PIECES OF ME

The morning of my departure basked in the sublime weather that made California so irresistible. It was late May 1993. Palm trees murmured in the breeze and the distant buzz of traffic reassured all that Hollywood was being worshipped right on schedule.

Mom was driving in from Vegas to pick me up. I had only a few more hours before I’d be gone from Los Angeles for good.

Earlier that day Olga, the wicked witch of every direction on the compass, had tried to make conversation. She hinted that if I wanted to talk, she was there to listen. The notion of opening up to my stepmother was like eating a dish I’d never heard of. Was I famished enough to try?

I’d packed my two suitcases with Olga’s help, which consisted mostly of her conducting and talking a mile a minute from the edge of the bed as if we were BFFs. I guessed it was her way of putting me at ease. Too bad she’d picked that particular day, though, when I could manage only short, simple responses without bawling like a seven-year-old whose bike has been stolen.

“All those ripped jeans. So unfashionable.” She scrunched up her face at a pair of bell-bottoms I’d placed in my suitcase. “You’re a grown woman now.”

“I’m moving to Vegas, not Milan.”

“It’s a classy place. Here. I want you to have these.” She shook out a pile of clothes she’d brought in earlier. There were a lot of shiny things with bells and sequins and golden thread. “Look. This one’s gorgeous. I got it on sale in Beverly Hills.” It was a dress covered entirely in metallic print.

I chuckled, probably for the first time in weeks. “I swear you were a freaking crow in your past life.”

“If you must know, I was a Hindu prince with impeccable taste.”

“I thought you were a male dancer, or was that in a different lifetime?”

She shrugged and dangled the dress in front of my face as if it were a chocolate bar, and wiggled her eyebrows. “Come on. You know you love it.”

I shook my head and stuffed a Slash T-shirt inside my suitcase.

My stepmother looked disappointed, but only for a moment before grabbing something else, a deep blue skirt with splashes of gleaming beads. “What about this one? The color will look amazing on you.”

“Maybe,” I said carefully, because Olga was being way too nice and I wasn’t used to it.

Pressing it against my waist, she said, “You can wear it when you go out to some fancy restaurant with your rich casino-owner husband.”

That was a stab in the gut. Immediately the light mood evaporated and I was back to scowling.

She sat back down, hands in lap, mouth pursed. “You can always stay here with us, you know.”

After a period of silence, I joined her on the bed, exhausted from thinking heavy thoughts.

“I saw him in the cards, you know,” she told me. “Right after he started taking lessons from your father.”

“You did a reading on him? You never told me that.”

“Well, I did one on both of you. It’s a professional habit.”

I didn’t want to ask, and started to get up in order to resume packing.

Olga squeezed my hand, urging me to stay. “You did the right thing, lambkin. He has a long journey ahead of him, and he must make it alone. Believe it or not, your destiny is in Las Vegas.”

“Right. That’s why you were trying to marry me off to a nice Roma boy.”

“Never hurts to try,” she said, waving it off like it hadn’t created a near disastrous standoff between us. “But this. Yes, I see it so clearly. You will dream about it first.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Olga wouldn’t tell me, claiming she had to set the table for when Mom got there. She had a truce in mind and acted as if she were preparing her home for the queen herself.

I finished packing and came out of the bedroom. Dad was smoking on the living-room couch, staring out the window with a faraway look. Gray peppered his temples and beard more than ever. While studying his profile, I noticed how much he reminded me of Grandpa Andrei. I wondered if he noticed the resemblance when he looked in the mirror or noisily slurped his tea, or when he lectured me on tradition. Did it bother him to be so much like the man with whom he thought he had nothing in common?

Countless times I recall Dad breaking his father’s staunchly conservative rules. When he tried, during one rehearsal, to incorporate an electric guitar into his act, Grandpa Andrei shouted from his seat in the empty theater, “Next thing I know, you’ll be wearing blue suede shoes, gyrating your ass, with grease dripping off your hair.” My grandfather’s biggest gripe was how quickly the young generation was drifting away from Romani ways, and if this complaint sounds familiar, it’s because it binds every culture like twine binds a broom.

Grandpa Andrei in one of his last performances

My father strayed, and I after his example, only we did it at different speeds.

Life had a strange sense of humor.

When he heard me come in, he turned. “Ready?”

“Dad, I need to ask you something important.”

He patted the couch and I sat down next to him.

“Can I have Grandpa’s photo album?”

My father yanked me to him and wrapped his arms around me as if I were about to go off to war. When he let go, I saw that he was crying.

“You don’t have to give it to me. It’s not that big of a deal. Really.”

His shoulders shook.

“Everything’s okay, Dad,” I said. I had no idea what had brought him to this state, or how to bring back the pigheaded, wisecracking man I was used to.

He shook a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose into it. “It’s that blasted mattress. Digs into my back every night and keeps me awake. Might as well sleep on top of a porcupine.” He pushed off the couch, stuffing the handkerchief back into the pocket. “I’m fine. Just gonna lie down in my studio for a while. By the way, I left something for you in the kitchen. On the table.”

It was the album, tattered and faded to a watery green. I took it back to the bedroom that no longer belonged to me and sat on the floor in the same spot Cruz and I had stood the night I told him I loved him. The album lay open in my lap. My grandparents’ faces peered up from a black-and-white photo taken on the set of a film they were shooting. Dressed in period costumes, they looked regal, immortal. And in a sense they were.

