Roman and I are not exactly sober as we search for my dead grandmother’s old apartment in Santa Monica. This is the last day of our trip to California, which was meant to be a “get a break from parenting and forget about the second ectopic pregnancy” trip, but which had gone sour the moment I checked my email when our plane landed in LAX, though we are still trying to find my grandmother’s place in hopes that it will salvage things. It doesn’t help that I have no address to guide us, only a pin of a nearby park and a picture of me and Baba standing outside the front door of her place when I was an awkward teenager, squinting into the sun.
“How about this one, over here?” Roman says, pointing. “It’s got a pink door.”
“The door was pink twenty years ago. It could be any color now. And no, it didn’t have palms like that.”
“You sure?”
“They’re all starting to look the same,” I say.
We had dutifully combed through half the city after the two-for-one margarita special got at Benny Bean’s in honor of my grandmother, who loved the two-for-one. Even when I was sixteen, she would order the two-for-one, pretending one was for me, though I was too nervous to sneak more than a sip just to please her, which meant I’d sit there watching her suck down two strong beverages while she raved about her latest suitor and I tried not to visibly shudder. And why the hell not have two drinks, when she had lost a husband and a daughter and a country? Hell, she should have had three. Now that I thought of it, she sometimes did order four and had at least three. Nothing could faze her. She never complained when she followed my family to America as a widow, moved to Santa Monica where she didn’t know a soul to work as a biologist at UCLA, and fell in love with the far-off city with the most beautiful sunsets, halfway across the world from Kyiv.
Meanwhile, I am complaining plenty, still seeing red over the email from my agent saying that the final batch of editors had passed on my second novel. It didn’t help that the book was a fictionalized version of the brutal postpartum depression and insomnia that followed my daughter’s birth, which the editors all found “too bleak” or even, in some cases, elaborated to say something like, “the protagonist wasn’t likeable enough for me”—which, I mean, if you saw me during those dark months, would be spot on. The worst rejection came from my former editor, who said the characters were too much like the ones in my first novel, which happened to be about my grandmother’s childhood during the Great War, adding that she could consider working with me again if you made a serious departure from your usual writing, not a doubling down. And she unnecessarily clarified that this was due to my first book’s lackluster sales. I hope you understand, she told me, given the track.
“You know what Baba would say?” I tell my husband as we cross the street to face another row of identical apartment buildings. “She’d just say, silly Oksana, just write another book!” Roman’s eyes crinkle at my attempt to be lighthearted, because it’s the first time we travelled anywhere without our three-year-old daughter and he’s desperate to reclaim it.
“And you’ll do it,” he adds. “She’d tell you the rest of it doesn’t matter too. The industry. The publicity. Even all the fucking billboards.”
“Don’t knock the billboards,” I say, half-joking.
There are billboards all over the city, one of its less charming facets. Every time we pass one, I can’t help but comment on it, because that year alone, three of my Iowa grad school classmates have had their books featured on billboards in Times Square, feverishly posting pictures of themselves standing in front of said billboards, their faces locked in delirious mock surprise.
“Fuck the billboards,” says Roman. “If your book is on a billboard, it just means the publishers want those books to be as ubiquitous as the beef jerky at the 7-11 checkout.”
“I personally hate beef jerky,” I say.
“Your book wasn’t a beef jerky book,” he says, ignoring me. “It was good, but it was weird. Soviet grandmas and their neurotic granddaughters aren’t jerky material.”
“That might be the highest compliment you’ve ever given my writing.”
“Well, I mean it.”
“Still,” I say, sighing as I look up at a billboard featuring an ambulance chasing lawyer, “it feels like, I don’t know, like torture. Like the world is mocking me, or something.”
“You know what feels like torture, Oksana?” he says, getting mad now. “Actual torture. Not getting enough money from a book to put down a down-payment on a house and becoming a university professor. What more do you want?”
“I wanted the baby to go in my uterus,” I say, even though it wasn’t what I was wanting in that specific moment but was something I knew would make him feel sorry for me instead of frustrated by my endless griping. “Is that so much to ask?”
