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August
My mother gave birth to me in the middle of August. I still bloom at the same time every year – I feel small and naked and not ready to breathe, but I also feel long-awaited and warm and pushed. I get a glimpse of those sensations every morning at nine – everyone must be the closest to who they are at the hour they were born.
Today I think of my mother, clearly too anemic to be giving birth yet again in that late summer heat. Yet again she was panting, yet again she was soaking in sweat – the way she did two years prior, when she was twenty-three. She told me about it on my twenty-third August. She made it a habit to tell me of things when I turn the age at which they happened to her.
“If I could take it at that time,” she said, “then you can too.”
So two years ago, I learned about her first pregnancy.
“That baby was ugly,” she said, “because it was stillborn. But you, you were so cute.”
Back then, on my twenty-third birthday, I felt my almost-sister or almost-brother – it must have been a sister, I don’t think our family could have fitted a boy – I felt her weight in my mother’s stomach when we were hugging. Today, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I can feel the August sun on the morning I was born. That sun isn’t hot, it’s just warm, but the air heated through June and July must have felt like steam. I guess my mother likes steam – it’s been decades since she started going to the bathhouse every other week.
I remember the first time she took me with her – it was somewhere after my pink potty and before going to school.
I was sitting on the couch. I think I spent most of my time on it. It had a green faux leather cover that my mother wiped with a mixture of soap, vinegar and lemon acid for months before it lost the tacky smell. It was the perfect size for my mother and me – she called it a one-and-a-half-person. We only got a new couch when I completely grew out of my half-personhood – that is, when I moved away for college.
That couch was awfully tall, or at least it felt like it, and I was born with a fear of heights. When my friends from the neighborhood climbed trees and garages, I stayed down. I think that’s why I was so late to most first times – first kisses, first cigarettes, first sips of Karmi Cherry. They all happened on top of things – on garages, on roofs, on fire escapes. On top of other people, too – I missed out on that first time for quite a while. I think mothering me must have been very easy, at least in those early days.
When my mother noticed that I could only go on and off the couch with her help, she started putting me on it just to keep me in one place. It worked for years. Most kids would have probably learned to get down, but I just waited for my legs to get longer.
The first time my mother took me to the bathhouse, my legs were still short and I sat there on that faux leather in the small puddle of sweat, watching her run around, packing.
A few steps away from me was an orange sportsbag. My mother told me she got it when she was pregnant with me, and the bag has followed me ever since – to my first sleepover, to college, to all moving around for work and cheaper rent. She got two towels and some sheets from our bedroom, folded them and put them at the bottom. My first towel was pink and plushy and had a big bear on it. My mother had a plain white one, and I remember wanting to grow up to have that instead of the stupid pink bear.
Then my mother grabbed the shampoo and the conditioner from the shower. She opened the lids and poured them into some small glass juice bottles she cleaned and dried prior. She did the same with some washing powder from under the sink. When my mother put her miniatures into the bag, she moved to soap. She had a bar for cleaning the sheets, underwear and for the first wash – that was kir sabyn, dirty soap. In Russian, they called it the household soap. The way my skin tightened and squeaked after using it made me wonder if we should be using it to wash our bodies – maybe there’s a reason the soap is dirty, or household, but it felt like my mother knew better.
“If something’s good enough to wash your underwear,” she said, “it’s good enough to wash your face. You don’t get it yet, but what’s down there is more important than what’s up here.”
She slapped my butt and then pinched my cheek.
My mother also had a soap bar for me – the Ukrainian “Long-eared Nanny.” For herself, she put in a bar of Palmolive, always the rosy bloom. All the soaps were put in dishes, and the dishes were first put into plastic bags, and then into the sportsbag. There went the washcloths – her green and mine blue. Some sponges, a saucepan. The hairdryer – so I won’t catch a cold on our way back. The slippers – her foam slides with the tiny acupressure bumps all around, and my flip-flop sandals. Her flat comb and my hairbrush with a mirror on its back. Clean underwear, too – mine was always some white with a ribbon on the elastic band, and hers was of the same shape but no decor.
I was looking at my legs, stretching and swinging them in the air, trying to grow them out to get down, when my mother zipped the bag. Then, she packed me just like she packed the bag – lifted me and put me on the bed, swapped my tights and my shirt, put my hair into a high ponytail and strapped the velcro on my sparkly shoes.
