OUTSIDE THE WINDOW

Maria Kuznetsova

June

“There she is. The other Masha,” my grandmother muttered, keeping her voice low as she tipped her head toward the other side of the neighborhood pool, to where a girl my age in a red bikini was per-forming a musical number for a pretty woman with a perm who must have been her mother. The woman shrieked and clapped and the girl shook her hips harder. Behind the woman was a hot older guy with dark hair falling into his eyes who I gathered was the brother based on the embarrassed look on his face.

My grandmother already warned me about the other Masha when I arrived from Michigan a week ago to spend the summer with my grandparents in New Jersey while my mother recovered from having what my father gently called “a nervous episode.” She told me the other Masha was cheap and confused, that her mother had been jilted by her husband, who was part of a famous duet back in Kyiv, and that she was known to go out on dates with random men in the evenings, leaving her already-chain-smoking-fourteen-year-old son to watch the girl on his own. Soon, from the way the girl was acting, she was liable to be in the family way herself, my grandmother had told me, with great fury.

Naturally, I was intrigued. My grandmother was waylaid by the red-haired Mila Rabinovich, who gave me a big, fake smile as she said, “I see you’ve put on some weight since last summer! Good for you, child!” I was relieved I was not expected to respond because she only wanted to gossip. She raved on about poor Marek Naumovich, the old man sitting at the chess tables with the other coots, who appeared to be losing his mind after the sudden death of his wife, an insanity which manifested in him walking through the neighbor-hood early in the morning and picking bouquets of flowers from the various landscaping displays to deliver to women he believed himself to be courting. Then she lowered her voice so much that I could no longer hear her. My grandmother listened with her nose raised high, as she eschewed gossip, finding it common. This was why her warning me about the other Masha was such a big deal.

I slipped away into the pool, near enough to the other Masha to catch her attention. I even kicked forcefully as I swam, sending up little burps of chlorinated water. I was pretty shy, but my shyness had been trumped by boredom, and after a week at my grandmother’s, I might have tried to befriend a known serial killer if she was roughly the same age as me. It didn’t take long for the other Masha to answer my friendship mating call. In fact, she jumped right in beside me. Maybe making up dances for her mother was as boring as playing cards with my grandmother.

“You are the other Masha,” she declared.
“Well, to me, you are the other Masha,” I fired back.

“I was here first,” she said, swimming toward me, away from her family, as I moved backwards toward the middle of the enormous pool, which was maybe the only nice part of the entire The Meadows apartment complex where my grandparents and all the coots who came to America from Kyiv as Jewish refugees in 1991 like my family lived. Pretty much everyone was out and about on this sweltering June morning. My cousin played soccer with the other hot – though not as hot as Masha’s brother – older guys in the back field. The widowed flower picker sat looking numb among a sea of other non-widowed old people. A few families and their kids played in the shallow end, along with the Taranovs, the unfortunate childless couple. Monika Kvitova, the only Polack and eligible woman in her twenties among us, was braiding her three-year-old daughter’s hair, soaking in the stares of the lecherous teenaged and adult men. The Smirnovs cheerfully shouted at their twin boys to stop strangling each other in the water. And my snooty contemporaries Nina, Nastya, and Nadya, as well as Nina’s hot and bored older sister, Natasha, were rubbing suntan lotion on their bodies. And there was me and the other Masha, coming up for air.

“Back home, I am the only Masha,” I said, which seemed to have no impact on her case. Still, I added, “Well I don’t want to be here, anyway.”

I told her I came every summer for a few weeks, but that was with my parents to protect me, and I had never been with just my grand-parents, unfettered, before. I missed my parents and Michigan, which I found superior to New Jersey because I was pretty popular there.

“I don’t want to be stuck in Jersey, either,” she said, lifting her head high.

“Where do you want to be?”

“Broadway,” she said. “Duh. One day, I’m gonna sing and dance on Broadway.”

“Really?” “Definitely.”

“I’m gonna be famous too,” I heard myself say. “Really?”

“I’m writing a book,” I said, trying to lift up my face the same way she did, as if I were the next Ann M. Martin, which admittedly was not as cool as being on stage, but I had two left feet and a voice like a drowning kitten.

“Cool,” she said, giving me a big, curious smile, like she was deciding what to ask about it next. I was relieved when she did not ask, because frankly I was only one page in. Instead, she said, “My mom told me about you. You’re the one whose mom had a mental breakdown.”

I felt like I chugged a mouthful of chlorine. “It was more of a nervous episode,” I countered, and when she snorted, I said, “And you’re the one whose dad walked out.”

She shrugged, unaffected. “That is the way the cookie crumbles, kid,” she said, which was definitely something she got from TV.

“I guess,” I said.

She stood tall in the water, scratching the back of her knee. “Want to see my new dance?”

I looked across the pool, to where my grandmother shot eye daggers at me. “Sure,” I said.

We got out and she did her number again, the one I saw from across the water – which I discovered was set to a song called “All That Jazz,” which was a bit slow but catchy – and bowed at the end. Most girls my age were getting gangly and had frizzy hair like yours truly, but she was absolutely beautiful. Her dark hair fell down her back like some luxurious pelt and her eyes were dark and consuming. I don’t even think she was eleven yet and there was already a swell in her bikini top and she was about a head taller than me. After her number, I believed her name really would be in lights one day. I think my mouth even hung open.

Her mother was talking to the old widowed flower-picker Marek Naumovich, her posture a mix of sympathy and flirtation as he ran his hands through his lush white hair. She had short brown hair and enormous eyes and looked like a movie star slightly past her prime. The other moms wore one-pieces that resembled squeezed dishrags, but she wore a black bikini that revealed her shockingly toned figure. Other Masha’s brother was sitting on a blanket at our feet, rolling his eyes as he pushed his dark locks away from his face, confirming that he was just about the hottest person I had ever seen in real life, like a more brooding and Jewish Rider Strong, whose mushroom cut and flannel tantalized me daily from the wall of my bedroom home. His name was Stas.

“Stop cavorting around already,” he told his sister. “Don’t you know there’s a pervert at large?”

“What?” I said, and then I felt embarrassed for speaking at all. My cousin Alex was about his age and looked fatally wounded any time I addressed him directly with offensive phrases like “good morning” or “please pass the sour cream.” But he did not look like he wanted to drown me right then and there just for speaking.

“The Peeping Tom?” Stas said. “Hello? Have you been living under a rock?”

“She just got here, idiot,” said the other Masha, and I felt a warmth flush through my body, thrilled she was already defending me. I felt considerably less warm when she revealed one of the many pieces of neighborhood gossip my grandmother was shielding me from. A week ago, Aunt Tamara, a respected community member and high school math teacher to boot, was showering around midnight and looked out her foggy window to find a man staring at her from be-hind the hedges that ran around the perimeter of the building. She screamed and he “glided off.” The neighborhood council, led by Aunt Mila, took this to the police.

I covered my body with my hands out of instinct and Stas laughed.
“I think you’ll be okay,” he said. “Aunt Tamara’s blonde and like seven times your age. You’re probably not his type.”
“Then why did you ask your sister to cover up?”I said.
He smiled slowly, like he was revising his opinion of me in a favor-able way. “I will take any excuse to ask my sister to cover up,” he said.
Other Masha smacked him, but I could see she wasn’t actually mad, that she just shook her head as he ran off to join my cousin and his friends to play soccer.

“There’s talk of a reward now,” she said, her eyes lighting up, like she was talking about Broadway again. “Four hundred dollars. The neighborhood council got together last night to decide the cops weren’t doing enough. They’re putting up flyers tonight. We should go looking for him.”

I considered my new friend’s idea. Currently, in addition to grandma cards, my main form of entertainment was trying to get my cousin to be nice to me and reading my work to my literary great-grandmother, who offered ample critique. Searching for a neighbor-hood pervert for cash seemed like pretty much the opposite of all that. I pictured my destroyed mother, smiling faintly at the thought of more money, proud I had accomplished something at last.

“When do we start?” I said, and my new friend’s eyes were as big as spotlights.

* * *

I was working on my first novel, which I planned to publish by the time I turned eleven. It was called Outside the Window and was about a set of twin sisters named Stephanie and Michelle, one of whom was kidnapped out of their bedroom window. The twins were sixteen, a perfect size six, and blonde. This was a pure knock-off of Sweet Valley High, but it’s not like my great-grandmother knew what that was.

I was translating my first chapter into Russian for her, a laborious process, not that I had anything better to do since it was raining and I couldn’t go to the pool to see my new friend. My grandmother was out being a housekeeper for an Orthodox family in Highland Park and my grandfather was watching my cousin try to build a website for him. I was sitting in my great-grandmother’s dark room, which featured a desk cluttered with abandoned knitting projects, a garage sale lamp that gave off almost no light, and a wall of photos of dead relatives who looked so old that it was almost like they were painted. Ancestors stood holding sickles in fields, posed in an of-fended manner before a New Year’s tree, or sat on various rocks and debris on a river bank, squinting into the sun. I had no idea who any of them were.

