Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

The toast put to rest, unraveled in some happy political mumbling, we shoveled in the food without reservation, all of us from countries historically strangled by starvation, none of us strangers to salt and brine. “Eunice,” my mother said, “perhaps you can answer for me this. Who is Lenny by profession? I never can figure out. He went to NYU business school. So he is… businessman?”

“Mama,” I said, letting out some air, “please.”

“I am talking to Eunice,” my mother said. “Girl talk.”

I had never seen Eunice’s face so serious, even as the tail end of a Baltic sardine disappeared between her glossy lips. I wondered what she might say. “Lenny does very important work,” she told my mother. “It’s, I think, like, medicine. He helps people live forever.”

My father’s fist slammed the dining table, not hard enough to break the Romanian contraption, but enough to make me draw into myself, enough to make me worry that he might hurt me. “Impossible!” my father cried. “It break every law of physics and biology, for one. For two, immoral, against God. Tphoo! I would not want such thing.”

“Work is work,” my mother said. “If stupid rich American want to live forever and Lenny make money, why you care?” She waved her hand at my father. “Stupid,” she said.

“Yes, but how Lenny knows about medicine?” My father lit up, brandishing a fork capped by a marinated mushroom. “He never study in high school. What is his weighted average? Eighty-six point eight nine four.”

“NYU Stern Business School rated number eleven for marketing, which was Lenny specialization,” my mother reminded him, and I warmed to her defense of me. They took turns attacking and defending me, as if each wanted to siphon off only so much of my love, while the other could stab at the crusted-over wounds. My mother turned to Eunice. “So Lenny tell us you speak perfect Italian,” she said.

Eunice blushed some more. “No,” she said, lowering her eyes and cupping her knees. “I’m forgetting everything. The irregular verbs.”

“Lenny spend one year in Italy,” my father said. “We come to visit him. Nothing! Bleh-bleh-bleh. Bleh-bleh-bleh.” He moved his body as if to imitate my walking through the Roman streets while trying to talk to the natives.

“You are liar, Boris,” my mother said casually. “He bought us beautiful tomato in market Piazza Vittorio. He brought down price. Three euro.”

“But tomato is so simple!” my father said. “In Russian pomidor , in Italian pomodoro . Even I know such thing! If he maybe negotiate for us cucumber or squash…”

“Zatknis’ uzhe, Borya” (“Shut up already, Boris”), my mother said. She readjusted her summer blouse and bored her eyes into mine. “Lenny, neighbor Mr. Vida show us you appear on stream ‘101 People We Need to Feel Sorry For.’ Why do you do it? This dick-sucking boy, he makes fun of you. He says you are fat and stupid and old. You don’t eat good food and you do not have profession and your Fuckability rankings are very low. Also he says tebya ponizili [‘you have been demoted’] at the company. Papa and I are very sad about this.”

My father looked away in some shame, while I curled and uncurled my toes beneath the table. So this was at the heart of their anger with me. I had told them so many times not to look at any streams or data about me. I was a private person with my own little world. I lived in a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. I had just learned to FAC. Why couldn’t they find a better use for their retirement years than this painful scrutiny of their only child? Why did they stalk me with their tomatoes and high-school averages and “Who are you by profession?” logic?

And then I heard Eunice speak, her straightforward American English ringing against the smallness of our house. “I told him not to appear in it too,” she said. “And he won’t anymore. You won’t, right, Lenny? You’re so good and smart, why do you need to do it?”

“ Exactly ,” my mother said. “Exactly, Eunice.”

I did not tell them that I had regained my desk. I did not say anything. I leaned back and watched the two women in my life look across a glossy Romanian table groaning beneath a plastic cover and twenty gallons of mayonnaise and canned fish. They were eyeing each other with a placid understanding. Sometimes mothers and girlfriends compete against one another, but that has never been my experience. It is quite easy for two smart women, no matter what the gap in their ages and backgrounds, to come to a complete agreement about me. This child , they seemed to be saying…

This child still needs to be brought up .

EUNI-TARD TO GRILLBITCH:

Hi Precious Pony,

Sup, meathole? Oh, man. Or, “oy, man,” as my Jewish boyfriend would say. I’m feeling so weird these days. Wish you could fly over and we could go to Padma and get our hair done. Mine is getting so long and freaky looking. Ugh. Maybe I should get one of those ajumma perms like our moms have, you just blow dry them in the morning and they settle into a helmet. I’m also getting those famous ajumma hips too! Great, huh? I look like my aunt Suewon crossed with a duck. And my ass is SO FUCKING HUGE it’s getting bigger than Lenny’s, which is one of those crushed middle-aged asses, not to gross you out again. See, we’re perfect for each other! Just call me Fatty McFatty, okay?

Oh, Pony of mine. What am I doing with Lenny? He’s so, like, brain-smart, it’s intimidating me. I was intimidated by Ben in Rome because of his looks and I never felt super-secure in bed because of that. With Lenny it’s easier. I can be myself, because everything he does is so sweet and honest. I gave him a half-gag CIM blow job and he was so grateful he actually started to cry. Who does that? I guess sometimes I just want to want him as much as he wants me. He’s already talking of marriage, my darling little dork! And I just want him to relax and maybe not always be so cute and caring and trying to please me, so that maybe I can pursue him a little myself. Does that make any sense?

So I went to Long Island to meet his parents. He basically guilted me into going. His dad’s weird and hard to understand, but I like his mom. She doesn’t take crap from Lenny or her husband. We even talked about ways Lenny could dress better and be more assertive at work, and she actually kissed me when I told her I was taking Lenny shopping for breathable fabrics. She’s so emotional, which kind of reminds me of Lenny. Um, what else? They live in a pretty poor house. It looks like the kind of place my dad’s Mexican patients used to have in L.A. Remember Mr. Hernandez, the deacon with the gimp leg? They’d invite us to their little teensy house in South Central after church. I think his daughter Flora died of leukemia.

Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn’t SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don’t mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it. I was going to teen my sister but I was so embarrassed I just stood there and watched him read which lasted for like HALF AN HOUR, and finally he put the book down and I pretended like nothing happened. And then I snuck a peek and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading (I guess it figures, cause Lenny’s parents are from Russia). I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolsoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was almost finished.