Fully packed, my mother, with the orange bag on her shoulder, and I, clinging with the entirety of my palm to her pinky, walked to “Communal Baths.” It was a white building with sparse windows, no balconies, and wide and heavy front doors. When my mother held the door for me to go inside, I learned what cleanness really smelled like – wood and soap.
My mother paid for our entry at the reception – two hundred tenge for one and kids below five got in for free.
We went further down the hall and turned right into the first door – the changing room. I took off everything my mother put on me – it has always been easier for me to undress. My mother helped me with some buttons, put my clothes into the locker, and started changing, too. Then she grabbed the empty saucepan from our bag, put the products in it, and gave me some sheets to hold onto.
As we entered the wash room, the bathhouse grew loud. I heard the showers splashing, the taps running, the basins getting filled and pouring out puddles of water. I heard the dirt and I heard the cleanness, too – in how the washcloths were scrubbing the skin, and how the soap and the shampoo were foaming up. It was water all around, all kinds of water – hot and cold, muddy and clear, droplets of sweat covering everyone’s bodies from either a long day or from sitting in the steam, and tears from the soap stinging someone’s eyes.
We went up to one of the tiled benches in the corner.
“Don’t sit yet,” my mother said. She left me standing and went up to the pile of basins in the middle of the room. She took one, then went to the taps, sat her baggies and started pouring water into the basin. The water was so hot I saw it exerting steam. My mother closed the tap, and took out the glass dish with the powder. She added some to the basin, then took a sponge and started washing the insides. Her hands must have hurt, I thought, and I had that thought a lot – and still, I don’t think I have ever touched hands softer than hers. Or perhaps, I don’t think hands softer than hers have ever touched me.
My mother poured out the foaming water on the floor – it swiftly flowed to the closest drain, leaving some bubbles behind. Then she made a few more rounds to the taps and splashed our seat with more hot foamy water. She took the sheets from me and spread one of them out on the bench. It got wet. The other sheets were put aside.
“Sit,” my mother said.
I sat down. She bathed me with very little gentleness – she washed me as if I was a shirt, pressing harder on the sides of my tummy, my hips and my back, and squeezing my hair as if it was a cleaning cloth she just used to mop the floors. I saw some dirt coming down with the water and hiding in the drain. I waited for my mother to wash herself, and then we went to the steaming room.
My mother and I preferred banya to anything else. In hamam’s thick wet fog and dim lights I could hardly talk or see anyone. The sauna got too hot too quickly, and the air was so dry that it made it hard to breathe. The banya, though, was yellow and bright, the stones on the furnace exhaled steam that clouded my sight just for a bit, and the heat came in waves. The smell of smoked oak opened my lungs and the heat traveled through them right into my belly.
We always rushed to the steam room when my mother saw one of the workers cleaning a big fan. That was another thing I grew to like about banyas – the big group steams. Ten in the morning, birch steam. Noon, pine steam. Two in the afternoon, fir-tree steam. And so on and so forth, right until midnight.
Entering the banya that first time, my mother laid down a folded sheet drenched with cool water on the lower bench. I ran to it as fast as I could, feeling the heat of the wooden floors burn the soles of my feet – everyone left their slippers outside. She then laid another sheet for herself, a step above me. Hers was thinner, and she liked to feel the warmth of the planks pressed against her limbs and her core – she often laid on her back, closed her eyes, and I worried she would fall asleep and dry out into just skin and bones. The steamroom worker came in, unfolding her gigantic fan with a wooden frame and linen cloth between the folds.
“Good afternoon, girls,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. Everyone in the bathhouse was a girl to one another. The older guests were girls, the middle-aged workers were girls, my mother was a girl, and I was a girl, too.
“Anyone here doesn’t like pines?” She said.
“That’s my favorite,” said one of the women above us.
“Good, then pass this around, girls.” She took a stack of leafy branches tied up together from a bucket near the furnace. “It’s a juniper broom. Good for the joints. Press it up like this.”
She folded her fan halfway and put it close to her body. The broom went around. Each woman took a moment with it, holding it close to her heart and sighing. Some put it on their knees, on their lower back, their calves.
