The UnAmericans: Stories Read online

  The UnAmericans

  Stories

  Molly Antopol

  For my parents

  Marcia Antopol

  Jeff Moskin

  &

  Paul Johnson

  Contents

  The Old World

  Minor Heroics

  My Grandmother Tells Me This Story

  The Quietest Man

  Duck and Cover

  A Difficult Phase

  The Unknown Soldier

  Retrospective

  The Old World

  No one wants to listen to a man lament his solitary nights—myself included. Which is why, on an early fall morning four months after Gail left, when a woman breezed into my shop with a pinstriped skirt in her arms and said, “On what day this can be ready?” I didn’t write a receipt, tell her Tuesday and move on to the next customer. Instead I said, “Your accent. Russian?”

  “Ukrainian.”

  “The Jewel of the Baltic! I’ve read a lot about it,” I said. “The art, the food, those ancient fishing villages!” On and on I went—though I had not, in fact, read about it. I had, however, caught a television special once, but I remembered little more than twisted spires, dreary accordions, plates of pink fish, pocked and shiny.

  “Ukraine,” she said slowly, “is not on the Baltic.” She had a wide pale face, full lips and short blond hair dyed the color of curry.

  “Ah,” I said, and swallowed.

  But she didn’t walk away. She squinted, as if trying to see me better. Then she leaned across the counter and extended her hand. “Svetlana Gumbar. But call me Sveta.”

  “I’m Howard Siegel.” Then I blanked and blurted, “You can call me anytime you like.” She smiled, sort of. The lines sketching the corners of her eyes hinted she was closer to my age than to my daughter’s, for which I was thankful: it was too pathetic a jump from the twentysomething girlfriend to the earring and squirrelly ponytail. I laid out her skirt, examining it for stains, and when I finally worked up the nerve, I asked her to dinner.

  “WHAT ARE you doing picking up women on the job?” my daughter said that evening over chicken at her place.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “There are better places to look for them. I know two women from Beit Adar who would love to meet you.”

  Beth was still lovely—dark and freckled with eyebrows too thick for her face—but the silk kerchief covering her hair would take some getting used to. So would the mezuzahs hanging in every doorway of her new Brooklyn apartment, the shelf of Hebrew prayer books I doubted she could even read. This was, to say the least, a recent development. And what timing. Right when I was trying to learn how to live alone after forty years of marriage, Beth had left for Jerusalem. And, worse, she came back born again—and with a fiancé, Ya’akov, who happened to be a fool.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling about Sveta. You trust my taste in women, don’t you, Beth?”

  “But why rule out other prospects?” the fool said.

  “I’m the one who has to spend an evening with these women, making small talk!”

  “Still,” he said, “give them a chance.” Ya’akov was small and wiry, with agitated little hands and a kippah that slid around his slick brown hair, like even it didn’t know what it was doing on his head. He was from Long Island. He had once been Jake “The Snake,” pledgemaster of his fraternity. At the wedding his brothers from Sigma Phi had looked as flummoxed as his parents, as if everyone were waiting for Jake to confess that his religious awakening was just an elaborate prank.

  “All my wife’s trying to say,” Ya’akov continued, “is that we know plenty of nice women.”

  “Maybe you could let Beth speak for herself, Jake.”

  “But I agree with him,” she said. “Why not let us fix you up?”

  “I just want to meet someone the normal way,” I said. “Shopping for romance after services just doesn’t sound like love.”

  “What do you think love should be, then?” Beth asked.

  OUTSIDE THE coffee shop windows, the swell of late-nighters sauntered past, their gazes concentrated and steady. Sveta looked so much more serene than the rest of the city, tiny and smiling in the big green booth, holding her tea mug with both hands. I sipped my coffee and listened to the goofy beat of my heart.

  “You ask every woman you meet in cleaners on dates?” Sveta said, swallowing a bite of cheesecake. Her blouse was the same salmon shade as her lipstick, and riding up her wrist were gold bracelets that clinked when she set down her fork.

