Little Failure

12. Immortality

The author poses as the popular music singer Billy Idol on the toilet of his family’s upstate bungalow. Puberty is coming, and the author is about to get chubby.

THE SUMMER OF 1985. I am about to become a man according to Jewish tradition. As in the past few summers, my family is staying in a Russian bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. The colony consists of a dozen sunburned wooden cottages squeezed in between some unimpressive hills and a daunting forest-and-brook combination that to kids from Queens might as well be the Amazon. During the workweek it is just our grandmas and their charges (a few grandpas have survived World War II to play competitive chess beneath the easygoing American sun), our lives revolving around the intermittent delivery of stale baked goods from the back of a station wagon. “Bread! Cakes!” an unhappy middle-aged local woman yells at us, and the grandmothers and kids jostle for a week-old raspberry Danish on sale for a quarter that tastes as good as anything we have ever known. (I clutch my change so tight it makes treads in my palms.) Otherwise, we children play The Fool, a Russian card game requiring little skill, and launch shuttlecocks into the air with our defective badminton rackets, not really caring whether they come down or not, because we are relaxed and happy and among our own kind.

My grandmother is always in the background, chewing an apricot down to its pit, her eyes firmly affixed on my once-skinny and now-somewhat-flabby body. She is making sure nothing and no one will cause me harm. The other kids have similar minders, women who grew up under Stalin whose entire lives in the USSR were devoted to crisis management, to making sure the arbitrary world around them would treat their children better than it had treated them. These days my grandmother is talking about going to “the next world,” and that Bar Mitzvah summer, having passed a milestone of my own, I begin to see her as an older woman in decline, the shaking hands clutching the apricot pit, the trembling voice as she begs me to swallow another forkful of sausage. She is a figure as anxious and helpless before eternity as any other. Maybe this is what America does to you. With the daily fight for survival abated, one can either reminisce about the past or face the singular destiny of the future. For all her talk of the paradise to come, my grandmother does not want to die.

On weekends our parents come up to visit from the city, and on Friday nights we kids sit at a picnic table by the quiet country road running past our bungalows, alert as terriers for the difficult sounds our fathers’ secondhand cars make. I remember my first love of that year — not a girl, but the gleaming new Mitsubishi Tredia-S sedan that my parents have bought, a boxy little number known mostly for its fuel efficiency. The beige front-wheel-drive Tredia-S is proof positive that we are ascending to the middle class, and whenever my father and I are out on the road I rejoice upon seeing the more basic Tredia model (the one without the S).

My father is at the apex of middle age, a deeply physical man who feasts with great emphasis upon entire garlic cloves on hunks of black bread and, with his small, tough physique, best resembles a cherry tomato. He lives for fishing. Each year he plucks hundreds, if not thousands, of fish out of streams, lakes, and oceans with his fishing stick and a chilling competence. He single-handedly empties out a lake near Middletown, New York, leaving behind just a small school of dazed, orphaned crappies. Compared with my father I am nothing. The Bar Mitzvah may soon make me a man, but when we enter the forbidding grasshopper-ridden forest by the bungalow colony, and he reaches into the ground with his bare hands to sift for the juiciest worms, I feel coursing through me the Russian word for “weak”—slabyi, an adjective that from my father’s mouth reduces me to near zero.

“Akh, ty, slabyi.” Eh, you, weakling.

When we aren’t fishing, we entertain ourselves at humble cinemas in towns with names like Liberty and Ellenville. The movie of the summer is Cocoon. Its premise: Aliens, Antareans to be exact, descend upon southern Florida to offer eternal life to a group of nursing-home residents, played by the likes of Wilford Brimley and Don Ameche. At this point in my life, Hollywood can sell me anything — from Daryl Hannah as a mermaid to Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and Al Pacino as a rather violent Cuban émigré. Watching movies in the air-conditioned chill I find myself wholly immersed and in love with everything that passes the camera lens. I feel close to my father, removed from the difficulties of worm gathering while being attacked by aggressive grasshoppers, free of my constant fear of getting my thumb impaled by one of the gigantic rusty hooks with which he terrorizes the local trout. At the movie theater my father and I are essentially two immigrant men — one smaller than the other and yet to be swaddled by a thick carpet of body hair — sitting before the canned spectacle of our new homeland, silent, attentive, enthralled.

