Mannequin Girl Read online

  “Your mom is really beautiful,” she tells him. They are walking back from supper, and though she’s not totally sincere, she is intrigued by this strange sparkly creature, so unlike the tired parents that come for everybody else.

  “She’s not my mother,” Igor says.

  He avoids Kat for the next two days, and when at last they speak again, neither of them mentions the woman.

  ANECHKA TURNS up Friday evening. She sweeps in all breathless, pops up out of nowhere in her typical illogical Anechka fashion, without warning or excuse. It’s useless to remind her that the next day is Saturday, that Kat will be going home after school.

  “Everyone’s parents came yesterday,” Kat whines. “Either yesterday or on Wednesday.”

  She should know better, of course. This line of logic never works with Anechka. “Since when are we comparing ourselves to ‘everyone’?”

  She’s brought Kat a jar of grated carrots mixed with sugar, and her rabbit baby spoon. Kat’s poor appetite is legendary.

  Kat tightens the lid on the jar after only a couple of spoonfuls.

  “I’m not taking it home,” protests Anechka.

  “You eat it then. You need it more than I do.”

  They sit side by side on the curvy park bench by the entrance. Kat studies her surreptitiously. Anechka does look better than she did last week. The blue hollows under her eyes have nearly vanished. She’s put on a tight-fitting turtleneck and a pretty nephrite necklace. She’s reapplied her cherry lipstick, which brightens up her face, makes it appear almost restful. Anechka’s beauty is a secret: it teases you, it peeks and retreats, shimmering mischievously in the corners of her eyes and lips.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Kat says to her.

  With a parent in tow, you can walk anywhere on campus. Every path is open to them to roam and explore. You can slip out the back into the park. You can leave through the front gates, go as far as the bus stop. Or go home altogether.

  Kat’s desires are modest. She knows there’s a swing behind the swimming pool, so she leads Anechka that way, down the central alley. She asks her what’s new at her and Misha’s school. Has anybody asked about Kat? Have there been new gatherings at home, with manuscript copies read aloud, dissident talk, songs on tapes?

  Anechka snaps, “Are you crazy? What gatherings?” Then she softens and says they’ve had no energy for anything like that. Not to mention that it’s gotten too dangerous, and now with Kat’s serious illness they can’t take any risks.

  As they pass the big canteen, they are walloped by the heavy smell of food: warm cocoa and baked pudding. Anechka stops and holds a handkerchief against her mouth.

  Kat says, “What’s the matter?”

  Anechka doesn’t answer. After a moment she runs behind the garbage cans, and there she is sick, sick in the most overt and vile way, in full view of anyone who might happen by. Rosa and her girls, for instance. It wouldn’t be unthinkable. Kat can see Rosa’s squeamish expression: Who is this inappropriate person? Is she drunk? And the girls will make the same prissy faces as Rosa.

  When Anechka returns, her makeup is all smeared and there’s a bit of vomit on her shoe. She tries to clean herself with her soiled handkerchief, which doesn’t really help. After a while she gives up and tells Kat, “Come with me.”

  Together they sneak into the nearest block.

  “Are we allowed?”

  “Be quiet, Kat. Be quiet.”

  Inside, the corridor is dim. The floors are covered in chipped institutional tile. They find a dank bathroom with a sink. It smells bad, the mirror is painted over, and Kat feels that she herself might throw up. Anechka sends her to wait outside.

  In the corridor, white boat-like objects are placed against the walls. Kat leans in to examine them. She touches their plaster-cast surfaces, hard and grainy against her fingertips. No, not boats. There’s something unnervingly human about the shapes of these things. They’re like molds of real people. A last name is scribbled on the back of each one, blue letters where the shoulder blades would be.

  “What are they?” Kat asks Anechka.

  “Beds,” she says. “Special beds. You probably won’t need one.”

  In the secluded corner behind the swimming pool, Anechka sits on the swing. She studies her face in a tiny hand mirror, applying powder to her nose and her cheeks. “Do I smell bad?” she worries.

  Kat says, “Are you sick?”