  “Absolutely not! I’ve worked there my entire life and you’re the first.”

  “You work at cleaners your whole life?”

  “Not just one cleaners—I own five. The original store on Houston, one in Murray Hill,” I said, counting them off on my fingers, “two on the Upper West Side and the one on 33rd where you met me. It’s been in the family since my grandfather. He was a tailor in Kiev, came here and started the business. If my grandfather had been a brain surgeon, I’d be a brain surgeon now, too.”

  “You are from Kiev?”

  “Not me, my grandfather. I’ve never stepped foot there.”

  But Sveta didn’t seem to be listening. “I am from Kiev!” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Our people are coming from same place.”

  Our people? My people were from Ditmas Avenue. My people had left Ukraine before the Cossacks could impregnate their wives. As a boy, I’d been dragged to visit my grandfather in White Plains, where our family kept him in assisted living. I’d been forced to sit on the tip of his bed, the smell of green beans and condensed milk heavy in the air, and listen to his stories of moldy potatoes for dinner, of the village beauty’s jaw shattered by the hoof of an angry horse. I’d heard stories of windows smashed, of my great-grandparents’ tombs knocked on their sides, the stones broken up and used to build roads. I’d imagined pasty faces wrapped tight in babushkas, soldiers charging through the streets with burning torches. I’d heard those stories so many times that they became only that to me: stories.

  But I didn’t say that to Sveta. I didn’t say that, until I met her, I’d studiously avoided so much as looking for Ukraine on a map. I said, “What an amazing coincidence!” because I could understand how happy she was to meet a man who shared her roots on this side of the globe—and mostly because she was still squeezing my hand, and I would have done anything to stop her from letting go. “What brought you here, then, from the marvelous land of Ivan the Terrible?”

  “My husband found work here.”

  “And your husband doesn’t mind your going out with every dry cleaner you meet?”

  “How would he know? He’s dead.” She spooned sugar into her tea and—was this really her deft way of changing the subject?—read the quote on the tea bag aloud like it was something to ponder.

  “If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth,” she read. “What you think it means?”

  I had no clue. And anyhow, I wanted to hear about the dead man. “You know where they come up with these quotes? At some warehouse out in San Francisco. Same place they make the Chinese fortunes for the cookies. The person who wrote this knows jack about truth.”

  “This person,” said Sveta, “is Gandhi.”

  Of course I’d opened my mouth just when our hands were touching. It was during these moments in life that I feared I’d become one of those old men I always saw here in the coffee shop, alone at a table, slurping soup.

  The check came and we both reached for it. “Let me,” we said in unison.

  “I had good time,” Sveta said, slapping down a bill before I’d even opened my wallet.

  I assumed she said it out of politeness after m
y Gandhi comment, but when we walked outside, she grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me, hard. “Where you are living?” she whispered. I pointed west, toward the Hudson. “Good,” she said, taking my hand.

  Inside my apartment, I led her to the kitchen. Not the sexiest room, but I really wanted to show off the view above the sink: I rarely had the opportunity anymore for guests to see it. While Sveta stared out at the boats dotting the river, the bright white lights of Jersey in the distance, I looked at her full cheeks and jagged teeth, remnants of lipstick escaping the corners of her mouth. In one long slow moment the room went quiet. I pulled her close. We were quick with each other, untucking, unbuckling, unzipping, until we were pressed naked against the dishwasher except for socks and watches and my glasses, which Sveta, at the last moment, set on the counter.

  We stayed up so late that gauzy yellow light filtered in through the blinds and I could hear the garbage trucks outside, making their runs. Sveta was curvy and round, with a scatter of moles across her hips. And here I was, sixty-three, paunchy and balding, wondering how I had gotten a woman like Sveta into my bed, wondering even more how to make certain she stayed, and still completely clueless about how to keep things casual. “How long,” I said finally, “has your husband been gone?”

