Oksana, Behave! Read online

  Oksana, Behave! is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Maria Kuznetsova

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following chapters appear, in different form, in literary journals: “I Pledge Allegiance to the Butterfly” in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, “Light Year” in Kenyon Review Online, and “The Yalta Conference” in The Southern Review.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kuznetsova, Maria, author.

  Title: Oksana, behave!: a novel / by Maria Kuznetsova.

  Description: New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018021375| ISBN 9780525511878 | ISBN 9780525511885 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Russian Americans—Fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3611.U985 O46 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018021375

  Ebook ISBN 9780525511885

  spiegelandgrau.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Na Kim

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1992, Kiev, Ukraine

  I Pledge Allegiance to the Butterfly

  Private Property

  Autograph

  Light Year

  Onward to the Bright Future

  Key to the City

  The Yalta Conference

  Photograph

  The High Dive

  Motherland

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

  After I asked what America would be like, my grandmother sighed philosophically and released a mouthful of smoke out the passenger window. “America, Ukraine, it’s all the same in the end,” Baba said, as her brother, Boris, drove us to the station. “We just need a change, that’s all. Some things will be better in America, and some will be worse,” she declared, taking another drag on her cigarette. “But think of all the men!”

  I was only seven, so this wasn’t much of a selling point. Mama and Papa were quiet on either side of me in the back seat, offering no consolation or clarification. For the last few months, they had stayed up late whispering about leaving Kiev, and during the day, they left to say goodbye to friends until it was our turn to go, when their remaining friends came over to say goodbye to us. I didn’t really know why we were leaving. All I knew was that we were at the start of a long journey that would end in a place called Florida, a land of beaches and theme parks. And now we were speeding by the Dnieper River and the rolling hills and maple trees I couldn’t imagine living without, even on this gray November day.

  “When will we be back?” I said.

  “Never,” Mama answered.

  “Very soon, darling,” Papa said.

  “In a while, foolish child,” said Baba, “when our hearts are healed and hungry for this place once more.”

  “Will our hearts be healed by New Year’s?” I asked. I had been looking forward to my school’s New Year’s party, where the teachers let me run around without punishing me, and where I could steal a few tangerines and chocolates when they weren’t looking.

  “Do not be sad, Oksana,” Papa said, though he seemed quite sad himself. “Kiev is in your soul. You can return there anytime you want.” He tapped my heart for emphasis.

  “Dearest God I don’t believe in,” Mama said, shaking her head. “What did I do to deserve such a silly child? Who cares about Kiev, darling? You have your family with you, lucky fool. Everything you need is right here.”

  Baba pointed her cigarette at me. “You know what your problem is?” she said.

  “Having an annoying family?” I asked.

  “You ask too many questions. What’s there to know, little idiot? You are born, you have some laughs and a rendezvous or two, and then you fall into the void. Just try to enjoy the ride, darling,” she added before turning away.

  I didn’t see it at the time, but everyone’s conduct during the rest of the drive captured their distinct approaches to life. There was Papa watching the Dnieper flow by, with longing and misty eyes. Mama with her hands on her lap, looking forward and wishing we’d hurry up already. Baba fluffing her bright-red hair and scoping out the romantic prospects on the street. Her brother, Boris, driving with a smirk, not caring about the lipstick on his collar, the high heel in his back seat, or about staying behind.

  And then there was me, always in the dark, not knowing that this was the last day all of us would ever spend in Kiev together or that Florida would just be the first stop in a series of places I would try to call home—stomping and howling, desperate for someone to tell me what would happen next.

  We had been living in Gainesville, Florida, for a year when Officer Friendly told my third-grade class that you could call 911 from home and the cops would show up right away. Nobody else seemed as stunned by his revelation as I was, but that was no surprise. I had been released from ESL at the start of my second school year in America, and there were a lot of things I was slow to learn.

  Like, for example, why people called me “Rod.” I thought it was because I was Russian or just scrawny, but one day Billy Spencer sang, “Have I told you lately that I love you…” at me and I figured out it was Rod for Rod Stewart because I had a bit of a mullet. Mama chopped it off, but the name stuck. The only people who used my real name were my teacher—Mrs. Thomas—and my ESL friend, Raluca, or I should say ex-friend, because she moved back to Romania over the summer without telling me. I tried not to take it personally.

  Cassandra called me “Okey Dokey,” which was definitely closer to Oksana than “Rod.” We only talked after class, when we walked to the lobby so she could get picked up by her mom and I could cross the street to meet my grandmother behind the clump of palm trees where I made her wait.

