You know, Frida, he said, you should call Diane. The two of you were such good friends, always running around together, sly looks on your little faces. Always up to something, weren’t you? And then you lost touch — why?
Was it possible he didn’t remember?
That was a long time ago, she said, keeping her face immensely close, figuring that abrupt recoil would be suspicious. We were kids.
You were a good influence on her. All that trouble she got into, who knows, maybe if you’d stayed friends, it would’ve been different. And now she’s living in the pit of Harlem, just as long as it’s Manhattan. Let me give you her number. She’d be so happy to hear from you. There are pens up there, on my desk.
The desktop was at eye level — Frida strained to reach up. She tore a thin strip from a yellow notepad, plucked a fat blue marker from the pen holder. Ready, she said, tensing as she took dictation, because just identifying Dr. Gamsky’s baritone approximations and translating them into digit form with a marker her fingers barely wrapped around was an incredible feat. Once it was accomplished, read back, confirmed: relief. Underneath the digits, she wrote Dinka.
While Frida was handing out bills, a mental reel began to play — jumping on a bed trying to touch a motel’s popcorn ceiling, rollerblade racing to the sole intact swing that hung like a last tooth in a ravaged mouth (Frida always won, the reward for which was pushing Dinka as she swung), biting into a blistery hot dog with ketchup-smeared fingers as they sat in damp bathing suits whose rampant itchiness was relieved by the rough texture of the sloping concrete steps overlooking the ocean, gulping down bottle after bottle of peach Snapple and weighing themselves obsessively, the scale reading seventy-eight pounds, eighty-one pounds. Oh, the splendor of those long-gone days. What fun they had! The supply of fond memories was endless, and the painful ones, while also in abundance, had been rendered void by time — Frida couldn’t possibly still be angry at the summer-camp snubbing of a ten-year-old, even if it had incorporated some advanced tactics of persecution. When she finally left Dr. Gamsky’s office, which was situated behind a large plastic-surgery facility with window-walls featuring ads of stone-faced women whose foreheads were being injected by arm-size syringes, she was clutching the yellow scrap with Diane’s number, wondering how so many years had elapsed without an attempt on either of their parts to revive the friendship.
Turning down Brighton Fourteenth Street and heading in the direction of the ocean, Frida quickened her pace, head retracted, as this small stretch was more dangerous to traverse than the Bermuda Triangle, rivaling it in terms of bizarre occurrences, not to mention awkward run-ins. It was a block short of the official border between Brighton Beach and the more prosperous Manhattan Beach, and all distant relatives and no-longer-quite-acquaintances had flocked to this fringe, where they could pay reasonable rents while getting wafted by ritzy breezes. Also, the train was almost out of earshot, not so far away that important service announcements couldn’t be heard but at enough of a distance that Grandma didn’t lose her dentures every seven minutes. Frida stumbled past tidy strips of lawn, her favorite with a PLEASE CARB YOUR DOG sign, double-parked Ferraris with needlessly tinted windows, the vacant lot that persisted in being a vacant lot despite its prime location, the homeless guitar band playing classic rock hits (mainly “American Pie” on a loop), and took those sloping concrete steps to the boardwalk, resolved to find a bench, overcome her phone anxieties, and make the call. Why shouldn’t Diane be happy to hear from her? She’d be overjoyed. Incidentally, she was having a little get-together at her place that Friday. It was late notice, Frida probably already had plans, but she was welcome to join. Plans could be scrapped. Frida’s nervousness prior to ringing the doorbell, her stomach cramps, her rapid pulse, would prove for naught. She’d instantly feel comfortable, finding herself in a dimly lit room with beanbag chairs arranged in a rough circle, one empty chair for her to claim, and a carton of red wine (like their parents had at picnics) in the center. Diane was mature, transformed, welcoming. The other beanbag chairs were occupied by youngish intellectual types who exhibited in equal measure Odessa humor, Petersburg interests (sans pretensions), Moscow cosmopolitanism (without the coarseness or hard consonants), and New York transit proficiency; who watched Tarkovsky films and played chess (and would finally succeed in teaching her how); who listened to Pink Floyd and Vysotsky and could recite whole stanzas of Eugene Onegin but never went on too long doing so, choosing instead to dance a little, European style, inside the beanbag fortress; who had jobs in the sciences but whose passions lay in art and literature; who got together every weekend in a casual but never obligatory manner and considered this gang, this kompaniya of theirs, a second family, sort of the way her parents considered their kompaniya. If they emulated the model, what was wrong with that? The model was tried and true. And they weren’t about to emulate blindly. Adaptations would be made. Think of it as the furthering of a tradition. Into the Vysotsky and Mashina Vremeni repertoire, they’d introduce nineties hip-hop, Uzbek rap. Along with Pushkin they’d recite Nasmertov — because surely Frida wouldn’t get the usual stupefied stares when attempting to explain whose niece she was, an excruciating mistake she was determined to repeat whenever given the chance. It was an attempt to bridge a terrible gap, an attempt that invariably proved futile. Within the home Pasha was a world-historical figure grappling with Dostoevskian forces. But the outside world squinted and asked, Pasha who? A poet? As in, they still have those? One reality was bound to triumph to the exclusion of the other. But with the kompaniya she’d just remark offhand that her uncle was the Pavel Nasmertov and they’d gape in awe.
And while the kompaniya was exclusive, Frida would be adopted despite her shortcomings. Her new friends would patiently peel away the layers of timidity, anxiety, acne, and fear, revealing — what, exactly? They would certainly know what, detecting deep within her something worthy of being revealed, something deserving of that grueling peeling work. In the end she’d be unrecognizable. In a good way. It would be the true her, fully realized. People would say, She bloomed late. An example would be made of the transformation. Everyone had taken Frida for a lost cause until suddenly, at the ripe age of twenty-five, she did a 360. Or was it a 180? A total turnaround, regardless. Left behind the field of medicine. A clean break. Never looked back. Lost weight and began parting her hair differently, in a much more becoming fashion, though the difference itself was elusive. Perhaps a creative calling should be involved? She’d been one of the top students in her high school’s acrylic-painting class. The kompaniya would probably encourage a return to that. They would be supportive, nurturing of the very tendencies the rest of the world tried to weed out. They’d let her borrow money when, painting maniacally, she went broke.
This scenario was countered with one of a lackluster reunion in a single-halogen-bulb kitchen with a faded, old-before-her-time Diane, the pauses in conversation accentuated by a child’s wailing in the background — or, worse yet, Diane not faded in the least but as manipulative and snobbish as ever, only more proficient with underhanded techniques of humiliation. It was foggy and blustery on the boardwalk. A gust blew the scrap with the number right out of Frida’s clutch, in a direction that was the opposite of home.