“Now that,” he says, softening, “is not too much to ask, darling. Not too much at all.”
We walk a few more blocks, halfheartedly looking up to see if we can spot any pink doors or wire balconies or three palms in a row, though it’s all blurring together. I’m losing my buzz and feeling ready to move into the hard drinking portion of the evening, which will require us to get ready at our hotel.
“All right,” I say. “We tried. Let’s get out of here.”
“You sure?” he says, looking pained and wary, pretty much the way he’s been around me for the past six months, ever since the doctor told me I was having a pregnancy loss but needed to run more tests to see if it was ectopic again, like my first loss, before I had my daughter. This led to two weeks of bloodwork and six ultrasounds before the technician pointed at the radiating orb in my tube and cried, “I found it, I found it!” like she had struck gold. Then I went to the ER at the height of the pandemic, months before they rolled out the vaccine, to get a shot of methotrexate in the ass, which did not kill the baby like it was supposed to, initiating a second shot a week later, which had the side effect of making me taste blood and see demons when I slept. It took, but I still had two more months of visits to the OB every week to get my blood drawn by a cruel phlebotomist to make sure the baby was still disappearing, sitting between radiant women with baby bumps waiting for my name to be called, until the whole thing mercifully ended, which was when we booked our trip.
“I’m sure,” I tell Roman after a moment, and I whip out my phone to call an Uber. Then I look up at him, and he looks so handsome and well-meaning that I plant a kiss on his lips.
“Careful,” he says with a smile. “If you look at me like that much longer, you may have another ectopic on your hands.”
I kick him in the shin. “I’ll try to resist.”
#
Roman and I have a hearty fuck in our hotel—he bends me over a chair as I overlook the ocean—using a condom to prevent any future ectopics. You would guess that, after having sex nearly kills you on two separate occasions, it would not exactly be an appealing proposition, and it wasn’t, for a while, but hey, it feels good to be getting into the swing of things. And it cheers us up, after the whole not-finding-my-grandmother’s-
“If you get the three-pack,” Roman opines, “you’ll use all three. If you get the six pack, you’d only use one or two because you think, I’ll never get to the end of this pack by the end of this vacation.”
“More sex for less money,” I agree. “Three-for-one deal.”
“Bingo,” he says. He loves teasing me for my penny-pinching ways, which have gotten worse since I used the bulk of my book advance on our down payment. And which will continue to get worse, I think, since there won’t be another over-inflated novel sale on the horizon.
Roman is less than thrilled when I point out that the driver’s name is Vadim just before we get in the car, because he does not share my affinity for talking to strangers, especially not Russian-speaking strangers, even after the rosé. Roman studies nineteenth century Russian literature, and when he’s not on the job, he likes to take a break from our “heritage” and all the weighty repressed stuff that it entails. Even through his mask, I can see that this Russian guy looks stranded in the vast wasteland of his forties, with tanned skin and sandy hair, though his face is undeniably Slavic in spite of any positive effects of the California sun, his wry suspicious gaze still shining through. It doesn’t take long for him to learn that I’m from Kyiv, that my family came to America when I was five. He tells me he’s from Moscow, that he’s been here for the last year and a half.
“How did you end up here?” I ask him, and he says something I can’t fully translate.
“I just…happened to be here,” he says with a shrug.
“That is a common ailment,” I tell him, stumbling through my Russian, but he barely seems to care as I note that we live in Alabama, of all places, where we work for the university there. And in general, his energy isn’t that of the wise, weathered, but ultimately good-natured drivers Roman and I have known. He is not like the ancient man who drove us around Reno a decade ago and, when asked where the fun bars were, gestured toward one particular block and noted, “Here are a couple of hell holes you could crawl into.”
Still, I persist, maybe because Roman is on his phone coordinating with his friends.
“My grandmother lived here,” I tell him. “For twenty years, actually. She loved it more than any place in the world except Kyiv. She would walk along the beach all the time.”
