VIVA LAS VEGAS

But in Rosa’s case, faith wasn’t enough. As a result, Rosa and Mom spent days barricaded in Rosa’s apartment, drinking tequila.

I began to worry about the kids. Due to our mothers’ preoccupation and my failure as a cook, they’d eaten cereal and toast for two days straight.

On the third day, I determinedly rummaged around the cupboards and in the fridge. Roxy and Maria took turns sashaying down an imaginary catwalk extending from the living room into the kitchen, heads adorned with hair made from Mom’s panty hose.

“I hate olives,” Roxy said when I picked up a can.

“Too bad for you,” I said.

I thumped the can down on the counter next to a bag of elbow pasta, a green pepper, and a braided loop of Armenian string cheese made of goat’s milk. With the exception of smoked cold cuts, Mom seldom bought processed food. We had neither frozen dinners nor a microwave to heat them in, but we didn’t need to. Mom could whip up a meal out of anything.

“I wanna help.” My sister leaned her skinny elbows on the counter next to me.

“And me,” Maria said. “You can make mac and cheese, no?”

The girls seemed excited about the prospect of cooking without an adult. Not me, but it was better that they thought I knew what I was doing, right?

“Grab a skillet.”

Roxy dove into the bottom cabinet and dug out the largest one she could find. Meanwhile, Maria got the task of washing the pepper. We were so cooking.

The three of us sat on the floor in front of the twelve-inch TV borrowed from one of the neighbors who never asked for it back. I Love Lucy was on, the episode where Lucy and Ethel get a job in the chocolate factory. Steam rose in willowy threads from my invention, piled generously on our plates. We gulped down the mush of overcooked pasta dotted with olives and green-pepper slices and topped with melting string cheese. The girls giggled at Lucy, her mouth stuffed with chocolates.

“What’s this?” Maria asked a few minutes into our dinner, pulling something small and black out of her mouth. I studied the fragment that didn’t fit the description of any ingredients I had used.

Roxy turned her spoon around her plate. “Look. I have some, too.”

I found several similar pieces in my food, my heart falling at the prospect of having just poisoned two little girls. “Don’t eat that anymore.”

Running back into the kitchen, I turned on all the lights, Roxy and Maria chattering at my back like chickens in a coop.

“Maybe they’re worms,” Roxy volunteered as I removed the lid off the skillet, hovering over its contents.

“Too hard,” Maria said. “One time, Mom found mouse poop under the sink. It could be mouse poop.”

“Shut up, you two.”

I grabbed the garbage can, poking around in it with the stick Mom used to prop up the kitchen window when smoking. Nothing. Back to the skillet. I snatched the cooking spoon I’d used and dug it deep in the pasta. I picked out more bits and laid them on the counter. As I lifted the spoon for another go, my eyes jumped to its bowl.

“Mat’ tvoyu cherez sem’vorot s prisvistom (Fuck your mother through seven gates while whistling)!” I said. The plastic edges had shrunk back in thick charred grooves, slicked with melted cheese.

“What? Let me see!” The girls attached themselves to my sides.

“I melted the damn spoon!”

*   *   *

I still sympathize with people who are taken in by the Mama Lolas of the world. Were it that easy, psychics would be in more demand than doctors and lawyers.

To me, mysticism isn’t showy ceremony. Agrefina, the old seer, saw the fortunes of others through flashes of vision, not in full pictures, and that imperfection made her real. These natural psychics are the ones I always trusted; the ones who showed vulnerability without fear and admitted freely that the art of divination was unpredictable, as changing as the universe. In my experience only charlatans had all the answers.

After days of moaning and bitching about women whose fucking East L.A. houses should burn to the fucking ground, Rosa knew what to do to make everything okay for a while.

She’d been played, and only one thing would cure it: a trip to Vegas.

In Russia my parents would have had no problem leaving us alone for a couple of days, but L.A. was still an unpredictable beast. We all knew that three straight days with Olga might end in casualties. But Mom had bigger things on her mind, though she wouldn’t share them with me. I complained for a few hours before she shipped us off, disappearing into the sunset in Rosa’s purple Buick.

That evening Olga made us eat with her and Dad’s friends at the dining-room table. Everything in my father’s house happened around that table. All the important decisions and arguments, and the socializing. Dad had plenty to say about Mom leaving in such a hurry, though nothing of the kind I’d want to repeat.

“Kakova huya ona poekhala tuda (Why the fuck did she go there)?”

“She cares nothing for the kids. That much is clear,” Olga added.

Olga’s beef Stroganoff tasted like cat food, but she insisted we girls needed nourishment. In front of several women she fretted over our skinny elbows and drawn cheeks.

“You poor girls,” she said in Russian, ladling more slop into Roxy’s bowl. “Your mother should pick up a skillet once in a while.”

“Mom went to Vegas to start an American life, not sit here pretending we’re still in Russia,” I said. “And so you know, she’s a great cook.” Just not lately.

Dad noticed Olga’s scowl and turned to me. “It’s the recipes, not her skill, that made the meals so good.”

I was about to say something more in Mom’s defense when Roxy kicked me under the table. “Stop making trouble or she’ll send us home,” she said in English, trying to whisper but not really succeeding. “I’m tired of eating Cheerios.”

“See?” Olga jumped in. “Nora doesn’t have time for you girls with all that drinking to keep her busy. You’d be much better off with us in India.”

I stood, dry of the anger I had felt at my mother. “We’re fine, so why don’t you shove off!”

My father’s fist came down on the table. The thud reverberated inside my stomach.

“Leave this table—now.”

I hoped Las Vegas would turn out to be the miraculous city so many Soviets claimed it to be. A place where impossible things happened to immigrants. I envisioned Mom coming back to L.A. in a shiny Rolls-Royce crammed with money. We’d buy a mansion, uptown from Olga. If she and Dad came to visit (as they would, to swim in our Olympic-size pool), Ken, our buff security guard, would refuse to let her past our Gucci wrought-iron gates.