I considered making my novel about a neighborhood pervert but went for a kidnapper instead, because their intentions seemed clearer. In real life, the council really had put up their flyers, along with their reward – which had been upped to five hundred dollars – to anyone who could offer information. Keep your windows closed at night! Per-vert at large! Anyone with information please call Mila Rabinovich and the Neighborhood Council, it said, with her number listed, as well as a picture of the pervert, or what was seen, which looked like a dark blob with eyes. Age 25–65, dark hair, dark eyes, medium build, it said, unhelpfully.

My great-grandmother thought the whole thing was hilarious. She told me it was just like how, a few months before my family left Kyiv, the papers put in a notice: Jews, keep your children at home! Violence likely outdoors. She had been a journalist of some repute in Kyiv, famous for her depictions of local color, supposedly a feat because she was Jewish, until she was abruptly fired due to an unfortunate accident. The accident was that she had written a colorful description of a new theatre in Kyiv on one page, and her byline somehow got placed under a portrait of General Kutuzov on the next; A. Schulman read the words under the portrait of the frowning general, and with that, her literary days were kaput, though she published some poetry underground, apparently.

I closed my book when I finished reading, waiting for her opinion. In Chapter One, Stephanie wakes up to find the window open and her sister Michelle gone, and after a chat with her parents and the police, she runs off to their various secret hideouts in the woods and searches for clues to no avail.

“It’s a little ham-handed, to be sure,” my great-grandmother declared. “The crook really climbs in through the window and nabs her sister without anybody noticing?”

I blinked, feeling gutted. Maybe I would have to wait until I was twelve to publish my novel, to really iron out the kinks. “I’m just copying from TV,” I told her.

She laughed. “We’re all just copying, dear,” she said, staring off vaguely, and then she waved her hand toward the wall, indicating all her – our – dead relatives. Then she focused on my face and remembered that I wanted something from her. “You know what? I do want to know what happens next. There is no higher praise.”

“Thank you, Baba,” I said.

She patted my hand and said, “I’m proud of you, darling.” Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep right in front of me, which would have been downright rude if she wasn’t eighty-nine.

* * *

Other Masha’s apartment was nothing like my grandparents’ or my condo back in Michigan. My grandmother kept a meticulously neat home and walked around making sure the coasters were coasting at a proper angle, that the pillows on the couch were fluffed, and that not a single crumb malingered outside the kitchen. She kept it dark because she did not want to waste money on electricity, and nondescript paintings of birds and flowers she acquired at garage sales – the only thing she seemed to like about America – hung on the walls in neat rows. If television could not be avoided, then it had to be kept at an almost silent volume, as if more sound meant more money. My condo was run in a similar manner by my mother, who liked to say that she should be able to lick every surface in the house without tasting a speck of dust.

Meanwhile every light was on at Masha’s though it wasn’t even dusk yet. The two sofas were made of pink velvet with scratches all over them and several stolen bouquets from Marek Naumovich were positioned in beer bottles around the apartment without any sign that anyone had ever watered them. The walls were plastered with enormous posters of Masha in her flashy dance costumes, one of which she happened to be wearing at that moment, a pink sequined number. A television blared on in the kitchen with nobody watching it, just for fun, a black-and-white image of a dancing couple flashing across the screen. While my grandmother insisted everyone should be groomed and covered up in the unlikely event that a neighbor – or even the postman – popped in, Stas walked around shirtless, hints of muscles protruding from his abs, making me queasy.

Masha’s mother, Aunt Alla, was not dressed more modestly. She wore a tight black tank top and cutoff shorts, her purple bra straps kept falling to her elbows, and a pine needle had lodged itself into her perm without her notice. She was nothing like my mother and her striving, hair-sprayed friends. I had never seen a woman her age even talk about dating, since my parents had met when they were fifteen. Until the whole breakdown fiasco, my mom had her shit together. She had an internship at a lab that she hoped would lead to a job that would offset the dire financial situation my family was in due to my father’s job as a temporary mathematician at the university. Other Masha’s mom did have a paying job, but she was only a secretary, and she kept getting fired for sleeping with her bosses.

But when she squeezed my hands with a wide smile, I decided that I definitely liked her.

“A friend for Masha!” she cried. “How lovely.”

“Mom,”Masha said, rolling here yes, but she wasn’t actually embarrassed, and besides, it wasn’t like I had any friends besides her daughter in our vicinity to speak of. The only girls our age really around were Nina, Nastya, and Nadia, but they all had their hair in perfect braids and had made it out of the apartment complex, to the real houses in the next towns over, and only came on occasion to visit their grandparents. Other Masha had only arrived at the complex that year, after living with a deadbeat boyfriend of her mom’s in Piscataway. She was an extended member of our Jewish crew from Ukraine – so extended that I had never seen her on either side of the ocean before that summer, though I had been dimly aware of her existence through bits of family gossip over the years.

Her mother turned away from us, looking in the mirror by the front door, teasing her hair, because, she informed us, she was going on “a second date” with a mechanic named Misha who her daughter told me looked like a rat. Aunt Alla said, “The second date is the most important of all. The first is like showing up to a restaurant – anyone could do it. But the second is like ordering an appetizer, which actually has substance . . . the third is the entrée, of course – “

“Please don’t tell us what dessert is,” said Stas, but I could see that he was amused by his mother, that he even adored her. Much to my disappointment, he threw on a shirt and ran out the door just before his mother did, leaving me and Masha alone. Even under the glare of the bright lights and with the TV on, I was nervous. I don’t think I had ever been home alone with just another kid. If my mother cared about me at all at that point, then she would have killed me. I followed Other Masha to her room, as if I did this kind of thing all the time.

Her room, like the rest of her apartment, was like a foreign country. In addition to the mega poster of Rider Strong over my bed, my walls back home featured JTT, Devon Sawa, Joey Lawrence, and Mariah Carey, the hottest stars of 1996. But I didn’t recognize the people in the black-and-white posters on Masha’s walls. She explained they were Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn (no relation), Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, and Gregory Peck. They were actors from the 1950s, an-other era, back when real talent mattered, supposedly. I pretended to know what she was talking about, and then I thought this was like her version of my Sweet Valley High and Bookmobile books, some-thing private she squirreled away. Did this fearless girl, who shared my name but wore dance costumes for fun, have nothing in common with me – or everything?

After I was done praising her room, she cleared her throat, like the main event was here, and brought out her big posterboard. She had drawn the entire apartment complex, complete with the corny names of each row of buildings, which were made up of two stories of apartments with an entrance that led to a cavernous hallway that connected all the homes. Each of the eight buildings in The Meadows was named after a tree: The Oak, The Maple, The Dogwood, The Lin-den, The Pine, The Aspen, The Elm, and The Birch. She drew every single building in her surprisingly messy handwriting, which looked like a much younger boy’s.

The pool was all the way at the edge of the complex, next to The Oak. She had drawn Xs on the two buildings where the pervert hit: The Oak, where Aunt Tamara lived and now, The Maple, home of the childless Tanya Taranova, who spotted him outside her bedroom window when she was changing two nights earlier. The buildings were on opposite sides of the complex, so this did not reveal all that much about the pervert’s preferred territory.

She also drew the rotting gazebo in the center of the complex. Every building had balconies with sliding glass doors and a brown roof and big windows, with the biggest being in the bathroom, which perplexingly did face the outdoors. Though the row of hedges along each building’s perimeter should have tempered anything the Peeping Tom would have seen.

“Does the neighborhood council have any leads?” I said. “Nope,” she said. “The police took their statements but haven’t

done shit besides that, so now they have a ‘watcher’ roaming around at night with a flashlight, looking for the culprit. They are going in pairs, like us, taking turns being out every night between eleven and midnight, since that’s when the Peeping Tom appeared. But I bet he’s getting smart and is going to go earlier or later, so I think we should start at ten.”

“How do you know all this?”

She grinned. “My mom went to the first meeting, hoping to meet men. All the men were over seventy.”

I laughed, but then I got nervous. “My grandparents are usually in bed by nine. I can sneak out through the balcony and be out before ten.”

She nodded in approval. It was so weird how she just accepted everything about me.

“And how are you going to sneak out?” I said.

She looked at me and laughed. “Sneak out? I’ll just tell my mom I’m going to hang out at your place. If she’s home, that is.”

This was as comprehensible to me as it would be if she told me she had a tail growing out of her ear. My own mother made me go home if there was a hint of darkness in the sky. And she also made me stay in during the peak hours of sunlight during the summer, to avoid sunburn, basically the hours between ten and three, the most fun times. Then again, if she had not been trying to control every-thing around me so tightly, then she might not have had her nervous episode. Maybe Other Masha and her family had the right approach. She had marked some buildings yellow and others green. Masha 2 = yellow, and Masha 1 = green, it said, and I almost protested but did not. My relegation to second place felt natural. I was in charge of my grandparents’ building, The Dogwood, and Other Masha would cover her own, The Linden. Her plan was for us to start with circling our own buildings, move on to our appointed three other buildings, and report to each other the next day.

I said, “So we start tonight, then?”

She smiled big. “They call it the present because today is a gift,” she said, again quoting from what I realized was the always-on television.

