Wayward

By Daria Rose

The letter arrived on Thursday, addressed, curiously, to their daughter. By Friday morning, she resolved to forward it to Katya’s address. She dropped the letter on the kitchen counter. 

“See, Katya wants us to get in touch, but she’s too proud. Why else would she use our address? She’s your daughter. She takes after you.”

To this, her husband nodded. It would have been easy to say more than he meant, so he preferred to say nothing. He scraped the burned flakes of blini off the edges of the pan.

She peeled a blini from the serving plate, scorching her fingertips. “It could be urgent. We’ll send it to her right away. I’m not calling her. She can’t get upset. Which, by the way, would have been a reasonable thing for a mother to do.” 

“We’re out of butter,” he said.

“We’ll stop by the supermarket after the post office.”

They ate the under-larded blini and drank black tea with bits of loose leaf sticking to the roofs of their mouths. He untied a mesh grocery bag from the door handle.

***

The boardwalk was deserted. It was too early in the year for swimmers, too early in the day for drunks with boomboxes blaring nineties Russian prison pop. The problem with Brighton Beach was not how much it had changed, but how little. He eyed the corner of the letter poking out of the handbag on his wife’s shoulder. It wasn’t a big deal, really, someone would toss the letter when it arrived at Katya’s old apartment in the East Village. He’d been so good at hiding his daughter’s mail, until last night, when he lingered at Berikoni Bakery talking to Borys, whose cousins had crossed from Dnipro to Kyiv, to Lviv, to Krakow, to Zürich, and finally, thank God, to Brighton Beach. He hooked his elbow into his wife’s arm, but she remained passive, neither gripping back nor leaning into him for support. He wished she did. He wanted to feel needed. He tucked his nose into his scarf. The wind was too strong for April.

She thought the ocean smelled like spring, or maybe it was the other way around. She grasped at her husband’s hand without looking and felt relieved to find him there. Leaning against him for balance, she looked down at her own feet pattering forward, skipping every other plank, every other. Katenka would surely admire her restraint in leaving the letter unopened, a testament to her respect for her daughter's privacy, despite accusations to the contrary. The letter was probably just a thank you for your donation, but it was the best pretext she’d had to contact Katya in over a year. The world, even now, held a possibility of joy. The scent of garlic and dill from Tatiana Grill brought back memories of dancing to the accordion at a beachside restaurant that summer in Yalta, before Katya was born, but it was too painful to think of what happened to Yalta now. The sound of slapping against the boardwalk alerted her that her husband hadn’t changed out of his house slippers.

“Bah, grandpa,” she called out, despite the embarrassing lack of grandchildren. “Your shoes. Again.”

He stomped the sand off his slippers. “My boots are too hot. I didn’t want socks full of sand. These I can just shake off on the balcony.”

She nodded to allow him the grace to turn a blunder into an intention. “She really took after you. Those hideous German sandals she wears. She even wore them to Afanasiy Alexeevich’s retirement party, remember?”

He didn’t remember. Neither the footwear his daughter wore on some stupid occasion five, no, six years ago, nor, progressively, anything at all. It wasn’t senility but a willful desire for forgetfulness. The cawing of the world had become too loud, the Western tyrants trumped the homegrown variety, and the price for continued existence was a slow dissolution of a film that cocooned him from the world. It was less the loss of real memories, things, or people–though of those he had also lost plenty–but of the small possibility of improvement, of the future more so than the past.

“Let’s stop by the supermarket first, before the post office” He surprised himself with his burst of initiative. He knew he must temper it to avoid rousing her suspicions. “It’s on the way.”

She tugged her husband’s arm to direct him to turn right, “We’ll go down Seventh Street. I don’t want to run into Pyotr Semyonovich’s patriotic encampment.”

Since February, Pyotr Semyonovich had split the neighborhood into zones of allegiance: those who could bear the sight of a Russian flag and the portrait of its president, and those who took the scenic route to Tashkent Supermarket to dodge the bald dictator’s likeness.

Her arm locked tighter around his elbow. He gladly relinquished the reins of control. Their shared life often sounded like this: she would introduce the leitmotif, he would flutter about with variations, trimming the chords she found unpleasant; resentment and gratitude blurred in a stable fugue of four decades of marriage.

The hot deli at Tashkent Supermarket was the center of the universe, radiating swirls of human activity. A young couple with matching haircuts pointed to the jellied pig feet and gasped. Bewigged grandmas with overarched eyebrows elbowed their way to the tinned herring at the back. A teenage boy restocked the lids for medium-sized takeout containers.

He rehearsed his words one last time in his head, then spoke them, “You finish up the groceries. I’ll go mail the letter. Grab some butter, too.” 

She looked down at the leeks, and a jar of pickles in her shopping cart. He knew that she was weighing the pleasure of writing her daughter’s address–a strand of connection, however loose–against the dread of overhearing another militant tirade while waiting in line.

He reached for the letter in her purse. She rocked back, yanking the shopping cart with her, and his hand emerged empty. She watched his fist, still grasping for her, a gesture of need and attack. She took the letter from her bag and handed it to him, but continued to clench the envelope, “She’s okay, right? She is safe?” He nodded, and she let go. 

