Part 100
Joanna took her children to the park on her day off. There were a few other parents and children there. Her son Ian came up to her, wanting her to tie his shoe. When she looked up, she saw AJ Quartermaine and a small boy on the grass in front of her.
"I run into you again," AJ said. "Is that your son?"
"Yes, this is Ian. That's Michael, isn't it?"
"Yes. They look near the same age."
"Ian is three."
"That's how old Michael is. Don't you have another one?"
"Heather. She's five. She's on the swing." Joanna pointed to the swing set.
"Do you like the swing as much as Michael does, Ian?" AJ asked.
"I'm sure the answer to that is yes," Joanna said with a grin.
Both boys and their parents went over to the swing. The parents pushed their respective sons.
"Carly is working on our costumes for the Nurse's Ball," Joanna volunteered.
"I know. She's really into the sewing. She sends clothes for Michael through her mother Nurse Spencer. So far I've turned them all down."
"But that's nice. It's something she can do for him."
"I don't know," he said. "Sometimes I think I shouldn't let her have any effect on him."
"I thought you were thinking of letting them even see each other," Joanna said.
"I don't know, when it comes to it, if I can," AJ said. "I find doing and talking are two different things. It is much easier to say you will do a thing than to do it."
"Well, whatever you think best," she answered. "Though the clothes sound to me like a good way for her to do something for him."
"You think so?" he asked.
"Yes, I really do."
"I guess it would be all right for now," he said. "He doesn't know where his clothes come from. But if she keeps it up, as he gets older, I'll have to explain it."
"You'll have to anyway."
"You have a point there. I ought to keep it as positive for him as possible. The thing is, I never know where it's going to turn bad."
"You can only do your best," Joanna said.
Quinn leaned back in the seat, and admired all of the car's interior gadgets. "You really are a spoiled rich kid, you know that?"
"I'd rather be working class and Irish."
"Oh no. Then you would not be you. I could not have that."
"At the baseball game, your Mom got Oksana talking about how she met Sergei. It fascinated me. I can't ask them questions like that. It gets into a fight, somehow, or, at least a struggle. But someone in your Mom's position, just asking like a friend, worked. She got something out of Oksana that I never heard before."
"That's good. How did it come up?"
"Somehow we got onto how Danny and Kathleen met, so Kathleen asked Oksana how she and Sergei met. She was a figure skater, he was a coach. I knew that. But not that she was seventeen then. The first thing he did was tell her coach she slid too much in her spins. With talking about Danny and Kathleen, we had been on the subject of love at first sight. Sergei said maybe it was, and Oksana said he was making that up, because, according to her, he only talked to her about skating for a long time."
"They don't even agree on their first year!"
Zander laughed. "Yeah, gee, are we surprised?"
"But since you were eleven, has there been anybody else involved with either of them?"
"No. Not that I know of."
"That is a long time. And you'd know if they had been important."
"Yes."
"I wonder. Do you ever think they would -"
"They wouldn't dare! After all that they've done, if they got back together I would kill them both."
"I wouldn't blame you," Quinn smiled.
"I'll settle for a civil divorce."
"It almost seems like if they could manage that, they could manage to be married," Quinn said. "But you must remember some good time. How far back can you remember? Like when you were eight, did they still get along?"
"I think they did, but they didn't seem to be together that much. We had so little time as a family. If we went anywhere as a family, they got along well. But it was rare."
"I sometimes think you would have been madder at Sergei, because of the way he kidnapped you, but you seemed usually to be madder at Oksana. But now I think I get it."
"What is your theory, shrink?"
"It sounds to me, and correct me if I overstate it, that when they were still married they both traveled a lot, were rarely together, and you rarely saw them. So the divorce may not have made a big difference. With Oksana it was the same, with Sergei you saw him even less. But when he took you to Russia, he spent the time with you. I remember how something about the life there got him to stay in one place, go to your games, and all that. So the only time you have a consistent parent is then."
"I read in the books you and Alexis gave me that in that kind of case, I could be feeling rejected by Oksana. Even though legally she was in the right, and it wasn't her fault, being a kid you don't understand why they don't come and find you. And he - Dad - had the advantage that he was paying more attention to us than he had before. And there was something also about how you see your parent in their original culture, and you like seeing that."
"Yeah. You needed to see that culture. You really come from it, more so than I would come from the Irish, say."
He smiled. "You come from the Irish-American culture."
"Which is around me. But your parents' wasn't all around you, until you got there."
"Even then it was different. The way they grew up is gone."
"Like your ancestors on one side are gone. It is so sad. On the other hand, if you want to see any bright side of it, you get to start over completely."
"I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know much about all that era, you know, when I was there, they were naturally into everything but that. They were looking out at the world for the first time."
"But that right there at least is a reflection of what went before. They were prohibited from looking out."
"And from looking at their own past. They were totally interested in anything before 1917. They loved to change the names of things back. The communists changed names of cities and streets. Sometime we would have a difference with Dad about the name of a street. He would say the old name and we the new. Except actually the name we knew was the older one, and his was the interim newer one. And their signs were never up to date, except in the main parts of downtown. So we would know both names. Everyone referred to the street by the new/old name, but we knew what the sign for that street said, which was something else, being that the sign was still in the communist name!"
Quinn laughed. "How looney," she said.
