CHER AND I HAVE THINGS IN COMMON

Communicating with strangers is death to an introvert, and even more so to a teenage introvert. How about a teenage immigrant introvert sporting a pair of acid-washed jeans with leg warmers pulled over the bottoms? As soon as I stepped on the campus grounds of Hollywood High on my first day of school, I recognized my folly. My Lioness did not fit in, either—not with the half-shaved skulls nor the locks streaked with blue.

In Russia, schools encompassed all grades. Seven-year-olds played hide-and-seek alongside the ninth-graders. Older kids took care of the younger ones. There, you were part of one community, whether you liked it or not, and all of us shared responsibilities according to our age. Teenagers helped out in the kitchens and on the playgrounds. Kids old enough to mop the floors of their classrooms or wipe the windows mopped and wiped, no matter what kind of a car their folks owned.

At Hollywood High, school was an empire divided, dictated by geography as much as by identity. On one end of the campus, the one closer to Hollywood Boulevard, you’d find the black-trench-coat territory, the Performing Arts Magnet School. Girls with purple hair, guys in dresses, and other artistic types with pierced noses and studded tongues lurked in the cavernous hallways of the auditorium, with its underbelly of music classrooms. It also housed the cafeteria—the only common ground for all students, regardless of their fashion sense, ethnicity, or level of weird.

Everybody on this end aimed to be a superstar someday. Hollywood High had given the world Judy Garland, Carol Burnett, and even Cher, who is adored as much as soccer by half of Europe. Using a prepaid international calling card (an essential in an immigrant neighborhood), I called Zhanna to tell her I’d be attending the same school that Cher once did. She screamed into the phone. According to Zhanna and Romani tradition, it couldn’t be simple coincidence—it was a sign of great things to come. I hoped so. After all, I was in America now. Great things were as common here as Twinkies.

Only a few hundred yards away, on the side of the school bordering Sunset Boulevard, the buzz of foreign tongues filled the hallways, spilling outside through massive windows: Spanish, Romanian, Mandarin, and Arabic. Sprinkled in between endured a small number of American kids who happened to live in the neighborhood but did not aspire to superstardom. My first bouts of English tutelage took place on this side of the campus.

By this time in my life I spoke three languages: Russian, Armenian, and Rromanes. The Romani side of the family slipped into Rromanes only when they wanted to say something they didn’t want anyone else to understand. After Mom left Armenia she preferred to speak Russian, said it made for a more sophisticated first impression. I had to ask Aunt Siranoosh to teach me Armenian. Every town had its own dialect. If two Armenians met on the moon, they’d know, after a few words, to which earthly city the other belonged. Armenian is livelier than Russian but not as rowdy as Rromanes. It has ties to Greek but is strongly influenced by ancient Iranian tongues. In fact, when I spoke it outside Armenia, people often assumed I was from the Middle East. It had come in handy only when I visited Grandma Rose in the summer, but I loved to practice speaking it.

And here I was, the bubble of foreignness keeping me prisoner up to that moment, about to be popped. Closer than ever to finally discovering the America of bootlegged movies that my parents collected like holy relics.

I wandered through the crowd, watching the entire population of the world milling about me. There were so many variations here that everyone fit in by not fitting in.

I was astonished to hear my counselor—the baldheaded and bespectacled Mr. Bedrosian—explain in Armenian how an American high school operated.

As far as Mr. Bedrosian knew, I had a Ukrainian father and an Armenian mother. He had no inkling of my “other” nationality, and I preferred it that way. I had long ago discovered that it was best to reveal my Roma side only to those I’d known for a while and to really anticipate how that piece of information would affect them.

A friend had called it the “Beauty and the Beast” syndrome. I was once waiting to meet up with Zhanna inside a coffee shop in Moscow, sipping my hot chocolate at the counter near a window overlooking a busy square, when a woman next to me started up a conversation. “How old are you?” “Fourteen.” “Are those music books in your sack?” “I play the piano.” “How wonderful! I’ve always wanted to try.” Then she asked if I could watch her grocery bags while she used the pay phone. “Sure,” I said, and she had made to leave with a grateful smile when her eyes fell on my cousin who’d come in through the door. Zhanna’s long sparkly skirt (the way she dressed only when the laundry hadn’t been done) and her long loose hair made the woman’s step falter. The stranger watched Zhanna’s progress across the room with a stifled breath. When it became obvious that the Gypsy was approaching us, she sat back down and muttered, “I’ll call later.” Only a few sips into our hot chocolate, the owner asked us to leave.

My Beast would remain safely veiled from Mr. Bedrosian.

The top of Mr. Bedrosian’s head barely came up to my chin as he marched ahead of me down the hallway.

