Published in Karamu Spring issue 2005

Published in Room of One’s Own Volume 27, 2005

Winner of Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for 2006

Published in Quintessential Barrington July/August 2006

Whenever it rained on Sunday Oksana took me to the movies.  There was little else to do in Villa Arroyo when it rained.  Streets turned to mud, snakes poked heads out of tall grasses, and fuzzy creatures crawled out of tree trunks to drink rainwater.  My mother was terrified of the rain.  She always thought the arroyo--the creek just outside of town-- would overflow and seep into our house again, as it had one spring.  So she insisted I stay home where it was safe.  But she did let me go with Oksana, maybe because we traveled all the way to the city, far from the danger of flooding.

​

Oksana lived a few houses away, and her family was so close it felt as though we were related.  Perhaps we were.  Her parents, like mine, were post-war immigrants in Argentina and everyone back in Europe seemed to have common relations if the roots were traced far enough.  Oksana was older, almost as old as my mother, but with her, I felt at ease, as though she were not an adult.

We walked quickly, my hand inside hers, the handle of the umbrella between us and the rain tumbling around us.   We stepped carefully on the grass and over stones along the unpaved roads of Villa Arroyo until we got to the asphalt of Avenida Legiones.  Here, when we had time, Oksana bought me ice cream in the little kiosk, and then we sat in the shelter of the station, waiting for the bus to Buenos Aires.

In the city, along the avenue lined with cinemas on both sides, we’d find a movie she liked.  Usually, it was American but often French or Italian--and it was always a love story.  I don’t remember most of them, but one has stayed with me; maybe because the leading lady looked a bit like Oksana.   The movie was in black and white, with subtitles that disappeared too fast so I followed the frames but didn’t bother much with the reading.  The story was simple--a prince and a peasant girl meet accidentally in the woods and fall in love.  The prince was on horseback, the girl looked up at him and it was love at first sight.  One could tell by the way their lips parted, their eyes opened wide.  Throughout the entire movie, the lovers never came closer than in that first meeting, but in the end, they were together on their wedding day, rapturously kissing, while the music grew louder and they gently faded from view.

I used to think this is what love is.  That last kiss when the screen faded into white was the final act in the lovers’ quest.  What came before was only preparation, what came after, irrelevant. 

​

I was practicing folding napkins the way Oksana had taught me.  First into a rectangle, then a square, then the edges over and around until they stood like little cloth towers.  It was my eighth birthday.  Mother was busy in the kitchen, and she had given me the job of placing napkins in the center of each plate in the dining room.  I heard her singing one of her happy songs and I was happy too because it was one of her good-mood days.   When the last of the napkins stood perfectly erect, I went looking for Oksana.

It wasn’t just the napkins.  Oksana taught me everything.  I think she thought of me as the child she could have had.  She was pretty and calm and always full of stories about the movies, the theater, the opera.  When I was three years old and allowed to stay overnight with her and her parents, she’d take me to her bedroom--she called it a boudoir --and let me watch as she transformed herself.  Her face became brighter, skin smoother, eyes bigger, as she traced the roundness of her cheeks with little dabs of liquid that looked like caffe latte. 

“Here,” she said, “I’ll show you how pretty you’ll look someday.” 

Then she doled out bits of magic, with a tiny drop on my forehead, a flicker of dark shadow on my lids.  My favorite was the loose powder jar.  It was shiny, embossed with dancing girls and when Oksana removed the puff, tiny white flecks flew round the room, scenting the air like fragrant thistle balls bouncing in the breeze.  If you catch thistle balls, she said, remove the grains and grind them into flour, you can make bread.  There is nothing in the entire world as wonderful as thistle flour bread. 

​

“It’s better than manna,” she told me.

Oksana had books.  Old, heavy, books with covers that smelled like boots and burnt leaves and pictures that told stories by themselves.   But it was the mysterious curlicues, dashes, and lines I wondered about.  It was just as when years later I would be at a party where everyone laughed and had a good time but when I joined they’d suddenly grow silent, and I’d have to guess what they were talking about.  The writing mocked me and made me angry because I knew it hid secrets.  I wanted the secrets.  I wanted the words.  My father’s books were heavy and had few pictures and he was too busy to explain.

