Coming to America

Laika  Andropov peered anxiously through the ice encrusted window as the lights of Detroit appeared below, twinkling behind the falling snow like diamond in a swirl of ash. A multi-colored knit quilt covered her lap, and her rough, calloused fingers worried the fraying threads. She caught sight of her countenance in the glass and looked ashamedly away: Her features were sharp and her eyes dark, her pale skin slathered with cold sweat and her lips a grave white slash. Her stomach rumbled because she was hungry, but she had no appetite to finish her in-flight meal. She was tired too, but could not sleep. Restlessness surged through her, and the air was too heavy, too stale. If she focused on those things, she would begin to panic again, so instead she concentrated on the city emerging from the tempestuous night; ancient brick buildings lined a riverfront, their lights dappling the inky surface like liquid gold. She spotted a bridge connecting two shores, cars moving slowly in either lane as though the drivers weren’t used to icy conditions.

Sixteen and tall for her age, with sallow red hair and plain features, the muscles of her arms toned from years of farm work, Laika  was what Soviet propaganda may have once called the model woman. She was not soft like the Western women she saw in the movies, she was strong and practical, not given to fancy or daydreaming. In her district, where wavering fields of wheat covered the land for miles in every direction, women were not as they were in the West, or even in Moscow; they were expected to do the same work as the men, because if they didn’t, it would not get done, and if it did not get done, the family would suffer. From the moment she could walk, she was working, first feeding chickens, then carrying buckets of water, then, finally, tending the crop. She did this without complaint or protest, because it was simply the way of life. Maybe in the city women can afford to be dainty and concern themselves with breaking their nails or getting their pretty dresses dirty, but in the country, they could not; from them, strength both inner and outer was required. Laika  firmly believed that she possessed such strength, but as she gazed out into the wintery night, mere moments from setting foot on strange soil, alone in the world save for a father she had never met and siblings had never particularly cared to know, she did not feel that she did.

She felt weak.

And afraid.

A voice crackled over the intercom and the FASTEN SEATBELTS sign flashed an urgent red. She did not understand what the pilot was saying, but guessed that he was telling them that they would be landing soon. Laika  let go of the blanket, which had provided comfort since leaving Yakutsk and pulled the belt tight around her waist, her eyes sliding suspiciously to the side when the old Frenchwoman beside her shifted and muttered to herself in her native tongue. She spoke broken Russian, and spent the first hour of the flight trying to engage Laika  in conversation. “That is a pretty blanket,” she said at point one. Laika  thanked her politely. “Did you make it?” No, Laika  told her, it was my mother’s. Her voice hitched on the last word and she turned away to stare at the window so that no one could see the tears in her eyes.

Tears that were beginning to form again. She blinked them back and clutched the blanket in one hand, as if doing so would bring her closer to her mother. Her mind went back to the last time she saw her, lying in a country hospital, so thin her bones stuck through her sallow skin and her eyes standing prominently out, her once vibrant body wasted with cancer. Laika  swallowed around a lump of emotion and glanced at the frosty window pane, at the traffic control tower looming from the dark, at the lights flanking the landing strip, at the confusion of streets and buildings beyond the cyclone fence. A dour frown tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she exhaled sharply through her nose.

She wanted none of this, yet her voice did not matter, nor did her desires; the government was forcing her to move with her father, and that was all there was to it. A deep, frightened, and very childlike part of her wanted to resist, to yell and stomp her feet until they let her go back home, but she would not do that. She was a proud Russian woman and she would meet her circumstances with quiet dignity just as she had met every challenge in her life. A country woman such as herself did not hide, nor did she back down, nor did she crumble when times were tough; a country woman does what is required of her, just as her mother did before her, and her mother before her.

That didn’t mean she wanted to.

She did not.

She wanted her mother.

The plane touched down, the cabin shaking and the tires screeching on the slick runway. Laika  dug her nails into the armrest. She did not like to feel this way, but she did; she wanted her mother very badly, wanted to feel safe and secure, wanted everything to be right in the world the way it used to be. She did not have her mother, though; she had only this now, a land she did not know, a people she did not know, and a family she did not know.

Outside, the main terminal appeared from the snowy night, its big windows blazing yellow. Men in orange vests scrambled around the tarmac as the plane slowed and taxied to the gate; Laika  watched them with intense scrutiny, then studied the building, drawing closer now, so close she could see people through the glass. So this was the U.S. Even living in a rural district, she had heard so much about it, seen it in movies and on the television. She expected...more; it looked little different than industrial cities she’d been to on the Ural.

