Lacy holds her hand over Zoe’s and makes her text, Yes.
Alex responds barely a second later.
“You see?” Lacy beams. “He was waiting for you!”
Zoe manages to be both thrilled and terrified. At least, if he’d ghosted her, she could say she’d tried. And the failure was absolutely not her fault. She’d have taken that as a win.
Alex writes, Cool.
“Write him back,” Lacy commands.
“Balissa says you should make men wait. So they want you more.”
“That is so last century,” Lacy groans. “Since when are you a Rules girl?”
Zoe declines to clarify that the rules she’s been raised on go back to the century before the bestselling book. And involve standing in front of the Odessa Opera House in a tight white dress. “What should I write?”
“Something clever. But not too serious. Sincere. But no pressure.” Zoe notes Lacy doesn’t actually offer any examples.
Zoe types, Don’t you want to know: yes, what?
Alex responds, Surprise me.
And then a date, time, and place.
Zoe dutifully returns to Brooklyn on Saturday. This is the anniversary party that will not die. At least, one Mama refuses to put out of its misery.
“Why are we doing this?” Zoe demands during a tour through Brighton’s 99-cent stores, on the hunt for decorations that don’t look cheap—but are. “Baba has said, over and over, she doesn’t want a party.”
“That’s what she says,” Mama dismisses, picking up off a shelf a Japanese spinning lantern made of tinsel. She checks the bottom for a price. She makes a face and sets it back down, as though the tchotchke tricked her into giving it a second glance. “It’s what she’s supposed to say.”
It’s what all properly raised people are supposed to say. Zoe was taught it’s bad manners to accept something the first time it’s offered. When you’re visiting someone’s home and they ask if you’d like something to eat or drink, you’re supposed to decline. They then spend fifteen minutes cajoling you—“Not even a tiny slice sausage? I bought it fresh”—then guilting you—“Such shame to waste, I went especially looking for it, I heard it was your favorite”—then threatening—“Since I can’t serve the main meal until after you’ve had the appetizer, I suppose we’ll all just go hungry.” The ritual ensures a good time being had by all, while proving you are a classy person. It wasn’t until Zoe visited American friends’ homes, was offered a snack, refused it, and then went hungry for the rest of the afternoon that she learned the ritual wasn’t like that everywhere else.
“What’s the point of saying what you don’t mean?”
Mama moves to examine dented on-sale stacked boxes of candy. She considers buying the lot, tossing the boxes, stacking the candy on a festive plate and, there you go, problem solved, with no one being the wiser. Except all the guests who do the same at their houses. “Baba can’t say she wants this party. It would sound greedy and selfish.”
Mama keeps moving. The store aisles are so narrow, the pair of them can’t walk side by side. Zoe ends up ducking other customers and addressing Mama’s neck. “But just this one time, how can you be sure Baba doesn’t mean what she says?”
“Because she never does this,” Mama tosses over a shoulder. “It wouldn’t cross her mind.”
“It wouldn’t cross her mind to tell the truth?”
Mama stops, sighs, and turns around, exasperated. “What is this American fascination with truth? Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Can you not see truth is different, depending on who is saying what to who and why? God, I am sure, can see this.”
Zoe echoes Lacy. “That’s so Soviet!”
“Not just Soviet.” Mama shakes her finger in Zoe’s face, forcing a pair of children to duck beneath her elbow. “American, too. American schools. You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“So who was right, you or me?”
In eleventh grade, Zoe’s teacher assigned an essay analyzing The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Zoe had been shocked by how Holden bad-mouthed adults, how little respect he showed, how he presumed to know better than them despite lacking life experience, how everyone indulged his hissy fits instead of telling him to pull himself together or matching his stories of imaginary suffering with real suffering, like exile, physical labor, starvation! The teacher gave Zoe a D. Poor Holden, she explained, was alienated. We should pity him and his traumatic, tragic life. No, Zoe countered, Holden was spoiled. We should send him to a Soviet work farm. Because Zoe had such an outstanding record up to that point, the teacher offered to let her rewrite the paper, this time with the correct opinion.
Mama told Zoe to do it. “Your teacher knows what is right.”
Baba told Zoe to do it. “Do what she says and get the grade you deserve. Why risk your average for something so unimportant?”
Balissa told Zoe to do it. “Write how she wants it and she will leave you alone. You do not want to get a reputation for troublemaking.”
Deda said, “Let our poor girl be. She is intelligent; she will decide for herself.” Though later, he did whisper, slipping Zoe a piece of candy, “Why not do this one little thing to make everyone happy and bring peace to the house? For your old deda?”
Zoe couldn’t do it. Not for him, not for herself. She refused to rewrite the paper and ended up with a B for the course. Which kept her out of Advanced Placement English the following year. Baba was, naturally, quite disappointed.
“Who won in that case?” Mama taunts now. “And who suffered? And all because you wrote the wrong truth.”
