Chapter 15
NIKOLAI
Irina Sokolova has lived in Detroit for eighteen years and has not adjusted her internal clock by a single hour.
She wakes at what would be morning in Russia.
She eats lunch at what would be afternoon in Russia.
She calls her son at what would be a reasonable hour in Russia and what is, in Atlanta, the hour at which the alarm has not yet sounded and the apartment is dark and Eli is asleep on my chest.
The phone rings. The ringtone is the one I assigned to my mother three years ago: a specific, sharp chime that I chose because it is impossible to sleep through and because ignoring a call from Irina Sokolova is a decision that produces consequences of a severity I am not willing to risk.
I extract myself from Eli. The extracting requires care because Eli sleeps the way Eli does everything: totally, with full-body commitment, his limbs claiming territory in all directions.
He has annexed the center of the bed. My portion is the margin, which is where I sleep now, and the margin is sufficient, and the sufficiency is the compromise, and the compromise is the relationship.
I take the phone to the kitchen. The kitchen is dark. The city is pre-dawn through the windows.
"Kolya," my mother says. The name is the Russian diminutive. The name is the child-name, the name from the Moscow apartment, the name from the skating rink where she coached and where I sat in the stands at age six doing homework while my mother turned girls into technicians on ice.
"Mama. It is six in the morning."
"It is a perfectly reasonable hour."
"In Moscow."
"I am not calling about the time." A pause.
Irina Sokolova's pauses are not Mik's pauses (structural, load-bearing) or Mars's pauses (data-processing).
Irina's pauses are tactical. Irina pauses the way she coached: letting the silence do the work, waiting for the student to understand the correction before the correction is delivered.
"Your father tells me you are seeing someone," she says.
My father. Marcus Sokolov, who retired from the Detroit Fire Department four years ago and who spends his days woodworking in the garage and who communicates with his son through biweekly phone calls that are warm and brief and contain the understated love of a man from Detroit who considers verbal emotional expression a luxury available to people who did not spend thirty years running into burning buildings.
My father knows because I told my father.
I told my father three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, in a phone call that lasted four minutes.
I said: "I am seeing someone. His name is Eli.
He is a rookie." My father said: "Is he good to you?
" I said: "Yes." My father said: "Good. Your mother will have questions.
" The conversation ended. Four minutes. The four minutes contained everything my father needed to say and nothing he didn't.
My mother has questions.
"Yes," I say. "I am seeing someone."
"Who?"
"Eli Mercer. He is a forward. Twenty-two. First-year player."
"Twenty-two." The number is repeated with the specific, evaluative tone of a woman who trained competitive athletes and who considers age a variable with implications. "He is young."
"He is twenty-two."
"That is what I said. He is young. You are thirty. The gap is not trivial."
"Mama."
"I am not criticizing. I am observing. The observation has a follow-up. Is he good?"
The question is Irina's version of my father's question, but my father asked "is he good to you" (the passive, the receiving, the question of a man who wants to know if his son is being treated well) and my mother asks "is he good" (the active, the assessment, the question of a woman who wants to know if the person her son has chosen is worthy of the choosing).
"He is chaos," I say.
The silence that follows is three seconds.
Three seconds of Irina Sokolova silence is significant because Irina Sokolova does not waste time on silence.
Silence from my mother is the opposite of silence from other people.
Silence from other people is the absence of speech.
Silence from my mother is the presence of thought.
"Good," she says.
"Good?"
"You need chaos, Kolya. You have too much order.
The order was my fault. I taught you discipline because discipline is the foundation of everything I know, and the discipline served you, and the discipline made you an athlete, and I am proud of the discipline.
But the discipline was a tool. You made it a life. "
She pauses. The tactical pause. The correction incoming.
"Control is my gift to you," she says. "It was not meant to be your prison."
The sentence arrives in the dark kitchen at 6:04 AM and settles into my chest beside the sentence Mik gave me ("rebuilding is not the same as living") and the sentence Mars gave me ("a data point about him, not about risk").
Three sentences from three people. Three languages for the same truth.
Mik's was emotional. Mars's was analytical.
