Everybody knew but me!

    One of the cleaning staff came Tuesday afternoon to empty the trash, sweep the floors, clean the bathrooms, and mop. The nice little man teased Nellie a bit and went about his business.
    Nellie leaned over to me. "She always does that."
    "Umm...she?"
    "Yes, yes, the cleaning lady."
    "Nellie," I corrected, "that's a man."
    "Oh, no. It's a woman."
    I read his nametag. Raul Vicente. Definitely a man's name. I told Nellie I was pretty certain.
    "I'm going to ask him." She didn't believe me. "Are you a man or a woman?" she asked--in Russian, of course. I had to translate.
    Surprise mixed with good humor in his face. He pantomimed astonishment and cupped his hands suggestively at his chest. "See? None of those. I'm a man!"
    Nellie was still incredulous. "Surely not. Look at your hair!"
    He insisted. "I have a son!" He showed us a picture. "I'm a man!" Shaking his head, he continued working.
    Nellie whispered, "He had a son with a woman?"
    I rolled my eyes at her. "Of course with a woman."
    Raul had to mop the floor, so we waited in the hall. Nellie grabbed the hand of one of the attendants and pointed at the cleaning man. "Eta muzhchina ili zhenshina?"
    Once again, I had to translate. "She wants to know if he's a man or a woman."
    The attendant's eyebrows rose in shock. "He's a man!"
    Nellie threw up her hands. "Everybody knew but me!"

I don't like it.

    I noticed Nellie eyeing my shirt as I sat with her one Tuesday afternoon and wondered what was up. It was black with brightly colored flowers--peasant style, maybe not the height of fashion, but I thought it was pretty.
    Finally she spoke. "I don't like that shirt."
    "Oh." What else could I say? "I'm sorry."
    "You should take it back."
    "Well, I can't. I've had it for several years and washed it many times."
    Nellie corrected herself. "No, I mean you should get rid of it."
    I raised my eyebrows. "I don't want to get rid of it. I like it. If you don't like it, you could just not look at me."
    She put on her pitiful expression. "But I want to look at you! I don't have anybody else to look at."
    "Don't look at the shirt, then, if you don't like it. Just look at my face." I held my hands like a window around my head.
    "I can't! I tried, and then--whoosh, there's the shirt."
    I was exasperated. "Nellie, how would you like it if I said I didn't like your shirt?"
    She looked down at her own clothes. "What's wrong with this shirt?"
    "Oy, for example. Would you think that was very nice?"
    Nellie thought about it. "But I'm older than you."
    I rolled my eyes. I couldn't help it. "So does that mean you don't need to be polite?"
    She thought some more. "Nooo....it doesn't mean that."
    "Well, then." I thought the subject was closed and picked up my teacup.
    Nellie looked at me a moment longer and then shook her head. "But I really don't like that shirt."

Sister Found

    Homesickness strikes in so many forms. For Nellie lately, it's shown up in her wish to reconnect with family and friends from Moscow and Baku.
    "I have a sister who went to teach at an institute in Vienna," she informed me one Tuesday afternoon, midway through tea. Russians use the terms "sister" and "brother" for every degree of cousinship, and I was pretty sure this time she meant a cousin. "I haven't heard from her in so long. How can I get in touch with her?"
    Nellie has an ancient spiral notebook, with loose pages falling out at every turn, scribbled phone numbers and addresses in no particular order, scratched out and re-written so many times it's nearly impossible to find anything. I was hopeful that perhaps she had this cousin's information somewhere. "Do you have her address? Or phone number?"
    She pulled out the notebook and started scrutinizing the pages. "Well, I thought I did. But I can't find it. Maybe you could ask the address table."
    I didn't think I'd understood correctly. "The what?"
    She said it again. "The address table."
    "You really mean address table?" I used the English words to make sure.
    "Yes, yes, you know...the address table. If you can't find somebody you ask them and they find them for you."
    I've read about sending mail to the local post office in a foreign country, to be held until called for. But that was in very old stories. I wasn't sure such a thing as an address table existed anymore. Or if it did, I wasn't sure how to find the one in Vienna. I wasn't ready to give up yet, however. "What's her name?"
    "Ira," Nellie answered, as if that was plenty.
    "How about her family name and patronymic? Do you know which institute she went to teach at? What year did she move to Vienna? Is she still teaching?" If I was going to have any chance at finding this sister, I'd need a little more to go on than her nickname.
    Nellie searched the recesses of her memory and filled in some of the gaps. "But how can we find her?" she wailed. "I don't know what happened to her address!"
    I didn't mention the possibility of an internet search, because Nellie has absolutely no concept of the internet. And if I were to fail, she'd probably fall into the depths of despair. But I intended to try. The next morning I typed the name she'd given me in a Google search bar. Guess who came up on the first page? Nellie's long-lost cousin, at the Institute of Vienna!
    I could hardly contain my excitement. Could it really be that easy? I sent a message to Irina, explaining that I was writing on behalf of Nellie. Irina immediately responded. Yes, she was Nellie's cousin, and she was so happy to find her again! Did Nellie have a telephone number so she could talk directly to her?
    We decided that I'd better warn Nellie before she got the call. Otherwise, as Irina said, "too much emotion, even good emotion, might be bad for her health."
    So I told her. "I have good news! I found Irina, and she still lives in Vienna, and she wants to call you!"
    Nellie was flabbergasted. "How did you do it? Oh, you good girl! But I don't understand. You just put her name in the computer? But that's amazing! And here I was all worried that I would never talk to her again."
    If only all stories had such a happy ending.