  “I’m just too wound up lately, baby.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of everything.” Anechka fumbles in her coat pocket and draws out a pack of cigarettes. “It’s constant stress and hurry-scurry. At work, at home. Everyone wants a piece of me. Get the dry cleaning, do the laundry, buy and prepare goulash, and while you’re at it, be so kind as to organize a museum excursion.”

  “You’re smoking?”

  “It helps with the nausea.”

  In Anechka’s slender fingers the cigarette signals a threat. Kat knows that she used to smoke in college. She and Misha spent all their free time in the smoking room of the Lenin Library, mingling with dissidents and sympathizers like themselves. Those were different times, though, exciting times, long before Kat was born, when her parents could rush on a whim to a Fellini retrospective or Okudzhava concert at the Central House of Art Workers. Sometimes, at a party, Anechka might still sneak a quick cigarette or two, but never like this, never in the open.

  “Throw away that poison. You need water and some decent food.” Kat searches through Anechka’s plaid bag, but all she comes up with is the unfinished jar of grated carrots. “Some vitamins at least?”

  Anechka wrinkles her nose.

  “I need you to do something special, baby. Can you do something special for me?”

  Kat nods eagerly. “What?”

  Anechka gives her a look like she’s the last friend she has in the whole world. Her eyes are enormous, imploring; her voice, barely audible, is soft. She’s so impetuous, so rash, always speaking too soon, plunging headlong into every project and often getting hurt. You wish you could shield her somehow.

  “Don’t tell your father what happened.”

  “The cigarette?”

  “The cigarette and the vomiting.”

  “That’s it?” Kat’s disappointed. She wanted something grander: a sacrifice, a task. Maybe she could sneak into the infirmary and make off with some medicine.

  “It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s important. Changes are coming, baby. I can’t explain it now, but later I might ask you to do more.”

  Kat wants to ask, What sort of changes? But she knows Anechka won’t tell her. Later means later. The thing is, she’s scared of changes. In Kat’s experience, they’re almost never good. They start with this thinly veiled secrecy—a dismissal, a smile, a cryptic hint—only to explode in your face, breaking your life into bits, scattering them without a second thought.

  THEIR APARTMENT seems different now that Kat’s at school most of the week. It is as if in her absence it has morphed into an utterly new entity—echoing, mysterious, bigger than it used to be. In reality, it’s not a very big apartment. Two rooms, furnished with sparse, disparate furniture: her parents’ sleeper sofa, the old desk in the corner, the thin-legged coffee table, as rickety as it can be. The armoire. The bookcase. The ancient mahogany dresser which holds their television set. The only ornament is an odd figurine made of tree snags and branches; it sits on the top bookshelf next to Cervantes and Rabelais.

  Kat’s own room is just as spartan: bookcase, wardrobe, bed. Her toys are packed away in boxes, because she has no more need for them. Her desk is always organized, her clothes neatly folded.

  Her parents are the opposite. They leave behind trails of their clothes and random scraps of paper. Crumpled notes and receipts, discarded ticket stubs, theater programs, telephone numbers jotted on newspaper margins, which later no one can identify. Kat thinks of their slovenly ways as a sign of their genius, though the chaos upsets her sometimes.
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  Home from school, Kat pads between the rooms of their apartment. She tries to sniff out the changes Anechka warned her about, the telltale messages and signs. In the hallway, she checks the built-in closet. In the kitchen she studies the Moscow Circus calendar, which has all their upcoming appointments. In the end, she finds nothing and only makes Anechka annoyed.

  Anechka hates their apartment. She calls it a rat cage, a low-clearance death trap, and sometimes, when she thinks Kat can’t hear her, simply a piece of crap. The ceilings are too low. There’s no decent sound insulation. Not to mention the overall shoddy craftsmanship and the never-ending winter drafts. It’s not her fault, she says, that she was raised to appreciate quality.

  That mythical apartment of Anechka’s childhood and youth! How it haunts them, with its cavernous hallways and three-meter ceilings. How often it is invoked, bemoaned, and pined for, and even thrown down as a trump card in family spats.

