New York

i got to New York City around 7 pm on the same day that I left home, August 23, 1996. acquaintances of my father's, a couple who had helped us find RIT and submit the paperwork, and who had made the arrangements with my host family in Rochester, were supposed to meet me in New York and tell me what to do next, how to get from New York City to Rochester, New York.
I'd made the mistake of falling asleep on the first leg of my trip, from St. Petersburg to Shannon, Ireland, and couldn't sleep a wink on the second flight. (due to a quirk in post-Cold war politics, Aeroflot flights from St. Petersburg to New York stopped in Ireland.) i disembarked groggy and confused. inside the airport was freezing due to airconditioning and teeming with people. a woman ran up to me at the customs exit and said, in Russian, "are you Olya? you must be Olya. come, come, my husband is circling outside. he can't stop!!"
what? what?
she turned around and without waiting for me to pick up my suitcase, the extra duffel, and the guitar, disappeared in the crowd of people. she then reappeared and waved, "come!"
pushing people out of her way, she rushed to the terminal exit. a blast of heat and humidity hit me in the face. new york city seemed to smell of something rotten. i looked around, expecting to see skyscrapers, but couldn't see anything past the lanes of traffic. while we stood there, waiting for i don't know what, the first raindrops landed. suddenly, somebody mad swerved through several lanes to stop right in front of my companion. "there he is! quick," the woman commanded. "he isn't supposed to stop here."
the raindrops were turning into a torrential downpour, of the kind I'd hardly seen before. the husband opened the trunk, and as best I could, I stuffed my luggage inside. the guitar i took to the back seat with me, and sat there, cradling it between my legs. "you're supposed to buckle," the woman said, turning around from the passenger seat. "ah, whatever. here are your tickets."
she handed me a long envelope. "your flight to Rochester is in forty minutes. it's at a different terminal. we'll drive you there. the family's waiting for you; they will pick you up."
inside the car was like a sauna. when i tried to open the window, i couldn't hear any of the instructions the woman was giving. she was speaking Russian, but i didn't understand half of what she was saying anyway. i closed the window.
"anyway, here you are. bye." her husband, who had said not a word through all of this, stopped the car. they were waiting for me to get out.
"but," I said. "but--"
"don't worry about anything. go, go. he isn't supposed to stop here," the woman said. and indeed, a uniformed man with a whistle was coming our way to shoo the driver from his place at the curb. I jumped out onto the street and rushed to collect my luggage.
inside the terminal, it was mercifully cool and I could collect my wits. I looked at the envelope in my hand. there was a ticket inside, New York City--Rochester, New York. I compared the flight numbers to the numbers on the tableau and went to register my luggage.
at the gate, there was a crowd. somebody made an announcement, but I understood not a word. something was clearly happening though. the tableau was blinking, the people seemed agitated. i decided to go up to the counter and ask if everything was okay. the flight was postponed. i don't think the word postponed was in my vocabulary, and so it took a lot of effort for the airline representative to explain to me what was happening. first it was, "later, later," and then, as the evening progressed it turned into, "tomorrow morning, 6 am."
what to do? my host family was apparently waiting for me in Rochester. "the payphones are over there," the airline representative directed.
the payphone instructions were taped to the payphone itself, and carefully studying the little pictures, I tried to dial the number. to place a distance call, i needed several dollars worth of quarters. luckily, quarters were not a problem. a numismatist uncle had given me a bagful of quarters to take on the trip, happy to collect from my father the equivalent in paper currency.
at the Rochester number, somebody picked up the phone. using the words i had just learned from the airline employee (delayed, postponed), I was able to explain my predicament. tomorrow, I said. 8 am! i wasn't sure who i was talking to and whether i was understood. but i dictated my new flight number to the person on the other end of the line, and that was the best i could do. i hung up the phone. should i call my parents? how many quarters would that take?
and what to do next? where could I spend the night? when did the airport close? could i wait outside?
i returned to the help desk.
"hotel rooms are over there," the airline representative pointed to another counter, where a long line had formed. did i need a hotel room? if all those people were waiting for one, they must've known something i didn't. i was conditioned to wait in queues. i hung in the back of the line, considering. how much did hotel rooms cost? i had about $800 with me, which i hoped would last me for six months.
i ended up paying $200 for the room--the hotel representative promised me that was the only one they had left. following the signs and other passengers, i took the shuttle bus to the hotel. i can't remember whether i had my luggage with me or not. i was confused. going from cold to hot and to cold again.
the hotel was finally a skyscraper, and my room on the sixteenth floor. that was exciting. i turned on the TV, but i was tired and couldn't follow a thing. the American words were all running together and lulling me to sleep.
i couldn't afford to fall asleep.
if i fell asleep, i would NOT be able to get up at five o'clock in the morning, when the airport shuttle would be waiting for me. at home, when i was particularly tired, it took my mother or my grandmother shaking me repeatedly to get me up. (and no, i didn't know about the wake up service. i was probably explained it at the check in, but i didn't get it. i did find the alarm clock in the room, but I did not trust my ability to get up with the help of only one alarm clock. grandmother alarm was far more effective.)
i needed to get to Rochester.
the only solution was to not sleep. i had my audio cassettes. besides the tape that Johnnie had made for me, i had Inna's mix of Metallica and the Scorpions ballads. I had my collection of the Beatles. I put on my headphones and spent the next six hours walking in circles around the $200 hotel room, trying not to fall asleep.