My mother's is the original: the source code, the Russian-accented, figure-skating-inflected, 6 AM phone call version of the thing everyone has been trying to tell me.
The discipline was a tool. I made it a life.
"Tell me about him," she says. "Not the hockey. The person."
"He talks constantly. He fills every room he enters.
He cannot organize his shoes. He eats my food and wears my clothes and leaves teaspoons in mugs.
He is the loudest person I have ever met and the most honest and the funniest and the most frustrating.
He sees through everything I build and he does not care about the building. He cares about the person inside it."
The silence this time is longer. Five seconds.
"Kolya," my mother says, and her voice has changed.
The coaching voice is gone. The tactical voice is gone.
What remains is the voice I heard at age twelve in the Detroit apartment when we arrived from Moscow and I stood in a room that was not my room and she said: "This is hard.
The hard will not last. The lasting things are different from the hard things.
" The mother-voice. The voice beneath the coach.
"This person sounds like your father," she says.
The comparison stops me. My father is warm and quiet and steady and contained and I have never, in thirty years, considered that the man I am drawn to might carry echoes of the man who raised me.
But the echo is there. Eli's warmth is not my father's warmth (my father's warmth is still, Eli's warmth is a weather system) but the direction of the warmth is the same: toward me, consistently, without conditions.
"Your father was chaos when I met him," she says.
"A firefighter from Detroit who did not speak Russian and who ate cereal for dinner and who laughed at inappropriate moments.
I was a skating coach from Moscow who considered laughter a frivolous expenditure of oxygen.
He made me laugh. The laughing was the beginning of everything. "
Eli made me laugh. In bed. With a lamp. The laughing was involuntary and the involuntary was the joy and the joy was the thing the discipline could not produce because the discipline was serious and laughter is not serious and the not-serious is, I am learning, essential.
"Bring him to Detroit," my mother says.
"Mama."
"I need to assess him. This is not negotiable. Your father will make his brisket. I will ask questions. The questions will be thorough."
"The questions will be terrifying."
"That is the point. If he survives my questions, he is strong enough. If he does not survive, you will learn this early, which is a gift."
"Your gifts all come with conditions."
"All gifts come with conditions. The conditions are what make them gifts instead of accidents."
We talk for another ten minutes. She asks about my playing (excellent, she says, which from Irina is the equivalent of another mother weeping with pride).
She asks about my eating (adequate, I say, because Eli has introduced cereal into the apartment and the cereal represents a nutritional regression that my mother would address with military force if she knew).
She asks about the team, the season, the playoff push.
She does not ask about Alexei. She does not say the name.
The name has not been spoken between us since the phone call three years ago when I told her what happened and she was silent for thirty seconds (the longest silence of my life) and then said: "He was not worthy of what you gave him. That is his failure. Not yours."
The call ends. The kitchen is lighter now. The pre-dawn has become dawn. The city is waking.
I make coffee. Two mugs. I carry them to the bedroom. Eli is still asleep, still claiming the center of the bed, still occupying space with the full-body commitment that is his approach to everything.
I set his mug on the nightstand. I sit on the edge of the bed with mine.
Control is my gift to you. It was not meant to be your prison.
The gift. The tool. The discipline that built me and that I built into a fortress and that the fortress became a prison and that the prison is opening, door by door, room by room, because a man who talks constantly and leaves teaspoons in mugs and laughs at 6 AM is inside the prison now and the inside is no longer a prison because a prison with another person in it is just a room.
Eli stirs. He reaches for me without opening his eyes. His hand finds my thigh and rests there, warm and heavy and automatic.
"Who called?" he mumbles.
"My mother."
"At six AM?"
"She operates on Moscow time."
"That's aggressive."
"She wants to meet you."
One eye opens. "Should I be scared?"
"Yes."
"Good." The eye closes. The hand stays on my thigh. "I'm good with scary."
I drink my coffee. The coffee is warm. The morning is warm. The hand on my thigh is warm.
The prison is opening. The opening is my mother's gift, the real one, the one that came after the discipline: the permission to let the discipline go.