The Cosmopolitans Read Online Free Page B

time to talk about happy things. Bim bom, bim bom, that’s what we should be singing. ” He shuffled past Leonid and Milla, raising a hand in greeting or farewell, and made his way up the stairs, still bim-boming.
    “Your turn,” Milla said. Leonid put down the word Zen , which, breathing noisily through her nose, she challenged and disqualified. He only had to play one turn after that — a meek tree — before his parents collected him.
     
     
     
     
    Milla
     
     
    Back in her room, back in her sweatpants, Milla called her grandmother.
    “ Da, lyagushinka, little frog, what’s the matter ?” Baba Byata said. She had nicknamed Milla, her favorite granddaughter, “little frog” on account of her long tongue, with which Milla was able to touch her nose. Her grandmother’s delight in this nickname, and in demonstrations of its origins, was a small, guilty reason that Milla had been a little bit relieved when she’d moved to Boston.
    Milla told her grandmother everything and a bit more. She called Leonid Chaikin a capitalist pig and her grandmother said, “ Da, I understand ,” with only a slight bit of irony: she still believed in the ideals of Communism and the treacheries of money-lust.
    “ I showed him,” Milla said, and told a slightly exaggerated version of her Scrabble victory, which confused her grandmother, who had never played, and Milla had to explain about the values of letters, and it wasn’t as satisfying to tell this part of her story as she’d anticipated. She said, “ Still, it’s very sad, to have your parents stand in the way of your true love. ”
    “ Da, da .”
    “ I wish you were right here ,” Milla said. Her grandmother was wearing, she knew, a polyester housecoat with cheerful, to Byata’s way of thinking, green flowers with orange stems. The housecoat was buttoned to the neck and scratched Milla’s forehead, not unpleasantly, all those times she’d cried into it. She invited her grandmother to Stamford.
    Byata said, “ It’s such a long trip, the train stinks…”
    “ But I’d cook for you. I just learned to make chicken a l’orange. That’s a French chicken recipe. Mom would be happy, too, she keeps talking about taking you shopping for supplements.”
    “ Yes, your mother’s very,” Byata took a breath, “ activnaya .”
    “ So ,” Milla said, hoping that her grandmother might, in sympathy for Milla’s plight, answer her question honestly, “ did you move to Boston to get away from Mom? I would understand , totally.” She began to tell again about what Stalina had said about Malcolm, and how Stalina had probably set out to ruin their love, because she was jealous.
    “ You know, lyagushinka, in these modern times, you can just call that boy you like .”
    A few minutes later, Milla took a deep breath and dialed the number she’d been trying to forget. “Am I interrupting?” She imagined a pyramid of beautiful girls in underpants, standing on one another’s shoulders to make the shape of a “Y,” for Yale, and for the questions of “why” he had ever bothered with someone like her, before tumbling down onto his bed.
    Malcolm said no, he’d just come through the door. He’d been working on his thesis, listening to this amazing vocalist, Ori Shacktar, she’d been in the Israeli army, klezmer could be really raw, did Milla know that?
    Milla told him about how rude she’d been to Leonid. “You dumped me, and he hates me, and now I have to marry him.”
    “I — what?”
    “You don’t understand my culture!” She sounded like Yana.
    “Hey, hey, calm down. You always take what I say the wrong way.”
    Milla tried to take the deep breaths — five counts in, five counts out — her father had taught her in her crybaby youth. She said, “I hardly ever cry, you know that.”
    “Anyway, you don’t want to marry that other guy, you want to marry me.”
    “I never said that, what makes you say that?”
    “I want to marry you, okay? I think it would