Zoe invites her family to stop by Alex’s office at lunchtime. Dinnertime by Russian standards, though Mama assures it’s no trouble, she’ll adjust their schedule—they’ll eat first, they don’t expect to be fed. They opt not to take the subway, and a cab is too expensive. Baba knows a guy who drives for a limo service who’s happy to pick up money on the side, charging less as long as you pay in cash.
They arrive, as Zoe predicted, twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Deda’s phobia of being late, triggered by the scramble to catch their trains while emigrating, prompts him to factor in way too much buffer for any journey. Zoe watches them through the security camera as they enter the lobby and head for the elevator—Mama and Baba propping Balissa up by the elbows, Deda bringing up the rear with his cane. Balissa is in her eighties but walks so regally that, despite needing help getting around and barely being able to see beyond her arm, it still appears as if she’s leading the pack. Balissa’s mother taught her that. Always stand tall. Always look everyone in the eye.
There’s not much of a dress code at Alex’s. He’s wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with a blazer thrown over it. Gideon’s in khakis and a black tee that reads world’s #0 programmer. Mama, on the other hand, is wearing a navy dress Zoe knows is new—she can see the creases on the sleeves and skirt. Baba is in a teal jacket with 1980s shoulder pads. She says it gives her the illusion of a waist. Why should she forgo such a figure-flattering style merely because a faceless authority deemed it over? Deda has on a white dress shirt buttoned up to his chin. Balissa is in a flower-print dress cut surprisingly low in the cleavage, with a gold brooch pinned to the lapel.
Zoe presumed she’d need to drag Alex to greet them at the elevator, but he beats her to it. When the doors open, there he suddenly is. Zoe’s family startles. As does Zoe.
“Welcome!” Alex effuses. In Russian. Zoe has never heard him speak Russian before. He’s got a bit of an accent. As he shakes everybody’s hand and leads them toward the office, Zoe realizes that his vocabulary is limited, like that of a child. But his charm isn’t.
Alex directs the bulk of his tour at Balissa; he understands that being gracious to her will trickle down. He shows Balissa the break room, with its abundance of free food and drinks for the staff. He offers her a cup of tea, which she politely declines. He asks again. She declines again. He makes her one anyway. “Just in case, for later.” Everybody beams.
He takes them to the conference room, with its whiteboards covered in equations and code, and proceeds to explain what he’s working on. Mama asks questions about the algorithms in a quiet voice, sorry to be troubling him. Alex answers, making clear it’s no trouble. Baba isn’t as sheepish. She wonders how much money this is costing, where he got it, and how he plans to make it back.
Alex explains about investors and angels, first- and second-round financing, IPOs. He doesn’t know the Russian words for those terms, so toggles back and forth while everyone nods thoughtfully.
“Zoe’s been an incredible help,” he says, “getting her company to fund our beta launch.”
For normal people, this would trigger concerns about conflicts of interest. But to the Brighton contingent, who else would one do business with, strangers?
Next up is a stroll through the cubicles. Alex takes the route with maximum Russian-speaking programmers. He introduces Zoe’s family, asks the coders to explain what they’re working on. Some are recent arrivals. Their language skills are far above Alex’s. Deda is interested in what they’re saying, but Balissa is overwhelmed by the jargon. Alex moves the tour along, for her sake. Deda looks longingly at the computer monitors, then dutifully hustles with his cane after the rest.
The final stop is Alex’s office, where he’s set up chairs for everyone. There’s one for Deda, but, when Zoe looks around, he’s hanging back, studying a snippet of code that’s hanging from a strip of paper thumbtacked to the outside of a cubicle wall. Zoe is about to go get him when she sees Gideon move in and ask her grandfather something. Deda nods, waving his arms enthusiastically. Gideon points in the direction of his own cubicle and takes Deda’s arm to help him navigate. He catches Zoe’s eye over her grandfather’s head, and mouths, “I got this.”
