ON THE ROOF

On most days walking home from school I could hear Dad and Olga shouting, and if they caught me at the front door, they immediately pulled me into their fights. Soon I started to use my bedroom window instead of the door.

Back in Moscow when my parents fought, I became the reluctant spy. Roxy was too young, but both my parents knew that I was the right age to remember events in detail.

“Did someone clean the living-room rug while I was gone?” Mom was saying one day as we entered a public banya located inside a five-story neoclassical building.

“I don’t think so.”

This particular banya, with its mermaid-themed mosaics and gigantic windows, was my favorite. When I stood in the main bathing area the size of an Olympic swimming complex, I felt like a fish at the bottom of the ocean with sunlight streaming down over me through the water.

“Oh. It looked like it was moved.”

“Dad probably used it under Vova’s drums during rehearsal.” A mistake, since Mom had forbidden my father to set up drums on the Persian rugs. We pushed our way through the busy lobby lined with kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers, shoeshine booths, and hair salons where women with rosy cheeks were getting perms.

We found our lockers and undressed, hanging the clothes on the hooks and locking the valuables behind dented doors. The banya split into two wings, men’s and women’s; inside those areas modesty was as distant a Russian concept as pay-per-view. Naked, we found our bench—one of many dotting the tiled floor of the main bathhouse—and on it our buckets, along with eucalyptus branches tied in a bunch. As we bathed, Mom fumed over the fact that Dad’s friends drank the three bottles of Armenian cognac she’d been saving to use as “gifts” for our case worker at the American embassy. I hadn’t wanted to tell her those details, but between the steam flushing my cheeks pink and the soothing murmur of women’s voices bouncing against the high ceilings, I was in a great mood, tongue unguarded.

“Just proves your father’s head is stuffed with cotton,” she said, upending a bucket of warm water she’d drawn from the raised pool nearby over the suds in my hair.

She picked up the eucalyptus branches and started to gently smack me with them, a traditional massage therapy. Combined with the steam, the minty smell of the plant was sharp inside my nostrils.

“What’s the big deal, Mom?”

“You always take his side.”

I had been so used to this kind of scenario that no way was I getting in the middle of Dad and Olga’s battle royal.

Walking up the sidewalk to our house, I heard shouting. Behind the living-room curtains, a silhouette picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor. I heard Olga congratulate Dad on breaking yet another Thomasville, her tone climbing into a falsetto. Their voices lashed across the front yard, up and down the empty street.

As I passed Sherri’s Mercedes in the driveway, I slowed down. Earlier that day, I’d left her and Dad alone; Annie had invited me over to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The front door burst open and Sherri raced outside, a mixture of tears and mascara transforming her face into a Halloween mask. She was missing a shoe, and the straps of her dress hung off her shoulders like noodles. There were scratches on her arms and legs.

Olga stumbled into the doorway. “Nu pizdets tebe, suka (You’re fucked, bitch)!”

My stepmother sprinted after Sherri. I’d never suspected such agility.

As Sherri limped to her car, Olga tossed a clump of frizzy orange hair on the lawn before jumping on Sherri from behind, making her stagger backward. “This is what you get for sleeping with my husband, manda (twat). Me!”

She pulled another fistful of the woman’s hair. Sherri screamed, her hands flying to her head. “You crazy bitch!”

“I’ll have you paralyzed. You’ll be shitting in diapers when I’m done with you.” Olga’s threats slurred and stumbled.

“I’m a man,” my father shouted over and over again. He was outside now, a bottle dangling from his fingertips. “Let her go, Olga! I order you.”

As the struggle progressed, Dad circled around them, shouting things like “Girls, that’s enough!” and “I demand you stop!” and “I’m a man, dammit. I can do as I please!”

But they ignored him, falling and rolling on the ground like kids in a wrestling match, flinging obscenities at each other.

The three of them were so drunk that I suspected somebody would end up in a hospital before the night was over. Acting on impulse, I picked up the garden hose and turned it on, covering the nozzle with my thumb and letting it rip. The women screamed and sputtered, and let go of each other to shield their faces. I didn’t stop until the water had soaked them through.

Dad wiped at his shirt and sway-walked in my direction. “Hey, that’s Oksana.” He gave me a sloppy hug. “My daughter. Hello, daughter.”

