They kept drinking Boddingtons. And now it was pleasurable to revisit the con, and especially to cover its more precarious moments, when things might have crashed but for their stiff English upper lips. They did this until Diane had to pee, at which point Club said, “Off to the loo, then,” and picked up the TV remote.
“Be right back.”
“Okay, luv. See you in a jif.”
But when she came back to the living room, Club, the coke, and the money were all gone, and by the time she got out to the parking lot, running, his touring bike was gone as well.
8
The King of Search
Ed, while at Stanford, saw his grandfather on occasion. Pop didn’t live too far from him, or as he put it the first time Ed called him, “North on 101 and—boom—like that you’re at the campus of Stanford University. Stanford,” Pop added enthusiastically, “is just for the highest, the cream of the crop. Only the best get accepted to Stanford. There was a wonderful Jewish player there, ’77, Dolph Schayes,” at which point Ed chimed in with a correction: “I don’t think Schayes played at Stanford, Pop. I think he played somewhere else.”
“What?” said Pop. “I’m losing my head. That’s right—Stanford was the son, Danny Schayes.”
“That’s not right, either, Pop. Danny played college ball at Syracuse.”
“Are you playing ball for Stanford?”
“Me?”
“Basketball.”
“Pop,” said Ed, “I’m not that good. I couldn’t even be their water boy.”
Pop said, “Okay, fine, you win, but here’s what, I’m taking you out for Chinese, Edeleh. That is, if you don’t mind an over-the-hill type. You name the date. Go ahead. Shoot. Me, I’m twiddling these thumbs of mine, but you? You’re busy. Doing what?”
“Math.”
“Since when are you mathematics?”
“Since always. A long time.”
“Oy, my head,” answered Pop.
In San Jose, on the Chinese-food evening, it took them a while to find Chan’s. Ed drove the Honda he’d gotten for his eighteenth birthday—Alice had wrapped a red ribbon around it and tied a bow on its roof, and Dan had sprung for an AAA membership, insurance, chains, and a gas credit card—while Pop directed Ed to take lefts and rights, guiding them along the same blocks twice, until, after a lot of confusion, there was Chan’s. They were shown to their seats by a dowager dressed in silk brocade whom Pop knew by name, except that at the moment he couldn’t remember her name; she showed them to a booth and said, to Pop, “You don’t want chopsticks,” and to Ed, “You want chopsticks?”
“Either way. Both.”
“This your grandson?”
“Stanford,” answered Pop.
“And he so handsome,” exclaimed their hostess. “Maybe he has big problem with girls!” She cackled, theatrically, then hurried away, while Ed crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.
After dinner, which was greasy and dominated by overcooked ginger, Pop insisted on a Sara Lee cheesecake that was waiting for them in his refrigerator. Besides, there was this miniseries, The Blue and the Gray, with Gregory Peck as Abraham Lincoln, that the two of them could watch on CBS while they had their wonderful dessert. Since his house and yard had become a burden, and also because he no longer drove, Pop now lived in a one-bedroom apartment in walking distance of Congregation Sinai, where he could daven with friends. “This bunch,” he said, “they’re dropping like flies. Already last month Sol Silver has a stroke, now we can’t make a minyan every week. Park here, Ed, they don’t give tickets.”
The place smelled foul; the toilet wasn’t clean; in the refrigerator Ed found moldy cheese. On Pop’s low sofa, they ate the cheesecake and drank Shasta while watching their special miniseries. Pop nodded off after fifteen minutes, and Ed savored Kathleen Beller as a war nurse. Fifteen more minutes of The Blue and the Gray, and then he stuffed the paper dessert plates in the garbage, ate a second slice of cheesecake from the pan, and wiped the kitchen counter in preparation for his exit. When he came back to the sofa, Pop’s eyes were open. “Simon,” he said. “I’m forty winks.”
“Ed.”
“Huh? Ed?”
“I’m Ed, not Simon.”
“You’re Ed?”
