I speak my brand of broken Russian,
practiced in weekly, hundred-dollar lessons,
she her broken English.
She wants to know
about books I’m reading,
my best subjects in school.
We’re drinking
black tea out of brown mugs,
and I can almost hear the hollers
from the TV set in the bedroom,
its volume turned up to fifty.
Our words lull,
and I break away,
to the bathroom;
I look in the mirror,
above the yellowing
sink basin and translucent, orange
pill containers,
and examine the face before me.
A pointed nose,
a hand-me-down from her,
the only Jewish girl in her class —
the highest marks in her class.
I used to like to look at photos
of her when she was young,
her eyes dark,
light cast high on her cheeks,
her Mona Lisa lips just about to break
into a small,
and thick eyebrows
like the ones I wax every four weeks.
As a kid, I never knew
her real name —
To me, Baba, always.
To others,
Natalie or Natasha,
depending on her distance from home.
But that nose before me has been rounded
a bit, softened
by my mother’s father,
as American as they come.
I see golden-brown freckles
breaking through a fair complexion,
borrowed from my mother —
she’s speckled with some of her own.
Maybe one day kids will borrow parts
of this fragmented face
and sit with me,
speaking a broken language
I haven’t yet mastered.
Grade: 12
Spring Valley
Washington, DC
Interpreter of Maladies
My parents