Laurie Boris's Blog, page 6

The Patriot

Anya didn’t remember much about her parents, and with each passing year, even those early memories began to fade into gossamer threads and dissolve. Occasionally she got flashes—a sturdy black umbrella, acrid hair dye in the sink, conversations hushed when Anya came into the room. Her mother’s sturdy heels clip-clopping ahead of her when she walked Anya to school. Warnings to be quiet in public, and never to interrupt her father when he was talking. He was a big important man in the government. This was about all she’d known about him.

Then one day he didn’t come home. Mama hid the newspapers. Scolded her when she found one and looked for news of her father.

“Where is Papa?” she asked one day, screwing up her courage. The explanations wavered, but always had the same conclusion: he was an important man selected by the president to do important work far away, and it would be unpatriotic to question why. That Anya was a lucky girl to have such a father; that as a girl she herself was not so lucky. She didn’t have a father at all.

Eventually Anya stopped asking after Papa. Mainly because it would make her mother cry. But she still had questions. Where did he go? What was he doing? If it was so important and patriotic, why couldn’t we know?

Later Anya would piece the clues together—but not until both of her parents were gone. Until there was nothing left of them but a medal in a red velvet box and a cold letter from the Russian government about “service” and “patriotism” and “honor.”

“It is all bullshit,” Bubbe said. One thunderstormy summer day while they shared tea at Anya’s kitchen table, not too long after they’d found each other. “Do you want to know what really happened?”

Anya wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Part of her wanted the fairy-tale history she’d crafted for herself to be smashed underfoot. Part of her wanted to cling to it like the lost child she sometimes felt herself to be. She thought of Gloria Steinam, whom she’d studied in her History of American Feminism class. Ms. Steinam had said, “The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.”

Maybe she was ready for the anger. Ready for that arrow of truth to find a target other than the tender heart she’d been protecting. She turned to her grandmother. Bubbe pressed a cool, bony hand over hers and met her gaze. Bubbe’s dark brown eyes, surrounded by crinkles, were often tough to read. But not now. Now there was pain. Anya withdrew her hand, busied herself with cutting the banana bread. “You don’t have to tell me.” Before she knew it, Anya had sliced up the entire loaf.

“It is your parents, it is your choice,” Bubbe finally said, with a little mouth-shrug at the end. She took up a slice of banana bread and nibbled. “Is good,” she said. “Whoever first decided to put walnut and banana together was a genius.”

“Most of those good things started out as a mistake,” Anya said, thinking of something she’d learned in a different class. But then the deeper meaning of what she’d said sliced through her—Mama saying, “I was not so lucky.”

“Bubbe…I didn’t mean—”

“Meh. What’s done is done and we make do. We are lucky to be here. Putin khuylo.”

The first time Anya had heard those words, she’d been horrified. From her brief time in Russia, she remembered the pictures of the president everywhere. And the people who worshipped him—or at least pretended that they did. A long-forgotten overheard argument came back to her. Papa’s scolding words, Mama crying. Saying through her tears that he could be arrested for what he was doing.

But what was he doing?

“Tell me,” Anya said.

“You are sure?”

“No,” she whispered. “Yes. Please.”

Bubbe sat back in her chair. “Well. Your mother”—she almost spat the word—“was a good and obedient Russian girl.”

Anya knew that. Very often Bubbe would talk about “your Russian mother” as if “Russian” was a curse. But to Bubbe, it must have felt that way, after what Russia did to Ukraine. “And my father?”

“Obedient—at first. In fact, he was one of the most loyal dogs at that bastard’s table.”

Anya’s brows rose. “At first?”

“Until he wasn’t.”

Anya gulped, said in a small voice, “And then they killed him.”

Bubbe let out a long breath. “You lie down with dogs such as those, when you get up you should stay away from open windows.”

The Wayback Machine

Some of you know that I used to write for PNN, a now-defunct blogging website for women. My column, “Mind, Body, Spirit,” was a wonderful, supportive outlet when I needed one. When word came down that it was going belly up, we all had an opportunity to grab our posts before the witching hour. I didn’t bother. Part of me didn’t want to keep that old stuff, didn’t want to go back there.

