REVISED / RE-EDITED 11/02/2022
CHAPTER 2
Dinner just made it to the table when the front door opened. No one in the kitchen moved to check and see who it was. The heavy steps in the hall after the sound of the door closing could only belong to one person - Dimitri. His Mama was there cooking tonight, so he was there eating tonight.
"Hello to the house!" His greeting boomed down the hallway.
Mickey laughed as he took a seat at the table and cracked open a beer. Olena probably told Dimitri she was coming over today, but it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility that he had a sixth sense which informed him his mother was standing in front of a stove somewhere in the world and all he had to do was follow his nose to get there. "Hey! Perfect timing, man. She just pulled the clay pot out of the oven. Smells like lamb tonight." Dimitri stood in the archway between the hall and the kitchen with his tool belt slung over his shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. His head just barely cleared the low spot in the ceiling. "Oh, please tell me you left your shoes out front? Ma has a wild hair up her ass lately about the carpets."
"I'm sorry, what is it yuh mother has up her where about the carpets lately?!" Loretta's question was punctuated with a firm slap to the back of Mickey's head. "Hi, Dimitri."
"Ow! Jesus, Ma too hard!" He flinched and turned his head, patting the spot to make sure his hair was okay.
Dimitri shook his head slowly, laughing at his best friend's error in judgment and his mother's swift retaliation. The poorly worded warning was unnecessary. Of course, he remembered to take off his shoes before entering someone else's house. His Mama had him housebroken from birth - wipe your feet, take your shoes off, bring a hostess gift, offer to set and clear the table, take out the trash if it looks full, yes mam, and no mam. He was always on his best behavior even at Loretta's, his second home.
"Oh, yeah, you're abused." Loretta sat in the chair next to her son and placed an unopened beer by the plate across from her indicating for Dimitri to sit down already. Then she was right back at it. "That skull yuh got there is so thick, yuh didn't feel a thing. You're just mad I touched your hair. Don't touch my hair! Don't breathe near my hair! Don't even look at my hair!"
"She's got your number, man," Dimitri snickered. He cracked his neck to the side and groaned. "Let me just put this thing down first. It weighs a ton." He pointed to the massive toolbelt before taking a few steps back down the hall to lay it on the bench where he'd stashed a surprise for the lady of the house.
"Oh please, you're one to talk about hair, Joe Namath," Mickey yelled after him. "You spend more time on your hair than I do on mine, and you know it! I'm taking this one up with Rose. We'll see what she has to say about this." Dimitri was back before Mickey was done complaining to the empty space where he'd previously been standing. Before finally taking a seat in his designated spot at the table he produced a bottle from behind his back and handed it to Loretta with a wink. "I stopped by Antonio's on the way here, and picked this up for you."
Mickey stifled a groan. His mother was already drunk enough for how early it still was in the evening.
"Fernet-Branca! Awww, Dimka, you've always been my favorite son." Loretta set down the bottle and got up to fetch her cordial glasses from the hutch in the formal dining room. She called Dimitri 'Dimka' on occasion - the traditional Russian nickname for Dimitri which his family all used when addressing him in private. Originally, it began as a joke on her part to embarrass him in front of girls, but now she did it out of endearment. Loretta had a free pass from the world to call anyone whatever she wanted without it sounding insolent or presumptuous.
Unless she meant it to, that is.
"Hey! Thanks a lot, Ma." Mickey called after her. "First you hit me, then you replace me."
"Both our boys are here now!" Olena walked up to the table and lowered her large burnished red clay pot onto a metal holder in the middle of all the other dishes. "Careful, it's very hot," she cautioned everyone before removing her oven mitts and leaning down to kiss the air near Mickey's head. Making a point of avoiding his hair, she patted his shoulder and whispered loudly, "Since Dimka has moved into his own place now, his room is open at the house. You can always move in with us." Then she made her way around the table to hug her son. With his height of 6'7", it was easier for her to really get a proper crushing squeeze on him when he was sitting and she was standing.
"I've missed you, my boy. You look skinny." She spoke to him lovingly in Russian and kissed his forehead before finally letting him go. Her seat was always right next to his, anyway; she could smother him from there.
Olena knew Dimitri was coming for dinner tonight, so she maybe went a little overboard on cooking for just four people. The small kitchen table in front of them was covered with carrot salad, salted cucumbers, potato vareniki, stewed lamb, and two fresh loaves of black bread. She was planning on preparing more dishes, not including the dessert that was already waiting in the refrigerator, but Loretta stopped her before she could get too carried away.
She just couldn't help herself.
Dimitri had recently purchased a small house of his own - three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an unfinished basement, a single-car garage, and a modest yard surrounding the lot. It was only a few blocks away from her home, therefore it was only a few blocks away from Loretta's, but Olena missed seeing her son at the breakfast and dinner table every day. He was the last to leave the nest, and the house felt empty with only herself and Yeva there. Her two eldest daughters, Karolina and Sonya, were married with children of their own, and her youngest, Victoria, was away at college in Pennsylvania.
