Notes From the B Train

by Lucy Morris

Check back on February 17th for another installment of "Notes."

I.
There was a year when I lived in Russia. I was 19 and most of what I did was watch television and drink tea and read books, and although that doesn’t sound so bad, at the end of it I was twenty pounds underweight and my nose was crooked in a way it hadn’t been before I left. I thought for sure I’d never go back. Now I am not so sure, only because a year is a long time to live somewhere without thinking of being there again someday: no matter how much you want to, it’s still hard to imagine not seeing your most hated relative again. Why make the investment of hatred without expecting a return? As it turned out, I didn’t need to go back to Russia because Russia came back to me. I finished college and within three weeks I got a call from a man named Nikolai asking me to come down to Brighton Beach to interview for a position as a translator at a large Russian retail company – the biggest, they claimed, in North America, though there were rumors of an errant Canadian side family with more books than us. “You do speak Russian, right?” he said. “In principle,” I say, which is one of the very first things I learned to say when I got to Russia.

II.
When I check for yesterday’s mail every morning, the name on the letters is Lucy Morris. I say goodbye to my sympathetic boyfriend, who is the other half of our two-person household in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and walk one block to buy my bagel and then walk another to the subway, where I board the R train at the second door on the third car. When I get off the subway an hour later, my name is Lusya Morrris – with a slack-jawed “ya” and an “R” that makes waves – and my main identifying trait is that I am American: an Amerikanka in the parlance of the world I work in. I spend my days trying to convince myself and those around me that I am a professional English-to-Russian translator, and on a given day I do this at one of two offices somewhere along the last handful of stops on the B and Q lines, after Sheepshead Bay and before Coney Island. Over the course of my commute, I watch the train empty of people speaking English and fill with those who don't: men in pointy shoes negotiating business deals in Russian, bundled-up babushkas clucking at their bilingual grandkids, and women my age in glittery jeans and elaborate heels texting intently in Cyrillic. I always arrive early enough to go to Starbucks, not because I like the coffee – I do not, particularly – but because it is my last contact with American New York before I go undercover for eight hours.

III.
There are days when I do feel like a spy. Misha, who is a security guard at one of my stores and somewhat sweet on me, likes to say that I am planning to work for the CIA, as though a job translating instructions to Russian Monopoly (“BE THE BOSS WHO DICTATES THE RULES!”) is a dice roll away from secret agent. One day he instructs our boss to only speak to me in Russian. I politely offer that this isn’t necessary, but he won’t have it because practice makes perfect and perfect makes you lots of money with the federal government. Misha looks at my time sheet, at the top of which my name is written LUCY MORR'S, and he says, "Special Agent LUCY MORR'S," as though saying it in his official English voice will make it true. In one of my first workplace embarrassments, Misha makes me recite some Pushkin. It is a very famous poem I memorized in Russia partly to fulfill a phonetics assignment and partly to impress babushkas - my central fan base in a nation that still assumes anyone who wants to visit must be a spy. The first line goes like this. “I loved you once, and perhaps I love you still.” I force the words out of my mouth with the reluctance of a Russian Custom’s officer validating your visa. Misha looks at me and says, with a great big smile: "That used to be serious and now it's funny!" I laugh with him and try to convince myself that butchering the country’s most famous poet is kind of like doing a remix. Europeans are pretty into techno, right?

IV.
Early on I make the mistake of referring to the company I work for as the Russian gift and book mafia. The problem with this bon mot is that people think I am serious. There was a Russian translator who wound up dead in the basement of a Russian couple two years ago for working on a mafia case, just a few blocks from where I get my coffee every morning. And the thing is that at first I wasn’t sure if I worked for a mafia front, or at the very least a highly successful counterfeit operation specializing in nesting dolls and child-rearing guides. Mysterious black garbage bags with Aeroflot cargo tape would appear on rainy days at the back door of one of our stores, seemingly truckloads of them, all hustled into the office and then taken down to the basement. It remains unclear to me what about seventy-five percent of my colleagues actually do. But I also spent my teenage years working at English-speaking retail companies, and there was always something there that could be misinterpreted as well: certain handling of cash boxes and bundles at the end of the day, where mysterious paperwork we were expected to arduously keep track of actually ended up and always, always, there was a basement room no one could get into. Now, though, my language disadvantage happens to place my observation talents just behind the dimly lit door to understanding, so everything is cast in this shade of confusion that is easy to mistake for suspicion. The Golden Rule as we define it – do unto others, et cetera – is predicated on being able to see yourself in someone else's shoes. When the sizing system of your shoes is itself an entirely different one from that of your peers, this is considerably harder to do. In America I am a size 6.5, but at work I am lucky if I get my shoes on and tied right each day.

View: Part 2

Contact Lucy at lucyqmorris@gmail.com.