The lady with the fan then took a tiny bottle from beneath her sports bra, and poured a bit onto the rocks in the furnace. It started smelling like pines. She lifted her fan and first waved it at the rocks. I felt the temperature rise. The heat was coming along the strokes of the fan, so everyone inhaled and exhaled together with that rhythm. Someone passed the broom to my mom, and she pressed it against my chest, then my neck and my face. I thought the leaves would smell like sweat from everyone’s bodies, but instead I sniffed wood and pepper and lemon. Nothing in the bathhouse ever smelled like sweat. Maybe only the drains in the shower rooms – used soap smelled like dirt, steam smelled like cleanliness.
The lady’s gestures became wider. She started slowly turning towards the benches, waving hot air at us. It was hard to keep my eyes open, so I turned away from the fan, leaving my back to it. When the heat reached my mom, she stretched her arms up and long, and women from above sighed again. They called her a small dainty thing, talked about her tiny waist, still shapely breasts, sharp collarbones, and then looked at each other.
All the compliments made something in me rise up – I think it was the same feeling my mother had when she got me all dolled up for matinees.
Then the women looked at me.
“How old is she?”
“Did you give birth yourself?”
“When did you stop breastfeeding to keep that?”
And they glanced at my mother’s breasts one more time.
The women learned I was five, and a natural birth – they let out short moans and grunts of approval. Or perhaps they all just liked how the woman with the fan splashed more cold water on the hot stones.
“She’s a formula baby though,” my mother said. The women seemed displeased.
“Nothing’s better than breastmilk,” someone said. “But at least you got to keep your boobs.”
My mom yawned and stretched out yet again.
Back then I thought that if it took me drinking fake milk from the bottle to keep my mother looking good, I would do that for the rest of my life. When I grew up just enough – that is, when I became taller than my mother, and my hands grew larger than hers, or was it that her hands shrunk from all the steam— When I looked at my mother’s dimples that settled on her face permanently, not needing a smile, and when I looked at the line that stayed between her eyebrows, not needing a frown; when I first noticed that her forehead was getting wider, or was it that her eyes were sliding down, or that her hair was climbing up the scalp, or maybe all those things were happening at the same time— That was when I thought that I would like to keep her from drying away even more. I looked at myself, too, and saw how I grew to resemble her more than in character, I saw it all in the physical – I watched myself becoming the image of her that I saw when I first opened my eyes. That is, of course, impossible – when babies open their eyes, they see blurred black-and-white shapes. I guess what I mean is – tomorrow, I will turn the age at which my mother gave birth to me. I will turn twenty-five, and I think celebrating it at the “Communal Baths” with her is an idea as nice as any other.
I take a bag and a train and find myself in front of my mother’s apartment. The door is still the same, and on my birthday eve I am the closest to the baby my mother once had and the girl she raised right here, so I take out the key that I still carry in my wallet out of habit – and when I try to turn it, it takes me the same hip bump to get the door unlocked. I go inside and see the couch and the kitchen, the TV playing some low-budget Russian romcom, muted. I hear the water running behind the closed door to the bathroom.
My mother comes out, hair still foamed, her body covered with a towel clamped in her hands.
“Oibai,” she says. I’ve also been saying that lately, and I would like to undo that – it’s awful enough that there are things that age us, like cardigans, smoking and not wearing sunscreen, but there are also words that age us even worse.
“Sorry for breaking in,” I say and close the door behind me.
She rushes to me with a hug and makes my blouse wet with all the water dripping off from her. As she wraps her hands around me, I feel like I am shrinking. I shrink into a teen when she pats me on the back, and it feels like the night I told her I don’t want her to be home for my birthday party. It’s been years since then, and now the only thing I want for my birthday is to be with her. Then she brings my face closer to her chest, and I shrink into the girl I was when I cried after a classmate called me a bitch. I first had to ask my mother what that meant, and then, after I learned – a very unpleasant woman – I cried the whole night. No way, I thought, I am not a woman, I am a girl, a girl. Then my mother kisses my forehead, and I finally shrink into a baby. Just for the second that the kiss lasts.
“Janym-janym,” my mother says. Janym-janym, I mouth, and the words taste sweet. I tried calling my first boyfriend that – janym, I said, Maksim, how was your day? It didn’t really stick for the brief two weeks we dated – maybe because Maksim was Korean and to him janym meant my soul, and to me it meant what I was to my mother. Maksim could never – never in those two long weeks – he could never get the sound right. Janim, janum, janam – so different from my mother’s warm janym. I don’t know who instilled this idea that my boyfriend, or even I – that either one of us had to be like my mother, but ever since I started dating I have been looking for that, the motherly.