Cocoon has everything I want from a movie. Here is the geriatric Don Ameche break-dancing after being energized by the aliens’ fountain of youth, while back at our bungalow colony my grandmother and her fellow senior citizens mull over the price of farmer’s cheese. Here are Floridian palm trees, ocean breezes, and Tahnee Welch — daughter of Raquel — taking off her clothes while Steve Guttenberg, playing essentially himself, peeks through a peephole. I have never seen a woman as easily beautiful, as effortlessly tanned and New World lovely, as Ms. Welch the Younger. The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.

The theme of the movie is immortality. “We’ll never be sick,” the Wilford Brimley character tells his grandson before the aliens beam him up. “We won’t get any older. And we’ll never die.” As he speaks, Mr. Brimley’s character is casting a fishing line into the Atlantic Ocean while his worried grandson looks on, a sliver of a boy next to a fully formed, famously mustached mastodon of a man. As my father guides the Mitsubishi Tredia-S beneath the bright rural canopy of stars on our way home, our sedan redolent of dead fish, live worms, and male sweat, I wonder why Wilford Brimley doesn’t take his grandson with him to Antarea. Wouldn’t that mean that he would eventually outlive his grandson? Are some of us destined for a flicker of physical existence while others explode like supernovas across the cold mountain sky? If so, where is the American fairness in that? That night, as my father’s healthy snores rumble in the bed next to mine and my grandmother wanders in and out of the bathroom, sighing to the depth of her ample, peasant bosom, I consider in great detail both the nothingness to which we will all eventually succumb and its very opposite, the backside of Tahnee Welch partly shrouded in a pair of white summer shorts. I want Wilford Brimley to be my grandpa, and I want him to die. I keep thinking of what he tells his slabyi obsessive little grandson at the start of the film: “The trouble with you is you think too much and that’s when a guy gets scared.”

Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony lies near the village of Ellenville, not far from the old Jewish Borscht Belt hotels. It sits on the slope of a hill, beneath which there is a circular hayfield that belongs to a rabidly anti-Semitic Polish man who will hunt us down with his German shepherd if we go near, or so our grandmothers tell us. We share our meandering country road with a fading hotel named the Tamarack Lodge and a settlement of free-range Hasids who descend on our bungalows with their prayer books and forelocks, trying to induct us Russians into their hirsute ways. My mother and I sneak into the nearby Tamarack Lodge, where Eddie Fisher and Buddy Hackett once shared a stage, to witness giant, tanned American Jews lying belly up next to an Olympic-sized outdoor pool or sleepwalking to the auditorium in bedroom slippers to watch Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer. After one showing we are herded into a dining room where the American Jews are served their meals — grilled chicken breasts and ice-cold Cokes! — and when the waiter comes up to ask for our room number my mother blurts out “Room 431.” Mama and I wolf down our purloined chicken breasts and make a run for it.

Back at Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony, we survive without Neil Diamond, and the pool can fit maybe a half-dozen small Russian children at a time. Ann Mason, the proprietor, is an old Yiddish-spouting behemoth with three muumuus to her wardrobe. The children (there are about ten of us, from Leningrad, Kiev, Kishinev, and Vilnius) adore Ann Mason’s husband, a ridiculous, potbellied, red-bearded runt named Marvin, an avid reader of the Sunday funny papers whose fly is always open and whose favorite phrase is “Everybody in the pool!” When Ann Mason cuts enough coupons, she and Marvin take some of us to the Ponderosa Steakhouse for T-bones and mashed potatoes. The all-you-can-eat salad bar is the nexus of capitalism and gluttony we’ve all been waiting for.

These Russian children are as close as I have come to compatriots. I look forward to being with them all year. There is no doubt that several of the girls are maturing into incomparable beauties, their tiny faces acquiring a round Eurasian cast, slim-hipped tomboyish bodies growing soft here and sometimes there. But what I love most are the sounds of our hoarse, excited voices. The Russian nouns lacing the barrage of English verbs, or vice versa (“Babushka, oni poshli shopping vmeste v ellenvilli”—“Grandma, they went shopping together in Ellenville”).

