“You know, the Borsch Babies are putting on a play about Chernobyl this fall. You are welcome to join us anytime,” says Marianna, and I know she’s keeping herself from adding, If you don’t think you’re too much of a hotshot for us.
“Thanks,” I say, trying not to visibly cringe about this stupid idea. Who would actually give a shit about Chernobyl? It’s not exactly a sexy topic. “I’m pretty busy with the new baby, but I’ll keep it in mind,” I say.
“Of course,” says Marianna.
I nearly trip over her leather boot as I step away.
“Oh, Natasha?” says Marianna, and I turn back to her steely smile.
“What?”
“Congratulations.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. I have the crazy thought that she’s congratulating me because I somehow already booked Pen & Sword, but then I remember I have a newish baby at home. I mumble a thank-you and choke on hairspray all the way to the elevator.
Outside, I catch my breath. I take a selfie and post it on Instagram: #backinthegame #auditionlife #threemonthspostpartum and watch the likes crop up on the screen, people I never see in real life telling me what a badass I am, a warrior, even, for going out for roles. I hate doing this shit, I’d literally rather have a screwdriver shoved up my ass while getting my teeth cleaned than write these dumb posts, but everybody else does it and if I don’t, then no one will remember that I exist. Anyway, it’s a nice change from posting pictures of Tally, though anything I share about the little rat gets more love than my posts about my career, such as it is.
I’m never out in the wild anymore, so I don’t even mind the mean June heat or the garbage-sewer summer smell of the city. I strut to the subway because I’m in full makeup and feel human and smile at everyone I pass, hoping someone cries, “It’s as easy as being a woman!” at me or at least tells me I have a nice ass. As I round the corner, a guy in a suit leers at my tits, but as he gets closer I see he’s not turned on but horrified, and then he points at my chest. I look down and realize he’s trying to be a good citizen, telling me my boobs are leaking. But I just give him the finger and cry, “Fetishist!” and stride past the poor man. My face burns as I throw my prostitute jacket back on and skulk into the subway.
Stas puts away the little black notebook he’s always scribbling his poetry in as soon as I walk in the door. Old Sharik is sitting on his lap and Tally must be sleeping in her crib, a small miracle. I peek in the bedroom to see the rise and fall of her chest. When Stas rolled in a few weeks ago, with his compact little body and ponytailed blond hair, wearing a tattered button-down shirt and black jeans though it was a hundred degrees out and the middle of May, reeking of cigarettes, flies practically swarming around him, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I hadn’t seen the guy since our wedding, when he got blacked out and boned sexy Babies Sofia in a broom closet, and he’s been a waiter-slash-poet-slash-heartbreaker ever since, according to Yuri. But then he held my girl and I had a hard time reconciling this fake bohemian guy who called himself a poet with the sweet man holding my daughter, and I hated him a little less.
He has experience with babies because he practically had to raise his kid sister on his own. His dad left his family to start a new one right after his sister was born when Stas was a teenager, and his mom was so depressed that Stas had to do most of the work when he wasn’t in school, or when Yuri’s parents, friends of his family from Minsk who lived in the same Boston suburb, couldn’t help out. Though Yuri was in college when this was going on, he came home on the weekends to check in on Stas, take him out for a burger and cheer him up, treating him like his baby brother. Now Stas’s baby sister is a teenager herself, and he’s obsessed with her, always facetiming her on our balcony. It’s a lifesaver that he’s showing some of that love for Tally.
“You have the magic touch,” I say, nodding toward the bedroom.
He smiles broadly. “She’s easy. How did it go?”
“Complete waste of time,” I say, kicking my shoes off. “I don’t know why I bothered.”
“You underestimate yourself.”
“I think I have a pretty realistic view of things.”
“If you don’t get this prostitute role, then you’ll get the next one. With that orange turd in office, there’s no shortage of them, I’m sure.”
“That may be true,” I offer, because I can’t deny that there have been more roles as Russian prostitutes and spies since Trump got elected last fall, since everyone loves having Russians be the villains again like it’s the fucking Cold War. “But it doesn’t matter if there are a million parts like that right now. I’ve been out of the game too long and I look like ass on a stick. I don’t even think I’m good enough for the Borsch Bitches anymore.”
“You don’t really miss them anyway, do you?”
“I’d rather die than crawl back to them. But I’d also rather die than—not work,” I say. He looks like he wants to further pursue the topic of my train wreck of a career, but I am way too tired for that. I say, “Really, thank you so much. You’re saving my life.”
“Likewise,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”
I consider asking: What am I saving you from, exactly? But I don’t want to make it weird. All I know is that he told Yuri that he got into a “messy situation” with a girl back in Boston, which was so bad that he placed a desperate call to Yuri asking if he could crash with us, insisting that sleeping on a couch in a one-bedroom with a newborn in it was preferable to his current situation, and of course Yuri didn’t bother asking whether this was preferable for me. Yuri, Yuri, always eager to please everybody because he was the only child of parents who were impossible to please—quiet, distant people who drove down from Boston to take one look at Tally and told us they would return after the summer, when there would be more they could do—even if it was at my expense. Once I clean up a bit in the kitchen, the man himself is back, opening the door loudly enough to wake Tally up. He doesn’t wait, doesn’t give her a minute to settle, he just runs into the bedroom and picks her up from her crib and raises her in the air, the sunlight flooding her few feathery strands of hair.
“There’s my baby girl,” he declares. “Let’s have a look at her.” He kisses her forehead, her cheeks, her little nose, and she gives him a smile, which obviously has melted his fucking simpleton parent heart, just as those early smiles are supposed to do. “Yep, everything is in working order,” he says, kissing me on the forehead like he’s a priest offering his blessing to a dying child. “We won’t have to take her back to the store for repairs.”
“I did my best,” Stas says, saluting him.
“You always do,” Yuri says. Once Stas steps out on the balcony to smoke, my husband turns to me and says, “How did it go?”
He’s just come back from class so he’s in his adorable professor gear, with his khakis hiked too high over his button-down shirt and his plaid loafers that could have belonged to my dad.
“It was fine,” I tell him. I don’t know why I don’t admit how awful it was.
“That’s great,” he says, failing to read my level of enthusiasm, turning back to Tally.
I could go on, but he won’t hear me. He doesn’t care about me at the moment. Talia is the apple of his eye and I’m old news. He cradles her and strokes her cheeks. “Little butterball,” he says, kissing her nose again. Right then, I could tell him my vagina split in half on the subway and he would just nod and smile.
I stop and fix my hair in the mirror that hangs above the one photo I have of my great-great-grandmother Antonina, who looks so stylish in her long black coat and famous white boa, the only picture Baba had of her, maybe the only one ever taken, not long before her world was thrown into chaos. And sure, she was batty, but she’s also the last woman in my family who was glam in any way—not my practical-minded great-grandmother, or my tough grandmother and her plain matching cardigan and pants and simple pearls, and not my own mother, who never wore makeup and kept her legs hidden under ugly work suits, though there was no hiding her beauty, a woman whose gorgeous hair I saw down exactly once. None of the other women, as far as I know, ever wore a lick of makeup, while Antonina was inches deep in rouge and powder, Revolution or not, and bless her for it. I tell myself that the women in my family had made it through the Revolution, and the Great War, and that surely I can make it through the early days of parenting, which reminds me I have to call Baba in an hour. I turn back to my nearly bald, big-eared little girl who has the face of the man I love, the man who is now staring at me.