Little Failure (17 page)

Family reunification takes precedence, and we are sent to New York instead of Northern California, where so many members of my generation of Soviet immigrants are currently making a fantastical living in the Google sector of the economy. My mother, having abandoned her own dying mother in Leningrad, has been thrust into the maw of my father’s family, whom she regards as
volchya poroda
.

A wolfish breed
.

In addition to Grandma Galya, we have abandoned two beautiful Europeanish cities, Leningrad and Rome, for—Queens. Which is where the wolfish breed lives. We are surrounded by constellations of redbrick apartment buildings with struggling people of many races and creeds. To my mother’s eye the whole setup looks like a sad approximation of what cultured European life should be.

My parents and I are housed together with Aunt Sonya in her small Forest Hills apartment. The experience of hearing the word
rodstvenniki
(relatives) slither out of my parents’ mouths has soured me on the very concept of having relations, and one particular incident from the days we live together has stuck inside my memory hole. My older Distant Cousin Tima has done something bad, has incorrectly sold a leather jacket at the flea market perhaps, and his father, Grisha, strikes him in front of the whole family. There’s a Russian phrase here—
dal emu po shee
, to give one across the neck. I am on the floor of Aunt Sonya’s apartment with my new toy, an American pen that you can click open and shut, completely engrossed in the beautiful clicking motion, and then: the sound of open palm hitting adolescent neck. Distant Cousin Tima is a swarthy, gangly boy with a Sephardic-like outbreak of mustache, and I can see him cringe and fold into himself
as he’s being struck. He stands there with the hurt on his neck, with everyone’s eyes on him as if he were naked. My first thought is:
I’m not the one being hit! A
nd my second:
Tima is not going to cry
. And he doesn’t. He shrugs it off, smiles bitterly, and then stores it up for some future use. This is what will separate Distant Cousin Tima, or Tima, MD, as he is now called, from a crybaby like me.

Industrious and crafty, our relatives are already making the kind of flea market money that will soon land them in one of Long Island’s most storied suburbs, the kind of money that requires many strikes across the neck. In 1979, some of that money has been sunk into televisions so big (a diagonal measurement of twenty-five inches!) that I try not to play with my pen next to them, worried that if they explode in the Soviet manner they will take the entire living room down with them. Money has also been spent on
stenki
, literally “walls,” a kind of mahogany-based shelving unit, lacquered to a fanatical buff, that, along with the leather jacket, is so loved by Russians. Lying on the floor, I stare at my own mahogany reflection, knowing that the lacquered “walls” and the twenty-five-inch Zenith with Space Command remote control are the utmost in human achievement. If we do everything right, if my parents learn to sell leather jackets with great cunning, someday we can live like this, too.

Through the hairy network of immigrants, my father finds an apartment in quiet and safe Kew Gardens, Queens, for the fair price of $235 per month. The one-bedroom apartment will have to accommodate three generations of us: me, Mama, Papa, Grandma Polya, and her belligerent husband Ilya, or Goebbels to his friends. With our two army-green sacks and three orange suitcases made out of
real Polish leather
, we leave one battlefield, our wolfish relatives, for closer quarters in which to nurse Old World grievances and to brew fresh New World ones.

As for the wolfish relatives themselves, I hardly see them after we
get our own apartment, but I hear about them daily. They have been petitioning my father to leave my mother and find a woman of, let’s say, a more flea market disposition. The more my mother cries in the living room over all those permed aunties telling Papa to leave her, the more I cry in the bathroom. Twenty-two years later, a more recently arrived relative, a middle-aged man who is also the kindest of their lot, will throw my first novel on the floor and spit on it, perhaps out of ideological considerations. When I think of my relatives, I think of this kind of emotional village excess. To throw the book on the floor, fine. To spit on it, sure. But to do both? This is not a Bollywood movie.

The apartment is off busy Union Turnpike, close to the juncture where it noisily confronts the Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway and across from the Kew Motor Inn, a 1960s slab that we are too Fresh off the Boat to recognize as “the most famous and exotic couples-friendly motel in Queens.” The Egyptian Room, yours for only forty-nine dollars an hour, looks oddly like the mirrored, lacquered, Cleopatra-friendly rooms of our relatives. All one has to do is take off the leather jacket, pay the hooker, and you’re home.

Our apartment gives out onto a pleasant courtyard with a dozen oaks that are home to a handful of squirrels. I try to present these fat, bushy-tailed creatures with curvaceous peanuts, a true American marvel, just a press of middle finger and thumb and they spill out their crunchy treasure. The squirrels stare directly into my eyes, their hungry cheeks quivering, and when I lean down to throw them my treat, they are almost within reach, the fearless urban rodents. I identify a family of three of them, a perfect counterpart to my own immediate family: One seems anxious, one unhappy, and one too young to know the difference. I call them Laika, Belka, and Strelka, after the three dog cosmonauts launched into space in the 1950s and ’60s. I know I shouldn’t think along Soviet lines anymore, but Belka, the second dog’s name, means “squirrel” in Russian, so what am I supposed to do?