* * *

It took forever to sneak out because my cousin was showing my grandfather how to use the website he had built for him at last. My grandfather wheeled his breathing machine next to my cousin and watched him work while sucking the whirring white mist in and out through a clear plastic mask. He was shrouded in it, like some kind of ghost, one who had to use a machine that had a fake lung type thing attached to it that helped him clear his own lungs through its potent, chemical concoction. It had a little bench in it and was fenced in like a tollbooth on wheels, and Grandpa used it every few hours.

His website said, WELCOME TO GRISHA’S WEBSITE OF MEMORIES! He planned to use it to share some “reminiscences” about his family and life in Kyiv with the members of our community, though he did say he hoped it had a “wider reach.” I think my grandmother was just glad he had something to keep him busy, as this seemed less wasteful than his previous hobby of building model World War Two artillery, which took up half their bedroom.

I think this should work,” my cousin said, typing furiously as he squinted at the monitor through his black glasses. His parents forced him to speak Russian at home, so he still sounded almost like a native speaker, while I just sounded pretty much like I did when I was five when we left Kyiv. In fact, his parents were also forcing him to read and report on Anna Karenina over the summer in order to “immerse himself in our superior culture.” I hadn’t seen him crack it.

His mom was my mom’s older sister, who just seemed like an older, sterner version of my mom. My cousin was like a miniature adult himself. He had a deep voice and would be attending a prestigious public high school in Brooklyn in the fall, which required an impossible entrance exam. On the rare times I found myself in the car with him, he nodded along to the adult conversation and even offered driving advice. And he had no sense of humor to speak of. All he watched on TV was soccer and a cartoon called Daria that wasn’t even funny at all.

He was currently working on sending my grandfather a message through his site. He nearly smiled when he completed his task and called him over, waiting about ten hours for him to climb out of his breathing machine past the fleeting clouds of mist and into his computer chair. My cousin’s message read:

HI GRANDPA! I LOVE YOU!

“Who is it from? Who is it from? A message!” said my grandfather, before he understood.

I tried not to laugh at him, because he was sweet and sick and de-served to get some kicks.

“I love you too, little professor,” my grandfather said, nuzzling his head. Then, perhaps misguidedly sensing I was left out, he also nuzzled my head and said, “You, too, little dummy.” It was a term of endearment in my backward culture, but it was hard not to be offended.

* * *

After I waited about two lifetimes for my grandparents to start snoring, I finally snuck down the hall to the balcony and climbed over it carefully, landing on firm grass. The moon was high in the sky and I felt like the whole world was mine. This was the most exciting thing I had ever done, and for the second time that summer, I felt like I was living someone else’s life, but this time, it was a good thing. The first time was not quite as good, as suddenly I found myself playing the part of a – what? A bedside nurse? An orphan? A girl who had to pretend her mother’s brain was just broken like it was her leg or some-thing and would heal soon enough?

This time, it was finally clear what I was, which was a sleuth. I looked at the moon one more time, saluting it, and I was off. I had never been alone before at night, outside, in the dark. My heart was pounding, though nothing had happened yet. I could see the apartment building across the way, so many lights still on, the glow of the televisions on the walls, so many lives being lived that I knew nothing about. So far, the Peeping Tom had only struck the master bath-room, which was located two windows to the left of the balcony of each identical unit, so those were my areas of focus. I moved around the bushes, not unlike the Peeping Tom himself.

But I did not see anyone else sneaking or peeking. I did hear some-thing, the sound of a woman crying, as I finished my tour of the Dog-wood block. It was Aunt Mila, in fact, who had seemed quite cheerful when she approached my grandmother at the pool the other day, to offer her unwanted gossip. She was in bed, and at first I thought she was sleeping, but I heard the low moan and saw the rise and fall of her body, by the light of her nightstand lamp while her husband was sound asleep beside her. This was not exactly Peeping Tom material, so I moved on.

There was a couple fighting in The Oak. It was the Smirnovs, who always seemed happy enough at the pool as they shouted at their twins. Not real happy, I mean, but happy by our community standards, a grim smile lodged squarely behind their complaints. And yet, they fought loud enough for the pounding to echo to the hedge I hid behind. And for me to hear the shards of the plates they launched crashing to the ground.

Then, at the Birch block, I saw Nina, my agemate who was staying over at her grandmother’s home though she lived in the fancy suburb of Basking Ridge, sitting in a chair staring out into nothing, her expression so vacant I was certain she was watching TV, her head filled with airy desperation. This sight was somehow more unsettling than the open tears or the smashed plates of my other neighbors. It was not unlike the vacant, chilling look that had come over my mother’s face in the weeks leading up to her breakdown.

One last go of it at the Maple: I saw old Maria Stepanova and her husband Grisha Mikhailovich in their ratty bathrobes, watching an old sitcom, laughing riotously. Seeing their ancient robes touching like the hides of sleeping bears almost, almost gave me some hope for humanity. But these chortling geezers and their boob tube were not exactly Peeping Tom fodder, I reminded myself, and hurried along. My search of my assigned buildings had been fruitless.

I spotted two people walking their dogs, one man jogging, and a woman in a nurse outfit hurrying back to her apartment. I realized that was what I wanted to do, to hurry back home furtively, to for-get everything that had happened that night. But when I snuck back into my grandparents’ apartment and slithered under the itchy wool covers on my little sofa, all I could think about was getting out there again, marveling and shivering at what else I might find.

* * *

“It’s your mother,” my grandmother said, gravely extending the phone to me the next morning, before I even had a chance to talk to Other Masha. She looked as nervous as I felt. I had my daily nothing conversations with a falsely cheerful Papa, but we hadn’t heard a peep from Mama. I hadn’t really spoken to her since the day I came into the kitchen and found her swaying and staring into a pot of burned rice, saying, “I can’t do it all, I can’t do it all, I can’t do it all . . . ” Her rice with ketchup and onions, which she called “Turkish souffle,” was one of her many budget-conscious recipes. After I summoned Papa home and he took her to the doctor, and then the doctor sent her off to a “facility,” the next thing I knew, I was shipped off myself.

“How are you, darling?” she said. She sounded underwater, a mil-lion miles away. She mumbled that she was back home and the doctor gave her medicine to make her brain better, that she should be back to work shortly and they would pick me up as soon as they could . . .
“That’s great,” I said, and when she didn’t answer, I felt the line buzzing with expectation, like there was more she wanted from me. “I made a new friend,” I told her.

“That’s wonderful, darling,” she said. “You’re always so good at making new friends.”

I supposed she was right. I was pretty popular, back home. But that was only because I possessed a singular talent for quickly absorbing a new person and knowing how to make them feel special and interesting, so that they would end up loving me.

“I guess,” I said. “I miss you.” “Oh, honey, I miss you too.”

She didn’t sound sad or choked up. She didn’t sound like any-thing, actually, or anyone. I wanted to test her out, to see if she was really still my mom.

“There’s a neighborhood pervert,” I told her. “He’s been peeking in the windows, watching women shower. My friend Masha and I are going to catch him.”

Mama laughed, like I had told a joke. “So you’re playing with Nikolai Zhurov’s girl, are you?” she said. “That must be driving your grandmother mad.”

“A little,” I said. “She thinks she’s a bad influence.”

“One time, he rode by us on a motorcycle, spraying mud all over our coats,” she said, and that was all I needed to know. Then she added, “The girl’s mother went to a piano conservatory, you know. She used to be a very serious person. And she sings like a lark. She wanted to be his other half, his duet half, I mean, but they said she didn’t have the look . . . They gave it to that bombshell Natasha Fimonova instead, of course. I suppose no marriage could recover from that.”

My mother casually unleashed this fascinating gossip without caveat. I tried to think of Other Masha’s mother as a “serious person” and only thought of her bra straps falling over her too-tan shoulders. Mama did not seem bothered by my new alliance. Or by anything. This being the woman who feared that if I did not wear three-layered coats in the winter, I would die from the cold. “You’ve always been so good at making friends,” she repeated, vaguely.

But I could see she wanted me to go on, to tell her more, when before, when I spoke to her, she always had one foot out the door, like there was some urgent chore that was endlessly beckoning her. So I told her everything I knew about the neighborhood pervert, who had struck a third woman, poor unsuspecting Dina Smirnova, this time in her bedroom in the middle of the night, roaming well past his usual hour. I even told her some things I didn’t know, just to keep her on the phone for as long as I could.

July

Other Masha and I were splayed out by the pool, comparing notes on our latest spying session as we pretended not to ogle the hot boys in our midst, which more specifically meant her brother in my case, and my cousin in hers. Nina, Nastya, and Nadia were making friendship bracelets on the other side of the pool, and I could not look at Nina with her perfect two braids without thinking about the eerie vacant look I saw on her face during my first spy session the other week. Now, prattling on with her friends and giggling foolishly, she had nothing in common with the empty girl I saw, making me wonder if every person had two versions of themselves: the one giggling beside the pool and the one sinking into a deep, unknowable grief.

