Original Material
AN AMERICAN DREAM
by Tatyana Fedyaeva
Marina could not even admit to herself that she wanted to be married, never mind telling her friends that, and far less her parents. With them she talked about science and the possible future for biology, which the whole family loved, discussed good articles printed in good periodicals, attended every performance put on by Moscow theaters on tour in Siberia. And meanwhile, her life was not just passing but flying by impossibly fast, leaving only changes in her character and little wrinkles—nothing for anyone else to notice yet, but all too evident to her—to remember them by. (Cosmetologists say that wrinkles start at the age of 20 or even sooner, and she was 29 already!)
She had begun by taking a good look at the boys in college and later had surveyed her male colleagues at work. And always there was something not quite right. Perhaps that was why she had skipped straight from “too soon” to what some might call “too late.” First she had to study, so that family problems would not get in the way of her future career. Then there was graduate school, her thesis. And when she made up her mind that it was time—and Marina, a level-headed girl, had decided at a very early age that stupid crushes and dumb little love affairs were not for her, that she was going to approach the problem sensibly and settle it once and for all—it turned out that her choices had dwindled to nothing. The correlation between her desire and her opportunities was rather like that old joke: “I want to buy a Mercedes but I can’t. I can buy a goat, but I don’t want to.”
Her desire was to pair up with a good father for her children-to-be—an educated, clever, kind, reliable person. But her opportunities, even in the scientific center where she and her family lived, were limited to divorcés, already well-bruised by life, and drivers, bricklayers, and lower-level cooperative workers. Not that Marina had anything personally against such men, but she could not imagine sharing her life with someone on a different career path, who didn’t like the books she liked and whose family background, traditions, and underpinnings had nothing in common with hers. By the time they turned 30, many of her hypothetical fiancés were already showing clear signs of what chagrined doctors call alcohol dependency. And she was also struck by how many members of the male gender were weak, envious, cowardly, and lazy—some women too, of course, but nowhere near as many. She even came up with a theory—and a very plausible one it was—for that.
Most of her age-mates born in the late 1950s or early 1960s had grown up without fathers. That was to some extent the fault of the war, which had made every man worth his weight in gold and free to do almost anything he wanted. And the children had absorbed their parents’ stereotypes. The girls learned patience and forgiveness (they watched their mothers putting up not only with adultery but with beatings too, and even in a highly educated milieu, women would come to work with their under-eyes heavily powdered, muttering something about how they were just walking along and tripped for no apparent reason. . .). Meanwhile, kindergarten boys were playing “Drunken Daddy.”
From nursery school all the way up to secondary school graduation, they were surrounded exclusively by women, except for the phys-ed, military training, and physics teachers, whose subjects always seemed second-rate. And always and everywhere they saw women working, shouldering the responsibility for home, children, job, and obligations to society. In the Komsomol, the trade unions, even Party organizations in “the localities,” as the expression goes—at every turn, there were women.
The most interesting part was that after college, when the girls got married and began staying home with the children, something strange happened: in every leadership position above those “lower levels,” over and over again, as if making up for their youthful irrelevance to society, men appeared. These were the very same men who had been almost invisible in school (and consequently had not a scrap of experience in team management and social relationship-building).
Now they were pursuing careers, having a fine old time in positions of authority, and had no intention of sharing that authority with women. In fact, many of them were apt to quote Arkady Raikin to the effect if the government would let all the women stay home and pay the men more, nothing could be fairer than that. And they thought that they were being so progressive and humanitarian about it all. They were, you might say, buying themselves off from all the difficulties of everyday life, with imaginary money that was not—even in projections—anywhere close to being in line with the real duties of a homemaker, and offloading it all onto the women. Who, poor things, were falling for the sweet talk hook, line, and sinker.
And since the ordinary Russian family could hardly live on one income (which is still the case today), women routinely ended up stuck with absolutely everything. And if they kept themselves under control when out in public, at home they were often driven to distraction. Children had more respect for their fathers, because they yelled less and were generally calmer.
