Little Failure

13. Sixty-nine Cents

Disney World, 1986. Father and son out for a spin. Mothers up and down Florida are locking up their daughters.

WHEN I TURN FOURTEEN, I lose my Russian accent. I can, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name of a Turkish politician. There are three things I want to do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understand that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl tell me that she likes me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of eating at McDonald’s often. Mama and Papa think that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street are things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate. Even my parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as only immigrants can be, cannot resist the iconic pull of Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.

And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation, two Russian families cram into a large used sedan and take I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other family — three members in all — mirror our own, except that their single offspring is a girl and they are, on the whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighs three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt grin that of a turn-of-the-last-century Jewish peddler scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney tickets are a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from Moscow?” the time-share salesman asks, appraising the polyester cut of my father’s jib.

“Leningrad.”

“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”

“Yes, mechanical engineer … Eh, please Disney tickets now.”

The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach is my real naturalization ceremony. I want all of it — the palm trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions, the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit availability of relations with amoral women. I can see myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I will have to wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends features army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach evolved enough to wave what looks like a fist at us. Scared out of Miami Beach, we decamp for Fort Lauderdale, where a Yugoslav woman shelters us in a faded motel, beach adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We always seem to be at the margins of places: the driveway of the Fontainebleau Hilton or the glassed-in elevator leading to a rooftop restaurant where we can momentarily peek over the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign at the endless ocean below, the Old World we have left behind so far and yet deceptively near.

To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel is an unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives. My father lies magnificently beneath the sun in his red-and-black-striped imitation Speedo while I stalk down the beach, past baking midwestern girls, my keloid scar, my secret sharer, radiating beneath an extra-large Band-Aid. Oh, hi there. The words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an acquisition, perch between my lips, but to walk up to one of these girls and say something so casual requires a deep rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint and freckled face. Back at the motel, the Star Trek reruns loop endlessly on channel 73 or 31 or some other prime number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar to me than our own.

On the drive back to New York, I plug myself firmly into my Sanyo AM/FM Stereo Cassette Player with Headphones and Anti-Rolling Mechanism, hoping to forget our vacation. Sometime after the palm trees run out, somewhere in southern Georgia, we stop at a McDonald’s. I can already taste it: The sixty-nine-cent hamburger. The ketchup, red and decadent, embedded with little flecks of grated onion. The uplift of the pickle slices; the obliterating rush of fresh Coca-Cola; the soda tingle at the back of the throat signifying that the act is complete. I run into the meat-fumigated coldness of the magical place, the larger Russians following behind me, lugging something big and red. It is a cooler, packed, before we left the motel, by the other mother, the kindly, round-faced equivalent of my own mother. She has prepared a full Russian lunch for us. Soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tinfoil; vinegret, the Russian beet salad, overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken served between crisp white furrows of a bulka. “But it’s not allowed,” I plead. “We have to buy the food here.”

I feel coldness, not the air-conditioned chill of southern Georgia, but the coldness of a body understanding the ramifications of its own demise, the pointlessness of it all. I sit down at a table as far away from my parents and their friends as possible. I watch the spectacle of the newly tanned resident aliens eating their ethnic meal — jowls working, jowls working — the soft-boiled eggs that quiver lightly as they are brought to the mouth; the girl, my coeval, sullen like me but with a hint of pliant equanimity; her parents, dishing out the chunks of beet with plastic spoons; my parents, getting up to use free McDonald’s napkins and straws while American motorists with their noisy tow-headed children buy themselves the happiest of meals.

My parents laugh at my haughtiness. Sitting there hungry and all alone — what a strange man I am becoming! So unlike them. My pockets are filled with several quarters and dimes, enough for a hamburger and a small Coke. I consider the possibility of redeeming my own dignity, of leaving behind our beet-salad heritage. My parents don’t spend money, because they live with the idea that disaster is close at hand, that a liver-function test will come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they will be fired from their jobs because their English does not suffice. Seven years in America, and we are still representatives of a shadow society, cowering under a cloud of bad tidings that will never come. The silver coins stay in my pocket, the anger burrows and expands into some future ulcer. I am my parents’ son.

But not entirely. The next summer, my mother announces that we will be going to Cape Cod. Aware of the beet-salad connotations of any journey with my mother, I ask her if we will be staying at a fine hotel like the Days Inn or maybe even the storied Holiday Inn. If not, if it’s some kind of Russian hut with a do-it-yourself cottage-cheese station, then I do not wish to go. I can just picture walking down to the beach where all the young ladies are from decent resorts with ice machines, and me, already with my unattractiveness trailing some kind of sad buckwheat odor in from breakfast. I do not want to be both poor and Russian in front of people my age for ten entire days. I want a vacation from Hebrew School, not an immersion into Gentile School. This summer I am ready to say, Oh, hi there.

