Other Resort Cities (18 page)

But now here it is, the last Saturday in March 1997, and she is thirty-five years old and telling lies to her own child only to avoid the realization that this whole adoption, the entire process of bringing Natalya to the States, must have been folly on her part.

“Are you hungry?”

“Some,” Natalya says. It’s one of about fifty English words Tania has grown tired of hearing since first meeting Natalya in Russia last month. Before actually adopting Natalya, after having only seen her photo and reading her letters (which, she knows now, Natalya never actually wrote, but were likely form letters with blanks for specific U.S. cities and American names), Tania envisioned that Natalya, though already twelve, would have an infantlike personality filled with abject need and wonder, such that every moment would be like a revelation to the girl. Tania would keep a scrapbook with pictures of “Natalya’s first Big Mac” and “Natalya’s bicycle,” and eventually it would just say “Nat’s” this and “ Nat ’s” that as things got more personal.

Instead she discovered this . . . girl, this half-woman, who wanted nothing but to be left alone, who had spent most every night on the Internet chatting with friends in Russia or crying, and who never directly addressed Tania at all. But Tania isn’t even sure what she’d like Natalya to call her. The word “mom” has so many connotations she’s simply not comfortable with, plus there’s the issue that Natalya still remembers her own mother, who, if the people at the orphanage in Russia are to be believed, was a scientist. The orphanage told Tania that both of Natalya’s parents were scientists who died in a car accident en route to a very prestigious conference. At
the time, this fact gave Tania a sense of true ebullience:
My daughter might be a scientist, too!

Now, though, she doubts any of it might be true. Scientists, particularly ones who attended prestigious conferences, probably had extended families, probably wouldn’t have left Natalya in an orphanage in Tula for nine years while she waited to be adopted by an American.

“ We should get out of this casino,” Tania says. “Have you ever had a taco?”

“Some,” Natalya says.

“I didn’t know there were Mexicans in Russia,” Tania says, but Natalya doesn’t respond. She’s learned already that Natalya has no ear for sarcasm yet, that her limited sum of English is based mostly on basic human services like eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom, her most complex sentence to date being the one she uttered as their plane circled Las Vegas three nights ago:
Why so many lights?
she asked. “It’s so people can see that they’re having a good time,” Tania told her, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Natalya. She spread her fingers out across the window, blocking out entire swatches of the city, so that all that was visible were the Red Rock Mountains and the muted lights of the city’s suburban sprawl. “Better,” she said.

 

Every ten minutes, another plane swoops over the Taco Bell on Maryland Parkway either en route to or just taking off from McCarron Airport. Outside, where Tania and Natalya are sitting eating their tacos in silence, Tania watches how Natalya follows the path of each plane with her eyes. Her expression remains fairly placid, but Tania thinks the girl
shows a bit more sadness for each plane that lands, though she recognizes immediately how stupid that is. The girl is sad about everything. It’s impossible she’s now assigned metaphors for her sadness, at least not ones as absurd as Southwest planes, particularly since one of those planes will deliver Tania’s own parents within the hour. “We can’t wait to meet our granddaughter,” Joan, Tania’s mother, said on the phone the day previous. “We’re bringing all the old scrapbooks so she can see pictures of you when you were a little girl. Won’t she get a kick out of that?”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Tania said. “Everything is already moving so fast for her.”

“They’re just pictures,” Joan said. “Don’t you think she’ll want to see what her mother was like when she was twelve? I remember when you came home from spending the summer with your Nana and couldn’t wait to tell me about seeing pictures of me in bobby socks and a poodle skirt.”

“I’m not her mother,” Tania said.

“You have to be,” Joan said.

The problem for Tania is not the concept that she’s now Natalya’s mother, but rather the execution. Natalya is nothing like her, there’s no seed of similarity to grasp yet that binds her to Natalya apart from the curve of the girl’s upper lip. It was the first thing Tania noticed when the orphanage in Russia sent her those first photos a year ago. The photos were several years old and showed Natalya posed around a metal jungle gym. In each, Natalya had either a piece of candy or an ice cream cone in her hand and was dressed in an adorable red velvet outfit. Her face was so alive in those photos, her smile nothing short of infectious, and her lip, the way it moved into
a soft point when she was particularly happy in those shots. How many people had Tania ever made
that
happy, ever? To be able to give this child the chance to make that face . . . it overwhelmed Tania, to the point that she printed out those photos and showed them to the other cocktail girls at the Mirage, told them, “This is my daughter,” and when they asked if she lived with an ex or something, Tania just nodded. Something. Certainly something.