  Anechka took Kat to see it one time. On the way from a matinee, they stopped in a small cul-de-sac. It was winter. The building had a shabby old façade and looked dilapidated. Anechka said, “Let’s go inside.” She had this loopy idea that they could actually visit the apartment, that its current residents would greet the two of them with open arms. Insane, to be sure. But Anechka had this mad glow about her: you wanted to be on her side, you wanted to believe in her. She had the magic, the gumption, the world at her feet. All you had to do was grab her hand and leap . . . Still, Kat balked and pulled back, suddenly stiff with fear.

  Anechka called her a coward and marched in by herself. She came back not five minutes later and wouldn’t admit that she’d failed. Best-case scenario, no one answered the door. Or maybe the residents thought she was a gypsy. There had been stories of gypsies ringing the bells of random apartments, forcing their way in, robbing innocent citizens.

  Kat dislikes old apartments, with their yellowish murkiness, the waxy smell of age. She prefers the simplicity of their little place, so light, and neat, and compact. In the morning, sun skims the pink wallpaper in her bedroom, blurring the discolored pattern, warming up the space. She loves waking up in her bed, breathing in the dusty scent of home.

  On Sunday morning, she wakes to the sunlight playing on her eyelids. From the kitchen comes the banging of the frying pan, the quiet murmur of her parents. She keeps her eyes closed, chasing the tail end of a dream. Mornings at school are too abrupt and early. They arrive unceremoniously, with a burst of energetic stomping, the thud of opened doors, the intrusion of bright electric lights.

  In the kitchen the voices grow strident, and now it sounds as though her parents are quarreling.

  “Let’s not make me into a tyrant!” says her father, just as she enters the kitchen.

  “Who’s being a tyrant?” Kat says.

  Anechka, at the stove, is boiling laundry in a pail.

  “Ah, Button!” Misha says. He seems absurdly thrilled to see her. He will do anything to circumvent an argument. Right now, he is finishing a plate of eggs and sausage, which on Sundays he makes for himself.

  “You want some eggs?”

  Anechka says, “She’s having oatmeal.”

  Kat scrunches her nose, makes gagging noises, gestures like she’s being strangled by the oatmeal. She means it as a joke.

  “Stop it,” Anechka says. “Stop at once this inappropriate performance.” Wrapped in her bathrobe with the buttons askew, she is looking bedraggled this morning. “I’ve gone to the trouble of making it for you—”

  “Darling,” Misha says.

  She ignores him. “The least you can do is have the decency—”

  “Darling, oatmeal is not a problem.”

  “I hate that you’re always encouraging her.”

  But what is there to encourage? Kat picks at the oatmeal that’s by now gone tepid, while Misha hurries her along. They are supposed to visit Zoya Moiseevna this morning.

  “Do we have to?” Kat groans, and Misha says, “We do!”

  “Just you and me? How come Mom doesn’t have to go?”

  “Oh Button, come on. You know how she and Grandma get. It’s a small apartment. Things can get awkward.”

  “You’re joking,” Kat says. “You’re always joking.”

  From her post by the laundry pail, Anechka says she’d be happy to go, but who will finish the laundry? Grind meat for the cutlets, cook soup for the next couple of days, peel potatoes, darn Kat’s tights and underthings, scrub the floors, clean the stove?

  “I’ll stay and help,” Kat offers.

  “You’re more hindrance than help.”

  “Button, don’t look for excuses. You haven’t seen your grandma since July. She loves you, you know.”

  “Sure,” mutters Anechka. “Let’s pretend she’s capable of loving anybody.”

  Love or no love, they’re going. With Misha you can snivel and moan all you want. He never gets annoyed. He keeps kidding around with you in his involved, kindly way, and in the meantime, you put on your warm socks and boots and wind a scarf around your neck. The next thing you know he’s holding up your coat and the whole errand is a foregone conclusion.

  Kat doesn’t like to visit Zoya Moiseevna. First, it takes them forever to get to Kuzminki, and once you’re there, there’s nothing to do. Her grandmother lives in a five-story Khrushchev building. Her apartment is one of those nine-square-meters-per-person deals: it consists of a single room, no hallway, a midget-sized kitchen.

  Zoya Moiseevna’s skin is tawny from her vacation in Estonia. As far as Kat’s concerned, they are still feuding. Her grandmother appears to concur. “That’s quite a hack job,” she says, examining Kat’s hair. “You look like a boy.”

