The Russian Word for Snow Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although writing a book seems to be largely about long periods of time spent alone with a computer, it is ultimately a collaborative effort. In that spirit, I'd like to begin by thanking my best collaborators, Adair Lara and Wendy Lichtman, teachers who became writing partners and then friends, and who have been with this memoir since the very first words I set on paper. Also, thanks to Rebecca Koffman, who has read every version of these pages.

  To Richard Reinhardt, who encouraged me to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where I learned how to write this book. And to both Richard and his wife, Joan, for the use of The Cabin and The Vineyard, truly charmed places in which to write.

  Thanks to Meg, for her encouragement and love. And to Kurt, for liking all my endings, especially the ones with hats.

  To Jim and Tracy, for the dinners, the babysitting, and the friendship.

  I would also like to thank my wonderful agent, Amy Rennert, for her good advice, and for coping with the many neuroses of a writer with a first book. Thanks to my editor, Diane Higgins, for loving this story, and to her assistants, Patricia Fernandez and Nichole Argyres, for handling all the details turning it into a book required.

  Thank you to Elaine Petrocelli and the staff and teachers at

  vi Acknowledgments

  Book Passage for providing so much inspiration and support. They are some of the best friends a writer could have.

  Finally, this book would not exist without my husband, Ken, my best editor and best friend, who never stopped believing that we would bring Alex home, and never stopped believing in me.

  For Ken,

  who gave me the time and space in which to write

  And for Alex,

  without whom there would be no story

  Matryoshka

  My son Alex, who is two years old, loves to play with the ma-tryoshka dolls my husband and I bought from a vendor in Iz-mailovsky Park. Each doll is a different family member, and Alex likes to twist open the father, who is playing an accordion, to find the mother nested inside. One by one, he opens them all: the grandfather balancing a yellow balalaika on his knee, the grandmother holding a golden samovar, until he comes to a tiny baby with a red pacifier painted into its mouth.

  When he's got them apart, purple and green and black half-bodies scattered across the carpet, I'm struck by how complete the family is: children, mother, father, grandparents. No one is missing, pulled out of place by death or desertion.

  As I watch him stacking the dolls, one smiling face disappearing into the round body of another, I have a strong and sudden urge to call my mother. I want to ask her if it's normal for children to eat what the cat threw up, or learn to say "dog" before "Mommy." I want to know if she ever wished I'd get tired of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, if she thought about leaving me in the frozen-food aisle when I started to scream and kick the shopping cart, if she lay awake at night, afraid something might take me from her.

  Instead, I ask Alex if he wants to play naked tiger, which is what we do to get him ready for his bath. He yanks on the tabs of his diaper and removes it with a grand gesture, a magician

  6 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  delighted with the reappearance of his penis. I throw his toys into the tub, while behind me, he leaps around with the white bucket from his training potty on his head. His legs are starting to look more like a boy's than a baby's, and I want to catch them and kiss them while he'll still let me.

  I put Alex into the warm water of the tub and push back his hair with a wet hand. With his hair slicked back, he looks like a small, smooth-skinned businessman.

  After his bath, I dress him in a T-shirt printed with circus animals.

  "Elephant big-nose," he tells me, pointing to an elephant balanced on a ball.

  We jump onto the bed together, the weight of our bodies pressing a valley into the comforter. Alex slips the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth, fingers that have developed small calluses from rubbing against the sharp edges of his teeth. He presses his damp head against my chest, wetting my shirt and raising goose bumps. I tuck my knees beneath his legs, so more of his body touches mine, and remember another bed.

  The pink chenille spread that left curved tracks on my cheek if I rested on it too long, the stripy light from Venetian blinds that clanged like something mechanical whenever the wind blew, and my mother, sleepy and pregnant with my twin brothers. Every afternoon we'd nap together, with my face as close to hers as she would allow. Before we'd fall asleep, I'd ask her to sing the same song over and over—a song in Italian about an orchestra.

  Lying on her back, my yet-to-be-born brothers causing the middle of her body to rise like a mountain, my mother would pretend to play the trombone, her arm pulling the long slide up toward the ceiling. Turning to look at me, she'd purse lips with traces of pink lipstick on them and make the wet sound of a trumpet. Just her breath on my face made me feel as if nothing bad could touch me.

  Now, in the bed with Alex, I try to sing the Italian song about the orchestra, but only a few of the words come back to me. The rest I have to invent: long phrases filled with vowels that make Alex smile around the fingers in his mouth.

  Lying there, I wish I could ask my mother if she can still slide the trombone to the ceiling, still make the wet sound of the trumpet. I wish I could ask her if she would breathe on my face again.

  Alex's biological mother abandoned him in a Moscow hospital three days after he was born. She left without telling anyone, disappearing back to the Ukraine, leaving the orphanage to find a name for him. Because it was still winter, they chose for his last name the Russian word for snow.

  Alex was the result of his mother's third pregnancy. Ken and I do not know whether he has a brother like the boy matryoshka who plays a flute painted around the curve of his head, or a sister like the matryoshka who carries a single spotted teacup. We don't know if his mother ever had the babies from those pregnancies, or why she chose to have him.