Deda so often gets overlooked at home. Sweet how Gideon singled him out for personalized attention. How many times is it now that Gideon’s come to Zoe’s rescue? And each time, before she figured out she needed it. Zoe isn’t certain how she feels about that. Heck, Zoe still isn’t sure how she feels about Gideon’s wink the other day. So like with all feelings she can’t understand, she chooses to ignore them.
She catches up to her family.
No one else has noticed Deda is gone.
Granted, Mama, Baba, and Balissa are engaged in the more pressing task of cross-examining Alex. Baba is doing the majority of the talking. Mama is holding back, afraid of saying something that might ruin Zoe’s matrimonial chances. Balissa prefers to sit back and watch. She believes in letting people hang themselves. Though it’s also a turn of phrase she hates. The Russian expression In a home where someone hanged himself, don’t bring up rope isn’t a metaphor for Balissa.
Baba wants to know if Alex ever goes back to Brighton.
“Of course,” he says. “To visit my parents.”
What a nice boy.
Will he ever move back there?
“Maybe. When I have children.”
What a sensible boy!
Where did he go to university?
“Caltech.”
“In California? Why so far away from home?”
“I wanted the best opportunity to make something of myself.”
What an enterprising boy!
Where does Alex live now?
“Battery Park City.”
“Own or rent?”
“Rent. I’m more flexible that way. I can relocate wherever I need to.”
Ready to flee at a moment’s notice? That’s a feature, not a bug.
“What do your parents do?”
“They’re engineers.”
Of course they are.
“How do they like our Zoya?”
“They love everything I’ve told them about her.”
“So you’re meeting us before they’re meeting her?”
“Naturally,” Alex says.
It goes on in this vein for another twenty minutes. Alex never loses patience, even when the questions begin repeating themselves, checking for inconsistencies à la the KGB. Zoe is the one who finally can’t take it. She tells her family Alex needs to get back to work. Alex says they’re welcome to stay as long as they like. To be polite, the family then insists that no, really, they must be leaving.
They lasso Deda from Gideon’s cubicle on the way out. He is standing, delighted, in front of a screen. He pokes a finger at the monitor and claims, “This language, this C you are using, it is like the Ratfor language. I learn little in USSR, before I get married. Ratfor is like the Fortran with C syntax, yes?” He turns to Gideon for confirmation.
“Yes,” Gideon says. “That’s exactly what it is.”
“I learn it, too.” Deda grins proudly. He asks Alex, “I come work for you?”
“Anytime.” Alex half bows. “It would be an honor.” But he isn’t looking at Deda as he says it. Zoe hopes her grandfather doesn’t notice. When his smile falters, it’s obvious he does. Zoe feels a flare-up of anger, followed immediately by guilt. How dare she nitpick like this after everything Alex has done for her this afternoon? Zoe is getting as bad as Baba! Will nothing ever be good enough for her? That, Mama would say, is why Zoe is alone. That is why Zoe is dying to prove them all wrong.
“We are to be leaving.” Her grandmother waves the backs of her hands in the direction of the elevator. “Kish. Alex and Zoya are busy.”
“Goodbye, Gideon.” Deda pronounces it Gee-Dee-One.
“Goodbye, sir. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
“Much pleasure for me, too.” Deda only nods in Alex’s direction. And Zoe feels strangely vindicated. Followed by more guilt.
Alex offers his own goodbyes in Russian. Balissa reaches into her bag and hands him a plastic container of zephyrs, whipped strawberry puree mixed with sugar, egg whites, and gelatin, then stiffened into flower shapes.
“My favorite!” Alex says.
There is more handshaking and beaming all around.
And the elevator doors finally close.
Zoe sags like all the water has been drained from her body. She is nothing but packed dry sand. Any move will cause the edifice to crumble.
Alex suffers no such exhaustion. He got to be the center of attention, receive waves of positive feedback—he obviously missed Deda’s diss—plus earn Zoe’s goodwill in the process. What’s not to like? Certainly not how calculated it felt.
Alex opens the box of zephyrs and pops one in his mouth. He chews, swallows, then decrees, “They still taste the same.”
“Are they really your favorite?”
“They’re fine,” he dismisses. “It made your babushka happy.”
