Мария Кузнецова - Something Unbelievable

“Next week, after your grandmother leaves, I’m going to Lake George for the weekend.”

This cracks me up. “You’ve got your poles ready?”

“I’ll figure something out.”

“I guess it’ll just be me and Tally,” I say, brushing some hair out of my girl’s eyes.

“If you say so.”

“Stas is visiting his family after the play anyway.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. You’re the one who said we should give it a few days.”

“Fine.”

I have an image of my father coming back with his fishing poles to his tiny Jersey City apartment, looking lovesick after hanging out with Yuri. I would ask him what they did there, what they talked about, but he would never tell me much, reminding me of the way I would act when I came home from a date and Mama gave me the third degree, though much less kindly of course. “We talked about life,” he would say. “What about it? Did you figure it all out then?” He would smile big. “For that, we’d need to fish at least a few more times, darling.”

As we cross into Queens, I stare at my daughter and the Hudson and wonder how I got to this fucked-up place, how I could have treated Yuri like such shit without even thinking twice about it. No, I can’t blame my hormones or weakened mom state, because there are millions of moms out there who don’t kiss and develop crushes, or worse, on their husband’s best friend. A guy who I’m more confused about than ever since he messed things up by giving me that stupid poem, making me wonder if I ever knew him at all.

I need to get back to where I was, to the person I used to be before I had this fucking baby, the baby who is sweetly sleeping in the backseat, just minutes away from meeting her great-grandmother. And actually, I do think she looks like her a bit—when she’s fussing over something, I can see it, that look on her face that so reminds me of my baba. The girl has become a wonder this summer, rolling over, babbling a bit, shaking rattles and chewing on everything in sight, even eating bananas. She’s come such a long way from the human puddle I gave birth to, though she’s got a long, long way to go. And yet, there are so many things my daughter can do that I wish I could—sleeping through the wild street sounds, facing the brutal, cold world with absolute wonder, smiling for no reason at all—but I have unlearned all of her survival skills, and one day, she will unlearn them, too, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

She opens her eyes but doesn’t cry out, she just stares at the cars flying by the window. Such a patient little thing, a girl I’m starting to feel somewhat connected to, a girl whose hair is getting a gorgeous fiery tint to it, beginning to cover up her enormous ears. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been busy working on my play and have actually had a chance to miss her, or if it’s my hormones returning to normal or what. At least there’s somebody around me who I feel somewhat certain about.

As I stroke Tally’s hair, Yuri puts his face in his hands at a red light. “Fuck,” he says.

“What?”

“I forgot to get flowers,” he says. “How could I have forgotten the flowers?”

“That’s all right,” I say, and for some reason his genuinely distressed face over this non-issue when I am contemplating how cosmically I have failed makes me laugh. “She won’t care.”

Standing at arrivals with Tally strapped to me, I’m anxious as hell about seeing my grandmother, because she’ll be able to tell that something is off. During our Sevastopol summers, she could always tell if I had snuck off in the middle of the night for a liaison, though she didn’t make a big deal about it. One time, when I returned to the cottage after spending all night hooking up on a sandy blanket with a lifeguard, I thought my grandmother was asleep. But as I crept toward my room, her sharp voice pierced the darkness. “You might want to shower first, darling,” she had said.

We watch the rumpled travelers descend with their small bags, rushing into the arms of the people who love them. There’s a man in uniform, a tiny pink-haired woman hugging a surprisingly large dude with all her might, and a mother and her two children reuniting with a husband in a sweater that looks out of place in late August. And there she is, my dear grandmother, looking much frailer than she does over Skype, descending from the escalator like a spirit from the heavens, her silver braid still silky and falling past her shoulders, her pearls on, a grim little frown on her face, looking like she means business. My only blood besides my daughter, who is curled up against my chest in her carrier, a little dazed as she blinks up at the bright lights. The tears well up in my eyes, not just because it’s been two years since I’ve seen her, before I was pregnant and when she and my grandfather were both healthy and happily eating at the little kitchen table I miss with all my heart, before I had fucked everything up. She really is the one soul on Earth who knows me, who knew Mama and of course Papa, who was proud to see me come out of my dark, dark twenties, though I’m doing no better now than the younger, flightier girl I was back then.

And in her face, I see Papa’s, and just a touch of my own, and yes, even my daughter’s, confirming that all of our genetic soup is as intermingled as I imagined. I rush toward her, forgetting, for a moment, that my daughter’s strapped to my body, not understanding that the joy and wonder on my grandmother’s face is reserved for her, this new miracle, not old-news me. She hunches slightly to get a good look at her.

“She looks better in person, actually,” she says, stroking the top of her head, turning to the left and the right to inspect the girl. “One ear is a bit smashed in, have you noticed that? She was probably all jammed up, down there,” she adds, gesturing at my lady parts, and for the first time in a while, Yuri and I both laugh. Tally, meanwhile, is staring at Baba with an open mouth, a black O of incomprehension. She looks up at the bright lights of the airport, the people rushing about, hugging loved ones and dragging suitcases and whipping out tickets, all of them with someplace to go, reminding me that I haven’t left town since I played a runaway who was found belly-up in a lake in Chicago before I got knocked up.

“You made it,” I say, giving my grandmother a big hug, smelling her thick perfume, and my eyes sting as the tears fall down my face.

“You haven’t aged a day,” Yuri says as he embraces her, and when he emerges from her grasp, she takes a step back and inspects us with the same suspicion she gave poor Tally. I know my hair’s a mess, my last night’s makeup is smudged, there’s spit-up on my too-tight T-shirt, and my sandals are caked in playground muck. Baba is soaking all of this in, rearing her head back like I’ve stepped in dog shit.

“The child looks good,” she says. “But what happened to her parents? Look at you—an old lady comes halfway across the world, and you don’t even bring her flowers?”

My arm is linked with Yuri’s as we stroll to the theater. The poor boy parked two blocks away and repeatedly asked if I was comfortable walking, as if I were some kind of invalid. And while it has been more and more difficult for me to walk lately, I am determined to make the most of my final trip to America, to welcome the challenge. I have spent so many days sitting by the sea, lapping at the waves, reading under the sun, waiting for my soul to regenerate. Of course, I loved being on the shore with a good book, but I had delved back into Onegin and it all just seemed mannered and silly to me, Onegin was just an old dunce for trying to get Tatyana back after all that time; he would have been better off staying home. I had already begun to feel—to say the least—a bit restless.