CROSSFIRE

We had been in America for two months when a recurring dream of drowning in a churning black ocean began to chase sweat down my back at least once a week. I flailed in the howling charred waves, skyscraper-size with ashen tips foaming, but I always woke before the ocean claimed me.

A very bad sign.

One morning Roxy and I woke up and Dad was gone.

“Where did Papa go?” Roxy asked, rubbing her eyes and climbing on Mom’s lap.

“Good morning, sladkaya (sweet),” Mom said.

I said nothing. A few minutes earlier, I found a pile of photographs in the garbage can under the sink. I picked up one of Mom, Dad, and me taken in a studio when I was three. We were dressed up, our hair all the same length, just above the shoulders, and I was holding a stuffed rabbit in my hands. I think I was smiling in that picture, but I couldn’t tell. Dad had cut out my head along with Mom’s.

Not long after, Aunt Varvara demanded we leave her house.

Aunt Varvara was the only woman I’d ever known whose brows furrowed even when she was playing patty-cake, but still, until the day she ordered my uncle to fetch an apartment guide from the gas station a few blocks away, I loved her. The rest of the world might not have seen past her brusque exterior, but as a kid I listened to her recite children’s rhymes from memory, convinced that she was a fairy with the power to bring them to life.

When Uncle came back, he tossed the magazine on the table and walked out of the house again, mumbling, “I don’t want to get involved in women’s business.”

Even years after the incident, the two women kept the reasons behind the falling-out to themselves, but it must’ve been something worse than cancer or world hunger, because within a few days Mom, Roxy, and I were gone.

My sister and I had expected our movie-star mansion at last. But when I saw the building and the neighborhood that was to be our new home, I almost dropped my canvas bag of clothes. Lexington Avenue was more concrete than grass. More sickly palm trees and dilapidated housing than the expected year-round California perfection. It looked as if a hurricane had barged through and no one had bothered to pick up. Our first American apartment was located on the second floor of a very noisy complex, a two-story dove-gray structure with a gated pool shaped like a cashew in the middle of a cement courtyard. Music spilled out of the windows, unfamiliar melodies bouncing off one another in decidedly non-American flight. Bars covered the windows, and graffiti crawled in bold strokes along the walls. I told my mother I had never imagined living somewhere identical to Butyrskaya Tyurma (Butyrka Prison) back in Moscow. “At least it has a roof,” my mother said as she squeezed my shoulder and bravely passed through the front gates.

Uncle Arsen had arranged for the deposit and first month’s rent. He hardly said a word as he helped carry the suitcases up the stairs. Mom unlocked the door and swung it open so that he could walk inside without bumping into her, which he did with tight lips and long strides. He dropped our things in the corner and went back to his car for more.

“Is Uncle gonna help hang my posters?” Roxy asked. Once inside she had immediately unzipped her bag and pulled out the rolls of George Michael posters she had brought from Moscow.

“No,” Mom said.

“But why? He’s a boy and you said only grown boys like Papa are allowed to touch nails and hammers and Papa’s not here and when Uncle leaves who’ll hang them then?”

Mom stood over the threshold peering into the courtyard.

“He’s not a grown boy yet,” she said.

Uncle left with a soft “Bye” and a softer “Sorry.”

I almost immediately caught my little sister trying to grab a cockroach in the palms of her hands. “Ew, Roxy, let it go!” I shouted. The creature dashed in crazy zigzags toward the fridge, disappearing under it.

After the initial shock and much frenzied clothes-shaking and closet-inspecting, we finally felt safe enough to hang up our things and put away the linens. We tried to make it a home over the next several days, all the while wondering if we had actually moved to Los Angeles or had somehow landed in a third-world country.

Despite my anger at the way we’d been treated, my yearning for friends brought me back to my cousins’ house. Basically I chose to ignore the tendency that life has to cuff you in the face. I would walk the four blocks between our places almost every weekend, expecting Aida or Nelly to be as I remembered them, but they never answered the door even if I could see them tiptoeing behind the curtains.

Once Aunt Varvara actually opened the door and thrust a plastic bag at me. “Here,” she said. “I don’t want anything of your alcgolichka (alcoholic) mother’s in my house.”

I obediently brought the bag home. When Mom opened it, I saw the silver coffee set she had given Aunt as a gift upon our arrival. She had to pay the customs officer a nice sum for letting it pass the gate. Mom stuffed the set back in the bag, hands shaking. “Take it back and tell her it was a gift.”

I did, three more times: a reluctant messenger caught between two emotionally charged alphas.