With my heart’s hand I scooped up the memory of every memento of my remarkable grandparents, and I ran my fingertips over their images before closing the album and laying it on top of my purse with much care.

I left the bedroom when I heard voices, one of them my mother’s. All morning, Olga had fluttered—dusting, basting, picking the right dress to wear—in preparation for Mom’s arrival. The richest of clients could not bring her to whip out her best china. Not even Grandma Ksenia had kindled such tribute.

“My baby!” Mom waved me over and tugged me onto her lap. When I was little, her bony thighs provided comfort against every little thing that was wrong with the world. Roxy came scurrying over.

“I’m the baby,” she said.

She threw her arms around my neck in that clumsily rough manner kids acquire at the foot of adolescence. Already she stood nearly tall as I did—a legacy of our grandfather, no doubt—but she still smelled like my little sister, of baby powder and bubble gum.

It was mind-boggling to see Mom drinking coffee at the same table with Dad and Olga. No one was fighting. They talked, laughing like the friends they used to be before the affair and the divorce.

“You best take a week off, Nora, ’cause I’m coming to Vegas,” Olga said, turning over an empress card and poking at it with a confident finger. “You see?”

Dad propped up on both forearms to peer at the card spread. “What? All this time you’ve been shitting away your money in the wrong place?”

“Don’t fret yourself,” Mom said. “This time she’ll have help. It’ll be over before you have time to wheedle some unsuspecting lounge manager into letting you on their stage.”

I never found out what happened to strike peace between the three of them, but I admire my mother for it the most. With dignity, she’d accepted the past. With grace, she’d pieced us together to resemble a family, fragmented as it would remain. For many years the three of them would remain close. At least once a year, Dad and Olga visited us in Vegas. Olga and my mother perfected the art of losing money at slots, and my father now had two women to drag out of casinos in the middle of the night.

Soon it was time to go.

I tossed my stuff in the back of my mother’s tank and turned to hug my father.

“If you don’t like Vegas…” he said, shrugging.

“I’ll visit this Christmas,” I said, abruptly attached to the house I’d never paid much attention to before.

I held my grandfather’s album in my lap and looked back. Dad and Olga stood on the sidewalk, waving. I waved, too, trying to memorize the picture they made together—a giant and a midget huddled close in a way they hadn’t in months.

When we passed Annie’s house, I watched it with a stab of longing, half expecting Cruz to rush out and say goodbye. But I was lying to myself. Cruz had stopped staying over at Annie’s, and after graduation no one knew of his whereabouts. Brandon and Annie avoided me and I them, probably as much for my own benefit as theirs. Of course, I didn’t expect them to abandon their loyalty to Cruz, but my eyes stung from crying all the same.

I took mental Polaroids of the entire neighborhood.

And from a distance I noticed someone standing at the corner of our street and Hollywood Boulevard.

My heart almost literally stopped.

He saw me at the same time.

I leaned my forehead on the window and painted a picture of him in my mind: tall, wide-shouldered, long hair nearly golden from the California sun, hands at his sides, wearing all black, turquoise-green eyes never wavering.

As we passed, he stood on the corner like an inkblot against the chalky sidewalk.

Our car slowed down before turning. He moved closer. For a moment I thought he’d changed his mind about Brazil and decided on Vegas instead. But he stopped at the curb.

We turned into the late-afternoon traffic, and I watched him until a city bus erased him from my view.

*   *   *

So there I was, a semi-American teenager leaving L.A.; bereft, but in possession of a substantially finer vocabulary than when I first set foot in Hollywood. The ragged skyline of my old home melted into smog, and the desert, drenched grapefruit-orange by the setting sun, now breathed around me.

“What’s with the album?” Mom asked, motioning at my lap. Her voice was balanced like a tightrope walker.

“I’m thinking of doing some family research,” I said.

“Really?… Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, if I have kids someday, I could pass it on to them.”

Mom turned on the radio where a cowboy crooner was singing that he still believed in me. Roxy was sleeping in the backseat, mouth open and drooling. We sped by a distant mountain with the word CALICO written on it in giant uneven letters.

“That’s a ghost town,” Mom said. Then she added, “Your father and I have lived through some amazing times. I could tell you stories. You know. If it helps your research.”

“It might,” I said, surprised by her offer. My mother hardly ever volunteered information on her life with Dad, but over the years, tales of her adventures with the Roma would gush out of her like water from a cracked dam.

“What are you thinking?” Mom asked sometime later. She’d left the windows open, and the air pounced at our hair.

“It’s beautiful.” I’d never paid attention to this untouched country outside the metropolis. It was a perfectly chiseled sculpture, yet wild and otherworldly. Like all of us.

For the first fifteen years of my life, I was an empty pitcher waiting for some random spout to fill me. What I didn’t realize was that I’d made the journey to that water many times over, like the people of Kirovakan ascending the hill of Tetoo Dzhoor. I’d tasted my cultures from the day I was born, and they’d keep me alive until I, too, became an image in an album. A memory. Did I have to choose who I was? At that moment the question sounded absurd. All I could hope for, really, was to improve upon the old design I happened to be a part of. If this meant that I’d someday call myself an American, it’d be a worthy achievement.

But if with time, when a maze of wrinkles claims my skin and the neighborhood strays purr at the sound of my footsteps; long after I’ve loved eagerly and hated without shame—if even then I am unchanged, unfound, well, perhaps that is simply because I never lost myself in the first place. And that would be just fine by me.