Zoe follows Mama out of the store, into the street. Mama lowers her voice. Though if she thinks they’re less likely to be overheard here, she’s delusional. The sidewalk is as packed as the shop was. There are people rushing by in all directions, reckless children on scooters, women swinging their massive, knockoff designer purses. Mama returns to her original point. “When Baba was young, she learned you say proper things in public because you are always being listened to, and you think your own thoughts in private. Nobody intelligent expects the words coming out of your mouth to match what is going on in your head.”
“But we’re not in the USSR. Nobody is listening to us.” Except the NSA. When news of their spying came out, nobody was more vindicated than Balissa. “You see? Even here they do this! Why you should always be careful!” Zoe presses on. “Nobody cares what we say. Why do we have to keep lying to each other?”
“Because your thoughts are the only things that are yours. If others know what you think and how you feel, they can use those thoughts and feelings against you. They can hurt you. Why take such a risk? What you think is private; what you say is for others.”
“How can anyone live like this? It’s insane! How can you love a person you’ll never truly get to know? And they’ll never get to know the real you, either!”
“The real you is so wonderful?” Mama challenges. “When you go out on date—the rare time you go out on date—you are completely honest? Or are you a little bit”—she holds up her thumb and forefinger, first close together, then stretching them out until they are longer than her palm—“better? Nicer, friendlier, politer, prettier?”
“Well, yes. But that’s just in the beginning, while we are getting to know each other.”
“How will you get to know each other if you are not, as you say, yourself?”
She has a point. Which is why, rather than concede it, Zoe tells Mama that, as a matter of fact, she has a date tonight. With a Brighton-born boy, no less.
“And you will be completely honest with him immediately?”
“Of course.”
Mama sighs. “This is big mistake, my Zoyenka.”
Zoe helps Mama carry her purchases home. She plans to dump the bags on the kitchen counter and make a quick getaway. Instead, Mama calls Baba and Deda in from the balcony, where they are “taking sun.” No matter how many public-service ads Zoe’s grandparents watch about the dangers of skin cancer, neither can shake their Old World conviction that the way to absorb vitamin D is to fry until your skin peels. That means it’s working and leaching down into your bones. A bit of folk wisdom handed down from Balissa’s childhood in Siberia.
“Our Zoya has a date tonight,” Mama announces loudly enough not just for Baba and Deda but for half of Brighton to hear. The news brings Balissa from her bedroom. She proceeds to riffle through the bags while listening keenly. Mama’s tone grows grim. “She intends to be herself with him!”
“No, Zoyenka,” Baba advises, her nose and cheeks brimming that healthy red. “This is not wise. Men, they are to be tortured. Men do not want what they can easily have. You must to make it difficult for them, or they will lose interest.”
Zoe thinks about what Mama said, about how the public face you show has nothing to do with the private person you are. Zoe wonders if the family she’s certain she knows is, in fact, completely different from what she’s assumed. Zoe looks at her churlish Baba and, like an X-ray, imagines catching a glimpse of the southern belle trapped inside. (Zoe defaults to southern belle because she’s thinking Scarlett O’Hara at the barbecue and can’t summon up an equally Russian example—Anna Karenina at the . . . Borscht Belt?)
Deda assures Zoe, “You are a lovely girl. Do not worry about this. If something is meant to be, it will happen; you do not need to manipulate. You must be patient and wait. Your moment of opportunity will come. And you will to take advantage of it.”
Patiently waiting then taking advantage of an opportunity the moment it comes up? Like a sniper? Isn’t that what they do? Sit for hours, days, weeks, then, when a split-second chance opens, they blow their enemy’s head off? Deda is the most tenderhearted, gentle soul Zoe knows. He feels bad for contestants voted off American Idol. “They tried so hard!” But could something darker be lurking underneath?
Balissa is the next to chime in. “Being yourself not always best idea. There is much that can then be used against you.”
Balissa is always on guard against being exposed. Zoe chalked it up to good ol’ Soviet conditioning. But what if she has her reasons? Balissa makes no secret of what her life in the USSR was like, neighbors spying on each other, turning people in for off-hand remarks or ill-advised jokes. When Zoe kidded that it was the original political correctness, Balissa didn’t laugh. Could Zoe’s quiet, inoffensive great-grandmother have been an opportunistic informer? Could that be why she’s on guard all the time? Balissa never explained exactly how her stepfather got Balissa and her father out of Siberia. Or how he brought Balissa and her mother back. What crimes were committed on her behalf? How might Balissa have repaid her family’s debts?
Mama confirms. “I told Zoya it is better to first listen to what person wants, then to give it.”
“What good advice,” Baba says to Mama, adding, “only twenty-five years too late.”
Seeing her opportunity, just like Deda advised, Zoe leaps in. “Then why aren’t we listening to Baba? She said she doesn’t want an anniversary party, yet here”—Zoe indicates the bags of paraphernalia—“we are!”
Cheap trick. But it works to divert their attention.
They’re still arguing, Baba grandstanding, Mama cajoling, Deda trying to calm them both, and Balissa, impervious, putting away the purchases into their appropriate cabinets, as Zoe steps out the door—and to her date with Alex.