“I said I don’t want it.” Aunt Varvara’s slitted eyes narrowed at me. She took up most of the love seat. Cousin Aida came into the room and somehow managed to squeeze in next to her mother. Aida used to read during her meals. Growing up, I thought it was a sign of great wisdom. That day, I felt sure that she’d talk sense into both our mothers. Then she put on her best foo dog grimace, and I blanched.

Aunt ordered for me to sit down and folded her meaty arms across her meatier chest.

“We have allowed you into our home, found you a place to live, done everything to make you comfortable. Tell me, why is your mother so ungrateful? Does she think just because she’s family it’s okay to bring her problems here?”

Her words froze my insides. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t act stupid, Oksana. I shouldn’t be surprised, now, should I? That’s what your mother gets for marrying a Gypsy. Did you know we had to keep him secret from our friends? For years! She didn’t really believe they would have a normal life together, did she? Arsen was right not to want you people here in America, with us. He warned me you’d be trouble.”

A cold weight pressed down at my heart. Had my father been right about Uncle Arsen intentionally leaving out the most important document in the visa application? Aunt Varvara went on. “They thought because they lived in Moscow, and because they were artists”—this last she spit out like bad tobacco—“that made them better than us. But because your mother knew all these important people didn’t make her better than us. We actually had to work for a living!”

“But you never worked,” I almost pointed out, then decided this was unwise.

“I told Arsen not to send that visa. I knew you’d be a burden, an embarrassment! We can barely make it here as it is without more people to take care of.”

Aida, my cousin, my friend from childhood, and the one person I believed to be unshakably good, said, “Grandmother took such good care of you half-breeds when your spoiled parents went off on their tours. She made sure you got the best caviar and the biggest birthday parties. But we are her grandkids, too.” Her eyes shot resentment. “Didn’t we deserve caviar, Oksana?”

Grandma Rose, a matriarch of my mother’s family, had risen above poverty after being orphaned at the age of three and became a successful accountant. She had made one great mistake in her life: she had allowed her kids to think she owed them something. Every time one of them found themselves in trouble, Grandma came to their rescue. With time, they grew to expect it.

If it were up to Grandpa Andrei, my dad’s father and the manager of the troupe, kids would never be permitted on the long tours that took the performers all over the fifteen republics; but most of the performers had no one to leave the kids with, and Grandpa grudgingly gave in only when he had to. For this reason, Mom sometimes had me stay with Grandma Rose in the small Armenian town of Kirovakan.

I remember only one birthday party from my entire childhood. I was turning five and Grandma had made me a dress with an orange-pink satin bodice and a tulle tutu so huge I couldn’t see my feet over its starched skirt. It made me look like a blooming marigold. I remember the barbecue fires infusing the air with the aroma of grilled beef and lamb, tables creaking under the weight of food: trays of horovatz (barbecue), pickled vegetables, dolma with garlic sauce, crusty matnakash (bread), crystal bowls full of walnuts and raisins, and sweet rolls called gatah. A crowd of guests, including my aunts and uncles and cousins, lifted their wineglasses to my health and happiness, and Armenian music rose and fell in a rhythmical lilt of duduk (Armenian oboe) and drums. And I clearly remember twirling around the dance floor until my head spun. I love my grandmother for that memory.

Years later, when I retold the events of that horrible day at Aunt Varvara’s to her, Grandma Rose laughed, her plump middle shaking, and said, “For goodness’ sake! I fed you so much caviar because your optometrist had said it would help with your vision problems.” I was born with a condition that rendered my left eye nearly blind. The doctor had thought that caviar and carrots could remedy that, and although I loved eating both, that eye, to this day, is there only for decorative purposes.

Now, when I replay that scene at Uncle’s, I come up with all the right things to say, but back then, I just stuttered.

Only when I stepped into the blinding sunlight did I allow myself to cry. By the time I took the steps up to our apartment, I had a migraine and my nose ran like an open faucet.

Mom met me at the door, her eyes searching for the bag of silver. “Did she keep it this time?”

“I threw it away in an alley.”

“Gospodi (my God), Oksana! That set was nearly two hundred years old. What…” She saw my face. “You look sick. What’s the matter?”

Mom held me while I tried to tell her what happened.

Although Uncle and Aunt never openly admitted that they didn’t want us in America, they did try, indirectly at least, to stop us from coming. Was the Gypsy side of us so unbearable that they would find any reason to dismiss us with such ease? At fifteen, I assumed that was it, even while it confused me. For the longest time I tried to solve the riddle of that day’s events, but I’m no Indiana Jones. One day I gave up.

It was the last time I knocked on my aunt and uncle’s door.