What I cherished from that time was the sisterhood of my PNN bloggers. We’ve kept in touch, even got together in fits and starts over the years. On FB this morning, one of our members (I’m looking at you, Beth Rose) wrote that her son found her old posts using Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/).

Then I got feeling all brave and tried to see if mine were still there.

Yep. Still there. I’m sharing one of my favorites from 2010. The technological world has changed since I wrote this post, but the basic concepts still hold up. And that makes me kinda sad. But I have hope for today’s young women, that they’ll never let some bullshit corporate standard of “beauty” make them feel bad about themselves.

Here we go…

Problem Areas

Okay, I finally figured out. It took me a few decades, but all of these fashion and beauty magazines–I’ve got their numbers.

They want me to feel bad about myself.

Not so bad that I’ll seal myself in a cave for the rest of my life, quietly whimpering myself to sleep each night, but bad enough that, once I put down the latest issue, I’ll high-tail it to the nearest mall with my credit card and buy out half of their inventory. Bad enough so I will own eighteen different lipsticks, because I’m never quite sure if they look good on me, and they never look as good in my bathroom mirror as they do in the store. Bad enough so I’ll never know if curves are in or out, if I should strive for the natural look or the Lady Gaga look, strut about on heels or be comfortable in flats, and forever be insecure.

They want me to feel bad about my hair so I’ll purchase, use, and repurchase the products advertised in the magazine. Then continue buying the magazine so I can rip out pictures of Jennifer Aniston or Meg Ryan or whatever other big star is having a good hair month and bring that unattainable hairstyle to my stylist to endure her rip-snorting guffaws because never in a million years will I look like Meg Ryan. Meg Ryan doesn’t even look like Meg Ryan.

They want me to feel so bad about my body that I’ll divvy up my various quadrants like those dotted lines on a USDA diagram of a cow, and identify which represent “problem areas.” These problem areas need very careful management, by a whole committee of beauty specialists. I need to choose fashions, makeup and hairstyles that minimize these areas by calling attention to other areas. I need to do ridiculously gymnastic “spot toning” exercises using a variety of plastic balls, best done in expensive exercise gear against a tropical backdrop decorated with other pretty gym people.

And once I have, through careful geometry, muscle flexing, and tricks of shadow and light, eliminated or disguised all of my problem areas, I’m still not good enough, according to them. Because somebody high up in the fashion world decides that every season a new (and I imagine, randomly chosen) color palette shall rule, and every season, hemlines, bust lines, and bikini lines change, none of which are flattering on a woman over twenty-five. Even the editorial urges me to purge–my closet, that is. (Don’t even get me started on diets.) To help me winnow my unworn wardrobe, I am to discard everything that I have not worn over one years’ time.

Of course they only have my best interests at heart. They, and their advertisers’.

I bought these magazines as a teenager, poring over the pages as if they were the gospel of how to be perfect, pretty, popular, poreless, perky, and altogether pulchritudinous. And the messages stuck. Even though I no longer wear makeup, dye my hair, care about fashion, or even want to look like Meg Ryan, there’s still a little part of me that wants to be beautiful.

Or whatever the high-ups in the fashion world decide is beautiful that month.

Maybe that’s why I still buy fashion magazines. I’m addicted to those early messages. I tell myself that I buy them for the interviews, but come on. I’m only fooling myself. It’s for that first hit of crack, the glare from the shiny pages filled with shiny women with shiny hair. It’s for that not-so-subtle promise that yes, it is possible for me to look like the girl in the photo spread, but only if I follow their directives and buy a subscription.

