Eleven
ELEVEN
DAWN: AMY HADN’T shut the curtain and found herself blinking awake as the first light came through the window.
Barking, traffic, the distant smell, perhaps, of dogs.
She would not be able to fall back asleep, so she let the feeling of strangeness wash over her.
Had she gotten two hours of sleep? Three?
At home she would never be able to face a day after so little rest, but here she felt energized, purposeful.
She would get up; she would start her day.
Still she tried to glide down the hall to the bathroom as silently as possible, as she could not bear facing Andrei, and only realized that her heart was thumping when she successfully locked the bathroom door behind her.
She stood like that, back against the door, relishing her successful escape for several seconds.
She should start the shower, she thought.
She should pee and brush her teeth. But instead she stayed frozen against the bathroom door, again disoriented.
What on earth was she doing? Why hadn’t she slept?
She imagined Judd waking up, Roxy waiting patiently to pee.
The cats getting fed. The coffee beans being ground, then getting spooned into the coffee maker.
The street noises filtering up: kids on their way to school, teenagers playing music while they walked.
Street sweepers, double parkers, the usual symphony of honks and barks.
Pigeons cooing. Judd in one of his unbuttoned flannel shirts, reading the paper at the kitchen table. An egg sandwich with cheddar cheese.
She tried to imagine herself in that scene. Cleaning up after the animals, folding laundry on a chair. She closed her eyes, could almost smell the coffee brewing, Roxy’s hot breath.
And then she heard a riot of barking out the window. Had a dog escaped?
She looked out to the street, and saw Irine walking several dogs up the hill, sprightly, the dogs pulling her forward. There was obviously something delicious in their noses; their leashes were taut. The sun beamed down through the clouds, catching Irine and the animals in its rays.
“Well,” she said. That was how it got done, she supposed, the caring for eleven dogs.
Her iPhone said it was six in the morning; at home, it was ten p.m., and Roxy was bedding down for the night.
As Amy stepped into the shower (how Roxy loved lying on the floor while she showered), she felt an unexpected tug on the thread that connected her to her home.
THE FIRST SCHOOL Amy remembered was the Columbia Street School, which she’d attended from second through fifth grades.
It was a small brick building eight blocks from her house whose sign in front offered rotating inspirational messages: “If you can dream it, you can do it!” or “It’s a great day to have a great day!
” Her stomach used to roil as she approached Columbia Street each morning, trying to keep a few feet behind her brother who was trying to keep a few feet behind her.
Slower and slower they walked, knowing they’d get dragged to the principal’s if they were more than ten minutes late, knowing their mother would get a phone call, trying to figure out who was more terrifying, their peers or their mother.
Usually they arrived exactly nine minutes and thirty seconds late, melting snow on their cheap boots.
And it was there that Amy learned to distrust school and anything it offered.
Education was less learning to read and add and more learning to duck and run from whatever cruelty the day conspired to bring, where she learned that her mother’s dire predictions (take care of yourself, nobody’ll do it for you) always always came true.
Because she was so tall, the teachers had a hard time seeing that she was only nine years old.
Because her brother was effeminate, they had a hard time being kind.
And while the other kids at Columbia Street weren’t exactly wealthy, they all at least used brand-named thermoses, wore Levi’s jeans.
And then came middle school, and then high school, about which the less said, the better.
Years later, it took a long time for Amy to gather up the courage to finish her GED, apply to Baruch.
She did it mostly to make a good impression on Ferry, so that he wouldn’t think she was undereducated—he always did so well in school!
She wanted to make him proud. So, with a pit in her stomach, she applied, got accepted (well, almost everyone got accepted), and showed up that September with a new backpack and notebooks, feeling extraordinarily shy.
But what startled her, at Baruch, was from the very first day how kind everyone was.
The professors seemed curious about what she thought.
They guided her through her courses in expository writing and intro psych, didn’t laugh at her when she mispronounced a word she’d always thought she was saying the right way.