The pilot’s voice came back on the loudspeaker, and everyone got up and retrieved their carry-ons from the overhead compartments. That must mean it was time to get off. Laika  hesitated, then followed their lead before they could leave her behind, lost and alone. She opened the little door and took out a red gym bag with NIKE on the side. It was an English word...she didn’t know what it meant. The other passengers lined up and made their way down the aisle. Laika  got behind a fat woman with gray hair and let herself be lead, her stomach rolling with nerves and her heartbeat speeding up. At the door, a stewardess smiled at her and said something in English; to Laika , it was unintelligible mush. She nodded curtly as though she understood, then went with the crowd.

When she entered the terminal, her steps slowed and her eyes widened slightly; the airport here was much bigger than the one in Russia. That one impressed her, this one overwhelmed her; people thick as forests filled the vast space, some rushing, others waiting in lines at counters; bright lights stung her eyes; and loudspeakers blared voices she could not comprehend. Panic clutched at her chest, and she found herself beginning to quiver as if in terror. Stop this, she thought, you are being childish. It is a place with people; pretend that you are of them and go sit down to get your bearings.

Someone bumped into her, and she stumbled forward. Another did the same, and another still. Huffing in indignation, she moved aside and flattened her back against a wall between two bathrooms, her thumb threading through the strap of her bag.

She looked left and right, seeing the baggage carousel on one side and a bookstore/cafe on the other, tables and potted plants sitting out front. She spotted a waiting area packed with people, and went over to an empty chair, sitting next to a fat man in a business suit who noisily ate a cheeseburger from a white wrapper with a yellow M on it. Laika  watched him from the corner of her eyes with a sneer of disgust. Americans, or so she heard, were pigs; most of them were fat, slow, and lazy; they also thought they were better than everyone else. Darting her eyes warily around the terminal, she saw dozens of them, hundreds even. Not all were fat, but far more were than in Russia. The majority looked...normal. She’d seen Americans before, of course, but she still expected them to be somehow different, as the eagle is different from the bear. The people streaming by her were largely the same as the ones in Russia, though she saw some many different types of them. Black ones, brown ones, Asian ones, a dizzying rainbow of colors.

Calmer now, she scanned the teeming mass for her father, but did not see him. She sat the bag on the floor between her legs, then reached into her coat and pulled out a Polaroid picture, faded and yellowed with age. It depicted her father sitting on a couch, a little girl with brown hair sitting in his lap. His blue eyes twinkled at the camera, and his smile reminded Laika  of a Santa Claus for some reason. She studied the image, trying to feel something for him, a connection, familial recognition, anything. She felt nothing, though; the man in the photo remained just that, a man like any other. Perhaps it would be normal to feel stirring or longing when looking upon the face of one’s father, but in her breast, nothing moved, in her stomach, nothing fluttered. She felt nothing at all for Lincoln Loud: No love, no yearning, no affection, not even anger, resentment, or disdain.

Shoving the picture back into her jacket, she bent and reached into her bag, but froze when a voice spoke from beside her, its tembre uncertain. “Laika ?”

She looked up, and there he was, his hands in the pockets of a green coat with a fleece plaid collar, his head bowed almost defensively. He was older than in the picture, the skin around his eyes and mouth creased and a sparse hair on the tip of his chin. He looked like a college dropout from a bad sitcom who smoked pot and played guitar.

This was her father?

Coming back to herself, she got to her feet, picked her bag up, and turned to him. They stared at one another for a moment, then he took his hands out of his pockets and hugged her. Her eyes widened and her body went rigid. Like any normal person, she did not like to be embraced by someone she did not know. Even so, she awkwardly hugged him back, patting his shoulder and then pulling away. He ducked his head and put one hand on his hip. He looked up at her, seeme to collect his thoughts, then said, in Russian so broken it was shattered, “How are you doing?”

She nodded and tried desperately to come up with the right word. She was certain that she knew it. “O-Okay.”

“Good,” he said, “we will go to the place now.”

She assumed he meant we will go home now, but how could some place you have never been be home?

“Okay.”

She followed him through the terminal, sticking close because while he wasn’t much, he was all she had right now, the only tether keeping her from drifting into the unknown. Outside, the night was blustery and fine snow pelted her face. “Watch my stairs,” her father said, and Laika  furrowed her brows. She looked around but saw no stairs - a wide concrete walkway skirted the front of the building, wet with melting snow. He looked at her, saw that she did not understand, and tapped the ground with his foot. “Fall,” he said.

Laika  looked down. Fall? On this? There was so little!

She nodded and followed him to the car; it was a small white thing parked along a curb. Her father held out his hand, and she assumed he wanted her bag, so she reluctantly gave it to him, feeling strangely naked and defenseless without it. He opened the back door and sat it down, then motioned for her to get in the passenger seat. She opened the door, slipped in, and closed it behind her; she sat stiffly, her knees pressed together and her hands resting in her lap, her eyes darting around.