Fresh from my success with the Gnorah, I decide to write the lyrics for a music album, popular American songs with a Russian inflection. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” becomes “Like a Sturgeon.” There are paeans to babushkas, to farmer’s cheese, to budding sexuality. We record these songs on a tape recorder I buy at a drugstore. For the album-cover photograph I pose as Bruce Springsteen on his Born in the U.S.A. album, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a red baseball cap sticking out of my back pocket. Several of the girls pose around my “Bruce” dressed like the singers Cyndi Lauper and Madonna with hopeful applications of mascara and lipstick. Born in the USSR is what we call the album. (I was bo-ho-rn down in-uh Le-nin-grad … wore a big fur shapka on my head, yeah …)

As soon as our parents roll in from their jobs in the city, the men take off their shirts and point their hairy chests at the sky; the women gather in the little bungalow kitchens to talk in low tones about their husbands. We kids cram into a tiny station wagon and head for one of the nearest towns where, along with a growing Hasidic population, there is a theater that shows last summer’s movies for two dollars (giant bag of popcorn with fake butter — fifty cents). On the return trip to Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony, sitting on each other’s laps, we discuss the finer points of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I wonder aloud why the film never ventured into outer space, never revealed to us the wrinkled fellow’s planet, his birthplace and true home.

We continue our discussion into the night, the stars lighting up the bull’s-eye of the anti-Semitic hayfield. Tomorrow, a long stretch of noncompetitive badminton. The day after that, Marvin will bring out the funny papers, and we will laugh at Beetle Bailey and Garfield, not always knowing why we’re laughing. It’s something like happiness, the not knowing why.

The girl I love is named Natasha. I understand there is a cartoon show with characters Boris and Natasha, which makes fun of Russians, and at SSSQ I would never be seen with a person so named. The only girl to go out with me for the school dance is a former Muscovite named Irina,^* and although a part of me understands that she is a slim, attractive girl, far prettier than most of the native-born or the Israelis, most of me is upset that she is not the former or at least the latter. Up in the bungalow colony, such considerations are not valid. We are all the same, and we treat one another with surprising gentleness.

On the other hand, I am not pretty. My body and face are changing, and not for the better. Grandma’s feedings combined with puberty have given me what steroid-using bodybuilders call “bitch tits,” and these tits are straining at the already tight T-shirts donated by the SSSQ secretarial staff. Along my right shoulder there is the result of a Soviet inoculation gone terribly wrong: a giant, flesh-colored keloid scar over which I wear a king’s ransom of Band-Aids. My face, once boyish and pleasant, is acquiring adult features that make little sense. Hair everywhere, my nose beginning to hook; my father has started calling me gubastyi, or “big lips,” and some days he grabs me by the chin and says, “Akh, ty, zhidovskaya morda.” Eh, you, Yid-face. In his Planet of the Yids stories, being a clever Jew is good, but here I sense that he is referring to the less pleasant attributes of our race. It is very confusing.

Here’s what isn’t confusing: Natasha is beautiful. Kind of like Tahnee Welch is beautiful in Cocoon. She even has the same short hairstyle that wonderfully exposes the slim architecture of her neck and eyes of blue that burn with pleasure as she gets ready to swing her badminton racket. She is boyish and athletic and is usually seen gliding through the Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony grounds with her brown boxer by her side. It is sad that I can no longer remember the boxer’s name, because once I knew it as surely as I know my own.

Natasha is sweet and kind and in full control of herself. She does not whine, she does not complain, and if there are insecurities about her place in the world, she deals with them elsewhere. When she somersaults or does a headstand in front of me, it is not to show off but because she is … happy? And when she’s standing on her hands, and her T-shirt succumbs to gravity, and I am looking at her tanned, brown, flat stomach, I am happy, too. She will never be my “girlfriend,” obviously, but she exists somewhere in the world, and that will be good enough until college.

By this stage everyone simply calls me Gnu (to my grandma: “Mozhet Gnu s nami poigraet?” May Gnu come out and play with us?), but Natasha always calls me Gary. I try to time my encounters with Natasha so that I am only playing every second game of badminton or Little Fool or Spit with her, but the children, especially since most of them are girls and hence smart, take notice. I am sitting at a green picnic table with Natasha, our calves touching for thirty-seven seconds (my mind: “thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, ah, she moved”), when one of the girls says, “Gnu likes Natasha.”

I start getting up, because killing myself will take some preparation, when Natasha says: “I like Gary, too. He’s my friend.” She then maneuvers one playing card on top of her pile and says to her slower adversary: “Spit!”

The cards fall on the table at great speed. And I am left with this duality. She likes me. Hence, I am likable. And not for this Gnu shit either. To her, I am Gary. But I am also her friend, and that statement is irrevocable as well.

