“You did what?”
My heart is so full, I might die from it. Had Yuri ever made me feel this idiotically giddy? It’s hard to remember. Of course, that wasn’t the feeling I was chasing when we got together, but here I am, hungry for it again.
“A poem,” he says. “I was going to give it to you after the show. But, well, fuck it, why wait?”
“I don’t believe it,” I say. I didn’t think I would ever see a poem of his. When he was passed out in our apartment, I might have searched once or twice but came up empty.
He cringes a bit. “I didn’t say it was a good poem. I just—well, here,” he says, and then I snatch the poem out of his hands and he starts frantically cleaning up his filthy kitchen, plunking dirty dishes in the sink. He looks so sweet, doing it, so sweet and vulnerable and a little bit filthy, and I feel pretty vulnerable and filthy, too, and wonder if this is it, exactly what I need, right in fucking front of me. But then I scan the opening line and a sickness washes over me.
The first thing that sucks the air out of me is how shitty the poem is. I’m no literary expert, but I’ve read some Yesenin and Tsvetaeva and even remember old Bobby Frost, with his stupid two paths, from high school. I’ve read my share of plays and well, I know good writing when I see it, and this reminds me of something a high school boyfriend would pass to me in the halls. Actually it reminds me of a drummer named Jake, who was already a college dropout by the time I met him outside my high school, who would leave little notes in my backpack, these humorous little sexual ditties that actually cracked me up, with choice lines like I would be a rube/to not touch/your boob and I would never punt/your cunt, but actually those were better than this garbage. But the garbage writing is almost beside the point, because he has not only sinned by writing crap but by stealing the song my mother sang, by daring to reference the private moment I told him about, right there with his dumb words. Though then again—I told him about it ages ago, at the beginning of this endless summer. The fact that he remembered who sang the damn song—it’s not nothing. But then he had to top it off by butchering the Tsvetaeva poem my grandfather gave my grandmother when he proposed to her—what was the point of that? Why was he trying to combine the messes that all the women in my family had made?
As I meet his gaze, his poor, anxious waiting-for-a-reaction face, I can hear my mother laughing at me, laughing the nasty laugh I remember when I wore an extra-slutty dress to prom, a tight red Forever 21 number I put on just to piss her off. I was only a freshman and going with a senior who called himself Axel but was really named Alex, wearing a dress that was all ass, which happened to rip down the middle as I stepped out the door. My date and I stared at each other, bewildered, as a terrible shriek erupted from Mama’s mouth. It was one of the most awful sounds I had ever heard, a delighted shriek no daughter’s mother should ever make at her expense, but I deserved it completely, because she had been right about the dress. It was too cheap and too tight and it would not last the evening, let alone the night. And now I hear her laughing again because I’ve gotten in over my head with this twenty-nothing idiot.
I don’t want Stas to mistake the tears in my eyes for love or fucking sentiment.
“What the fuck is this?” I say, tossing him back the poem like it’s on fire.
His face shifts. He reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear and realizes it isn’t there. But I say it again, I don’t care how it makes him feel.
“What the fuck is this?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought—”
“I tell you something about my mom, something really private, and you put it in a poem?” I say. I don’t even bother with Tsvetaeva.
“I didn’t post it on Facebook. I just thought it would be nice to, I don’t know, pay some kind of tribute to your mom—”
“You didn’t know her,” I say, taking a few steps away from him. “You aren’t family.”
He follows me and then stops in his tracks. I see how much I’ve hurt him, but I don’t care. “I wasn’t trying to be your family. I was trying to be nice. To share my work—”
“It isn’t your work.”
“It’s a compilation,” he says, reaching out for that phantom strand again. He swallows hard and his face gets all pale, as he really gets how much he fucked up. “I don’t understand why you’re acting like this. I was trying to do something nice for you.” I look at him, into his eyes, and wonder if he’s really the man I kissed. If he knows anything about me. If he did, then he never would have done anything so stupid.
He comes toward me, brushes hair out of my face, but I don’t feel like kissing him anymore. I feel sick, actually. Like I have eaten all the old pizza in the kitchen and need to puke it up.
“Please,” he says. “I’m sorry about the poem.”
“Let’s clean up this mess,” I say, nodding at his kitchen. I don’t have the energy to discuss it further. Then, when he looks genuinely hurt, I add, “Thank you.”
“Thank you?”
“For trying,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I did try.”
I wash the disgusting dishes and he dries them, and then he sweeps his tiny kitchen, I feel tense when he’s right behind me, brushing up against my back. As I’m finishing up with the dishes and asking myself why the fuck I’m still here, his phone rings, and at first I wonder if it’s Yuri, but when I see him smile at his screen, I know it’s his sister.
“Answer it,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I want to meet her.”
“Fine,” he says, and a cute chunky little preteen appears on the screen. She has his pretty eyes. “Sonya, this is Natasha. Natasha, Sonya.”
“Hi,” she says. “She’s pretty,” she tells him.
“I know it,” he says.
“You should have seen me before I had a kid.”
She laughs and says, “Are you ready for your big show?”
“Sure,” I say, but I’m lost, I’m not thinking of the show exactly, I’m thinking of my grandmother, of her own sister, Polina. It’s so obvious my grandmother misses her every day, that she would give anything to be with her again, but she doesn’t see it. So I look at Stas’s sister. “Are you ready?” I ask her.
“For what?” she asks, and her brother gives me a big nervous look.
“For your brother to visit you when it’s over,” I say.
I can feel his spirit falling, but he gives her a big smile, and directs that smile at me with hatred in his eyes. “That’s right,” he tells her. “I can’t wait.”