  “Eleven month.”

  “And am I too nosy if I ask how he went?”

  “No, not nosy,” she said, propping a pillow behind her head. And then she told me their story. She’d met him fifteen years ago, in her late twenties, just as they were finishing graduate school. They’d both been deep into their research—Sveta’s dissertation was on Kiev’s Golden Age, and Nikolai, a chemistry Ph.D., was researching Chernobyl’s long-term impact on the nearby city of Pripyat—and there was something so comforting, Sveta told me, about those early years together. “It was the first time,” she said, “I really knew what happiness means.” Whenever they were together, even just reading side by side or walking down the block for groceries, the sky seemed a little brighter, the sun a little warmer, the world turned up a notch. They were both obsessed with their work, introverts at heart, and it had felt, once they were married, that she no longer had to try with other people, that what everyone else thought of her was of little importance. Of course they still went out with friends, but there was always a moment toward the end of the evening when they’d share a look across the bar, a silent understanding it was time to leave, to be alone again. That was a look I knew well, one Gail and I would notice between other couples, at dinners or parties, a look that always made us feel defensive and exposed. After those evenings, we’d find ourselves dissecting the relationships of our friends, picking apart their dynamic until we felt better about our own, standing beside one another at our twin sinks, brushing our teeth.

  Nikolai had been exposed to Chernobyl’s radiation every day for six years while he researched the disaster, Sveta continued, but it wasn’t until he accepted a fellowship here and they moved to a safe, quiet street on Staten Island that he walked outside to rake the leaves one morning, clutched his chest and collapsed right there in the driveway. “Nobody had idea about his heart,” Sveta said. “We were knowing nothing. Murmur condition is affecting something like one in every million men, and it has to be my Nikolai.” Sveta was left alone in a new house in a new country with only Galina, a cousin she’d grown up with in Kiev who now lived in Chicago, to talk to.

  I ran a finger along the inside of her wrist, creamy and warm and marbled with delicate veins. My own problems, the ones I had wallowed in for months, were nothing compared to hers. It occurred to me that she was stronger than I was. “Why not go home to your family?”

  “I have no child, and my parents die long time ago. My grandmother raise me, but when Nikolai and I marry, she do aliyah to Israel. Move back home?” She shook her head. “At least here I can learn English and get job in accounting. It’s more easy being in U.S.”

  “Oh, Sveta.” A throwaway comment, but the only thing I could think to say.

  “How you say here? Shit it happens.” She laughed, but it sounded startled and strained—the laugh that carries over everyone else’s in a crowded restaurant.

  I, in turn, tried my best to hint at what an unbelievable catch I was. I told Sveta about growing up next door to Gail in Brooklyn, how she went from being my playmate at school to my best friend to my steady girlfriend. I told her we married at twenty-three and scrimped for years, finally landing our dream apartment on Riverside Drive. I told her Beth’s birth was undoubtedly the most important day of my life. I told her how even as a little girl, Beth seemed more like a friend than a daughter. And I told her what a terrific time we had over the summer, after Beth finished law school and moved home to save money while she studied for the bar. What bliss: we ordered in most nights, matineed on Sundays, sat up late talking in the kitchen—it was as if she had never been gone.

  I didn’t tell Sveta how painful it was to hear my daughter announce, at the end of the summer, that she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life (“Neither do I!” I’d said. “And I’m sixty-three!”), that she’d chosen this career simply because she was terrified of never discovering what she did want—only then to run off to Jerusalem and return with Ya’akov. I didn’t tell her how even walking from the subway to Beth’s new apartment made me jittery and cold. I felt like I was walking back in time, back to when I was still a religious kid living in Brooklyn. Back when my family had enough money for a silver kiddush cup but not for new winter coats, back when we were just another poor family with too much faith in God.