"I've missed you too, Mama," Dimitri assured her in their shared language, before switching back to English when Loretta returned with two small crystal stemmed cups hanging from each hand. The Tanners had picked up a little Russian over the years, they also didn't begrudge them the small privacies speaking it allowed the Belikovs from time to time, but he didn't want to exclude them at their own table. "I saw you two days ago. That's not enough time to lose weight. And don't threaten Mickey with living in the same house as Babushka. He wouldn't last a week."
They all laughed at that.
With everyone finally seated and in possession of their drinks of choice - red wine for the women, beers for the boys, and water all around - Olena instructed everyone to bow their heads for a quick grace. She was inarguably the most religious of the group, and always managed an appropriate blessing that didn't make the occasionally practicing, semi-believers at the table feel uncomfortable. Or as Loretta once put it, "nothing that's too goddamn churchy all the time."
The respectful quiet of grace was followed immediately by a chorus of serving spoons scraping, plates exchanging hands, napkins unfolding and being placed in laps, and several 'please pass me the's as well as a few 'here you are's. The business of dinner was at hand and these four didn't just dabble in food. They had all gone pro some years back.
"Is that why yuh wouldn't take yuh Auntie's $20 earlier, Mikhail Christopher? Yuh don't want to piss off the old lady by telling her to fuck herself right before yuh move into her house?" Loretta inquired after swallowing a large bite of lamb meat. Dimitri, having not been present for the shouted hallway conversation, didn't just chuckle at the question like his mother was currently doing, he choked while laughing and had to take a drink of water to clear the potato dumpling out of his air passage.
"She paid you to do what!?" He gasped.
Mickey looked up from his plate. "You don't wanna know. Trust me." That was the best bud code for 'I'll tell you about it later.'
Another comfortable, chewing-filled silence passed. It was just long enough and pleasant enough to knock the boys off their guard.
They were in Loretta's house, now.
"So Dimitri, Olena tells me yuh were maybe going to possibly be having a conversation this week with a certain young lady we all know about her feelings on the prospect of maybe-sorta-kinda living in sin with yuh at that new place uh yours. It's been all smiles since yuh walked in…do yuh have anything we should maybe, I don't know, hear about from yuh instead of hearing about it from one of the neighbors or from a guy at the union hall?"
"Ma! Let the man eat."
"He can talk and eat, Mikhail Christopher, we don't mind." She insisted.
"You mind when I do it," Mickey grumbled.
"That's because yuh do it wrong."
Olena sipped her wine and stayed quiet. She knew her boy well enough to know he didn't have any life-changing news to share, but she was curious nonetheless. A little pressure from an outside source would help move things along in this situation. She wasn't the pushy type, but Loretta was. She would gladly do the dirty work here.
Dimitri set down his fork and deliberately chugged half his beer before answering Loretta's predictably presumptuous question. "Rose had a final today at Nursing School. I didn't think it was a good idea to distract her from her studies, even if I do hope she will see it as something positive."
They were smooth words to cover for his frazzled nerves.
Dimitri Belikov had been in love with Rosemarie Hathaway, his Roza, from the second he first laid eyes on her three years ago. That day was etched into his memory forever in razor-sharp detail.
It was a Tuesday in mid-July, and by 8:00 am it was already sweltering hot. He'd taken the bus to work that morning because his mother needed his truck to pick up a new dining set she purchased for his sister Sonya's wedding gift. It was a very Sonya thing to do - select furniture from the only store in Newark that didn't offer a delivery service, but soon she would be someone else's pain in the ass. He saved his breath. In a house of women, a man had to pick his battles.
He'd completely zoned out just staring through the grime-edged window to his right, blindly retaining no information about what he saw. Each intersection they passed looked just like the one before it. When they came to a stop at W. Market street he snapped out of his daze, panicking slightly that he missed his exit out of carelessness. Leaning to his left and straining his neck a bit in an effort to see through the front windshield of the bus to regain his bearings, he was struck absolutely dumb by the sight of the most beautiful woman to ever walk the earth, let alone to set foot on that bus.
She was a good ten or twelve inches shorter than himself, with long, toned legs and a slim waist. That handspan waist was accentuated by the ample braless bosom and round hips it rested between. Her skin was a creamy shade of tanned light golden brown sugar, and her navel-length tumble of hair was thick pure dark chocolate. All of that combined with big beautiful hazelnut-colored eyes had him fucking starved in spite of the huge breakfast his Mama cooked him that morning out of guilt for making him take the bus.