Though some adults did not hide their sadness as well as Nina. The recent widower Marek Naumovich looked gutted over a chessboard, hesitating as he moved his pawn forward. The childless Taranovs did not look particularly happy, either, as they held hands and watched the children they could not have splashing each other in the shallow end of the enormous pool. Aunt Tamara was in the deep end with her son, looking like she was swimming in a sea of sorrow, her face pinched. Nina’s older sister Natasha looked bored out of her mind as she painted her nails near the lip of the pool. Near her, single Monika Kvitova played dolls with her daughter with a desperate ennui ra-diating from her pores. Though then again, Aunt Mila looked eons away from crying as she gave an impassioned speech to the dozen or so members of the community council, whose concern had been raised as the fourth victim, Aunt Larissa, spotted the Peeping Tom as she was changing in her bedroom, this time at nine at night.

Like the council, Other Masha and I had come no closer to find-ing the pervert. We did, however, learn a number of other interesting facts. Of course, there were all the sad crying people I had encoun-tered. Since my first foray, I also saw Aunt Sasha decorating the room of her soon-to-arrive second child with a worried countenance, and the Voroshilov brothers fighting over the TV remote so aggressively that their father finally unplugged the damn thing from the wall. Other Masha’s forays had yielded much more interesting results. For instance, she learned that Misha Taranov was having an affair with an unidentified younger woman.

“They were like, having sex against the balcony window,” Other Masha said. “It was really gross.” This made me feel even more sorry for Tanya Taranova, which I did not think was possible, given that Mama had hammered into my head that infertility was a fate worse than death. Still, any sex at all was more intriguing than revolting, I supposed. As Masha pinned her hands behind her head, thrusting to emphasize what she saw, I spotted my grandmother trying to murder me with her gaze across the pool. She stood behind my grandfather, who was having a rare outing and chatting up some geezers with a delighted look. Her hair was pulled back tightly, as usual, as if she could be asked to complete an unpleasant task at any moment and needed to be maximally efficient. I turned back toward Other Masha, pretending not to notice her.

“How come you got to see sex, and all I saw was crying and yelling?” I said.

“I would happily trade,” she said, sneering in the direction of her mother, who was sitting with linked arms with swarthy Uncle Misha the mechanic, her new true love, who had seemingly passed the test of the appetizer, main course, and the dessert, and picked her up for dates almost every night, leaving Other Masha and her brother joy-fully alone. Other Masha was right: he did have a bit of a rat face and did not hold a candle to the image of her father on the duet poster she had up on the inside of her closet door. Her father was more of a handsome bear than a rat, and really did look like a movie star beside the gorgeous Natasha woman, with the words Nikolai and Natasha em-blazoned over their heads.

“Really, you’re too much!” her mother cried, loud enough for the entire complex to hear, hitting her beau with near violence, though he did not seem to mind it and leaned in for a kiss. She had the frantic, eager look of someone who believed she was saved from a lifetime of loneliness at last. I remembered what Mama told me about her and tried to picture her tanned hands with their pink fake nails hitting the keys of a keyboard, or her singing with serious intention, and could almost see it, her mania directed at art instead of finding a man. But she seemed all right where she was, I supposed, so pleased that when the widowed flower picker approached, giving her a gentlemanly bow, she continued to be kind to him though she didn’t really need to anymore.

“Marek, darling, how are you today?” she said.

“Oh, you know, you know how I am . . . ” he said, shaking his head grimly, and I could not hear the rest.

“I’m just glad she’s happy,” Masha said under her breath, almost as if to convince herself.

I tried to distract her with dispatches from my latest nightly exploits. I tried to elaborate on how disproportionately angry the Vo-roshilov father looked about the television debate, like he was facing a Biblical reckoning. I did not understand it, these wells of emotion that sprung up in the privacy of people’s homes. If I did, then perhaps I would have understood whatever it was that suddenly, but not actually suddenly, had welled up in my mother. My exploits only confirmed that I did not know anything, about anyone. Meanwhile, Other Masha acted like what we saw was just a confirmation of every-thing she already suspected about the world.

“I don’t know if I can keep going out there,” I said, though I didn’t really mean it.

“We’re just getting started, kid,” she said, and I knew she got that word from TV.

* * *

My grandmother had a nose for somebody else having a good time and would not stand for it. Just when I was finally enjoying myself, hanging out with Other Masha by day and spying by night, she decided I should go to work with her. She claimed she could use the help, now that the baby was getting more active, but I think she just wanted to keep me away from Masha and her “negative influence.”

She worked for an Orthodox Jewish family in Highland Park, cleaning their house and watching their baby. The neighborhood was only twenty minutes away, but with the beacon of the Jerusalem Pizza at the helm of the shiny downtown, leading to the neat white split-level homes sitting a respectable distance apart with their manicured lawns, it might as well have been on another planet. It was amazing to me that just minutes away from the slum of my grandparents’ complex, people had money and actually went to synagogue, not in the half assed way that the refugees in my community did, but every week, out of desire instead of guilt.

The other sitter, a stern-looking Jewish lady, opened the door for us on her way out and told us the baby was sleeping. My grand-mother nodded with equal solemnity and I followed her in to the bright white extremely neat and enormous home. It had a staircase with golden rails, even, and a white, clean carpet. One day, I knew, I would be a famous writer and would make lots of money and would have a place just like this. I would never be cleaning floors and changing diapers like my grandmother did, because she was only a retired biologist.

“This is a nice, traditional, serious family,” my grandmother said, nodding at a family portrait of two solemn-looking married Jews and their five children who ranged from the baby to a dignified teen-aged girl.

“They sure seem that way,” I said.

“Don’t be impudent, Masha,” she said, and I shrugged, unsure how she was able to detect my sarcasm. “A good home, a refined neighborhood,” she added. “There are no perverts here.”

I wasn’t sure that money and cleanliness was the opposite of per-version, but I nodded along. The house was so clean that I wondered what she could possibly do there, yet she sprang to action, while I sat in front of an enormous television, willing it to turn on. Eventually, the Orthodox baby woke up, and I had to hold her while my grand-mother cleaned and cooked. This infant looked like a serious old lady in her own right, with her dark hair and thick brows, and she regarded me with a critical gaze while I stared at the tantalizing television. For the first time in years, I saw my grandmother nearly smile when she regarded the stern infant. This was a shock because she typically considered emotions to be an indulgence and a waste of time.

In fact, she was her usual no-nonsense self when my mother called at the beginning of the summer and told her, “I feel like the walls are closing in around me, Mama. Some days I can’t breathe at all. I think I need to take myself to a doctor, the hospital . . . ” She had told her, “Oh, Lenachka, stop fooling around and take a nap.” I know about this because I heard her from the other room but did not think much of it, assuming she just had a bad cold or something, just days before her official “nervous episode.”

It took me a moment to realize that my grandmother’s strange smile was directed at me.

“This is wonderful,” she said. “Simply wonderful. I knew I’d find a use for you, after all.”

* * *

“A little slower than the first chapter,” my great-grandmother declared, “but that’s only natural. It’s not a problem, I know you’ll hurry it along.” I had reached the middle of my novel, which chronicled Stephanie’s attempts to outsmart the cops and deduce that her sister’s kidnapper was a teacher at her school, though she didn’t know which one, and thought she would be more impressed. She took a sip of tea as I shifted on her itchy couch, failing to find a comfortable position. Above her, a woman in the ball gown on a log stared out with dead eyes, as if to say, join me, join me . . .

“But why hurry?” I asked her, after I saw she would give no further explanation.

I did not see a need for it. My favorite day of the week was when the Bookmobile came, when I could get the latest haul and take it into my room and not leave for about a day, turning page after page, get-ting more and more lost.

“Well,” my grandmother explained, “when I wrote my profiles, they had to be under 500 words. You have given us . . . many superfluous details instead of focusing on the crime. Think of it like you’re a drowning man shouting as the water takes you under. Every word counts.”

I didn’t want every word to count. I wanted the totality of the thing, the big mess of it, to count overall, and did not appreciate her additional pressure. Nothing about my life felt neat or tidy like how she said my writing should be. My life was crowded by endless relatives, generations, family friends, anecdotes, images . . . I looked at her room, filled with pictures of Kyiv and unfinished novels planted face-down like dying birds and three separate abandoned knitting projects.

“But you’re not drowning at all,” I said.

She chuckled. “We all drown in different ways, darling.” Then she reached for her knitting and just turned it over and over in her hands.

* * *

There was a heat wave that week. Even at ten at night, the backs of my knees were sweating along with the back of my neck, my armpits, and my scalp, a sensation so all-encompassing that it was impossible to imagine, as I regarded the lush trees in the moonlight, that any other season was possible in this climate. I began with my grandparents’ Dogwood building and moved on to my other appointed territories, the Oak, Maple, and Birch blocks. I kicked off my quest by watching the always-angry Voroshilov father pounding on his AC unit.

Nearby, I saw a rustling in the bushes and nearly screamed before I saw two figures emerging. It was Uncle Taranov and his female par-amour, who I realized was Natasha, Nina’s older sister who had only recently started college and whose immense amount of quality time spent with her grandparents when she had a whole exciting life at Rutgers had puzzled me until that moment. I hid behind a car until they scurried away, giggling like they were both teenagers.

