Home > The Nesting Dolls

The Nesting Dolls
Author: Alina Adams

Prologue

 

 

2019

 

“Love is not a potato,” Zoe’s great-grandmother Alyssa had been telling her since before Zoe was old enough to know for certain what either word meant.

Zoe hoped her confusion was merely a language barrier. Her great-grandmother spoke Russian—and some German. Zoe spoke English—and some Russian. Neither spoke Yiddish. Her great-grandmother was very proud of this.

“Because,” Zoe’s great-grandmother explains, in Russian, “when love goes bad, you cannot throw it out the window.” In Russian, okoshka (window) rhymes with kartoshka (potato).

“What Balissa means,” Zoe’s mother, Julia, chimes in, using the portmanteau Zoe gave her great-grandmother as a baby. This is what happens when three generations of women—and one so-genial-they-sometimes-forget-he’s-in-the-room man—share a three-bedroom apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. There’s no such thing as a private conversation. For this we left the Soviet Union?

Then again, this is the neighborhood where a faded metal sign off the elevated subway welcomes you to brighton beach: a whole new world!, while the majority of residents are doing their best to turn it into the old one. Want to buy something in a restaurant or store and don’t speak Russian? Good luck with that! On the other hand—sales tax? What’s that? To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, in Brighton, only the English speakers pay taxes.

You’d think, with her mother having been born in America, and Zoe having been born in America, they’d speak the same language. You’d be wrong. Mama jokes that she’s stuck between languages; she’s starting to forget Russian but hasn’t learned English yet. Mama communicates in Russian, at home and at work, with a few English words thrown in, like “okay,” “parking” (rather, a hybrid, za-PARK-ovat), and “mobile phone” (aka MOBIL-ney).

“What Balissa means”—Mama’s lips flatten against each other and purse out. She resembles a platypus in a pink housecoat, needles stuck through the lapel, ready for any sewing emergency—“is there’s nothing more important than choosing the right person to spend your life with.”

“She is right.” Oh, good, another nation heard from. It’s the first thing Zoe’s grandmother has said since Zoe arrived to help plan her grandparents’ forty-fifth-anniversary party.

Baba Natasha is in a snit, shuffling from living room to kitchen, silently sliding a stack of cherry pirozhki the size of an open hand onto the lacquered coffee table alongside marmalades of many colors that look like orange slices with sugar shells. Snits should never prevent eating.

Zoe asked Mama, when they began planning the big day weeks ago, why Baba is so against a party in her honor. She’s usually all about being venerated. It doesn’t take much to get her talking about the academic gold medal she almost earned in school, if a vengeful instructor hadn’t decided to teach Baba a lesson. There was also anti-Semitism involved. In Baba’s stories, anti-Semitism is always involved. She is equally happy to boast about how she’s circumvented the Americans’ tax system, using their own rules against them. “So easy! Why does everyone not to do this?” Problems begin when Baba feels the family isn’t gushing over her enough. At Zoe’s NYU graduation, Baba made a point of telling everyone she wasn’t some ignorant, immigrant grandmother, but, “I hold the degree in mathematics, also!” And God help anyone who forgets to call, email, or send flowers on March 8, International Women’s Day. And then again on American Mother’s Day.

“I deserve both!” Baba says.

Zoe lives in terror of Baba discovering Grandparents Day is a thing.

Baba’s birthdays are major celebrations, necessitating more flowers, a gift (with receipt included; she says it’s so she has the option to exchange it, but Zoe suspects Baba needs to know how much it cost), a dinner in her honor (where she always snatches up the bill; she says it’s so she can make sure they charged the table properly and no one overcalculated the tip, but Zoe thinks it’s so the assembled can chime in about how she can’t be expected to pay, please, let us, it would be an honor), and several toasts that extol the unparalleled wonder that is her.

So this antipathy toward an anniversary party is not like Zoe’s Baba.

On the other hand, Zoe doesn’t need to ask Mama why, in the face of Baba’s resistance, Mama is still so adamant about going through with it. When your bickering parents are running the clock out on forty-five years of marriage the same way they entered it, her haranguing and his amicably agreeing, you throw them a shindig in a Russian restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, complete with a house band; a mirrored dance floor; aspic-covered fried foods; a variety of shredded, colored cabbages; and many tipsy toasts, at least 50 percent of which are required to be in rhyme. That’s just what you do.

Mama claims to have no idea as to the origin of Baba’s negative stance. Neither does Deda. Neither does Balissa.

They keep claiming this right up until the night of the party.

Zoe gives up and shows up as mandated, along with maybe a hundred other people who had no choice in the matter. When your bickering friends are running the clock out on forty-five years of marriage, you show up. That’s just what you do.

Zoe, however, shows up with a date that, on any other occasion, would have been the talk of Brighton Beach, and still might be, provided all live through the scheduled festivities.

For now, though, Baba is at the center of the tables, and the attention. Baba and her immobile frown. The earsplitting festive music isn’t doing it for her. Mama and Deda’s cajoling also does no good. Mama moves on to hissed threats. Deda throws his hands in the air and pastes on a twice as wide smile, to make up for her lack of one. That’s when the night takes a surreal turn even Zoe’s millennial cynicism couldn’t have predicted. Her grandmother is handed an anniversary gift, some kind of civic license in a fancy frame.

Baba’s frown fades, melting like a coat of armor dissolved by a stealth acid attack. It’s replaced by an almost punch-drunk bewilderment. Baba, who prides herself on remaining in control and on top no matter what the situation, suddenly looks helpless and lost.

She turns to Zoe and whispers, “Why would you to do this?”

Zoe doesn’t know what to say. Because Zoe has no idea what Baba means. Why would she to do what?

As Zoe’s confusion deepens, Baba’s passes. She forces it to pass.

Without waiting for Zoe to answer, right there, in front of all her guests, Baba raises the frame above her head.

And hurls it to the floor.

 

 

Book I

Daria

1931–1941

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

Odessa, USSR

 

Signing the marriage license brisked by so quickly, Daria missed the exact moment when she moved from seventeen-year-old girl to married woman. One minute, she was standing between her mother and her groom at the shabby ZAGS office in front of an official stamping the couples through, the next she was kissing Edward, being kissed by Mama, receiving an embrace from Edward’s papa, and it was over. As Isaak Israelevitch declared how delighted he was to have Daria for a daughter, Mama scrutinized the license she’d snatched from the officiant’s hands, making certain Daria had done as instructed and signed her new legal name as Daria Gordon, not the Dvora Kaganovitch she’d been registered at birth.

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