stereotypes

в 1996 в Рочестере я оказалась одной из первых россиянок из пост-Советской России. были ребята иммигрировашие со своими родителями в Бруклин и несколько лет раньше, были ребята из Казахстана и Узбекистана, но вот так вот что прямо из Питера в Рочестер -- таких не было.
от меня ждали, что я буду представлять россию в буквальном смысле. например, организация международных студентов устраивала костюмированную вечеринку, где всем студентам предлагалось нарядиться в национальные костюмы. у многих студентов из индии были с собой сари, с удовольствием переодевались и студенты из японии, малайзии. а мне что делать? надевать кокошник и сарафан, что ли?? (когда-то в моём счастливом советском дествте мы с мамой сооурдили изумительный кокошник из картона и бисера, но даже вспоминать об этом было как-то неловко). я принялась объяснять всем, что на самом деле, я из еврейской семьи, и вообще в пост-советской россии национальные костюмы это отстой. пироги я тоже не пекла, а борщ хоть и приходилось готовить, но это потому, что особого выбора не было.

на вечеринку национального костюма я не пошла, хотя на красивые сари посмотреть и хотелось, но долго проблему игнорировать тоже не получалось. жизнь в россии интересовала всех поголовно, от парней в общежитии до моих профессоров и начальниц в библиотеке, куда я устроилась работать. а что в россии едят на завтрак ланч и обед? в россии правда все очень умные? ты наверное с детства танцуешь в балете и занимаешься фигурным катанием?
чтобы как можно вежливее объяснить свой отказ одевать кокошник, я быстро научилась при первой же встерче с новым человеком представляться иначе: я не из россии, а из петербурга, балет не люблю, люблю Битлз, и вообще я не русская, а из еврейской семьи, бОльшая часть которой находится в израиле. впрочем, с таким ответом тоже время от времени случались проколы. как, например, при встерче с дейвом, который вырос в еврейской семье под Филадельфии и не понаслышке знал об иудаизме. при разговоре с ним быть еврейкой по паспорту становилось тоже как-то неловко. в питере, в моём окружении, были ребята, которые ездили в сохнутские лагеря и которые занимались в синагоге. я была не из их числа.
не помню, подсказал ли мне кто-то, обсуждалось ли это, скажем, на занятиях международного бизнеса, или я со временем сама догадалась, что стереотипы трудно разрушить, отвечая в лоб на продиктованные ими вопросы. а может быть, это урок из крёстного отца, it's not personal it's just business. вопрос -- признак заинтересованности собеседника, и нечего злиться и раздражаться, когда тебе в очередной раз предлагают водку на вечерине. водку со льдом, т.к. россияне привыкли к холоду.
поиск креативных ответов на продиктованные стереотипами вопросы -- вот, на самом деле, огромный стимул к творчеству

in love

1996. so this part is difficult to write. i fell in love with a guy. i called him A in an earlier installment of this story. he was an international student from India, a sophomore, who helped to organize all the welcoming activities for the 1996 incoming freshmen.
A. had that rare spark of organizational brilliance that made everyone want to follow his lead. he, for example, was the guy, who, as we were all standing out on the athletic fields during the bucket brigade challenge, said, why don't we dance The Macarena? and we did. a computer science student, he could dance and sing and loved theatricals of any kind. when he saw that I had a guitar in my dorm room, he instantly wanted me to play it.
"I'm not very good," I said, by which I meant that I played the guitar as a hobby and was not to be judged on the professional scale. I could play well enough a few Russian songs, and I wanted to play for him the Russian songs that meant the world to me, but first I wanted to establish the premises under which I would play the guitar for him: he had to get ready to be charmed.
"There's a good English expression, practice makes perfect," he said, handing me the guitar. From anyone else, I would have found that kind of response insufferable. Not only was he feeding me a platitude, but he was also refusing to understand me on my terms. He was refusing to say, "I'm sure I will enjoy whatever you play because it's you who's playing it."
I probably banged out a three-chord Vyssotsky song and passed the guitar to him. It turned out that not only did he play beautifully, he could also tune the guitar (which I struggled with). He was a little rusty, and nevertheless picked his way into a moving rendition of Stairway to Heaven. That sealed the deal. I wanted him. "Why don't you borrow the guitar?" I offered.
"Don't you want it? If you want to get better at it, you should really play every day."
"Take it," I said. "You're so good, and I love to hear you play it."
it turned out that he could really use it. there was some kind of party he was invited to or that he was organizing, and he couldn't invite me, because it was mostly for Indian kids, and anyway he invited me to a cricket match later, but warned me that I wouldn't understand anything, and i didn't. what i did understand was that he was brilliant at sports, too.
as a seventeen-year old I fell in love easily and constantly, but i fell in love particularly strongly with people who sent me mixed signals. A. seemed to enjoy my admiration, and he would on occasion invite me to parties and cricket matches and rub my shoulders and pat me on the knee. and then he would try to have a conversation with me about how he wasn't ready for a serious relationship and how in America there was such thing as casual dating and have I heard about it?
i knew the word from the English class and translated it to myself as roughly "seeing somebody you're in love with for a good long while with the purpose of finding out whether you two truly love each other and should get married." my heart overflowed with love and I said, yes, I've heard of dating.

