They sat, bemasked, in a tiny backyard, she and Nat on one side, her parents on the other, two delightful gnomes talking at their granddaughter and engaging in the act of anxious mindless chatter （boltovnya, as it’s called in Russian） at the rapid clip that Nat preferred. They loved her so much, even though she looked nothing like them, these descendants of a tiny sweaty tribe that had seen its share of tsoris, Dzhordzh and otherwise, and now, for academic reasons （her mother still taught introductory math at a large Catholic college） found themselves on the cusp of a historic American city, all eyes on a Harbin girl in a tunic as green as the cluster of elms that shaded their little garden of which they were so proprietarily proud. （“Nu, ne chorosho zhe li u nas, pryamo kak v derevne”—“Well, isn’t it great here, just like in the country?”）
“Your mother helps people like Grandpa Boris and Baba Galya feel less angry,” Senderovsky would explain Masha’s psychiatric job to Nat, referring to his own parents. But was she helping them, the Laras of her world, to help Senderovsky himself? Maybe that was the truth instead of the lie she had told herself—that she wanted to ease someone’s sorrow in Inna’s language. And now her parents, small and gray but still vital and funny, warbled before her and her daughter and she could hear in the nonaggression of their language just how minimally humiliated they had been by the immigrant experience. What a stroke of luck that had been for her. Luck she could own, instead of passing on the pain of others to her daughter. And now that her husband was out of work, how could she not return to private practice? Yes, sell the bungalow colony, retreat to the city, rent an office in a leafy part of town, and help wealthy white native-born Americans talk through their atomized lives and commune with their share of historical blame. Imagine counseling people who actually wanted the world made better instead of ethnically cleansed.
They lit the twenty-six-hour Yahrzeit candle （So many candles in my life, she thought） in the backyard, even though the anniversary of Inna’s death was still a month away, but they were together now, and perhaps it wasn’t a bad omen to have the ceremony early. The Levins argued over who should light the candle, and Masha said, “But the mother should, of course,” and that predictably made her pretty mother cry （how Masha wanted to hug her, how she wished the virus would disappear so that mothers who lost their daughters could be properly comforted）， which made Nat nervous, and so Masha pressed her close as the wick caught flame and the pale yellow light emerged among them like a clean new soul. “My God, Inna would have loved Nat,” her mother said in Russian as she blew out one of the Wegmans matches. “I understood that!” Nat shouted, and Masha, being Masha, instead of celebrating her trilingual daughter had to think of the question Nat had posed to her during the long ride over: “Do you think I could be Korean? Maybe you adopted me from a Korean orphanage.”
And she had answered, eyes on the road, heart in her hands, and in contravention of her training and deep reservoir of Petrograd common sense, “I think that’s what happened, honey. I think that’s where you’re from.”
* * *
—
They were getting ready for dinner. Ed had on his first pair of Bermuda shorts ever, a gift from his girlfriend. He had fermented his own Napa cabbage and was serving a BTS-themed dinner for Nat, which consisted of J-Hope’s beloved kimchi fried rice and haembeogeo.
And now we must talk about what Vinod and Senderovsky were wearing above the waist. They were wearing nothing. Both were now so comfortable among their friends that they chose to dine in the evening heat wearing only a pair of shorts for the landowner and a checkered lungi for his friend. Nat looked back and forth between her new uncle’s sarong-like garment and the muscular surgery-scarred body above it （she had just watched breaststroking Vinod surface like a sea monster with a loud gurgle as he raced across the pool） and her father’s heavy, womanlike bosom. Well, thought Masha, this is who we are. Without the Laras in the back of her mind, the sight of two near-naked friends whose sense of masculinity would disturb roughly half of the country relaxed her. Masha rolled back the sleeves of her own blouse to reveal the new bronze of her shoulders, felt the subtle wind graze beneath her arms. So much pleasure still to be had in this world. Karen, too, sat in her clingy swimsuit, a one-piece that made her look, in Vinod’s eyes, unbearably young, as if they were about to grab their landlines, punch in those sonorous numbers, and spend the next half an hour discussing a live episode of The Simpsons while downstairs their parents raged against the machine and each other.