  Alex loves the mother matryoshka. Sometimes he opens up the set just to her. Her painted dress is embroidered with puffy white sleeves, and she has round blue eyes and blond hair. She looks much more like him than I do.

  One day, I imagine that he will look at her small painted-on mouth and ask her the questions about his Russian mother that I cannot answer.

  Alex throws his body over the footboard of the bed to show me how he can stand on his head. His hair falls into the air like ruffled feathers.

  Then we go into his room, and I sit on the floor beside a dress-up frog whose clothes I can no longer find. Alex puts the matiyoshkas back together, starting with the baby with the painted pacifier in its mouth, which he threatens to eat because he likes it when I tell him not to. When he's finished, he comes

  8 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  and sits in my lap, nesting himself there. I push my nose into the skin at the back of his neck, breathing in the scent of rising bread, and vanilla bean, and the ocean. And I wonder if my mother had ever breathed in the scent of my skin, and if she thought it as sweet.

  ww>

  Cellular Multiplication and Division

  I never wanted to have children.

  I'd watch the families climbing out of their minivans and walk wide around them, so I wouldn't be contaminated by the damp stickiness of their parenthood. I'd study them from afar, little girls with princess hair and socks that matched their dresses; moms lumpy from pockets filled with goldfish crackers and Cheerios. The dads always seemed confused, lugging a crying child in a plastic carrier like something heavy someone else had slipped into their basket at the supermarket.
/>   The lives of these parents appeared to be made up of running noses, earnest cartoon characters, and small plastic cars to be stepped on with bare feet. Watching them move across the parking lot, the mother unaware of the small chocolate-colored handprint on the seat of her pants, the father dragging a flowered diaper bag behind him, I'd shudder and walk cleanly away, a neat leather purse over my shoulder.

  And then my mother started dying.

  My mother's cancer came as a small hard lump in her breast. She discovered it one morning in the shower and told her doctor before she told anyone else. She had to wait a week for the mammogram. Another to see the surgeon. She said she could feel the cancer cells spreading through her body as the receptionist turned the pages of her appointment book.

  When the surgeon did see her, he put her in the hospital and removed the hard lump the size of a BB that wasn't supposed

  14 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  to be there. Afterward, I flew from my home in California to New Jersey to see her.

  "It's in the lymph nodes," she said. She was sitting up in bed, dressed in a hospital gown with green geometric shapes printed on it. She wasn't smoking, and it made her look strangely still. "All I get is bad news."

  They kept her in the hospital for five days. The night before she was released, she told me, "Tomorrow, we'll go to the outlets."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes. I want to go to Lizzie's." Lizzie's was the Liz Claiborne outlet. My mother kept on a first-name basis with all of her favorite stores.

  By 10:00 the next morning, we were walking among clapboard buildings with false dormers meant to make the mall resemble a small New England village. By noon, we'd made two trips back to the car to unload shopping bags. By 3:00, the arm where the surgeon had removed my mother's lymph nodes was so sore, she could try on only slacks and shoes.

  The following week, I drove her to her first appointment with the radiologist. While we waited, I pointed out the purplish highlights in the receptionist's hair, the outfits of celebrities in People magazine, hoping these things would keep my mother from noticing the sallow-skinned people waiting beside us.

  After half an hour, the purple-haired receptionist called my mother's name, and a technician tattooed the place on her breast where they would aim the radiation.

  The next day, my mother told me to go home.

  "I'll be fine," she said. My parents were divorced, my mother now married to man who was younger than she was. "Mike will take care of me."

  After the radiation, my mother was given chemotherapy. Every three weeks she'd lie in a reclining chair while drugs that destroyed every fast-growing cell in her body dripped into her

  veins. Her last treatment came the week before Thanksgiving. My husband, Ken, and I flew back to spend the holiday with her.

  We sat in her living room surrounded by my mother's collection of antique clocks—clocks that chimed the hour several minutes apart, so that I always felt that time itself was forced to wait until the last clock had caught up. My mother's scalp was covered with soft down like a baby duck's, and she'd lost the thick black eyebrows that made her look like herself. Her skin had a greenish cast, made greener by the pale pink lipstick she liked to wear.

  "It was hell," she told us. "I don't care what happens, I'm never going through that again."

  But two years later, when the cancer metastasized to her liver, she agreed to try an experimental high-dose chemotherapy.

  When my mother's cancer returned, undeterred by the radiation and chemicals the rest of her body couldn't tolerate, I began to believe that I would be next. At least once a week, I'd check my own breasts, lying flat on the floor because I thought it would make it easier to detect the lump I knew was hiding under my skin like a small time bomb. Moving my fingers in the tight spiral shape I'd learned from the "Guide to Breast Self-Exam" enclosed in a package of panty hose, I'd hold my breath until I'd reached the last spiral.

  "I'm thinking about having a mastectomy," I told my mother on the phone.

  "Whatever for?" she asked.