First one’s free…

Prodigal Son

Something else I’ve been working on lately…

Ma was a wreck at the service. You get it, they’ve been married forever, and you’ve seen it in the pictures, and other funerals, but you never thought your own mother would act that way. Wailing how she should have gone first, wanting to throw herself into the open grave. It took you and two of Pop’s guys to stop her. On the way back to the house to sit shiva, you tell Lola you should have let the doctor give her something. She nods, says she tried. Later you find out that Ma called her a golddigger and slapped her face. But your Lola, she’s so great that day. Always at your elbow, all perfumed and sophisticated, smoothing things over, thanking everyone for coming. It’s smart of her, because you can barely think straight, and you’re grateful. You’ll buy her something from Tiffany’s to show her how much. Maybe she’ll be marriage material after all, despite what Ma thinks. You daydream how you’ll propose, all romantic-like, but it isn’t the right time to think that out. Herschel and Moishe want to talk. You throw down a glass of bootleg scotch—only the best for Pop—and take them into a quiet room upstairs. Yeah, Pop is gone, but business is business. Guys need direction. A show of strength. One thing you’d learned from Pop is not to leave a vacuum. It only invites trouble. Later, you’ll do something for him. Maybe give to that charity that grows trees in Jewish Palestine or feeds hungry kids. But today is for thinking about tomorrow. If only you’d had more time to learn from him the kind of guts that tomorrow would take.

The Farm

None who took refuge at the small family farm in Poland would do so without a contribution. Yulia offered to milk the cows. She knew how, from summers spent at her grandfather’s dairy outside Cherkasy, and she welcomed the relative peace and quiet after the tumult of humanity that brought her there.

Cows knew how to keep secrets.

On her second day, as she trundled from the barn carrying two milk pails, a blue-eyed farmhand barely old enough to shave eased up next to her. “May I help you with this?” he asked.

Yulia blew out a steady breath. At home, before the invasion, she might have laughed at a man who’d made such an offer. She was certainly strong enough to bear the weight. But this was not her country; it was not her farm. And he was not a Russian soldier. He was just a nice young Polish man who wanted to make the disruption in her life easier. But she could not make that last fact stick. “Is this what they tell you about us? That Ukrainian women are such fragile things?”

She could almost feel the heat radiating off his blushing face. “No… I mean… They say you’ve…” He sighed, studied his boots for a moment, lifted his head. “I would just like to help.”

“Fine.” She held out one of the buckets like a trophy. “You can help.”

His name was Anatol, and he met her coming from the barn the next afternoon, and the next, and the next. Days became a week, then two, and she’d merely give him a smile of thanks, which he returned. That afternoon while taking the bucket he held her gaze long enough for even the cows to guess his growing fondness for her. Despite the swell of her abdomen. Despite the borrowed ring on her finger. She didn’t want more trouble. Didn’t want more blood on her hands—Russian or otherwise. Her fingers clenched white around the handle of the bucket she was still holding. She could still picture the man’s face. That smug, amused expression, despite the gun she’d pulled from under her bedroll. Before all went silent, and she’d had to push the weight of him off her and flee.

He is not that man. She had to keep repeating it to herself. Just a nice young Polish farmhand who wants to help. He has a name and a family and he is not that man. She repeated it all the way back from the barn.

When the milk was safely stowed, Anatol leaned against a brick wall and dabbed the sweat from his forehead with a soiled bandana. For a moment he appeared to be thinking about offering it to her, then reconsidered, stuffing it into his back pocket. He crossed his arms over his chest. “So… I hear from the others that some are returning to Kyiv, now that soldiers are withdrawing from there.” He paused. “Will you go?”

The final three words stopped her thoughts. A sudden melancholia overtook her, and she pressed a hand to her belly. What would she and this little one be returning to? A basement apartment buried in rubble? An art school that was now a tomb? And the ghosts. So many ghosts.

“Yulia?”

“Yes? What?” She shook the ghosts away, the place where the man’s smug face had been.

“Will you go?”

His tone was small, plaintive. It was clear to her now. If she left he would miss her. If she stayed? She feared for him. That he’d get too close to the hand grenade she’d become, and explode.

Not Your Grandfather’s Immigration Stories

So, there’s this cool new site called Shepherd that asks authors to create book recommendation lists…and they asked me to participate! Here’s my list in Shepherd, just out today. I hope you’ll give it a look, and explore the rest of their site. Peace to you all.

Forgiveness

Her grandmother’s stories about the drawing of the shirtless man with the fire in his eyes didn’t add up. But every time Anya pressed for details, she would either wave it off as ancient history or pretend she didn’t remember.

Didn’t remember? Anya was aghast. How could a woman forget such a man! One that she’d obviously had such strong feelings for—passion in the blazes of charcoal, hatred in what could only be a bullet hole singed into the center of the page (it was too big for a cigarette burn). Her grandmother didn’t smoke but did have a formidable pistol, a relic from the war, and she was quite proud of it. Yet…if she had such fury for this man that she’d use his image for target practice, why save what remained?