But the Oak and Maple blocks were quiet. The tulip display that Marek Naumovich liberally stole from looked enchanting in the moonlight. Around the Birch block, I spotted Uncle Ronya and Aunt Valeria stumbling back into their building, clearly tipsy from a night out, and good for them. Mama was always saying she wanted a night out with my father but also was always saying how they could never afford such a luxury like that – a babysitter and the cost of the meal itself – and I wondered if she wouldn’t have gotten so sad or trapped or overwhelmed or whatever if she let herself out to breathe once in a while.

As for The Birch, there were three guys, non-Russian-speaking civilians, who skateboarded past the building to the skate park at the community college across the street, no doubt. Then I saw Aunt Tamara smoking out on her balcony in her bathrobe and ducked behind an oak tree until she was done. She was out there a long time, until the last ember was extinguished. I tried to rack my brains to remember anything about her that could explain what she was doing out there for so long, and then I remembered that back in Kyiv, she had a child who died, though I could not remember how.

* * *

Halfway through the summer, Aunt Marianna spotted the night pervert creeping away from an apartment in The Birch block as she headed home from a late shift at the hospital. She knew it was him because he sprung from an opened window and disappeared around the corner, and she was certain that he was a nimble young man, no older than thirty. Other Masha and I checked off The Birch block, an-other row where the pervert had done his bidding, or tried to, a sighting I missed because I stayed in that night. But the biggest development of all happened right in the middle of the day.

When my grandmother was out working and the other grandparents were napping, my cousin pulled me aside in the kitchen as I was making a grilled cheese on black bread, which did not taste nearly as good as it did when my grandmother made it. From the wary look on his face, I saw that he was nervous about what he had to say, and I wondered if my grandmother had bullied him into telling me to stop hanging out with Other Masha, as if that would make a difference. But he came to me with something else entirely.

“Grandpa got a message to his website last night,” he whispered.
“Oh, finally!” I said. “He’ll be so happy.”
“No,” my cousin said, keeping his voice low. “He won’t. Because after I show it to you, I’m going to delete it.”

I followed him to the computer. I tried to think of what it could be. Dear Masha, I love you! Let’s hang out. Love, Stas. Those words were unlikely but would certainly alarm my cousin. As he loaded up the message, I leaned forward, confused and intrigued.

TELL YOUR GRANDDAUGHTER TO STOP LOOKING FOR THE PEEPER. HE IS HARMLESS. LEAVE HIM ALONE.

“What the hell?” I said.

My cousin said, “So that’s what you’ve been doing, when you go out at night?”

“I didn’t even know you knew.”

“Of course I know. You think I go to bed at nine?”

“What do you do, without TV or a computer? Read Anna Karenina?” I said.

He smiled. “About that . . . “ “Yeah?”

“If you want to keep sneaking out, then you have to do something for me, all right?”

“What is it?”

“Well, speaking of Anna Karenina . . . ” he said.

The plan was simple. I liked to read anyway, didn’t I? If I wanted to keep sneaking out, then I had to do something in exchange for him. He had less than two months to complete his assigned reading for his parents, and he just “couldn’t get into it.”

“But a book lover like you . . . well, you’ll be done in no time. And then you can give me a little summary.”

I sighed, trying not to show I was excited by the challenge. I loved age-inappropriate books and hadn’t read one since I snuck one of my other grandmother’s romance novels out of her suitcase.

“It’s not too long, is it?” I said.
My cousin gave me a big smile. “For you? Not at all.”

* * *

When I reported the events to Masha the next morning, her eyes lit up. “Dude,” she said, “don’t you get it? The night perv is your cousin. He sent that message just to throw you off. I mean don’t you think it’s weird nobody but you and him even saw it? Like your grandpa lives on that computer, but it happened to come in the moment he went to sleep? And he said he already knew you were sneaking out, right? He probably spotted you outside and hid . . . “

“My grandpa doesn’t even know how to check the messages,” I said.

“He’s just trying to throw you off the scent because he’s out there, prowling around . . .”

“I’ve never heard a peep out of his room.” “He could be sneaking out his own window.” “To look at women older than our moms?”

She shrugged, unmoved by my logic. “People have all kinds of fetishes,” she declared, using yet another word she must have gotten from TV or Cosmo, which her mom let her read. “Oh my god. It’s so him! Why didn’t we see it all along?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean he normally shows no interest in women or really anything except soccer . . .”

“There is a lot you don’t know about your cousin,” she said.

“I don’t really know anyone in that apartment,” I said. Though it wasn’t for lack of trying. My grandparents and cousin moved like mysterious fish in a tank, occasionally opening their mouths in cloudy water and colliding at random. Things felt murkier and murkier. We were farther from the truth than ever. I wrapped my arms around my-self, though I wasn’t cold.

“I want to go home,” I said.

Though the home I wanted to go to did not exist. It was like a deleted message on a website that took about an hour to load. It was there, as clear as day, and then it wasn’t.

Other Masha and I had nothing else to say on the subject so we dozed under a tree for a while. We woke up to the sound of her mother collapsing on our blanket in dramatic fashion.

“Misha has abandoned me for a waitress,” she declared. “A twenty-year-old waitress!”

“Misha had bad breath,” Other Masha said, but she draped her arm around her mother, and I followed suit. Her mother was still beautiful, but her eyes had sunk into her face a little.

Aunt Alla was probably around thirty, not young but not so old that she had to give up hope forever.

“Oh, I didn’t really care about that fool,” her mother said with a sigh. “I just wanted him to care about me. I want someone to care about me, don’t you see?”

“I care,” her daughter said.

“Your care isn’t going to keep me warm at night, darling.”

Stas ambled over from the soccer field and gave his mother a big, comforting hug, almost like he was her husband but not in a sexual way. He ran his hands over her head with true care. I tried to remember the last time I embraced my mother like that and came up with the time she held me after I got bit by a dog three years earlier.

“You’ll be okay, Mama,” Stas said. “I promise. Anyone who doesn’t want you is a fool.”

“Is that right,” she breathed softly, not even stating it as a question.
As Aunt Alla cried out theatrically, putting her head in her hands, I saw my grandmother shoot ice picks in our direction. Then she re-turned to her coot conversation, her lips set, like she was just trying to get out of it as quickly as she could. In fact, it seemed like life was just one big ordeal that she was just trying to get out of as quickly as possible.

Stas had left the fold and was performing perfect dives off the high dive, and watching him while my heart ached for his mother, I felt like my senses were on fire. He did one more dive and then joined my cousin and his friends, like a visiting dignitary. They treated him with begrudging respect, like they better be nice to him in case he turned violent, though he wasn’t really the type.

Then old Marek Naumovich looked at us, sensing that something sad was happening. Out of nowhere, a bouquet of flowers he must have picked from the entrance of the development materialized in his hands. He bowed and handed them to Aunt Alla.

“Some beauties for a beauty,” he declared.
“Oh, stop it, Marek,” she said, pretending to smack him. But she accepted the flowers and clutched them tight against her chest.

* * *

Mama continued to take interest in the neighborhood pervert during her calls. I tried to be as entertaining as possible without mentioning Masha’s theory about my cousin being the culprit, which I had dis-missed when I spotted him at the computer late at night during one of the Peeping Tom’s most recent rampages. Though over a week had gone by since his latest plight, a record for him. I exaggerated his exploits to keep Mama interested, feeling like nothing could shock her anymore. The woman I was talking to was hardly even my mother, it was some other woman hopped up on medication, and she was frankly a lot more fun.

“Aunt Marianna saw him through her window and was sure he was a young man,” I said. “But the next week, Aunt Natalia spotted him and said she was absolutely certain he was old.”

“Whoever he is, he’s having himself a good romp, isn’t he?” Mama said, laughing.

I wondered why my mother wasn’t always on these pills, when she was suddenly so fun. Then I told her about me and Masha sneaking out to catch him, just to see if she was really all that fun. I could feel a wariness creeping into her voice.

“Your grandmother would have an embolism if she knew,” Mama said.

I agreed and told her about my grandmother’s recent almost-smile at me with the Orthodox baby.

Mama laughed heartily. “Yes,” she said, “I believe she smiled at me once or twice as well . . . she had a hard life, darling.” Then she went on to reveal things about my grandmother in vivid, absorbing detail. Apparently her town had been occupied by Nazis when she was my age and her father was taken away by the Secret Police be-cause a jealous neighbor reported him for fraternizing with foreigners because he received a postcard from abroad. “Then the prisons got full so they brought him back for a year, which he spent sitting in a dark corner and playing some kind of prison game with his fingers, and then the prisons had room again, so they took him once more. You can see why your grandmother tries to live correctly,” Mama said. I tried to make the connection – she was afraid of gossip because it could lead to the Secret Police taking your dad, or afraid of making a wrong move because it could mean death by Nazis. This seemed an unnecessarily dramatic mindset to have in the Meadowbrook apart-ment complex.

I just said, “Wow. I had no idea. I don’t really know her at all.” “You know what they say,” Mama told me. “A person is fog.”

I did not know that was what people said, but it was just one of the many Russian sayings that made no sense to me. I pictured my grandmother evaporating into white mist, and then my own mother doing the same.