I remember long before I started school, Oksana began teaching me to read.  She opened one of her books and said--“This is the letter ‘S’.  It makes a sound like a snake, ssss...  Look here, it even twists itself like one.”  She pointed to a large “S” in the book and followed its curve with the tip of her long red nail.  Her hands were different from my mother’s.  The fingers were slim and the nails always perfectly painted and long.  My mother’s nails were short and the fingers stubby and creased, the inside of the pointing finger tinted with the blackness of potato peel and garden soil.   When my mother touched my face, her touch was rough, almost like my father’s stubbly face in the morning.

My mother didn’t like books--she said they were full of lies and it was better to avoid them.  She said history had been twisted, innocent people killed, nations destroyed because of what had been written in books. 

“You’ll have plenty to read when you get to school,” she said.  “In a few years, you’ll be sick of it all.”

Oksana’s hands were slow and soft as she guided my hand over the outline of each letter.  “Here’s an ‘M’ standing like two mountains and in the center a ‘V’--that’s a valley between...”   By the time I was four I was reading.

​

That day, when all the preparations were being made for my eighth birthday party, I finished setting the table and walked across the hall.  I pushed the door open.  “Oksana!  Come, look at this!”  I called out, anxious to show her how precisely I had folded the napkins.

She was sitting in the high-back chair facing away from me and my father was at her side, standing.  His arm was behind her head and he was bending over her.  Their faces were very close.

As soon as I walked in, my father took a step away from the chair, and Oksana stood up, brushed her skirt with one hand and tugged at the hem with the other.  My father’s eyes were wide.  He coughed, the kind of cough he had when he watched a sad movie.  His Adam’s apple traveled up and down.  He put his hand to his neck as if to straighten out a tie, but his shirt was unbuttoned and he wasn’t wearing one.

We stood, the three of us, frozen in that long moment.  My father walked around me and out of the room.  I hardly noticed he had left because I was looking at Oksana and the way she continued to fix her clothes.  A moist strand of hair had tumbled over her forehead and she pushed it from her face.  My throat tightened.   Oksana looked blurred, the way my teacher looked when I was called on to recite in class and my glasses fogged up.  She pulled me toward her and held me in her arms but didn’t say anything.  All I heard was the steady, quick pounding of her heart against my cheek.  I held her tight around the waist, pressed my forehead against her breasts, inhaled the fragrance of her perfume. 

“What’s the matter, honey?” she asked, stroking my hair.  “Why are you upset?”

“I don’t like it when you’re close to my Daddy,”  I said.

“He was just getting something out of my eye.  That’s all.  Your father’s a doctor, he takes care of people.  He was just taking care of my eye.”

She wiped my eyes with her handkerchief.  She always carried white, embroidered handkerchiefs--perfectly folded, smelling of perfume, like her skin.

“You dear sweetheart,” she said, hugging me again.  “Would I ever do anything to hurt you?”

“No,” I murmured.  “I don’t think so.”

I believed her--I wanted to.  But deep inside I had some doubts because I kept my eye on them from then on watching for signs, for moments alone, for anything that would let me know there was something between them.  Even when I was in high school, each time I saw my father near Oksana, I remembered that day.  They never gave me any more reasons to suspect them, though--I can see that now--I secretly wished they would.

​

As I grew up, Mother became more peculiar.  I never knew what to expect from her.  I learned to listen to her songs--they told me what mood she was in.  But later, her songs became less predictable--the jolly tunes mingled with the melancholy ones to form one continuous wailing melody--piercingly sad, like laughter mingling with tears.  She was full of hate for everything in her past.  She hated what the Communists had done to her nation, she hated the war, hated being one of the discarded nation-less wanderers in South America, hated not knowing about her family back in Ukraine.  She refused to learn Spanish and got by on the merest fraction of knowledge, dependent on my father or Oksana’s family or on any other countrymen in town.  Eventually, she lay in bed almost every day and I’d find her among crumpled covers, a cloth over her eyes, blinds drawn, the room stale and hot like a foul tropical paradise.

“Mama, do you want me to bring you some water?” 