But the face in those early pictures is lost now beneath too much makeup—she’d have to make Natalya wash her face before the parents landed—and a scowl so persistent that Tania has begun to think that perhaps there was a clerical mistake somewhere in the process and that she was allowed to adopt the wrong child. Somewhere in Tula, Russia, is a happy girl with the same cute little lip Natalya has, and she’s waiting patiently for Tania to return and rectify the situation.

Tania had failed to consider that the years between when those first photos were taken and now would have aged Natalya. She knew it rationally, of course; knew that adopting a twelve-year-old girl came with its own specific set of problems. But Tania couldn’t stand the idea of being one of those forty-year-old women still toting around an infant like an accessory. She imagined Natalya as an instant friend, as well as someone she could actually talk to, but also as a child who would need her. The first time she actually saw Natalya in Tula, however, she realized how juvenile her thinking had been: Natalya was sitting at a picnic table not far from the jungle gym in the old photos, reading aloud from a picture book to three small boys, and even from her vantage point fifty yards away, Tania could tell that Natalya had presence, personality, a life.

“Are you happy?” Tania asks.

Natalya cocks her head, as if to make sure she’s heard correctly, but doesn’t answer right away. Tania isn’t sure how much English Natalya actually knows. The people at the orphanage said she was “75 percent fluent,” which Tania thought was fairly remarkable in light of how many people she knew in Las Vegas who were probably closer to 50 percent and held management positions at the hotel. What she’s learned in the month they’ve spent together—first during the bureaucratic morass of court hearings and meetings in Russia, where legally she was only allowed to spend fifteen unsupervised minutes each day with Natalya, and now as they’ve walked this odd alien tightrope in Tania’s Summerlin townhouse—is that Natalya can read well enough but that she’s selective in what she can say or understand of spoken English. Tania’s sister tells her that’s normal for a twelve-year-old born in America, too, which would be funny to Tania if it was her own flesh that ignored her. But this child, this child who cost her nearly all of the $50,000 she won on a single hand of Caribbean Stud on the same night they closed the Sands, wasn’t really hers at all.

“ I am not,” Natalya says.

“Can you be?”

Natalya fingers her cup of Sprite and looks away from Tania, out toward the street, which has suddenly filled with college students exiting UNLV. It’s noon, though with the persistent case of jet lag she has, it feels much later, but also somehow slower to Tania. She imagines Natalya must feel something entirely different, though, and for the first time since they arrived back in Las Vegas, Tania begins to feel sorry
for Natalya. For her dead parents, for this woman who has shown up in her life and brought her to America, forced her to eat tacos, made her answer questions about how she feels, when the woman herself has only the vaguest sense of her own emotions.

“One day, maybe,” Natalya says. “This place is so different. Not like home.”

“I’m going to work on that,” Tania says, though the truth is that she has no idea how she’ll change anything. She’s been in school for the last six months trying to become a dental hygienist, to give herself—and her daughter—a chance at a life outside Las Vegas, but has failed chemistry twice in that span. If she couldn’t master an even rudimentary understanding of the composition, structure, and properties of matter, how could she claim to know anything? “I want to be a good parent to you, Natalya. I’ve never been one before, so this is going to take some doing.” Another plane roars overhead and Tania checks her watch. Her parents are due to land in another thirty minutes. “You don’t have to answer this, and maybe you don’t know, but I wonder what really happened to your parents?”

Natalya shrugs. “Dead,” she says. “ I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

“When I go back when I’m older,” Natalya says.

