THE CURBS OF BEVERLY HILLS

I once heard a rumor about immigrants who, unable to read English, had mistaken cat food for canned tuna. That unwelcome image was wedged in my mind as Mom and I stepped through the sliding doors of the local supermarket on our first official shopping trip alone. When we moved out of Uncle’s, the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program brought us groceries, but their services ended after a month or so.

“First things first,” Mom said as we pushed our cart down the bright aisles. “We need butter.” Her black pumps echoed against the canyon of freezers stuffed with food. She wore a gray dress with intricately carved silver buttons down the front. With her freshly curled and styled hair, she looked like a Mediterranean Jane Seymour. When she’d spent an hour dressing up, I had complained, worried we’d draw too much attention. I was right. People stared, not only because of her opera-ready makeup, but also because she shouted in Russian to me as if we were miles apart. The heels and the crimson nails weren’t too bad. We came from a culture where outside excursions meant people would be checking you out, forming opinions behind your back. You absolutely had to look your best. God forbid you went to the downstairs bakery in your sweats and slippers; eventually the neighborhood would learn of your poverty. Party invitations would be withdrawn and rumors of mental illness would circulate.

It was the volume of my mother’s voice that drove me to pretend I didn’t know her that day. For the first time, I was ashamed of my language.

“Do you see butter, Oksana?” Mom bellowed.

Anybody familiar with Eastern European cooking practices will understand the value of good butter. If you don’t use a stick of the stuff in your recipe, you’re either a miser or a lousy cook.

We had found the dairy section, and with it, our first dilemma: too many varieties. Butter, according to Merriam-Webster, is a solid edible emulsion obtained from cream by churning. How many different ways of churning are there? How many kinds of cream?

I missed the days when I’d walk up to our local market’s dairy counter, ask the brightly lipsticked Elena Leonidovna for a kilo of butter, and be on my way.

“Oksana. What does this mean?”

I squinted at a beige tub Mom pointed to, studying it with the curiosity of an archaeologist. “‘Fat-free.’ I don’t think that’s good.”

“Why not? What does this ‘fat-free’ mean?”

I envisioned a golden cloud of creamy mass floating in the sparkling sky, blobs of fat swirling around it in fancy-free abandon. “It means it has way too much fat. Fat has complete freedom. It has taken over this butter.”

“Oh … then we don’t want it.”

In the produce aisle I almost forgot about my mother’s vocalizations. I had never seen so much food in one place, not to mention so many off-season fruits and vegetables. The neat rows of unreasonably large strawberries and glossy apples made me think they must’ve come from a factory instead of a farm.

We couldn’t splurge with the thirty dollars we had allotted for food that week, so we bought potatoes, bread, bologna, cheese, milk, and pasta. I did get the strawberries, but Mom drew the line at the apples, which she said smelled like candle wax. It took a good two hours, but in the end, we left with a sense of great accomplishment. And that night Roxy and I sifted sugar over our tasteless strawberry giants while I told tales of the market: not just a market but a supermarket.

*   *   *

The next task made me a bit more nervous: paying the rent. The landlady, Rosa Torres, lived downstairs in a unit tucked into the corner of the courtyard. Mom had officially elected me as her interpreter, though I could say little more than “My name is Oksana, I am fifteen years old.”

At age twelve, with help from my tattered Russian-English dictionary, I had started writing songs with English lyrics. I performed this one at a school concert.

Today, me not to think of in the past.

Stars to burn how fires.

Them show to me way

To fairy-tale valley full happiness.

Only when I came to America did I laugh at those lyrics. Hurriedly I’d acquired a used Russian-English dictionary from one of the workers at the Russian Immigrant Outreach Program to replace the one my dad had taken when he left. Every day I opened to a random page and scanned the words, saying them out loud, trying them on for size. The ones I found especially beautiful I wrote down in my journal. “Transparent” was the first, then “shenanigans.” I’d stand in front of a mirror and have conversations with myself in a language that still felt like a pair of new shoes. Or I’d repeat things I heard on TV, memorizing phrases like “buy one, get one half off.” In front of that mirror I interviewed Madonna. In public I stuttered while buying milk.

“You know plenty of English, Oksana,” Mom said as I knocked on the landlady’s door, hoping for no answer. “At your age I spoke Russian with barely an accent.” Russian was the official language of the USSR, but you could tell which of the fifteen republics a person came from by their accent when they spoke it.

I haphazardly pieced together all the useful words I could think of, and forgot them the instant the door opened.

“Jes?” Rosa smiled at me above the door chain. Her bleached hair shrieked next to her dark, pockmarked skin.

“Hello. We pay rent. Please. Thank you.”

“Come. I’ll give ju a receipt.” Her apartment, rich with dark furniture against very pink walls, smelled strongly of beans, onions, and spices I didn’t recognize.

We carefully counted out the money on top of Rosa’s polished dining-room table: $450. But we didn’t leave right away. One hour passed, another, and the three of us … talked. A true conversation. Rosa, an immigrant herself, had come from Mexico with her husband and daughter, Maria, six years before. Like Mom, she was now divorced. As it turned out, Maria and Roxy had met only days after we moved in and had without hesitation become best friends. And it wasn’t long before our two broken families became very close.

Once Rosa saw the inside of our apartment she began to visit regularly. Almost every day, she walked up the stairs carrying a shiny toaster, or a chair, or some curtains for the bedroom windows.

Mom kept refusing the gifts, uncomfortable with the idea of taking handouts—especially since back in Russia, she’d been the one handing them out.

“Mija. This stuff is free and ju need it.”

“Free?” I asked.

“Rich people gets rid of things. Good things. They leave them on street in front of their houses.”

“To throw away?”

“Jes. But dose are good things: furniture, clothes. Expensive. I go to Beverly Hills and pick up for my garage sales.”

That weekend Rosa talked Mom into going to Beverly Hills with her. Roxy, Maria, and I piled into the back of Rosa’s purple 1978 Buick Regal, with Mom and Rosa in the front. We drove past unremarkable houses, but as the neighborhoods changed, those houses blossomed.

“Maybe my George lives here,” Roxy said, staring out the window in fascination.

“Or not,” I said.

“You’re such a grump, Oksana. We should ask somebody.”

We stopped at our first curb, where cardboard boxes overflowed with clothes and vibrant fake flowers. Rosa kept the car running. She tossed the boxes in the trunk and jumped back in, driving away quickly.

“It is okay to take them?” I asked. The process felt too much like stealing.

“Is fine. They jes don’t like to see us do it.” While Rosa stuffed the car with merchandise, I admired the grandeur of the impeccable lawns and the plentitude of Mercedes-Benzes. This, I thought, was the America I’d expected. Unfortunately, I was scavenging from its garbage.

We went to Beverly Hills regularly, raking in carloads of stuff Rosa later sold. Each time her Buick passed the Beverly Hills sign, we entered a universe most people glimpsed only on TV. On both sides of the spotless streets, beautiful palms swayed their model-thin necks. The houses lay scattered about like multicolored beads. Everything here glimmered with that special, extra-golden sunshine. And for the few hours a week we spent ragpicking, we, too, got to bathe in its rays.