-tales. Except I wasn’t even greedy.
Lariska rang the bell at ten o’clock. It looked as if she hadn’t slept much either. She was pale and forlorn, with her hair pulled back and a couple of pimples along the side of her jaw. She looked like one of the Orthodox girls who went to Hillel Academy — too young to get married.
“You never called,” she said.
I told her I’d been busy.
“Busy with what? You’re just sitting in here.”
The world, I said, didn’t revolve around her. Besides, she had the twins to entertain her.
Lariska groaned.
Outside, it was spring, the sky blue and ebullient, everything thawing, dripping. A splendid wedding day, except never before had a wedding seemed like such a bad idea. We walked to Schenley Park, the streets trim and comely and full of well-made, sturdy houses, a perfect place to settle down with your doctor husband. In the winter, she’d bring her kiddies to the skating rink, which now stood half melted and neglected. We loitered around it.
“Is Zhenechka back?”
Lariska shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“You’re sure he’s coming to the wedding?”
“Give me some credit,” she said.
The rule was, if it’s bad in the beginning, it’ll never get better. She’d told me this herself.
“I said that? Really? I don’t remember.”
“You don’t have to do it,” I said. “You don’t have to pretend. If you’re not sure –”
“But I’m sure,” she said. “Don’t you get it? I’ve been sure for years, since the first time I met him. There was a dinner party at his parents’ house. It was April, we’d just got here from Leningrad, and they’d invited us because we’re related. I sat across from him. I closed my eyes and I could see it all: the two of us together, the rest of our lives.”
I’d never seen her so sentimental. Ten years ago, this would’ve been me. But now I knew it was simpler than that: Love either worked or it didn’t. And in the beginning it did. Tom’s face, so pale, so thin, the needled lines of his first wrinkles, our autumn trips across New England, spiked apple cider and the opulence of leaves. The windows are half open, and Tom’s hand is warm on my knee. He’s saying I have this windswept, sultry look, and he can hardly stand it, the way I look, the way the leaves are swirling ahead of us.
Lariska stretched out her hands. They trembled a little, and the fingers were red.
I said, “Wedding jitters?”
“It’s so dumb,” she said.
I gripped them in my hands, and we stood like that for a minute.
She said, “I’m sort of envious. I think you’re really brave. I wouldn’t have the nerve to drop my career and start something else. It’s what we always dreamed of, isn’t it? I know you think I’m settling, retreating –”
I didn’t, I said.
“I wish you’d understand it’s not like that. I need you to believe me. Can you try? Can you promise me that?”
We hugged, which was something we never did. Her coat was torn at the shoulder and smelled of cigarettes. Her cheek felt cold against my cheek. She was late for her hair appointment.
After she left, I went inside the pavilion where kids had birthday parties and pizza. It was empty — the parties didn’t start till later, and besides, there wouldn’t be much skating that day. I stepped out onto the deck. An older man sat out there, at one of the big wooden tables. He asked me if I needed to sharpen my skates. “Three dollars,” he said. “Best price in town.” I thanked him. I told him I didn’t have skates. I had to make a phone call. “Go ahead,” he said, and then excused himself.
I got out my cell phone. It was on days like these, days scrambled by sunlight and insomnia, that I found myself feeling foolishly hopeful. Or maybe Lariska was to blame.
“It’s you,” said Tom. “Are you back? Are you home?”
He could never remember my plans.
I said, “I’m coming back tomorrow.”
He said he’d been sick with a cold. It was bad. He wanted to call me, but he didn’t think I’d want to talk to him. He wondered how the wedding went.
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
“I wish I could go,” he said. “I’d love to meet your parents and your friend. Of course, I’d get everyone sick with whatever I have. I’ve done no work in three days. Has it been three days already? Is that when you left? Three days ago?”
“Honey, you’re making no sense.”
“That’s certainly nothing new.”
I told him to go back to bed and that I’d see him tomorrow.
“Come straight to my house,” he said.
I said I’d take a cab from Logan.