“Better than Holiday Inn,” my mother says. “I think it’s called Hilton.”

I sit down hard on a copy of the National Review. But how could it be, Hilton? What about baby steps? First the Motel 6, then the Motel 7, then a few years down the road, Hilton.

We arrive on the balmy Massachusetts cape in late June. Our accommodation is a ramshackle Russian dacha, several stories of grime and peeling wallpaper, a toilet that should not really be indoors, a dinner setting of aging Odessa somnambulists shuffling down for shchi, cold summer sauerkraut soup. Am I forgetting something? Beet salad? You bet.

“What?” my mother says. “It’s almost like the Hilton.”

And then it occurs to me: If to my father I am an object of love-hate, both a best friend and an adversary, to my mother I am not even a person.

It’s more than a realization on my part; it’s a realignment. My mother is from a country of lies, and I am still one of its citizens. She can lie to me at will. She can lie to me without even using her imagination. And whatever comes out of her mouth I am supposed to accept as truth, as Doubleplusgood. No, I can never trust her again. As I fume alongside the beach, and tanned kids my age gather beneath the magnificent steps of some middle-class hotel that lets out directly onto the shore — ours is up a highway — I formulate my first act of rebellion.

The next day I pack two gigantic garbage bags with my summer clothes and my Isaac Asimovs. I tell my father to drive me to the Peter Pan bus station. I cannot remember most of the fight that takes place between me and my mother as I announce my leave-taking, except for the fact that she does not retreat one centimeter, does not even acknowledge that the Sauerkraut Arms is not the Hilton. “What’s the difference between the two?” she shouts. “Show me one difference!” It is a frightening fight, with my mother’s harshest words and her silent treatment somehow woven into one. But it’s an important fight, too. I stand my ground. I will not be lied to.

“I’d like to see you live alone at home!” my mother says. “I’d like to see you starve.”

“I have fifty-three dollars,” I say.

And so my father, my partner in this particular crime, wheels me over to the bus station with my two garbage bags full of clothes and books. He kisses me on both cheeks. He looks me in the eye. “Bud’ zdorov, synok,” he says. Be well, little son. And then a sly but respectful wink. He knows I have triumphed over her.

Only what have I done? The scenery is scrolling past me, the bridges and woods of New England giving way to the grilled-cheese patty-melt of a New York City summer. I am alone in the Peter Pan, surrounded by American adults and their Walkmans. All alone, but what else? Emancipated, liberated, giddy, with fifty-three dollars in allowance money to last me one and a half weeks.

At the Port Authority, I scramble past the subway turnstile with my two garbage bags. By the time I reach eastern Queens, two hours and many subway trains later, one of them breaks. (Our family is not the kind to use Hefty and other premier-class bags.) I try to tie off the hole in the bag with my hands, but you have to be very handy to do this successfully, and I am, no point denying it, a mama’s boy, unable to perform basic tasks. I take some of the clothes out of the distressed garbage bag and wear them in layers around me, tying several T-shirts around my neck. Not wanting to spend an extra token, I trudge the last segment to our garden apartment on foot, sweating for about five miles in the early summer heat beneath many layers of clothing as I drag my one and a half garbage bags behind me.

I run down to the Waldbaum’s supermarket and invest in forty dollars’ worth of Swanson Hungry-Man TV dinners, a half-dozen full-sized bags of Doritos, which my family never eats (my parents call them rvota, or “vomit”), and several fun-sized bottles of Coke. There isn’t a McDonald’s within striking distance, and I do not wish to try my luck with the Burger King, where I believe the basic hamburger is costlier and inauthentic.

Back home, I take my clothes off down to my underwear and turn on the television for 240 hours. Mama, what have I done to you? I cry as the morning news turns into the nightly news and a comic show about an inventive orphaned child named Punky Brewster takes up some of the time in between. How could I have run away from you like that? Am I really any better now than this motherless Punky?

My father calls from Cape Cod to check up on me.

“Could you put Mama on?” I ask.

“She doesn’t want to speak to you.”

And I know what will happen when she returns, at least a month of silence, of doing a little whinny with her head whenever I so much as come into her line of vision, and sometimes even pushing away the air in front of her with her palm as if to signify that I am no longer welcome to share the earth’s atmosphere with her.

But one day, deep within my ten-day escape, all alone with my science fiction and my forbidden Doritos, my ass sore from sitting on the scruffy couch for so long, my eyes television red, my mind television numb, my fifty-three-dollar capitalization reduced to a pocketful of quarters, I think to myself: This is not so bad.

It’s actually kind of good.

It’s actually kind of perfect.

Maybe this is who I really am.

Not a loner, exactly.

But someone who can be alone.