"Yes! Pete and I thought it was funny. Once Dad wanted to meet us in front of the main gate to the Kremlin on Red Square. In Russian the new name and the communist name sound similar. The communist name was the Spasskaya gate, to us it was the Spasseetiya gate. It was a riot. He kept insisting, we kept insisting, thinking we were talking about different places, until it finally dawned on us."
"Was every name changed?"
"Oh, no, the communists only changed it if it referred to something religious or something imperial. Like the city Oksana comes from, Yekaterinburg, that refers to the Empress Catherine, so in that meanwhile it was named after some communist hero."
"What was the gate you were confused about?"
"I don't know. The new/old name means Savior's gate. That must be religious."
"Yep, it is. Ask you Catholic little brother and he can probably explain it by now."
"OK. Now I'm curious."
Quinn finally agreed to drive when they stopped just east of Cleveland.
She admired everything; the steering, the brakes, the accelerator, the transmission. Zander smiled. "What do you think of the windshield wipers?" he asked, mischievously.
"I don't think it dares rain where this car is, but I'm sure the windshield wipers clear the glass better than normal. Everything is so over the top in this car!"
They were silent for awhile. Zander let her hear the engine hum. He sat back in the passenger seat, feeling the ride.
Eventually, Quinn said, "I remember something when I read that Family Breakdown book, too."
"You read it? That's sweet of you."
"I think you are affected by it. So I want to know what I can. But I've run across the idea more than once that the child always deep down wants the parents to get back together. Even though he knows it isn't practical, or knows it would not even be good, and even when he is middle-aged. Does that make sense to you?"
"I think so. In my head that is the last thing the world needs. But I do have that part that thinks it would make me happy. I suppose it wouldn't make them happy, though. So they have to do what they have to do, they can't put on a show for me that goes that far. I'm happy for the show I'm getting."
"They were both at the baseball game."
"They sat on either side of me."
"It's a big responsibility for you," Quinn said. "But it's really not your responsibility. To keep them from fighting, that is."
"I can't help it, it is like an automatic thing," he said, sighing.
"They might sit next to each other if they had to," Quinn said. "There it was natural to want to sit next to you, and fortunately, you have two sides."
Zander smiled, and reached over and patted Quinn's head. "One side is reserved for you, so it's a good thing you weren't there. But seriously, they went how far before they came to an area of disagreement? It was about the past, but one feels as if one can go no further. Maybe I don't need to know so much, but I can't help be curious. Family Breakdown and the other stuff got me worried about myself. That if I don't figure out what they did wrong, I'll do the same thing without trying."
"You have time. And they will get more and more civil. Especially after Pete turns 18, what could they have left? And the longer and longer away it gets from their divorce and their big conflicts."
"They both seem to be here more than they were even in Florida, lately, at least. You know what I'm afraid of now? That they'll compete in some business deals."
"Have they done that before?"
"I don't think so."
"Did they work together?"
"I don't think they did that, either."
"Maybe they should try it! If they can get along that way, they can make a foundation to get along at your graduations and weddings and their grandchildren's birthday parties!"
"You know, they must have worked together OK as skater and coach."
"And they worked together to defect to the West."
"I wonder."
"Do you feel comfortable asking either one about that?"
"Dad, maybe. I might not get much of an answer, but I don't think he would get testy with me."
"I feel bad sometimes, for you. Mom and Dad have their memories, and those are the family memories. You have to struggle to even get them to tell you those. We sit around and watch their wedding slides sometimes, or hear stories about the wedding. You have parents who don't want to think about their wedding."
"And it wasn't much of one," Zander said. "Danny and Kathleen's – their parents were there, all their brothers and sisters, their uncles and cousins and aunts and second cousin twice removed."
"And their friends they grew up with," Quinn added. "Yours didn't even get that. You can also see them as really strong people, living with all that. Really brave. They did a lot considering their situation."
"They made a lot of mistakes, too. Heavy ones. Danny and Kathleen didn't take those type of risks, and if you aren't rich, so what? You're rich enough. And the downside never was risked. You were always together."
"I know, but you can't judge them as equal, because they weren't born in the Soviet Union and didn't have to deal with making the choice to defect and living in a kind of nice exile. Who knows what your parents would have done had they been born in America to American families and never had to deal with all that."
"I guess. It is still possible that they didn't have to travel a lot, though. Why not stick with one store – one sporting goods store? That was when she admitted they were happy, too."
"They could have felt insecure. Capitalism, you could lose it all, something like that. Do you ever wonder – what if they had stayed? Raised you and Peter there in the Soviet Union? It would have fallen when you were a little kid and you'd have been in Russia that whole time."
"They might have gotten divorced anyway. Well no, they wouldn't have that insecurity about making it in the capitalist world. There was a lot of insecurity when the Soviet Union fell. Then it was the same for everybody."
"Even if they got divorced, they couldn't have hidden from each other like that."
"Yeah, and they might not have become so competitive with everything. She'd probably have become a skating coach too. Pete and I would have been skaters."
"Well, it sounds like it could have worked out better, except for one thing. I wouldn't have met you. So all the suffering you got, I wouldn't have you miss it. Selfish, but that's the way it is."
Zander smiled. "It was nothing, when you put it like that. I would have them do it all again, exactly as they did it! Exactly, because even if they had gotten along OK as a divorced couple in Florida, then I would still be down in Florida now. Congratulations, Quinn. You finally got me to where I have to thank those two for their every act!"
