BRINGING DOWN THE WALL

At my uncle’s house old habits and new converged into a patchwork of delirium. I itched to learn everything at once.

“What is this?”

“A water dispenser. And here’s the ice maker.”

“How come your legs are so smooth?”

“In America, girls shave their leg hairs with a razor, and their underarms, too. No one here likes to look like a yeti.”

“Our pillowcases don’t fit any of your pillows.”

“That’s because pillows here are not square like in Russia. Who makes square pillows nowadays, really! That’s so seventies. Real pillows are rectangular.”

When my cousins went to school, Roxy and I watched TV, enraptured by flawless women and men promising instant miracles during the advertisements. I hadn’t realized how many important things our previous existence lacked.

We had owned a VCR. One had to have money to afford a VCR. Most came from Japan via the black market, and ours was a gift from a Japanese journalist who had come to stay with us for a while. Electronics equaled status; if you had them, you would never fall short of friends. But even as my parents boasted about the JVCs and the Panasonics to many close friends who appreciated all of the name brands, one huge difference set them apart from truly having it all: sixty channels of cable television.

I can’t recall much of what my parents were up to during those first weeks in America. Looking back, I see their absence had a definite cause: something awful had begun brewing between them. And I either chose to ignore the signs or was too overwhelmed by pepperoni pizza and Murder, She Wrote to notice.

Truth be told, my parents’ problems had started years before our move. Back then Dad claimed he couldn’t stand Mom’s drinking; this even while he drank himself. Mom insisted that he had driven her to it by cheating on her with her friends. In Moscow, they used to get into blistering fights, too wrapped up in each other to notice the destruction they were wreaking on Roxy and me.

Once when I was about twelve, I was in my bedroom, reading Russian fairy tales and waiting for my parents to stop wishing each other dead. Earlier I had made a mistake of coming out. Dad was chasing Mom with a butter knife. What he thought he could do with such a dull weapon, I can’t say. They yelled for me to get back inside my room and shut the door, and I scampered away and tried to calm my sister down while listening to the ruckus outside. Roxy kept crying, and it was well past midnight when I finally read her to sleep in my bed. My eyes drooped, but I struggled to stay awake in case I needed to call an ambulance. A terrifying silence fell and I sneaked out to make sure no one was dead, tiptoeing on the freezing parquet floor down the hallway toward the only source of light streaming from the living room. My heart galloped ahead of me. I heard voices coming from behind the cracked living-room door, and I peeked around it.

Mom was sitting in a chair with Dad kneeling in front of her, the butter knife still in his hand. They were both crying.

“Don’t you know I love you,” he said. “Why do you torment me like this? Don’t you know how much I love you?”

Mom didn’t say a thing. Just curled her fingers in his hair and sobbed.

I felt like an intruder, but after I ran back to my bed I fell asleep within moments; I had heard my father’s words, and I believed in their truth. The memory of that night had always made me think that we would be okay, even in America.

But I was wrong. One day we were an immigrant army of four, ready to take on Hollywood; the next, my parents were lashing out at each other with accusations of infidelity and abuse.

“Don’t lie to these girls, Nora. I never planned on staying with you.” My father had a booming voice. “You’re nothing to me.”

Mother’s hands flew to her hips, her eyes enraged and glassy. “I’d like to know where you plan on going, then. Where? Where will you go?”

“Oh, I’ll be taken care of.”

Mom halted as if she’d swallowed too much water and was about to choke. And then the words tipped over. “If it weren’t for my brother sending that visa you’d be playing Moscow clubs with your drunken buddies—”

“Your brother didn’t want us here. I know that’s why he left out that paper. They’ve always been jealous of us, your brother and his wife. It’d make them deliriously happy had we been denied the entry and stayed to rot back in Russia, waiting for them to bless us with their packages of American crap. That’s what they wanted.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my aunt hiding behind a potted fern while she punched a number (probably Uncle’s at work) into the kitchen phone.

“You should be thankful,” Mom continued as if he hadn’t said a word, “that I brought you here, that I didn’t leave you after the shit you’d put me through all these years.”

My father exploded. “Thankful? You were a nobody, derevnia (country bumpkin). I showed you the world, gave you the opportunity to work onstage. I could’ve had any woman. They lined up, one knockout after another.”

“Oh, I see now. The only reason you came with me was to bring your slut to the States. Is that it? Why didn’t you just stay with her?”

“She’s more of a woman than you’ll ever be. Look at you. You’re nothing but skin and bones!”

“I should’ve run away from every one of you when I had the chance,” Mom shouted, and I knew that if someone didn’t intervene soon, my parents would start throwing things. That’s what happened once Mom grouped all of us into one category. Suddenly she wasn’t fighting just Dad but the entire population of the world, her children included.

“I gave you all my life, my youth.”

“Stop the melodrama. What about my life?”

“The girls are going to hate you for this.”

“You’ve made sure they already do with all your bad-mouthing.”

I couldn’t take it any longer and burst into the living room. Wasn’t there any love left between them?

“Will you guys stop? Split or make up, but stop yelling. Talk like normal people, so you can hear each other for once.”

Dad’s face turned redder than it already was. “Unless you can stop your mother from harassing me, I have no use for you.”

“Don’t call our daughter useless.”

“With you as her mother…” Dad shrugged.

I stood in between them, confused; it was difficult to tell if the argument had something to do with me now or if my parents threw my name in to piss each other off. All I remember is that with each day, their arguments intensified, and consumed everybody around them.

Apprehension pulled at Roxy and me like rubber cement. Had our family really traveled all this way just to lose one another?