  Everything felt so new and fragile with Sveta that I didn’t want to make the mistake of oversharing too soon. There was a huge part of me, hearing Sveta talk so openly about her marriage, that didn’t want her to know my own had failed. And I knew my closeness to Beth—whom I’d always felt understood me better than anyone else in the world, including her mother—might sound odd if I attempted to describe it to another person. So I didn’t tell her how Gail would snap about some mess I’d left in the kitchen and Beth would catch my gaze and roll her eyes: she had a way of making me feel she was on my side without ever explicitly saying so. I didn’t tell her that when Beth wasn’t around and we were left without a buffer, Gail and I could barely share a meal without a blowup. Everything I did ignited a fight: the way I chewed my food, the way I folded laundry, the way I made love. I told Gail it was impossible to live with someone so critical; Gail said it was impossible to live with a man who dealt with emotion by avoiding it altogether. But I had wanted to work things out—if not for us, then for Beth. I suggested counseling; Gail flew to Burlington and fucked a retired architect she had met online.

  “The fantastic thing about Gail is that we’re still great friends,” I lied. “I couldn’t imagine not being in touch after sharing so much.”

  Sveta touched my face. “I told Galina I wasn’t ready for new somebody, but she said there were many other people out there.”

  I waited for her to finish the thought, but she didn’t. She tucked her body around mine and shut her eyes, as if there were nothing left to say.

  FOR THE next few weeks, I’d close up the shop near Herald Square and wait for Sveta to finish her English class. I’d had this same view of a bodega and a produce stand for years and never thought much of it—but now Sveta would come gliding around the corner and even the asphalt would shimmer.

  “But be honest,” the fool said, “aren’t you the tiniest bit worried you’re just a rebound?”

  I was, yet again, at Beth and Ya’akov’s for Friday night dinner. It was the only time I saw them: they wouldn’t ride the subway to visit me on Shabbat, they wouldn’t eat in my kitchen because it wasn’t kosher, they wouldn’t eat at kosher restaurants near my apartment because they weren’t kosher enough. Who does the hashgacha at this place? Ya’akov always wanted to know.

  “I mean, how long has it been since this guy died?” Ya’akov held up his hands, as if they were supported by logic. “Tell
me you haven’t considered this.”

  “What do you know about loss?” I said.

  “Actually, a lot. When I was in Jerusalem I did home visits with my yeshiva to bring a little tikva”—already he and Beth had begun to pepper their sentences with Hebrew, their inside jokes with God—“back into the lives of people who had lost family in the bombings, and—”

  “Ya’akov.” Beth shot the fool a look he deserved. “My father knows what he’s doing. He’s a grown man.”

  “Thank you, Beth,” I said. “Listen, why don’t you come over tomorrow and spend the day with me and Sveta? Lightning won’t strike if you miss services just this once.”

  “I like going.”

  “But why?”

  “I just do. Why do you care so much?” She suddenly sounded like the old Beth, and I had a glimpse of how she might have been as a lawyer, her delivery so sharp I felt my own voice wobble when I said, “No, really. I mean—what about it do you love?” I honestly wanted to know.

  “Something about stepping into that sanctuary where people have been singing the same melodies for hundreds of years. It’s like I finally belong somewhere,” she said, her tone softening, and though I expected her blue eyes to be wild with fervor, they were bright and calm. “All these people in shul, they’re like my safety net,” she said, and I stood there blinking: wasn’t it enough to fall back on me?

  “Now that you’re here,” she said, “I wanted to tell you that—”

  “We’re pregnant,” Ya’akov said, coming behind her and stroking her flat belly.

  He gathered me into a hug, his skinny arms tight and firm, while I stood there, my feet cemented to the floor. I swallowed a pain in my throat, but it came back up again.

  “What news!” I said, sliding out of Ya’akov’s hug. “Does Mom know?”

  “I haven’t told her yet,” Beth said. “I wanted you to be the first to hear.”