Many nights, when she was weary from her studies but too agitated to sleep, Anya pondered her grandmother’s mysteries. The break in the timeline of her life between bohemian art teacher in Kyiv to shuffling babushka bringing day-old bread and yellow blooms standing in for sunflowers. “Someday, you will tell me,” Anya often said, and her grandmother would give her that same secret smile.

That afternoon, Anya promised herself not to be so easily dismissed. She set a fine little teatime table for the two of them, at its center an apple tart she’d just warmed in the oven, and after the mealtime blessing, she was thinking of how to start the conversation.

“This is nice,” Grandma said, pointing to the plate with her fork. “And you made it yourself? Apples from that tree out back?”

Anya blushed. The lot behind her building was private property, but she’d never seen any interest in the fruit other than the woodchucks and rabbits enjoying whatever fell within their reach, so what was the harm in picking a few? Or at least she’d told herself that at the time.

“Y-yes, I made it. But I should have asked first.”

Grandma gave a tired smile, a press of her cool hand across Anya’s. “Tateleh. Unless you are taking from those hungrier than you, there is no need for shame. And I know, it is far more tempting to hope for forgiveness than ask for permission.”

In her grandmother’s weary eyes, Anya guessed at some of her history. Of a woman who did what she normally wouldn’t in the name of survival. Of the permissions she hadn’t asked, of the forgiveness she hadn’t or wasn’t granted.

“Eh, if it still weighs on you, make him one of these with the fruit. He would be foolish not to forgive you.”

“Grandma, tell me about the man.”

“What, your neighbor there? We’ve never met.”

“Ugh. No! The man in the portrait.”

Grandma studied a bite of tart on her plate, her wiseass smile melting.

“Was he my grandfather?”

The old eyes speared hers. “What kind of lies did your Russian mother fill your head with?”

Anya dropped her gaze to the napkin in her lap.

A sigh came from across the table. Grandma had to know bringing up her mother was dirty pool. There was no forgiving what that woman had done. “Fine,” her grandmother said. “You want me to tell so I’ll tell. I don’t know.”

Anya could only blink in response.

“What. There was a war. Things happen in war.”

The permutations were like a series of punches to Anya’s stomach. “You were… What my teachers said about the Russian soldiers—?”

“Enough,” Grandma said. Then with a softer voice, “Enough talk. Look around you. The sun is shining. The birds sing. We have this wonderful tart made with stolen apples. So, we eat.”

Weeds

This week Grandma brings day-old brioche and a wedge of Swiss cheese and slightly wilted daisies. While Anya sets about making the spread festive, she thinks about a day long ago, when she was a child, in a different country, trundling after her mother on the way to the market.

For as long as Anya could remember, the walls of their city had been gray. Her world had not been completely devoid of color—she had a red winter coat and pink snowboots, and the small bedroom she shared with her sickly aunt was a pale shade of green. And there was the blue sky, of course. But the wall never changed. It was long and even, broken in spots to allow for automobiles to come and go, and by signs in big, bold letters that made her stomach wobble, the messages of which her mother would not explain to her, so she stopped asking.

She could measure time by those long stretches of gray. Their apartment building was ten segments of wall from her school. The market, seven. Which was where they were going that morning.

But when she saw something new on the wall, something fascinating and colorful and not at all frightening, she couldn’t make her feet go forward. It was a flower. A painting of a flower. Unlike any flower she’d seen in all of her six years. It was certainly not their country’s national flower, the tiny chamomile, with its white petals and tiny yellow center, which her mother used to make medicine for her auntie. This one…it was almost all yellow center. Towering over the sidewalk, the yellow center seemed to Anya as big and high as the sun itself, the tiny petals almost an afterthought.

“Mama!” she cried out.

“What? It is getting late. They will be out of everything if you do not stop this—”

“Mama, what kind of flower is that?”

Her mother made a sniffing sound, one Anya had heard when Mama didn’t like a fish at the market. “That is not a flower. It’s a weed.”

Anya pursed her lips. With her mother she’d pulled weeds from the community vegetable garden in the back of their apartment building. The grownups told her that they pulled weeds because they took all the food and water from the good plants. So all weeds must go, all the way down to their roots. But this did not look like any weed she’d seen.

