THE MISS

Encouraged by the scores I was receiving from Mrs. Maxim, I decided to venture farther into the world of Los Angeles than I’d ever had the nerve to go before.

I peered timidly through the window of a secondhand shop off Highland Avenue. The girl I was staring at barely smiled, her pencil-sketched form ghost-still, but she was beautiful and regal to me. I pressed my forehead to the glass and sounded out the words on the book jacket: DJ-E-IN AI-RR.

My pulse jumped. I knew the name; sometimes I believed I loved Rochester better than Jane did. I’d read Jane Eyre in Russian several times but had always dreamed of reading it in the original language. Without hesitation I purchased the tattered copy with a few dollars I’d been saving. Home, I flopped on the bed, ignoring Roxy and the three open bottles of nail polish beside her on the floor.

Her only reason for going to school at that point was to show off her affluent sense of fashion. The girls in her clique were quickly becoming the sought-out experts on headbands and color-coordinated outfits. Many a morning Roxy scrunched up her face at my outfit and endeavored to secure a lock of my hair with a Hello Kitty clip. Apparently everything hot pink was in, but black T-shirts with grimacing rockers: so not.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, grabbing her left foot and blowing on her toenails: two red, two black, and one pink. “Can’t you read in the living room? Maria’s coming. We’re gonna play the Oscars.”

“This is my room, too.”

“I’m telling Mom.” Roxy scrambled up and left in a huff.

I ignored her, opening the text to a random page:

The old crone “nichered” a laugh under her bonnet and bandage; she then drew out a short black pipe, and lighting it began to smoke. Having indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body, took the pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire, said very deliberately—“You are cold; you are sick; and you are silly.”

“Prove it,” I rejoined.

“I will, in few words. You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you.”

I’d been sure I would recognize the contents no matter which passage fate led me to, but I didn’t. With help from my dictionary it took me an hour to learn that the section was one of my favorites. Rochester, disguised as an old Gypsy woman, was reading Jane’s fortune.

I threw down the book and paced the narrow room. Seven months in America, and what did I have to show for it? I could tell you that I was born in Riga but nothing about the city’s Gothic beauty. I could name my favorite movie and not be able to explain why I avoided watching it. Perhaps I wasn’t studying hard enough, or maybe the material we used in the classroom wasn’t challenging enough.

First, I dialed Aunt Siranoosh. Mom didn’t call home as often as when we first moved. When she did, it was to report how well we were doing. And though everyone thought Nora was crazy-busy making American dollars with no time for mothballing (Roxy and I were practically the next Hollywood starlets), I knew Mom’s ever-growing stockpile of lies had gotten so shaky that she was afraid to let the wrong things slip in conversation and make the whole thing tumble. And because Mom was aware of her sister’s skills in the area of stealthy information retrieval, I was instructed not to call unless Mom was present. But the situation demanded immediate attention, and so I sneaked the phone into the bedroom. Aunt would have the answer. “Darling,” she said. “I don’t have the answer. Talk to a teacher. Teachers always know what to do.”

Mrs. Maxim was the next logical choice.

But when I walked into the classroom the next morning, I lost my resolve, intimidated not by Mrs. Maxim but by an unfamiliar face.

The rain outside pounded so hard, it seemed likely to drown the world. Soaked through, I had run shivering into the classroom and right into his stare. He reclined behind his desk as if he owned it: long legs extended, arms crossed, a self-satisfied smile creasing the corners of his eyes. His dirty-blond hair reached past his shoulders and down tanned arms accentuated by a plain black T-shirt. I had never noticed plain black T-shirts before. A pair of black jeans made for a nice finish (I had always noticed black jeans). A leather jacket was slung over the back of his chair.

“Check out the new guy. Isn’t he gorgeous?” Natasha, one of the Russian students, whispered as I sat behind her. “I bet that jacket is real leather, and look, his eyes are so green I can see them all the way from here.”

At the teacher’s prompting he sauntered up to the front of the class.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Cruz Marchi. I am from Manaus, Brazil.”

You’d think his words might lurch, considering this was an ESL class. Mine had. You might expect him, like the rest of us, to scuttle back to his desk, cowering in embarrassment. I did. But his English sounded surprisingly smooth, so what was he doing here?

“Do you like music?” Mrs. Maxim asked, folding her hands into the pockets of a furry brown cardigan. She was always looking for ways to keep us talking, and as soon as Cruz nodded she inquired what kind.

