The Amway woman

Everyone in Moskva knew an Amway woman, or at least they knew someone who knew an Amway woman. Or a Mary Kay woman. In the fall, my host mother was a Mary Kay woman. Her name was Elena Mikhailovna. In letters home, I called her Lady Elaine, because her nose and eyes recalled the puppet from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood (where I learned English). Later I reduced this to Lady M. She was a geologist by training, and claimed that the bard Gorodnitsky, who is indeed a geologist, worked at her institute, but she wouldn’t divulge any other details. She never seemed to go to any institute. She would dash off at odd hours, having made appointments by telephone to meet in the middle of the platform at such and such a train station. Later I made the connection between these rendezvous and the enormous satchel that slumped in the hallway: it was filled with every shade of rose and violet and crimson and berry. Sometimes when I came home an unfamiliar woman would be sitting on a stool in that hallway, her arm covered with dozens of variants of lipstick stripes, so that she looked a blushing tiger.

Lady M. could not speak except with the intonation of a saleswoman. Even when she fed me I felt as if she were trying to sell me the poor bowl of oatmeal mush, the tea in a cup swarmed with painted bees, sweetened with honey I had bought myself at a honey fair, at which beekeepers from all over the former Soviet Union had strung up stalls from which to sell their sap. In the beginning of my stay at her house, I had the habit of jogging around the nearby monastery in my Stuyvesant gym shorts; those ambitious mornings ceased the day I ran into a bee and got stung. I was unhappy with Lady M., for her son and daughter shunned me entirely. They lived holed up in their rooms, whose doors were always closed and which they always entered from the corridor. I decided that the rooms were actually connected, and that collectively they contained a garden, where the family feasted (because they never ate with me).

I finally moved out in mid-November and strangely enough it felt as if I were running away from home. Middlebury put me up in the dorm for foreigners for the rest of the semester. The building stood in the courtyard behind the main university building, so suddenly I did not have to commute; suddenly I had still more time. My room was meant for two, but I had no roommate, so I lived for two, writing letters sometimes from one desk and sometimes from the other. I was already used to sleights of character: in Internet cafes my rapid typing drew the attention and awe of the surrounding patrons, so that in my mind I began to bill myself as Rachmaninov. Others, in turn, dubbed me Julia Timoshenko, on account of the braid I sometimes wrapped around my head. More often, though, my resemblance to Katya Pushkareva was pointed out to me by complete strangers in the metro and even by children at the ice-skating rink. Katya Pushkareva was the lead character in a television serial called “Не родись красивой;” this show was very popular in Moscow that spring. Its plot was a caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation: Katya begins as a shy bookish girl with braces and braids, and blooms into a successful business woman with lacquered hair. I took to watching the show with my host-sister, Olia, just to see what I was up against; I remember being disappointed when Pushkareva cut her hair. It was very telling that the next morning this haircut was the talk of the town.