Much later, she learned that this “weed” was not a weed at all. And the painting of such in a public place in the country of her birth was considered blasephemy.

The next day, it was gone.

“You need help in there, mamaleh? Or shall I ring for the maid?”

Her grandmother’s gentle teasing brings Anya back to the present, makes her smile. She brings the tray, sets it on the table, pours the tea.

But still thinking of the “weed” on the gray wall, she strokes a white petal of one of the daisies in the vase, as if she could coax it back to life. As if she could transform it into a different flower. Anya sighs. “I wish we could bring them inside.”

Grandma also sighs. “They would be beautiful on your table. But it would mean the death of them. That flower, it belongs outside, don’t you agree? Forever reaching for the sun?” She gestures to the daisies. “At least here we can have something that reminds us of them.”

Anya agrees, thinking of the difference between the country where she now lives and the one she left behind. Here, a flower is revered; there, it is criminal.

“May I offer the blessing today?” Anya says, noting that Grandma had just filled her plate.

“Of course, mein shayna maidel.” She makes a big show of putting the cloth napkin in her lap and reaching across the table for Anya’s hands.

They bow their heads. “Thank you for this bounty before us. Thank you for the blue sky and the green grass and most of all for the sunflower.” She breaks into a tiny grin and adds, “Putin khulyo.”

“Putin khylyo,” Grandma repeats, and they both spit, and laugh, and eat.

Leaving

With each shell that whistled through the night, the small boy who’d fallen asleep with his head in Yulia’s lap whimpered, and she stroked his hair and sang a soft lullaby. For him, for all the children holed up in her basement apartment, and for herself. Did she dare bring a child into this world, a child whose father might already have been killed in the war? But it served no purpose to ponder what the future held for her; all she dared focus on was getting through this night. Then, a blast landed so close she could hear glass shatter and rubble cascade to the ground. Marina, mother and grandmother to eight men and boys out fighting for their country, cried out and again cursed the devil who’d visited this hellscape upon them.

Still, Yulia could not help but think about Maksym. Worry never kept anyone safe, but she hoped he had food and water and warm clothing and enough ammunition. And then she prayed. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the skies quieted, and those who were still awake eyed each other in the dim slit of light filtering through the dirty street-level windows. The question passed around the basement apartment was clear: Was it finally time to leave?

The old man who lived on the fourth floor—once a soldier, now past the age to serve—met Yulia’s gaze with a nod. She gently eased the boy onto a folded blanket and rose, brushing the night from her eyes. The old man held out a hand and she took it, careful to step between the sleeping bodies and their possessions as they made their way toward the exit. He stopped her there and put a palm to the door. She understood it was to check for fire; with shuddering horror she recalled hearing about some of her neighbors trapped in their burning buildings. Apparently he deemed it safe, and soon they stumbled into the burgeoning daylight. There, on the sidewalk, Yulia’s heart damn near stopped beating. The old soldier cursed. The building had been hit. No. Not just hit. The eastern corner of the top two floors had been lopped off as if a giant had swept it off in a fit of pique. Bare rebar and splintered wood hung askew. Each breeze plumed concrete dust up into the air. Disbelief froze Yulia to the spot, then she burned with anger. She spun toward the old man, mouth open to vent her fury, but he stopped her.

“It’s time,” he said. “Come. Let’s see to the others.”

The denizens of the basement looked as if sleepwalking, when he first made the announcement, then they shook themselves back to reality and moved with greater purpose. “One bag per person,” the old man said, helping a frail woman to her feet.

Yulia sighed. What she hadn’t already sold or given away wasn’t worth taking. The only possession that mattered was the leather portfolio her parents had presented her upon her art school graduation. Among other work, it contained sketches of the neighborhood children, and of course those of him. With his molten eyes and broad shoulders—across the room while she sketched him and later, many times later, above her. “Maksym, you rotten bastard,” she thought, with a secret smile and a press of her hand to her belly. “How could I have let you leave?”

But she didn’t have the luxury to think about her own dramas. She found teddy bears and blankies and picture books; she dried tears and hugged mothers and cursed Russia. Then plucked her portfolio from the closet, and into its inside pocket, she tucked a change of clothing, and a gun.

