Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

At dinnertime—the Joneses sat down promptly at six-thirty with cloth napkins and everything—I scuttled back to my house, where we usually ate in front of the TV so my mother could watch the news. We didn’t yet have a microwave, but my mother favored dishes that were easy to prepare; we had spaghetti sauced with Ragú at least twice a week. For vegetables she relied on bags of frozen peas.

“It’s strange that the Joneses bought a house here,” my mother said not long after they moved in.

“Why?”

“Because most people in our neighborhood are Democrats. Cleveland Park is a liberal stronghold. You’d think they’d want to be in McLean or Arlington. All those Pentagon types are in northern Virginia.”

“Mr. Jones doesn’t work at the Pentagon,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But his company’s out there in the suburbs somewhere. They consult for the government. Strategy for defense agencies, that kind of thing.”

“Are they Republicans?”

“They claim they’re independents,” she said, “but Linda is so smitten with Nancy Reagan. You should have heard her talking about Nancy’s hair.”

Reagan’s campaign against détente infuriated my mother. She couldn’t bear to get out of bed the day after the election, and she remained depressed two days after that, on my eighth birthday. It was customary for kids to bring cupcakes to school on their birthdays, but I was empty-handed as Jenny and I walked down Lowell Street that morning. I tried not to feel sorry for myself. “You’re privileged,” my mother always said to me when self-pity creased my face. But when we got to school, Mrs. Haynes said, “Happy birthday!” and there was a tray of twenty-four cupcakes, half of them frosted in chocolate, half in vanilla. Jenny’s mother had baked them.

“For me?” I said.

“Yes, silly,” said Jenny. “It’s your special day.”

I knew that my mother was skeptical of Mrs. Jones’s motives. (“She’s baked cookies for everyone on the block. It’s like she’s running for office,” my mother said once.) But I was grateful. I spent more and more time at Jenny’s house. It seemed immune to the anxiety I tuned in to everywhere else. Jenny’s parents always looked like they were coasting downhill. They had the thrilled flush and bright eyes of alpine skiers. They were never fearful or fazed. They sang while they loaded the dishwasher. They wore matching sweaters on their annual Christmas card. While my mother went to disarmament meetings, the Joneses initiated tennis round-robins at the neighborhood courts. I think my mother’s activism amused Jenny’s father. “If one of those godforsaken Russians is crazy enough to push the button, there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said.

I thought that if something happened to my mom—a car crash or a fallen tree limb—I could live at Jenny’s house. That I could sleep on the top bunk in her green-and-white-flowered Laura Ashley paradise, that I could store my toothbrush next to hers in the yellow ceramic cup in her bathroom. That I could wake up to Mr. Jones’s pancake breakfasts. The Jones household was neatly made with hospital corners. I took comfort in their routines. Mrs. Jones was always ordering things from catalogs; I got used to hearing her recite item numbers and colors (One in watermelon, one in lime) into the phone. Mr. Jones went for a run at six-thirty every morning, and the sound of the glass door in the kitchen sliding open marked his return. I loved my mother, but she was always exhausted. She was too tired to bother to fix her hair anymore, so she wore scarves on her head all the time, tucking away the unruly frizz so that people wondered if she had cancer. Mrs. Haynes asked me more than once that fall if I was really sure my mother was all right. And when I said “Yes, why?” she tilted her head in that pitying way reserved for people who don’t yet understand the pain they are going to face.

“Let me braid your hair,” Jenny used to say. I’d sit in her desk chair while she used her fingers to get my tangles out. “Don’t you love having your scalp scratched? My mom always used to scratch my head when she did my hair.” I did love it. Her fingernails sketched gentle patterns as she separated strands, prepared to plait. My mother had never braided my hair. I couldn’t even remember her brushing it. When she was done, Jenny pushed me into her bathroom to confront the mirror. “What do you think?” she’d say. I always thought it looked perfect.

Jenny and I were best friends. That title mattered then. We didn’t throw the term “best” around lightly. You had to earn it. I’d never had a best friend, but I didn’t tell Jenny that. I didn’t tell her that until she came along I’d never felt like I belonged anywhere. I knew that the other kids at school thought I was strange. I was the first kid whose parents got divorced. I was quiet and pensive. They could smell the sadness on me, rank and stale. Jenny and I exchanged friendship pins—safety pins decorated with tiny colored beads—that we fastened onto the laces of our L.L. Bean Blucher moccasins. We pricked our fingertips with one of her mother’s sewing needles and became blood sisters. Our bedrooms faced each other across the street. The houses were too far apart for us to actually see into each other’s rooms, but at bedtime we exchanged good-nights, flicking our flashlights on and off three times: blink, blink, blink. I couldn’t fall asleep until I saw her light winking at me. With Jenny I felt safe.

SOMETIMES I THINK of the three of them—my sister, my father, Jenny—nesting inside one another, like a matryoshka doll. Each loss has to be unpacked to find the loss that came before. My sister is the smallest doll, the kernel of pain. My father is the next one, and then Jenny. And if there are bigger dolls, the hollow shells that contain the others, they represent various boyfriends who abandoned me, usually because I was too serious, too “intense.” Their departures were just echoes of a much earlier grief.

If “defection” seems too strong a word—“A defection is a deliberate betrayal, is it not?” said my college shrink. “It’s not as if your sister or Jenny chose to die”—you have to remember that I came of age during the Cold War. When I was a kid, the United States and the Soviet Union were always keeping score. Each defector claimed by the other side was a point. If your country is so great, why did so-and-so leave?

I was one and a half when Mikhail Baryshnikov defected while on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in Canada. And seven in 1979, when another Soviet dancer, Alexander Godunov, slipped away while the Bolshoi was in New York. (“Those dancers sure are good at sneaking around,” my father said. “Must be the ballet shoes. They can walk without making any bloody noise.”) KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected in August of 1985—just eight months after Jenny died—and then escaped from his CIA handler at Au Pied de Cochon in Georgetown and marched up the street to the Russian embassy to redefect. In high school my friends and I used to go to Au Pied de Cochon for croque-monsieurs after we’d been drinking at house parties. The restaurant was open all night and was a good place to sober up before curfew. On those boozy nights when I tried to mimic the carefree behavior of my peers, I always thought of Yurchenko, who missed his homeland enough to return and risk execution. So yes, I said to my shrink, maybe Jenny’s death wasn’t deliberate, but she betrayed me before she died, and besides, when you’ve had as many people disappear from your life as I have, you start to wonder if you’re defective. You start to wonder if there’s somewhere better to go.