American Gypsy by Oksana Marafioti Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t sacrifice my youth, my status, for you to turn out like his brood. I had more admirers than stars in the sky, decent men … and who did I end up with?”
    â€œYes, Mom,” we’d say.
    Mom’s eyebrows would lower into dangerous angles. “I curse the day I laid eyes on your shit-eating gigolo of a father. The bastard lured me in with his guitar and smooth tongue. I won’t let you two make the same mistake. You’ll marry nice American doctors or lawyers.”
    I woke up one morning to find Mom ironing one of her dresses on an ironing board in the kitchen. In Moscow, sheets, socks, underwear, and mounds of handkerchiefs regularly underwent this treatment. The last time she ironed was when she got a call from an old friend from Moscow who wanted to let Mom know that Dad had bought two return tickets to America. One for him and another for his mistress. My father, being a real spoon bender, didn’t move across the ocean to change. He knew that no matter what, he’d always be Rom, but that at least in America, nobody cared. He took his outsider status to even greater heights by getting engaged to his longtime mistress, a notorious fortune-teller with eyes the color of chimney smoke and a soul a shade darker. The day my mother heard that Dad was bringing his fiancée to the States, she steam-ironed all the curtains in our apartment.
    Now she was at it again.
    â€œAre you going somewhere?” I asked.
    â€œWhen your sister wakes up, get her breakfast, don’t forget. And make sure she doesn’t stay at the neighbors’ too long. She could eat what I cook for once.”
    I went to the fridge to get orange juice. The way that dress was being ironed, I figured the farther away from her, the better.
    â€œYour father and I are getting a divorce,” Mom said to the dress.
    She looked up at me, and I dropped onto a kitchen chair.
    â€œHe’s bringing his hussy over from Russia. I bet that’s why he disappeared before we even moved out of Arsen’s place. Didn’t have the decency to wait.”
    â€œYou’ve been married seventeen years.”
    Mom’s cheeks were flushed, and she concentrated on the areas around the buttons of the dress as if she were setting a diamond into a ring. “He’s running,” she said. “Wish I could run, too, but I have you and your sister to look after. He’s my punishment for walking out on Leonid all those years ago, I know it now. No matter. I won’t let you make the same mistakes. I will keep you safe.”
    *   *   *
    I don’t think she would’ve ever told me who Leonid was if it weren’t for my habit of rummaging through her dresser for money. One day in Los Angeles, I was looking for change for a pack of rubber bracelets and came across a picture, hidden beneath Mom’s nightdresses, of a handsome man with blue eyes. I thought it was Montgomery Clift and took it into the kitchen, where Mom was shredding cabbages for homemade sauerkraut. Completely overlooking the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be going through her things, I said, “Can I put him up on my wall?” Mom snatched the picture from my hands and gave me a halfhearted lecture on stealing. She didn’t ground me, though, seeming distracted by my find. My curiosity kept me after her for weeks. Her confession shocked me.
    Handsome and a well-respected member of the intelligentsia, Leonid was a music professor at a university in Krasnodar in southern Russia. He’d had the bad luck of falling in love with one of his students, who came from a well-to-do Armenian Greek family. They loved each other, my mother told me, with the tenderness and modesty one finds in old black-and-white films.
    Once married, Mom left the university to avoid a scandal. Leonid built a boat as a wedding gift to her, and on the weekends they sailed the Kuban River, fishing, talking about philosophy, and