Marina had also been quietly noticing another paradox: the assignment of women to the private sphere of life and of men to the public sphere was steadily driving the problem inward. Men were increasingly alienated from the family. Their rights with regard to their children were also being chipped away. Even the law lays no long term responsibility upon a father, in terms of rights and duties. And that may possibly be why many fathers, even pretty good ones, subconsciously distance themselves from their children in all respects except for the basic duty of earning money.
Maybe that also explains why, after divorce, many men fall apart—because everything that shored them up and helped them stay on their feet is gone. Frequent visits with their children are often impossible, and when meetings do take place, no one knows what to talk about. (There was never any real closeness. The wife had stayed with the youngsters during their childhood illnesses and taken them to kindergarten, while the mother-in-law made sure they got to their after-school hobbies and sports, and the two women had read with them and decorated the New Year tree with them.)
And now there is an emptiness and a sense of being at loose ends. Surrogate activities start to appear—random companionships, chance girlfriends, drinking binges, and then it’s all over. . . Say what you will about how weak and beaten down women are, there is no getting away from one awful statistic: the life expectancy of men is a good ten years shorter than that of women. So, then, men are the weaker sex?
Marina’s father was a famous scientist and a remarkable man. They went on mountain and riverside hikes as a family. At home, he did almost everything along with her mom. There was no particular separation into “men’s work” and “women’s work” in her home. But, to tell the truth, Marina had felt sorry for her father, especially in the mid- and late eighties, when everything was in short supply, all of Siberia had long been using ration cards, and he, with his Ph.D., had to get on his bicycle after a long day’s work and cycle seven kilometers to their “country place” which was really only a kitchen garden consisting of five 100-meter plots. All that digging, weeding, and watering was terrific, but it took so much time and effort. . . And to have to deliver a portion of the harvest to the state on top of it all! If only he had been able to apply that energy and knowledge to his scientific pursuits—how much more would he have achieved! Marina loved her parents a lot and wanted the man in her life to resemble her father, if only a little.
Even with her wholehearted devotion to science, there were still times when she regretted having chosen that particular college department, because the student body there was basically female. The few guys were real “botany-heads,” completely absorbed in their studies. Any who weren’t that way—who liked sports, parties, and slacking off—were tossed out of the university in their first year. So much for the theory that “the stronger sex” was more drawn to the hard sciences.
The odd thing was that those quiet, serious botany-heads, one and all, graduated with rings on their fingers. When and how they had managed that was a total mystery to Marina. Most likely, though, it was they who had been “managed.” But she didn’t want it to be that way. Her dreams were of a lovely courtship, romance, long walks, and poetry. And although she was no raving beauty—being rather freckled and short, but with regular features, gorgeous hair, and a sweet little figure—she would not have looked at all bad in white. Besides, she had realized long ago that beauty and happiness are far from synonymous.
When she decided to go abroad, the official motivation was easy to understand and explain: I want to pursue my science seriously, and there ’s almost no hope of that here, with all the under-financing, pitiful salaries, and cancelled projects. She knew the language well, so she should have no problem adapting. And specialists with her qualifications were in demand almost everywhere.
She never told anyone—not even herself—that she was going overseas in search of a husband. Although she will admit to you today that she had taken the information that people marry much later in the West than they do in Russia and that marriageable Russian women, even the most unprepossessing of them, are welcomed with open arms, and tried it on for size. So every way you looked at it, she just had to go.
She had read once that Western men, far more so than their fathers, associated their self-actualization more with having a family and, therefore, less with raising their professional profile. Moreover, sociologists have found that American men want a family not just in order to reinforce their societal status, but in order to be part of that family. Studies have shown that in those families where the father is as involved as (or even a little more involved than) the mother in the upbringing of the children, those children will have fewer problems in the future with self-identification and will readily take on tasks considered “traditionally female” or “traditionally male.”
Marina was particularly staggered to discover that a Yale University study had concluded that the three most important signs of a well-adjusted child—the adoption of a socially acceptable approach to gender roles, success in school, and moral development—correlate directly with the presence or absence of a father. Could the Russian male’s moral infantilism, she wondered, be the result of their having grown up in broken homes? Since the woman and mother in Russia is, all else aside, at the epicenter of the family, her existence, unlike that of a man’s, will always have meaning no matter what disaster may befall.