Suddenly he thought that swampy bus was the best dang thing to ever happen to him, and he likewise took back every curse he'd directed at the sticky hot weather because the bronze goddess he couldn't tear his eyes away from had clearly dressed accordingly - indigo denim short shorts, a saffron red halter top, huarache sandals, a straw bag with leather straps, and a very large pair of silver hoop earrings. He noticed her collarbones and the bridge of her nose were misted with sweat. She gleamed. This woman was effortlessly cool, absolutely gorgeous, and hotter than two bowls of soup.
Dimitri wasn't the only man staring at her on that bus. The moment he realized he was one of about half a dozen others, he forced his eyes back toward the window and vowed not to look her way again for at least two more stops. One man, in particular, was very indiscreet about his blatant interest. Seated directly across the center aisle from the young woman, he would not stop staring unabashedly at her breasts. City block after city block, his gaze never strayed from them, and somewhere along the way he stuck his hand in his pants pocket at an awkward angle.
As a brother of three sisters, Dimitri found the man's behavior appalling, and he'd officially seen enough to get up and say something to the filthy pervert when his outrage was shut down completely by the sound of the young woman's voice. "Excuse me!" She turned to face the man, snapping her fingers repeatedly a few inches from his face before continuing. "I'm not exactly sure what it is you think you're looking at, guy, but my eyes are up HERE, and the road is THAT WAY. How fucking old are you, anyway? Forty? Fifty? I'm seventeen years old. Can you hear me over your disgusting mouth breathing, guy!? SEVENTEEN! Take your nasty-ass old man eyes off my chest, and stop touching your dick! There are children on this bus, and I don't mean me!" She pointed in the direction of the front of the bus where a woman was nursing a baby under a blanket and holding onto her other child, a toddler in the seat next to her, for dear life.
Not expecting to be stood up to by the object of his lust, the creep immediately jumped up from his seat and dashed for the back exit of the bus. The girl continued to shout after him as he fled. "Oh, that's a surprise! The pervert on the bus is also a coward! You better not sit next to me tomorrow! I've seen you on here before!" Somehow the bus pervert managed to shove himself through the already-closing door, his feet just barely hitting the pavement before the bus tore away from the regularly scheduled stop. Apparently, the driver wasn't impressed by what he could see of the man's behavior in the rearview mirror, either.
The rest of Dimitri's commute continued without incident. The young woman was still beautiful, but now she was also brave and had a smart mouth. Her voice was a slightly raspy velvet alto, and her accent sounded more New York than Jersey.
Maybe he should talk to her?
Yeah, great, and then you'd be a bus pervert number two.
He got up from his seat when they finally reached his stop and made the deliberate choice of exiting through the door at the front of the bus, though it was technically against bus etiquette, so he might linger on the steps and take one last look at her.
She was looking right back at him.
By some miracle, their eyes made direct contact from the length of half a city bus - lightning in a bottle. She smiled at him and it was a lazy, lopsided grin revealing just a hint of pearly white teeth. She was beguiling and she knew it
He was a fucking goner.
…And then she was gone.
He spent the rest of the week kicking himself for not saying something to her. He could have at least asked how she was after what happened and maybe managed to get her name. But even so, the timing would have been all wrong for him to flirt given she'd just verbally eviscerated a man for behaving like a letch. There just wasn't much for it.
That is until ten days later when he made the drive over to his Electrical Workers Union Hall to pay his dues in person before they were marked late, and he stopped in the café across the street for something to hold him over until his Mama's set in stone suppertime. He seated himself in a booth as a sign posted up front instructed. After glancing briefly at the menu and making the easy decision to go with the day's special, he set it aside and pulled out the handwritten receipt a woman at the Union Hall gave him as proof of payment. It was completely illegible, like a prescription from a doctor. How would this prove to anyone he paid his $13.64 for the last quarter's dues if there were no numbers on it?
"Hey, Cowboy. I'll be your server for today."
That. Voice.
He looked up from the small slip of green paper in his hands and by some unseen - and probably undeserved - demonstration of divine intervention he was looking into the hazelnut eyes of his dream woman - the girl from the bus.
She stood facing him head-on, casually leaning against the hand she'd placed on the backrest of the seat opposite his in the booth. It was a faintly intimate posture - like she already knew him and they shared secrets. This wasn't one of those places that still forced their waitresses to wear hideous uniforms leftover from the 1950s. She was dressed simply, in a black t-shirt and tight rust-colored corduroy bell bottoms. The silver hoops were still dangling from her ears, and she had the same raffish smirk he remembered. Today, her hair was twisted up into an enormous bun on top of her head and there was a nametag pinned just above her right breast.
Rose.
Roza.
"So, Cowboy," Rose tilted her head to make sure he saw her checking out the dark brown snakeskin boots he wore as his casual footwear of choice before continuing, "do you know what you want? Or do you maybe need some more time to think about it?"
You.
"So that means yuh planning on asking her tonight, then?" Loretta asked, not wanting to give up without a concrete answer.
