7. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“Arms out. Don’t move.”
The woman with pins in her mouth has said those words four times in forty minutes, and I’ve obeyed every one, which is a personal record I’m not proud of.
She’s on the floor of a Manhattan atelier working a hem around my calves.
She measured my seated waist without a flicker, asked which side I lead with, and pinned the back so the fabric won’t bunch under my shoulder blades when I push.
She knew all about me before I came through the door.
“You’ve got my file,” I say.
“I have instructions.” Two pins into the hem. “And I’m good at what I do.”
“So everyone’s working off the same terrifying dossier. Is there a copy floating around? I’d love to find out what I like for breakfast.”
She sits back on her heels and gives me a smile with nothing living in it.
The dress is oxblood, floor-length, cut to fall right when I’m sitting.
I hate that it’s the best-looking thing that’s ever been on my body.
I hate that I’ve turned toward the mirror twice without anyone asking.
Somewhere in this building, a man with a clipboard decided what I’d wear to my own engagement party, and the dress is perfect, and I’m going to wear it, and all three of those can go to hell holding hands.
Poppy would lose her entire mind. Poppy doesn’t know I’m here, because that’s the conversation I’ve been outrunning since Wednesday, and tomorrow I get married in a church while my best friend thinks I’ll be chilling at home with a new mystery novel.
Danil’s at the curb with the door open. He’s traded the janitor coveralls for a suit, which makes him look less like a person, not more.
“Good mop work this week,” I tell him. “Kevin’s a changed man. There’s talk of a plaque.”
“He’s a good kid,” he says, then loads my chair with more care than I’d expect from him.
Brighton Beach comes up off the Belt with the train roaring on its stilts over the avenue, and I know this stretch, I’ve bought pickled things under that track my whole life with my father talking too loud beside me.
The restaurant sits under the tracks, gold sign, no English on it.
Windows fogged from the inside. Fourteen black cars along the curb, and every man leaning on one of them straightens when we pull in.
None of them are looking at Danil.
Lev’s at my door before the ramp’s out. Black on black, no coat, shirt buttoned at the wrist over the knife on his forearm, and my body does its disgraceful thing, which I’ve decided to treat like a food allergy. Manageable. I’ll carry the EpiPen.
“You look like a woman about to bite somebody,” he says.
“I’m in a dress I didn’t buy, going to a party I didn’t RSVP to. Biting’s the only self-expression left.”
“Then bite. Not Yefim, the beard with the bad hip. Thirty years loyal, and he’ll cry.”
“That is the least reassuring sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
“You’ll upgrade it before the night’s out.”
I transfer, set my brakes, put my hands on my sunflower rims, and go in under my own steam through a door two men hold open like I’m cargo they’ve been warned about.
The noise stops.
I’ve been in a lot of rooms since the accident.
I know the sound a room makes when it decides what to do about me, that little wobble in the conversation, the half second where the mouths keep going, and the eyes handle the update.
This isn’t that. Forty men and a dozen women go quiet in a restaurant that smells like dill and smoke and roasting meat, and every face turns, and not one of them drops to the chair first. They go to my face, and they stay there.
Then the old ones start standing.
There’s a man at the back, gold tooth, neck like a fire hydrant, cane hooked on the table edge.
He gets himself up in three separate painful stages so he can be on his feet when I come through.
Down the length of the room they’re all doing it, the ones with ink up their throats, the ones with stars on their knuckles, chairs scraping the tile in a wave rolling toward me.
Nobody stands up for me. People tend to sit down for me or even crouch.
“Vasilisa Gavrilovna,” the man with the cane says, and he says it like it’s liturgy, and I go cold inside a beautiful dress I didn’t pick.
They come one at a time. That’s the horror, it’s orderly, there’s a sequence, and everyone knows it except me.
An old woman in black with a face like a dried apple takes my hand in both of hers and says something in Russian I half get, and the half I get is my mother’s name.
A man with a scar splitting his lip to the chin bows from the waist. Actually bows.
At me. In a wheelchair. In Brooklyn. The next one kisses the back of my hand, and his mouth is dry, and his eyes, coming up, belong to a man who’s done things I couldn’t name with that same mouth.
Every one of them says it. Filatova. Not Plaksin. They put my mother’s maiden name into the air over my head like they’re returning property.
Lev sits at my right and lets it happen. Four minutes in, I understand he told them already that the whole room knew before my car pulled up.
Vodka arrives next. A plate lands in front of me with herring, beets, and a boiled egg cut into a flower, my glass gets refilled before I’ve touched it, and the toasts start.
Cane man goes first. Three stages to get up again. Nobody helps him.
“Za Milyenu Ustinovnu.” He holds the glass toward me.
“God rest her. I carried her on my shoulders at her father’s dacha when she was five years old.
She pulled my hair, and I let her.” Forty glasses go up.
“Now her daughter is here. Ustin went in the ground thinking his blood was finished. He was wrong. I’d give the years I’ve got left to have told him he was wrong. ”
They drink. I drink, because forty men are watching my hand.
The vodka goes down like a lit match.
My mother is a scarf, a bad photograph, a red tin with a rooster on it, and a headstone in Queens I’ve visited maybe eleven times.
My mother is an absence with a name on it.
