Vladimir(26)

The next day, after I had finished my class, I ran into Vladimir. He walked me up to my office and stayed for almost a half an hour, leaning against my door frame. The National Book Award finalists had been announced and we discussed which books we had read and whether we considered the awardees worthy. I sat on the edge of my desk, a position I never sit in, and even pulled one knee up, leaning my chin on it as we spoke. He held the door frame around where the lock was with his right hand, and lifted his left hand over his head, grabbing the frame and stretching his body, like a nymph at a fountain. He was wearing a T-shirt (the heat had been accidentally turned on in our office and it was abominably hot) and I could see both the damp of his armpit and a tuft of his underarm hair peeking through his short, crumpled sleeve. I was overcaffeinated and felt as though I was talking too fast, losing the thread of the conversation. He, however, seemed just as interested in speaking, and we chirped at each other like two frantic birds until the department admin walked over to the doorway, smiled, and walked away, a clear gesture to let us know we were being too loud.

I was elated by our run-in, our conversation. His body, when he was standing in my door frame in his figure skater’s pose, seemed to beg for me to come and grab it around the middle. Did he do this with everyone—this sensual display of his corporeal beauty? “Your body was very flirtatious,” my college friend said to me when I called her crying after she left a bar without me and I was pushed in an alley and groped by an angry local. At the time, I remember thinking she was right. My body had been offering an invitation, if not a promise. Did Vladimir know that he was communicating with me? Did he think me to be younger than I was? Or did he find me attractive no matter? Was I actually, as my daughter’s drunken episode the previous night had suggested, so well-preserved that I was still mistakable for a student? But it couldn’t be. He was humoring me, this maternal woman, probably so outdated in her views and opinions, with lines in places I had yet to realize.

After work I picked up Sidney and she and I went to our favorite diner. It was one of the only boxcar diners left in our area, and the family who had taken it over in the nineties had mercifully left its menu alone, except for the occasional portobello-mushroom wrap sandwich posted on the specials. The parents had emigrated from Armenia and borne four daughters and a son, all of whom they homeschooled for religious purposes, all of whom were extremely attractive and reserved, all of whom worked at the restaurant. The daughter who sat us at our booth was chipper but blank, she called us “honey” incessantly but without any force or affection behind it, like she was a telemarketer reading a call script.

Sidney looked awful. Her eyes were bloodshot and her skin was a greenish-gray and there was a pimple on each side of her mouth. She ordered like she wanted to eat the world—everything fried and dripping with cheese and a milkshake. I ordered a Greek omelet, with a salad instead of potatoes and no toast.

“Don’t go too crazy, Mom.” Sidney rubbed her eyes hard, as though she was weary that I existed.

“What?”

“Would the potatoes kill you?”

“If you had the digestive system I have, you might argue yes.”

She dropped the subject with a wave of her hand, dismissing me. I didn’t mind. I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they’ll still be loved, even at their most peevish.

I watched as Sid took the crayons that they kept on each table in a juice cup and flipped the paper place mat over to the kid’s menu side and began to color. It had been the same picture for nearly twenty years, a crowded jungle scene with tigers and snakes and baboons, and she always colored it the same way—blue tigers, green snakes, red baboons, yellow foliage.

I gradually dredged out the information that she had slept until noon, and then sat with John and watched The Deer Hunter. She and John shared a love for long seventies-era films with big character journeys that left them feeling cozily wrung out at the end. When she was in high school I would feel slightly left out to find them on a Sunday afternoon in the dark of the den watching Apocalypse Now, M*A*S*H, The Godfather Part I or II, drinking chocolate milk and eating bag after bag of butter-soaked microwave popcorn. I loved all those movies once, but they were so long, and I was so busy that even when I tried to sit and sink inside of them I kept popping up, remembering to water a plant or fold a load of laundry, until I was told by my husband and child that my fussing presence was not welcome.

The waitress served us big brown plastic cups of water. I pushed a cup toward Sidney, telling her she needed to hydrate, and she scowled and continued coloring. Gently, my breath calibrated to avoid annoying her, I put my finger on the place mat she was coloring, so that her crayon ran over my finger. She began coloring in a new spot and I put my finger there. I did it a few more times until her guarded grimness cracked a bit, and she grabbed my hand and colored my fingernail in mock fury.

I took her hand in both of mine and asked, “How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and started to cry.

“Can I sit next to you?” I asked her. In an effort to teach her about the independence of her own body, I had, from the time she was a small child, asked her whenever I wanted to kiss her or lift her up or give her a hug. My mother and sisters had put their hands all over me, I was their little pet to poke and prod at. I didn’t ever want Sidney to feel that way—to feel as though her body belonged to me, or to anyone.