“Well, Kyiv is beautiful. The Lavra, the hills! Here? Here is too much…of everything,” he says, sweeping his hands around to the swarm of tourists approaching the amusement park on the pier, the three dancers doing backflips in a circle, the old man playing a jazz rendition of “Starboy.” The driver doesn’t need to elaborate. He doesn’t need to note the excess, the tonal confusion, or likely the fact that he thinks there are too many minorities. So he and I were not bonding as fellow immigrants, nor was he communing with my grandmother’s ghost.
“My grandmother loved it here,” I say anyway.
“Good for her,” the man says, gruffly. “Somebody has to.”
Roman just rolls his eyes at me like, why do you even bother talking to strangers, or telling them where you’re from?
“You speak Russian?” the man asks Roman from the rearview, just as we’re pulling up on the more hip and less touristy Main Street.
Roman puts his hands up, and I see his face cloud over, like he is much more annoyed with me for engaging with the cab driver than the situation calls for. “Sorry,” he tells him, opening the door the moment we stop. “One hundred percent American.”
#
Our friends start to trickle in. Or, really, Roman’s long-standing film school friends and Marina, a writer I had “met” when she emailed to tell me how much she loved my novel, a Belorussian who has just finished an immigrant novel of her own. Most of Roman’s friends are immigrants or children of immigrants, a Korean, a Peruvian, and a white guy, and though they are obnoxiously loud and crude, I like them because they prove that there is more than one way to live, that you can be in your forties without kids and bounce around from one semi-interesting film-adjacent job to another when it suits you, and they don’t seem to be bemoaning the fact that their lives aren’t magazine ready. Though Alabama has been wide open for months, they’ve just allowed people to gather indoors in LA, so Roman’s friends are extra ready to party, dropping their masks on the table.
“Hey shithead,” says Ho, giving Roman a hug. “Oksana. Looking beautiful as usual.”
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Seth adds.
“You’ve been eating well,” Pedro notes, rubbing Roman’s belly.
Roman shoves them all and says, “And you’ve been snorting well, you assholes,” because apparently their coke habit has not abated. Pedro’s new girlfriend, Lauren or Laurie, looks wholesome but okay with hanging out with such a questionable milieu, which makes me like her right away. The guys plunge into their own vortex of inside jokes, leaving no room for me and Marina as the first round of sangrias arrives, which is perfectly fine.
She is telling me her novel just went out on submission, and so far, she’s gotten one offer—from a respected small press. She says she’s excited, of course, but she’s still got her fingers crossed for something bigger. She wants to quit her day job as a copywriter.
“There’s an editor at a major publisher who’s interested? But she said I should cut out one of the two plotlines and I don’t know how I feel about that. Though the money would be nice.”
“I know what you mean about the big money,” I tell her. “But there’s something to be said for a smaller publisher. They can really take care of you. They wouldn’t let you get lost in their long lists of beach reads, or pass you around three different editors,” I say, trying to curb my own bitterness.
“True, but it’s that immigrant mentality, you know,” she continues, her pretty dark eyes getting bigger. “I want more money, more fame, more of it, just more, more, more.”
“We all want more,” I tell her glumly. “And it’ll never be enough.”
“Never.”
Marina doesn’t need me to elaborate because all of us Soviet kids have suffered some version of the following—coming to America with a mullet, all the kids laughing at me and spilling their sloppy joes down the front of my mismatched outfits in the cafeteria, struggling through ESL and having behavioral problems as a child. The next part seems to have only been my story—how this translated to me feeling like the world was once again throwing sloppy joes at me when I had tried so hard to fit in and be normal by not letting me have my face on a fucking billboard.
Marina tells me the amount the small publisher offered her and I nearly gasp, because my admittedly major publisher gave me ten times that much for my novel, because I basically paid for our new home and two cars with that money, and got a well-paying tenure-track job afterward, and yet there I was, still wanting affirmation. Of course I had my principles, but I didn’t realize the difference was that stark. I feel so guilty about this, and worried that she would ask how much they offered me, that I quickly switch the topic from money.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I say, “the editor from the major publisher—what did she want you to cut?”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, the present arc is about this klepto girl who works in a tattoo parlor, and the past is about her grandfather being a Red Army general who also loved to steal stuff? She thinks the grandpa stuff is too much, maybe material for a different book.”
