Saturday, June 19, 1999

Junior year is finished. Every day the mail brings brochures from universities, like snow, glossy, all with the same photograph: three students of three different colors laughing on a green lawn under a tree. Misha has a list. At the top, the big technical university in Pittsburgh. Also the state university. Also one in Massachusetts which I will not name, because it is embarrassing to want something so much. And the college here, twenty minutes away, "for safety." I asked, safety from what? He said, "From not getting in anywhere." Ah.

The money. My salary is not a university salary. I have read the financial aid forms three times. They are written in a language which is neither English nor Russian. I think it is the language of the groundhog.

Yesterday Brent called me into the office. Mr. Landis was there too. They are giving me a raise, to eight dollars and fifty cents, and they would like me to be "grower" for the tomato house, which means I decide things and Brent signs them. Mr. Landis said, "We should have asked you two years ago." Brent looked at the floor. I said thank you. I said it very formally, I think. RELAX!!!!

The tomatoes are planted out. Thirty-two along Mrs. Weaver's fence and garage. Two I gave to Lupe, who says she will make salsa from them. I said this is a crime against my mother. She said my mother never had her salsa.

Sunday, May 23, 1999

The scores came. I did not understand the numbers, so Misha explained: each part is up to 800. Verbal 640, math 760. Together 1400. He says this is "good, not great," and the guidance counselor says it is "very solid," and I say it is his second language and I would like to see the guidance counselor take it in Russian. He will take it again in the fall, he says, to bring up the verbal. I have learned not to argue with a seventeen-year-old who has a plan.

Tuesday night he went at midnight with three friends to see the new Star Wars. It is a film about space wizards. He came home at three and went to school at seven, and this is the most American thing he has done, more than the driver's license.

My thirty-four tomatoes are in pots now, outside in the sun during the day to harden. Mrs. Weaver has given me the whole strip along the fence, and a second strip beside the garage. "I want to see what all the fuss is about," she says.

Saturday, May 1, 1999

May Day. In my old life this was parade day, with red flags and balloons and speeches, and after it everybody went to the dacha to plant potatoes, which was the real holiday.

In my new life I drove my son at seven in the morning to a high school in another town, with two pencils number 2, a calculator, a banana and the paper which says who he is. The SAT. He was very calm. I was not. I bought a coffee and sat in the car and read the Russian newspaper from New York, a week old, and did not understand one word, because I was reading the same sentence nine times.

Three hours and something. He came out and said, "It was fine." That is all I will get, I know. Seventeen-year-old boys are like the Soviet press agency: everything is fine, the harvest is excellent.

Then I went to the greenhouse. Mother's Day is next Sunday. The hanging baskets hang.

Thursday, April 22, 1999

Tuesday, the school in Colorado. I heard it on the radio in House 4 at two in the afternoon, and I drove to Misha's school without telling anybody and sat in the parking lot until the buses came. I did not go in. I only wanted to see him walk out. He walked out with his backpack hanging from one shoulder like always, talking to a boy, laughing. He did not see me. I drove back to work. Brent did not ask where I went. Lupe had watered my benches.

At night I told Misha. He was embarrassed and then he was not. He said, "Mam, it's okay." Then he said, "It's not okay. But I'm okay."

In October 1993 I watched on television the tanks shooting at the parliament building, and I could hear it also through our kitchen window, because we did not live so far. Misha was eleven. He slept through it. I told myself then: I will take him somewhere safe. I do not think there is such a country. I think there are only parking lots, where mothers sit.

Wednesday, March 31, 1999

Thirty-four of thirty-six came up. Ninety-four percent. I am prouder of this than of my dissertation, which had more pages and fewer results.

Easter lilies. This is the crop which makes greenhouse men lose their hair: it must bloom exactly for Easter, which is this Sunday, not one week before and not one week after, and Easter moves every year. Three weeks ago Brent came to me with the lily schedule, the leaf counts and the temperature charts from the grower's guide, and put them on my bench and said, "Can you look at this?" Just like that. Not "huh."

I looked. They were behind. I told him to raise the night temperature in House 2 by four degrees and count again in a week. We counted. He does not like to count; he wants a machine to count. I told him at the Institute we counted everything by hand for twenty years and nobody died of it except from boredom.

