What Happened to Anna K.: A Novel

SAUSAGE IMMIGRANTS

Anna K. was not the only pale woman in a black shearling to glide along 108th Street in Rego Park, but she was the most striking. A Tajik shopkeeper, about to weigh a bag of unripe persimmons, paused in order to follow the course of Anna's backside as it made its way down the block.
What set her apart from the others, at least in her own mind? Her curls, for one -- black, lustrous, caressing the bottom of her neck. Her green eyes, the color of leaves in midsummer. Her walk, perhaps, delicate, thought-through, her toes jutting slightly outward. The more observant man might notice the litheness of her torso, her proactive breasts, substantial hips, regal posture, a sharp, even precarious, gleam in her eye.
She walked by the Russian groceries, where women abused store proprietors over the price of sausages. Anna passed stores she had not entered in years. There was European Fashions for Less, and across the street, International Couture and Parisian Chic, with their mirrored walls, their fur-swaddled mannequins, their sequined gowns with padded shoulders. Their saleswomen, who swore that only the most fashionable women of Moscow, Paris, London were stepping out in this leopard-print pantsuit, that fur-collared ballerina dress. Whose skin was overmaquillaged, traces of foundation streaking their cheeks, their plump middles betraying an overindulgence in Stalin sausages. One of them, sporting a severe blond bun and a black apron, chain-smoked outside the front door, watching Anna as she walked past.
By the time Anna left Queens, she grew to detest those stores. But her dear mother would never renounce them no matter how many Longchamp bags Anna bought her. Her mother thought paying retail was for the very rich or the very foolish. Give her a good, crowded Daffy's, squinting women ransacking blemished Italian cashmere, or a T.J. Maxx, with its hope of a decent Ralph Lauren handbag lying unmolested among the tangle of braided straps. According to New York magazine and the new wealthy daughters of oligarchs, Anna and her mother were considered "sausage immigrants."
There they were, her parents, just nine blocks away from 108th Street on Sixty-third Road (though in Queens, one must also take into consideration Sixty-third Avenue and Sixty-third Street and Sixty-third Drive, as if the effort of naming were quickly abandoned here), on the fourth floor of an eighteen-story building. Attached to their building was a desolate playground where Anna had played as a child, hoping a sympathetic soul would materialize to form the other half of a seesaw configuration. Later, in her teens, Anna could be found reading on the swings until her mother yelled out the window that it was time for dinner.
In the elevator, just press the number five, walk one flight down (the elevator stopped only on odd-numbered floors), turn left, knock on the lemon-colored door, and voil�, you've reached the Roitmans'!
Her mother had already started planning the wedding; as Anna walked in, she was sprawled in her house robe on the living room rug, the names of family and friends scattered around her on little pieces of paper. "Table twelve," she muttered, dooming several slips of paper to this particular fate.
Anna K. required no pleasantries at the door, no kisses, no interruption of routine. She had her own set of slippers in the hall closet; they were pink chenille, worn down at the heel. She slipped off the shearling, releasing the scent of lavender, the fresh smell of outdoors mingled with Penn Station sweat. She had just seen off her fianc�, Alex K., on a business trip to Philadelphia.
"Hello, Mamochka," she said, giving her mother, then her father, a kiss. Papochka sat in his boxers on the living room couch, buried inside a Novoye Russkoye Slovo. His fingers were black with newsprint; he thumbed through the paper in his white, stretched-out tank top, his rolled-up socks.
"Can you believe what's going on in the world?" he said without looking up. "Did you know that we have another Stalin and he has practically the same name?" When not spearheading the demise of yet another unprofitable business venture, Papochka's most sustained interactions were between himself and the paper, lovingly folded and chronologically filed away, only to be thrown out by Mrs. Roitman when he wasn't looking.
"Nu i shto, Papa, we know, we know."
The wedding would be at Faberg�, the classiest Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach. The restaurant boasted that its dancers were all former Bolshoi Ballet corps ballerinas, although Anna believed they were shipped directly from Uzbek strip clubs. Only the best vodka for Anyechka's wedding, it was already decided, none of that Smirnoff crap, only the best wine, one that costs more than $20 a bottle. For God's sake, you can't go Loehmann's on everything.