"Ma! Leave him alone for a minute, will you? He came here to eat his mother's food not to get ambushed and grilled by you."
"Oh, please, that boy came to this gunfight prepared." She snorted. "Just because he can fool yuh, doesn't mean he can fool either uh us." Loretta gestured back and forth between Olena and herself before lowering the tone of her voice and attempting an impression of Dimitri's faint Russian accent, "'even if I do hope she will see it as something positive.' What twenty-five-year-old man talks like that? Who talks like that? That was a rehearsed line if I ever heard one. I'm glad you're considerate about her schooling but she's on summer vacation as of tonight, or am I wrong?"
Dimitri smiled at his mother first, shooting her an unmistakable 'thanks for this' look before turning to his best friend's mother to answer. "You're not wrong. She has about two months before her next classes start up." He shoveled in a large bite of carrot salad to buy some time.
"Well, then it sounds like tonight is the night to me, ehh? That new place of yours will be nice, but right now it's a dump. Yuh need to get a woman in there to help yuh make it really look like something. A woman, and not yuh mother, otherwise yuh house will look exactly like hers."
This worked out just as Olena hoped it would. Everyone and the furniture knew Dimitri bought that house with the intention of asking Rose to move in with him. She knew he also planned to ask Rose to marry him once she finished her nursing program and was established in a position at one of the better-paying hospitals. The entire Belikov extended family network was constantly asking her if Dimitri had finally sealed the deal with his young lady. It was the main topic of conversation for every phone call and every visit she'd received since he signed the deed.
"That's it!" Mickey shouted. He decided it was time to play the clown and take the pressure off of his friend who was about to gag himself to death with food to prevent having to sign another contract, this time verbal though it may as well be in blood, to his mother stating he absolutely would ask Rosemarie Hathaway to move in with him TONIGHT or all his lands and titles were forfeit to Loretta Tanner who knows everything about everything. "That's it! Living with Yeva can't be this bad. After dinner, I'm gonna go upstairs and start packing. Ma, you brought this on yourself."
Everyone at the table laughed.
Dimitri knew what Mickey was doing, and he was grateful. But that didn't mean he was going to miss an opportunity to tease the living snot out of him. "I'm not so sure you'll feel that way for long, Mickey. Ever since Zinaida's Christening, Babushka has started calling you Donald Duck."
Olena choked on her wine and plastered her hands over her mouth to keep from spitting it onto the table. She wasn't expecting that little tidbit to make its way outside the walls of her home; her son really was trying to avoid talking about his own life.
Loretta turned to Mickey expectantly. She was obviously missing out on something.
"Why does she call me Donald Duck?" Mickey asked.
"Yeah, why does she call him Donald Duck?" Loretta urged.
"Uhh…well…she says it's because you're short, you're white, you walk around in a shirt with no pants on, and you've got a tiny cock." Dimitri said, as though it were a matter of official public record.
This time the laughter from the table was explosive. Mickey was indignant, but the rest of them couldn't catch their breath. "Very funny. Very fucking funny. Laugh it up, jerks," he fumed, his face the color of a hothouse tomato.
They did.
Olena got a hold of herself first. "Your Babushka did not say 'tiny cock'!"
"No. She said 'маленький член' but I didn't think that would have quite the same ring to it for the non-Russian speakers at the table."
"Yuh wouldn't tell the old bat to go fuck herself, but yuh been going around and showing her your cock?!"
"She didn't see my cock!" Mickey insisted.
"That's not how she tells it." Dimitri insisted.
Dimitri was quite pleased with the direction the conversation had taken. He ate another dumpling, and this time he could really savor the potato and herb filling.
"Okay, first of all, she did NOT see my cock. I was laying face down on the grass. I made sure she was back in the house before I climbed up to the treehouse to get my pants. Second of all, I'm 6'2', and that's not short! White? I can't really argue with her there. I work indoors and I wear coveralls all day long. But I USUALLY wear pants. Sometimes I'll wear shorts if it's hot outside, but I always at least manage underwear. This was a one-time thing!"
"6'2" is short for the men in our family," Dimitri informed him.
"Well, that makes your people the circus folk, not me, and it probably alters her expectations of a perfectly respectable-sized adult male cock. Not that she saw mine!"
"How do you know Babushka wasn't watching you climb the tree from the kitchen window? She loves spying on the neighbors. She has binoculars. She got them for 'bird watching,' or so she claims, but I don't think that woman could identify a single bird that wasn't a pigeon if you asked her. Or is your cock so small she couldn't even see it with binoculars?"
"Dimka, enough of that word." Olena admonished.
"Sorry, Mama."
"Am I the only one here who has no clue what yuh talking about!?" Loretta asked.
"Yes!" Olena and Dimitri answered in unison.
