Lara Vapnyar - Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

“‘It’s so pretty and small,’ I said.

That was the only time I didn’t lie about a man’s size, Katya wanted to add, but then changed her mind.

“‘What do you do with it?’

“‘Not much, really.’ He shrugged, tucking his peesya into his underpants. ‘I pee with it; I pull on it sometimes. Not much.’

“‘Not much?’ I frowned. Such a pretty, fun toy. I would have known what to do with it! For one thing I would’ve dressed it in all the clothes from my tiny-dolls collection. I would’ve tried little hats, socks, and dresses on it. Then I would’ve tried to feed it and put it into bed.”

“Classic case of penis envy,” Katya’s lover said, laughing. He was playing with her bra straps.

“Oh, no, not at all. I didn’t feel envy. It was rather a feeling of waste that such a promising thing wasn’t properly used.

“Anyway, I was excited, and I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mother. In fact, I didn’t wait to go home. I told her on the way from school. I stopped in the middle of a dry summer sidewalk, let go of my mother’s hand, and said, ‘Mom, you won’t believe what I saw today!’

“Several hours of yelling, sobbing, and hysterical phone confessions to her friends followed. Then there was a lecture. My mother led me into a room that we shared — my little bed stood perpendicularly to her big one — sat me on a little chair in the corner, and walked to the middle of the room, her arms folded on her chest and her brows furrowed. I think I might have giggled, because I remember my mother suddenly yelling, ‘It’s not funny! It’s a very serious matter!’

“The lecture wasn’t long. I remember sitting patiently through the whole of it, and I couldn’t have possibly done that if the lecture lasted more than twenty minutes. At one point my mother began to sob in mid-sentence and ran to lock herself in the bathroom.”

“Oh, my God. It could’ve left you scarred for life.”

Katya stopped. Her lover looked mildly horrified. He’d even freed his fingers from under the straps of her bra.

It would be a bad idea to mention that she then had banged on the bathroom door, yelling, “Mommy, please, please forgive me!” It would be an even worse idea to add that she had dropped to her knees and tried to calm her mother by whispering through the slit under the door. The last thing Katya needed was to show her scars.

She continued in a lighter tone.

“After my mother had gone, I decided to go on with the lecture. Probably wanted to try on the role of an authority figure. I gathered all my dolls — some I had to pull from under the beds and bookcases — and sat them on little chairs from my toy furniture set. It was a peculiar group, with the dolls ranging from one inch to three feet high, a few with missing body parts. ‘Listen to me,’ I said, looming above them with my arms folded on my chest. ‘Listen hard, you bunch of stupid, irresponsible dolls. And don’t you giggle! Never ever show your little peesya to anyone. First of all, good dolls don’t do that. Second of all, you can go to prison for it.’”

Ru ena paused before the punch line.

“And guess what? They never did.”

The punch line worked, lifting Ru ena’s lover’s hands back to her bra straps and making him laugh.

“But you did. You did! You weren’t as obedient as your dolls.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Ru ena agreed, and helped to unhook her bra.

The story was a success. It was certainly better than watching the news broadcast, as they did the last time. “You were great,” he had said, pulling on his socks afterward, but she wasn’t sure whether he referred to their lovemaking or her patience in watching the news.

IT WASN’Tuntil much later, when Katya returned to her Brooklyn apartment, that the story started to bother her. It felt like the onset of a toothache, a vague gnawing sensation that would grow into real pain at any moment. Katya brewed some bitter dark tea right in the mug and opened a jar of walnut jam, which, having cost her a ridiculous $5.99, still didn’t taste like home. It was too sugary — wrong — just like her story. The very lightness of her carefully dispensed jokes made her shiver with disgust now. It’s not funny! she wanted to scream, like her mother had. Her mother, whom she’d just betrayed for a strange man’s entertainment.

Soon Katya was awash with shame: for herself, for her mother, but most of all for the hungry teacher’s boys who had to eat leftovers at the little kids’ tables.

At the bottom of her mug sat a small pile of tea leaves, the very stuff people used to read to tell fortunes. Years ago Katya did that with her best friend, Vera. They sat leaning over their mugs, the tip of Katya’s yellow braid touching the table. “I don’t see anything,” Vera complained. “I see a shape,” Katya said. “A shape of what? A man?” Katya shrugged. “A shape of something.”

She peered into the pile now and tried to read if she would ever meet a man who would understand her pity and her shame, to whom she’d tell her real stories, the ones that mattered, the ones that haunted her, without dressing them up with descriptions of labor-camp preschool, her red tie, or her family’s lack of bread and toilet paper.

“There were two things I craved as a child: imported clothes and imported junk food in crunchy bags.” That was how she would start her real story.

One day I came close to having them both.

It happened soon after I turned thirteen. I remember the year exactly, because it was the year when I developed breasts, and it was also the year when my aunt Marusya returned from West Germany and brought me a bunch of hip German clothes. “Here, dig in!” she said, handing me a tightly packed plastic bag.

I ran to my room and shook the bag’s contents right onto the floor. They made an impressive pile. I wanted to dive in and swim in that colorful sea of fabric. Instead, I sat in the middle of the pile and ran the clothes through my fingers, like somebody who’d opened a treasure box. I stretched stockings, I stroked fuzzy sweaters, I played with shiny metallic belts. I even kissed one nylon blouse that I particularly liked. Then I hurried to try everything on, afraid that if I waited, they might disappear. I pulled them on, one by one, admiring my reflection in the shiny glass shelves of the bookcase. The clothes, though obscured by book covers, looked divine, even more than divine — they looked just like the ones in the dog-eared J.C. Penney catalog I’d once seen at my best friend Vera’s place.

The last piece in the pile was a modest beige sweater with funny shoulder straps. Why would somebody sew shoulder straps to a sweater? I’d thought, when I first saw it. And why bother spending precious currency, when you could buy a simple thing like that here? But I was wrong, I was very wrong, and I saw it as soon as I tried the sweater on. That pale unimpressive piece of cloth could perform miracles. I didn’t know whether it was because of the shoulder straps or some other tailoring trick, but it made me appear as if I had breasts! I couldn’t believe my eyes. For several months I’d been staring into the bathroom mirror hoping to discover the much-desired swellings on my chest. I kneaded and pinched myself, but no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. My chest was as flat and as hard as my grandmother’s washboard. Drink more milk, my happier, breast-equipped girlfriends advised. I did. I drank six to eight glasses a day, fighting the spasms of nausea. It didn’t work.