“That’s incredible, though,” I tell her. “Is it based on your grandfather?”
“Dedya Misha,” she says. “He’s one of the last living Red Army generals, actually. He’s lived right here in Santa Monica for the last thirty years, since my family moved to LA.”
“Holy shit. Are you close?”
“As close as can be.”
“He and my Baba might have hit it off. She had a lot of suitors here, back in the day.”
“That would’ve been cool.”
Then I mention the failed exodus to find my grandmother’s apartment earlier that evening and ask, “Where does he live?”
“Just north of the Promenade. You know where? Right by that crazy guy with the “MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN” sign on his lawn. That thing is such an eyesore. The whole yard is covered in American kitsch crap and it lights up all night long. He’s had it up since Trump was elected and wouldn’t even take it down when Biden won. My grandpa even started a campaign to remove it, but nothing came of it. He’s aways heading one campaign or another,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“We didn’t see it,” I tell her, though I’m not sure how we missed it. I add, “I’m sure your grandfather loves it.”
“Oh, you bet. Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he just marches over to it in the middle of the night and wags his cane at the window.”
Two sangrias in, we move on from the Orwell lawn and I launch into my conspiracy theories about why my second book didn’t sell. The most obvious is that my first book didn’t sell very well, so I was washed up, no longer a shiny debut. Another: postpartum depression just isn’t sexy, unless the mother ends up joining a sex cult or time traveling to her days as a happy-go-lucky sorority girl to see where it all went wrong or does something interesting besides trying to process her incredible pain. A third: people don’t really give a shit about post-Soviet immigrants. We generally thrive in America and are just kind of seen as weird white people with an accent, and they think they already know who we are from the Bond movies, or from the endless slew of prostitutes or spies they’ve seen on TV.
“And the last theory,” I tell an increasingly alarmed-looking Marina, “is that my book just plain sucked.”
“No way,” Marina says, which means something since she actually read a draft. “Your book is fucking amazing. But hey, let’s say it’s not? You can’t ever admit that to yourself. You just keep going, right?”
“Exactly,” I tell her. “Anyway, I’m sure my other theories are superior.”
“Of course,” she says, tilting her head in concern, a tilt that only becomes more pronounced once I add, “I mean, it’s not beef jerky,” without further explanation.
The night’s heating up around us. Pedro and his girlfriend are basically making out. Prompted by Roman’s recounting of our trip to downtown Santa Monica earlier, Seth and Ho and Roman are loudly reminiscing about our wedding, or rather, about how the guys smoked cigarettes with my grandmother outside as she commented on every young woman who walked by after several two-for-ones. “Ugly, ugly, ugly, trying too hard, trying too hard—now there’s a beauty!” she had said, and they turned to see the beauty she was indicating and saw that it was her granddaughter, of course. And then, how she clutched my hands and added, “You look like Grace Kelly! It’s really amazing—what makeup can do!”
Then they talk about their friend Gio, who recently got divorced because his wife ran off with a guy she met at a food truck, no he didn’t work the truck, Ho clarified, he was just also waiting in line for tacos, but Seth insisted the guy was the one making the tacos, and soon they got loud and the argument became about the argument itself, and they were really enjoying themselves. Marina sees that something we are not fully a part of is happening and settles her tab and gives me a hug goodbye. I have this feeling that there is some wisdom I have failed to impart to her, the burgeoning writer, and that I have asked something of her instead.
“You know what?” I say. “If I were you? I’d ditch the grandpa plot and take the money. I’m sure he’d understand.”
She laughs. “I’ll think about it,” she says. Then she squeezes my hand and says, “Good luck,” even though I should have been the one telling her this.
After I watch her leave, I turn back to the table to find a surprisingly sober and amiable Ho and a determined Seth standing beside me.
“Oksana? Are you ready?” Ho says, and I squint at him and take a step closer. There is nothing I feel ready for. “To find your grandmother’s apartment?” he adds.
