A Step Forward

“You do everything incorrectly.”

I look up from the plate of stewed fish and potatoes I’m currently reconciling myself to consuming and see my host mother shaking her head.

I am not surprised.

I am slightly hopeful.

Generally speaking, this is not the kind of statement I like to hear directed at anyone, least of all myself. Grammatical errors in my Facebook wall posts cause me to wince in retrospect. In my younger, more sensitive years, an assertion similar to Elena Mixailovna’s would have sparked a flood of grief to rival that of Niobe. Now, however, I feel expectation in the place of shame. In the past 5 or 10 minutes, I’ve brewed tea, eaten a bowl of borsch, and washed a few dishes—foolproof tasks! The lack of opportunity for making such glaring errors as hanging my towel in the wrong place or accidentally slamming a door leads me to believe that she is about to make the bigger picture clear to me. The scales will fall from my eyes. I’ll finally understand how to “live well” in her house, as she urged a groggy, recently awoken me two months ago while leading me out into the stairwell to demonstrate—yet again—the proper technique for locking and unlocking the door.

“I do everything incorrectly?” I try to correctly copy the Russian question intonation without either sounding incredulous and impolite or revealing my elation at the imminent epiphany.

“Yes,” she confirms. “Incorrectly and illogically.”

She does not offer an explanation.

I am somewhat annoyed at being thwarted. A little voice in the back of my head whispers that being called illogical is not something I should take from the person who thought it was a good idea to take that delightful piece of salmon I saw in the refrigerator last week and pressure cook it with potatoes until the whole mixture homogenously acquired the color and odor of kimchi. One of the nice things about having been alive for 19 years is that I can now ignore that voice. I press on.

“If…” I begin.

“No. Maybe some families do things differently. But you do everything incorrectly and illogically,” she pauses briefly, “when you wash dishes.”

My bubble of elation pops. This is clearly not leading to the miraculous revelation I was looking for. I resign myself to correcting this most recently discovered deficiency of mine, thus shortening our next 8 am stuff-you’ve-been-doing-wrong session.

“But,” I persist, “if you explain in what way I’m doing it incorrectly, I’ll do it right next time.”

She gives me a look, acknowledging our mutual understanding that my illogical dishwashing is so low down on the list of things I do that annoy her, it’s barely worth the effort to explain, and then walks over to the sink. It turns out it’s not my dishwashing technique in question at all, (presumably too flawed to be saved at this point) but the way I put the silverware to dry in the basket at the side of the sink. I realize I’ve been putting silverware in it as if they were about to go in the dishwasher—knife blades up.

“Maybe some families do it differently,” she repeats, “but every normal mother stands the knives like this,” she demonstrates the knife blade pointing down, “not like this.”

She stresses the word normal, once again emphasizing shared knowledge of ours—this time her opinion of my subnormality. The last time I heard her pronounce the word quite that way was on the morning of Door Slamming Gate, when she explained that “normal people close the door this way,” kindly speaking very slowly and tapping her head with one finger to aid my comprehension while demonstrating the use of a door handle.

I wonder if she is now making insinuations about my mother. When I showed her photos of my family on my first night here, she told me that my mother was beautiful, and that I looked like her. One case of the stomach flu later, she decided that my mother was crazy, and that I thought like her.

“But my mom always gave us flattened coke when we had the stomach flu!” I protested in the face of her horrified questioning about the liter of coke on my floor.

“Insane” she replied, leaving the room.

Sorry, mom.

“You’re still a little girl,” EM continues. “Entirely, I think.” She’s smiling. I’m confused. “Marina is too,” she says of her daughter, more to herself than to me. “She also loves doing nothing.” Looking at me again, she says, “I’m going to go sit down,” and sweeps out of the room.

I don't know what to think.

Part of me feels that I should be in some way demoralized by this conversation, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve made progress. It was still a conversation, after all. Those have been happening with somewhat increasing frequency since I’ve been back, and I remain optimistic that things are going to go up from here. I’ve got 4 months left to make friends with these people.

And to rebuild my poor mother’s reputation, one downward-pointing knife at a time.