Mother Doll: Excerpt from the Novel by Katya Apekina
To read a Q&A with Katya Apekina, go here.
When her grandmother, still occasionally lucid half a year ago, asked Zhenia whether she loved Ben, Zhenia had said that he treated her really well.
Her grandmother had wanted more than anything for Zhenia to get out into the world, to get away, and only now did it dimly occur to Vera Osipovna that maybe there was no getting away. This listlessness and strange inertia had followed her granddaughter out west; it was not, it appeared, something that could be outrun. Zhenia had chosen to marry a person whom she held at arm’s length, whom she herself did not love, and maybe in all of the upheaval of her childhood, she had not learned how to love or what that even meant. How could she know about loving a man properly? Whom did she have as a model? A math professor with his own family in Russia who refused to even meet her, or this pale, ugly Nathaniel, with a nervous hesitation around anything that could displease Zhenia’s tyrannical mother?
Of course, all of these things were excuses. Vera had no role models either in the orphanage, and yet the love she found when she married Grisha took her away from all that. Their love was such pleasure, it had often felt taboo. That she could, in a totalitarian state, where everything was monitored and warped, be permitted to have this pleasure, a pleasure that untethered her from everything on earth but him.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” her grandmother said gently. “Did you already do it?”
It might not have been a good idea, but it was Zhenia’s only idea, and they had. They’d married that morning—March 3, 2008—in the East L.A. courthouse. Their witness had been a complete stranger. Ben had wanted to ask Naomi, but Zhenia had flown into a jealous rage. She didn’t want Naomi anywhere near this day. The cat that drops a mouse out of its mouth long enough for Zhenia to marry it.
“I’m very happy,” Zhenia said to her grandmother, and though she wouldn’t have said this was false, self-conscious under her grandmother’s scrutiny, it sounded false.
But her grandmother didn’t probe further, she was already asking what time Zhenia would be there to visit, saying things in her confusion about space and time that made no sense at all. When she’d been lucid, her grandmother had made Zhenia promise she wouldn’t visit. To have Zhenichka witness the humiliations of her failing body and mind . . . this was awful. Not what she wanted at all. She wanted Zhenia to be free, to live a rich, interesting, and unburdened life.
Anyway, because her grandmother’s momentary lucidity was overwritten by her confusion, Zhenia didn’t let herself dwell on this disapproval of her marriage.
*
It had not seemed like a remote possibility to Zhenia that Ben would want their marriage to end. Yes, she’d said that it ended to Naomi, but she hadn’t meant it! She had really only suggested it now in the car to be reaffirmed in his love, to hear him say that she was being ridiculous.
She felt her cheeks burning. Ben was looking out at the road. There was an accident up ahead, a rainy-day inevitability, and they were now crawling along amid the red taillights reflecting off the wet pavement.
She wanted very much to take back what she’d said, to have the words, like a silk scarf that had emerged dry from the magician’s mouth, be shoved back in.
Months later, in what felt like an entirely different life, Zhenia would tell Anton’s wife, Chloe, about the dissolution of her marriage.
“The last few months of it felt,” Zhenia said, “like we were always fighting and I was always taking him to the airport.”
“That makes sense.” Chloe nodded. “He was leaving you, so that’s how you’d remember it.”
“Was he leaving me? I don’t know,” Zhenia said stubbornly.
Chloe blinked a few times, confused. “Well, he left you, no?”
“I think in articulating it, I created it.”
Chloe was looking down at her baby, rubbing her back in a circle to get a burp out. “You don’t think you said it because you thought it? You think you said it and then you thought it?”
Zhenia leaned back on Chloe’s couch and looked up at the ceiling.
“I thought a lot of contradictory things simultaneously. Maybe in that moment, if I had said that they would figure it out . . .”
“That they would?” Chloe repeated with a smirk. “Who’s they?”
“That we would. Whatever. I misspoke.”
Chloe didn’t say anything about this kind of dissociation and magical thinking, just patted and patted the baby’s back until finally a stream of clotted milk came pouring out of the corner of the baby’s mouth.
“Though,” Zhenia continued, smiling despite herself, “I guess it was appropriate that my marriage ended after visiting a clubhouse for magicians. The stability of marriage was an illusion. A purgatory. All of it had a temporary clapboard feeling.”
“Well, that’s all life, isn’t it?” Chloe said, wiping the baby’s mouth. “Temporary.”
And the women nodded at each other and at their babies, but neither of them in that moment believed it in their hearts.
About the Author
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Her debut novel, THE DEEPER THE WATER, THE UGLIER THE FISH, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Lithub, and others, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, French, German, and Italian. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, the Alena Wilson prize, and a Third Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where she did her MFA. Born in Moscow, she moved to the US when she was three years old and currently lives in Los Angeles. MOTHER DOLL is her second novel.
Related Posts
Passing Notes: On Grief-Craft with Michelle Suzanne Mirsky →
Processing Trauma Through Personal Narrative: An Interview with Bridey Thelen-Heidel →
Playing House: An Excerpt from BRIGHT EYES →