“You were fantastic.”
“No big deal. I knew what they wanted; I gave it to them.”
“I really appreciate it.”
“All in a day’s work.” Alex leans in and gives Zoe a quick peck on the lips, the rest of his body already turning toward his cubicle. “I’ll see you later.”
Unlike her family when they first immigrated, Zoe knows that means no time soon.
Zoe stops by Gideon’s cubicle on her way out. It’s in the opposite direction of her way out, but it would be rude to leave without saying goodbye and thanking him for indulging Deda.
“No big deal,” Gideon echoes Alex, offering Zoe insight on why they work so well together. What others would consider a major effort or, at the very least, a generous concession, they take in stride. Nothing is difficult for either of them, because they refuse to see it that way.
“I love talking to old computer guys,” Gideon says. “Hearing about the early days, how they had to stick wires into circuit boards or punch holes into cards, then sit around waiting overnight to see if they got it right. God help anybody who dropped their box of cards and got them mixed up. We forget how good we’ve got it these days.”
“He appreciated you listening to him, making him feel valued. It’s hardest for his generation, I think. He lived half his life in one place, half in another. He’s neither here nor there.”
“Like you?” Gideon guesses Zoe’s greatest fear.
She denies it with all the vigor such unspoken truth deserves. “No! Of course not! I’m fine. My life is easy compared to what they went through.” She quotes Gideon, to drive her point home. “We forget how good we’ve got it these days.”
“’Cause, you know”—Gideon lets her homage pass without comment—“I wouldn’t understand feeling like you don’t belong in any one place, with any one group.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Zoe expects Gideon to laugh at her. He doesn’t. He continues sitting there, patiently waiting to hear what uninformed, offensive nonsense will sprout from her mouth next. But Zoe’s not being glib or ignorant or culturally insensitive. She’s seen Facebook posts and tweets about black men needing to “act white” in order to get ahead, the lack of diversity in tech, code-switching, cultural appropriation. She can recite all the latest buzzwords. She’s woke. Ish.
“It’s not the same.” Zoe gives up the ghost of her lie in order to make him see the truth. “You’re comfortable anywhere.”
“I made myself that way.”
“How?” Her query bursts like the xenomorph from John Hurt’s chest in Alien.
Gideon asks, “Why do college kids go to bars?”
Is this a trick question? “To get wasted?”
“I went to listen. Not at the bars around Caltech. Caltech is, shockingly, not a cross section of the American public. I went farther out, where the regular people go. I’d sit there with my drink, and I’d listen to the conversations going on around me. It was like an anthropology project.”
“And that worked?”
“Enough that I could avoid being like my dad.”
“What’s wrong with your dad?”
“Keeping jobs wasn’t his thing. He’s a smart guy. Too smart, according to popular consensus. They call him Cassandra at work, always predicting what will go wrong. Folks don’t like that. Makes them feel stupid. My dad may have been smart, but he never quite learned what to say when. Or how. Or to whom. My dad went on a lot of job interviews. My mom would give him a kiss for luck before each, and she’d remind him, ‘Don’t be yourself!’”
“Your mom should meet my family. They’re constantly telling me how nobody wants to hear what you really have to say. Or what you really think.”
“Until you find somebody who does.” Gideon one-eighties.
“That’s totally going to happen.” Zoe saves her greatest scoffs for matters she most wants to believe are true.
“My mom and dad used to talk for hours. About everything.”
“My grandparents can not talk for hours. About everything.”
Gideon laughs. He has a great laugh. He doesn’t let it out in trial balloons, as if waiting for permission. He doesn’t stop if no one joins him. He doesn’t hold anything back.
“So tell me, how does one go about finding someone who actually wants to listen to you, like your mom and dad?” Zoe is teasing.
He answers as if she’s not. “You listen to them. Especially to the things they don’t say.”
“Are you for real?” Zoe does her speaking-without-thinking bit again. And then she takes it a step further. She puts her money where her mouth is. She doesn’t just speak without thinking; she acts without thinking, too.
She kisses Gideon. For real.