“All music.”

Clearly the guy was a liar, I mused. Nobody likes all music. I should know. I’d been playing piano since the age of six because my mother insisted I get a formal education in a music school where neither rock nor jazz made it into our music-history textbooks.

My father didn’t participate much in my piano education; playing instruments had been largely a man’s job, and most Roma women danced or sang. In the old days a woman holding an instrument was a perverse sight, and maybe some of those sensibilities carried across the ages. If it had been up to Dad, I wouldn’t have gone to a music school. I was too young to understand that he simply didn’t believe I, a girl, could be a good musician. But I wanted to be good.

Especially at jazz.

My interest most likely came from Zhanna’s older brother, my cousin Misha, who adored everything American. The walls of his apartment were covered with posters of Wynton Marsalis, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Penthouse models; he claimed that real musicians dated the most beautiful women, and that you found those women only in Penthouse. He was a full-time musician himself, and whenever he toured, Zhanna and their mom, my aunt Laura, would apartment-sit. Sometimes they invited me to stay with them, but I hated using Misha’s bathroom, where spread-eagled naked women pouted from every direction, even the door. Aunt Laura taped paper flowers over the more offensive spots. “These girls are too young to see what a manda looks like,” she told Misha.

On many occasions, Zhanna warned her stoner brother that God would someday punish him for his vulgar tastes, to which Misha replied that he was already being punished by having a Soviet passport and a black man’s soul.

*   *   *

At the end of the class period I got my chance to talk to Mrs. Maxim as she sat at her desk making notes in her student record book.

“I have a question,” I said.

“Let’s see if I can answer it.”

“This book. I read it before. Seven times.”

She took the copy, leafing through the yellowed pages. “It’s a great story. Wow! Seven times?”

“In Russian.”

“Wonderful!”

I accepted the book back, holding it to my chest like a shield. “When will my accent go away?” I didn’t mean to ask precisely that.

Maybe she sensed my discomfort, because her face remained politely amiable. “It might never go away. Why?”

“I should know English now. I should be able to read Jane Eyre; I should speak without thinking words first; should be thinking in English also, not only Russian; should—”

“Slow down. You’re upset because you think your English isn’t good enough?”

“I’m still a foreigner.”

She stood, hands on my shoulders. “There is nothing wrong with that. Our heritage is what makes us unique. As for the language, it takes time, and you are doing very well, considering it hasn’t even been a year. Give yourself a break. Recognize your accomplishments.”

A rush of despair made its way up my body. I didn’t want to be comforted just now. “Is not enough. I must learn faster. Show me how.”

“It’ll come to you eventually. Why are you in such a hurry?” When I didn’t answer, Mrs. Maxim studied me. She squeezed her fingers for a second, and then let go. “I don’t have the answers, Oksana. I can’t give you a magic formula so that you wake up tomorrow ready for Jeopardy! I didn’t say I can’t help, though, so don’t look at me like you’re ready to bawl. Let’s think about this. You’re doing great in this class, right?”

“Perhaps.”

She frowned, waiting.

“Yes. I’m doing good.”

“Classics isn’t where you start. The text is too complex; there are too many analogies, metaphors, double meanings, which may only be caught when one thinks in the language one reads. Think baby steps.” She went around the desk and, from the bottom drawer, produced a thin paperback. “Try this.”

“The Miss and the Maverick,” I read aloud. The girl on the cover wore a man’s hat and a defiant expression. In the bottom right corner, there was another image of her. Here she pretended to sleep in the grass, hair in disarray, shirt unbuttoned. A blond man hovered over her with a ravenous expression on his unnaturally chiseled face. The maverick, no doubt—whatever that meant.

“It’s a romance novel,” Mrs. Maxim said, to my perplexity. “About love. Not the most educational read, but much easier to read. You might still have problems understanding everything, but it’s less complicated than Brontë or Dumas.”

Thus began my education in the language of swoons and sighs. For the longest time, I called an umbrella a parasol, and my ideas of the American West came straight out of Linda Lael Miller’s frontier novels such as Caroline and the Raider. I even joined the Harlequin book club and squealed every time the mailman delivered the package containing four brand-new romances. Suddenly I had a goal. The soundest, the most brilliant goal: like my mother (when she first came to Russia and re-created herself), I would master English, shed the old me, and become a brand-new, all-American Oksana.