Dreaming of a Life of Privilege, but First...

FIRST saw him in the break room at the graphic design trade school I was attending in Phoenix. He was getting a Butterfinger from the candy machine, and all I could think was that he looked like Bart Simpson — same mischievous smile, same flat-top haircut. “Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfinger!” I imagined him saying, my mind grasping at linguistic and cultural straws.
David Chelsea

I was 18 years old. My parents, my brother and I had recently arrived in Arizona from Russia. We’d come on a tourist visa without English, money or legal immigration status. I was about to start college when we left Russia, but in Phoenix, college became a distant dream, while my reality consisted of dismal “cash under the table” jobs and waiting for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to acknowledge my family’s asylum application.

So I was happy when some friends used their connections to allow me to attend, for free, this trade school — the kind of place that advertises on local TV, doesn’t ask its students for their high school diplomas or green cards and seems to survive off government financial aid. The school stood down the street from a campus of Arizona State University, a place I fantasized about attending as I traced puppies from pet food ads in my “Rendering” class. But I liked the break room for the imposing machine that dispensed coffee and chicken soup into tiny paper cups, and for its social potential, although I was too shy to talk to anyone.

I was flattered when the Bart Simpson double began to flirt with me. Since my fashion sense was dictated by clothing donations, I often wore floral dresses, yellow construction boots and a straw hat festooned with wooden fruit. Apparently, he found me exotic.

BEFORE coming to Arizona in search of a better future, he’d been a truck driver in the Midwest, delivering vegetables to Amish stores. He said he used to fantasize about seducing an Amish girl and told me that I reminded him of those girls. I gathered he meant that he found me sheltered, high-minded and repressed, though he wouldn’t have used such words. After I told him I was Jewish, he promptly assured me that he personally didn’t think all Jews were stingy and nicknamed me “Anne Frank.”

With considerable effort, he climbed over our language barrier to tell me about his life — about how, when he was a toddler, his father came back from Vietnam, stole a van and disappeared; about how his mom met his stepfather at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; about “speaking in tongues” in church; about wanting to quit chewing tobacco because spit cups were disgusting; about how much he’d loved his job at T.G.I. Friday’s before he got fired.

I lacked the experience and the cultural context to notice warning signs in his stories. It was the first I’d heard of A.A., T.G.I. Friday’s, tobacco chewing and speaking in tongues. His life was my first American narrative, and in my mind he was, foremost, an American — that is, a privileged person whose problems were by definition smaller than mine because he had the legal right to work, owned a car and was allowed to apply for a Pell grant.

Our dates were a happy antidote to my family life. After raising two children in Soviet Russia, my parents were accustomed to material poverty, but their fall from the middle class and the uncertainties of the immigration process turned them into nervous wrecks. My mother spent time between her cleaning jobs crying — from exhaustion, yes, but mostly from the humiliation of being a domestic servant. In response to her breakdowns, my formerly mild-mannered father became someone who shouted in frustration. There were too many of us in our dingy Phoenix apartment, and it seemed that we were always screaming at each other. It was a joy to escape into the sunset in my boyfriend’s dented Ford Escort.

He taught me to in-line skate and sneaked me into a bar where his best friend worked. On that date, I learned about darts and strawberry daiquiris and about how many daiquiris it takes to make darts dangerous. He made me a mixed tape of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and R.E.M. He let me drive his car and introduced me to Chicken McNuggets.

I, meanwhile, tried to make him read Nabokov. This, after all, was what I’d done with my high school boyfriend in Russia — we exchanged books, wrote poems for each other, kissed and held hands for hours, but never went beyond that. In my mind, physical intimacy came later, after poetry, after making sure one was absolutely, passionately in love, maybe even after marriage. This Victorian attitude of mine quickly became a point of contention between my new American boyfriend and me.

The first time he managed to wrestle one of my breasts out of my near-bulletproof Czech bra, I slapped him across the face. I imagined I would have sex in some distant, theoretical future, but not like this — not on the stained carpet of my family’s apartment, with my hair dangerously close to the open flame of a wall gas heater.

After I apologized, he agreed to take things more slowly. Still, it was apparent to me that he was losing patience with my Russian-poetry-reciting, sexually repressed approach to romance. One day, as he drove me to a mansion I cleaned, I hit upon a solution to all of our problems. I could go to the university, get out of my parents’ apartment, and make him happy, all at once.

“Let’s get married,” I said, “and I’ll sleep with you.”

“O.K.,” he said.