  But the day after the officer’s visit, Baba was flirting with Mr. Trevors, the crossing guard, by the front entrance, dangerously on display. Kids swarmed around like the ants in our kitchen, looking for their buses or parents or just their friends to walk home with, and nobody seemed to notice her. Baba squeezed the crossing guard’s arm, her fiery hair flying in all directions, her purple dress flailing about her high-heeled veiny legs.

  Cassandra spotted her and said, “Yuck. Your mom is even older than my mom.”

  “That’s my grandma.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “How old is she anyway?”

  I knew my parents were thirty-one, but I had no idea how old Baba was. “No clue. Eighty, ninety, something like that,” I said. No one at school had spotted her before, and it made me twitch. I said, “You really think if I call the cops they’ll come?”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Yes, yes,” she said. “Call the cops!”

  “What do I say?”

  She rubbed her h
ands together. “Say, ‘Help! My grandma is trying to kill me!’ ”

  “All right,” I said. As Baba caressed Mr. Trevors’s arms and then his STOP sign, it sounded like the truth.

  “Okeydokey, Okey Dokey. I’m flying away,” Cassandra said, flapping her hands like wings, which had to do with her saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the butterfly instead of the flag every morning, a ritual that baffled and intrigued me. She flew off to her mom, a silver-haired lady who waited for her in a Jeep, merciful enough to never step out and embarrass her.

  But Baba had no mercy for me. I approached her with my head down, incognito. Thankfully she had taken a step away from her prospect.

  Mr. Trevors was a nice bald war veteran. He lifted a hand at us and said, “Have a nice day, Sveta! Have a nice day, Rod—I mean Oksana!”

  Baba winked and strutted away. She leaned toward me and said, “Such biceps!”

  “A cop came to class,” I told her. “He was nice.”

  “Some are,” she said. Then she told a boring story about one summer in Odessa in 1957 when a police officer named Bobik wrote a song about her legs.

  The sun baked us along Main Street, also known as Prostitute Street. It was covered in broken glass and only had a couple of palms for shade. It ran along the Pick’n Save, where Baba took me to get a doll once a month, Dick’s Adult Video, and a gas station with an inflatable alligator in front of it. Lizards scattered at our feet. There were always a few kingdoms on the ground, little deflated balloons. Men put them over their things to have sex with the prostitutes.

  I never saw actual prostitutes there, but sometimes men would honk or slow down and shout at Baba and she didn’t know why. Mama and Papa said not to tell her, because she needed the attention since her daughter had just died, her husband had kicked it a while back, her father had been purged, her morning work at the lab was unpaid, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, she had to share a room with me, her family had been gutted by fascism, the world was cruel and unwelcoming, et cetera.

  She got one honk and tittered. “Your grandma still has it all, doesn’t she?”

  “Are you eighty or ninety?”

  She laughed. “Eighty or ninety what, dear child?” She realized what I meant and pretended to choke me. “Fifty-five years young. Hardly old at all, infinite imbecile!” She walked a few steps ahead of me the rest of the way.

  When we got home, I knew Mama was napping, because it was quiet. If the TV was on, then she was applying for accountant jobs or trying to learn English or silently weeping or calling her best friend, Valentina, who lived in a place called New Jersey. Everyone my parents knew back in Ukraine was in New Jersey now, except Mama’s mom, who had stayed in Kiev because “her mind was too troubled,” but we were in Florida because that was where Papa found a job as a physicist for the university. It didn’t seem like such a great job to me, because he also had to deliver pizza for Dino’s.

  I went to the room I shared with Baba, while she smoked on the patio. The carpet was brown and crawling with cicadas, and the walls displayed a photo of Baryshnikov framed in a heart and her dead daughter’s painting of the Dnieper, a dark-blue river with a white sandy beach on its far side, a place where I had loved to swim. Our beds were separated by a nightstand with a sad photo and letters from Baba’s suitors from Kiev on it; if she was in a good mood, she’d read me choice passages before she wrote back with a demented smile on her face. If she was not in a good mood, then she would bring a glass of cognac into the room after dinner and stare at the river painting until she decided to turn the lights off. My only possessions were the pile of dolls by my bed and the tower of Sweet Valley High and Boxcar Children books Mama brought me from the library.

  Baba’s cigarette smoke wafted through the window. I had to act fast before I lost my nerve. I took a breath and put my hand on the receiver and pictured Officer Friendly in his blue uniform. He was tall and handsome and he had a mustache and winked at me when I said, “You’ll really be there if I need help?” I imagined Cassandra clapping her hands and dialed.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” said a lady’s voice.

  “Um,” I said. “I just wanted to see if this worked?”

  “Honey, is there an adult I can talk to?”

  “Nobody here speaks English,” I said, hanging up. I had done it! My heart pounded wildly. Then the phone rang again and I picked it up.

  “May I please speak to your mother or father?”

