“I have three uncles in that organization,” Dee said.
“The Patriotic Defense League?” Masha asked. “How scary!”
“No, the US Marines.”
“Oh,” Masha said.
“You go, girl,” drunk Ed said to Dee. “You tell ’em! Down with the ruling elites!”
“Just so you know,” Karen said, “Ed is the scion of a chaebol family.”
“Chaebol light,” Ed said. “And I’m the black sheep of the family. They got me on a tight leash these days.”
“When using a foreign word it might be cool to explain what it is, or some of us might look stupid,” Dee said.
“That’s right,” the Actor said. He looked at Dee in a blaze of heterosexuality.
The definition of “chaebol” was patiently explained to Dee by the two Koreans. “But my family doesn’t own Samsung or anything,” Ed cautioned. He was drunk now; his hand off his ear. A part of him did want Dee to understand that he had means at his disposal. Enough for a decent life, enough for Chania.
Masha was still thinking of the fascist sticker on the platform of the train station, and her unlit Sabbath candles （it was Friday）， and her Asian daughter. “What does slegs blankes mean?” she asked.
“？‘Whites only.’？” Ed said. “It’s Afrikaans.”
“Great,” Masha said. “Just great.”
“More wine, Proffy!” Dee demanded.
“I’m going to cut you off,” Senderovsky said, though he gave her a full pour, while looking at the Actor corner-eyed. He had noticed the way the Actor was staring at Dee and wanted to see where this was going.
Dee bolted down the thick fruity vintage. Ed was quietly selling her his vision of what constituted a memorable journey to Crete, but she seemed to have something else on her mind. She turned to Senderovsky. “You know, instead of building all these cottages or whatever you call them and inviting your friends up, you could just get to know some of the locals instead. I mean they’re people, too, right? Ex-Marines and all.”
“Right,” Ed and the Actor said.
“Well, aren’t you a firecracker,” Masha said.
“Sasha doesn’t really know how to make new friends,” Karen said. She gestured at the convivial gathering. “This is all a ruse.”
“You should make an app for him,” Dee said. “Help a brotha out.”
“Daaamn,” Ed said.
“She was always like this in class,” Senderovsky said, “especially after a couple of drinks.”
“I hung out with some actual Nazis when we were researching München am Hudson,” the Actor said.
“That movie was chilling,” Masha said.
“？‘I think they got cum in ’em,’？” Dee rapped into her wineglass, “？‘？’cause they nuthin’ but dicks.’？”
Senderovsky and his friends immediately recognized the rap song Dee was appropriating and smiled nostalgically. It had been a staple at the parties Senderovsky and Vinod used to throw in their tight but chaste studio after they graduated from a city college. The Actor had first heard it in high school. Dee must have been, what, seven when it was released? The Actor considered that fact. Her behavior, who she was, came at him like the tides. She was standing up against her former teacher, against the boredom of his kind, the timidity and lack of adventurousness. （Exactly the problems with his endless volleys of revised scripts.） Look at me! the Actor yelled in his mind, so loudly the surrounding sounds disappeared, the rustle of naked tree branches, the yip of coyotes catching wind of the awakened fear-pheromone-generating neighborhood sheep. Why won’t you look at me? If you query, I will answer. If you inquire, I will enlighten. If you want the stroke of my fingers, the pinch of my stubble, the torque of my tongue, I will provide. But first you must look at me the way I am looking at you!
Masha had put her hands over Nat’s ears. “Okay,” she said, “I think it’s time someone went to bed.”
“I’m sorry, Nat,” Dee said. “I shouldn’t have used bad language. ‘Dicks’ is a bad word.”
And she knows when to be contrite, the Actor thought. She’s in control even when she’s hammered.
“That’s okay,” Senderovsky said. “She’ll have to learn about male anatomy sometime, why not tonight? But off to bed you go, sladkaya.” Sweet one.
The strength of the howl was unexpected. “No!” Nat yelled, quieting even the coyotes casing the sheep farm’s perimeter. “I don’t want to go to sleep!” She was running around the porch, getting dangerously close to others. The world was a whirlwind of nice things and unfair things; her head wanted to butt into Mommy’s tummy, to ruffle through the beginnings of Daddy’s new beard, to pass lightly along Karen’s thin-wale corduroys, which she imagined as soft as blah blah blah Llama Llama Red Pajama, and why was she too old to read that book anymore? And what happened to their little apartment in the city, and what happened to Dennis the Doorman and the rumpled back of his suit, and what happened to her overlit classroom and the worlds her classmates constructed among themselves, worlds to which she wasn’t invited but observed and cataloged from the Elba of her Quiet Mat, and what happened, what happened, what happened? Senderovsky watched his child running, howling, out of control. He did not know her thoughts, but he was registering attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the borderlands of autism, loss of executive function, pragmatic speech deficits—all the therapists and specialized schools wanted a piece of her, all of them had a novel idea about what was wrong, but the only diagnosis that ever stuck was his and Masha’s Ashkenazi one, generalized anxiety disorder. On an impossible order of magnitude. The one dream he had for his child: that she would not suffer an immigrant’s humiliations. But even though she did not share in their incestuous gene pool, he could not deliver her from that particular pain.