Free Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart Page B

hand.
    “St. Petersburg,” said her mother, Vincie, with undue authority and then laughed loudly over her own overbearing nature.
    “Yes,” Vladimir admitted, although he could never picture the city of his birth—where Lenin’s munificent visage peeked out of every kiosk and water closet—going by any other name. He told them the story of how he was born with such a big forehead that the director of the maternity ward personally congratulated his mother on giving birth to the next Vladimir Ilyich.
    Her parents cackled up a mixture of genuine laughter andpoliteness. With a few more Armagnacs, guessed Vladimir, it would settle on the former.
    “That’s wonderful,” said Joseph, mindlessly layering his industrial-gray hair. “And you still have a tremendous forehead!”
    Before Vladimir had a chance to blush, Francesca (blushing herself) entered the book-lined living room in a black velvet dress that clung to her like a second skin. “Why, Frannie,” Vincie brayed, adjusting her enormous pinkish eyeglasses. “Look at you! Where did you say you were headed tonight, dear?”
    “Just to a little party,” Francesca smirked at her mother. Vladimir presumed she didn’t like being called Frannie, and he loved it—another item for her burgeoning file, along with the contact-lens solution he spotted in the bathroom (and why not glasses?).
    “So what do you do, Mr. Girshkin?” Joseph said with exaggerated gravity, as if to suggest that he was not about to take himself seriously, although Vladimir certainly could if he wanted to.
    “Leave him alone, Dad,” Francesca said, and Vladimir smiled inwardly at this happy American word: Dad. There was something awkward and demeaning, he had always felt, in the Russian papa.
    “Sometimes your Happy Hegemon act is just a little too convincing,” Francesca told her father. “How would you like it if we had lost the Cold War and not Vladimir’s country?”
    Yes, Vladimir liked the Ruoccos, there was no doubt. Both were City College professors, and Vladimir had met his share during his tenure at the math-and-science high school, where professorial offspring herded together to form an intellectual elite. All the welcoming signs were there: a copy of the New Left Review on the coffee table; an unlimited supply of booze in the kitchen; their unabashed feeling of pleasant surprise at meeting an intelligent young person after the long days of lecturing to hundreds ofsleeping bodies, only to be confronted by overeager Baobab-types during office hours.
    “I resettle immigrants,” Vladimir said.
    “That’s right, he speaks Russian,” Vincie said, a self-congratulatory smile on her cracked lips.
    “We better go soon,” Francesca said.
    “Another shot of Armagnac won’t hurt anyone,” said Joseph, shaking his head at his daughter and her prudery.
    “Oh, you’ll get them smashed before the party!” laughed Vincie. She held out her own glass for a refill.
    “And what do your parents do?” Joseph said, overfilling Vladimir’s glass. Vladimir raised his eyebrows and folded his arms—a gesture performed reflexively whenever his family was mentioned—until Joseph was visibly worried that he had struck a sensitive nerve, and Francesca looked ready to disembowel him, or at least use the word “hegemon” again. But then Vladimir revealed the Girshkins’ exclusive professions, and everyone smiled and toasted to the foreigners.
    WHEN LOOKING BACK at the summer, which Vladimir would do microscopically in the restless years to come, it could all be said to have come together in that one evening, although that evening was not terribly different from the evenings that would follow. It was simply the first. It set the tone. First the lovely, interested parents. Then the lovely, interested daughter. Then the lovely, interested friends. And then, once again, the lovely, interested daughter à la carte, off to bed still lovely and interested.
    Lovely? Not a catalog beauty: her nose