“Yeah,” I said, after a moment.

“You be careful out there, all right?” Mama said. She cautioned me, but I noted that she did not tell me to stop what I was doing.

“If you’re so worried about me, then why don’t you pick me up?” I said.

She took a deep breath and I could feel her measuring her words. “You are the best part of my life,” she said. “The absolute best part of my life. But I think being around you right now will hurt me in a way I can’t quite explain. Soon, though, I know I will feel differently. Then we will pick you up.”

Her voice got softer and softer as she said it, like she was retreating underwater again.

“I can barely hear you,” I said, though I had unfortunately heard every word perfectly.
“Soon,” she said. “We will be there soon, darling. In the meantime, you be careful.”

* * *

When the baby began to fall sleep in my arms a few sessions later, my grandmother scooped her up and put her in her crib, and then I felt like I needed a purpose. I got down on my knees and helped my grandmother scrub the floor. I had never scrubbed the floor before in my life. I regarded my scrubbing grandmother surreptitiously. I wondered if she pictured Nazis at the door, or the Secret Police coming for her if she did not clean everything to perfection. I didn’t know which enemy was worse.

When the baby woke up again, I was relieved to have her as a buffer. My grandmother again gave me that almost-smile as I held the girl on the white couch.

“You’re a natural,” she said, and then she looked away, out the window, and I thought she heard her boss coming back, but no one was there.

Later that day, though, I met the Orthodox mom for the first time. When she walked in the door, a big bright smile rose on her face when she saw my grandmother and me. All summer long, only the other stern sitter let us in and saw us out, and it was strange seeing this woman from the photos come to life. Something was happening to my grandmother’s face that it took me a moment to realize was a tremendous smile, making the tentative smile of earlier seem like nothing.

“We love your grandmother so much,” the woman told me, holding my hands. “She is just so fun! Such a joy. We are so blessed to have her.”

My mouth hung open as I watched her and my grandmother joke around for a while, as my grandmother made charming observations about the baby. So much fun? A joy? I nearly looked behind me, since it was so obvious she must have been talking about something else.

“So, so big!” my grandmother said, her eyes bulging. “She is so so big now! She is like summer cucumber!”

“It’s amazing, right?” said the woman, still laughing as I tried to reconstitute my jaw.

I did not know that my grandmother could joke around. I did not even know she knew so much English. I did not know anything at all. That might have been the only thing I knew.

* * *

My cousin and I watched as much TV as we wanted whenever my grandmother was out, and thankfully my grandfather liked to watch what I was watching, even if it was Maury Povich or Matchbox 20 music videos. On this particular afternoon I was watching Singled Out, hosted by some random dude and the enormous-breasted Jenny McCarthy. I tried to explain how it worked, but he already knew. He was sitting in his breathing machine, clouds of white air rising to the sky as the lung of the machine puffed in and out as he did his thing.

“What does it matter, if the lucky man cannot see the women? They are all young and attractive,” he said. “What will be the big surprise? There’s not a stinker among them!”

I was deflated, realizing he was right. “It’s an American thing, all right? This is how people date in America,” I informed him, as if I had any idea.

He chuckled. “The way I did it was better. I saw your grandmother from across the chemistry lab, and I knew I wanted to make her my wife.”

The thought of my grandmother as the object of anyone’s romantic affection made my stomach churn, but I wanted to know more.

“What was it?” I said, batting away a clump of mist.

But he lifted a hand, going back into his breathing mask, in with his breath, then out, then in and out again. “You know what it was, little dummy? It was the skilled way she lit her Bunsen burner,” he said when he removed it. “I knew she could take care of me.”

My grandfather watched Jenny parading around with a small smile on his face. I thought maybe he would reveal another telling detail about his courtship with my grandmother.
“It’s a marvel she doesn’t topple over,” he said.

* * *

A few nights later, I finally ran into someone who wasn’t an errant dog walker or in the middle of a brooding or shouting session. At first, my journey was uneventful, as all I saw was the Smirnov twins playing video games while their parents fought, Aunt Rita yelling into the phone, probably at her husband, who was still in Kyiv, the Voroshilov father yelling and kicking a television that didn’t seem to be working, and the Tsekalo family silently sitting over a very late dinner, saying absolutely nothing as they chewed. This seemed to be life, from the outside: a lot of sadness and silence and some occasional yelling. I did see my cousin’s friend Greg watching TV with his girlfriend, his hand sliding up her shirt, offering a bit of light in this otherwise dismal display.

But nothing held a candle to what I saw next. As I was passing from Other Masha’s Poplar building to my assigned Dogwood, I saw Stas sneaking out the balcony of the first right Dogwood unit, which everyone knew belonged to the Polish single woman, Monika Kvitova. It seemed she wasn’t completely single, at least, from the way Stas pulled up his pants. When he climbed over the railing and saw me, I thought he would be mortified to see me spotting him in such a compromising position, but instead a wide grin spread across his face.

He put a finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he said, and then he winked at me.

And then I found that I was the one who was mortified, as if I had been caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, which in a way I was, I suppose.

* * *

I never did tell Other Masha about her brother prowling about. In-stead I played up the other things I saw, which weren’t too impressive: one old man talking to his dog with such tenderness that I thought he was speaking to his beloved until I turned the corner. Two nurses in a carpool hugging goodbye for a long time before retreating to their separate apartments. Old Uncle Yan in his living room, cursing as he assembled a TV stand. Other Masha barely had anything to report, and as I spoke, I could feel her drifting away, her eyes looking off at my cousin, at Aunt Mila, at the childless and troubled Taranovs and at her mother, who was flirting with the recently-divorced Uncle Ivan.

And still, I loved Stas, though he hadn’t said a word to me pretty much since that first day at the pool. Even if there was now a chance – the smallest chance – that in addition to his alliance with Monika Kvitova, he was also the Peeping Tom. I still cared for him deeply. But his sister was drifting away from me. It was almost August, and she was starting dance class soon. I worried I would lose her. I stared at Nina on the other side of the pool and wondered if I should have tried to hang out with her instead, this seemingly popular and happy girl with private regrets.

“I mean maybe he’s over it,” Other Masha said, and I realized she meant the pervert. It was true, he hadn’t attacked for two weeks now. The flyers had mostly been torn down by a few afternoon thunder-storms and the neighborhood council had cancelled their latest meeting due to the weather, or so they said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

Marek Naumovich brought her mother flowers again, and she accepted them. I was still stunned by the amount of white hair he had, an obscene, unnecessary amount. “Thank you, darling,” she said, her face almost forming a smile.

“Only the best for you, Allachka, darling,” he said, bowing. I never did tell Other Masha about her brother prowling about. In-stead I played up the other things I saw, which weren’t too impressive: one old man talking to his dog with such tenderness that I thought he was speaking to his beloved until I turned the corner. Two nurses in a carpool hugging goodbye for a long time before retreating to their separate apartments. Old Uncle Yan in his living room, cursing as he assembled a TV stand. Other Masha barely had anything to report, and as I spoke, I could feel her drifting away, her eyes looking off at my cousin, at Aunt Mila, at the childless and troubled Taranovs and at her mother, who was flirting with the recently-divorced Uncle Ivan. And still, I loved Stas, though he hadn’t said a word to me pretty much since that first day at the pool. Even if there was now a chance – the smallest chance – that in addition to his alliance with Monika Kvi-tova, he was also the Peeping Tom. I still cared for him deeply. But his sister was drifting away from me. It was almost August, and she was starting dance class soon. I worried I would lose her. I stared at Nina on the other side of the pool and wondered if I should have tried to hang out with her instead, this seemingly popular and happy girl with private regrets.

“I mean maybe he’s over it,” Other Masha said, and I realized she meant the pervert. It was true, he hadn’t attacked for two weeks now. The flyers had mostly been torn down by a few afternoon thunder-storms and the neighborhood council had cancelled their latest meet-ing due to the weather, or so they said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

Marek Naumovich brought her mother flowers again, and she ac-cepted them. I was still stunned by the amount of white hair he had, an obscene, unnecessary amount. “Thank you, darling,” she said, her face almost forming a smile.

“Only the best for you, Allachka, darling,” he said, bowing.

* * *

My grandmother was talking to two of her favorite old ladies, her face stern, without a hint of the smile I briefly spotted on her face. This smile turned into an outright frown as Other Masha began doing another dance routine for me, this time to the tune of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” yet another American tune that was unknown to me.

As she finished shaking her rump, my cousin came over to us, looking at her not without approval, and then practically sneered at me. “Grandma told me to tell you it’s time to go in for lunch,” he said.

Masha laughed. “You guys can’t eat whenever you want?”

My cousin was embarrassed. “Well I can,” he insisted. “I’m just looking out for little Masha here. Babushka’s got her on an iron leash.” “Oh, yeah?” I said, vowing that I would avenge this humiliation. I was already terrified that Other Masha was losing interest in me, and telling her that I was just a big baby did not help.

