Five
That night, it’s just me and my parents at the dinner table. Klaudie is hanging out with Ally and Jenna and intends to stay out all night as part of her weekend-long graduation celebration. I know this is tough for my dad. He doesn’t play favorites, exactly, but he and Klaudie have this special bond. It’s funny because by rights, he should like me more. I am generally loud and demonstrative, like him, while Klaudie is more reserved, like Mom. I wonder if he likes Klaudie so much because she’s different from him personality-wise but the same as him interest-wise. Klaudie likes cooking; I can’t tell you with 100 percent certainty what a spatula’s official use is. Klaudie likes talking college basketball stats for hours; I will scream my heart out during March Madness same as the next Lexingtonian, but it’s pointless to memorize stuff like free throw percentages when the players are just going to go pro the next year. Klaudie is into engineering like Dad’s dad was; I’m okay at math but prefer drama and fiction and no right answers.
It would probably bother me more, this special paternal bond I’m not part of, if I weren’t certain that I’m my mother’s favorite. Not in an epic, Steinbeck-novel way—just a slight, unspoken preference. Maybe a lot of it—the leniency on rules that were way stricter for Klaudie, the extra smiles and winks—is normal for any youngest sibling. Maybe it’s because I meditate regularly, while Klaudie publicly announced her sophomore year that she was just atheist now, and not a Buddhist. Maybe.
Anyway, even if I hadn’t picked up a Major Sad Vibe off Dad, I would’ve known his mood based on the meal. He’s cooked goulash, and he only cooks goulash—the ultimate comfort food—when he is mopey. The air in the dining room is drenched with a rich, meaty scent as Dad sets thick, freshly sliced dumplings on each of our stew-filled plates.
Technically, the meaty smell is only coming from Dad’s plate, since Mom and I don’t eat meat. This is normal in our house: Dad’s the cook, and he always fixes a meat-based dinner for him and Klaudie and a vegetarian version for me and Mom. Most of the time this works just fine, but when it comes to goulash it’s kind of depressing, because pretty much the whole point of Czech goulash is the beef.
The recipe is Nana Zelenka’s, and as such it demands to be eaten in the place where my grandmother’s spirit is most present—here, in the dining room, surrounded by the rows of floral-trimmed china and crystal pitchers accumulated over the fifty years since my grandparents’ move from Prague to Lexington.
Gramps and Nana Zelenka died in a car accident when I was nine. Car crashes are an awful way to go, no matter what, but it’s especially unfair that’s how my grandparents went out, because up until that point their life had been so magnificent, and driving off a country road late at night is such a trite end.
Gramps and Nana lived in Prague back during the Cold War. They were in their twenties in early 1968. In case you don’t know Czech history that well, that’s when the local Communist government implemented a lot of reforms granting more rights to Czech citizens, who went wild with their new freedom and did a lot of super artistic and daring stuff like distribute uncensored newspapers and experiment with rock ’n’ roll. Nana Zelenka would say, “It was a terrifying time. Terrifying and splendid.” She said this so much that Klaudie and I made up a whole new word—“splendifying”—and you’d be surprised how much it comes in handy.
Anyway, in July of 1968, my grandfather received an offer to serve as a visiting professor of chemical engineering at the University of Kentucky. So he and Nana Zelenka moved to the States, and three weeks later the Soviets were like, “WHAT’S ALL THE RUCKUS IN PRAGUE, WE’RE COMING IN WITH TANKS. WE ARE THE BORG, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE, YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. ” My grandmother didn’t say that; that’s half me, half Star Trek: The Next Generation . Nana had a more eloquent way of putting it, which was, “Then those Soviet bastards came in and did what Soviets did best: Shat all over everything.”
Whichever way you look at it, this was bad news for the Czech population, and my grandparents considered themselves lucky to have gotten their visas and shipped across the Atlantic when they did. Gramps’s visiting professor stint turned full-time, and that’s how two young Czechs came to live in the middle of Kentucky. And that’s why we, their progeny, are eating goulash in a shabby midcentury modern house in a suburb west of Appalachia. Life is weird like that.
I take a dumpling and soak it in my goulash. I watch as the sauce permeates the soft bread, staining it brown.
“You’re very quiet, Tasha,” says Mom.
Klaudie and I joke that our mom is constantly trying to get people to talk. It’s a joke because she’s a speech pathologist, but it really is true. Mom has this calming, subversive way of siphoning words out of people. I suspect it has something to do with her Kiwi accent, which she hasn’t given up even twenty years after leaving New Zealand. I say “given up,” not “lost,” because Mom is an accent expert. She could pass herself off as a Scottish Highlander if she wanted; she could definitely pass as a Midwesterner. But she chooses not to.
“I’m thinking about Gramps and Nana,” I reply truthfully, before considering this might not be the best thing to say when Dad is already feeling gloomy. I cast a glance his way and am pained by the glassy, distant look in his eyes. Then he catches me looking, shakes himself, and grins.
“Well!” he says, slamming a hand on the table. “And wouldn’t they be proud of you two. Sister heading off to Vandy, and you a budding Woody Allen.”
