A Country You Can Leave: A Novel

PART I

LESSONS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death.

—DEBORAH LEVY, Things I Don’t Want to Know

1

There is no release from life’s turmoil, so put your back into it.

In a gulch somewhere between the San Jacinto and Santa Anas, my mother, Yevgenia, slows the car at the sign welcoming us to the dubiously named Oasis Mobile Estates. She cuts the engine behind the property manager’s battered truck and goes about the task of cleaning herself up. She pulls a rubber band out of her stiff, dyed-black hair. She scrunches it back to life. Tweezers in hand, she yanks the rearview mirror down to brutalize her already emaciated eyebrows. When she smell-checks her armpits, I know there is a man inside.

Don’t I get a vote? I ask, watching Yevgenia resuscitate her breasts by scooping them up in her bra. Our drive from Nevada to California has been nonstop. For miles, nothing but hot dust, windswept trash, and nameless mountains closing in on our resentments.

My mother ignores me. Instead, she looks through the bug-splattered windshield, her eyes turned to the heaven she doesn’t believe in. She blows hard through her mouth. Traces of old beer and tobacco stir in the narrow space between us.

"People who cast votes decide nothing. People who count votes decide everything. Pushing the car door open with her shoulder, she says, Stalin. Look it up."

Hey, I call out as she heads to the manager’s trailer, her red tank top plastered to her back with sweat. Use a condom.

There’s a brief pause in her step. Her body tenses. Then I hear it. The source of what I yearned for most in childhood, her husky laugh, etched by decades of chain-smoking.

Waiting for her to score whatever it is she thinks she’ll get from a place like this, I crane my neck to survey the Oasis Mobile Estates. Nestled in shriveled patches of yellow desert grass wedged between boulders heavily scarred by acid rain, this oasis is a decrepit collection of rusted metal boxes lined up along small tributaries of roughly hewed roads. The only sign that I’m in the year 2000 is a flat-roofed Circle K squatting a half mile outside the trailer park. Fiery air blasts through the open car window from the direction of the Mojave. I shove my hand down the back of my jeans to pull my sweat-drenched underwear out of my crack.

Eventually, the door of the property manager’s tin hut opens. My mother emerges with a man in tow. Her skirt is straight, her tank top tucked in. They hadn’t done it. This is a bad sign. It means she’s serious about the place. They approach the car and I overhear Yevgenia casually lying about where we have just been, saying Denver and not Las Vegas. That she’s leaving a job rather than leaving yet another guy who turned out to be broke. The property manager, with his tangled waist-length black hair and weathered brown skin, is smitten. He follows my mother, eyeing her swaying hips.

Don’t just sit there like a dum-dum, my mother says to me through a fake smile. Her voice comes from the earthy place deep between her legs. It drips with allure, turned up by the presence of a man who has something she wants. Get out of the car. Say hello to Carlos.

Out of habit, I do as she says. But inside I smolder. I raise my hand in a half-hearted greeting. Yevgenia glares.

This is my daughter, Lara, she says. And I wait for it. Maybe secretly, Yevgenia does too. The scrutiny of a white woman with a Black child.

There. Carlos’s eyes flick between me and my mother. The appraisal of biological proximity. Her straight hair to my curly, lopsided Afro. Her rounded, fleshy curves to my limp, flat lines. Her light, white skin, the known story, to my dark, open question.

Call me Papa Bear, he says, straightening his face, giving us a pass. Everyone does.

He’s got a bum knee, so we follow Papa Bear’s slow, limping figure down the cracked asphalt road. He heads with purpose toward the main artery of the Oasis. Dead Man Walking isn’t a film I’ve seen but the title comes to mind. I try not to notice Papa Bear’s disability, but his lurching movement ignites an involuntary jumpiness within my own body. I hate myself for it and glance at my mother. Her attention is on two women standing next to the trailer we’re approaching.

Don’t Minnie look silly? says an older white woman. She’s standing in the carport on a step stool, attaching a rainbow umbrella hat over a yellow baseball cap worn by a second, taller old woman. They wave at Papa Bear.

