The Secrets We Kept Read Online Free PDF Page B

whispered “Good luck.” I smiled and told myself to knock it off.
    I checked the time on the wall clock as an excuse to check out the petite brunette seated to my left. She seemed just out of secretarial school—twenty, maybe, but she didn’t look a day over sixteen. Prettier than me, she wore a coat of glossy pink nail polish the color of ballet slippers. She had one of those hairstyles that looked as if it had taken a lot of time and bobby pins to achieve. And she wore an outfit that looked new: a long-sleeved dress with a white collar and hound’s-tooth heels. It was the kind of dress I would’ve seen in a department store window and wished I could buy instead of having to go home and draw it on a piece of paper so my mother could make me a knockoff. My own blasted wool skirt was a copy of a lovely gray one I’d seen on a mannequin in a Garfinckel’s widow display a year earlier.
    I complained far too often that my clothes weren’t store-bought or even in fashion, but after the litigator had fully retired and let me go, Mama’s seamstress business was the only thing paying the rent for our basement apartment. She worked out of the dining room on an old Ping-Pong table we’d found on the curb. We removed the broken net and she positioned her pride and joy—a foot-pedal Vesta that was a gift from my father, and one of the only items she’d taken with her on the journey from Moscow—on the large green table. In Moscow, Mama had worked at a Bolshevichka factory, but she always had a black-market side business creating custom dresses and wedding gowns. She was a bulldog of a woman—in looks and temperament. She’d come to America during the last of the second wave of Russian immigrants to leave the Motherland. The borders were on the brink of closing, and if my parents had waited even a few more months, I’d have grown up behind the Iron Curtain instead of in the Land of the Free.
    When they’d packed up their tiny room, in a collective apartment shared with four families, Mama had been three months pregnant with me and hoped to reach American shores in time for my birth. In fact, Mama’s pregnancy was what motivated my parents to leave. As her belly swelled, my father had secured the necessary papers and a place to live temporarily—with second cousins who’d made a life for themselves in a place called Pikesville, Maryland. It sounded so exotic to Mama at the time, and she’d whisper it to herself like a prayer: “Maryland,” she’d say. “Maryland.”
    At the time, my father had worked in an armaments factory, but before that, he’d attended the Institute of the Red Professors, where he studied philosophy. In his third year, he was dismissed for expressing ideas which fell outside the designated curriculum. The plan was for my father to seek work at one of the many universities in Baltimore or Washington, save up by living with our cousins for a year or two, then buy a house, a car, have another baby—the whole thing. My parents dreamed about the baby they’d have. They’d visualized its entire life: birth in a clean American hospital, learning its first words in both Russian and English, attending the best schools, learning to drive a big American car on a big American highway, maybe even playing baseball. In their dream, they’d sit up in the stands and eat peanuts and cheer. And in their future home, Mama would have a room of her own to make her dresses, and maybe even start her own business.
    They said goodbye to their parents and siblings and everyone and everything they’d ever known. They knew that once they left, they’d never be able to return, their citizenship stripped permanently for the pursuit of the American dream.
    I was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and my first word was a Russian da, followed by an English no. I did attend an excellent public school and even played softball and learned to drive in my cousin’s Crosley. But my father never saw any of it. It took years for