She had worried about being so much older than the other students, but in fact there were many students who were her age or even older than she was, and while none of them became her best friends, there was always someone to have lunch with, grab a coffee.
They were interested in her and all she had done.
They loved going to Le Coin. She got mostly As and Bs.
And then her History of New York professor told her she was a good writer, and introduced her to a friend of his who published New York Eats , and who was always looking for new points of view on the restaurant world, and said it was rare to find someone who could cook and write.
She screwed up her courage, submitted an article about working in the restaurant industry as a self-taught cook.
And Eats accepted it and paid her eighty dollars!
So she did it again (interviewing women who navigated the sexist world of restaurant kitchens) and again (the impact of low-wage work on kitchen staff), and by the time she graduated she had a nice little portfolio and had earned eleven hundred dollars before taxes from her experience and her writing and her wits.
Enough for half her tuition bill that semester.
Enough to set her up with a whole new idea of herself and what she could do.
And this was how Amy had learned to love school.
AND THEREFORE, A whistle was on her lips as she headed toward Irine’s workplace, threading her way down the hill—she was learning the city, she was learning the food, she was learning bits of the language, the culture, she was learning .
The Tbilisi sky was bright blue and the wind had stilled, and she felt the warmth of the sun on her scalp.
She unzipped her parka to let the fresh air touch her throat.
It was seven in the morning on the fifth day of March, 2023.
At the foot of the Dry Bridge over the broad gray Kura River, vendors had set up tables and blankets full of all sorts of wares: folding chess sets and coffee urns and plastic Soviet kitsch: hammer-and-sickle belt buckles, shot glasses emblazoned with Lenin’s face.
She paused to poke through a display of socks brandishing Georgian dumplings.
The saleslady, an old woman with a scarf wrapped around her head, pointed at a sign: THREE SOCK 5 LARI .
Less than two dollars. Amy put her three new pairs of socks in her bag and kept walking, crossing the bridge with the morning commuters.
The eastern half of Tbilisi felt more crowded than the west, with narrower, criss-crossing streets, drying laundry pinned to balcony railings, busier sidewalks.
Every streetside window seemed to open to a bakery selling stuffed breads: cheese, egg, mushroom, spinach.
Dogs were everywhere, too, many of them sleeping on their sides, but some of them briskly crossing streets or marching down sidewalks.
These ones seemed to be true strays, skinnier and more forlorn than the ones on Rustaveli Avenue, teats swinging like loose handkerchiefs.
Amy bought two spinach pastries, tucked one in her bag for later, tore up the other and offered bits to the next few strays she passed.
But also, as she pressed deeper into the neighborhood: art galleries, vintage stores, record shops.
Bars. Signs in English and Russian. A sneaker store with cling-wrapped Nikes in the window.
Another store, full of graffiti-print sweatshirts and jeans, and then one selling artfully tattered black dresses.
The slow march of the international style: Paris and New York and Los Angeles and even here.
Then, as she got closer to the school, the neighborhood took another turn: off the main road, the apartment buildings turned shabbier, and the sidewalks were jumbled with trashcans and trash bags and beaten-up cars.
A huge older woman stood in a threadbare nightgown on the corner, murmuring quietly to herself.
Children picked their way through the crowded sidewalks, hunched under their backpacks.
Some had parents trailing them, but others, who seemed to be only five or six years old, walked by themselves.
Down the middle of the street a kid whooshed by on a scooter. The woman in the nightgown shouted out what sounded like a curse as the kid peeled away.
Amy followed him.
Many of the shop signs here had faded Cyrillic on them, painted over but still visible on the brick.
Amy wondered what the people here thought of the Russians in their midst. Were they aware of them?
Did they bother them? Or did they welcome them?
If half the population wanted to return to the USSR, maybe these Russian visitors were as welcome as she was.
More welcome, even. Or else viewed as invaders.
This was probably why Andrei didn’t go out during the daytime.