  Kat tells her the tan makes her wrinkly and stupid.

  “Girls,” Misha begs them. “Don’t quarrel, girls.”

  In her grandmother’s single room, a sewing machine is perched atop a wobbly table. She’s always fiddling with it, making curtains, pot holders, or plain canvas bags—though never anything attractive. Still, it’s a beautiful sewing machine. Black and shiny, with a golden harpy on it. Misha’s father brought it back from Germany in 1945.

  “I could teach you to sew,” Zoya Moiseevna says out of the blue.

  Kat begs off, because a) she doesn’t want to, and b) she knows her grandmother’s just showing off. Kat’s brought along her book, Timm Thaler, The Boy Who Lost His Laughter. She points to it now.

  “Reading,” grumbles Zoya Moiseevna. “Always reading. You should be moving, running. Your back’s already crooked; next you’ll need glasses like your dad.”

  “God forbid,” Misha says.

  They are seated across from her in matching armchairs; Kat’s book, closed for now, is in her lap. She knows there’s a copy of Literaturka in Misha’s coat pocket, and she suspects he’d rather be reading as well. He yawns. He is tired. But he doesn’t tell Zoya Moiseevna about the nights he and Anechka spend crafting articles for small samizdat rags, the articles they publish under pseudonyms. His mother knows nothing, and apparently it’s always been like that. She doesn’t know, for example, that Misha, while still in high school, spent three winter days outside the courthouse where the dissident writers Sinyavsky and Daniel were tried for their anti-Soviet activities. She doesn’t know that on the third day the KGB swooped down on the crowds and Misha was just lucky that, having gotten too cold, he happened to be at a pelmeny joint around the corner. Later he’d discover that Anechka was there too, though at the time they didn’t know each other.

  Zoya Moiseevna, of course, has no inkling. To her, Misha is a hardworking, straitlaced boy, and he makes sure to foster this illusion. He gripes to her about school matters: his workload this term is absurd, truancy is rampant, and the principal is clamoring for more ideological outreach—more pageants, rallies, marches.

  “And your wife?” says Zoya Moiseevna. “She’s healthy, I assume? Running around as always and squandering your money?”

  “It’s her money, too.”

 
“You’re hungry?” she changes the subject, and when he grunts something uncertain in response, she tells him to come help her in the kitchen. “I don’t have much,” she warns him. “Tea, biscuits, that’s all. Some of us have only our pension to count on. Some of us know enough to live within our means.”

  “Miss prudence!” Misha laughs at her. “Living like a monk in a cell.”

  “I fail to see the humor.”

  Left alone, Kat reaches for the stack of her grandmother’s magazines. They are called Working Woman. She flips through the pages of fashion advice, food recipes, lurid relationship letters from a waitress at the restaurant Sunrise. She finds a profile of an actor she likes, with a daughter her age, a pretty wife, a miniature poodle. But her attention drifts. Almost despite herself, she listens to the conversation in the kitchen. How can she resist? Misha has a lovely booming voice, and the walls in Zoya Moiseevna’s apartment are so very thin.

  “She’s eating poorly,” says Misha. Everyone’s always talking about Kat’s eating, her pickiness, her lack of appetite. They seem to treat it as a neutral topic, like weather or food shortages.

  “I told your wife to stop indulging her.”

  “She’s been sick, throwing up a little.”

  “Who?” says Zoya Moiseevna. “The little one’s sick?”

  No, Misha tells her. Not the little one.

  The kettle blasts its ear-splitting whistle, and for a while no one speaks.

  “You’re joking,” says Zoya Moiseevna. “It’s the last thing you need.”

  “Please stay out of it, Mom.”

  “I’m warning you, Misha. I’m absolutely serious.”

  “It’s our decision.”

  “Sure it is. But who’s going to raise your decision? Go ahead, breed more cripples. Just don’t come to me—”

  Whatever else she means to say is drowned by a din of many plates plunging to their death. A cupboard full of plates, plus something else, solid and rattling. Kat jumps in her armchair. Her grandmother shrieks in a strange, strangled way, and then it’s so quiet that Kat wonders if she’s been crushed to death.