I make a face. “Dad, I’ve told you, I hate him. If you’re gonna go there, make it Orson Welles. Or Elia Kazan.”
Dad forks a hearty helping of beef into his mouth. Talking around it, he says, “Aren’t we ambitious?”
He shoots me a cheery wink, and I shoot back a “har har har” eye roll.
“Actually,” I say, before realizing I have no idea how to phrase my news.
It’s too late to backtrack, though. My parents are watching me with interested expressions.
“Actually?” Mom coaxes.
“Um,” I say. “Well, the web series got a big boost yesterday. Someone famous mentioned us, and our views are shooting through the roof.”
“Tasha, that’s wonderful ,” Mom says warmly.
“Excellent news,” says Dad. “Is this the one about tea?”
I remind myself that my parents are thirty years older than me and cannot be expected to keep this stuff straight. I say, “The one about tea is my vlog. The web series is the modernization of Anna Karenina .”
“Ambitious,” Dad repeats, grinning. “That’s my girl.”
I am genuinely pleased by Dad’s pride, and also proud that I’ve distracted him from his darker thoughts. But as it turns out, the distraction is only momentary, because the next thing he says is, “Hard to believe this is how dinners are always going to be. You’d better get used to being an only child. We’re going to lavish all our attention on you, so you should forget about dating, because it will only end in tears.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say drily.
I decide not to add that this isn’t how dinners will always be. It’s how they’ll be for a year. Then I’ll be gone to college too. Vanderbilt is at the top of my list. Actually, it’s the only school I want to apply to, period. I love Nashville, and Vandy has an excellent film track. But Ms. Deter, my guidance counselor, keeps stressing again and again that with my grades, Vanderbilt is a reach school and that choosing film as an undergraduate degree isn’t a wise decision.
“Don’t specialize early,” she advised back in March. “You want a university where there are plenty of options. That way, if you decide film isn’t for you, you’ll have a wide array of other majors to choose from. And if film really is what you want to do, you can head to L.A. or New York for an internship or graduate degree with a more versatile B.A. in hand.”
Not only does Ms. Deter think I shouldn’t specialize in film, she thinks I should forget about Vandy altogether and go to the University of Kentucky instead.
“You can still get a solid foundation in communications, art, or maybe English,” she said in a valiant attempt to, I don’t know, counsel and guide me? “Also, you’ll pay basically nothing for tuition, since you’re in-state and a Governor’s School for the Arts attendee. Just think about it, Tash.”
I’ve thought about it. What I think is, If I don’t get out of Lexington now, I’m going to be stuck here for the rest of my life. I’ll make excuses for why things didn’t work out and become some drunk has-been straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song.
I know very well I’m not Klaudie. I’m not smart enough to earn an academic scholarship at a private university like Vanderbilt. I’ll be lucky, very lucky, just to be admitted. And yes, it will cost me a ton of money, but isn’t that the case for everybody these days? Isn’t everyone in their twenties laden with bone-breaking college debt? And it’s Vanderbilt . It is stonework and lattices and ivory towers. UK is sorority row and ugly, experimental buildings from the seventies. It’s wind tunnels and insane traffic during football season. And it’s so . . . familiar. I’ve grown up riding through its streets and taking piano lessons at the School of Art and attending plays at the Singletary Center. I need something new. Something non-Kentuckian. A place where half the graduating class of Calhoun won’t end up.
And it’s not like I am being entirely irresponsible. I have a plan. I’ve already looked into loans and departmental scholarships, and I am working part-time at Old Navy this summer. And okay, yes, I know that my entire summer wages from Old Navy won’t even cover one semester’s worth of books, but I am doing something . I am working toward my dream. This is what working toward your dream looks like. Isn’t it?
“Your father and I were thinking of watching a movie,” Mom says, slicing her fork through a dumpling. “Want to join? We could run down to Kroger, see what’s at the Redbox.”
I chew my food slowly. Lately, Mom and Dad have wanted to hang out a lot more than usual. Graduation is an emotional upheaval for parents, and no doubt mine want to smush me between them on a couch in an attempt to dull the pain of their other daughter’s imminent departure. It wouldn’t be an appealing proposition even if I didn’t have a laptop to get back to and stare at for the remainder of the evening.
Cautiously, I say, “I’m actually pretty tired.”
Dad looks a little crestfallen when he says, “Maybe another night sometime soon, hmm? All four of us. We’ll let you girls choose the movie.”
Which really means they’ll let Klaudie choose, since Klaudie and I have diametrically opposed tastes in movies and Klaudie gets the trump card all summer long, because it is her “last summer.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I say. “Tonight, I’ll let you two have a nice romantic evening.”
Mom laughs—an airy, glittery sound. “Me, your father, Tom Cruise, and a bottle of chardonnay. Very romantic.”
“We live the high life,” says Dad, reaching across the table for Mom’s hand.
“Get a room,” I say pleasantly, taking my plate and glass into the kitchen.
I wash up, then blow a final kiss to my parents before heading upstairs to check on Seedling Productions’ most recent stats and notifications. I feel only a little guilty for giving them a rain check.