Loretta turned to Mickey who was now chugging a fresh beer he'd just cracked. "If yuh don't explain to me right now what they are on about, I swear on your father's grave I will shave that head of yours. I'll sneak into your room, and I'll shave yuh as bald as he was. Get talking, Mister."
Mickey continued slugging back his drink but held up a single finger to indicate he'd be done in a second. He would need a little extra help to get through this whole story. Maybe he'd ask Olena for some of her vodka.
"No, no, take yuh time. I'm not going to a club with my friends later. I've got all night. For the record, I haven't seen your cock since yuh were in diapers, but it sure was tiny then."
Olena pushed herself up from the table to avoid another bout of laughter. The poor boy threw himself in front of a firing squad to save her son, and now they were all making fun of his manhood. She could get started on the dishes so there would be one less person at the table to pick on him. "Dimka, keep them from killing each other. I can handle these myself."
"Bring the vodka." Dimitri whispered to her out of the side of his mouth even though he spoke in Russian. Who knew what would set one of the Tanners off at this stage in a mounting family conflict?
"I'm not a stupid woman. Pour her a Fernet."
After three cordial glasses of Fernet for Loretta, and three of vodka for everyone else, Mickey was ready to begin the tale of his three-week ordeal with Denise Caputo. He began with the last of what he could remember from the party. He was in the garage with Dimitri, his sister Sonya's husband Craig, his sister Victoria's boyfriend George, their friend Howie from around the neighborhood, and Olena's youngest brother Yevgeny who just moved to the states recently from Russia under slightly suspicious circumstances.
Olena shook her head and began muttering to herself in Russian at the mention of her baby brother's name. That boy was always just a little bit wrong, and there was no way around it.
Mickey went on to describe how they were sitting in folding chairs around a plastic table doing what Yevgeny called the "men's drinking". That's all it was, sitting at a tiny table and smoking and drinking. Or that's all it was until Howie started up with his favorite party shtick - pestering people into betting him money that he wouldn't eat stuff.
Mickey and Dimitri kept their money. They'd seen him do this act a couple of times over the years, and the novelty had worn off. The new guys were a different story. Craig bet him $2.00 to eat a pound of butter, and he managed that pretty easily. George bet him $3.75 to eat $0.75 in quarters - he'd get the $3.00 upfront, and the rest he would have to go digging for. Mickey didn't need to clarify for his mother or Olena where he would have to go digging.
All this was pretty tame on the scale of how much Howie was willing to debase himself for cash. Then Yevgeny bet him to start eating cigarette butts. He held out a giant silver money clip full of bills and set his price at $5.00 a butt.
This was a lot of money for someone like Howie who didn't have a high-paying tradesman job like Dimitri, or the luxury of living rent and bill free like Mickey. He managed to eat ten cigarettes before he turned green, then gray, and ran out of the garage through the side door. He came back about fifteen minutes later smelling to high fucking heaven, shaky and bleary-eyed, and told them he'd just thrown his guts up all over the O'Malley's lawn jockey next door.
After that, there was some dispute as to whether or not Howie had truly earned the fifty bucks from Yevgeny since he believed puking was a disqualifier. Dimitri had to break up a near-fistfight between the two men, and then Loretta came out to yell at them to shut the fuck up or she would, 'make sure none of them ever needed to attend a Christening for one of their own kids because they wouldn't have the tools to make'um in the first place.'
She also brought them a cake.
After the cake, Yevgeny apologized to everyone by going out to his van and bringing back with him a giant unmarked clear glass jug full of something he called 'Voodoo Water'. Voodoo Water, as it would turn out, was his own creation of homemade brandy made from cherries and…probably lighter fluid. Dimitri took one whiff of the jug and then took a hard pass on Voodoo Water. He knew his way around some Russian moonshine, and that shit smelled particularly noxious. It was the kind of rotgut that caused small explosions in basements and deteriorating eyesight. Mickey drank too much Voodoo Water. Any amount of Voodoo Water was too much fucking Voodoo Water. The next thing he could remember was the feeling of dewy early morning grass on his balls, and the bottom of Yeva's cane jabbing into the base of his spine.
"He's calling it Voodoo Water now?" Olena didn't look surprised or pleased by anything Mickey just said. "Back in Russia he called it -" She stopped herself from speaking for a beat. Then she shook her head in resignation. "- 'Дракон сперма'. I have to say, the name has improved somewhat in my opinion. The recipe is probably the same, unfortunately. I hope for your sake, Mickey, he has something other than a disused toilet in the garden shed to mix it in as he did back home."
Upon hearing his mother utter the words "Дракон сперма," Dimitri brought his elbows to the table, cradled his forehead in his hands, and shook with uncontrollable laughter. It began silently. He could have been sobbing from the looks of it, his shoulders trembling with an inaudible force. But then the deep rumbling kicked in, working its way up to roaring, and then back down to gasping and croaking as he tried to contain himself.
