Мария Кузнецова - Something Unbelievable

Yuri: “Pick any of the ladies up?”

Stas: “Of course. I invited my top three prospects up for dinner, I hope you don’t mind.”

Yuri: “How will you choose between them?”

Stas: “Who says I have to choose?”

“You never learn, do you?” Yuri says. He only speaks this way to Stas, while being so proper with me and the rest of the world. I wish he knew I actually wanted him to let loose a little more with me too. But we hardly have time to joke around anymore because we’re too busy tracking the last time Tally was changed or napped or spit up everywhere. Now he cleans the litterbox and gets the trash together and he and Stas grab the trash and take off to get groceries and run a bunch of other errands.

I’m alone with a whimpering Tally in my arms, and I try to rock her with one hand while checking my Insta with my other and I see I’ve gotten a few dozen more likes on my audition post, even from the Borsch Babies, and feel a little better about showing up there at all. After I prop Tally up on my lap and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to her and shake a rattle around for a while, feeling my remaining brain cells ooze out my ears, the sweet girl looks sleepy, so I take her to her crib and lower her down and by a miracle she actually settles down after a little while, just like Baba said she would. I curl up on the couch next to Sharik, resting my head near his haunches, and try to do the same, but I can’t, all I can do is wonder what Mama would think of me now, if she would judge me or praise me for auditioning when I’m at the end of my rope.

A few months after Mama began chemo, I woke up in the middle of the night to this beautiful singing. I thought I was still dreaming, or that Papa was listening to Pugacheva or something, but it was four in the morning, so I went downstairs to investigate. We lived in a cramped condo but it had this big wooden patio that faced the woods where Mama liked to sit with her morning coffee. And that was where I found her, bald as a gosling in her bathrobe, with the sliding glass door open. It was a fall night, and pretty cold, and I wanted to throw a blanket over her like she always did to me, to tell her she would catch cold, or to beg her to go back to sleep—the chemo had exhausted her—but for some reason, I just stood there. She was singing a song I had heard before, one of the Soviet ballads Papa would play on his record player during their occasional date nights, filled with longing and darkness, a song by Lev Mishkin from his album Heartsongs for the Drowned, a song I had seen her rocking her head to but never, ever singing. But there it was:

I knew it was something I wasn’t supposed to see, like the time I walked into my parents’ room when I was in elementary school and understood that they were having sex, that the strange grunting and sweating shadowy shapes belonged, crazily, to my parents, so there I was, unable to turn around, but knowing I couldn’t announce myself, until I slowly backed away. My relationship with my mother hadn’t exactly been healed by all the chemo and in fact had gotten steadily worse since earlier in the fall, when I sat my parents down and explained that I would not be applying to colleges, that I would move to the city to be an actress after my senior year was over. Papa was upset but not surprised and didn’t put up much of a fight, but Mama had been livid. “Are you trying to kill me even faster?” she had said. “You’re not thinking clearly. Life is long, child, or at least it should be, for most. You can go to school and try this actress business on the side, but do not bank your life on it.” “But I know what I want,” I said to her. “I don’t want to spend all day in pointless classes.” She didn’t speak to me for a week after that.

So there I was, listening to my mother sing in this gorgeous voice filled with dark passion and love. I had never heard my mom sing a single note before. Even on lame family vacations when I was a kid, sometimes Papa and I would sing to the Beatles or whatever he put on, and Papa was terrible and knew it, and I was just slightly above average, but Mama would sit in the passenger seat with this pained little smile on her face, which I thought was just because we were not very good at singing, but then I saw it might have been more complicated.

I moved forward, toward my mother, without even realizing it was happening. It was breezy out and Mama’s robe and the trees in front of us were rustling. If she still had her long flowing hair, it would have danced in the wind. Mama turned around, looking absolutely horrified, far worse than I imagine she would have looked if she knew I caught her and my dad fucking when I was a kid. Her eyes were wild and she looked absolutely mad but also beautiful in her white robe, her head completely bare and her eyes black and slick and her collarbone sticking out in a not-unstunning way, my mother even when she was dying.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I didn’t know you could sing.”

“Go to sleep, darling. You were just dreaming.”

“I heard you—”

“You are mistaken. Go back to your room. You have school tomorrow.”

“But it sounded beautiful,” I said. “I didn’t know—”

She grabbed my wrist, hard, and looked like I had let her down worse than I ever had with all the boys or the drinking and skipping school or even the whole no-college thing, all of it, as if it had somehow snowballed into this one moment on the patio, when I was pretty sure that I hadn’t done anything wrong, for once. If anything, I was trying to be nice and get to know my mother before it was too late.

“You didn’t hear a thing. Now, leave me alone. I just need a bit of peace.”

I didn’t fight her, for once. I went back inside and grabbed a blanket, but Mama looked so fragile and ghostlike on the patio that no blanket could warm her up, that it would only make her more angry and would invade her privacy even further. I had already stopped her from her beautiful singing, which seemed like the worst crime of all, and I knew then, standing by the sliding door with a scratchy old blanket my grandmother had brought from Kiev, that Mama was not long for this world, that she had one foot out of it already.

I was right. Though I thought maybe if I could bargain with God, not that I believed in that kind of thing, if I promised to be a good girl and stopped driving down the Shore with older boys in the middle of the night, if I stopped popping the Xanax I got under the bleachers after school in exchange for blow jobs, if I ate my dinner and didn’t skip class and even got B-pluses in English and history classes and even Spanish, and forced myself to apply to college and tough it out for four fucking years, then maybe God would let Mama live. Of course the big joke was that, for once, I was acting like the good daughter Mama had always wanted, but it was too late.

She hardly noticed that I went to school and stopped talking to boys and wearing the short shorts and tanks with exposed bra straps that had gotten me sent to the nurse to change into my gym clothes on a weekly basis. She barely cared that I even filled out applications to Rutgers and NYU and Marymount though I made a point of doing them at the kitchen table, but none of it did any good. Mama quit chemo after Thanksgiving and died, fittingly, just before the New Year, which had been her favorite holiday, the only time she got dressed up and festive and hung out with the other Russians, sometimes even hosted them, and stayed up drinking and laughing until the sun came up, but no, not that year, which me and my poor father had to face on our own.