But in their first year of marriage, Marja suddenly began to speak her mind and act her will in a way that surprised even her. She couldn’t quite find the balance between what she should resist and what she should bend towards, so she ended up twisting in all the ways that proved to those around her that she was a cripple of her gender, not quite a righteous woman, and not wholly a defunct one.
Her husband broke down the bathroom door and grabbed Marja’s flailing legs into his chest, pushing her up, and reaching one hand high for the rope’s noose.
After Marja tried to hang herself in the bathroom, it was unanimously decided that she needed electricity. And so, a couple of sessions of shocking did it. Marja was fixed. Voilà.
Then their first and only child, a baby girl, was born.
By this time, Marja’s little brother, Gejza, was long distant, in America, after getting a chance ticket to come over, passing as the son of his employer.
And now, long after, Gejza was an American citizen, married to the local high school teacher, Tammie, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Gejza hadn’t heard about his sister for decades. But when he got news that she was recently widowed, left all alone with one daughter, a problem child, unmanageable, with nowhere to turn… Gejza talked it over with Tammie and they decided it was the right thing to do. Besides, Tammie had this thing where she couldn’t have children. And she liked spinning the stand-up globe on the table next to the TV and watching where her finger would land. The last few times, it was Madagascar and she thought perhaps a child would come to them from that region somehow. Then this promising black kid, for whom Tammie had a special fondness, just fell over dead one track meet, one of those inexplicable heart attacks. Star athlete, star scholar. He was her favourite student in her intermediate French 3 class. Weeks later, when she spun the globe, her finger kept landing in water. Tammie cried sparingly and said she knew it wasn’t her place, but she just didn’t understand why the world wouldn’t explain itself a little more, why certain children couldn’t be born and others just dropped down dead.
To cheer up their spirits, the couple went out to eat at Taco Bell, but midway through their taco menus, there was some sort of fight in the kitchen where a teenage girl stormed out from the back, her long braids swinging over her shoulder as she pulled her visor with the restaurant logo off her head, screaming “Ain’t nobody wanna see your ugly-ass dick” and “Never axt you for no raise,” then flung the visor like a Frisbee at the manager who was just rushing out from behind the cashier station, in his blue polo shirt and shiny name tag. He got nailed right in the forehead, then screamed, “Dammit, Djamilla!” Then the cops were called, and Gejza and Tammie got a voucher for a free meal.
The next morning, they had the same idea, to sponsor Marja and her daughter to come over to America and live with them.
Marja arrived more gawky than Gejza imagined her, with her cream blouse collar laid neatly over her brown and tan jumper, tucked over her knee-length brown checked skirt, with a laminated pink belt hooked at the waist. She had the same bird-eyes and fluffed-out hair, with skin that looked unfolded and refolded already. Her daughter was sixteen, long-limbed, with a pale complexion and pitch-dark hair cut short, sitting jagged on her head, the trail above her neck slightly longer than the rest. Her face held stark, black eyebrows over two dense eyes like iron nails. She had light denim jeans on with two worn holes revealing her bony knees, a loose black T-shirt that was made for a large man, rippling down her torso, and over that a man’s white shirt, the kind that would usually be worn starched to the office, but the girl’s was wrinkled, one sleeve bunched up at her skinny elbow, the other hanging low over her fingertips.
The flight had been long, but it seemed that mother and daughter were operating on some sort of peace treaty, as each spoke to Gejza in Czech individually, never acknowledging each other’s presence.
Tammie helped to enrol the girl at the local public high school, got her some after-school tutoring for her English, and put her in her Basic French class so that Tammie could keep an eye on the girl in this brand-new school.
To celebrate their first week in America, the four went for dinner at McDonald’s where the girl took bites of everyone’s food and licked her wrist that she kept putting in the ketchup she squirted out for herself on her tray. Tammie listened patiently and every time Gejza tried to translate for her, she politely waved her hand, and mouthed, “It’s fine, I’ll just listen.”
At home, they continued their discussion about who should live in the garage space Gejza had just finished converting into a bedroom, and who in the guest bedroom in the house. Marja was a discrete claustrophobe, and kept having visions of a dark-headed, blue-eyed woman in a fur coat slumped in the front seat of a car in the garage, dying of exhaust fumes. She explained to her younger brother that she thought the place was cursed. Not like American cursed, vengeful ghosts or resentful zombies, but cursed in the Eastern way, by one’s own inevitable fate. So she said that her daughter should take the garage room, but under one condition:
“I don’t want you to get a venereal disease like the Americans. They look very clean, but they are very dirty.” She gave her daughter a firm nod, then her daughter rolled her eyes at her mother, then reached inside her own T-shirt and pulled up her bra strap.
Marja grabbed her daughter’s chin and pulled her face in.
“Zorka, I’m serious!”
Zorka pursed her lips together and flapped her mother a kiss, keeping her eyes taut and sly.
Marja lifted her hand and wacked her palm against Zorka’s cheek. Zorka winced but when she opened her eyes they were fully cocked. Both Gejza and Tammie flinched, and grew immediately polite in their unease.
Marja turned to her brother and said in Czech, “She destroyed our mother’s beautiful fur coat, by the way, and of course I love her, she’s my daughter, but I’ll never forgive her, I hope you know.”
Waiting,
waiting,
waiting.
Are u there?
Dominxxika_N39: Are u there? Amy?
0_hotgirlAmy_0: Yeah I’m here… Where did u go last time?
Dominxxika_N39: I’m sorry sexy Amy. Internet cut off. I cannot stop think about u. My husband come home and he cut internet. Now he left again for work. I climb on roof and reconnect internet to satellite dish.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: U went on the roof to fix the satellite dish? For real?
Dominxxika_N39: Yes this is real.
0_hotgirlAmy_0: I guess I thought… u like… got weirded out by what I said…
Dominxxika_N39: No, no, my sexy Amy! I was so sad all week I want to scream a million screams, but I stay quiet. I wait for my husband to leave so I can climb on roof and fix internet connection.