Never in his life did he expect his Mama to utter that combination of words. Never. That alone was surreal, but added to the memory of his Babushka hobbling around making fun of the size of Mickey's cock AND the fact she saw his cock because he got blotto drunk from sucking down his uncle's toilet hooch…it was too fucking much! He came to dinner tonight expecting to stuff himself silly with his Mama's cooking and to have the screws put to him by Loretta - on his Mama's behalf - about how soon he could have Roza moved into his new home and picking out china patterns. He didn't expect to enter The Twilight Zone.
"What does, uhhh… what do those words mean? That was two words, wasn't it?" Loretta didn't like to be out of the loop, but she wasn't going to touch trying to pronounce "Дракон сперма" with a ten-foot pole.
Olena's face was beetroot, and she poured herself another vodka. "I would prefer Dimitri be the one to tell you once he is finished wetting himself on your kitchen floor." She turned in her seat to look at her son who was now slowly peeling his palms from his forehead and raking his hands through his hair down to the back of his neck in an attempt to regain his composure. His face was as red as hers was. "Are you quite finished, Dimka?"
After another moment, he nodded and looked across the table at both the Tanners. It was best to shoot straight from the hip.
"It roughly translates to…dragon semen."
Voodoo Water née Dragon Semen.
Loretta looked disgusted. Mickey looked disgusted and thoughtful.
He was the one to finally break the silence.
"Honestly, if you're just going off of how the stuff tastes…both of those names are pretty fucking good." Mickey observed. "Olena, your brother is a complete maniac, but he's surprisingly creative with words."
Olena set down her vodka glass.
"Who wants pie?"
"So that's why the little Caputo cooze has been calling around here lately!? I just thought maybe yuh ran into her at one of the clubs and said or did something that sounded keen to her, but no, of course not! It had to be something so much dumber than that for it to be a good enough reason when my boy is mixed in it! I've always disliked that girl. She used to sniff around the two of yuh all the time when yuh were in school. I allowed it before because yuh barely noticed she was alive, but she's officially used poor dumb Victoria as her free pass into our lives for the last time!"
Mickey used the crutches of coffee and Olena's dessert to help him limp through the remainder of his story. The shitshow he endured earlier that day was of particular interest to his captive audience as it was entirely new information.
"Ma, I don't think she'll be coming around here anymore. Not after what happened at the garage. That's the single upshot to it. And Victoria is the only one of us, out of either of our families, who will have a college degree. She's far from dumb."
"Victoria is book smart. She's not street-smart. It takes being a bitch to think like a bitch, and that girl is far too kind-hearted to think like a bitch. It's a wonder she didn't come home from school one day hungry with no lunch money and a sack of magic beans in her hand."
Dimitri and Olena both nodded in agreement to this assessment. Victoria was definitely the most sheltered of the Belikov children, and it was purposefully done. Karolina, Sonya, and Dimitri had to suffer the abuses of their father for too long before Olena could get them all safely out from under his thumb. Making sure her youngest child never had to experience the nastier side of life was the main reason she brought her family to the states in the first place.
That's not to say that living in East Orange was always a picnic for them.
Olena and Loretta met for the first time by chance at the corner shop by their respective homes shortly after the Belikovs moved to East Orange. The proprietor of the store, a man who demanded everyone call him "Big Dave" rather than just Dave, was working the register himself that day. He was ringing up Olena's purchases and blatantly overcharging her for the items in her basket. Loretta was standing two people behind her in the line, but she could see exactly what he was doing, and to a woman with a scared expression on her face and four children standing next to her. She marched herself up to the front and let Big Dave have her take on the situation right in the kisser.
"I'm sorry, what was that yuh just said to her? How much are those oranges?"
Big Dave tried to bluster his way out of answering, but that just egged her on.
"Well then let's just see for ourselves, shall we?" She reached over the counter and ripped the paper out of his register to review it for herself. She didn't like what she saw. "This is highway robbery. Just because she's new to the country doesn't mean yuh can get away with taking advantage of her like this." She balled up the strip of paper and threw it behind the counter onto the floor. "I suggest yuh get back on that little adding machine uh yours and do some better math, Dave. Yeah, that's right, I called yuh Dave. And I'm only calling yuh Dave because if I called yuh anything else it wouldn't be Big Dave, it would be Fat-fucking-Dave because you're a fat fuck!" She began to attract the attention of other shoppers. "I heard from other people that yuh did this kind of thing, but I've never seen it before today. Yuh should be ashamed of yourself! Everyone in this fucking neighborhood came from someplace else, or their parents did." The tiny crowd was growing right along with her rage. "And yuh with the map of Ireland all over your fucking face. Your mother came from County Cork same as my grandfather on my father's side, and that's not in fucking New Jersey last time I checked!"
A voice shouted from somewhere behind her in the store, "Give him, hell Mrs. T!"
