It was an ordinary Saturday. Luka and I sat on the living room floor, watching cartoons. Ma sat behind us, on her little couch, neither watching nor not watching the TV, just existing, as she usually did. Mom had already taken up her command post at the kitchen table, sitting in “her” chair under the phone, surrounded by stuff that somehow orbited her, like Pigpen’s cloud of dust: ashtray, cigarettes, lighter, a cup of coffee, half a dozen pens that didn’t work, a grocery list in progress, envelopes, checkbook, bills and papers, and assorted catalogs. She’d spend all day there, much of it on the phone, her feet up on the portable Harvest Gold Maytag washer she’d tend along with her gossip. The machine was a reliable source of entertainment for me and Luka. We’d watch her wrestle it out of the kitchen corner, where it lived six days of the week, to a position in front of the kitchen sink. The “in” rubber hose that attached to the kitchen tap had a tendency to noisily detach itself when the washer went through a spin cycle, which was sometimes so intense we could feel the vibrations in the floor as we watched Scooby Doo, though the real excitement was when the dirty water “out” hose threatened to overflow the sink. Mom would yell “hold on” to her phone friend and get up, swearing, to bail water into the other half of the sink to prevent a flood.
Piles of clothes littered the kitchen on Saturdays. My and Luka’s clothes were sorted into a light pile and a dark pile, then there was a pile of whites, a pile of towels, and mom’s oily work clothes were sorted into piles of lights and darks. Her clothes would be washed last, tonight — the washer was tiny, so it took all day — and didn’t go in with ours because, Mom said, she didn’t want us smelling like that goddamned factory. Ma’s clothes didn’t go in at all because she thought the washer was k chortu (from the devil), one of a very few Russian phrases Mom had translated for us because Ma used it so often. Ma had complicated relationships with inanimate objects — or more precisely, didn’t seem to consider them inanimate in the way most people did — and I rarely understood the logic of what she would or wouldn’t use. But she washed her clothes by hand, usually when we were at school, and I only knew she’d done it because we’d come home to find them draped all over the trailer, drying. Ma also, in other words, refused to use the Harvest Gold Maytag dryer that lived in the bathroom. On Saturdays, it was my and Luka’s job to ferry the basket of wet clothes from the kitchen to the bathroom — inevitably bickering along the way, as Luka tended to hold his end of the basket in one hand while holding a GI Joe in the other, and distracted, would run himself or the basket or me into the wall — but when we made it, I’d load the dryer and start it. When it beeped, I’d take the dry clothes out, carry the now much lighter load of clean clothes into my bedroom and dump in it on my bed, where Mom or sometimes Ma would fold it.
I was making my way back down the hall after just such a mission when an unexpected knock came at the door. Mom gestured for me to get it, busy as she was on the phone, and I opened it to find the mailman standing there. “Is your mother home?” he asked.
“Hold on, Shirley,” I heard Mom say, and she put the phone down. She appeared behind me in the door, saying “Yes, I am.”
“Are these for you?” he asked, holding up two letters. I could clearly see my name on the front of one of them, but I didn’t have time to absorb more before Emma reached for them. She studied them for a moment, her brows knit. She glanced up at the return address in the corner, awareness seemed to dawn, and then her face flushed a deep red. “Yes, they are,” she said to the mailman, then hesitated.
The postman was watching her quizzically and when she shrugged, somewhat apologetically, in lieu of further explanation, he said, “That’s fine, just wanted to be sure.” He handed her the rest of her mail and wished her a good day.
“Is that for me?” I asked when she closed the door. I knew my name was on one of the letters but I also knew, from the way she was acting, that something weird was happening. I was afraid she might not give me the letter and I’d never know who it was from.
She looked at me for a moment, as if surprised to see me there, and she looked the letters over again, turning them over to look at the back, apparently considering what to say, then said, “Yes, they’re for you, you kids.” That was enough to pique Luka’s interest and he came away from the TV to see what was up. Mom handed us each a letter. Mine was addressed to Goddess Katya Lastname and Luka’s to God Luka Lastname.
“What is it?” we both asked.
“It’s a letter, from your uncle,” Mom said. “Your Uncle Vladimir.”
“To us?”
“Yes, I guess, open them and see,” Mom said. Luka and I looked at our own letters, then each other’s, checking the names and addresses on them. We rarely got mail addressed to us, of course, and loved it when we did, but this was so weird we weren’t sure whether to be excited.
“Why does it say God Luka and Goddess Katya?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Katya,” Mom said in her tired voice, which meant stop asking questions. She picked up the phone and went back to Shirley.
