Our Country Friends(24)
“Right,” Ed and the Actor said.
“Well, aren’t you a firecracker,” Masha said.
“Sasha doesn’t really know how to make new friends,” Karen said. She gestured at the convivial gathering. “This is all a ruse.”
“You should make an app for him,” Dee said. “Help a brotha out.”
“Daaamn,” Ed said.
“She was always like this in class,” Senderovsky said, “especially after a couple of drinks.”
“I hung out with some actual Nazis when we were researching München am Hudson,” the Actor said.
“That movie was chilling,” Masha said.
“?‘I think they got cum in ’em,’?” Dee rapped into her wineglass, “?‘?’cause they nuthin’ but dicks.’?”
Senderovsky and his friends immediately recognized the rap song Dee was appropriating and smiled nostalgically. It had been a staple at the parties Senderovsky and Vinod used to throw in their tight but chaste studio after they graduated from a city college. The Actor had first heard it in high school. Dee must have been, what, seven when it was released? The Actor considered that fact. Her behavior, who she was, came at him like the tides. She was standing up against her former teacher, against the boredom of his kind, the timidity and lack of adventurousness. (Exactly the problems with his endless volleys of revised scripts.) Look at me! the Actor yelled in his mind, so loudly the surrounding sounds disappeared, the rustle of naked tree branches, the yip of coyotes catching wind of the awakened fear-pheromone-generating neighborhood sheep. Why won’t you look at me? If you query, I will answer. If you inquire, I will enlighten. If you want the stroke of my fingers, the pinch of my stubble, the torque of my tongue, I will provide. But first you must look at me the way I am looking at you!
Masha had put her hands over Nat’s ears. “Okay,” she said, “I think it’s time someone went to bed.”
“I’m sorry, Nat,” Dee said. “I shouldn’t have used bad language. ‘Dicks’ is a bad word.”
And she knows when to be contrite, the Actor thought. She’s in control even when she’s hammered.
“That’s okay,” Senderovsky said. “She’ll have to learn about male anatomy sometime, why not tonight? But off to bed you go, sladkaya.” Sweet one.
The strength of the howl was unexpected. “No!” Nat yelled, quieting even the coyotes casing the sheep farm’s perimeter. “I don’t want to go to sleep!” She was running around the porch, getting dangerously close to others. The world was a whirlwind of nice things and unfair things; her head wanted to butt into Mommy’s tummy, to ruffle through the beginnings of Daddy’s new beard, to pass lightly along Karen’s thin-wale corduroys, which she imagined as soft as blah blah blah Llama Llama Red Pajama, and why was she too old to read that book anymore? And what happened to their little apartment in the city, and what happened to Dennis the Doorman and the rumpled back of his suit, and what happened to her overlit classroom and the worlds her classmates constructed among themselves, worlds to which she wasn’t invited but observed and cataloged from the Elba of her Quiet Mat, and what happened, what happened, what happened? Senderovsky watched his child running, howling, out of control. He did not know her thoughts, but he was registering attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the borderlands of autism, loss of executive function, pragmatic speech deficits—all the therapists and specialized schools wanted a piece of her, all of them had a novel idea about what was wrong, but the only diagnosis that ever stuck was his and Masha’s Ashkenazi one, generalized anxiety disorder. On an impossible order of magnitude. The one dream he had for his child: that she would not suffer an immigrant’s humiliations. But even though she did not share in their incestuous gene pool, he could not deliver her from that particular pain.
Masha had caught up to her screaming daughter and now held her in her arms. She spoke authoritatively. “You don’t want to go to sleep, do you, Nat?” The therapeutic voice. “This must be very frustrating for you.”
“It is!” Nat burbled through her tears. “It’s very frustrating.”
“What can make you feel better?”
“BTS!”
“No screens right before bedtime. How about a prairie dog kiss?”
Karen watched the scene wistfully. She could feel the child’s dry lips on her own forehead. “That’s how they know they’re the right ones,” she said out loud. Vinod wanted to reach across the table and take Karen’s hand. He had cried when he found out she was getting divorced, though he didn’t know for whom.
“What does that mean?” Dee slurred. “Whatsa prairie dog kiss?” But Karen would not explain it to her. She kept it to herself.
After Nat and Masha had said their goodbyes, Dee got up and said, “Well, I better be a good girl and call it a night.”
“No nightcap?” Ed asked.
“What’s your email address so I can send you the photo?” Dee asked the Actor. He wrote it down on a paper napkin, steadying one hand with the other.
They watched her descend the cedar steps, listened to the clap of her sandals. (Wasn’t it too cold for sandals, the Actor thought.) There was no reception in the bungalows, so she went into the living room to send the Actor the Tr?? Emotions photo. It was a featureless room except for a Steinway and the heritage chestnut trim of its windowsills, the identities of its inhabitants broadcast outward toward the bungalows. There was one silver-framed photo of Senderovsky and Masha as twelve-year-old kids in the Russian colony across the river. They looked like they were sitting on a haystack, and their skinny innocence dwarfed Dee’s at that age. Senderovsky had enough crooked teeth to fill half a smile. His eyes were on Masha, much as the Actor’s had been on Dee. And Masha herself was a slim beauty with a pinch of something not quite European about her, which could have been explained by a heavy Russian tome on a bookshelf by the piano outlining the effects of the Mongol conquest of the Kievan Rus’. Dee walked outside, past the porch (once more, two sets of male eyes upon her, though different eyes than before), and toward her bungalow, which sat on its wooden haunches, bathed in a frosty glow.