Her father slid in behind the wheel, yanked the door closed, and put on his seatbelt. He turned to her and looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and suddenly wished she was still holding her mother’s quilt. “You are...upset?” he asked haltingly. She couldn’t be sure if that was exactly the word he meant to use or not, so she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Uh...strange?” That meant nervous, did it not? She didn’t know, and she felt herself becoming frustrated.

He nodded his head and turned in his seat to face her. “I think...it is firm for you and I am a man who wears a dress.”

Laika ’s brow furrowed. Surely this is not what he was meaning to say.

To God she hoped it was not. From his tone and the context, she thought he was trying to tell her that he understood that this was difficult for her. He did not, though, not fully. No one can know what is it like to be dropped into a foreign place where things are similar but not exactly familiar, and where you cannot understand everyone, and everyone cannot understand you. You can say that feeling cast adrift, as though you are in a raft at sea, is melodrama, but when you find yourself lost in a strange place where you are an outsider, you will understand.



>“It is...okay,” she lied after a moment’s thought. It was not okay but she did not have the words to express to him her emotions, and even if she did, she would not want to. He was a stranger and where she came from, you guard yourself against strangers. Her village was small and people from the outside did not often come, so you knew everyone and they knew you; when you saw someone you did not know, you were ware of them. She did not think that was strange, surely people here in America were like that too. Somethings cross borders, and not being open to someone you do not know had to be one of them.
>Her father thought for a moment, as though he were trying to find words, then he nodded. She watched him from the corner of her eye as he sighed, turned to face the wheel, and started the car. Warm air rushe out of the vents and the radio came on, an announcer speaking so fast that she coud not pick out even the words she knew.
>Neither of them talked on the way to his house; she stared out the window as the world flashed by the interstate, clusters of lights twinkling in the darkness denoting settlements. The signs on the side of the road were strange shapes and colors and the symbols on them made no sense to her They were like hieroglyphs and she could not even where she would even begin in attempt to understand them. A police car sat on the gravel shoulder behind another vehicle, its blue lights flashing. She turned to watch as they passed - the cars looked so strangely here. She had seen American cars before, but not often, and none like these.
>A sense of wrongness came over her so strong that it made her head spin. Those things might be little - what cars and signs look like - but the small things are the ones that put one off balance the most because it is the small things you accept first. They form a background that we do not think about; they are so normal and commonplace. You do not notice them until they are different. Imagine having a routine. You do the same thing at the same time everyday, and you see the same things everyday. You go through this routine one day only to find something like a tree being missing where there was a tree the day before. You metaphorcially stumble and are confused. Where did the tree go? Now imagine everything being just a little different. A door that was red for years is now green; flowers grow where there was pavement only the day before; a sign that was on this side of the street is now on that side of the street.
>She had the advantage of knowing things would be different, but that did not make it any less disconcerting.
>Several times during the drive, she caught her father stealing sidelong glances at her, and for some reason that served only to increase her nerves.
>Did he even want her to move in with him?
>She asked herself that a lot on the flight. He was not a part of her life until now. Her mother did not speak of him often and she always felt that mother was angry with him for some reason. She thought that it was because he did not want to be a father and turned his back of them. Her mother said that that was not so but it gave her pause. Was he now looking at her and hating that she was moving in?
>That lead her mind to the house into which she was moving, a house with many siblings she did not know. She was not a shy person, but this was different. She was moving into their homes and into their lives. She had been an outsider in groups, but this was not a group, it was a family, and she was in essence shouldering her way in, asking, by her very presence, to be accepted as one of them. She was not a person to impose herself or to ask for things from others, especially something this serious. To borrow a cup of sugar or for help moving something heavy, yes, but not to take her, a stranger, into their lives.
>Her father changed lanes and took an off-ramp that wound between low hilocks and terminated at a two-lane highway. To the left as darkness as dense a forest, to the right, the outskirts of a village. He turned right and followed the road into town. Buildings stood on both sides of the street, lamps up and down the sidewalks casting cold light. She did not see people as they made their way to the house, but that was to be expected. In her village during winter, only madman or those with urgent tasks left their homes after sundown. People in her oblast were accosutmed to the extreme cold, but they were not impervious, and nights were brutal enough that even the toughest man would cower in his home rather than face the biting chill.
>They turned onto a side street, and the first thing she noticed were the blinking Christmas lights strung along the roofs of the houses and framing their windows. In a yard to the left, she spotted an inflatable Santa with his hand raised in a wave. She was aware that people decorated this way for Christmas - some did it in Russia too - but it was still strange to see. Why? What point was there in putting these lights on your house and the things in your yard? It was decadant and frivilous, a thing done by people with money and too much whismy for their own good.