  I hung up again. It rang a third time, and I heard Mama grab it. She used her careful English voice, which was nothing like her Russian voice; she seemed nice in English.

  “Oksana Ivanovna Konnikova,” she called. I approached her with my best angel face. Her skin was paler than usual, making her dark eyes and hair look even more striking. She was tragically beautiful and her eyes were filled with desperate rage. I was tan, sandy haired, and hideous. “Tell this lady nothing is wrong here,” Mama said. She shoved the phone in my direction and it looked like a weapon, like a rocket launcher from Doom. Outside, Baba crushed her cigarette with her heel, and as she opened the sliding glass door and entered the apartment, she looked menacing too. I screamed wildly.

  “Help!” I cried. “My grandmother is trying to kill me! Help!”

  I wept and choked and ran out to the back porch and past the SUN BAY APARTMENTS sign and the pool, all the way to the lake with the mossy trees and smelly ducks. I stared at the water, remembering swimming in the Dnieper, which flowed outside our Kiev apartment, where I slept in the living room that doubled as a bedroom with Mama and Papa while my grandmother lived on the other side of the city and nobody ever called me Rod. I wasn’t there long when Mama dragged me away by the ear.

  “Dearest God I don’t believe in,” she said. “Tell me, what have I done to deserve this child? Did I commit murder in a past life I don’t believe in? Genocide? Was I Stalin himself? Did I smother a litter of puppies?” She glared at me as we approached the apartment building, which was three stories tall and made of ugly red-orange bricks that were pretty much the same color as Baba’s dyed hair. “The police are on their way, poor idiot. You must tell them everything is normal.”

  Baba was sitting in a plastic chair and drinking cognac on the patio, thrilled by this turn of events. Papa was in his Dino’s uniform, eating pizza standing up; there was sauce on his nose. His light-brown poofy hair was matted from the Dino’s hat he had to wear on the job.

  Baba wagged a finger at me and said, “I was young and sharp once, but you are young and dim-witted, and one day you will be old and dim-witted, don’t you see?” She lifted her glass and smiled slyly. “I hope your officer has a nice juicy rump!” she added, squeezing the air with her hand for emphasis. Papa dropped his slice on the cement below him, shrugged, and picked it up and ate it anyway.

  “You see?” Mama said. “Normal family.”

  They were knocking as soon as we walked into the apartment. The woman had short hair and the man was definitely not Officer Friendly, or even friendly. Officer Friendly was young and energetic, and this was a tired bearded man. He greeted my parents curtly and walked over to me.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, young lady? We could be spending our time helping people who actually need it,” he said.

  “Who says I don’t need help?” I said.

  “We are profoundly sorry,” Papa said, stepping in front of me.

  “Quite profoundly,” Baba said, circling the man like a vulture.

  “Tea?” Mama asked, but they did not look like they wanted tea.

  The officer inspected the apartment—the coffee table we ate dinner on, the lawn furniture we used inside, the squat old radio with its foil antennae, which sat on a plastic crate below a poster Papa had hung up that said, IT’S NOT ALWAYS THIS MESSY HERE…SOMETIMES IT’S WORSE, the stained green couch that sank to the floor, and a rather s
evere three-headed self-portrait of Papa’s dead sister, which was a part of what Baba called the “unfortunate experimental period” that characterized her final artistic years. Then he studied Mama and Papa and Baba, who, with their thick accents and garage-sale clothes, were probably even weirder to him than our apartment. I tried to make eye contact to show I was not happy being tied to this place or these people, but he didn’t look at me. Though when he finished his inspection, he squatted next to me until we were eye to eye.

  “Do we understand each other?” he said.

  “No calling unless I need help,” I said. I didn’t know what else to do, so I saluted him.

  “Enjoy your day,” said the female officer, and they were gone. It was already getting dark out. The cicadas chirped. I had messed up big time, but I was thrilled.

  “What were you thinking, you fool?” Baba said. “They could throw you in jail!”

  “This feels like jail,” I noted, and Mama sent me to my room without dinner.

  Baba entered hours later, sneaking me a chicken cutlet sandwich, which I devoured in three bites. She was energized by the officers’ visit, so she read me a letter from a suitor named Anatoly, who called her breasts “the world’s ripest melons,” and then she turned off the lights. When she was feeling particularly happy, she’d end the night with her favorite declaration.

  “Good night, little fool,” she said, reaching over to tousle my hair. “Another day closer to oblivion, here we go.”

  * * *

  —

  At lunch, I sat with Cassandra instead of alone for once. She had greasy blond hair and freckles and wore dresses that were so big they could have belonged to her mother. Billy Spencer grinned a wild dog’s grin at me, like he was amused I had a friend, but I didn’t care. Cassandra looked up from her PB&J and didn’t tell me to go away, so I told her about the cops.