Short Fiction: A Prayer for Remembrance

From the stoop I watch my grandmother drawing closer. Her back is bent—she says from the sins of her youth—her walk plodding but deliberate. When she sees me her step quickens, her smile twinkles eyes nearly lost in a roadmap of wrinkles.

“Mein shayna madel,” she says, over and over as if we had not seen each other in years, squeezing my left forearm with strength built from hauling groceries and children, rolling out pastry, carrying the burdens of others. Then, “So. Are you married yet?”

It’s a joke between us.

“Nope.” I grin, taking the string bag from her arm—a bouquet of almost-fresh black-eyed Susans, day-old bread, and a cheese, the aroma of which I can’t place. “Are you?”

“Ach, you.” She is done with men, she always says. Then spits out a Yiddish phrase, literally translated as “they shit in your house and leave you the mess.” But I don’t believe her. I’ve seen her old charcoal drawings, many of the same handsome shirtless man, with eyes like fire and a prominent scar running down his torso. I’m only a college student and don’t know much about art, but there is clearly passion in those lines and shadows. I can hardly see this woman being done with men for good, unless it’s for spite.

Finally we go upstairs; I make tea and she sits at my kitchen table, awaiting me. I put the flowers into a vase and hope they’ll revive; I make a plate of the bread and cheese with some apples I bought from the farm market. I don’t let her lift a finger. She fought my mother on this but not me. Never me. Maybe that’s the difference between being a daughter versus a granddaughter.

When I join her and we prepare to eat, she reaches for my hand and murmurs a prayer. Our tradition is to say what others call “grace” after a meal, but it is just the two of us now and grandma says we can make our own traditions.

We bow our heads, tighten the grip between us and say “Putin khylo.”

My grandmother turns her head and spits. Then we eat.

It’s funny. The man is long dead, and we still do this thing. So we’ll never forget, she says.

But she doesn’t like to talk about what it is she wants to forget. I know it has to do with the war, and what happened after. I promise myself that next time, I will ask about the man in the drawings. But not today. Today is for bread and cheese and flowers, and for practicing how to forget.

Putin Khulyo

(Author’s note: I wrote this story two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)

Yulia eyes Maksym, who sits bathed in the shadows that fall from the flickering lights, and smudges in more charcoal where it’s needed. In the hollows of his cheekbones and clavicles. Even in the thick, lumpy scar that runs diagonally across his chest, a souvenir—as he calls it—from the last war. Does he know how beautiful he is? No. Men never know these things. Well…some know. Those are the ones who hurt you. This man is still a puzzle to her, more than one simply to be deconstructed and reassembled on her sketchpad, even though he’s one of her favorite models—when he’s not out fighting the Russians. Thinking about the danger he faces on the outside tightens her stomach.

“You could have left, with the others,” he says, as if he can read her thoughts. “I don’t know why you would have stayed.”

“I stay…” She is suddenly conscious of the press of time. When will the sirens go off? When will the upstairs neighbors be arriving? She rents the entire basement, such as it is, and they bring whatever food and water and blankets and flashlights they can find, everyone pitching in to care for one another. She teaches the children to draw; it calms them, and there’s no shortage of charcoal. But right now she scolds her selfishness for just wanting to complete Maksym’s portrait. At least then he could put his shirt back on and not have to endure the cold.

He has endured enough. They all have.

“It is where I’m from,” she says, her voice shaking. “It’s what I know. I will not run scared.” She stands straighter. “I will not run from that khuylo.”

He grins, deepening the shadows on his face in a way that is not unpleasant. “Putin khulyo.”

“I want to shout it from the rooftop,” she says. “The way they do at the football games.” She looks at the unfinished drawing, and lets her shoulders drop. No more. She has lost the thread. “You might as well get dressed. You must be freezing.”

“It is nothing,” he says. As he stands. As he reaches for the bulky sweater he’d draped across a wooden chair.

The action moves something in her, heightens his unselfconscious beauty. “Wait.”

Maksym looks up, eyes deep and soft. Asking a question.

“We still have time,” she says, stepping closer, her voice silent in the underground depths. “Yes?”

He smiles.