>Ahead, to the left, was the worst offender. Lights lined its roof, its windows, the porch overhang, and the front door, all white and so bright it looked as though it he house were on fire. Plastic candy canes lined the walkway, wooden reindeer, snowmen, and Santas dotted the snowy front lawn, and a pine tree twenty feet tall and fully decorated with garland, tensil, glass ordiments, and even more lights. Laikia gaped. God, what fool lived in that house?
>She got her answer when they pulled into the driveway.
>Oh.
>Why was she not surprised?
>Dad parked the car next to a silver minivan and doused the headlights. He turned the radio off and cut the engine; it ticked as it cooled, and cold air began to creep in at once like the chill of death. He sat where he was, his hands clasped to the wheel, and pursed his lips in contemplation. Laika watched him from the corner of her eye, then flicked her gaze to the front door. A wreath festooned with red ribbons adorned it, and warm, yellow light shone in the adjacent window. A shadow flickered across the curtains, and Laika’s stomach knotted with dread.
>Soon, in mere minutes, she would walk through that door, and all of this would somehow cement and become real. The long flight here, the drive, this very moment, all perfunctory matters. Her new life in this strange, new place did not truly begin until she crossed the threshold...the point of no return.
>She stole another glance at her father. Meeting him was difficult enough, but soon she would meet the others, surrounded by aunts and half-siblings whose names she barely even knew, and whose faces she had never seen before. She would be surrounded by things she had never seen, the furnishings and family memories of a home that meant nothing to her. That alone did not bother her, she had been in other people’s homes many times, but the fact that she was expected to just accept it as her own did. Home is something you ease into over time, something you build either yourself or with other people. It isn’t something you can be dropped into the middle of. She imagined she would adjust, but as it stood this very moment, she did not want to go in there, did not want to begin the process
>Dad took out his phone and texted someone, then sat it in his lap. “I figure it’ll be easier to meet everyone one at a time,” he said and laughed, “there’re so many of them it can be kind of overwhelming even when you’re used to it.
>She was able to understand only a handful of words, but nodded as though she understood them all.
>His phone chimed, and he swiped his thumb across the screen, the soft blue glow faintly touching his face. He nodded, pressed a button on the side, and slipped the phone into his hip pocket. “Are you ready?”
>She understood that phrase entirely.
>No, she was not, but she would do it and she would do it with the stoic resignation for which her people were known. This arrangement was not something she wanted but it is what she had been given, and while American women might whine about the injustice of circumstance, she was raised to accept life as it came. Complaining solved nothing even if, sometimes, you felt like doing it.
>She started to speak, but nodded instead.
>Dad watched her for a concerned moment, as though he were seriously considering calling this all off and sending her back for her own comfort, then he threw the door open and got out. Laika  pulled the handle, pushed her own door open, and climbed into the frosty night. Hardened slush crunched under her boots and a cool wind caressed her face as if in welcome. Her breath puffed out in front of her as she awkwardly shoved her hands into her pockets. Dad opened the back door, reached in, and took out her bag. She watched him warily, then the house. It was big with a covered porch, pitched roof, and dormers. Her mother’s home was much smaller as was her grandparents’ townhouse; the latter’s dacha on Lake Taymyr, however, was roughly the same size.
>Slamming the door, Dad came around the front of the car and stood next to her, following her gaze and scanning the facade as though he, too, were seeing it for the first time. “It’s almost a hundred years old,” he said with a hint of pride.
>It looked it, for on closer inspection, the siding was grimy and loose in spots, the porch sagged, and shingles peeled back from the roof like flecks of dead skin. “Is...nice,” she said, even though it really wasn’t.
>”It’s even nicer inside,” he said. She glanced at him; his face was red, his teeth chattered, and he trembled slightly. From that, you would think it was cold out here.
>She favored the house with one more anxious look and steeled her resolve. She would have to go in there sometime.
>”Okay,” she said and nodded, “to go...in the side.”
>Dad flashed a quick, wan smile and then turned and started up the walkway. Laikia looked up at the house one final time, steeled her resolve, then followed. The porch steps creaked under her boots, and a windchime tinkled in the breeze. A swing hung suspended by chains at the far end, and a mess of patio furniture and children’s toys littered the floor. Dad slung her bag over his shoulder, fished a set of keys from his pocket, and methodically flipped through them in search of the correct one. Laika shoved her hands into her pockets and stared down at her feet. Her nerves increased with each passing second, and when he finally got the door open, her stomach twisted like a limp dishrag and she felt as though she were going to be sick.
>Light spilled out and fell over her like the glow of revelation, and she took a deep breath, annoyed with herself for being so cowardly. A Russian woman meets every challenge with strength and determination, she told herself, and that is what she must do now. Whatever these people were or were not, whatever they were like, they were her family and that link, though tenuous, had to count for something.
>If only there weren’t so many of them. And if only she did not have to adopt their life.
>And if only walking through the door weren’t so permanent.
>Dad crossed the threshold, and after a brief hesitation, Laika followed.