Papa Bear smiles at them, polite and exaggerated. To me he says, She’s Mickey and the other is Minnie. Get it?

Yeah. I don’t get it, but I know it’s easier to just go along.

"Their names. Their actual names." He’s shaking his head, as if he’s looking at the eighth wonder.

I grunt a false half laugh, not confused by their names but by the winter clothes they’re wearing. Shapeless jeans and baggy sweatshirts, and neither of them is sweating.

Several trailers down we stop next to a cramped front porch with steep carpeted steps. It looks the same as all the others except in the covered carport there are black plastic garbage bags flung one on top of the other like bodies in an open grave.

Don’t mind that crap, Papa Bear says, his eyes on the swell of my mother’s breasts. They’ll come ’round to collect in a day or two.

My mother considers the place, shaking her head. Fishing her cigarettes out of her fake Chanel, she lights up carefully. Yevgenia always takes her time before haggling over the rent. It’s her game. Acting as though she’s deliberating from a long list of nonexistent options. She sighs, annoyed, glancing at the mess in the carport, pretending those bags interrupt some big plan of hers. Amid the dilapidations and failures, my mother, Yevgenia, a woman who accidentally defected from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is at her most Russian. She will make anything work. A broken washing machine, a flat tire, a foreign country. This.

I don’t want to be here but it’s not like I’m at risk of running away. Though my mother wouldn’t care. The truth is, she’s tethered to me by weak strings of obligation. Nathaniel Nate Basmadjian taught me this, and how to scrunch my body into a tiny ball on the floor of the car, while he and my mother drove around town. One night, Nate hinted that if my mother lost the Black kid, he’d marry her and within a few days, they were off. I was five at the time so the recollection is vague. What I do remember of my life without Yevgenia is time spent with the strange people my mother pawned me off on. The Polish Seventh-day Adventist couple who liked to show me pictures from their missionary trip to Botswana, saying, This is your culture, dear, until I nodded my head like I understood. The pretty Canadian coke addict who made me lie on the floor at the foot of her bed while she talked to me about her married boyfriend until I fell asleep. Then there was the large family from Guam who worked me like a slave and called me nekglo ñamu, black mosquito, in their Chamorro language, which was amazing that they even knew those words, the eleven-year-old cousin told me, since the U.S. burned all the dictionaries in his country.

So not exactly foster care, but something like it.

Acquaintances from Yevgenia’s various jobs. People who owed her a favor. She exhausted everyone with promises she would send more money, be back soon. She was gone for nearly two years. Supposedly embarking on a new life in Scottsdale as a blonde named Evie who played mixed doubles every Saturday. When my mother returned to me in California with brown roots and an allergy to shrimp cocktail, she didn’t speak too much about tennis or Nate or Arizona, so I didn’t ask.

Those years without her created a savage hunger in me that’s hard to shake. When I was eight, nine, and ten, Yevgenia had to cleave me from her body whenever she left for work or to go to the store. At twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, I yoked my mother, leaving little space between us as she sat to read, on the sofa or in a chair. If she closed a door, my back would be pressed against it. I was the inextricable daughter, physically and mentally. But now, as we arrive at the Oasis during this Indian summer, as I enter what will be the merciless year of sixteen, I am ready for the grip of longing to finally loosen. And there’s relief, like letting go of a sweaty hand.

THE DESERT HEAT is powerful, an unrelenting foe of the living. Papa Bear and my mother seem unfazed by it. I wipe my brow with the back of my hand, my eyes on the cigarette strangled between Yevgenia’s two fingers. She sucks smoke deep into her lungs, frowning. Papa Bear is not looking at her face so he can’t see her dissatisfaction. Yevgenia clears her throat, loudly. She motions her cigarette in the direction of the piles of trash in the carport; he jerks his eyes away from her chest, nervous.

That’s the thing about her. Her powers of seduction specialize in lonely, sexually frustrated men, and Papa Bear fits the bill. In my mother, he sees a drinking partner, hot sex, the chance to introduce her as his old lady.

Papa Bear has no idea.

He blathers panicky explanations about the trailer, like he needs to change her mind. You know, the former tenants had to beat a hasty retreat.

