Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

After the tour, Alex obliges with a taste of Maya’s grechanniki . When the patty — ground pork and chicken mixed with buckwheat and stewed carrots, a peasant’s meal — meets his tongue, he stops speaking and closes his eyes. His mother does not make grechanniki , but he does not need the direct comparison. The comparison is between someone who plays hockey in Riverside Park and the great Slava Fetisov. After Alex is finished stuffing himself (Maya has to ask him to stop so something is left for the table), they work. Alex stands at the sink, soapy to the forearm, and she bustles behind him, next to him, under him. The kitchen is so terribly cramped — at one point, Maya sets up a cutting board on the floor — that no movement leaves her more than a foot from him, and from this he takes solace even though he knows he shouldn’t. He tries to keep his eyes on the caked Dutch oven in his hands, but he can hardly ignore the appearance of her mouth just inches from his thigh, all the skin her shorts and A-shirt fail to conceal (it’s twenty degrees outside but a hundred in the cubbyhole kitchen), the way house slippers stay on her feet as they never do his.

“Whom is the dinner for?” he asks again.

“A friend has a friend who puts money in restaurants,” she says, sending a pan of beef chuck de Gaulle into the oven, briefly enveloping Alex in a fogbank of heat. Alex wonders about the purpose of such an investment if she has to go home in three months, but keeps quiet.

“Are you worried about things back home?” he says, not wanting to remind her directly of her impending return. Nor himself — if he does not speak of it, it does not have to be real, at least for the duration of this visit. And while the visit has to end, it will not do so for a very long time; there is still so much to be done before dinner is ready and the kitchenware has been cleaned. Never has Alex been such an enthusiastic, deliberate washer of dishes.

“It’s no longer home to you?” Maya says.

“It’s different for you,” he says. “We left without a return ticket. There was a day two years ago after which I’ve lived more of my life here than there.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she says, and Alex hesitantly admits a reservation into his moonings about Maya. He doesn’t like the declarative way that she speaks, so flauntingly indifferent to his opinion.

“Do you want to return, then?” he retaliates.

“My parents are there, of course I want to return,” she says, then curses because her thumb has landed on the handle of a hot pan. Alex half turns from the sink with intention to minister, but she waves him away, sucking hungrily on the finger. “But I have a devil in my head about cooking,” she says through the finger in her mouth. “I’m trying to fuck up as much as I can, so he leaves me alone.”

Alex turns back to the sink in a welter of disagreeable thoughts. He isn’t accustomed to crass words from the girls he dates. Then a new thought finds him once more: When Maya is not overly declarative, she is overly self-deprecating. He doesn’t intend to exploit this weakness, or even mention it, but it makes him feel less cornered.

“How did it start?” he says like a doctor filling out a chart.

“Maybe two years ago. Around the time you became an American. There was a festival on campus with local restaurants. All the chefs were wearing that white hat that French chefs wear. Every chef was a guy — except one. Her face was flushed to the roots of her hair. She had these hands — cut, burned, bruised. I just stared at them. They were beautiful. I felt like a twig next to her. If I saw her on the street, she would have struck me as a questionable woman. But there. . She was magnificent. She was nice — she asked me if I cooked. I said not really — just dinner, you know, what my mother and grandmother taught me. Not, like, for people. And she said that if I was willing to spend one year practicing, she would come and eat at my house in one year.”

Alex pauses, his hands around a patch of steel wool. “ That’s who’s coming to dinner?”

“Not exactly,” Maya says. “She can’t make it, but she is sending a friend. The friend who buys into restaurants.”

Alex whistles admiringly. “Not bad,” he says. He can’t resist adding: “Dima’s missing quite the experience.”

“Oh, he’ll be back for the meal,” she says. “He’ll hold court. I cook, and he’ll seduce with his talk.”

“That doesn’t annoy you?” Alex says cautiously, then berates himself — there is no cautious way to make a comment like that. He’s overstepped, and tenses against Maya’s comeback.

“Annoy me?” she looks up. “What, that my boyfriend knows how to talk?” Alex feels as if the word boyfriend has been flung at him like a rock. The compliment to Dima’s charisma is a second rock. “Or that his best friend is helping me with the most important meal of my life while he’s off playing hockey?” Again, the insolent smile is up on her face. It occurs to Alex that he is hopelessly literal. What law says that people say what they mean, that insolence means displeasure and politeness means fondness? It does in Alex; Alex feels as if his true intent is always inscribed on his face; it is why he strains so mightily to trap the surge of his feelings, why he never argues with Dima, why he goes along with Raisa’s plans for his future. But perhaps others work differently. It strikes him that Maya has referred to him as Dima’s best friend. That is news to Alex. He has learned and thought of so many new things in the hour he has spent with Maya. If that kind of person isn’t deserving of his desire, who is?

“That’s Dima,” she answers herself. “You can’t make a dog fly. He’s wonderful. He’s just Dima.”

Until now, Alex has been torching himself trying to figure out how to finagle an invitation to remain through dinner. But after this comment, he wishes only to leave because all the trying in the world can’t help Alex if Maya does not mind Dima’s flaws . After Alex concludes his shift at the sink, the light outside growing dim even though the clock is only at four, he excuses himself even though Maya calls him crazy — he’s not her charwoman; after everything he’s done, he needs to stay for dinner, at least. At least? he thinks with a bitter hopefulness. No, he doesn’t require charity. In fact, he is craving the cold sting of the outside air. He wants to slide his hands into his pockets and watch his breath unfurl out of his mouth as his cheeks turn the color of radishes. He wants to shriek like the parrot. This he knows how to do.

But he surprises himself again because — against his own wishes, in thrall to the movement of his hands, even as his dignity protests — he calls her the next day to find out how it went. And she surprises him with a delight at hearing his voice that he — even correcting for the fantasies that kept him awake, masturbating into his boxers while Eugene and Raisa slept on the other side of the hallway — can’t write off as pure politeness. She owes him for helping; how can she make it up? No, no, he says unconvincingly. And then she says: “I want to see you, you idiot.” He feels light-headed. “But how did it go?” he says sleepily, inebriated with her. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. And that way it begins.

At first, not knowing how to square his desire with his guilt, Alex accommodates both: He proposes to cook dinner for his friend Dima and Dima’s girlfriend Maya at his parents’ house. You’re going to do what? Dima says. Alex ruins everything, belatedly marveling at the obliterating sway of his infatuation: He thought he could impress Maya in a category at which she excels and he has not even attempted. They chew stringy rabbit as Alex ruminates on the spectacular way in which he has gratuitously kneecapped his aspirations. Dima makes fun but Maya neither makes fun nor pretends the meal is a success. She explains that everyone eats chicken instead of rabbit because rabbit is so lean; you can abandon a chicken in the oven for an hour, but a rabbit you have to bathe like an infant. Daydream for a minute, and you’re dealing with tough meat. Alex does not tell her that he spent many moments at the stove daydreaming. Alex feels an alliance with Maya against Dima — an alliance of rabbit specialists, but he’ll take what he can get. If you want, I’ll show you another time, Maya says. He wants.