The next day, Ed called his mother about Pop. Alice called back, a half-hour later, to report that she’d talked to a Pincus somebody or a somebody Pincus who knew Pop from Congregation Sinai, and that this Pincus confirmed what Ed was saying. Alice had also called the Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco, and JFCS was going to send a social worker all the way out to San Jose who could assess Pop’s needs and make recommendations to Pop’s family about the right course of action. All of this, Alice said, “because you, Ed, are a loving and concerned grandson. Thank you, Ed, for your caring.”
“You’re making me cringe.”
“But that’s what mothers do,” Alice cooed. “I don’t care how old you get, you’ll always be my baby.”
Dan, who was on the line, too, said, “It is really good of you to look after Pop. He’s getting kind of out of it, I guess.”
“Signing off immediately,” answered Ed. “Way, way too much extolling.”
In the opinion of the social worker from the JFCS, Pop needed occasional help and consistent monitoring. By Ed’s sophomore year, though, things had deteriorated, to the point where it was either a life sentence in an assisted-living situation or regular in-home care. Pop was adamant and refused to budge, so Alice found someone who would show up five days a week to clean, cook, wash, and iron for him, and hired someone else for weekends. The weekend help seemed to change from month to month, but the weekday person was proficient and consistent. She was a Soviet émigrée who’d been shepherded to the Bay Area by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—this, at first, was all Ed could discern, in part because she was so profoundly purse-lipped that, no matter what he asked, she hardly answered, and in part because her English was either terrible or nonexistent: Ed couldn’t tell which. He said, “Hello, I’m his grandson, Ed King,” and she answered with something he didn’t comprehend, two or three words, or maybe one long word, in Russian, English, or something else. He said, “Tell me your name, please—what is your name,” and again she said something he couldn’t catch. She stood in the doorway between the living room and kitchen with a set of folded towels on one arm, wearing a head scarf and cloddish pink running shoes, and looked at Ed as if he’d come to deport her. He said, “I’m Ed,” and she tipped her head gravely and went down the hall toward the bathroom.
Pop was amused. “She says zilch,” he told Ed. “She comes, cleans, organizes, maybe ten words, a few peeps, that’s it—you know, hello, time for dinner, goodbye, that’s the conversation we’re having.”
“So no English.”
“She says ‘hi.’ ”
“What’s her name?”
“Zinaida. That much I know—Zinaida, that’s it. You know my head, I don’t know her last name, even though I heard it one time.”
After a few minutes, Zinaida came back, and went into the kitchen. Ed watched, but she was so rapidly evasive—fleeing, it was clear—that he only caught a glimpse from behind. Her pants were nursing scrubs. She was shrouded by a bulky and bleakly gray sweatshirt. It was a housebound outfit, though sometimes you saw something like it in a grocery aisle on a woman loading her cart with the cheapest brands and buying everything with coupons. Zinaida was dour, drab, impoverished, and inaccessible. She was what could be arranged for minimum wage by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services. On the other hand, she made an adequate toasted cheese, knew how to open a can of tomato soup, and was willing to take dinner in the kitchen with Ed and Pop—albeit standing up with her back to them while she cleaned, wiped, scrubbed, and rinsed. Her hands stayed busy, Ed saw, at a deliberate and constant rate, but her efforts were punctuated by furtive bites of a sandwich, eaten, as she worked, with minimal jaw movement. Despite the hideous washerwoman head scarf, the sweatshirt,
scrubs, and ersatz running shoes, despite her disoriented foreigner’s disadvantage and tense, stony face, Zinaida moved in a self-possessed way, with neither servility nor disdain. When she was done in the kitchen and had left it as she’d found it—or, rather, as she’d established it in her brief regime: spotless—she donned a knock-off military parka, collected her handbag, which was really a shopping bag, nodded a farewell at Pop, and acknowledged, finally, that Ed existed by shifting her eyes, however fleetingly, in his direction. Pop said, “Watch, I’m like a Russian guy here. Do svidanya, Zinaida!”
“Gud niite,” she answered, and, with no more ado, released herself from Pop’s apartment. “What did I tell you?” Pop asked, when the door shut. “Two words, three if you’re blessed.”