Of course she’ll go back. Tania had already entertained the idea of one day having a home in Tula, too, so that Natalya wouldn’t grow up thinking she was some kind of refugee, so that she knew she hadn’t escaped, that she was still tethered to her past, even if her future, if the people who really loved her (and this was when Tania was sure she already loved Natalya, before this sense of emotional burden began its slow descent),
now lived in America.

On her third day in Tula, she’d rented a car and just drove, not bothering to consult the map of tourist locales—she’d never read any Tolstoy, so visiting his home didn’t seem necessary, and she wasn’t very excited about the prospect of visiting the Museum of Russian Weapons, either—hoping instead to stumble into neighborhoods, the kind perhaps Natalya had lived in as a toddler and where they might live together, or at least visit.

She discovered a neighborhood just adjacent to the local university, only a few miles west of the twisting Upa River. It was the mid-morning—a time she rarely saw in Las Vegas, since her shift at the Mirage typically ran 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, which meant she usually was heading to bed just as normal people were waking up—so the streets were alive with college students, but also with people who just looked like regular humans, people like her who served the people who bothered to go to school. There was a main drag of coffee shops and stores interspersed with one-story houses with flat roofs, but on large slats of green land. She was surprised by the lack of fences surrounding the homes here, but also by the lack of trash on the street.
Yes,
she thought,
we could live in this place. I could learn the language. I could go to school. We could drink coffee on the street and read Tolstoy together.

When she returned to the orphanage and told Leda, the administrator she dealt with most closely, that she’d found the most perfect neighborhood for them to one day return to, Leda brushed her off quickly. “Very polluted there from Chernobyl,” she said. “Most of Tula is.”

“ Then how do people live here?”

“You have to live somewhere.”

That was true enough, Tania knew. She’d lived in Spokane, Reno, and Las Vegas in her life, each place as unremarkable as the previous, but the thing that always amazed her, even when she simply went out of town for a few days, like when she went on a cruise to Mexico with a few girlfriends back when she worked at the Cal-Neva, was how much she missed her
spaces,
how comforting it was to know she could never get lost in these resort cities other people visited.

And now this child. This new life. Somehow she’d figured out the only way to muddle her existence beyond recognition. I should tell her I’m sorry, Tania thinks. That this was all very selfish of me. That I can return her.

“Do you remember your parents?” Tania asks. All Tania knows for sure about Natalya’s parents is their medical history, which includes a history of cancer and heart disease on both sides of the family. “Nobody dies from being healthy,” Leda, the administrator, told her. “Everybody dies from something awful.”

“ My father had a beard.” Natalya’s watching the planes again, and Tania wonders if in ten years she’ ll be as scantily recalled. “And my mother was pretty,” Natalya says. “ Like you.”

 

No one chooses to cocktail, Tania thinks. She and her family—her parents, Stu and Joan, and Natalya—are waiting for a table at Odessa, the one Russian restaurant in all of Las Vegas. It’s in a strip mall off of Paradise, a few blocks south of Flamingo. Tania has strenuously avoided the place over the years, since it was one of those restaurants in town everyone said was mob owned, like the Venetian on Sahara and Piero’s over by the convention center. But now she sees that it’s filled with
families, that the waiters are all older men with mustaches wearing black pants and spotless white shirts. The cocktail girls hovering around the people playing video poker in the bar, however, look the same as everywhere: low-cut tops, hair sprayed and teased, shoes no woman would ever consent to walk in on her own. One of the girls looks familiar, though Tania can’t quite place her, thinks maybe she worked at the Excalibur with her when she first got to town, or maybe she picked up a few shifts at the Mirage, or . . . well, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to say hello anyway. Wherever they knew each other from, that time was over, and now the girl was working in a strip mall.

Since landing three hours ago, Tania’s mother has been lecturing Natalya on American history, telling her interesting tidbits about the League of Nations and Woodrow Wilson, and now, in the restaurant, has worked all the way up to the Hoover Dam, but Tania’s not taking part, instead she’s watching the restaurant, watching the people serving, thinking about how difficult it is to know who you’re going to be when you’re just a kid. What did she want to do with her life? She never decided, though she knows now it wasn’t cocktailing. That’s the job you end up with when you’ve made no decisions at all; or at least none that matter. And then one day that’s just who you are.