“Remember what I said. A few hours alone in the crib will only make her stronger—and you as well,” I tell her.
“How could I forget?” she says, mustering a laugh as she hangs up.
I feel uneasy after I say goodbye to the girl. Of course, delving into the war doesn’t do my spirit any favors, but my main concern lies in the present: how far gone is Natasha? Is she simply feeling the eternal mother blues, or is it something more? She does not look like a complete wreck like I was when my son was born, when I was hardly capable of changing the child without weeping, though then again our worthless cloth diapers were enough to undo the strongest of women. No, no, Natasha is faring far better than I did, or at least, not worse. I prepare for sleep, telling myself I have nothing to worry about.
Natasha
“You think you can afford me, Mr. Robertson? It is impossible. You can have me, for a price, but you can never truly afford me, you understand? Natasha—she is priceless,” I say in my best Russian accent. I give one little swivel of my hips and add, “Thank you.”
“Thank you, Ms. Sterling,” the casting director says, nodding to say there’s nothing else he wants from me. He and his crew shuffle papers at their desk and whisper to one another, not giving me another look. I usually know at least someone in casting, but this time, they’re all strangers, which doesn’t help my case. I leave the cramped room with my back straight and head high, as if my heels aren’t killing my still-swollen feet, like I have places to be and don’t care if I book the fucking gig or not, as if I can’t tell they were completely unimpressed.
I walk down the too-bright hallway into a too-dark room filled with other hopeful would-be prostitutes-and-secret-spies who look like me, with long wavy hair and pale skin, five foot nine and one hundred and ten pounds—or that was my pre-pregnancy fighting weight anyway. Though the character in question is supposed to be in her thirties, they all look like twentysomethings trying to look older, brushing their hair and chatting nervously in a sea of hairspray and perfume.
And these bitches have a right to be nervous, because this isn’t just another audition for one of the thousands of Russian prostitute parts all over the city but one for Pen & Sword, a real NBC political prime-time show people like my bland mother-in-law actually watch, a role as a series regular who wins the heart of Mr. Robertson, aka Greg Spade, played by Mark Sims, my childhood TV crush, and in fact, one of the first men I ever masturbated to at the probably-too-young-and-the-cause-of-so-many-of-my-man-problems delicate age of ten.
Though I promised Yuri I’d take the summer off from auditions, when my agent said she had another top-notch prostitute audition for me, one that was even more prestigious than my respectable three-season gig as Katya Andreyeva, the telepathic crime-solving hooker on CBS’s Seeing Things, I couldn’t turn it down. When I got the text after spending the better part of the past three months getting my nipples chewed on, I thought I might blow my brains out if I couldn’t get out of the house and be someone other than a mom, even if that someone was a prostitute-spy conveniently named Natasha, as they often are. But seeing these younger, skinnier, smooth-skinned, perky-breasted women who have slept more than three hours in a row in the last month, I know I’ve wasted my time, that I would have been better off talking to my grandmother at our appointed time instead of rescheduling for later in the day for this bullshit.
I take off my jacket and leather pants and bright-red lipstick in the bathroom, my prostitute gear which had gotten me plenty of hooker roles before I got pregnant, though now I just look like a plastic bag my cat, Sharik, ingested and threw up. My boobs are killing me so I squeeze some of my milk into the toilet and change into a T-shirt and leggings and flats, my default mom garb. But as I head for the door, I see I’m not getting off that easy. I spot Marianna, Sofia, and Vera, three girls from the Borsch Babies—or as I call them, the Borsch Bitches—who seem to haunt all the same auditions as I do and whose tiny asses and thigh gaps make it clear that they most definitely do not have babies of their own. And they’ve spotted me too—it’s too late to sneak away.
For a while there, the Borsch Babies, a Russian-Jewish theater troupe, was basically saving my life. When I dropped out of NYU after a semester and was spending my time bartending and failing at auditions and hating my dead mother for saying I told you so, the only thing that gave my life meaning was meeting a bunch of equally dubiously employed Russian immigrants in the founder Vadim’s dim little theater in Brighton and trading immigration stories and then looking further back, to our parents and even our grand- or great-grandparents, talking about the collapse and perestroika and communal life and the purges and wars and pogroms, trying to make sense of that ancient rubble, asking how it made us who we were.
None of our plays were very good, I can say that now, though we pretended otherwise, as if the people in the audience were there for art’s sake, not because they were related to or had fucked or wanted to fuck one of us. But talking about the poor dead Russians who had been royally screwed by the government to bring us here to live our strange uncertain lives did something so essential for our souls that we couldn’t see past it to the stiff accents and melodramatic plots we forced our audiences to endure a few times a year. Plus, we partied hard and had a good time. In fact, too good of a time, and once I got involved with Vadim while he was already involved with Sofia, and then, it turned out, also Marianna, things got too messy, culminating in an ill-advised foursome on a waterbed after too much blow that we were convinced would solve the awkwardness instead of making everything impossibly worse. After that, I left the Babies, traded my last name, Orlova, for Sterling, and then I got some money doing voiceover work for The Americans, basically just chitchatting in ’80s-appropriate Russian as background noise for three full seasons for an impressive hourly rate, and then I got my big break in an eco-friendly tampon company commercial for a brand called Lady Planet that was big for a while, where I paused in front of the camera to tie my shoe and declared, “It’s as easy as being a woman!” It didn’t exactly make me Flo from Progressive or the Mentos man, but people recognized me, for a while. Then I signed with my agent and booked Seeing Things, and sure, it seemed like I left the Babies for bigger things, but the timing of me leaving and then getting lucky with work was a coincidence. And now my former Babies costars are winding through the crowd just to be bitches to me, I’m sure.
“Looks like Mamachka is back in the game,” Vera, the queen of the troupe, says as she runs a cold hand over my head. She still weighs about ninety pounds and her long black hair is impossibly thick and shiny. “But oh, she looks so tired. Unless you’ve had your eyes done recently.”
“Have you slept since the baby was born?” says Marianna, the prettiest and meanest of the three. “We should come over, say hello. Bring you some bouillon and rub your feet.”
“At least you’ve put on weight. That’s good. You were too skinny before. Now you look like a real woman,” says Sofia, the sexy one, squeezing my side while I try not to flinch.
“Did you actually stop shaving your arms?” says Marianna, stroking my stubbly forearms.
“Always a pleasure, ladies,” I say. She’s right about the forearms, but fuck her. “Really. So lovely to see you.”
They cackle like little witches, Shakespearean cunts without cauldrons. “Natasha thinks she can be this Natasha,” Vera says. “We will see, won’t we?”