What does it mean to love someone? At SSSQ, I am not allowed to be near the native-born girls, because I am of the dalit caste, untouchable, and my presence may pollute them. But at Ann Mason’s, as you have seen, I can touch my skinned knee to Natasha’s glowing one for thirty-seven seconds, and she will be my friend, if not more. One early summer day I am shielding myself from the sun beneath an oak tree, reading Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, sneezing from the rich American pollen and dreaming of distant allergen-free planets, when I encounter these lines in a story: “I stood up and hugged her to me in that humid darkness, running my hand along her thin back and then around to cup one little breast. ‘I love you, Jane,’ I said.” I close my eyes and picture a little bag of weight in my hand. Cup. You cup the little breast of a Jane. So this is love.

At home, there is love between my parents, and sometimes I can hear them loving each other. But love mostly means fighting. My mother has perfected the silent treatment to such an extent that she will not speak to my father for many days, sometimes weeks, even as they continue to share their mahogany full-sized bed together. When this happens, I serve as the emissary between them. My parents schedule meetings with me to air their grievances and to discuss the prospects for a razvod. And so I shuttle between them, sometimes allowing tears to strengthen my bid for them to stay together. “He apologizes, Mama. He will not fall under the influence of his wolfish relatives any longer.” “Papa, she knows she should not have been an hour late when you were picking her up, but suddenly there was extra typing at work and she wanted to earn overtime.”

Indeed, the most dangerous part of my day is when my father has to pick my mother up after work, after he has collected me from my grandma’s, so that we may all go back to distant Little Neck together in the Tredia. We wait for Mother near a subway station at the corner of Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard, not far from the Queens Criminal Court. There is a 1920s statue on that corner called Triumph of Civic Virtue: a naked, well-muscled man with a drawn sword is stepping on two bare-chested mermaids who symbolize corruption and vice. “Where is she? Suka tvoya mat’!” my father cries, because my bitch-mother is late, ten minutes, twenty, thirty, forty, an hour late. And with each gradation of lateness I know the fight will ratchet right up the razvod scale.

To pass the time, and stem his anger and my worry, Papa and I play a nervous version of hide-and-seek around the well-endowed, tight-assed Civic Virtue God and his vanquished mermaids, absorbing the sickening lessons in gender relations the statue so clearly presents. (In 2012, after much outcry, the Triumph of Civic Virtue was removed to a Brooklyn cemetery.)

Finally, my mother puffs out of the subway in her rabbit-fur coat, the one indulgence no Russian woman can do without, and we pack into the car, and the fighting begins.

Suka! Suka! Suka!

Go to the khui!

In front of the child she is cursing like this. How much did you send to your relatives?

Ne-tvoyo sobache delo. It is not your dog-business.

Then where were you, bitch?

My mother is sick! My mother is dying! Ah, you wolfish breed!

And then my father to me, quietly, but loud enough for her to hear in the backseat, Other men hit their wives. But I never hit her. And look what good it did.

And I am turning in to my window, leaning my head against the cold pane, as Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” from the nerd-musical Chess plays as loudly as it may on the car’s stereo. I picture an Asian girl beneath an enormous Thai stupa in some kind of silky native dress. I’m not sure what it means other than the urge to go somewhere else right now, to leap out of the car and run toward Kennedy Airport, which is not very far away.

One thing I know for certain is that my parents can never get a razvod. Why? Because we are the Family Shteyngart, population three, and with already such low numbers we are not supposed to be apart. Not to mention that maintaining two households will mean our living standards will erode, we will no longer be middle-middle class, and we might have to give up the Mitsubishi, which I have already pointed out to my unimpressed SSSQ classmates: “Behold! The Tredia-S.” And finally, if either of my parents was to remarry (unthinkable), their American spouses would look down on my keloid scar and borrowed Batman T-shirt, and I might end up with no family at all.

Sometimes I get angry. On the school bus back at SSSQ, I find an Israeli girl — some Shlomit or Osnat — whose star shines even less brightly than my own, and I make fun of her mercilessly. She has a mustache like my grandmother’s and a training bra. I slide into the seat next to her and make jokes about her need to wax her mustache with something called “turtle wax,” an insult that I’ve overheard from another bus mate and that seems like just the right kind of topical cruelty to use on this small, dark, friendly creature. I tease her about her training bra and what I can only imagine lies beneath it. What I can’t quite understand is that I have a crush on this girl precisely because she has a mustache just like my grandmother’s, which makes me want to hug her and tell her all of my troubles. The girl informs on me to Mrs. R, the kindly educator who helped me with my shoelaces and sang Troo-loo-loo-loo when I was in first grade. Mrs. R takes me aside on the bus line and tells me to stop bothering the girl. Mrs. R’s gentle opprobrium, much worse than her anger, makes me so ashamed I consider skipping the school bus and walking across Queens to my grandmother’s house. The truth is I don’t even understand what turtle wax is. The truth is that if those furry lips were to graze my own, I would not turn away.