“First, homeroom,” he said, pushing the office glass door inward. “Read the list. It has all the room numbers and teachers’ names.”

“Homeroom?” I asked, hastening after him.

He stopped to face me, eyebrows huddled above thick lenses. “Homeroom. Third floor. Last building on the left.”

“What do we learn in homeroom?”

“Nothing. You sit and you don’t ask useless questions.”

As promised, homeroom proved quite uneventful. When I found the second class on the list, I thought I had made a mistake. I didn’t know what ESL stood for, so I had expected a room full of American kids.

But the people in my ESL (English as a second language) class, chattering at fifty words per second, were like me: foreigners. The din inside the room rose in waves. No one was speaking English. As I picked a desk at the back, I even heard Russian. I stiffened, ordering my fingers to relax their hold on the notebook I had been strangling.

Growing up, I was never one of those girls with an inexhaustible appetite for socializing. I preferred my easel and paints to playground politics. Even before the kids at my school turned on me after hearing my grandmother sing on the radio, I was already solitary, memorizing epic poems with help from Aunt Siranoosh.

The singer Vysotsky once wrote:

Amidst molten candles and sundown prayers,

Amidst war trophies and fires of peace,

Lived book children who knew no battles,

Suffering their minor catastrophes.

 

Children always complain

of their age and their lot.

And we fought until slain,

And schemed mortal plots.

 

And our clothes were patched

By our mothers with haste.

We then swallowed books,

Getting drunk on the taste.

That’s exactly the kind of thirst that plunged me headlong into one book after another. Every package that arrived from Aunt Siranoosh at our doorstep in Moscow sent me deep into a waking dream. Visions of Sherlock Holmes’s foggy London spun behind my lids with the clatter of carriage wheels, and I scouted with the last of the Mohicans. Mom complained that her well-meaning sister was encouraging me to become a recluse and socially inept, but Aunt Siranoosh maintained that the first step to success is to learn human nature and that the surest way to do that is through works of great men and women. She lived by Plato’s dictum: “And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.”

The ESL teacher, Mrs. Maxim, asked me to introduce myself.

My heart beat against the roof of my mouth.

“Tell us your name and where you are from. Don’t be nervous. In this class, we are learning to speak English together,” the teacher said slowly, clasping her hands and grinning. Her hair was almost as bad as mine, if a little shorter and frizzier.

I cleared my throat and scanned the room without seeing a single face clearly. “My name is Oksana. I was burned in Latvia.”

“Burned?” Mrs. Maxim said.

“Yes. In the city of Riga. In October.”

“Oh, you mean born. You were born in Riga, Latvia. Wow. Can you tell us a little about your hometown?”

My memories of Riga were the haphazard images of a child too young to remember the details—we had moved to Moscow by the time I turned nine—but they were filled with sunlight, the Old Town’s cobblestone streets anchored by Gothic cathedrals, and the summer rains during which some Rigans danced outside in their swimsuits (a legacy of their pagan past). Back then, my parents and I had lived at Grandpa Andrei’s house, where the backyard looked like a forest, abundant in gooseberry and loganberry bushes, studded with apple and cherry trees. Every spring Grandma Ksenia filled several giant buckets to the rim with ripe cherries, simmering the fruit with sugar until the entire house smelled like a candy factory. We kept some of the preserves and sold the rest to Scandinavian tourists.

To me, Latvia had always remained a land of enchantment straight out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and I would have loved to share this with the class that day. But who had these words?

*   *   *

At the end of the day exhaustion threatened to knock me off my feet. Sitting at a bus stop, I realized that only seven months ago Zhanna and I were making plans to get out of Moscow if my parents botched the American interview. We’d go to Armenia and get work at the city hall where Grandma Rose’s best friend was a chief secretary. Or we’d head to the resort towns on the Black Sea. Zhanna’s voice had blossomed in her last year at the music school. She’d sing pop tunes in the clubs and I’d be happy waiting tables as long as we had our own place.

And now I was here, in this dreamlike limbo where the past and the present ran parallel. Zhanna’s excitement never diminished during our phone conversations. But I wasn’t telling her everything. Not about the way Roxy jumped up and down whenever Mom dragged in a black garbage bag filled with used clothes she had bought at a garage sale or found on the curb, nor about the change we now counted with care. She also didn’t know that I was thinking up ways to keep my Gypsiness incognito for now, that even being in America didn’t stop me from replaying the events leading to Ruslan’s death. My cousin, who never shied away from her heritage, would not approve. So every morning after that first day of school, I’d chant into my bathroom mirror, “If anyone asks what you are, you must tell the entire truth.” My reflection seemed determined to comply, chin lifted and eyes sparkly, but every time the question came up she scurried into hiding.