Yelena Akhtiorskaya - Panic in a Suitcase

The necklace’s appealing qualities (in order from least to most): It was chunky, it had a clasp, it accentuated her breasts. In the bathroom mirror, she kept track of the day-to-day changes. The areolas were fluffy and light pink like inside a conch shell, but the surrounding whiteness, what Frida understood to be actual breast, refused to un-cling from her rib cage. Pushing them together was no more possible than making a joint eye. The first thing that greeted Frida in the bathroom was disappointment, but by the time she unlocked the door, letting in whichever crazed family member had been trying to knock it down, she felt herself the owner of a real set of boobs. There was nothing passive about these mirror sessions. Work was being done, tissue developed. Yet no one mentioned a training bra. To ask for one was against the rules — the world had to offer. The bra had to be deserved. The necklace fell heavily to her navel, on the way outlining each breast, creating visible mounds. Examining herself from every imaginable angle and in all her tank tops of the thinnest cotton, she decided that this time the evidence was irrefutable.

The corridor came alive not terribly long thereafter, introducing a final unpleasant moment: Miss Gala’s dismissal. Whispers characterized this small event, as Frida was made the subject of a report. Miss Gala was troubled by Frida’s antisocial behavior. When walking out of the Y, Frida tried to fall into step with a group of girls and grimace as if she were interacting, but this tactic didn’t always work, because Miss Gala was no fool. Once the door had slammed behind Miss Gala, Frida could at last make her appearance. It was calculated for effect. The only possible result was the urgent purchase of a training bra. Frida knew the exact one she wanted and where it hung in Berta Department Store.

After the recent string of days (one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven), Marina’s powers of observation weren’t as sharp as one might hope. Frida, torso puffed, had to go so far as point. Once Marina processed what she was seeing, she leaped in her daughter’s direction, meanwhile maintaining perfect silence. This made her daughter squeal all the louder. Realizing that her mother was a lost cause, Frida turned her chest to her grandma, who was straining to remove her shoes on the creaky piano bench. No need to know what Baba Esther’s words meant to sense the force of profanity. By now her mother, too, had found her voice. Take that thing off! she yelled. Right this instant!

Mission aborted, Frida ran to the bathroom, turned the lock. How could it be that they’d missed the point entirely? Somehow or other, Baba Esther was to blame — if she wasn’t busy, she was furious. Most of the world slipped under her radar. When she looked at Frida, it wasn’t as one person looked at another, certainly not as a grandma looked at her granddaughter, but as an inspector checking a garment. She was interested only when something was wrong. If Frida had a fever, an ear infection, splinters in her heel, Baba Esther gave her undivided attention. She was visibly disappointed when Frida’s cough wasn’t a cough but a badly swallowed grape. And she never lacked for the proper admonition: I’ve seen many girls just like you asphyxiate because they stuffed their mouths and ran while eating.

Too discouraged to conduct another mirror session, Frida climbed into the bathtub and stretched out her legs. The necklace rose and subsided with her rib cage. Its weight instilled a lesson. It wasn’t a good lesson, but at least it wasn’t algebra and at least her uncle, to whom she assumed the lesson belonged, as her grandma had yelled his name several times, wasn’t trying to instill it himself. The walls of the bathtub were rounded and white like distant mountains. For a moment she felt as if her surroundings were open and vast, in contrast to her days, which were crowded with buildings and shadows.

ROBERT’S YEARLONG SCHEMING had manifested such outward symptoms as an acute mailbox fixation, the revival of dusty desk implementa (magnifying glass, makeshift clipboard, pencil sharpener the size of a pet cat), severe bouts of pharmaceutical-resistant insomnia — all of which Esther and Marina misdiagnosed with dread as stage one in the fulfillment of the mythic memoir project. But they need not have worried about their secrets leaking out through Robert’s pencil. Thanks to his furtive efforts, John Lamborg had translated half the poems in Pasha’s collection. No publisher had taken it on, no lectureship been offered. Robert miraculously kept up the correspondence in Pasha’s name until foolishly mentioning that he would be visiting his family in New York this July. Lamborg read this as an invitation. He’d assumed that they both assumed it was important and inevitable that they meet. Perhaps not entirely unintentionally, Robert had gotten himself into a bind and saw no choice but to disclose to Pasha the details of the entire deception.

He wasn’t sure what to expect — an outburst of rage at the intrinsic breach of privacy or gratitude at the sight of the translated poems, perhaps one followed by the other. But Pasha took the news as tepidly as he’d taken the letter. He’d never had any intention of responding to Professor Lamborg, having skimmed his letter with a bit of amusement but a lack of any other sensation. The amusement was partly in response to the letter and partly to the attached photograph of the Russian branch of the Slavic department assembled in two paltry rows on a concrete staircase. John Lamborg had forgotten to point himself out, which didn’t make much of a difference, since the four men were identical. Their ruddiness was half fresh air, half rosacea. They had scrawny men’s confined bellies and wore quality sweaters made of wool, the necklines of which were tight and pronounced; perhaps it was this constriction that caused the bloom in their cheeks. If Pasha had been surprised by anything, it was his own boredom.

Fine! yelled Robert. I’ll cancel the goddamn meeting!

There’s no need, said Pasha. Calm down, Papa. I’ll go meet the man.

But the calm was precisely the problem.

The department photograph must have been a decade old. Lamborg was gaunt, aged in the haphazard way rosy people age. His button-down shirt still had the size sticker on the back (XS), and his hair looked like freshly mowed grass. It was for this occasion that the man had cleaned up. Having little to present to Pasha, Lamborg wanted to be presentable himself. He must have thought that all these months Pasha had been awaiting news of an English-language publisher.

They met in Brighton, a neighborhood whose pulse Lamborg made a point to check at least once a year. Pasha professed ignorance, and it was Lamborg who ended up showing Pasha around, leading the way to a restaurant-café that served the most delicate blintzes. A rheumatic finger pointed out that over there was the most sinus-excavating plov and here the airiest meringue, while two blocks up stood white vats of the crunchiest pickles. The only men Pasha knew with such an investment in the matter were grotesquely obese — they ate all day long, did little else — yet even they were less expert in the field. And here was Lamborg, a chopstick of a man, warning Pasha never to buy Korean carrot salad from Gold Label but only from Taste of Russia, which, on the other hand, used the worst dough for its frozen pelmeni. All in utter earnestness, not a hint of sarcasm, not a measly grin. Lamborg was disappointed at Pasha’s inability to supply new tips or fill lacunae like Brighton breakfast fare. The only gastronomic wisdom Pasha could muster was that it was truly uncanny how much the food here was like that in Odessa, the only divergence being in abundance. He kept at it until he’d talked himself into admitting how disturbing and pathetic he found Brighton, though he actually didn’t feel one way or another.