I look over at Roman, who seems to have softened towards me because of the booze or the fact that this is our last night out in California. He shrugs at me with a smile and I sigh and chug my sangria, which is my way of saying why the hell not?
#
That’s how I find myself tipsy in the back of Ho’s car, with Roman to my left and Pedro making out with his on-his-lap girlfriend to my right, while Seth and Ho Lewis and Clark their way back into downtown Santa Monica with a seriousness the occasion does not call for. Seth and Ho are really into this, looking at the pin and the photo and shouting something about the awnings, about a sloped awning, they think it’s here, no, there, no, no, it’s maybe over there, but Roman and I just smile at each other. I swipe through the various pictures my mother has sent us of my daughter, trying to ignore the fact that she looks lost in all of them, and flash them in my husband’s direction. Ho’s Korean rap blasts through the car, mingling with the sound of Seth munching on a random stick of beef jerky he found in the glovebox and the wet smacks of Pedro and Laurie or Lauren’s make-out, and, I hope, nothing more. I think of the cab driver and his “too much of everything” comment and wonder if this would also qualify.
“At least someone’s having fun,” I say to Roman, indicating the lovebirds and his friends.
He laughs. “Who says we’re not having fun?”
“We’re never gonna find it,” I say quietly, not that they would hear me anyway. I don’t want to disappoint these two, who seem more excited about my Baba’s home than the Lakers. It seemed to me they saw in her the same radical honesty that they practiced, and the fact that an old Soviet lady didn’t give two shits about what people thought of her validated something in them, I think. They didn’t say that, of course. They also didn’t muse over the deeper meaning of her comment about the make-up, or rather, what I was coming to see about her comment about the make-up: that she was saying that hey, you may feel like you’re happier because you’re checking off some America-approved wedding box in your mind, but I can see right through your makeup and know you’re still the same hideous person, that nothing will ever be enough for you.
“Ugly, ugly, ugly…” Seth cries as we pass a clump of distinctly not ugly young ladies.
“Ugly!” cries Ho ecstatically, waving an imaginary cigarette in his hand. “Ugly!”
Roman rolls his eyes and smiles. Should Ho be driving?
“I must admit,” I tell him, “these guys are better than the cabbie.”
“You know why?” Roman says, looking more serious than amused. “Because they’re actual friends. Real people who give a shit about you.” I’m surprised by how riled up he’s getting. As his friends shout more loudly, he continues to speak in the same low but urgent manner. “You’re always wanting too much from the wrong people,” he says. “That idiot cabbie who wanted to shit on Santa Monica for no reason. Your former editor. Women who read whatever the industry tells them to. The phlebotomist who took your bloodwork over and over and kept asking when the baby was due because she was too busy to care.” At the sound of the sobering term “phlebotomist,” Lauren or Laurie comes up for air, squints at us critically, and returns to making out.
Roman has a point, though. Which I consider as we pass two more women walking near the Promenade, whom no one declares them ugly.
“Who does care, then?”
“Me, you asshole. Your mom. Our sweet daughter.”
Now Ho has sped up to another picturesque block, and I think of how, even if it’s touristy, Santa Monica is so nice and quiet compared to other parts of LA, the ones with the garish signs and billboards and traffic that makes it all just feel like a post-apocalyptic ride to nothing. I try to remember myself there, first visiting my grandmother at sixteen, right when men began leering at me. The whole world was laid out before me and I was falling in love with it all: boys, my new sun-tanned body, my amateur writing, the wide scope of the earth that had not yet disappointed me. I had no grudges then and I did not know that it would be possible to feel immensely grateful and wronged at once.
I take his hand. “I wish none of it happened,” I tell him. The shots in the ass, the phlebotomist repeatedly asking if this was my first baby, the postpartum year of staring at the ceiling all night long, bargaining with a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in that I would do anything at all if he would just let me sleep. “I don’t want it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to write about it, even. I don’t know how to carry it. I want it out,” I say, which was the same thing I said about the egg that would not die in my tube, that insisted on stubbornly sticking around. I want it out, I had screamed in the ER for four hours until they came to give me my first shot in the ass. I want it out.