Ed came next to collect Pop for Thanksgiving—he was supposed to drive him to the airport for their flight to Seattle, where Dan and Alice would meet them. Pop, as usual, was nervous about air travel, not about being at thirty thousand feet but about being late for boarding the plane, so at eight he’d called Ed to remind him to come at two; at noon he’d called to be sure two was understood; at one he called to see if Ed had left yet; and at a quarter to two, when Ed arrived, he was pacing the living room with his coat over his arm and his suitcase poised by the door. “Bad luck,” he said. “Zinaida wants a ride, because Zinaida lives close to the airport.”
Zinaida looked less tacky this time, but still wore the scarf and the running shoes. She sat in the back seat with her faux military parka zipped and with its synthetic fur hood pushed back. “Der is Cen-trawl Expressvay,” she said, and, “Der is Tomas Expressvay.” It was complicated after that, a series of soft lefts and soft rights, stop signs and stop lights, in a profusely littered neighborhood where the bulldozed lots and abandoned houses sat behind chain-link fences. They approached the sort of apartment complex that looked, in Pop’s stated estimation, funded by public money for the purpose of consolidating drug dealers in one place—low-income housing, in the style of a bunker, with a taco wagon out front. “Da,” said Zinaida, in the middle of Pop’s denigrating. “Apartment.”
“This?” said Pop. “It don’t look so good. This kind of place, they have violent crimes—somebody wants to take your purse.”
Zinaida was already out of the Honda, but she leaned in again and said, in her flat baritone, “Tank you and gud for holuday.”
Pop answered with all the Russian he had: “Do svidanya, Zinaida. Spasibo!”
This, Ed saw, forced Zinaida to suppress a smile—one that said Pop was a barrel of laughs—but then he could tell that she saw he could see this, because, having caught his eye, she purged her face of both the smile and its suppression. Ed said, “Do svidanya,” too, and this caused another problem for Zinaida, another battle with emotional transparency, which she addressed by saying, once more, “Tank you,” and retreating.
Ed watched her go, mainly because, when Zinaida had suppressed her smile, he’d noticed something he hadn’t noticed before: cavities beneath her cheekbones, like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, if minus the elegance. Now he hoped that, as Zinaida walked away, there might be more along these lines—a message in her ass or in the way she walked—but there was nothing enticing, attractive, or sexy, just a woman, approximately a bag lady, who looked like she was returning, empty-handed, from a government-run shop that had run out of tinned meat to a flat where the gas was turned off.
In December, Pop insisted that Ed come for Hanukkah, because, he said, Zinaida would make latkes, and also they could watch Georgetown play Virginia, “Ewing versus Sampson, what a match-up!” The latkes, Ed thought, were heavy on the onion, and fried not in oil but, thoroughly, in Crisco; they ate them in front of the television, on paper plates, with sour cream and a quivering, translucent plum jelly, and with Michelob Pop bought for the occasion. Zinaida, Ed noticed, intercepting her in the kitchen, drank beer from a glass while poking at her frying pancakes with the edge of a plastic spatula and blotting them with paper towels. “The pancake,” she said, piling latkes on her spatula. “You want?”
“Your English is getting better,” Ed answered, and took the latkes. “It’s much better, really. Way better.”
Zinaida pointed out the refrigerator and added, “More zour crim.”
“Sow-er creeem.”
“Accent,” explained Zinaida.
“Cream, with a long ‘e.’ ”
“Creeem.”
He hung around the kitchen. He set down his paper plate and leaned against the counter. From the living room came basketball cheers and the exclamatory voices of commentators. “He’s asleep in there,” Ed said, “so it’s just me, Ed. In case you didn’t know. I’m Ed.”
Zinaida pressed her latkes and said, “Ed.”
“Right,” said Ed. “So, Zinaida—am I saying that right?—where are you from? Basic ESL question. Where are you from, Zinaida?”
“From Soviet Union.”
“Specifically where in the Soviet Union?”
“What is shpasifically?”
“Your town. Your region.”
“Ach,” said Zinaida. “Bukhara. Tashkent.”
“Which one is it? Bukhara or Tashkent?”
“One is Bukhara,” Zinaida said. “Two, I am in Tashkent.”
“More ESL?” said Ed. “Okay, here we go. What were you doing in Tashkent?”