She put her hands on her head and I saw that they were covered with writing.  Circles, lines, strange animal shapes covered the backs of her hands and arms and I knew one of the curanderas had been there while I was at school.  Some of these faith healers--counterfeit medicine women, my father called them--braided her hair with grasses and herbs, smeared her forehead with coffee grounds, and lit smelly candles.  Every time she had a headache she called one of these women.  She would not even allow me in the room.

“Go away.” she moaned.  “Leave me alone.”

She pulled up the covers over her head.  I knew what that meant.  She would stay in the room for the rest of the day and into the night and even my father’s gentle words would not help.

“Just leave your mother alone,” he told me.  “She’ll get out of it in her own way.”

In the evening my father and I sat at the supper table eating a simple dinner of potatoes and sausage.  We hardly spoke and when we did, it was in a low voice, to not disturb Mother.

My father didn’t talk much anymore.  When I was little, before I started school, he used to be jolly.  I rode on his shoulders as he walked from house to house in Villa Arroyo.  He carried his black medicine bag in one hand and held me with the other around one of my legs as we went to see neighbors who were sick that day.  I loved the smell of his bag--the comforting mixture of old leather and medicine.  Sometimes he even whistled a tune.

Often Oksana joined us on these walks.  She worked in Buenos Aires and my father would pass by her house and we’d go with her to the bus station.  He slowed his pace and they talked quietly about his childhood in Ukraine, about his younger brother who disappeared during the war, about his parents--my grandparents--whom I had never met, about wanting to be a doctor since he was seven years old.  I learned more about his past during these walks than at any other time.

From the perch of his shoulders, I looked down at Oksana’s head and watched the glints appear and reappear in her hair.  She had golden hair.  Actually it was silver indoors, but outside in the bright sunlight, it looked like her golden powder jar.  It was my dream to have hair like that when I grew up.  I wondered if that could ever happen since my mother’s hair was black and my father’s white, though in the old photographs it was also dark.  My own hair was a strange brown--the color of mud in the middle of summer when no rain had fallen for weeks.  But it had been different when I was a baby.  The proof was in a hatbox in Mother’s closet.  There, wrapped in a piece of silk, lay a tiny strand of hair, soft and pale, shimmery as cotton candy--my hair before it was shaved.            

​

“It’s very important,” Mother explained.  “You must remove all the baby hair so the permanent hair comes in good and strong.  It’s just a pity your hair turned dark.  We can never predict what will happen.  But if you don’t do it, the hair will grow weak and very thin.” 

​

My hair was still thin, and worst of all, it wasn’t blond anymore.

Gradually, as my mother’s moods shifted more often, my father began to change too.  I could no longer go with him on his morning rounds when I started school, although I sometimes joined him in the evening or on Saturday.  He grew somber and quiet and we walked apart, his black bag between us.  We were both thinking about Mother--we never knew what to expect from her--but neither of us ever spoke directly about her.  When we sat together at dinner, my father and I, we knew she was just beyond the door, hiding under the covers in the bedroom, and we kept silent.

Sometimes, without warning, Mother would appear in the doorway.  Smiling, as though everything was fine, she’d come over to the table and kiss my father on the forehead.

“What kind of supper is this?”  she’d say.  “You should have waited for me.  What would this family do without me?”

She’d put on her apron and begin slicing onions, garlic, tomatoes. My father never argued with her.  Long after I had gone to bed I could smell the meal she prepared and hear the rustling of forks and spoons as the two of them sat down to eat.  During those late-night suppers she seemed calm and cheerful and I lay in bed and prayed that she would be that way all the time.

Once, while my father and I were eating, my mother suddenly burst into the kitchen.  She was naked--the only time in my life I had seen my mother totally nude.  Her large breasts hung like deflated balloons and her pubic hair was thick and black, like the hair on her head.

“Take me away!  Take me away!” she screamed and my father jumped from his chair and ran toward her, shielding her.

He grasped her wrists and pulled her to him and she yanked her arms and kicked him with her bare feet.  Her breathing was heavy and she made a low, humming sound.  She broke away from him and dashed across the kitchen, past the table where I had pressed myself into a chair.  My father ran after her and caught her just as she put her hand on the handle of the front door.

“No...No!”  she shrieked  “Let me go!  I know you don’t want me!”