I built her out of four objects, and my father’s unreliable sentences, and what I built was gentle and ordinary and unlucky, a woman who married badly, died young in Coney Island, and left me her eyes as an apology.
A man with a gold tooth just told me he carried her on his shoulders at her father’s dacha.
She had a country house in Russia. She had a father who had a dacha. She was Milyena Ustinovna, and she pulled this killer’s hair at five years old.
Lev told me the gist of it when he came to inform me of my father’s debt. I heard it, but it’s different hearing it than actually living it.
My mother ran. That’s what I keep coming back to while the second toast starts.
My mother stood in a house full of these men at nineteen, and she went out a window or a door or however it happened, and she married Gavril Plaksin, who couldn’t hold a job or a promise or a hand of cards.
She traded a kingdom for a man who’d eventually sell her daughter across a table.
Everyone here thinks that’s the tragedy of the Filatov line. I’m sitting in her eyes, wondering if it’s the only smart move anybody in this bloodline ever made.
“You’re not eating,” Lev says.
“I’m being toasted. I don’t know the etiquette. Is chewing during a toast a capital offense, because half these men look like they’d handle it personally.”
“Eat, Vasilisa.”
“Order or suggestion?”
“It’s the fourth glass they’ve poured you, and you weigh what you weigh.
” He puts the bread basket within reach of my hand.
Not in my hand, but in reach, and the difference is so exact I want to throw it at his head.
“Yefim’s about to tell a story about your grandfather and the horse. It runs eleven minutes.”
The horse story goes on for fourteen minutes instead.
It’s incomprehensible, it involves a customs official in Odessa, and the whole room laughs at the end.
I laugh too, because it’s funny, because these people are funny, because the old woman in black is wiping her eyes and gripping my forearm like we’ve known each other since the war.
That’s the part nobody warned me about. They’re warm.
It’s a party. There’s an accordion going in the corner, a kid asleep under a table, a woman feeding her husband off her own fork.
The man with the split lip who bowed at me is down on the floor now, showing a four-year-old how to fold a napkin into a boat.
And every man in this room has the eyes.
Not lust. I could work with lust. I’ve had comebacks for lust since I was fourteen. This is worse. Reverence has weight. Reverence means they’ve already decided what I’m for.
They’re not seeing the chair at all. They see a bloodline in a dress.
The old woman leans in, still holding my arm, and switches to English for me.
“Your mother had your face. Exactly this face. She hated her freckles.”
“Did she?”
“She put lemon on them. Every summer. Lemon and buttermilk, out of a bowl, in the sun, like an idiot.” She pats my arm twice, hard. “Never worked. God gives what God gives.”
Then she goes back to her borscht.
Twenty-six years, and nobody has ever told me my mother hated her freckles. My father never said it. He had so many stories about her in him, but he never thought to share them with me.
I go looking for Lev’s hands. It’s a reflex I decline to examine. He’s got them flat on the table either side of a glass he hasn’t touched, His split knuckles scabbed over, the steel watch on his wrist. It’s not a watch. It’s a headstone he wears to work.
The party runs its ninety minutes. Lev stands, the room follows, and we go out to the cars with the accordion still playing behind us.
The man with the cane gets up one last time to see me leave.
My hands stay steady on my rims the whole way to the door, because forty people are watching me exit a room, and I refuse to do it as anything less than beautifully.
The car door shuts. Manhattan starts coming at us over the bridge, and I go off like a struck match.
“You knew about my mother.”
“I told you Tuesday.”
“You told me a fact. You didn’t tell me a room full of murderers was going to stand up out of their chairs.
” My hands are shaking, which enrages me more than anything else this week.
“You know the stories they told? They gave me more of my mother than I’ve had in twenty-six years.
What gave you the right to decide tonight was the night? ”
“I decided Friday was the night because the wedding’s tomorrow, and every man in that room needed to see you with their own eyes and your own name before he watches you take mine.
If I’d walk you in cold on Saturday, half of them would spend the ceremony wondering what I’m pulling.
Now that they’ve stood up, they can’t unstand. ”
“I’m not a maneuver, Lev.”
“You’re the most important pawn in two countries, and I moved you like one.”
Bridge lights come through in long gold strips across his hands. I get my breath back, ready for round two.
“So here’s how this goes.” I turn in the seat as far as my back allows, which is further than he thinks.
“Tomorrow, I’ll get married to you. I’ll wear any dress you want.
I’ll stand at that altar as long as my body gives me and sit for the rest, and I’ll say the words.
Then you and I are going to have the coldest marriage in the history of the state of New York.
Separate rooms, separate lives. You get your church, your paper, your witnesses, and every man who stood up tonight goes home believing you own the last Filatov breathing.
And you come back to a woman who says good morning to you like you’re a neighbor she doesn’t care for.
But you do need to promise me that I’ll get to keep my job and that your…
job won’t affect me in any way. You keep me safe and away from any killers. ”
“That’s the offer?”
“That’s the offer. Take it. It’s the only one on the table, and I’m out of merchandise.”
He turns his head. In the gold strobing off the cables, I watch the corner of his mouth move, and it isn’t much, about a millimeter of a man, but I’ve had days studying that face, and a millimeter is a landslide.
“Something funny?”
“You’re the only person who’s threatened me this month,” he says. “Everyone else negotiates.”