Sacred Vows

“Now this is a party!” slurred the second cousin of my second cousin downing his umpteenth double shot of Balinoff. Slapping me on the back with glazed camaraderie, Vadik slithered back unto the lacquered dance floor, elbows ready for the dropping as the strobe lights danced like intoxicated prison yard searchlights around young couples, soused middle-aged men, and —inexplicably —several elder ladies forgetting to lift their chiffon hems.

Nodding to no one in particular, I sipped from my own sloppily poured shkalik, sweeping the room with a surveying swivel. This is a party alright. $90,000 of my uncle’s money later, everything was in its proper place. The uneaten lobster bisque was cooling on approximately 180 plates. Unopened Grey Goose bottles lined the tables, their ice-cold inertia contrasting the dance floor decadence: not a reflection of the guests’ temperance, but a testament to my family’s “better safe than sorry” mantra. No guest goes hungry on our watch, my mom’s face seemed to intone from across the room, where she was chatting up one of our more abhorrent relatives.

“Eh, Vitya, whaddaya say?” Dad interrupted. “Jealous, ey?”

I had little to offer but a shit-eating, cognac-chugging grin.

“Want one like it, eh? Don’t worry, go back for your master’s, and we’ll put on a feast they’ll be talking about from Santa Monica to Sochi!”

As implausible as the prospect sounded, in my still youthful mind, coated with top-shelf spirits, spinning copies of the New Russian Word, Moscow Times, Izvestiya, and Odessa’s Slovo carried front page announcements of my own nuptials to my college sweetheart. Vitaly Siroy, Of The Medical Supply Siroys, Weds…Speaking of…sweetheart? Where are ya? Missing her seriously for the first time that night, I remembered the awkward unpleasantness of her absence and flipped my shiny new phone open to drunk-text her:

Grandma’s finE. False aLarM. Ospital prohibtz cell, Wll call frm home.

The band, suddenly shifting from the Russian golden oldie standard “My Dear Old-Timers,” feting my aunt and uncle courtesy of Cousin Misha’s prodigal best friend, played the first bars of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” a tribute to the youth in our midst. “Ey, Vitya, dance floor, toute d’suite!” ordered my younger sister Valya, who’d just completed her study abroad in Provence. But my mind was still on the song:

My old timers got old,
Unnoticeably as it happens,
And all of a sudden,
My mom is now called a grandma.

Even the liquor couldn’t freeze out my better senses. I looked over at my parents, one at a time; at 65, an age once considered old. Despite my protestations, they did, too. Time was running out and we all knew it. “My old timers got even older…” Dad would croon around the Sunday dinner table, in jest, Mom sighing. No, it was no joke —they wanted grandkids. To make up for the gifts I’d received over the years and hadn’t reciprocated––birth, food, and a healthy sense of shame––I was finally returning the favor by coupling and planting the seed of the only American fruit Mom and Dad had yet to taste. Married?…my God. Where is she, anyway? I searched the room, as if expecting her to come from behind the fake marble Ionic column propping the old rabbi making his third toast to my grandfather’s health. Baby...oh, right, I didn’t bring her. Marisa was knitting wool socks at home, wondering if my grandma’s cerebrovascular accident was resolving. More than happy to report that Grandma was full of punch, tisking disapprovingly at the slow-grinding session my younger cousin Vera was now engaging in with her boyfriend, but, for obvious reasons, I could not. An infrequent liar, tonight I’d committed the most mundane and dishonorable of fibs: I didn’t want my New England-bred, vegan, drama-major, petition-signing girlfriend to see how Russians got married.

TBC...