She continued screaming as he gathered her in his arms, covered her as though he were a blanket.  He turned to me and I saw he was frightened too.

“Go to your room.  I’ll handle this,” he said.  I was shaking and got up as quickly as possible and went to my bedroom.  I stayed there the rest of the night crying, even after my mother quieted down and all I heard were her soft sobs and then nothing.

Oksana came to our house the next day and stayed with my mother.  While I was getting ready for school I heard the two of them talking in the bedroom.    I couldn’t make out what they were saying except for the mention of my father’s name a few times.  Soon my mother grew quiet and I only heard Oksana’s mellow voice, like the murmur of the arroyo in autumn, and it soothed me.  When I returned from school my mother and Oksana were sitting, drinking tea, and the sweet smell of fresh churros floated through the kitchen.  My mother was dressed in clean clothes, her hair combed, not a trace of writing on her hands.  She smiled at me when I walked in and planted a noisy kiss on my cheek. 

Our neighbors knew something was wrong.  Sometimes, when I was at a store or in church, women took my chin into their hands and spoke softly to me.  They asked about my father, how he was getting on, and called me a “sweet child.”  It seemed to me that these women were waiting for my mother to disappear so they could grab my father for themselves, and even though I hated the way my mother was, I hated them more.  I clenched my teeth and pretended to smile.

Kids sneaked by our house and peeked in the window trying to catch a glimpse of my mother.  When she saw them she would begin screaming at them in Ukrainian-- “Cholera, psia kref!”  May you be afflicted with cholera, blood of dogs!   Although they didn’t understand the words, they knew what she meant.  The kids wanted her reaction and laughed as they ran away.  Some of the older ones turned to my mother and screamed back: “Polaca demente!”-- “mad Polack.”  Anyone from Eastern Europe was polaco.    Then, when my father came home, my mother would be crying and cursing.   

“I want to leave this place, I hate it!” she said again and again.                   

​

When I was thirteen, a large envelope was delivered and my mother asked me to open it.  It was a document from the American government giving us permission to emigrate to the United States.  When I told my mother what it was, she began to cry and then laugh.

“Oh, this is good!  This is good!” she kept repeating.  “Now we will finally leave this cursed place!”                                                                       

My parents had put in an application to emigrate and had been waiting for the approval for several years.  Everyone wanted to go to North America--it was the place where everybody succeeded.  But when my father came home and my mother ran to him waving the paper and saying “We can leave!  We can leave!” his face did not light up.   Instead he took the paper from her hands, quickly read it and then sat at the table without a word.

“Aren’t you happy?” my mother said.  “You can finally leave this stupid, ignorant town and practice your profession in the U.S.!”

“Yes, of course, of course,”  he ran his fingers through his hair.  “you don’t have to tell me.  I know there is no future here, not for us, not for her.” he continued,

pointing in my direction.  “But still, we’ve been here for so long.  Our neighbors... our friends... Won’t you miss them?”

“The only thing I ever miss is what the war took away from me--my family and my youth,” my mother said.

He went to her and embraced her and she put her face in his chest and began to cry.  I had seen my mother cry so many times without reason that I wasn’t surprised, but then I saw my father crying softly along with her.  I thought of Oksana and I suddenly felt so sad I had to go outside. 

​

Oksana came to see us off at the airport.  She was wearing a trench coat and a gray scarf over her hair.  The day had started with a drizzle, but then the rain began to beat down on the slanted windows of the hangar and we had to wait a long time until it stopped and the runway was ready for take-off.   My two best friends were there too and I spent my time talking excitedly to them.  We kept making promises to write to each other forever and to visit as soon as we had enough money.  I didn’t pay much attention to anyone else until the final good-byes. 

When it was time to leave, Oksana embraced me so hard I couldn’t breathe and then she let me go and I picked up my bag and walked after my mother.  I looked back one last time and I saw Oksana standing with her left arm extended before her and her right hand in a tight fist above her heart.  My father had stopped a few feet from her and faced her in the same position.  The airport was full of people--men and women walked past them hurrying forward--but at that moment I had a keen sense of the two of them being completely isolated, somehow united in spite of the commotion around them.  They stood like that--mirror images of each other--for a brief instant and then my father turned and followed my mother and me.