Gideon doesn’t break off their kiss like Zoe expects him to. He kisses her back, not tentatively or politely, like a man taken by surprise and acting on instinct, but enthusiastically. Alas, their current positions aren’t conducive to grand passion. They’re sitting on office chairs. With wheelies. Which means their bodies drift side to side in opposite directions while their lips remain plastered together. They’re bent at the waist, cutting off a good amount of necessary airflow. If they remove their hands from the plastic armrests, they risk the chairs twisting even farther apart.
In spite of that, it’s still a hell of a kiss. One that starts at the lips, but snakes down to the stomach, from which it branches off in all directions, reaching as far as the tips of Zoe’s fingers and toes, while turning her ears bright pink.
Zoe’s the one who finally breaks it off. While kissing in general, and this kiss in particular, is awesome, breathing is kind of a vital function, too.
“You didn’t break it off,” Zoe accuses, as if Gideon had violated a previously agreed upon social contract.
“I figured you would, when you wanted to.”
“Stop treating me like an adult who knows her own mind.” When Gideon fails to grasp the gravity of the situation, Zoe extrapolates, “What if the decisions I make for myself are wrong? What if I’m a huge disappointment? As long as I’m following other people’s expectations for me, I have somebody else to blame my screwups on.”
“You’ll figure it out.” Gideon swivels back to his computer, smiling.
He expects her to leave his cubicle. That’s what she stopped by to tell him she was about to do. Before they got . . . distracted. Instead, Zoe asks, “Want to do something crazy?”
Gideon turns back around, looking at Zoe with what she hopes is newfound—if undeserved—respect. “Always.”
Flying a plane, scaling a mountain, driving a race car, slicing fruit with a ninja sword . . . These are all things Zoe wants to do. As soon as she gets up the courage. In the meantime, she’ll settle for checking out a Midtown Virtual Reality place where yellow bellies like her can attempt all of the above, only with goggles strapped to their heads and feet planted squarely on the floor.
“No one ever wants to go with me,” Zoe confesses to Gideon as they pay their admission and are issued their gear. Gideon helps himself to the Wet-Naps on offer and wipes down first her equipment, then his. “All my friends said, quote, lame, nerdy, and pathetically lame.”
“Leaves more Fruit Ninja for us.” Gideon flourishes his weapon dramatically. In real life, it’s a black plastic stick with a censor on it. But on the VR screen, it’s a mighty sword meant to slash any and all fruit that comes flying their way.
So they gleefully slash fruit. They climb the Matterhorn using disembodied metal hands that periodically lose their grip and send them tumbling. They race cars and crash into walls without dying fiery deaths. They blow the heads off zombies and maneuver spaceships through asteroid fields while improvising a pilot-to-pilot dialogue that goes like this:
Him: You’ve got a Bogey on your six.
Her: You’ve got a Bacall on your five thirty.
Him: Great, kid, don’t get cocky.
Her: I shot first.
Him: I’m Spartacus.
Her: I’m Brian!
Him: I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.
Her: I’m Mrs. Robinson.
Him: I’m the entire Swiss Family Robinson.
Her: I’m the Swiss Miss.
Him: You are the sun, I am the moon.
Her: That’s no moon; that’s a space station.
Did somebody say lame, nerdy, and pathetically lame?
Ha! Zoe slices them with her ninja sword like so much airborne banana!
Zoe has never closed down a bar, had sex in public, or done anything similarly cool in her life. But she’s getting the impression that’s what the staff fears she and Gideon are doing as they climb into the airplane simulator . . . and decline to come out. (What’s the problem? Nobody else is in line. It’s the middle of the day, and they’re the only ones playing hooky.)
There’s something mesmerizing about sitting in a room designed to look like a real cockpit, pushing buttons and twisting dials, watching the view outside their windshield as it turns from clear blue skies to lightning storms to an image of the ground coming at them at many miles per hour to the Himalayas popping up out of nowhere, all the while knowing that, even if you make a mistake and send your plane plummeting, everything will turn out fine.
This is how Zoe likes her danger, behind a screen and as far away from reality as possible. When she was little and scared to get shots, Baba commanded Zoe to be a brave partisan—did she want to be a coward all her life? Zoe would make a lousy partisan. Because the bravest thing she’s ever done—or ever expects to do—in the cockpit of a plane that isn’t even real—is, after multiple false starts and second-guesses, reaching out and resting her hand atop Gideon’s.
She’s ready to spring back and claim a mere slip of the wrist at the first hint of disapproval. Or visible revulsion. Instead, Zoe sees Gideon smiling. So she just sits back.