  "I'm afraid this is going to happen to me."

  "I did not give you breast cancer," she said, and hung up.

  Not long after, I stood in line at the supermarket behind a woman with boxes of apple juice and a little boy in her cart. As the woman waited for the cashier to ring up shampoo that wouldn't cause tears and packages of fruit leather, she ran her fingers up and down the back of the boy's Winnie-the-Pooh sweatshirt. I watched her brush the fuzzed fabric and thought

  16 THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW

  that her life must be filled with the touch of soft things: flannel pajamas and stuffed bears, well-washed blankets and the little boy's skin. Running my fingers along the sleeve of my sweater, I tried to imagine what that would be like.

  As my mother lost the ability to walk—from the cancer or the chemotherapy, nobody seemed to know which—I began to wonder what it would feel like to be pregnant. I imagined myself huge and round, so fertile I could make fruit and flowers spring out of the ground just by walking over it. Pregnancy seemed the antithesis of cancer; another condition that caused cells to multiply and divide, but with an entirely opposite result.

  When the experimental chemotherapy did not slow the cancer in my mother's liver, I called and told her I wanted to visit.

  "This isn't a good time," she said. "The house is a mess. I've got a woman here taking care of me. There's really no room for you."

  And I let her talk me out of coming, afraid that if I saw her I would have to tell her about wanting a baby.

  The one time I'd gotten pregnant, my mother had slapped my face. I was twenty-one years old and had forgotten to use my diaphragm.

  "We could get married," my boyfriend told me. He was thirty-three and had been married before.

  "I don't think so," I said, not realizing until he'd asked that I didn't want to marry him. "Besides, I don't want children."

  On a bright morning, he drove me to a clinic near the Bronx Zoo, where they performed so many abortions the preop counseling was done in groups of five.

  Two weeks later, I woke in the middle of the night with stomach cramps and threw up on the floor.

  It took nearly two months for the doctors to discover that I was still pregnant, the fetus trapped inside one of my fallopian tubes, rupturing it every time it tried to grow. They put me in the hospital two days before Christmas and scheduled me for surgery.

  The night before the operation, a fireman dressed as Santa Claus came into my room and gave me a candy cane and a handful of Hershey's kisses. Later, the doctor came by to explain that he would have to remove the damaged tube.

  "As long as you're in there," I told him, "tie the other one."

  The doctor stared at me, sucking on the chocolate kiss I'd given him.

  "I'm not planning on having children. Ever."

  "That's not a decision you should make right now."

  And when the surgery was over, I still had one untied tube.

  After the operation, I moved back into my old bedroom. I told my mother I'd had the surgery to remove a cyst.

  A few weeks later, a bill from the anesthesiologist arrived and she opened it. At the bottom of the page, under diagnosis, someone had typed "tubal pregnancy." My mother read the words and slapped my face. She said it was for not telling her the surgery had been so complicated, for not letting her know that I might have died. I told her people rarely died from having a fallopian tube removed, but she only looked as if she wanted to slap me again.

  "I'm so glad you don't want to have children," my mother would say after that. "It's too risky for you." And I didn't argue with her, though I knew that women who'd had tubal pregnancies also had babies every day.

  While my mother waited to hear if she'd be a candidate for a bone-marrow transplant, I sent her small gifts. Bath oil scented with lavender, a wooden roller etched with tight grooves to massage her feet, books on tape with stories where nobody died. One day, I sent her a
tape about cancer patients who had cured themselves using meditation. It was called, "How to Be an Exceptional Patient."

  "Why did you send this to me?" my mother shouted into the phone. "I don't want to be an exceptional patient, I want to be left alone." And she hung up before I could say anything.

  The only time my mother had ever walked me to school was

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  the first day of kindergarten. I remember shiny black plastic shoes reflecting red and yellow leaves, a pear in a brown paper bag with my name printed on it, the feel of her bigger hand wrapped around mine. When school was over, I ran outside, searching for her among the mothers standing outside the chain-link fence.

  "It's only two blocks," she said, when I got home, my plastic shoes already cracking across the toes. "You know the way."

  The summer I was ten, my father would take my brothers and me waterskiing on a small lake that smelled of oil and gas from the boat engines. We were each allowed to bring a friend, and every Saturday, six kids and my tall black-haired father would take turns skiing until our legs felt shaky and we'd swallowed so much lake water that it hurt to take a deep breath.

  My mother never came with us on those Saturdays. "A whole day on a boat with a bunch of kids?" she'd say, taking a pack of cigarettes and an instant iced tea out to a lounge chair in the backyard. "No, thanks." And she'd look at my father as though his wanting to spend the day with us revealed something embarrassing about him.

  I remember hearing my mother once say that she wished she'd never had children, but when I asked her about it, she sounded surprised.

  "That's impossible," she said, lighting a long, thin cigarette. "I couldn't wait for you to be born." And then she repeated the story she told me every year on my birthday.

  "When I went to the hospital to have you, it was still winter. The trees were bare and there was snow on the ground."