“Dad, someone’s going to call the police if you don’t get her out of here.”

“I’ll give them one of my CDs,” he said.

“Great. Why don’t we go inside and I’ll make coffee. Okay?”

“Premium idea, daughter, premium idea.” He ambled toward the house.

Sherri finally managed to make it to her car and left, the tires screeching with a startled yelp. Olga refused my help as she scrambled to her feet, muttering curses in liquor-tongue all the way to the bathroom.

I took a deep breath as I went inside, locking the front door behind me. The quiet was a good sign. No sirens, no cops. I made Armenian coffee and poured it into two espresso cups. That stuff is strong enough to make the dead dance, Grandpa Andrei used to say. Dad drank his while gazing at the cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. Olga refused to come out of the bathroom. There was no point asking what had happened, not that I actually wanted to know; but judging by the worried expression on Dad’s face, it was obvious that Olga had finally gotten proof of his unfaithfulness.

When Olga came into the kitchen, my father grinned at her.

“Don’t even start.” Olga shook a finger at him.

“But it was nothing, my sparrow. I did … she attacked me, you see. I didn’t want to but—”

“You fell into her pussy, I know,” she said. “Men are dogs, only dogs don’t lie about being dogs. They don’t screw the clients, expecting their wives to say nothing.” Olga rummaged through every cabinet, huffing at all of Dad’s awkward apologies, until she found a full bottle of vodka under the sink.

I reached for the bottle and tried to pry it from her hands. “Come on, Olga. It’s late. Go to bed, okay?”

Olga spit on the floor. She then went outside with the bottle tucked under one arm, leaned the garden ladder against the back of the house, and climbed to the roof. “I’m not sleeping with that man tonight,” she shouted from above. “Throw me a blanket, will you?”

I did.

A few minutes later Dad came outside and stood in the backyard, where the grass grew in bunches terrified of all the barren spots. I think he had sobered up a little after the coffee. He looked lost—an unfamiliar sight to me.

“Stop this nonsense, wife. It’ll get cold up there,” he said.

“No colder than down there,” she said. “I’m not sleeping with you. Ever.”

Then she started to sing.

I will flee o’er the mountains

Up the path my moon has painted …

The bottle quickly emptied, giving Olga’s lungs more clout. She was a terrible singer. Multiply that by the 40 percent alcohol rushing through her system, and the result would shame a yowling cat. No matter how we tried to get Olga down, she remained unmoved. The threats, the pleas, even the bribes were cut down by ten verses and ten choruses.

Every time Dad spoke, Olga raised her voice. By three in the morning, vacillating between rage and the very real fear that I might see Olga fall, my body demanded a bed, but I settled for a lawn chair. I fell asleep to the sounds of Olga singing and cursing at the sky.

The doorbell rang at seven-thirty. It was our landlord. The neighbors had complained about the inebriated five-foot-three Gypsy woman hollering from the roof all night. Since he also owned the two houses on either side of ours, they were kind enough to call him instead of the police. The house on the right had a neat row of cannabis plants blooming on its patio, and the one on the left contained a large family of illegal immigrants.

“Mr. Roy,” Olga said from the doorway. The landlord’s name was Roy Shuck, but she always called him Mr. Roy. She had finally descended half an hour earlier. “Mr. Roy. I go on roof for count stars. Is my job. Come, I do chart for you. Only one hundred dollars. You take off rent, yes?”

Roy was a tall, sinewy man who lived in his bike shorts. I’d never seen men wear such tight outfits, except for the dancers in the Bolshoi Ballet productions, and even then they used codpieces for modesty. The first time I met Roy, I nearly lost my innocence; he showed up to collect rent in the most perversely crowded pair of animal-print Lycra shorts I hope never to see again. This time he had on a canary-yellow number.

Roy patiently explained about roofs and why tenants shouldn’t go on them. “You’re old enough to know that,” he said jokingly.

Olga took that to heart. “I no old. I wery famous psychic. Clients need hep, so I hep. On roof, inside, everywhere.”

Unfazed by Olga’s indignation, our landlord insisted that from now on all stargazing and client support be done from inside the house. They finally agreed, but according to Olga, only because she’d needed to pee since four in the morning and no longer wished to talk to the idiot in yellow underwear.