This night my mother and I sleep in one bed, and because I forgot my pajamas, I wear one of her old nightgowns. She looks at me and says that she can’t believe it once suited her just as well.
I wake up in the morning and we have breakfast – my mother makes sunny side ups, and when the clock hits nine, she kisses me on the head and hugs me tightly. I shrink, shrink, shrink.
“Happy birthday,” she says, and I once again bloom and feel small and naked and not ready to breathe, but also long-awaited and warm and pushed.
When we walk into “Communal Baths” on this hot mid-August day, it smells just the same; it smells like cleanness. I am carrying that old orange sportsbag, and my mother is carrying a backpack. Much better for her spine. We pay two thousands at the entrance – a thousand for her, and a thousand for me. We walk down the hall and turn to the right.
We unload our bags to separate lockers. My mom is still wearing the same type of white that covers most of her butt, and then she takes it off and puts on a pair of disposable bottoms. I do the same.
In the shower room, we take our separate basins and clean two neighboring benches in an identical manner. We rub each other’s backs.
In the banya, my mother climbs up to the top bench. I see her surrounded by women with similarly grey hair – my mother dyes it red these days, but the silver is coming through on her temples and roots. She spreads her sheet and lies down on her side – I get on the middle bench and face her. One of the women from above glances at me and clicks her tongue.
“Look at that pretty thing,” she nudges the woman next to her. They both click their tongue three times – I am afraid that it’s the next mannerism my mom is going to pick up now that she’s mastered oibai. Ts, ts, ts— I can see myself doing that soon after, too.
“What a girl,” says her neighbor. “Just like us!”
They laugh and push each other lightly. Their hands touching their shoulders sound like wet kisses.
“Thank you,” says my mother. “I worked hard to get that one.”
They laugh more and my mother pats my head. I pull my knees closer to my chest and feel a droplet of sweat running down my arched back.
“Where did you get this?” My mother points at my elbow. I look at it and see a small scar I got a year ago.
“Got scratched by a cat,” I say.
“You’ve got a cat?” She says.
“No, I just got scratched by it,” I say.
“Remember how you used to tell about stuff like that?” She says. “Mommy, my knee; mommy, I got a papercut.”
Instead, I remember the first time I hid something from her – it was my period.
I knew that there would come a day when I would bleed and start using pads.
“Probably at twelve,” said my mother. “Mine came at twelve.”
So after my period came when I was eleven, I got so scared something was wrong with me that I just didn’t tell her. The first few times blood was so minimal and fast-passing that I just folded layers of toilet paper to soak it up. I flushed it all into the toilet, and whenever I stained my underwear, I just washed it with kir sabyn right away. I remember coming to the bathhouse with her, undressing and thinking that she knows, she has to know, she can see it on my body. She couldn’t, so I waited until I turned twelve and made a big scene out of seeing blood down there and crying and getting my first box of pads.
I learned that I can be naked and still have secrets. I hid my first sex, too – I think my mother was waiting for it more than I did.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re so old it’s getting embarrassing.”
She taught me about STIs and gave me condoms; she never closed my eyes during a movie, and often sex was the happy part after which she turned the TV off – she had this habit of dropping things at their peak. I wanted the sex story I would tell her to live up to everything she put into my head. It never did.
In my senior year of college I liked a boy and a boy liked me – we had plenty of mutual friends and always ended up at the same parties. Nothing went wrong there – if anything, I think my mother would have been excited to hear that I hooked up with a guy at a house party. She would’ve said it is very western, very forward-thinking. Yet, me and that boy – Ulan – did this thing where we sat on other people’s beds and listened to songs that he liked. I really liked him, so I waited playlist after playlist to see if sitting shoulder to shoulder gets me anywhere.
