FOUR
THEY MADE IT OUT to Lake George still on speaking terms, a not-inconsiderable feat for which the reward was being presented with a vast array of separate directions to go off into, the newfound spaciousness startling less in comparison to the car, dubbed Green Cow for a reason, than to their apartment and to the whole city they’d been so inexplicably hesitant to leave behind. Esther headed straight for the kitchen, attacking drawers and cupboards, sniffing wherever something may have been left behind claimable as theirs. There’s olive oil! she yelled. And coffee grounds! Two squares of paper towel! Not bad at all. They’d brought their own provisions, of course, and she began sorting through plastic bags, operating on a damaged eggplant, installing the meat grinder, but suddenly stopped, went to the window, ran her finger along the sill. She stared at her furry fingertip. Took a breath. The dank air was satisfying. One gulp and the entire summer lodged in your guts. She took in more and looked at the untended garden, almost crying out, We forgot the television!
Gaze refocused, there was no garden to speak of. An open field of matted grass, weeds like gray hairs, a patch of turned-up soil, two stolid motels undulating across an overheated road. She turned and was slapped by an unfamiliar kitchen.
Old habits had conjured up their dacha.
Oh, their dacha. But there was no garden, and she was in a cabin with fake wood paneling, Formica countertops, a neutral blur of smothered smells, deflated polyester comforters whose floral pattern mirrored the sensibly sized nature paintings. Esther’s hands itched to plant tomatoes and hang up the hammock; she half expected to see Robert crawling on all fours with his tool kit and overhear Levik’s under-the-breath cursing as he battled the metal shutters, then his full-fledged fit as he changed the propane tank so she could begin to cook. Two trips were necessary to haul everything from their apartment in the city to their dacha on Tenth Fountain, of utmost importance, for everyone’s sake, the television.
Pretending to be consumed by tasks, they were really just observing their arms in motion. Murky sensations nagged. After the initial ecstasy of freedom, time stalled. The vacation seemed to hover over its beginning, unable to attain liftoff. Doubts arose. They became aware of what could go wrong and how far they were from home and pleaded to be quietly (without fuss) returned to their bedrooms, where time resided effortlessly, like a mouse whose peep was heard only occasionally in the depth of night. Pasha’s CD player had a tiny knob for adjusting volume and muting murky sensations; he used it freely.
Don’t you think it’s time to wake Frida? said Esther, standing in the doorway under a stuffed moose head wearing a far pleasanter expression.
Marina, engulfed in an easy chair, looked up from the “Visiting Lake George” brochure. But she was carsick the whole way up, she said.
Just don’t complain to me when she keeps you up all night.
A quarrel ensued, alleviating the existential disquiet. Esther won. They approached the king-size bed on the far end of which Frida was balanced like a glass half over a table’s edge. They stood above her, engulfed in a warm cloud of sleep. Go on, said Esther’s elbow. On being awoken, Frida gasped for air, convulsively catching her breath. Her gaze scaled the walls. No lilac wallpaper soup-streaked and lumpy from air bubbles, no drab macramé curtains, no glistening Russian tram slipping into the painting of a glistening Russian street. Frida’s long in-breath was interpreted, by both mother and grandmother, as a cue to exhale, but then she was seized by violent sobs. Marina barged into the hall. Esther smothered Frida’s tears with a breast and began to sing her favorite song — no, not the one about the orphan boy on the street after the war selling papirosi and not the one about the obese beauty with an elephant step, the other one about the swaying rowan tree and the tall oak that stand on opposite sides of the road never to meet.
• • •
THE FOLLOWING MORNING marked a momentous occasion: the Nasmertovs’ first encounter with freshwater. All their lives steeped in salt. It was nothing short of a rite of passage. First, however, they learned the meaning of the phrase in the vicinity and got to the bottom of the reasonable rate for the cabin: When Marina asked the elderly man at the reception desk how to walk to the lake, she got deadpan instructions for a four-hour trek along the highway.
Out of the car, the cash unloading commenced — they paid for parking, for day passes, for plastic chaise longues on the carpet of pebbly beach. At last they were paddling their arms and legs inside the square allotted for bathers. There would’ve been no harm were the square a bit bigger, the swimmers fewer. How much progeny did a single family require? They’d always considered one the ideal and two the limit. But here five, six, even seven children all addressed the same elderly lady as Mommy. At first the Nasmertovs thought they were observing an aberration, but after further observation they were able to recognize that the aberration was them. All those children! An ocean was a dominant force. Whoever partook of it was subservient, abiding an implicit understanding that it was letting you in and could just as easily rescind the invitation. But a lake was the bathtub of these snot-faced kids. After flopping around for two minutes, Marina remarked how difficult it was to stay afloat, and returned to her chaise.
Esther distributed bulki, stale white buns with an inedible crust that was softened by the damp heat from palms. Growing garrulous, she let slip that what she’d actually wanted to do for her birthday was see the Russian Marionette Theater. Obraztsov was performing in Millennium this week. It would probably be the last time he went on tour, considering he’s a thousand years old. Why hadn’t she said anything before? Well, she hadn’t wanted to stand in the way of their plans. But she did understand, didn’t she, that this was all being done for her? Maybe they could still get tickets, suggested Robert. If the vacation had to be cut short a day, so be it. Tonight’s the final performance, said Esther. The clouds went like this and like that, the bread got soggy in their fists.
Cotton balls had been stuffed into Marina’s cheeks. The corners of her lips pulled taut, the dark side of her eyeballs throbbed. Was it Esther’s remark about the marionettes? Was it that no one had thanked her for putting all this together? That no one even acknowledged the effort involved? Maybe it was that her thighs were now large enough to rub together when she walked and a few layers of skin had scraped off. She sat with her legs on either side of the chaise, letting the wounds breathe. It was probably general exhaustion — she hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Things called out to her in the night. Things? There were no distinctions such as animate/inanimate, living/dead, past/present — it had all gotten hopelessly jumbled into one mass, and at night this tumor of concerns called out to her in its indistinct voice. During the day you had appointments, papers to fill out, people to speak to. At night there was no one to address. Marina was being bothered, but there was no one to bother back. Everything ended with her, prone, unmoving. And she burped up the strangest, most disconcerting concoctions. She was ashamed and frightened of her dreams. And she certainly wasn’t sleeping the nine hours she used to claim that her body needed in order to function, as if she were a car that only took premium. If I get even an hour less, stay away, she’d warned. All exaggeration, it turned out. Now she regularly did with half that and was fine. Only hurt, terribly, overwhelmingly wounded and hurt, in giant wraparound sunglasses and a new one-piece that concealed her new flab. Her stomach wasn’t so bad, not yet, but all she had to do was look slightly to the left to see what it would look like in maturity. Esther’s belly stretched her swimsuit until the individual fibers were visible, the parts that hadn’t been dyed. Her black swimsuit petered to gray over the mound of stomach — the stomach that had wanted to tremble with laughter at the marionette theater in Millennium Hall.