Quality Concepts

In the story of my RIT career, a special place will have to be dedicated to my nemesis, one of my business professors, let's call him Mr. P.J. He taught several of the Quality Concepts classes, a series all incoming business students were required to take.

Mr P.J. professed an informal approach to teaching, but decidedly didn't get it when I, trying to learn, reflected back to him the informality that he projected. Note the use of fonts in his assignment and the particular request at the end "to explore hitherto unexplored attributes and traits of your own self." I got in trouble with him (in another paper) for using funny fonts, and I daresay my reference to Voltaire here, in the futile attempt to describe my personality, didn't gain me any points with him.
He gave me a C for this draft, which was not acceptable. If I remember correctly, I got the whole dorm helping me revise this draft. It worked so well that then Mr. P.J. accused me of plagiarism. I was angry. In a personal meeting, I tried to explain to him how much work I put into it. I guess he believed me, though I don't remember him outright saying so. He let me pass the class with a B. This was one of only two Bs in my college career. The rest were As, and I graduated with the highest honors at the top of my class.
Mr. P.J.'s biggest offense though was that he decidedly did not get my sense of humor. I found myself pretty hilarious and made sure to spice each paragraph with a joke or two.

air-conditioning

In August 1996, Rochester was oppressively hot and humid. The heat caused me considerable discomfort the following summer, and during all three summers that I spent in Rochester without air-conditioning, but when I think of my first summer days in Rochester, it's not the heat that comes to mind, but the cold.
I'd never been exposed to air-conditioning before. I'd hardly been aware of the existence of air-conditioning as a practical technology outside of science fiction novels. Not even my father's car had an air-conditioner. For one week a year when the weather in St. Petersburg climbed into the 70s, people took cold showers and made cold soup for dinner.
Every indoor space in Rochester seemed air-conditioned on high (except, later, it turned out, student housing). My host parents took me to Wegmans, K-Mart, Sam's Club, and all I remember is being extremely uncomfortable and wanting to get back outside into the heat. From the store to the back seat of the car, where I was also too cold. I soon learned that I wasn't supposed to open the car window when the air-conditioning was on. They explained that the air-conditioning had levels, and tried to adjust the blowers just right, but I wasn't used to having a blower directed at my face, and so couldn't tell whether the temperature was too hot or too cold. It was just wrong.
When the time came to go to orientation at RIT, I put on my stockings and heels, suffering through the day of being alternatively too cold inside and too hot outside. How did people manage stockings in these conditions? It turned out, they didn't. Most of the students around me, men and women, wore jeans with something that looked like oversized pajamas on top. T-shirt was a new word in my vocabulary. Another new word: sneakers. These were what I considered gym shoes. Few women wore make-up, unless they put it on so carefully that I didn't even notice.
I recalled having a conversation with a friend, back in St. Petersburg, about her aging grandmother, who, though she hadn't left the house in some years, began each day by putting on her powder and mascara and lipstick. "She just doesn't feel like a human being without it," my friend said. We both agreed: her grandmother was a strong old lady who didn't allow old age to get to her. Wearing make-up to one's dying day was the example of womanhood to aspire to.
The college students around me decidedly treated the college as though it was some kind of country village. The whole atmosphere was very country side. People rode their bikes, lay down to rest on the lawn, and, to my amazement, some even took off their shoes in the classrooms. Campus buildings were surrounded by nature: woods on one side of the property, swamp on the other. I saw a squirrel! There was talk of deer! Having spent every summer of my life in the countryside fifty kilometers north of Petersburg, I'd never seen a deer in my life.
My host family had a decently sized back yard, and it was a sign of true luxury that all of the plants they grew were purely decorative. They could've grown tomatoes and cherries and plums, but they didn't need to.
When the sun neared the horizon, the smell of freshly mowed grass stood in the air. The full sky was brightly lit with stars. I heard chirping of a myriad of voices, which from novels about Ukraine, I decided must've been the cicadas. It was a shame to have to sleep behind the closed window, but because of the air-conditioning, the windows were supposed to stay closed. Intimidated by the machinery of the blinds, I kept them shut too.