The wife journeyed from the kitchen to the bathroom, as this was an opportunity to pass by Frida’s station. Having taken a good look, she went to deliberate over the toilet seat. Her impression was that Frida didn’t look like a spy. But back in the kitchen, the suspicions returned. She took a vase of wilted carnations from the corridor and brought it, along with a cloud of fruit flies, to the living room, setting it atop an already overloaded coffee table. Frida’s gaze bounced from the wife to the vase to the wife. Thank you, Frida muttered. The wife noticed a photo album in Frida’s hands and left satisfied. But something still didn’t sit right.
Over the course of the morning, Frida received stale flowers, fresh towels, and plenty of unnerving stares. There was minimal verbal accompaniment. A malfunction seemed to occur when the wife ran into the room, looked square at Frida, and ran out. A minute later, more composed, she peeked in to see whether Frida had worked up an appetite — odd phrasing, as Frida had hardly moved all day. Frida shook her head in what was presumably a universal gesture. A plate of plov appeared on her lap. The wife was on her way out but plopped down on the sofa instead.
The remote control was nearby, but the wife’s arms were short; they couldn’t quite make it. Frida was determined not to help. The wife was determined to prove her helplessness, groaning and grunting as she fruitlessly reached. Frida refused to be drawn into this ridiculous drama, the wife refused to get up or even scooch forward to get the damn piece of plastic off the coffee table. After much ineffectual strain, she emitted a sigh of defeat and fell back onto the cushion. Resigned to life without television. This was horrible. Little was as depressing as the wife sitting on the sofa deprived of entertainment. Unfortunately she couldn’t also turn off her need to see. Her gaze began to scale the walls, crammed with icons of the Virgin. If she were to become entranced by the icons, Frida was in danger as well. Remote snatched and thrown at the wife, who accepted the device with only a touch of exasperation that it hadn’t arrived sooner.
Two women sat across from each other in an intimate kitchen setting, their flabby elbows propped on a crocheted tablecloth on which stood, ideally spaced, a gorgeous blue porcelain tea set, cups too tiny to hold any reasonable amount of liquid, fulfilling the nobler function of evoking distant epochs when objects still had value. These were hefty broads, keen to gossip. With chins drawn into their chests, they peered out deviously from under hooded eyelids while tossing around names that in a country of roughly fifty million meant nothing only to Frida. Once a name was thrown into the air, the unfortunate person to whom it belonged became an invisible patient lying on the table amid the fine china and a dissection began, lasting as long as it took to get to the source of all rottenness. The finer specimens really made you dig. There didn’t seem to be more to the show’s premise. Commercials were few but potent. Frida tried to avoid looking up, as the TV was now the wife’s domain and Frida intended to not get tangled up in the wife’s business. The screen, clearly, was a trap. So she stared at the massive photo album in her lap, selecting a page at random. It was toward the beginning — the obscure part of every good photo album, where the relationships on display were at their most abstract. Pasha took this obscurity to the extreme. Most people’s albums began with their grandparents and ended with themselves in the present or the recent past or their children. Pasha’s album ended with grandparents and began with inconceivable likenesses. Here was a photograph of a man, yet the photograph didn’t look like a photograph and the man didn’t look like a man. It looked as if someone had used a soft graphite pencil to sketch the shadow of a ghost caught in a dusty mirror, then tried to erase it with one of those hardened pink erasers on the pencil’s other end, and buried the sketch in a courtyard’s piss-soaked soil until it was dug up by Pasha, who didn’t bother to clean it off before sticking it into the album. The man was ultra-dead, all the people who’d ever seen the back of his head or heard him hum were dead, and this lack of ties to the wet cement of time was felt deeply when looking at his face. Or trying to look and failing, since a composite image never formed, there was no man to be seen.
That’s a pretty top, said the wife.
Frida looked up when spoken to, a bad habit. The wife noted Frida’s confusion and pinched her collar to show what she meant. Your top, she said, is pretty.
Frida looked down at her long-sleeved gray T-shirt, the one she’d been sleeping in, which contained visible traces of many of her previous snacks and was sprinkled with crumbs from her latest one, and the heat rushed to her face.
Is that a typical American top? asked the wife. Once again registering Frida’s confusion, she elaborated, Are those the kinds of tops that the young women wear in the States?
Yeah, said Frida. Then shook her head, No. They wear lots of different kinds, she said, an infinite variety. No such thing as a typical top. That’s why America’s known as a free country. She wasn’t sure why she was taking this tone or whether she was being sarcastic.
And you have Baby Einstein, said the wife.
Yep, said Frida, hoping to leave it at that and not stir the insanity brewing underneath.
Here they’d never think up anything like that, said the wife. And it shows, you know, upon the quality of our youth. Savages! Little liars, hooligans, and thieves! Whenever Volky or I hear that somebody’s visiting from abroad, we don’t ask for denim jackets or air conditioners or even fancy phones, we ask only for Baby Einstein. The wife paused and gave a stare of significance. When we heard you were coming, she resumed, we asked Pavel Robertovich to ask you to bring the Baby Einstein for us. They’re always coming up with something new, you know.
Frida’s eyes lifted in contemplation, as if she might suddenly remember about all the Baby Einstein products she’d hauled in from the States. The wife read Frida’s thoughts and narrowed her focus on the bloated suitcase in the center of the room (still packed, of course, just herniating a few garments). The moment of hope was allowed to take a breath.
I would’ve, but Pasha never mentioned anything.
The wife’s attention remained fixed on the suitcase. He never mentioned it? she repeated, absorbing her disappointment gradually, in doses.
Not a word, said Frida.
Well, Pavel Robertovich is a busy man. He has many important things to think about. And who are we to him?
Pasha’s a little absentminded, said Frida. There seems to be a consensus about that. If you want him to do something, you need to provide constant poking.
We reminded the both of them not once and not twice. Volky and I keep to ourselves, we don’t impose. But when it comes to Baby Einstein, we’re not shy. They really never said anything about it to you?
Frida shook her head, noting the regression, a bad sign. Of course, if I’d known, she said, I would’ve brought it for you. And next time—
So you don’t have it? said the wife.
No, said Frida.
The wife wasn’t devastated, another bad sign. She wasn’t devastated not because she was a rational adult who could handle such news but because it still didn’t register, or perhaps she didn’t believe it.
The door flew open, and a boy ran in, inflamed knees like grapefruits being lurched through the air, hands cupped tensely over something. He screeched — the sound came from his joints. Other boys followed, dashing after the first, screeching at their own particular frequencies, little Einsteins in training. The last one, chubby and asthmatic, probably with a rash somewhere, caught Frida’s foot and went flying, stumpy arms akimbo, past the sofa, slamming the entirety of his weight into one of the grandfather clocks. The compound wail of the boy and the clock set something off in Frida. She was gone.