“My roommates are so different—Fern thinks if she has sex in college, it’ll mean something went wrong. Whereas I think if I don’t have sex in college, something will have gone wrong. With Valerie, she’s so easygoing you never know what she’s thinking. How about you, are you planning to have sex in college?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never really thought about it.”
“I have,” Svetlana said. “I look at strangers’ faces while I’m walking down the street and wonder: Is he the one? I wonder whether I’ve seen him yet, whether I’ve read his name printed somewhere, maybe on some list or directory. He must exist somewhere—he can’t not have been born yet. So where is he? Where’s this thing that’s going to go inside my body? You never wonder that?”
I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with.
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We got off at Euclid Circle. There was no circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad. “That’s so typical of your attitude,” Svetlana said. “You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It’s over two thousand years after his death, he’s in Boston for the first time, they’ve named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off?”
Bells rang when we opened the shop door, and then the smell of salami and smoked fish hit us in the face like a curtain. Two clerks, one fat and one thin, stood behind a glass counter.
“Hello,” Svetlana said in Russian.
“‘Hello,’” said the clerks, somehow making it sound ironic.
It was interesting to see so many Russian things: hard and soft cheeses, red and black caviar, stuffed cabbage, bliny, piroshki, pickled mushrooms, pickled herrings, a muddy tank of carp that were alive, but perhaps only barely, and a barrel full of challenging-looking rectangular sweets, in wrappers printed with sentimental Cyrillic writing and pictures of squirrels. There was a whole aisle in the dry-goods section devoted to Turkish products: Koska halvah, Tat pepper paste, Tamek rose-petal jam and canned grape leaves, and Eti biscuits. Eti meant Hittite—there had been a commercial when I was little with children chanting, “Hittite, Hittite, Hittite.” The Hittites had been beloved by all Turkish children, because Atatürk said the Turks were descended from them and that’s why it was okay for Anatolia to be the Turkish homeland. It had to do with the Fourteen Points—with the right to national self-determination.
It turned out that Svetlana knew all these brands, because they had had them in Belgrade, and that the words for eggplant, bean, chickpea, and sour cherry were the same in Serbo-Croatian as in Turkish. “It stands to reason,” she said, “since the Turks occupied Serbia for practically four hundred years.” I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about.
Svetlana bought half a kilogram of loose tea and asked in exaggeratedly correct Russian if it was true that the store loaned videotapes. One of the clerks handed her a binder with a list of titles. Svetlana flipped through the plastic-encased pages way faster than I could follow, picking out a Soviet comedy about a car insurance agent. The skinny clerk went to get the tape. The fat clerk asked her to write her name and address in a register. “Should I write in English . . . or in Russian?” asked Svetlana.
“As you like, it doesn’t matter,” replied the clerk. “Are you here from Russia?”
“No, I’m not Russian.”
“Not Russian? How do you speak perfect Russian?”
“I don’t speak perfect Russian. I can say very little. I’m taking a class in Russian language at the university.”
“To me, it sounds perfect. And I’m, well, Russian.”
“You see, the thing is that, by nationality, I’m a Serb.”
“Aha,” said the fat clerk.
“What is she?” asked the skinny clerk, returning with the tape.
“A Serb,” said the fat clerk.
“Aha,” said the skinny clerk.
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On the train back, Svetlana told me about a Serbian movie director who had been friends with her father in Belgrade. The director’s wife, an actress, had gone to Paris to make a movie with a young French director. The French director had died tragically, by falling off a barstool. “They say it might have been suicide,” Svetlana said.
By the time we got back to campus at ten, I felt wiped out and speechless. Cut open my head, I felt, and you would find, as in the stomach of the world’s largest crocodile, a horse and 150 pounds of rocks. I opened my notebook. He died by falling off a barstool, I wrote. It might have been suicide.
The phone rang—it was Ralph. He had gotten the internship at the Kennedy Library. It was a real internship, open to juniors, seniors, and even graduate students, and they had chosen Ralph. He would be working in the archival division, classifying materials and entering their information into a database.
To celebrate, we went to the basement of the Garage, where a small elderly Asian man sold frozen yogurt until late into the night.
“I’m thinking about espresso,” Ralph said, “but part of me also really wants to try blackberry.”
“Couldn’t you get both?” I asked.
“Oh, that would be too much.”
“You get one and I’ll get the other and we can share.”
“But I don’t want to impose.”
We got one of each. They tasted the same.
Ralph had brought me a book, a 1980s pocket paperback. It was the autobiography of Oleg Cassini, a Russian aristocrat who fled the revolution in 1918 and ended up in America and became Jackie’s official fashion designer.
Jackie Kennedy’s people first contacted Oleg Cassini in December 1960, when he was on vacation in Florida. He was told to report to the Georgetown University Hospital, where Jackie had just delivered her son John Jr.
On the plane, Cassini thought and thought about Jackie—about her hieroglyphic body and sphinxlike nature—then began to sketch. At her hospital bed, he showed her A-line dresses inspired by the simple lines of ancient Egyptian art. The pillbox was based on Nefertiti’s hat. No other designer had designed a whole line just for Jackie. Cassini got the job: exclusive couturier to the First Lady. She always withheld a tiny part of herself, and still bought dresses from Balenciaga.
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In linguistics class, we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale—albeit without morphemes. By studying where the poles were, and what morphemes got lost, you could figure out where the morphemes were stored.