"Also, I know for a fact your wife does her laundry at my place. If yuh don't charge this lady here properly for those oranges, and whatever else she was buying to feed her family, just wait and see what it'll cost Big Betty to wash your goddamn underwear from now on!"
After a second or two of letting her words sink in for everyone, Loretta grabbed Olena by the elbow and turned her slightly away from the din to whisper in her ear. "I'm sorry to make a scene like this in front of the kids, but I think if I keep this going a little longer I can get yuh a free ham out of that asshole behind the counter there. My name is Loretta."
She got two hams.
Olena was aware that the grocer had been taking advantage of her for weeks now, but it was the closest place to shop near her new home and she wasn't comfortable venturing out any further yet with all her children in tow. She also didn't feel like she could say anything about it at the time. She knew that more than a few of the business owners in town were connected to organized crime. In places like that there were often people you could yell at and people you definitely could not yell at, and she wasn't sure which side of the line Big Dave Moriarty fell behind. Her English was also not very strong, she was in a new country that was vastly different from the one she'd left behind, and she was still dealing with the emotional fallout of enduring years of an abusive relationship. She was weary of most men.
Loretta yelled at whoever the fuck she wanted to. It was another one of her strange gifts.
After the great shopping incident of 1963, Olena and Loretta were fast friends. Their children were all of similar ages and instantly got on like a house on fire, especially their two boys. They were also both newly single in the world, Loretta being a widow and Olena a divorcee of sorts.
Over the following years, Big Dave's gambling debts added up, and he sold the store in 1970 to a family that just moved there from Korea.
"Is Rose going to be working at the bar tonight, or will she just be going with you, Dimka?" Olena asked her son after the boys had finished clearing away the plates and forks from dessert. Everyone was in an after-dinner lull, nursing a drink and beginning to regret how much they'd eaten.
Dimitri was slow to answer his Mama's innocent-seeming question for a couple of reasons, the first of which being his reluctance to return to the topic of his asking Roza to move in with him - he would do it in his own good time. The second reason was the fact that the answer to her question really, really pissed him off. "Rose is working tonight, but she's not bartending." He muttered, peevishly.
"Surely he doesn't have her cocktail waitressing on roller skates again? Not after the last time. Your cousin is…unique, but he's never been a stupid boy."
Mickey and Loretta both laughed at Olena's careful choice of words. She never wanted to speak ill of anybody, and the verbal gymnastics she was known to perform in order to avoid doing so were very funny to a couple of true blue shit-talkers like them.
It had been about a year since the fateful night Rose took exception to a patron of Adrian's establishment thinking it was acceptable to slip her cash tips directly into her bra, each time allowing his hand to linger unnecessarily. She let him go the first time with a verbal warning. The second time she dumped the 7 & 7 he ordered in his lap. Unfortunately, the wet crotch must have had the opposite effect on him from what she intended. The guy faked a heartfelt apology to her and ordered a replacement drink. This time when he made a sloppy attempt at slipping a dollar bill down the back of her sequined hot pants and into the crack of her ass, she broke his wrist in two places with one of her skates before Security showed up to pull her off of him.
"Now yuh cousin Adrian! There's a young man whose cock we've all seen more times than I care to think about. After three drinks that boy couldn't keep his clothes on if yuh stapled them to his body."
"His cock is smaller than mine!" Mickey interjected.
"Would yuh shut up about yuh cock, Mikhail Christopher. I was just making an observation. We're back to bugging Dimitri about Rose again. Keep up with the rest of us, or go upstairs and spray yuh hair."
Mickey slumped back in his chair and sulked like a teenager. Adrian's dick was smaller than his.
"Rose is on a special assignment for Adrian tonight. He has potential investors coming in to talk about the possibility of opening a club with him in Miami. She's going to be playing the role of his personal assistant and arm candy for the evening." Dimitri explained. "He's assured her there won't be anything else expected of her beyond flirting and answering questions on his behalf should he take a turn for the unique all of the sudden. But I still don't like it."
"Adrian hired Rose to be his hot babysitter for the night," Mickey added, already knowing Dimitri's explanation wasn't going to be sufficient enough for their respective mothers. "The guys who are coming in to check the place out are apparently big puss…ladies men. He's paying her A LOT to do it, too. You know she's putting herself through nursing school, so she couldn't really turn it down when he accepted the number she threw out as a joke when he asked her to name her price."
Dimitri leaned back in his chair and began grinding his teeth to stop himself from growling. Tonight was shaping up to be pure shit for him. His sole purpose in going to the club tonight was to watch Roza like a hawk and to make sure Adrian's potential future business partners didn't mistake her as being some kind of fringe benefit in their dealings with him. She was only required to stay until 2:00 am to collect her 'overtime' fee, and he was more than willing to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of there at 2:01 am even if she was mid-goddamn-sentence. Cousin or not, Adrian was fucking pushing it this time.
