Lara Vapnyar - Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

“Why are you standing there like an idiot?” the saleswoman screamed. “Do something! Call the police!”

Vasyok or Ivan snorted.

“Why police? No need for police.” He rolled up his sleeves and smiled again. His arms were red and perfectly round, with pale hairs scattered between scars and tattoos.

He drew some air in and huffed into my neck. His breath was hot and garlicky wet.

I screamed.

“No need for police,” Vasyok repeated, in the same calm and cheerful tone.

And then he lifted me off the ground. It was the first thing that I noticed — the sensation of being in the air, of losing control. His hands were on my chest, right there where I’d felt the precious little knobs just a couple of hours earlier. His index fingers crushed my nipples flat, while his thumbs pressed into my back, an inch away from my shoulder blades. Half crazy with fear and pain, I kicked with my knees, which was exactly what he needed. He used me as a battering ram, crashing me into the crowd to push people out of the store.

I don’t remember how long it took him to clear the room. I don’t remember at which point my feet met the ground, and whether I fell or not. It is strange, but I don’t even remember if Vera was waiting for me at the store doors or if I had to walk home alone. I don’t remember if I walked or ran.

I do remember that after changing into my pajamas that night, I took the new sweater, folded it several times, and shoved it into the garbage pail between an empty sour cream container and a long string of potato peel. And I remember thinking that I wasn’t beautiful and never would be.

Later, when I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I heard the rumble of a refuse chute — my mother was sending the garbage down. I pressed my face into the pillow and sobbed, suddenly regretting that I’d thrown the sweater away.

KATYA PEEREDinto her mug again. The tea leaves looked like a bunch of dead flies. They didn’t show the face of a man, nor did they give any hint of his name. If they knew something, they certainly kept it secret. Katya put the mug away and went to brush her teeth.

M Y MOTHERhas always removed her shoes under the table, placed her feet on top of them, and entertained herself by curling and uncurling her toes. Aunt Masha liked to scratch her ankles with her stiletto heels. Uncle Boris stomped his right foot when he argued. “I insist!” he would say, and his hard leather heel went boom! against the linoleum floor. My father’s feet weren’t particularly funny, except when he wore mismatched socks, as he often did.

We, my cousin Violetta and I, liked to spend holiday meals under the table. From there, hidden behind three layers of tablecloth, we watched the secret life of the adult feet and listened to adult conversations.

“Mm, mm,” they said, above our heads. “The salad is good today! Not bad, is it? Not bad at all!”

They champed, they crunched, they jingled their forks, they clinked glasses.

“In Paris they serve Olivier without meat,” Uncle Boris said.

“Come on!”

“They do!”—angry boom of Uncle Boris’s right shoe—“I read it in A Moveable Feast. ”

“Olivier can’t possibly be made without meat!” My mother’s toes curled. “It’s even worse than Olivier with bologna.”

“Olivier with bologna is plebeian.” Aunt Masha’s stiletto heels agreed.

IF I GIGGLED, Cousin Violetta covered my mouth with her cupped hand. She had rough fingers, hardened by piano lessons. Her mother also took her to drawing and figure-skating lessons. She said that her figure-skating teacher liked to bend the kids’ backs to the point where their vertebrae were about to break loose and scatter onto the rink. Poor Cousin Violetta. I didn’t have to take any lessons because my father was the genius of the family. “The Mikhail Lanzman,” people said about him. He used up piles of paper, covering it with formulas; he often froze with a perplexed expression during meals and conversations, and he did every simple chore slowly and zealously. When we all prepared Salad Olivier and my father sliced potatoes, he did exactly four cuts across and six lengthwise.

At that time I tried to copy him. My mother put a sofa cushion on my chair, so I could reach the table, and gave me a bowl of peeled eggs — a safer ingredient that wouldn’t soil my holiday clothes. I didn’t mind, even though Cousin Violetta had been trusted with sour pickles. I liked eggs. They were soft, smooth, and easy to slice.

I held an egg between my thumb and index finger, carefully counted the cuts. My father, who sat across from me, nodded approvingly. From time to time his reading glasses would slide to the tip of his nose, and it was my job to push them up because I had the cleanest hands. “Puppy Tail!” he would call, and I would slip off my pillow and rush to his end of the table, push the glasses to the bridge of his nose, and command, “Stay there!” But invariably the glasses slid down again, often as soon as I made it back to my place and resumed counting.

By the time I could reach the table without the pillow, my slicing zeal had cooled off. Strangely enough, it coincided with a vague suspicion that my father was an ordinary man after all. Ordinary, and maybe even boring. The puppy tail stopped wagging.

By the time we moved to America my cutting zeal had perished altogether.

“ SLICE, DON’T CHOP!” my mother says in our Brooklyn kitchen. I remove the large potato chunks that I’d just put into the crystal bowl and slice them some more.

It’s June 14, our first American anniversary. We’ll celebrate it alone, the three of us, consuming a bowl of Olivier and a bottle of sickly sweet wine that rests on top of the refrigerator. We are not happy. In my mother’s opinion, it’s my fault.

“You can’t say that you don’t meet men. You work with men, don’t you?” My mother rips sinew out of the chunks of boiled pork.

I raise my eyes. I work in a urologist’s office and my mother knows it.

“Mother, the men I meet are either impotent or carry sexually transmitted diseases.” This isn’t completely true. The urologist also has two or three incontinence cases and a few prostate cancers, which I neglect to mention.

She purses her lips and starts knocking with her knife against the cutting board. She works fast when she is angry. The bits of meat fly from under her knife all over the table. I pick the bits up and throw them into the garbage, seeing a corner of the living room with my father’s small figure sprawled on the couch. His feet, clad in perfectly matched gray socks, are placed on top of the armrest. His feet are the first thing I see on entering the apartment. Sometimes he taps with them rhythmically as if listening to a sad, slow tune; at other times they just stay perched there like two lost birds.

His feet were the first thing I saw yesterday, having returned from a date that had started with my mother’s phone hunt for a “suitable boy” and ended with the “suitable boy” telling me I could be certain that he would never ever ask me out again.

“He’s not our kind, Ma. I’m sure that in his family they put bologna in the salad,” I said, trying to console her. She didn’t buy it.

THE FACT IS,Marochka, that Tanya does have suitors,” she says on the phone. “Wonderful men. But Americans ! You understand me, don’t you? There are differences that can’t be resolved, different cultures and such. We want a Russian boy for her.”