Today the buds are right. The lilies will open for Sunday. Brent brought me a coffee from the gas station with two sugars, which is how I take it, which I did not know he knew.

Our Easter, the Orthodox one, is April 11 this year. By then the lilies will be finished. They do not care about our calendar either.

Saturday, March 13, 1999

Forty-eight today. Misha made a cake from a box, chocolate, with frosting from a can, and wrote on it with the tube MAM 48, and the 8 fell over a little, so it looks like I am forty-something undefined. Which is how I feel.

Galya called, on her own money. From Moscow this is a lot. She sang, badly, which is our family talent. Nastya sang also, in the background.

This morning, before the cake, I sowed the seeds. My seeds, from the tomato of last August: fermented, washed, dried on the plate, and kept all winter in an envelope in the refrigerator with the word ПОМИДОРЫ on it (tomatoes) so that Misha would not eat them. Thirty-six seeds in a flat in the corner of House 4, this time with permission. I asked Brent. He said, "Sure, whatever," which from Brent now is almost warm.

In my old life I sowed ten thousand seeds a year and counted every one. These thirty-six I will count too. But not the same way.

Thursday, February 18, 1999

Misha and I are studying together. He has the SAT book; I have my English class. At the kitchen table after supper, him on one side of the small dog, me on the other.

The worst part for him is the analogies. OSTRICH is to BIRD as... and five choices. He says, "Who decides this? Who decided what an ostrich is to a bird?" I said, "Scientists. We decide everything. It is a terrible power."

I make my own list from his words. Tonight: ephemeral, lasting a very short time. Obdurate, stubborn. Magnanimous, generous in a big way. I use them at work. I told Lupe her son's excuse was ephemeral. She told me in Spanish what I could do with my vocabulary. (I am learning Spanish also, the most useful parts first.) In exchange for his words I teach Misha the Latin names of the weeds in Mrs. Weaver's lawn. He says this will not be on the test. It is on my test.

A letter from Galya. They have given back something from the bank, through another bank, in rubles, one small paper. I will not write the number. She writes: "Enough for a winter coat for Nastya. So Mama's dacha has become a coat. Well, it was always a warm place." That is Galya. She will make a joke at her own funeral and then complain that the flowers are the wrong color.

Tuesday, February 2, 1999

Groundhog Day. In Pennsylvania this is a real holiday: a large rodent in the west of the state predicts the weather, it is on the news, and grown men wear top hats. I have lived in two countries with strange ideas about who can predict the future. The groundhog at least is honest about being a rodent.

Something happened at work. The tomato house is replanted, the hydroponic one, eight thousand plants in slabs of rockwool, a beefsteak variety for the supermarkets. The new plants in the east half had yellow young leaves with the veins still green. Brent was standing there with his hands on his hips and the fertilizer salesman on his cellular telephone. I was passing with a cart. He said, not really to me, "What the heck is that?"

I said, "Iron. Not that there is no iron. The pH in the solution is too high, and they cannot take it up. Check the pH on the east line. Probably the acid injector."

He looked at me as if the groundhog had spoken. Then he checked. It was 7.2. It should be about 5.8. The injector was stuck.

He said, "Huh." Again "huh." I am collecting them.

Saturday, January 9, 1999

Happy New Year, and a new look. I have learned tables! Misha showed me once, and then I read a book from the library with a very long title and a cartoon on the cover of a man hitting his computer, and now I can make a box, and a box inside the box. Misha says the page looks like the web site of a Soviet ministry. This is the correct look for a serious page, I tell him.

Also you will see that I now write the month first and then the day. January 9. I am tired of being confused: for Americans 3/4 is March the fourth, for me it was always the third of April. So I surrender. Like the ruble.

Thursday was our Christmas, the Orthodox one. Misha and I went to the service, and I lit a candle for Mama, and one for Papa, and, after I thought about it, one for Galya's bank.

Misha has his driver's license. He passed the first time. The examiner was a woman who said nothing for twenty minutes and then said, "Nice job," and my son, who is six feet tall, came out of that building with the face of a five-year-old at a New Year's tree.

He also has a book for the SAT, the big test for the universities. It weighs as much as a small dog. He will take the test in May. The book lives on the kitchen table now. We eat around it.