Part OneThe First Day1.She Had to Hold the Family TogetherSchool started and it was awful. “Predictably awful,” as Anne Mom would say. “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” she might add of Vera’s disdain for school. Anne Mom was always predicting things in the near future. “I’m the Nostradamus of two weeks from now,” she told Vera over and over again and Vera knew the correct social response was to laugh because Anne Mom was trying to be as witty as Daddy, though when Vera became a teenager in three years she could roll her eyes, because she had seen it done on television and sometimes on the devices Anne Mom didn’t allow her.
She added “Nostradamus” to her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.
The hallways of the school were a faded red and pink and orange and there were motivational posters and funny sayings from the Peanuts gang and dusty green floors and mesh over the windows looking onto the rump of another sad uptown building. Daddy compared the color scheme to an “ice-cream shop in hell” and Anne Mom had yelled at him not to use that language (“You know she’s going to imitate you, she worships you!”) or to talk the school down. The school was a point of pride for Daddy because you had to take a test when you were only four years old to get in, and you needed to score “in the ninety-ninth percentile,” although Vera had overheard that Dylan had been admitted because they wanted to keep siblings together and she thought this contrast between their intelligence to be “exquisite” and “delectable,” two words Anne Mom wanted her to drop if she were to make any friends at her school.
“Both my kids go to a public school,” Daddy had once declared on television with what Anne Mom called a “raffish” smile while some other men in suits and ties were yelling at him about his “politics,” although he had failed to mention that it was a school for superbright kids, and that made her sad. There were a lot of “statuses” in the world and each year she was becoming aware of more of them. For example, it also made her sad when Daddy sat apart from them on planes because he always had a ticket in “Business Class” and just this summer when they had flown to Korea and Japan, where Daddy had to deliver some speeches, she had asked him “Why can’t you fly with us in Family Class?” and he said “Awwww, poor Doxie” (despite being short, she was shaped lean and tubular like a dachshund), then bent down and grizzled her forehead with his stubble and it hurt the whole ride back and she didn’t see “a lick” (Anne Mom phrasing) of him for fourteen hours straight—not that she saw that much of him at home.
So, yes, school was predictably awful and a lot of it was dumb. Vera looked through the mesh on the windows at the Black people across the block who patronized a fish store. Sometimes they would look back at her and sometimes they would smile, maybe remembering how boring fifth grade had been. There was a lot of “advanced” work, but Vera breezed through it; mostly it was ordering things in rows and columns and sometimes demonstrating “comprehension.” This year, because of the conventions, there was going to be a whole module on the Constitution and just how it might be amended.
All the students sat dutifully in their red checkered uniforms (the girls had to wear bow ties and skirts, the boys sweaters and ties) and raised their hands whether they knew an answer or not because participation was forty percent of their grade. There was only one troublemaker in the class, Stephen, one of the Moncler Twins (Anne Mom had named them thus because of the expensive winter jackets they wore), and he probably thought he could get away with it because he was Five-Three, same as Dylan and Anne Mom, and both of the twins’ parents were “super white” and could trace their heritage to the Revolutionary War. At least half the kids in her school were Asian or half Asian like Vera was, at least genetically because of her mom mom, who had been Daddy’s girlfriend before he met Anne Mom. Mom Mom had abandoned her and Daddy, maybe because she didn’t love Vera on account of that she had been a “tough baby” who couldn’t go to sleep unless you drove her around the block in a car, and back then Daddy could barely afford the gas.
It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety, in the same way the rest of her family did except for Dylan, whose blond curls were constantly in motion as he made short work of the school’s jungle gym and wrestled on the hot tarmac with his little buddies. School made her anxious, especially because of what Anne Mom called the “social component,” but she had been worried the entire summer as well.
Her parents fought every day on a variety of subjects, but especially about how she and Dylan were to be raised. Anne Mom wanted a lot of structure, but Daddy said childhood “should just happen,” like it had happened to him, and that until you went to grad school “nothing really mattered,” it was all just a “neoliberal frog-march of the damned.” (Daddy supplied a lot of the words for her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.) Once, she even overheard him crying in “Daddy’s Little Pool” as she used to call the hot tub at their summer house when she was much younger and more innocent, and she begged Anne Mom to please not fight with him anymore that day. But Anne Mom told her Daddy was crying because someone important—the “Rhodesian Billionaire” who wanted to buy his magazine and thus make them “more comfortable”—had been especially mean to him on social media and that he felt bullied. “If he’s being bullied he should talk to someone,” Vera told Anne Mom, but Daddy kept crying softly like one of the wounded wild animals in the forest behind the hot tub and nothing could be done about it until dinner and time for his first glass of what she used to call “Daddy’s special juice” or “Daddy’s mar-tiny.”
She tried to “dialogue” with Dylan about their family situation, but he would just go on playing with his robot dinos on the porch while their summer house shuddered with their parents’ elegant and vicious turns of phrase. “Don’t you care if they get divorced?” she would whisper to Dylan, even though no one was in earshot, because the words felt so sad and shameful to her. Her love for Anne Mom was measured, but to have two moms leave her (surely, she would take Dylan with her in the split) would mean she was beyond loving, beyond Family Class. “I dunn ah”—Dylan would shrug and then punch her in the elbow where it hurt the most. “Fine, but don’t come to me when we’re homeless,” Vera told him.
Becoming homeless worried Vera. She read the billboards at the bus shelters very earnestly. One told her that sixty-three percent of the occupants of homeless shelters in the city were members of families, probably failed families like her own would become if she were unable to hold her parents together, or if her daddy didn’t manage to sell the troubled magazine he edited to the Rhodesian Billionaire who would make them comfortable and unafraid. She had once quizzed her dad on the subject of their finances, and he had said, “Well, we’re not poor, but we’re not super rich like half the jerks in this city.”
“Then what are we exactly?” Vera had asked. She liked to be exact.
“We’re what’s called merely rich,” Daddy explained, “but our position is very precarious especially with how much I’ve staked on this goddamn magazine. We could lose everything, and your mother’s trust just pays for the incidentals. Unless we moved to a small metro in the sticks. And then I’d like to see your mom eat a plate of General Tso’s chicken or whatever.”
So, it was true, she thought. They were all going to end up in a homeless shelter. Especially if Daddy’s magazine remained unsold “and/or” Daddy and Anne Mom got divorced.
“Ergo,” another diary word, she had to hold them together.
Ergo, the Lists.
Copyright © 2025 by Gary Shteyngart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