A hasty retreat. Our calling card, my mother and I. In those Hefty bags filled with whatever junk didn’t make the cut in the rush to get out before the cops or Immigration or a murderous ex broke the door down, I imagine lie rotting artifacts from a taxonomy of restless belonging. A yearbook from the school three moves ago. A green dress bought and never worn for a party whose invitation never arrived. A salvaged mirror, cracked but still pretty. A letter with a father’s last known address.

And if those bags aren’t an ominous sign, the boy directly across the street, nine or ten years old, is. He’s sitting on the curb with his bike thrown on the ground behind him. His white hair is a perfect polished tooth next to his shabby, yellowed mobile home. He’s disconcerting, this boy. It’s like his face is out of place here in the desert. The freckles, the bright white hair, the upturned nose of privilege, and the astute blue eyes all belong to a clean-cut Caucasian kid in a cereal commercial. But from the neck down there are signs of neglect. Dirty ripped clothing, bloodied knuckles, filthy bare feet. He’s throwing rocks in the middle of the road, tracking us: me, Papa Bear, my mother. When he catches me looking, he freezes. Then he thrusts his middle finger in the air.

Caught off guard, I stammer, That … that kid.

Oh yeah, Papa Bear says, turning to give the kid a quick wave. That’s Brody. He’s alright.

Yeah, well, he just flipped us off.

Don’t make an elephant out of a fly. A standard Yevgenia idiom. She stamps out her second cigarette.

"But he’s an asshole," I say, hating the whining tone in my voice but unable to rein it in.

My mother sighs. She turns to Brody. Hey, asshole.

His blue eyes turn toward her and she flips him off. His mouth twists into a sneer and he laughs, high-pitched and phony.

She brushes her hands on her jean skirt, turning to me. Better now?

Much. There is more to say. There always is between my mother and me.

Her jaw clenches, communicating. Don’t screw this up.

I shrug her off with an eye roll.

Her eyes lock onto Papa Bear, who seems uncomfortable. Stepping a little closer to him, she starts her negotiation boldly. One hundred fifty a week.

Papa Bear shakes his head. No can do. Two hundred forty cash and it’s already a huge discount.

Two hundred, cash. Best and last. Yevgenia’s brows are thin, uneven arches, making her look fierce and slightly psychotic. She jams her hand in her purse and pulls out her ring of keys. She’s ready to leave if she has to.

Papa Bear’s hand trembles slightly as he rubs his chin. He is trying to figure out if she means it. Yevgenia shifts her weight to one leg, arms crossing under her breasts. The round flesh of her boobs pours out from her shirt. It’s a beckoning. I’ve seen her practice this move in countless bathroom mirrors, been a witness to its effects on gas station attendants and motel clerks. The pit of my stomach burns. I look over at the kid across the street. I am neither religious nor superstitious, but I throw myself at the feet of whatever higher power is out there. Please. Not the fucking Oasis. I can’t live in this penal colony. This refuge for losers. Across the street, the blond kid picks his nose, balling up his boogers between his fingers. Fucking gross. This is all my mother’s fault. Before California was Nevada and Utah and Colorado and Texas. But before all of that was Mexico, a place I was learning to call home, and she took that away from me. And I’m pissed. Now here we are, at what feels like our last chance. Because it’s not hard to miss that the Oasis is just a pit stop on the way to the bottom.

Oh, damn it to hell. Papa Bear kicks at the ground and puffs of dust plume. Don’t mention what you’re paying to anyone, he says, reaching into his pocket. The keys clink together as he softly tosses them to my mother.

Yevgenia turns to me, her face flush with victory. Get the suitcase.

My shoulders drop.