And dares to fly.
Zoe shows up in Brighton for dinner the following day without calling or texting. No one is surprised to see her. Reporting for debriefing was understood. Baba didn’t get her chance to offer Zoe the customary twenty-minute recap of her sins during their visit with Alex.
Deda finishes eating, kisses the top of Zoe’s head, and says he’s stepping out to take a stroll on the boardwalk, so they might have girl talk.
Mama clears the dishes and carries her stack to the kitchen. A waist-high island separates it from the dining room, so she can see and hear everything. Baba gathers the edges of the tablecloth and takes it to the balcony to shake off the crumbs. A glass door separates it from the dining room, so she can see and hear everything. Balissa is left sitting at the table with Zoe.
Zoe figures she can do this the Soviet way—pretend she has no interest in the subject she has the most interest in and spend thirty minutes discussing everything but—or she can go all-American, like squeezing a pimple before it’s ready to burst. It’s painful, and half the time it gets infected and takes longer to heal, but at least you’ve done something rather than wait passively.
“So.” Call her a Yankee Doodle Dandy. “What did you think of Alex?”
The three women somehow manage to exchange glances without looking at one another.
“He is a very nice boy,” Mama says.
“Shrewd,” Baba adds. “Ambitious. Enterprising. Dynamic.”
“An excellent young man for you,” Mama concludes.
“Not the right man for you,” Baba says at the same time.
Zoe’s head swivels. She’s used to Baba contradicting anything anyone says out of principle. And she’s certainly used to Baba disapproving of anything Zoe does, out of habit. But Zoe honestly thought, this time, she’d gotten it right. Finally done something her entire family could approve of, maybe even praise! Her shock is seen and raised by her confusion. How in the world has she managed to screw up again?
Baba finishes cleaning off the tablecloth and folds it while reentering the dining room. Mama takes off her apron, hangs it on a hook, and leaves the dishes to soak, then reenters the dining room. They stand on either side of Zoe.
“Why would you say such a thing, Mama?” Zoe’s mother seems as confused as Zoe. She, too, must have hoped this would be that rare Baba-condoned situation. “Alex is precisely the sort of man you’ve always held up as an example. It’s what you loved about Eugene!”
“And how did that work out?” Baba reminds her.
“That was my fault, not his.”
Zoe can’t believe it. Might Mama, at long last, let slip what drove her to leave her marriage? Maybe Zoe has finally done something right, after all!
Julia continues, “I know I disappointed you, Mama. You may not have been happy with Papa all these years, but at least you stuck it out.”
And now Mama is admitting the forty-fifth anniversary she’s been so insistent on is in celebration of a less-than-ideal couple? Zoe sneaks a peek at Balissa to check if Zoe is hearing what she thinks she’s hearing, but her great-grandmother appears as serene as if they were discussing a grocery list. No, she’d be more invested in a grocery list. Balissa claims Baba buys the wrong kind of sunflower seeds. She says they never taste like the ones back home. The ones back home, she says, tasted as sweet as candy.
“Papa and me is Papa and me,” Baba says, “and you and Eugene is you and Eugene. The difference is, I failed with a good man. You failed with a bad one.”
“What was wrong with him?” Zoe bursts out, pissed that a conversation that was supposed to be about her has bypassed her completely.
“Tell her,” Baba commands with a dismissive sweep of her arm. “Keeping it secret only makes Zoya imagine the worst.”
She’s right. When Zoe was little, she imagined her father as a literal monster. As a sophisticated, know-it-all teen, she cynically assumed there’d been an affair. Now that she’s older and knows a whole lot less, she’s actually afraid to hear about physical abuse or assault.
“Insurance.” Mama sighs, her voice a combination of embarrassment and defeat. She sinks into a chair and buries her face in her hands. She’s gone beet red, and there are tears in her eyes.
“Insurance?” Zoe repeats numbly.
“Insurance,” Baba repeats, scoffing.
That, most definitely, is not what Zoe imagined.
Mama’s eyes peek out between her fingers. She mutters, “You know I met your papa when I went to work in his office, bookkeeping.”
Zoe did know that.
“After we married, he promoted me from part-time to full-time.”
Baba corrects, “He fired his regular man and put Mama in, this time without paying her.”
Mama flops back in her chair, hands by her sides, fingers twitching nervously, like she’s playing an imaginary keyboard. Balissa cocks her head, notices, and smiles. She does it when she gets anxious, too. Zoe proudly broke herself of the family habit years earlier.