“Yeah,” my cousin said, but then he got this hunted look, like he wasn’t sure what to do next. To prove his point, he ran back to the soccer game while Masha watched him with her arms folded and an amused smile. My cousin had been playing soccer in the background of my life for as long as I could remember, but I had never watched him play for more than a few seconds. If I had, then I might have no-ticed what I saw then: that he was easily the best player on the field. It was beautiful and complex, like he was playing chess and everyone else was playing checkers. I almost felt proud, as if he had anything at all to do with me.

* * *

“When you were three, I asked my mother to watch you for a few hours so I could celebrate my best friend’s birthday. She punished me for days afterward. It was the first time I was out without you since you had been born. Isn’t that funny? It’s not like how it is in America these days, with all the babysitters . . . “

“Are you mad at her?” I said. “For not doing more when you called to say you uh, weren’t feeling well?”

She laughed. “Why would I be mad at her? Did you already forget that her father was taken away by the Secret Police? She does not trust authority. The thought of me going to the hospital when it wasn’t ab-solutely necessary scared her.”

“And Grandpa?” I said. He was not present during the interaction. “Oh, my sweet Papa . . . ” she said. I could almost feel her clasp-ing her hands together. “If you had only known him before he was thrown off that bus by that mean drunk. He was the most handsome man in the building, all the wives were always making eyes at him.
Every winter, your grandmother and I would take three different buses to visit him in the hospital where he was laid up, bringing him various soups and jars of medicine . . . “

“Thrown off the bus?” I said with a gulp. “By a mean drunk?”
“Of course, you fool, how do you think he got that way? He was headed to work, and a mean old drunk shoved him from the top step of the bus, and he fell on his side and collapsed one of his lungs.”

My poor grandfather! Somehow, knowing that his condition was not a result of bad health but from an accident made it ten times worse. Why had no one told me this before? Why was Mama telling me so much now?

It occurred to me that she was speaking like she was on her death-bed and no longer cared about the consequences of her revelations. It gave me a sinking feeling, but also one that made me feel like I was finally getting to know my mother, like instead of dying, something in her was finally coming alive. In exchange for her family gossip, I told her about all of the things Masha and I had discovered in the neigh-borhood, and I could hear her murmuring with interest, but more like she was watching a compelling television show.

“You’re running out of time to catch your man,” she said, with a sound I could not distinguish between a laugh or a cry, though what-ever it was, it sounded again like it was coming from underwater.

August

I managed to convince Other Masha to have one last nocturnal jour-ney before we put the pervert to rest. My circumnavigation of my assigned buildings yielded little except a perfectly content-seeming Nina watching television with her grandfather, the Taranovs sharing a silent meal, and old Father Voroshilov raging again, this time direct-ing his anger at a stubborn cabinet door. But I had not expected to find anything. That was not my true reason for going out there.

I went to the buildings Other Masha had appointed for herself and walked around them as quickly as I could. So quickly that, if my friend had actually been out and about, I would have naturally spot-ted her doing her duty, taking her notes. But she was nowhere to be seen. I thought about how, all along, we were never supposed to go around each other’s buildings. I snuck all the way down to her apart-ment, though we were not supposed to cover each other’s buildings, and found her and her mother and brother in front of the TV, watching something apparently enthralling in black and white. I watched my former friend, who wore a neon green leotard, laugh and laugh and laugh and wondered if this was the only pure joy I had found during all of my nights of wandering.

* * *

I had finished my novel at last. I read the end to my great-grandmother. Stephanie had found Michelle, who was safe and sound. She used some clues to find that her twin sister was being held captive in the basement of a mean substitute math teacher. A lot of hijinks ensued with them pouring buckets of tacks and honey on the ground to trap the teacher as they waited for the cops to arrive.

“For your first effort,” said my great-grandmother, “it is above average.”
“Thank you,” I said, my face flushing with pride.

I had never made anything like it before. I had drawn hundreds of pictures and molded nonsense out of clay and done some papier-mâché and watercolors, but this was an actual story and another human had cared about what happened in it and how it ended. I wanted to bottle this feeling up and keep it forever, but I knew I would just want to do it again and again and again, like how Other Masha would cannonball into the pool one more time over and over as her mom yelled for her to get out of the water already and go home.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” said my great-grandmother. “You, my dear, are no Tolstoy.” Then her lips moved in that super-old-person way, like she was chewing cud, and I waited to see if another word would emerge. “Yet,” she added at last, with a wink.

“Yet,” I said, smiling so much it hurt. Then, riding the wave of goodwill I was on, I finally had the courage to nod toward the photo-graphs on the wall behind my great-grandmother, to sit patiently as she unraveled the tales of each one, which I would be able to under-stand far better than the blurring-together block language about each relative on my grandfather’s website.

“Who are they?” I said, and she followed my pointing finger as if I had lined her up against the wall and prepared to shoot.

She shook her head and laughed vaguely. “Them?” she said. “I don’t even remember who half of them are . . . ” Then she moved her lips and I waited for her to go through the ones she did know, but she just opened her mouth wider and wider into a yawn and closed her eyes. I knew where this was going but I still sat there until I heard her snore.

My cousin found me in the kitchen, his prematurely grown-up face scrunched with worry. He grabbed my bicep and dragged me to the computer screen without a word.

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE MASHA. LEAVE THE POOR MAN ALONE OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.

This freaked me out and thrilled me at the same time. I felt like I was a character in the novel I was writing, my life filled with intrigue and mystery. And threat.

“Do you think it’s coming from the pervert himself?” I said. “Or is someone really protecting him?”

I pictured Stas, typing away at his own keyboard, nodding his hair out of his eyes. I had not told his sister I saw him and knew I never would. I was still figuring out what it all meant. Maybe his mother knew about his shenanigans and was protecting him. Maybe his sister was doing it and that was why she was drifting away from me.

“Maybe,” said my cousin. “Probably. Maybe you really should stay at home,” he said.

“But what about Anna Karenina?” I said.

He stroked his non-existent beard. “Well, have you heard of doing something out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Others do that kind of thing all the time, yes,” I said, shoving the book back at him. “But have you?”

He laughed and threw the heavy tome at me. It was a marvel I didn’t topple over.

“Don’t be an idiot out there,” my cousin said.

I said I would not, and then I told him what happened in the first half of the book. Reading which had been no easy feat, not only be-cause of the dense prose, but also because I had to read it in secret, in the bathroom at night, on the evenings when I was not sneaking out. My cousin nodded slowly as I spoke, kind of like how he did when he was helping my parents drive when he was in the backseat.

“Sounds like quite a story,” he declared at last. “I don’t know why it took him so many pages to set up a love affair. You could do that in about five minutes if you really wanted to.”

I sighed, wondering if he would ever understand anything. He de-leted the message, but I stayed at the keyboard for a while, scrolling around my Grandpa’s site. It featured short pages with the names of all of our family members, but each time I clicked on one, there was a big block of Russian text that made my eyes swim. But then I saw it. MASHA, it said.

Unlike all the others, the block about me was short, like I had not lived long enough to merit a sizeable entry. It just said: I’m not sure about anyone else in my life, but in Masha’s eyes, I can always see how much she loves me.

I put a hand on the computer desk and looked at my feet, my head spinning. My grandfather wasn’t wrong, but it was unsettling, see-ing myself listed on his website, without giving my permission. It was true, of course I loved him. But how did he know anything about me from looking in my eyes. How?

* * *

The note was just the thing I needed to get Masha’s attention. She was going to dance three nights a week now and barely had time for me, and I spent more evenings secretly finishing Anna Karenina than I did trying to catch the Peeping Tom. The summer was wrapping up and soon enough, I would be doing my back-to-school shopping, if that was something Mama did anymore. Besides, over three weeks had gone by without a peep from the Tom, and even the neighborhood council had shifted their efforts to finding the person who didn’t clean up their dog’s doo doo in the night instead of the pervert.

Still, I hoped mentioning the second note to Other Masha would ignite some dying ember within her. I sat under the gaze of Greta Garbo in her room, hoping her regal presence would help me.

“Those notes sound pretty serious,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to back off.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything,” I said.

“Well maybe this is different,” she said. But I could see that her heart wasn’t in it.

“You’re making excuses,” I said.

“I think we should quit,” she said. “I’m getting tired of sneaking out at night, and we haven’t gotten any closer to finding the per-vert. Besides, he hasn’t even done anything lately. Maybe he got bored.”

“Then why is he warning me? Or why is someone protecting him so hard?” I said.

She shrugged. “Life is a mystery.”

“I don’t know if he got bored, but I do know that you got bored,” I said. “So bored that you didn’t even complete your mission, last time.”

She gazed at me evenly. “I know you wanted to keep doing it, so I let you,” she said.

“I guess I did,” I admitted.
I did not know why I was so determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. Maybe because it was the only thing that seemed to make sense. Even if at the end of it, there was Stas, my one true love. I would still accept him if he was the pervert, even if it meant I’d have to completely rethink the way I looked at him.

“Yeah,” she said, kind of stiffly. “I’m tired of spying on all the sad neighbors. You,” she said, really staring at me for the first time, “should go back to thinking about yourself. You think seeing all these messed-up people means your family is so innocent? We’ve all got problems.”