“I wish none of it happened too,” he says. “But it did. And having that cabbie think you were cool wouldn’t have fixed it.”
“How about having my face on a billboard?” I say. “I would have loved that.” I can see he’s not surprised that I finally said it aloud, though he wished I hadn’t.
As we zip by the bright streets, I allow myself the fantasy. I see my face holding my book in Times Square, the bright lights all around me, me shining down on the crowd like some kind of benevolent god, one who has never, ever suffered. The midtown workers and tourists would look up at me and say, wow. Oh my god. Look at her. She’s amazing. She probably hasn’t suffered a day in her life.
“It couldn’t hurt,” I go on, which I can sense was the exact wrong thing to say from how Roman’s body stiffens, even if I was kind of joking.
“Actually,” Roman says, “You’d be surprised by how much damage it could do.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, softly now, like I am confessing to an affair.
He shakes his head and stares out the window, but he doesn’t let go of my hand. I stare out the other side, trying to understand exactly what I’m sorry for, while the cries of his friends get less enthusiastic, like they too are giving up on this night.
That’s when something catches my eye and I put a hand on Ho’s shoulder.
“Stop,” I tell him. “Stop here. Right here.”
“Here?” Ho says, stopping the car so hard that all of us lurch forward, that Pedro and his girlfriend are forced to come up for air. “She lived here?”
“No,” I say, but I get out, and Roman does not follow. It’s not my grandmother’s place I see, not her pink-doored apartment at all. It’s the yard Marina told me about, the one with all the flashing lights, the red, white and blue lawn ornament-monuments to American Democracy. I spot the glow from around the corner and follow it, and there I am, standing in the yard with the “MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN” sign flashing before me. Somewhere across the street is Marina’s grandfather, a Red Army general, trying to sleep in spite of the glow.
In fact, just a moment later, I hear his footsteps coming up behind me as he approaches to give me a piece of his mind about the racket we are making.
He has seen more death in five minutes than I ever will in my lifetime and has no patience for my person-sized heartache. His cane taps harshly against the cement of the sidewalk, bemoaning his failed campaign. I want to tell him I’m sorry for what I said about him, that his story should not be taken out of Marina’s book for the sake of efficiency and cold hard cash.
“What are you doing?” he says, his voice gruff in the night, filled with decades of heartache and world-weariness and unimaginable pain.
But I turn in his direction and find Roman standing there.
“Marina’s grandfather lives around here. The Red Army general,” I say.
“And?”
“It’s some kind of sign, isn’t it?”
“Sure, Oksana,” he says. “It could be a sign.”
“One hundred percent American,” I say with a smile, nodding at the monstrosity on the lawn, but he doesn’t react.
He leads me under the arch of red, white, and blue balloons and we stand in the center of the lawn display, like we are not watching it and are almost a part of it instead. It’s got garish Uncle Sam with his big goofy star-studded hat, a donkey and an elephant fighting, and the Statue of Liberty and a couple of Christmas penguins for good measure. It really is an impressive eyesore. The block is utterly dark except for this pointless monument. Roman squeezes my hand.
If I were writing the story of this night, then my first impulse would be to act like Marina’s potential editor: there would be a lot I would take out, and I would make it about a lost youngish woman searching for her grandmother’s former home, hoping to find a key to her future through her past, some generational link when, given the track, it does not seem likely that she will produce any more children herself.
But there was so much more that happened that day, and as I watched the lights dance on Roman’s face, I wondered if he could see them dancing on mine, if he could tell that I was thinking, well, fuck them all, if I was actually going to write about this night, then I would cram in everything that mattered to me: the glow, the billboard fight, getting fucked while looking at the ocean, the mean throbbing in my tube, the picture my mother sent of our daughter frowning without me in a kiddie pool, the three glasses of sangria I sucked down like they were water, Marina’s sweet hopefulness and doubt, the memory of my grandmother smoking a cigarette and slyly whispering something unprintable in my ear on my wedding night—every last speck of the night would go into the story, even the parts that didn’t seem all that flattering or important, I would have kept it all in.