If an inanimate object can bully, it’s the blue suitcase. Since Yevgenia never takes a standard approach to anything, I have learned to watch the case. Before she buys groceries, or stops reusing the same plastic utensils, or thinks about getting any furniture, Yevgenia will put the blue suitcase in the corner of a room with a door, marking her territory. If she leaves it in the car, I know we will be moving on. But it’s not just the suitcase itself and what it represents that bullies. It’s what is contained inside. The multicolored spiral-bound notebooks, their torn pages like slim fingers slipped through prison bars, taunt me. In these notebooks live my mother’s authoritarian edicts, philosophies, and communiqués, mostly regarding sex and men and politics and reading habits. The notebooks will be the sum total of her legacy and my meager inheritance. When she’s bored or drunk or both, she gets the suitcase, rummages past Technicolor photos of herself smoking with friends outside a drab apartment block in Cheryomushki or posing arm in arm with lecherous-looking Italian men in front of the Colosseum, and reads out loud from her lists.

Yevgenia claps her hands at me. Chip-chop.

I hate when she says that. It’s so colonial. It’s chop-chop, I mutter, walking to the car.

Shun men who are actors. Or models. They are looking for validation. Their lives are all about hoping and waiting, which means they will make you hope and wait for a good orgasm too.

Armageddon arrives at the Oasis on the first of the month. It starts early in the afternoon with the TVs turned up at top volumes, mariachi music piping from radios, and hard rock or hip-hop blaring too much treble from busted car speakers. It is only a matter of hours before all the day drinking transitions to sloppy drunken parties spilling out of trailers to carports and into the narrow streets. A fight starts, a tremor that turns into an all-out brawl until the cops come and shut it down. After a night of reckoning, the part of the Oasis that slept through the chaos wakes, too early, to grab hold of the cool Saturday morning before the sun starts scorching. This time belongs to the Oasis’s elderly residents. Ms. Eunice, a trim African American woman who keeps busy riding up and down the streets on her bright red electric mobility scooter, the basket on the handlebar stuffed with papers and plastic bags. Her cane is jammed in the basket too, aluminum knocking against aluminum as she rides over the potholes and cracks in the road. Then there’s Lourdes’s husband, Gus, tinkering under the hood of his truck, his small transistor playing Spanish talk radio. The white-haired sisters, Mickey and Minnie, speed-walk the neighborhood in their pink and pale blue sweatpants. Papa Bear, though not elderly, sits out under his carport, a lawn chair backed up against the bumper of his truck as if he’s tailgating, drinking a cup of coffee.

You’re up early, he calls to me. I am trudging down the road from the Circle K. Yevgenia is still out from the night before and there was no bread for toast.

Yeah, too early, I say, because he is the landlord. But I’m lying—9:00 a.m. is late for me. The truth is, I have been up for hours, keeping vigil for my mother, as I often do. I can’t sleep when she’s not home.

Ask your mom for the killer hangover cure she has. It works. He chuckles, raising his coffee mug, in salute.

Sure. I guess he doesn’t know I am five years away from the legal drinking age. Or maybe he thinks, given how Yevgenia is with liquor, that I’m the same way. I always find it curious, the idea of what traits or behaviors a parent passes to their child. I don’t do the things my mother does. I don’t drink or smoke or have sex. The no drinking and no smoking parts of my monastic life are easy. I hate the taste. But sex? This is not a question I will solve on my walk home from the Circle K.

The Toyota is in the carport. Yevgenia returned while I was out. Not that I was too worried. My mother can’t stomach more than seventy-two hours with a man. Any more than that is too much domesticity. Of course, the men never see it coming. Yevgenia is a deceptive lover. Attentive to needs of a sexual nature, but don’t ask her to pass a pack of smokes, get a beer from the fridge, or scratch that hard-to-reach spot in the middle of your back. By the time someone might look at her and wonder if she will be the intense, clingy type, she vanishes, leaving bruised egos and blue balls in her wake. It’s brilliant, really, the way my mother gets what she wants from people, men in particular.

I was eleven when I finally paid attention to Yevgenia’s lessons about men. It was after I told her about seeing one of her friends sitting on my bed, sniffing a pair of my underwear. Yevgenia’s reaction was surprisingly satisfying. We drove out from Burbank to a barren tire shop in Castaic in search of this guy.

Not finding him, she went after his car. Fucking pervert! Yevgenia shouted as she brought the crowbar down over her head into the windshield. At first, the smash of glass was anticlimactic. Small fractures extended moderately from the epicenter. My mother hit the window again and again until she was sweating and bits of window sprayed over the dashboard. Even after all the windows of the car were broken she kept hitting, and I knew she was beating back a history that had nothing to do with me.