His bitter mood must have been written all over his face because his mother deemed it necessary to chide him for it in Russian right there at the table rather than waiting to address him in private as she would on any other occasion.
"Dimitri, please try not to get yourself into any trouble tonight. You have a career and you own a home now. The stakes are much higher than they were when you were a boy who threw his fists around at the wrong people without thinking. Please just think first. You're a man now, so that's all I'll say about it."
"I know, Mama. Don't spend all night worrying about me, I'll be fine. It's just been a long week, and I'm tired. I love you."
"I love you too."
"Uh oh. It took too long for me to realize yuh two weren't speaking English just then. I think this will be my last drink tonight." Loretta drained the last of her fifth digestif and placed the glass on the table with such an air of finality the others at the table almost believed her.
"Well if you do decide to get any drunker, Ma, learn from my mistakes and stay away from the treehouse," Mickey warned. "It won't end well, trust me."
"Oh, yeah right, me up a tree. The reason yuh built that deathtrap in the first place was yuh knew I'd never go there. But thanks for the warning, Donald Duck."
Olena and Dimitri laughed. Mickey ignored her, knowing he'd walked right into that one, and stood up from the table. He stretched his arms up over his head, clasped his hands, and bent from side to side trying to ease some of the effects of sitting for so long. "C'mon, man," he motioned to Dimitri, "we gotta get ready if we plan on being there around 10:30 like you said."
"Dimitri, you know where the for company towels are, right?"
Dimitri resisted the urge to roll his eyes and say, 'Yeeeeeess, Loretta, I know where the 'for company towels' are.' If his Mama wasn't sitting right next to him he would have said it, but he didn't want a slap on the back of the head to end the meal as Mickey had begun it. Those towels hadn't moved from the cupboard at the top of the stairs in fourteen years, but she still asked him that same question every single time he stayed overnight at their house. "Yes. I know where they are. The green ones, right?"
"That's them. Go on up and shower now, yuh smell like a dirty old goat."
Dimitri pushed himself up from the table and gave his mother a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Then he walked over to Loretta, bent down as if to give her a similar hug, and swooped back up at the last second to leave her hanging. "Apparently I smell like a barnyard animal, so no hugs for you tonight!"
"Yuh got barnyard manners too! Get back down here and hug me. Who knows if either of yuh will make it back from partying at Adrian's all night in one piece."
Loretta was only half joking. Adrian Ivashkov was a strange kid with too much money to spend and nothing but time on his hands. The first and last time he was allowed to stay over at their house was Easter Sunday four years ago. Adrian had nowhere else to go for the holiday, so he showed up at the Tanner's house along with Olena, Dimitri, and Victoria. He got too drunk to go home and wound up sleeping it off on the futon in the den. Apparently, he woke up in the middle of the night and somehow got ahold of the label maker she used for canning. He labeled everything in the entire downstairs of the house with seemingly random words while they were all sleeping. Every single thing - the doors, the door frames, the tables, and the lamps. The chair she was currently sitting on he'd labeled 'can opener' and the refrigerator said 'swimming pool'. There were labels on every food item in the kitchen, including individual labels on all four bananas in the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. He labeled all the forks. One of them said 'hamburger sandwich.' He labeled their fucking cat!
When she came downstairs the next morning to start breakfast he was still labeling the living room, and she shouted at him, "What in the holy fuck are yuh doing!?" Dimitri, Mickey, and three of Mickey's sisters woke up and came running when they heard her, and got there just in time to witness Adrian nonchalantly telling - not asking - an absolutely furious Loretta, "Please don't touch anything. I need to go back to my studio to get my camera so I can photograph this for my portfolio for art school."
The labels would be enough to annoy anyone, but the reason he was barred for life from Loretta's home was her discovery that at some point during the night, Adrian took a break from labeling just long enough to piss all over the tank of her water heater. He must have opened the door to the closet where it was stored, which incidentally was one door over from the downstairs bathroom, and whizzed at it like it was a urinal. She was on her way back upstairs to get dressed when she placed a slippered foot into a yellow puddle on the hallway floor. She looked at the puddle, looked in the closet, and then all hell broke loose. She immediately stormed back down the hall to the kitchen to grab her rolling pin - that was now labeled 'Walter Cronkite' - and nearly brained Adrian with it before Mickey could drag him outside to his car.
Dimitri and Mickey both said an early goodnight to Loretta. She would be passed out on the sofa with the tv still on before they left. Mikhail kissed Olena's cheek and thanked her for dinner before following Dimitri down the hallway and up the stairs.
It was time for the boys to act like men and go make themselves look pretty for the ladies.
SOUNDTRACK
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones (Rose Steps On the Bus)
NOTES
Sorry if the translations from English to Russian are not great. I just used a web translator, so who knows!?