“Tashkent is big city. Many university. And government building.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“Tashkent.”
Ed said, “Okay, Tashkent, I got it, fine, but you, what did you do there? In Tashkent?”
“I am working for government. Seckaratary. Is word? Seckeckaratary?”
“Secretary. In Tashkent you worked as a secretary. For the government. You were a government, like, secretary.”
“Seckaratary.”
“Great,” said Ed. “This is really great. We’re having a great conversation.”
She didn’t answer, so he said, “In America we know like nothing about Russia. You guys use rubles, you have your five-year plans, you like to drink vodka, the main guy is Brezhnev except he just died, if anyone speaks up they get sent to Siberia, you’ve got a lot of nukes and a space program. Is there anything else? We’ve heard of Solzhenitsyn. And you’re good at chess. Spassky. Karpov. But we got Bobby Fischer. You got the gymnasts, we got the sprinters, you got the weightlifters, we got the swimmers. It’s a wash, I think. Détente.”
Zinaida answered, “My country, Uzbekistan,” then turned off the burner underneath the latkes. “No talk,” she said. “I clean.”
For Hanukkah, Pop gave Zinaida a bonus: twenty Susan B. Anthony silver dollars, each in a sleeve, but presented in a brown paper bag. She seemed genuinely pleased, and even stayed in the living room, standing up despite Pop’s insistence that she “sit, sit down, sit already, Zinaida!,” to watch the exciting end of the Hoyas and the Cavs. Then, since by coincidence they were leaving Pop’s apartment at the same time, Ed offered Zinaida a ride home.
In the Honda, Zinaida reverted to mute fretting and put on her purse-lipped, wary expression. Ed, driving, glanced at her hands, which were long, pale, bony, and full of tendons, with a couple of swollen, arthritic joints that had yet to defeat their handsome grace. Then, at a loss, he said, “The Jewish Family and Children’s Services.”
“I know.”
“How did they find you?”
“Yes,” said Zinaida.
“How long have you been in San Jose?”
“Two month.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Why did is what?”
Ed thought about this and then said, “Here because?”
“Because immigrant,” said Zinaida. “Immigration.”
Ed, again, gave her answer some thought. They were driving on a spacious palm-lined boulevard, and Zinaida was admiring, Ed thought, the big homes, either that or looking at them so as not to look at him. “Immigrate because?” he asked.
Zinaida’s
expression now suggested ambivalence, and also—maybe—that he was stupid. She said, simply, “Soviet Union,” as if that explained everything that needed to be explained, then returned to looking out her window.
So Ed gave up. They drove without talking. It was irritating to be giving Zinaida a ride now, but, to be fair, maybe she didn’t understand that in America polite talk was part of the deal when you accepted a ride from somebody. Then she said, out of nowhere, “University?”
“Excuse me?”
“You are student?”
“Yes.”
“You are studying what … field?”
“I’m studying mathematics and computers. I’m learning, right now, about computers.”
“Good,” said Zinaida. “For future.”
Ed said, “Right now’s good, too,” but it occurred to him that this construction was unintelligible, so he added, “But you’re right—it’s good for the future.”
Zinaida raised her forefinger, as if to say, “Very good, you concur with my pragmatic, post-communist wisdom,” then went back to looking out the window.
But Ed felt liberated. She’d offered something. So on the expressway he put to work his pidgin English skills and teased from Zinaida biographical particulars. She lived with her sister, who had two children, a boy and a girl, ages eight and eleven. Her sister’s second husband, a Ukrainian, had gone to Houston for some ambiguous reason that sounded nefarious. Ed caught the drift from Zinaida, as he sorted through her expressions and rudimentary phrases, that the Ukrainian was treacherous, mean-spirited, and an absconder, and that he and the sister were engaged in a trial separation that should—this was what Zinaida advocated—lead to a divorce.
Then it was time to drop her in front of her bunkerlike apartment complex, where, he imagined, the signature smell was stewing cabbage. “Tank you,” she said, and Ed answered, “My pleasure; what a good opportunity to get to know you a little better.” Zinaida took his measure defensively, tugged her head scarf lower at the back so as to cover escaping tendrils of hair, got out, and didn’t look back.