“Okay…but can you make it quick? Sometimes my phone picks up the background noise.”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” When they’d first met for a drink after work, Janelle had assured her that she “worked hard, played hard,” was rarely home, didn’t mind if Katya had overnight guests but personally preferred to “sleep out” if there was a gentleman or a lady in her life, and would pay her rent on time. Basically, the perfect roommate. Katya’s previous roommate, Alicia, was always asking Katya to hang out and seemed offended when Katya made plans with other people that didn’t include her. Katya had enough to worry about without having to wonder whether she was hurting her roommate’s feelings because she’d gone to a concert with someone else. It was, frankly, too much hassle. These were Katya’s first roommate experiences—she lived in her bedroom at her dad’s during college at NYU, which had actually been a better experience than she was expecting; her dad was so proud that his daughter had gotten a scholarship (partial, but still) that he and her stepmother, Larisa, pretty much left her alone, and she didn’t have to live in one of the overpriced, overcrowded dorms, and she still got to come and go as she pleased. It was a long commute into the city every day, but she always got a seat on the B train and used the forty-five minutes to study. She’d kept living at home for those first few months after graduation when she was interning at Mashable by day and bartending at night, trying to save enough money to move out. Finally one of her professors from NYU put her in touch with Rich, and after he’d canceled several times, they eventually met for coffee and she was hired on the spot. Two weeks after Katya moved out, her dad announced he and Larisa were moving to a nicer apartment in Brighton Beach because Larisa’s best friend and her hair salon were there.
Katya showered and got dressed quickly—Victor was still sleeping. Janelle paused her smoky-eye tutorial just long enough to remind Katya that Victor had officially overstayed his welcome, and so Katya left the apartment feeling anxious and annoyed at the situation she now found herself in. As she walked down Greenpoint Avenue toward the G, which would take her to the L to get into Manhattan, she thought about whether she should tell her parents she was dating someone. Lately Victor had started dropping hints that he thought it was a little weird that Katya’s parents lived so close to them and he hadn’t met them yet, and she didn’t want to tell him that her parents didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. And the longer she waited, the more awkward it was going to be when she finally did tell them, because they’d ask her how long it had been and she’d have to answer truthfully, and then they’d wonder why she hadn’t introduced them, and then she’d have to tell them he was Mexican, and she didn’t want to see their faces fall when she said that. She didn’t want Victor to be exposed to their old-world racism. They didn’t seem to care that she was living with a black woman, probably because they weren’t sleeping together. When she was feeling generous toward them, she thought of it more as ethnocentrism than anything else. Almost their entire world—home, work, friends, the stores they shopped in, the restaurants where they ate, the newspapers they read, most of the TV they watched—was Russian. Her dad and Larisa, as well as her mom and her boyfriend, rarely ventured out of Brighton Beach, and when they did, it was to see friends in other Russian enclaves in Brooklyn and Staten Island. They disapproved of her living in Greenpoint, a Polish neighborhood, even though she had told them dozens of times that lots of different kinds of people lived there now, “even Russians!” They hadn’t believed her, and it only got worse the one time her father and Larisa had come to visit her and observed that the nearest bodega, coffee shop, grocery store, bank, and nightclub were all Polish-owned. “I don’t even go to nightclubs! And World War Two is over, you know,” Katya had hissed at them, and her father had shrugged, a shrug that implied that this was about so much more than World War II, it was about generations and blood and traditions that someone like Katya, raised as she was in the United States, could never hope to understand. It was then she realized that they were stuck in a Russia that they had psychically transported to Brooklyn, and introducing them to her Mexican boyfriend was only going to make things more complicated for everyone. So it had been easier to deflect their questions for the past few months about whether she was dating, and who, and try to avoid letting them set her up with one of their friends’ sons, who were invariably named Boris and had thick necks and vague jobs and drove their BMWs way too fast down Ocean Parkway.
She got to work just as the weekly TechScene editorial meeting was about to begin. Everyone had taken a bagel and was standing in the kitchen expectantly, waiting for Rich or Deanna to say something. They had these meetings every Monday morning. When Katya started, they went through a dozen bagels in a meeting. Now, because they’d hired so many new people, they were up to three dozen, none of which Katya ever ate, although she would occasionally avail herself of a spoonful of scallion cream cheese and lick it surreptitiously at her desk later.
“Good morning, everyone,” Rich said. No one responded, but the chatter gradually died down. “I said, good morning, everyone!”
“Good morning, Rich,” everyone replied, a chorus of voices in various stages of enthusiasm. Katya glanced around at her colleagues. Dan was standing toward the back, looking at his phone.
On Friday, the day after Andrew’s party, Dan had messaged her on Slack when he got into the office.
Dan: sooooo…I heard you met my lovely wife last night.
Katya: yup.
Dan: she said she had fun talking to you.
Katya: yeah she was cool
Dan: what’d you guys talk about? just out of curiosity
Katya: ummm idk, I don’t really remember