“I know that,” I said, though I did not know that before, which was maybe why I liked doing it so much. “That’s why I like spying on everyone, I guess. It’s kind of comforting.”

She laughed but then her face turned solemn as she straightened out the black fringe of her dance skirt. “It’s not just pointless to go out there again. It’s dangerous,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

She had decided something about me and there was no turning back. I would never be able to draw her back in, to return to those early days of giggles and gossip, of the novelty of sharing the same name, and sharing other things, too. Then she burst into song and a few slow dance moves, this time to the tune of a song I actually knew, “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Fiddler on the Roof, not looking at me a single time as she did it. She twirled in front of her mirror, the color-ful triangles of her dance skirt flapping in the air, like so many hand-kerchiefs waving goodbye.

* * *

My aunt and uncle came to retrieve my cousin at last during the death throes of summer. That morning I had briefed him on the ending of Anna Karenina, and when they sat down to eat, I could nearly see my grandmother’s dignified, strict face in my aunt’s, pushing through the surface of her placid face. It did not take my aunt long to cut to the chase.

“How was Anna Karenina?” she asked her son.

“Very edifying,” my cousin said with a big smile, switching to his Russian intellectual persona. Then he went on to tell her his favorite parts: how Kitty and Levin fell in love, the scene where Anna danced with Vronsky at the ball, even the long descriptions of farming caught his eye . . . I could see things were going very well, that my aunt was even smiling, until he reached the conclusion of his report. “And the ending was so poetic! I just loved how Vronsky saved Anna as she was trying to jump under that train and got caught in the gears himself. Justice was served at last!” he said, pleased with himself as he chewed his potatoes.

My uncle pounded a fist on the table. “What have you been doing with yourself all summer, son?”

My cousin began to mutter, searching for actual words. “Little Masha’s not a total moron after all,” I said to him.

Then his face regained some of its normal overconfidence. “What did I do? Well, I . . . I helped Grandpa with his website. He actually received some very interesting messages.”

He glared at me, and I glared back.

“Oh?” said my grandfather. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“The message said that Masha has been snooping at night, trying to find the neighborhood pervert.”

“You did what?” said my grandmother, her brows approaching her forehead. It looked like someone else had tightened her bun to an even greater extent.

“I didn’t find him anyway,” I said. When everyone kept staring, I added, “I wanted to keep the neighborhood safe.”

“A pervert?” said my aunt, who was turning as white as my grand-mother’s teacups.

“Just the looking kind, not the touching,” I insisted, which I saw did not help my case. I added, “There was reward money!”

“The girl is pennywise,” my grandfather said carefully. “That should count for something, no?”

“You had all summer to read one single book, Alexei,” my uncle said to his son, shaking his head. “How will you ever become a cul-tured man, or know your Motherland?”

“Oh, stop it already, Dima, at his age you were just chasing girls and shooting at beer cans!” my great-grandmother cried. “Let the young enjoy their youth. If the boy wants to play soccer with his friends and Masha wants to chase after perverts, then let them live!” My aunt turned to my cousin with lightning bolts in her eyes.

“Soccer?” she said.

“He’s actually really good,” I said, softly.

My cousin glared at me, which was honestly kind of nice, because I had never inspired so much feeling in him before. I looked at my grandmother, whose brows were still stuck near her hairline, though she said nothing.

“You are so dead,” my cousin muttered under his breath.

* * *

My grandfather and I were watching The Tom Green Show as we waited for my parents to arrive. Thankfully they had just missed my cousin and his family, because Mama said it would be too taxing to talk to her own sister, to feel like she had to explain. I could not help but regard my grandfather with my new knowledge of his health situation. A drunk on a bus – random accident – how could he not live his life in fury, but instead with mild amusement? He clicked off the remote with his usual smile.

“There is something deeply off-putting about that man. If you told me he was the neighborhood degenerate I would not blink twice . . .” he said. Then he shook his head, clearly still rankled, and hung up his breathing mask. As he shifted from the little machine bench to the couch, I realized what I had wanted from him all along.

“Can I try it?” I said, tilting my head at his device.

I kept my voice low, since my grandmother was in the kitchen, preparing a feast for my impending parents. My great-grandmother was already sitting in front of the tabled feast items, smacking her lips as she sampled the wares.

A chastened look crossed my grandfather’s face. “Darling,” he said, “it’s not meant for healthy little girls. It could make you sick . . .” But he kept his voice low, because he was going to say yes and we both knew it. He put a finger to his lips and I climbed inside the little booth, which felt like it was caving in on me even though I was smaller than my grandfather, but maybe not that much smaller.
“Quickly,” my grandfather said. “They’ll be here any minute.”

Now was my chance to feel it, to see what it was like to be him, to see life from his strange perch. I did not hesitate. He explained what the buttons did, how the main part functioned like a fake lung. How it went up and down, up and down, and how the mist helped clear his lungs. He turned it on and I sat there with the mask on my face, breathing it in. It felt cool and warm at the same time. It was making me lightheaded, but my grandfather assured me it wouldn’t hurt.

I looked at him through his mask and everything seemed sud-denly blurry. I tried to see him as he saw me, tried to see in his eyes if he really loved me, or if he could really sense my love. But I couldn’t see anything. I was panicking, shrouded in mist.

“What on earth are you doing?”

I looked up to find my mother standing there, on the other side of the thick but billowy mist. My father had materialized behind her, looking harried. My grandmother stood behind them with her dish-rag while my grandfather gave her a semi-apologetic shrug.

Through the mist I could see that my mother looked smaller and older, that she had spent even less time than usual in the sun that summer, that I wasn’t sure if she even knew me. But she was still my mother. She lifted a hand, tentatively. She was more pale than usual under her dark hair, and still pretty. I guessed I still looked like her, except the pretty part. Or the skinny part.

I climbed out of the machine and bowed my head. “I just wanted to know what it was like,” I declared, to no one in particular. I batted away an errant cloud of mist.

“Are you mad?” she said, and as I stood by her, I was flooded with relief.

This was the old Mama, the one who yelled at me for any overt wrongdoing, not the one who would be interested in my deep mo-tivations or ask follow-up questions or shoot the shit with me like I was her peer. The Mama who did not reveal my family’s confound-ing history or laugh at my jokes like a schoolgirl. This was the woman I had been missing all summer, I saw now. I watched her face and thought I saw it soften just a tiny bit.

“Mama,” I said.

I waited for her to say Masha, not Masha Two or Other Masha, or some bastardized version of my name. But she didn’t say my name at all. She just opened her arms and walked toward me while the machine continued to do its strange breathing.

“Daughter,” she said.

* * *

That night, I waited for my parents to settle into the room my cousin had vacated, for Papa’s powerful snore to fill the apartment. It was my last chance to go pervert hunting. I searched every building by myself and found nothing, and then I thought, well, maybe it was a big co-incidence that her building was the only one that was untouched, and maybe the pervert was just biding his time until he did his peeping there. Or maybe, maybe, Other Masha realized her brother was the pervert during one of our romps, or that someone else worth protect-ing was the pervert, and wanted me to leave it alone.

I became more convinced of my theory as I approached her build-ing. I could feel a new heaviness thickening the air. First, before I saw anything, I heard the singing, coming from the direction of Other Masha’s apartment, more specifically, her bathroom. I thought it was Other Masha, but no, I realized that it was her mother singing, her mother who had a beautiful voice, it turned out, even if it was not the stuff of nationally-sanctioned popular duets, a voice like her daugh-ter’s except deeper, more mature, more filled with sorrow. She was singing an old Russian folk song, one I had heard my parents and their friends drunkenly singing, but one I could not name in that mo-ment, whose name I knew would come to me later. I peeked around the big tree trunk and watched her. She had defied the instructions of the community and had left her window wide open and she looked beautiful as she rubbed soap on her body, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders and back.

Old Marek Naumovich the widower thought so, too. He was standing right at the window, staring at her. I wondered if she knew what he was doing. I wondered if it was the song that drew him in, at least the first time, if it drew him in like the scent of tuna attracts a hungry cat. Maybe it reminded him of home. Maybe it reminded him of his dead wife. Maybe it reminded him of feeling like he belonged somewhere instead of being alone in this weird apartment complex where everything looked the same and it was so easy to get lost.

From the turn of her head, the almost smile on her lips, I knew that Masha’s mom saw him and that she was putting on a show, think-ing the man needed a little joy in his life. She was generous like that, just like her daughter, though maybe she needed a bit of joy, too. Her song was beguiling. I stood behind the old man and watched her and watched her until she turned the water off and got out of the shower and covered her body with a towel, retreating toward the bedroom where her daughter slept, her daughter who had likely fig-ured out what was going on without telling me weeks ago. Then I crept back to the apartment where I belonged, deciding that I would not tell anyone else what I saw and that I did not want to be respon-sible for stopping it, even if I did not fully understand what it was, and never would.

---

Maria Kuznetsova is the author of two novels from Random House, Oksana, Behave! (2019) and Something Unbelievable (2021). Her work has appeared in Slate, Guernica, Southern Review, Threepenny Review, The Sun, and McSweeney’s Quarterly.