I really couldn’t stand being the last virgin amongst my friends. Ulan and I saw each other almost every day, and I really got the gist of emo-rock – we’re talking Moss Icon, Jimmy Eat World and Street Smart Cyclist. I found myself singing along to some song when he and I were lying on my twin-sized dorm bed, and then he asked if he could kiss me and I wanted to punch his face, but instead I said yes, yes. We kissed very sloppily, very tit for tat – if I bit his lip, he bit mine. When he went down to my neck, I was acutely aware of every sound I made. What is a moan, I thought, and when do I enact it? I made sounds at what I thought were sexy places to kiss – behind the ear, the collarbones, the mole between my breasts – and all the disorganized squeezing and patting made me wiggle in panic. He must have mistaken that for excitement – and there really was excitement, but more than that there was confusion. I grew competitive – when he grabbed me, I felt like I had to return that to keep up, and so I gripped and clutched and pinched his body.
Clothes were being pulled off – first my top, then his t-shirt, and that was how I learned the inequality of baring a man’s torso compared to a woman’s. I wished he would stop and look at my underwear – the poor matching bralette and bottoms – but the bra went away pretty quickly. We struggled with both of our jeans – he had a belt and mine had a bad zipper – and then I took a condom out of my bedside table. I never learned to put one on, so I handed it to him. He looked like he knew what was happening – he ripped it with his teeth and I had another urge to punch his face, and then he rolled it down. It rolled back up. He rolled it down again. It rolled back up. I wanted to help, but I also didn’t know if I should ask if I could touch him. My mother only ever said that guys should ask me before they do anything, and she never thought of a reversed scenario. Eventually, Ulan got the condom on by pinching and dragging it down the edges.
Then he laid me on my back – or did I do that myself – and we kissed. I kept thinking if my hair was looking okay, if I was making pleasant sounds and if it felt good to be with me. I couldn’t read his face, so I decided to assert a positive emotion myself.
“Yes,” I said, “it feels so good.”
And when he didn’t say anything affirming back at me, I wanted to punch my own face. He went faster, then slower, then faster again – I looked at his face and his eyes were on where our bodies hurtled together. When I saw that, I decided to look at it too. When he finished and pulled out, he stretched his hand out to take off the condom.
“Shoot,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not there,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
I looked down and saw his bare penis. I thought of the times I felt like I closed the door and I haven’t, or when I was sure that I took my keys but I didn’t – but I remembered the condom rolling up and down.
“Where is it?” I said.
I got on my knees and looked at the bed. There was nothing. I looked at the floor. It was dusty.
“No way,” I said. “Is it there?”
I pointed down. My vagina ate the condom, I thought. And there’s cum in it. I started crying right then – and I haven’t stopped when Ulan tried to fish the condom out with his hand, and when we went to buy a Plan B pill and when I got a bad allergic reaction to it. I cried again when I saw a gynecologist and got my very first pap smear. There are things that don’t belong there, I thought, and it’s a used condom and a tube, and maybe even Ulan’s hand – at least not like that.
The only thing I told my mother was that I thought I was in love with some guy. I didn’t tell her, though, that it was because of how he cradled me like a baby when I sobbed, kissed away my Plan B rash, showered with me and taught me how to easily tell which way panties should go.
“There’s an open seam at the crotch, it looks like a pocket,” he said, and I couldn’t believe that my mother never told me that. Ulan learned it from dressing his little sister. It’s been some time since we broke up, but I still look for that open seam whenever I put on my underwear.
When my mother and I leave the banya, we go straight to our benches to exfoliate – we scrub each other’s backs and let the dirt roll down and flow to the drain. Then we do another round of soap, use shampoos and conditioners, and come out to the changing rooms anew. I put on my underwear looking at that seam. We dress up, blowdry each other’s hair and head home.
On our way, we stop at a cake shop. When we’re back, my mother makes dinner. We eat kuurdak and have cake for dessert. When I cut into it, my mother closes her eyes and makes a wish.
“Cherish the body I gave birth to,” she says. “Really, today should be my day.”
“I know, I know,” I say. “Happy birth-giving day.”
“Thanks,” she says. “You were such a perfect baby. You know, some babies are ugly, but you were so plump and sweet.”
“I know, I know.”
This birthday, my mother tells me another story. When amidst August heat she was trying to push me out – and I was one stubborn baby – she got ripped way too far. The tear led to blood, way more blood than there was supposed to be, and at the very end there was me, very healthy and crying for the first time in my life; my mother, sent to intensive care; and the womb I just came out of, all cut up to shreds and pieces.