NONFICTION | Diana Ruzova The Manager’s Daughter

NONFICTION

The Manager’s Daughter

By Diana Ruzova

When you are little and alone you should not open the front door. Even if someone knocks. Even if the doorbell rings. Open the door because you know they heard you. You know they heard the crinkle of your bag of cheese puffs, the jazzy Hey Arnold theme song. Feel simultaneously saved and abandoned. Know that you are responsible for too much. Know that you were brought to this country for more than just helping your parents with the building. Know that your mama can’t drive so your papa has to drive her places, places you can’t always go. Know that not all people live like this, but you do. Stop crying. Why are you crying? Dig your wet face into the stranger’s shoulder and smear orange cheese powder on his shirt.

When you are older and alone and someone knocks on the door only open it after the phone rings many times. How many times is many? Don’t ask stupid questions. Open the door if the phone keeps ringing or if the knocking won’t stop. This means it’s an emergency. This means a garbage disposal is clogged, or an A/C has stopped working, or maybe a tenant locked themselves out of their apartment, or someone is stuck in the elevator, or the cops are here to break up a domestic dispute, or

maybe there’s a flood. Why is there always a flood?

Don’t touch the rent checks or the wads of cash stuffed in white envelopes. Walk by the front door and accidentally slide your sock on a loose check. Pick it up and move it to the kitchen table. Open the front door and take the cash that is handed to you by a man with a black mustache. Don’t even think about pocketing it for yourself. Think about pocketing it for yourself. Don’t. Know that everyone else pays rent but your family. Your family pays with time and the surrender of privacy.

Eat your breakfast at the kitchen table. Don’t eat your breakfast at the kitchen table because you know at any minute the doorbell might ring. Another flood. A broken air conditioner. Someone new to sign the lease. Watch your papa shuffle his feet to the door like a maître d’ in his own home. Slurp your Froot Loops in the hallway by the closet under the flickering fluorescent light.

Mouth the word “feet,” so your mama doesn’t say “foot” yet again while on the phone with a prospective tenant. Apartment is 900 square-foot. You don’t know how you know you are right, and she is wrong, but you know, and she reluctantly listens, rolls her big blue eyes while shooing you away.

Eat crepes on Sunday mornings. When you sleep over at your friends’ houses, you eat bacon and eggs and chocolate chip studded pancakes made from creamy goop gently poured out of store-bought plastic jugs. When your friends sleep over at your apartment, your mama impresses them with homemade crepes. No, you’re not French. But your mama grew up in the

Soviet Union idolizing Sophia Loren and reading Dumas. Fill the crepes with sour cream, or apricot jam, or mashed up banana, or shredded cheese. Don’t fill the crepes with salmon roe because your friends won’t understand. The salty amber jewels, eggs pulled out of the sack too soon.

Make a “Happy Holidays” sign in Word ‘97, on a desktop computer covered in puffy stickers. Just last week the computer was sick with a pornographic virus. Pixelated naked ladies with hair in places you don’t have pouting for attention. Close the pop-ups, one by one. Make the “Happy Holidays” sign festive with clip art and exclamation points, so the tenants remember to drop off presents. Fruit Cake. Ferrero Rocher. Homemade fudge. Gifts cards. Cash. Take note of their holiday generosity when fulfilling their maintenance requests. Put up the signs in opportune places like parking garages. The mailroom. Places where people idle and think about your value.

Hide behind the couch while an angry old man waves a cane around. Try to yell stop but nothing comes out. Watch Papa say Monday and the old man say Right now! Watch Papa be a good little immigrant and shuffle his feet out the door to change the fluorescent bulb in the old man’s kitchen for a $20 tip on a Saturday afternoon. Find out the old man sues people for a living. Find out he is known to get managers drunk and fired. Find out he no longer lives in the building but pays rent just so he can continue to take the owners to court. Wonder if it’s even legal for you to write this down. Write it down anyway.

Realize that you are different, not only because you work here and live here for free but also because you are a family of

immigrants. Sure, there are other immigrants in the building, but they keep to themselves. Your family is on display. Notice how people treat your family like second-class citizens. How they mock your parents’ accents. How they barge into your apartment and linger in the living room as if it were an office. How they scrutinize your décor, a collection of discarded furniture from vacated apartments. How they assume that you are not very bright. Try to prove them wrong by over enunciating your words and making the honor roll. Don’t make friends with any of the tenants. It is a trap. They want to be your friend to use it against you for favors. Learn that people in the US are spoiled, entitled, that they walk around as if they are owed something. Listen while they complain about the manager. But when they are in a life-threatening situation the manager must save them. Try not to become one of them. Understand that your parents have a thankless job. Understand that no one owes you anything.

Remember your father is a good man. In the USSR he used to travel around for a living, building barns for farm animals, now he stays put, manages a property with your mama, saves old ladies trapped in showers. You want to be a good person too. Try. Babysit the child star who lives in the building to help your parents pay for stuff, while the child star’s young mom parties in the Hollywood Hills. Fail. Watch the child star take a shit on the soft carpet next to the bathroom door.

Celebrate Christmas on New Year’s because there was no god in the Soviet Union. Even though you are Jewish and your grandfather was a Yiddish poet who had to read the Torah in a dark room with a single candle burning to avoid being swept

away to the Gulag by the KGB. Decorate the New Year’s tree, a discarded Christmas tree your father picked up off the sidewalk. Cover the tree in handmade snowflakes cut from white printer paper bought with petty cash.

Learn about money. About how some people have it and some people don’t. How you came here with none. How the only way to have money is to save it or invest it in a sure thing. How nothing is a sure thing. How money is handed down in this country to those lucky enough to be on the list. How you must marry rich or be a lawyer or you’ll stay poor. How that one old woman died in her apartment and had no living relatives, so she split her life savings amongst her neighbors who would sometimes buy her groceries. How Papa cleaned out the dead woman’s apartment and discovered her will. How he stared at it long and hard, hoping his name was on the list.

Help your parents keep their job. Go with them to the Hanukah party at the country club the owners of the building frequent. Wear your nicest sale rack dress. Smile at the grownups and tell them how much you love your teachers, how you want to be a writer like your grandfather. Don’t mention the bullying. They call you a Russian spy. Do mention your obsession with Urban Outfitters and Emily Dickinson. Find out the girl at the table also likes these things. Translate all of this to your parents in Russian, who have been stumbling over their words between bites of slimy gefilte fish. Look around at all the money. Begin to realize you are somebody’s mitzvah, somebody’s good deed.

Think about how strange it is to live so close to people you don’t know. Think about how strange it is to share walls with people

outside your family. People that can hear you cough or sneeze or snore or yell or fuck. Think about how strange buildings are. How on the surface they seem so dull and utilitarian like one of those old jewelry boxes, but on the inside, they are filled with the music of our lives.

Grow sick of being the manager’s daughter. So responsible and kind. You are now ready for anonymity. Understand that you are now ready to secure a future outside the open music box you’ve spun around in for far too long. Because before you figure out what exactly you are meant to do with your life, you must get out of the building that raised you.