Later, by the side of the road, Yevgenia took a swig from her makeshift flask. I stared at the small cut across her cheek where a bubble of blood swelled and ran toward her jaw. She seemed oblivious to it. Instead, she gripped the old perfume bottle filled with dark bourbon tightly, until her knuckles were white. Sex before puberty is a bodily violation, she said. It will age you. If a man touches you when you’re not ready, you tell me and I’ll kill him.

That was the extent of my sex-ed talk. I understood then, between me and my mother, this kind of violence was an act of love.

AN UNFAMILIAR MOTORCYCLE is parked in front of Brody and his mother Terri’s trailer. Since our first run-in, I stay away from the kid and take to watching him from the kitchen window whenever he is outside. Or, like now, I create a wide berth whenever I am walking near his house. I don’t trust him. He seems like the type of kid who could set whole neighborhoods on fire and watch gleefully from the sidelines.

Hotel California wafts up from their backyard. My mother hates this song. A guy she dated once called it America’s Dirtbag Anthem, and now that’s what she calls it too. I stop for a minute to listen. Hoarse male laughter fills a gap in the music. I turn toward my house, not all that interested in the lives of my neighbors.

What are you looking at, you stupid pussy? It’s Brody’s voice behind me. He’s standing at the edge of the street with his arms across his bare, concave chest.

Fuck off, kid. Go brush your teeth or take a bath or something. I scramble quickly into my yard.

There’s the metallic clang of Brody’s screen door snapping shut, the shuffle of feet on the landing.

Hey, is this little dude causing you grief? The voice is genial.

I turn despite my embarrassment at being heard cursing at a little kid. The man standing on the top step of Brody’s trailer is smiling. He is clearly not from the trailer park. First of all, he looks clean. Clean jeans, clean white T-shirt, clean motorcycle boots. His blond hair is long enough for him to tuck it behind his ears. He’s a little older but beautiful enough to be a model.

I feel my palms start to sweat.

I’m Steve, Brody’s dad. He comes walking over with the confidence of a salesman. I met your mom yesterday. Evie, right?

I roll my eyes. His voice doesn’t give anything away. But knowing my mother, she tried to give him a lap dance in the middle of the road.

Yeah, my mom’s real name is Yevgenia. She tells people to call her Evie, so it’s easier for them. Evie is such a dumb name.

Steve’s eyes drift over to his trailer, like something more important is calling him back.

I mean she’s Russian, I say.

Yeah, Russian, that’s cool. Listen, I was wondering if you’d watch Brody sometime. I’ll pay you. Not much, you know, a little walking-around money…

I don’t hear the rest of what he’s saying because I am already nodding my head, Yeah, sure, I’ll do it.

Okay, great. He gives me another smile.

I hurry up my trailer steps. I shut the door and the plywood-paneled walls of my living room threaten to cave in around me. I come to my senses. The last thing I want to do is babysit some devil kid. Fuck, I say out loud.

Ah, you met our neighbor. There’s a hint of laughter in my mother’s voice. She’s sitting on the sofa in a purple bra and black underwear, disdainfully plucking through the English edition of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. The book isn’t the source of her scorn. For Yevgenia, there is nothing better than the Russians in all things, especially literature. Pushkin and Tolstoy, which seems a bit obvious, and Gogol were the greats according to her. I think her appreciation of Gogol is a nod to a shared biographical footnote. He spent a few years in Rome and so did she. But Russian stories in English? Can’t be translated, my mother always says.

I bend to collect her discarded clothes and drape them on the back of the hideous and uncomfortable Russian imperial-style chair she found at a swap meet. Dark wood with an ornately carved high back. The seat, a small square of padded red brocade held by several broken brass nails, offers a parody of comfort. I want to move toward my room, but Yevgenia stops me by saying, wistfully, You know, our neighbor Steve is movie-star sexy but he’s still just a normal guy. Makes you think we can all fuck Brad Pitt. She arches her back and, still holding Resurrection, stretches her arms over her head. "Do you want to fuck Brad