The first momentous thing that happens to me in Kew Gardens, Queens, is that I fall in love with cereal boxes. We are too poor to afford toys at this point, but we do have to eat. Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels. I’m obsessed with the fact that many cereal boxes come with prizes inside, which seems to me an unprecedented miracle. Something for nothing. My favorite comes in a box of cereal called Honeycomb, a box featuring a healthy freckled white kid—I begin to accept him as an important role model—on a bike flying through the sky. (Many years later I learn he’s probably “popping a wheelie.”) What you get inside each box of Honeycomb are small license plates to be tied to the rear of your bicycle. The license plates are much smaller than the real thing, but they have a nice metallic heft to them. I keep getting
MICHIGAN
, a very simple plate, white letters on a black base. I trace the word with my finger. I speak it aloud, getting most of the sounds wrong.
MEESHUGAN
.

When I have a thick stack of plates, I hold them in my hand and spread them out like playing cards. I casually throw them on the dingy mattress my parents have hauled out of a nearby trash heap—then scoop them up and press them to my chest for no reason. I hide them under my pillow, then ferret them out like a demented post-Soviet dog. Each plate is terribly unique. Some states present themselves as “America’s Dairyland”; others wish to “Live Free or Die.” What I need now, in a very serious way, is to get an actual bike.

In America the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great. I want a bike, so some rich American neighbor (they’re all unspeakably rich) gives me a bike. A rusted red monstrosity with the spokes coming dangerously undone, but there it is. I tie a license plate to the bicycle, and I spend most of my day wondering which plate to use next, citrus-sunny
FLORIDA
or snowy
VERMONT
. This is what America is about: choice.

I don’t have much choice in pals, but there’s a one-eyed girl in our
building complex whom I have sort of befriended. She’s tiny and scrappy, and poor just like us. We’re suspicious of each other at first, but I’m an immigrant and she has one eye, so we’re even. The girl rides around on a half-broken bike just like mine, and she keeps falling and scraping herself (rumor is that’s how she lost her eye) and bawling whenever her palms get bloodied, her blond head raised up to the sky. One day she sees me riding my banged-up bicycle with the Honeycomb license plate clanging behind me, and she screams, “MICHIGAN! MICHIGAN!” And I ride ahead, smiling and tooting my bike horn, proud of the English letters that are attached somewhere below my ass. Michigan! Michigan! with its bluish-black license plate the color of my friend’s remaining eye. Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

And even here, so far away from the wonder towns of Lansing, Flint, and Detroit, something like a life is beginning for me. I have a semblance of health, the lungs are accepting and absorbing oxygen, my Soviet-o-mania is being kept at bay by Honeycomb license plates and the colorful old stash of
All Rome, All Venice
, and
All Florence
books, which I look back on as my new founding texts. I am allowed to buy a stamp album with the portrait of a jaunty pirate on the cover and also to order a thousand stamps from a stamp company in upstate New York. Some of the stamps are from the Soviet Union, to my chagrin, reminders of the ever-present upcoming Moscow Olympics, but then there are gorgeous golden stamps from Haiti bearing the images of people at work in the fields, the people we have heard so much about, that is to say, black people. (Some of the other stamps, for no reason I can now discern, are marked
DEUTSCHES REICH
; one features a jeep being lifted into the air by an explosion. In another, a short, uniformed man with a funny little mustache bends down to cradle the cheek of a girl holding up a basket of flowers, beneath the words 20
APRIL
1940.)

Underemployed Papa and I go to the neighborhood park down the street. At first, we are confused by the boys who like to run around a dusty field after they hit a ball with a hollow aluminum stick for no
reason. So we bring
our
thing along, a European soccer ball, and some older boys join us in kicking it. I am not good
at futbol
, but then, I am not completely incompetent at it either, not with Papa by my side, being strong.

And then it all goes terribly wrong.

A good Jewish boy smiles for his Hebrew school class photo. Notice the widely spaced teeth, the slight furrows beneath his eyes, and the Casio music wristwatch, which played both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Russian “Kalinka” (“Little Guelder Rose”). The author hated himself for preferring the latter
.

I
AM STANDING
amid a gaggle of boys in white shirts and skullcaps and girls in long dresses wailing a prayer in an ancient language. Adults are on hand to make sure we are all singing in unison; that is to say, refusing to wail is not an option. “
Sh’ma Yisroel
,” I wail, obediently, “
Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
.”