I get angry even among the peaceable kingdom of Ann Mason’s Bungalow Colony. There is a new kid no one likes exactly. Straight out of Minsk or somewhere, scrawny, undernourished, weak, Belorussian. He is with his grandmother, and we don’t know the whereabouts of his parents. He looks like a younger version of my step-grandfather Ilya — the unhappy eyes, the Leninist forehead — and that makes me hate him even more. My favorite book of the summer of 1984 and the two subsequent summers is Nineteen Eighty-Four. I commit the passages in which O’Brien tortures Winston to memory. When the kid is alone staring sullenly at a comic book over a picnic table, I approach him. I sit down and begin to speak in measured tones. “Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

I slide over to the kid. He cowers before me, which I both love and hate. He is more slabyi than I am, which is good. But I am about to sing from my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion at the Congregation Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, which makes me — what? A man. What would a man do?

Before he can stop me, before I can stop me, I grab his hand. I hold up my left hand, thumb hidden, four fingers extended, just like in Orwell’s book. “How many fingers am I holding up, Vinston?”

He doesn’t understand me. Doesn’t understand my English. Doesn’t understand who is Vinston. I repeat in Russian. “Four,” he says finally, his whole little sardine body trembling.

“And if the Republican Party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”

“Four.”

I begin twisting his fingers. He cries out in pain. I am bearing down on him, hating this, hating this. “Pyat’!” he cries in Russian. “Five!”

Trying to keep back the welling tears in my own eyes: “No, Vinston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”

He breaks free and runs down the vast green lawn separating our bungalows. “Baaaaa-buuuuuu-shkaaaa!”

Later, out my bedroom window, I see his old babushka talking to mine, a stooped, tired, emaciated figure confiding to a thick, voracious, quasi-American one. Now I will be punished! Now I will be punished! I savor it. I did this terrible thing, and now I will be punished. I rush out to meet Grandma. She sighs and looks at me. She loves me so much. Why does she love me so much?

“That boy’s babushka says you hit him,” Grandma says.

“I didn’t hit him,” I say. “I read to him from a book.”

“Did he do something to you?”

“No.”

“My shining sun,” Grandmother says. “Whatever you did to him, I’m certain he deserved it.”

When Grandma leaves I go to the bedroom and weep over the monster I now am, but the next day I do the same thing. And then again. And again. How many fingers, Vinston? After a few weeks the boy leaves the bungalow colony for good.

The summer sun is down around eight-thirty. Grandma is already in bed and snoring with all her might. The country folk in the Russian novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov greet each nightfall with the phrase “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!” and something similar can be said of Grandma’s worldview. I quietly pour myself out past her bed and into the new night. The stars are constellating above, and the bungalow colony is quiet, but somewhere I hear girlish giggles and the scratchy warble of Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” on a no-brand radio. The children are out bathed in moonlight and they are so happy to see me. “Gnu! Gnu!”

“Shhh, Eva … You’ll wake Babushka.”

“You shhh.”

Natasha is sitting on an Adirondack chair, wearing her favorite green hooded sweatshirt, her boxer faithfully at her feet. “Come here, Gary,” she gestures at her lap. It is not manly to sit on top of a girl, I know, but we are roughly the same height, and I do want to feel her warmth so. The boxer looks up protectively as I sit on her lap, then lowers his frothy muzzle with disregard. Oh, it’s just him. Boy George is crooning: “I’m a man (a man) without conviction / I’m a man (a man) who doesn’t know.” Natasha leans forward, and I feel her cheek, still heated by the day’s sun, against my ear. “Gnu, tell a joke,” someone says. I want to lower my eyelids and be in this moment forever, but I understand what these children want of me. I tell the joke.

^* Curiously enough, she will become the novelist and essayist Irina Reyn. A graduating class of fewer than thirty Hebrew school children produced two writers, both of them from the USSR.