Luka and I went to sit on the couch, side by side, and opened our letters, finding a single sheet of paper in each, addressed likewise to Goddess Katya and God Luka. Uncle Vladimir thanked us for the Christmas present and card we sent, apparently. I sort of remembered Emma putting together a package to send to him around Christmas — I only noticed because there’d been a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, a kind she didn’t smoke, on the kitchen table, next to a package of fancy cookies she told me I’d better not even think about touching — but I didn’t know she’d sent a card signed from us. Uncle Vladimir asked about our Christmas and invited us to write to him.
After I read Luka’s letter to him, he proudly showed it to Ma, and she nodded and fake smiled at it, but she didn’t take it from him or read it. He gave it back to me and lost interest altogether — he could barely write his name — and went back to the TV, but I sat on the couch, reading the letter over and over and looking at the envelope again and again, a little bit stunned. Vladimir was real. Which I’d always known, of course, but his existence had been so secret and so abstract that it’d never occurred to me that he could reach out from there, which I now knew was somewhere in Foxborough, Massachusetts, nor had it ever occurred to me that he might reach out directly to me. I had no idea how to ask my questions — or even exactly what they were, yet — but now the possibility existed. I felt like a portal to a new world had opened up.
Within only a few weeks, my hopes proved true. It was another ordinary Saturday, Luka and I were sitting on the living room floor, watching cartoons, when my mom answered the phone. Instead of her usual “Hi, how are you?,” though, her voice went loud and bright as she said, “Yes, I’ll accept the charges.”
I knew that meant somebody was calling collect, and that didn’t happen very often.
“Hi, Vova,” Mom said into the phone, still louder and fake happier than she usually was on the phone. I turned to look at Ma, and she was looking at Mom too. Mom was already gesturing at Ma, come here, but Ma shook her head no. Mom gestured harder so Ma got up and left the living room and went to her bedroom.
I stood up and went to Ma’s couch and sat down, wanting to hear what Mom was saying without the distraction of the TV. It wasn’t much so far — I’m good, working hard as always, how are you? — when mom turned and gestured to me, come here. I was suddenly frozen to the spot, unsure what was happening.
“Yes,” Mom said, “they were so happy to get your letters. Katya is right here” — she gestured harder at me — “and she’d love to talk to you.” I stood and walked toward her, feeling half like I was sleepwalking and half like I was having a nervous breakdown. I was worried about 1) what I would say to Uncle Vladimir and 2) how much trouble I would get in if I said the wrong thing to Uncle Vladimir. Mom had never given me instructions for talking to him because I’d never talked to him before. But Mom was nodding at me with a big, fake smile, so I kept walking and then she put the phone in my hand.
“Hi, Katya,” Uncle Vore sang out, his voice higher and happier than I expected. He had a thicker Boston accent than I expected too. I knew they all talked like that back east — my Aunt Luda and Uncle Venya sounded the same, and even my mom had a trace of it still, she said some words strangely, not like everyone else in our town — but I somehow hadn’t expected it from him.
He asked me if I’d gotten his letter, then began asking normal adult questions about school, and I suddenly had a burning question that I was afraid to ask. I looked to my mom, wondering if I could get a clue from her face how to proceed, but she’d busied herself with piles of laundry and wasn’t looking at me, though I knew she was listening. But he sounded so friendly that, with a surge of confidence I have no idea where I got, I said, “Can I ask you a question about your letter?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Why did you send the letters to Goddess Katya and God Luka?” I could feel my mom’s eyes boring into the back of my head — maybe she dropped the laundry and went still, or moved toward me, I’m not sure how I knew — but I also oddly, suddenly didn’t care that I might get in trouble for it later. She shouldn’t have given me the phone if she didn’t want me to speak.
“Well,” Vore said, drawing the word out as if he were thinking hard about what he seemed to find a perfectly reasonable question, “You know that our family is Russian Orthodox, right?”
“Yes,” I said, though I didn’t, really. I wasn’t even sure what religion was. I went to church very rarely, only with my dad’s mom, and it was a Presbyterian church, and I did little there but get pinched into being quiet, but I did know that my mom had a heavy gold cross with three arms on it, from Russia, so I had a sense of what he was referring to.
“And Orthodox believe,” Vore went on, “that when God made us, he breathed into each of us a Divine Spark. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, that’s what a priest told me once,” Vore said. “And if God breathed a little piece of himself into us — that’s what the divine spark is — then we are all a little bit divine, or gods and goddesses too, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. It didn’t quite make sense to me — and even if it did, it was weird to send letters that way, I knew — but I didn’t care. What mattered was that Uncle Vladimir answered my question and he didn’t get mad that I asked it. I wanted to ask more about the divine spark — did he feel it in him?, I sure didn’t — but Mom came to take the phone out of my hand — c’mon Katya, say goodbye, collect calls are expensive — so instead I said that I’d write to him, and he promised to write to me too.
I'm fascinated by your story and each member of your family. Fantastic writing. I can't wait to read more!