Mama says, “Doing his books, I saw where Eugene was being dishonest. He would bill insurance companies for procedures he didn’t perform. Or he would use one person’s Medicare number to treat another. Most of his patients were on welfare, so it was easy to cheat. He would sign papers saying a person deserved disability payments. The government doesn’t look closely.”
“Exactly!” Baba crows. “If Eugene hadn’t done this, somebody else would have. And it is not as if he hurt his patients, only the idiot government. They deserve this. Why should bureaucrats decide who needs what procedure, when, and how much doctor should charge for it; why bureaucrats decide who should work and who should not? Why should he play by the rules when no one else does? Why should he be the fool?”
So the big secret is Zoe’s dad was . . . no different from most of the dads she’d known growing up? If they weren’t doctors signing disability claims, they were office managers stealing software and selling copies of it at half-off retail price, or store owners who didn’t charge tax, or piano teachers who accepted cash only for lessons while collecting welfare. Baba was right. In Brighton, playing by the rules was considered being a chump. Why in the world had Mama chosen to break from the pack and take a stand there, of all places?
“Because it’s the right thing to do!” Mama insists, her tears as bitter now as Zoe imagines they must have been then. Zoe can also imagine Baba’s disapproval, Eugene’s confusion, and the entire neighborhood’s contempt. And yet, Mama—Zoe’s soft-spoken, conflict-averse, peacemaker Mama—stuck to her guns and did what she thought was right, regardless of the consequences. She didn’t let anybody cow her. She didn’t care what anybody thought. Another family member whom it turns out Zoe hardly knew. At least this secret was a good thing. Something to be proud of.
“I could not stay married to a man who would be so dishonest,” Mama continues.
“Because you were scared you’d be caught,” Baba begs to differ. “You’re just like your father!”
“I already said I was sorry for disappointing you. I know you think I never should have divorced Eugene!”
“You never should have married him!” Baba amends, which comes as much of a surprise to Mama as it does to Zoe.
“But you liked Eugene,” Mama practically whimpers. “You said he was shrewd, ambitious, dynamic, enterprising.”
Now where has Zoe heard those words before?
“Good for him,” Baba says. “Not good for you. Or for our Zoya.”
“No such thing as good man,” Balissa unexpectedly speaks up. “Only man in a good time. If Eugene is living in USSR, what he does, it is to provide for his family. He would be hero. But in America, he is criminal who puts family at risk.” Balissa says to Baba, “I love your papa, yes?” referring to the great-grandfather with the eye patch Zoe has seen only in photographs.
“I suppose . . .” Baba falters.
“I love him. He is good man. Drinks too much, talks too much, works maybe too little, still good man. There are many good men where we live in Siberia. But your papa, he is a soldier, he is there temporarily, and he has propiska, permission to live in Odessa. I want to return to Odessa.”
Balissa lets that sink in. It does.
Baba begins, “You married Papa for . . .”
“Many reasons,” Balissa insists. “Odessa propiska is one of them.” She goes on, instructing Baba, “Your grandfather Edward was good man, too. He loved my mama. He loved me and my sister. But the right man must also be in the right place, at the right time, for the right purpose.” She looks meaningfully at Baba, and something passes between them that Zoe can’t identify. “You know this, don’t you, my Natashenka?”
Baba clearly knows this.
“Alex is the perfect man for me at the perfect time.” Zoe is unsure how this happened. She thought they’d be the ones selling Alex to her, not the other way around! Her extant terror of making the wrong call, thanks to her family’s continued expectation of Zoe doing precisely that, flares with a vengeance. The less confident Zoe is of her choices, the more she feels compelled to defend them. By putting the onus on somebody else.
“You told me I should find a nice Brighton boy. Alex is from Brighton! And he’s nice. Enough. You said the problem with your husband, Balissa, is he worked too little. No one could say that about Alex. And everything he’s doing is legal. I saw the paperwork, Mama; you don’t have to worry he’s too ambitious. Alex inspires me to be a better person. Isn’t that why you’re constantly criticizing me, telling me how to behave? Because you want me to be a better person? Alex is on your side! He already sees me as the person I want to be. You told me not to be myself when we went out? I wasn’t. I did what you said to land the kind of guy you want who believes I already am the girl you think I should be!”
Zoe’s great-grandmother speaks Russian—and some German. Zoe speaks English—and some Russian. Zoe’s grandmother and mother speak both Russian and English.
Right now, Zoe doesn’t think any of them are speaking the same language.
Which, as her family learned almost one hundred years ago, is a sure path to disaster.
That no one could figure out how to stop.