Part Five
Russian weddings are not like American weddings. There are no ushers inquiring which side of the family you belong to, no seating arrangements, no receiving line. They are confusing and disorganized, with the guests puttering in the hallway and poking into wrong doors; and some boys, who look like they’re still in high school, scurrying around with car keys and rolling up their sleeves; and somebody’s mother saying, “But what about parking?” The parking, in fact, is difficult, because the wedding is at the Mellon Institute on Bellefield, which might be the reason why the minister is late and why he leaves his car outside with the emergency lights blinking. He’s nondenominational. His hair is long and he makes a long speech about the importance of commitment. He tries to say something in Hebrew. It sounds all wrong and it makes the groom wince. The groom, as a kid, had studied at Hillel Academy. It’s hard to imagine that he’s ever been a kid. He’s portly, unpleasant, but the bride, of course, doesn’t see it. They share a kiss. The stereo plays “Freylekhs.” The guests want to eat.
Or maybe every wedding is like this?
Except it wasn’t so bad. There was a trellis strewn with pretty flowers, and a carpet that led up to it, and the bride had a tremulous smile, and the music was sweeping. The ceremony ended, and we filed into the room next door, where the tables were shaped in a long letter L. There was a giant chandelier and a blackboard.
“A blackboard,” said my father. “Whoever thought of that?”
“I don’t see it bothering anyone else,” said my mother.
“Did I say I was bothered?” he said.
I asked them to please not fight in public. They weren’t, they said. They were having a dialogue. And no one cared anyway.
“You worry too much,” said my father.
I’d arrived with Lariska, an hour in advance. I’d gotten ready at her house, and it was only just before the ceremony that my father finally saw my dress. “Not bad,” he said. “A little mousy in color.” “It’s green,” I said, and he just raised his eyebrows.
We were seated across from Lariska’s acidic Aunt Tamara. “Are you related to anyone here?” she said. We weren’t. We were only related to one another, and soon we’d be going our separate ways. For now, we were solicitous and quiet. My mother passed the eggplant and the sprats. I helped her with the salad. My father poured us some vodka and some lemonade.
I hadn’t been the only one perplexed. No one knew exactly what to say, given the couple’s spotty record. There were quick, awkward toasts, followed by the clinking of glasses, and a speech by Aunt Sasha, in English, for the benefit of the out-of-town American guests. “Enough,” said Lariska’s aunt. “Enough of this peacocking and playacting!”
“You’re writing this down?” my father said. “These are your Russians.”
The room, of course, was full of them. There were new arrivals and my parents’ old friends; ailing women, widowed men, separated computer programmers. Borya Rivkin and his daughter Vika. Aunt Sasha’s friend from Mellon Bank, Natasha, remarried and pregnant, with her new husband hailing from Spain and her son now finishing high school. Tanya Katz, reunited with her husband, Petya, and pregnant as well. A girl in a red spaghetti-strap dress stood by the blackboard with her mother. She was chalking a chemical formula. “Remember them?” my mother said. The girl’s name was Anya. Her mother did accounting, and her father had died from a heart attack last April. The girl was in Boston, in grad school, studying chemistry, following in her father’s footsteps.
Before dessert, the twins came over to chat. During the ceremony, we’d hardly had a chance to acknowledge each other. Now I saw they had lost some of their old rambunctious charm. They looked pinched and tired, and their dresses didn’t match. Mila had midterms, and Yana had stayed up with the kid, who’d been crying and crying. It was hard, they said, but also gratifying. It was just the two of them now. Their parents had moved to Chicago. So many changes, they said. They’d heard that I’d, too, made a change, and they wanted to say they were glad, they were proud. “Harvard,” said Yana. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
And then it was time for the couple’s first dance. They weren’t great dancers, especially Zhenechka, who’d always been a little lumpish, and also nearsighted. But you could tell he was doing his best. He held Lariska tenderly and tried not to step on the edges of her dress, and whenever he blundered, she smiled at him. They were trying. And maybe not everything was a mistake. Maybe we had learned something, and next time we’d do a little better, if only we gave it a chance. Lariska and Zhenechka were dancing. Under the shining chandelier. In small, shuffling steps. Forever and ever. In sickness and in health. Mismatched like the rest of us. More beautiful than anything. And I had no words to describe them.
