Our Country Friends(30)
“The children of diplomats.” He realized he needed some commonality with her at this point. “Senderovsky is one of the few self-made people I know. Him and his high-school friends.”
The liberal estate continued to scroll before them. In a pond made by a careful human hand, a gently streaming duck, its head iridescent, was talking up itself to anyone who would listen. Rich people’s chickens crossed the road, their heads held up high. The road sprinted upward, away from the ideal pasturelands and toward the state road. The sun disappeared behind a prayer shawl.
“Why does Sasha do this?” Dee asked. “Have all those cabins? It must cost a fortune to maintain.”
“You mentioned that at dinner,” Ed said. The gentle slope was winding him. He had to stop smoking. Yet how desperately he wanted to smoke. He took out his pack of Gauloises.
“I was drunk and rude last night,” Dee said. “Not one of my proudest moments. Can I bum one?”
They met in the middle of the road, both with their arms extended. Ed passed her a lighter, then thought better of it, came up to her, dangerously close, and lit the cigarette hanging from her mouth. All the bungalows were outfitted with the same cheap floral shampoo, and while Ed hated the greasy clump it had made of his own hair (just this morning, he had sent away for a better shampoo), the scent of it on Dee made him feel as if they were fellow travelers who had met on the high road, pilgrims destined to find each other. She exhaled the smoke away from him, but he wanted to follow it, to draw it into his own nicotine-greased lungs. He needed to say something about Senderovsky that would build trust between him and Dee. He knew how curious she was about her former teacher, how curious we all are about our mentors.
“I don’t think his finances are very sound,” he heard himself say. “I think he’s floundering.”
This had the intended effect. Dee nodded as she smoked, her face pursed in thought. “Does his wife make a lot of money?” she asked.
There was a striver’s innocence to that question. “She used to be in private practice,” Ed said, “but now she works for a nonprofit for old Russians with mental problems. Her sister died a few years back.”
“That’s terrible.”
“That’s when she switched jobs.”
“I think Sasha once called her ‘the moral conscience of our family.’?” They both laughed. “These cigarettes are strong.”
“Sasha’s been trying to make up the difference with TV work,” Ed said, now fully enjoying the gossiping.
“Even though he doesn’t own a TV.”
“Ding, ding, ding! Maybe that’s why his shows never get made.”
“Poor Sasha.”
“Not meant for these times,” Ed said. They were both somehow cheered up by this conversation. “But he means well.”
They were passing tract houses with green-gray rusted siding now, the properties uniformly square and evocative of the city’s outer boroughs, but with a full acre to their names. A red sign on one lawn, its grass cut to within an inch of its life, read ALL LIVES MATTER.
A few houses down, a pregnant corgi ran down the lawn to yap at Ed and Dee. Its owner, a middle-aged woman in rollers, followed her down, shouting, “Bessie! Don’t go in the road!”
“Go back to your mommy, honey,” Dee drawled to the dog, which immediately stopped in her tracks, mesmerized, tail poised to wag.
The woman in rollers stared at Ed. “Get over here now!” she screamed, presumably to the dog, but her gaze still on the gentleman with three passports. As the dog turned around and waddled back, her stomach scraping the grass, her owner turned to Dee and said, “Sorry ’bout the bother.”
“No worries at all,” Dee said. “She’s a cutie pie. Looks about ready to burst.”
The owner’s face looked burned by the morning’s brief guest appearance by the sun, or maybe she was an alcoholic. She continued to glance back and forth between the members of the unlikely couple, perhaps trying to figure out what the man was wearing (a sleek black tailored piece known as the City Hunter jacket). “Well, if you want puppies,” she said to Dee. Then she turned around and stomped off toward the house, the corgi lapping at her feet with love, unaware of the fact that her own children were just offered to a stranger.
“Conclusions?” Ed said as they walked away.
“She said ‘Don’t go in the road,’ to the dog,” Dee said. “Not ‘on the road.’ The road is something you enter. Alien to your own property.”
Ed nodded. “Your anthropology is sound,” he said. “You should have seen the look she gave me.”
“Your people aren’t getting a lot of love from the state media these days.”
“My people? I’m Anglo-Swiss-Canadian.” They both laughed. Dee noticed an American flag done up in black, blue, and white, which also connoted a far-right disposition, fluttering from the back of a stationary black pickup truck. Maybe Masha wasn’t entirely wrong about the content of this particular neighborhood, though these people, she reckoned, would never do her family harm. The calculus of a small northern town like this wouldn’t allow it to happen, at least not to a nominally white couple. On the other hand, the state of the nation was changing rapidly.