Concert

    Nellie's nephew gave a spring concert on her birthday weekend, and when I came on Tuesday I asked how it had gone. Usually her response is that it was absolutely wonderful, positively miraculous, and I really should have been there. This time I got a slightly different answer.
    "Well, they came about 4:30 to pick me up and we went to this restaurant where they serve sandwiches. I got some sort of roll with kitchen in it." She used the English word "kitchen" and I raised my eyebrows at her.
    "Are you sure? Kitchen is kukhnya (kitchen)."
    She wrinkled her forehead and thought. "No, that's not right. It was...let me think...chicken." English again.
    I laughed. "Ohhh. That makes much more sense."
    "And then we went to the university and they had to set everything up, so I rolled around and watched them and waited and waited and then finally it was time to start. So they played lots of music and it was very nice and then there was an intermission and I thought, What are they going to do in the second half? They've already played everything! And when they came back, they started congratulating everybody who was graduating. If it had only been two or three, it would have been alright, but they went on and on and on. And everybody had to say something, and everybody had to give presents and get presents and I was so tired I just wanted to go home. I was nervy and overexcited...you know how I get! Finally they were done, but then he had to clean up. So we waited and waited, and I said, 'Karik, can we please go?' and we went out to the car and then he couldn't find his keys so he had to go back inside and look for them and at last he came back and we left and THEN they wanted to go to a restaurant!"
    I was laughing so hard at her telling that she chuckled a little herself.
    "You're laughing, but it wasn't funny! So I said, 'Why can't we just go home?' and Karik said 'It's your birthday! We have to celebrate.' So we went to this restaurant, and it must have been a very fancy one because it was so dark. So there we were, sitting in the dark, trying to read the menus like this." She held her hands like a book a few inches from her eyes and peered at her imaginary menu. "And then finally we ordered...at five 'til eleven!"
    I could hardly catch my breath from laughter. "So was it good?" I gasped.
    Nellie waved her hand. "Oh, it was fine, I guess. I just wanted to go home!"

C-A-K-E

    Friday is Nellie's 88th birthday. She asked me to brush and style her wig on Tuesday. "I'll need to wear it on Friday and then again on Sunday for my nephew's concert," she informed me.
    "What are you doing on Friday?" I asked.
    "I don't know."
    Confused, I tried to get some more information. "But you need your wig?"
    "Yes," she answered. "I don't know exactly, but I heard some of the women talking. 'Nellie's birthday is on Friday,' they said. So I think they're planning a surprise. Maybe cake. They had a cake for another lady."
    A few minutes later, Melissa poked her head in Nellie's room. Melissa is one of the residents who tries to take care of everybody. "You know Friday is Nellie's birthday," she began, and I nodded. "Well, she doesn't know what we've got planned and I don't want you tell her..."
    I stopped her. "Better be careful what you say! She understands a lot of English."
    Melissa looked worried. Whispering behind her hand, she spelled it out. "Do you think she'd understand c-a-k-e?"
    I laughed. "Yes, I think so."
    "Ummm..." she thought for a moment. "Um...we're going to sing Happy Birthday to her on Friday."
    After Melissa wheeled away, Nellie nodded to me wisely. "I told you!"

    Happy Birthday, my Babushka.

You Forgot.

    Nellie called me this afternoon in panic. "The little girl...oh, oh, oh, I can't remember her name...you know, the girl...it's her birthday on the 18th! And I forgot, and you forgot, and we have to send her a package!"
    I wanted to say that I didn't forget anything. I never knew about it in the first place. Come to think of it, I don't even know the girl, although I know exactly who she's talking about. I've never met the girl, or any of her family, but I've been responsible for sending them birthday and Christmas packages for a year or two now. What I wanted to say was that it really wasn't my fault.
    What I actually said was, "What kind of candy do you want me to get?"

Borrowing Trouble

    I may have mentioned that Nellie tends toward pessimism. If there is a possible interpretation of any set of circumstances that involves death, sickness, hospitalization, jail time, etc., Nellie will immediately jump to that conclusion. And no "glass-half-full" talk from me will change her mind.
    There's a lovely Russian lady who used to live nearby and visited Nellie often with her two daughters; sadly, her husband's job moved them all near Washington, D.C. a little over a year ago. Nellie still loves to hear from them, to get Christmas cards and photos of the girls, to send packages of random treasures for birthdays. It had been awhile since Anna had called, and Nellie began to worry.
    "I haven't heard anything from them in so long, and I'm so worried that something has happened!"
    I tried in vain to reassure her. "I'm sure they're just busy--the girls probably have lots of schoolwork and exams, and you said Anna was finishing her nursing studies..."
    Twisting her hands nervously, Nellie shook her head. "I'd give anything for that to be true. But I know it isn't! I keep thinking--maybe they were in a car wreck. I'm sure that's what has happened. And maybe Lauren died, and Anna's been in the hospital, maybe in a coma...or maybe it's her husband. I know he was deployed, and then he came home, but maybe he had to go again and got shot! And what about Katya? She's old enough to drive too--I'll bet she wrecked her car and was killed. Or maybe she got pregnant. She has a boyfriend now, you know. Oh, why won't they call and tell me! If I only knew, then I could bear it. You have to write them a letter and tell them that I've been so worried!"
    She was nearly in tears, and nothing I could say would calm her. It was time for me to go, so I hugged her and promised to write the letter. I prayed that she would hear good new from her friends soon.

    A week or two later, Nellie called me with some request or another. After relaying her need, she said, "Oh, Anna called me yesterday! They're all doing fine, just very busy with the holidays and exams and everything."
    You don't say.