But unemployment compounded with divorce is for a man the last straw, an utter catastrophe, one might say. Marina didn’t want any catastrophes.
Once in the US, she threw herself into her work. The equipment was a pleasure to work with and the salary was very nice too, especially by Russian standards. But the best was that she did not feel like an out-of-place old maid. No one seemed to pay any attention to her age or marital status or, for that matter, to lots of other things, like the color of one colleague’s skin or another’s evident handicap. No one acted horrified, heaved a bitter sigh and asked how she could still be alone, or offered to set her up with “a real catch.” All that counted was professionalism and knowledge.
After a while, Marina fell in love, forgetting all she had told herself about not doing anything stupid. He was clever, tall, good looking, blue-eyed—the very image of a real American—and she was afraid to approach him. She just gazed at him from afar. That was a huge source of amusement for both of them later. Because “Paul” turned out to be Pavel from Moscow. After his divorce, he had done the noble thing by moving out of the apartment, and then had set off to seek his fortune in America. And why not? The way he figured it, he might meet an American woman, and if he did, he would have a prenuptial agreement drawn up, so as not to lose everything in a divorce. And if it did not work out that way, he would at least be earning a living. The main thing was that he would see the world and have as much work as he wanted.
They decided to make their home in Russia. . .
. . . A little boy’s hand lay in mine. “Artemka, what do you want to be when you grow up? Cat got your tongue? A pilot? A doctor? A policeman?”
He looked up, his huge blue eyes meeting mine. “For some reason, those are the only jobs that grown-ups talk about. But I. . . I want to be an entomologist.” “A wha-a-a-at?” “An entomologist. And study insects.” “Cockroaches, you mean? But they’re disgusting!” “No they’ re not! They have compound eyes. And spiders. . .”
The six-year-old “entomologist” then went on to describe at great length and in considerable detail dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and even plant lice. Then all at once he grew unexpectedly serious and said, “And if I change my mind, I’ll be a chemist.”
“Organic or inorganic?” I ventured to ask.
“They’re both interesting in their own ways.”
Realizing that I would not be able to handle a conversation on valences and substitution reactions, I asked him how he knew all this, and was answered with an astonished, “What do you mean, how? From the encyclopedia. I read it ages ago. Mom told me all about it. And dad too. They’ll be working on the computer with me this evening. And yesterday we repaired a bicycle. It’s a shame that Nastya’s small and pedals slowly and Mitya’s still in a baby carriage, or else we could race. There are no other children in the village. Just the three of us. And there’s no school either.”
Marina and Pavel are leasing out the Moscow apartment that they bought with their “American earnings.” The money they make does not cover everything, though, so they keep a cow and some chickens. Their home is hospitable and welcoming, and they had reminded me several times how best to get there and invited me to come and “stay a good long while.”
Pavel is famed throughout the neighborhood as a skilful craftsman. He not only builds houses but first draws up his own plans, factoring in the owners’ professional and creative preferences. Next he works with Marina to estimate the job. And then they really get down to it. Along the way, they advise the owners on landscaping, recommend what fruit trees or bushes and decorative greenery to plant, and how to care for their gardens.
When Marina takes one of the children to a Moscow doctor (they all have fairly serious health problems), Pavel takes on all the household chores and responsibilities. He helps the daughter he had with his first wife, who loves her father and all her step-siblings, and respects Marina. It’s unfortunate that she can’t visit more often, but she takes her studies at Moscow State too seriously for that. And Pavel and Marina invariably talk on the phone a couple of times every day. They have no regrets. Their American dream, it seems, has come true. Way out there in the Russian countryside, over 100 kilometers away from Moscow.
They never did draw up a prenuptial agreement. They say that, first, they don’t have time, and second, they can’t see a reason for it, because there is simply no way they could split the life they have today into two separate, independent parts. Anyway, the idea seemed somehow un-Russian.
And so ends my simple tale of an American dream.
The names in this article have been changed.