She changed her mind by the time she reached the dairy aisle, but her husband had already disappeared through the exit. The kefir selection was a sliver of what she’d been used to in Saint Petersburg, thirty-something years ago. Capitalism excised the important and expanded the trivial. She picked up a block of butter and dropped it in her shopping cart. The sticks of frozen syrki, with drawings of children skating on frozen lakes, filled her with mounting sadness. Katya used to adore those treats, waiting at the door when her mother brought them back from the store, their shiny wrappers slick with condensation. Katya would clap her hands and ask, in her half-Russian language of endearment, “Mom, did you get the little cheeses?” Raising their daughter on this strange half-island at the southern tip of Brooklyn, where taxidermied bears guarded the entrances to restaurants serving pelmeni, and old men in flat caps played chess on the boardwalk, meant that Katya’s childhood was filled with the flotsam of their shipwrecked country.

Little Katenka had often resisted their fervent parenting, which called for a kind of love that resembled vigilance. During a sandwich break between ballet and cello practice, the six-year-old discovered a computer in her school’s basement. The secret ciphers of BASIC promised a world beyond the nauseating ambiguity of facing fastidious teachers, doting parents, and barbarous classmates. Computer-speak was clean, its logic rational, its rules provided the satisfaction of tolerating exactly one right answer. She needed only to speak the machine’s language to direct the snake to crawl around the screen, to coax the ball to eat away the pixelated bricks, or to command the Tetris shapes to fall from the sky. 

Katya’s mother was bewildered by her daughter’s lack of common sense. Having been forced into engineering by the excellence of her grades, she couldn’t fathom why Katya would choose to be saddled with something as coldly practical as computers. To distract Katya from her wayward hobby, her mother woke up at six to gel Katya’s hair into a hard shell for Nutcracker auditions, sat on the stiff piano bench for hours while Katya practiced chromatic scales, then stayed up until four, covered in oil and turpentine, to finish Katenka’s paintings for the school competition. And for what? The sniveling ingrate just wanted to tap tap tap on her keyboard, like some hunchback vermin, and to plot new schemes with her father in their silly secret language.

Katya graduated from MIT’s Course 6-3 at eighteen and by twenty-nine was promoted to a staff engineer at a major technology company with infinite M&M’s in their microkitchens. Her rapid ascent made it all the more surprising when, a year into the pandemic, her parents received an email stating that she’d quit her job, broken off her engagement with Peter, and disowned them as parents. 

The email arrived on a Thursday afternoon, while her mother was propagating geranium cuttings on the balcony. Katya’s father was playing online chess and read it first. He rapped on the window, waving for his wife to come to the study. With her fingers still knuckle-deep in dirt, she stared at the screen until her narrowing vision forced her to sit down. Her husband sighed without sound and plucked errant leaves of geranium off her shirt. 

Later that evening, when she scrubbed soil stains off the balcony tiles, she memorized every word of her daughter’s email. Their inexhaustible care, referred to as ‘endless haranguing,’ had become unhelpful, even more so, ‘draining,’ even more, ‘periodically suffocating.’ Katya wrote in both Russian, to ensure that they understood, and English, to convey her message with precision. They were forbidden from contacting her until she contacted them, whether it took a month, a year, or twenty. Katya’s mother sighed over the severed stems of geraniums and thought of the time Katya didn’t pick her up from the airport when she came to visit for graduation. She had to admit that Katya–who really took after her father–always had a penchant for cruelty.

***

Katya’s mother tossed a red onion into her shopping cart. It was all Katya’s shrink who set her up against her own parents. Those charlatans should be thrown in jail. Look at Salima Rafaelovna, from the apartment across. Her daughter went to see a shrink, and, sure enough, she blamed her mother for immigrating when Zarina was a child, for giving her the education that enabled her six-figure job, and in the end? With all that free time and excess income, Zarina paid $200, $300 an hour to the phonies who told her that her mother was at fault.

She picked at a limp bunch of lettuce. She could visit Madame Teresa, in the walkup behind the urology clinic, to ask the cards whether Katya was safe. At the next aisle over, she saw Katya’s old history teacher, whose son had been drafted in Kyiv. Katya’s mother reached for a radish on the top shelf when it all came to her. A series of sparse signs, standing for feeble symbols: the letter from Ukrainian Response Initiative, her husband’s silent nods, his sudden desire to take charge of the letter, Katya’s cryptic social media posts at odd hours of the night. She thought of the restlessness of a young brilliant mind anxious for purpose in a post-pandemic vacuum.

She parked her shopping cart beside a mountain of tinfoil candy, and walked past the smoked sprats, and the emerald tarragon sodas, past the hot bar, and the Uzbek pastries, past the sliced watermelon, out, past the pile of crab apples heaped by the entrance. She had to reach the ocean separating them from each other. She walked the tired street, slick with suds of dirt dripping off the subway tracks overhead, out and away, toward the water.

About the Author

Daria Rose is a writer based in Brooklyn, a PhD student in the History of Art at Harvard, and a refugee.