The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

everything and at once?”
    “Did they all lose their cotton-picking minds?”
    Olga Fedorivna’s voice prickles with sharp, rejuvenated notes that bring on, in a hazy fade-in, a vision in Daryna’s mind from more than thirty years ago: a trim brunette in a bright yellow dress marching across the kindergarten yard beside a flummoxedteacher to whom she is reading the riot act, while little Darynka looks on through the window of the dining room, where she’d been locked up after dinner to finish the hateful sour cream—a whole glass of goo that she, in desperation, forever abandoned by everyone, sits straining, with disgust, through her puckered lips, which does nothing to lower the level of the white gunk under her nose. She looks on and a blast of joy shoots through her both for the knowledge of her imminent liberation—Mom’s here!—and the shock of her first experience of
seeing from outside
: this is my mom—how beautiful she is! If only you could always remember your parents the way they were in their best years. But there’s never time for that, because you’ve got bigger fish to fry—your own best years, which, just like theirs, pass, damn it. They pass.
    The thing that really got her was that her producer never, not for a second, doubted that their offer would flatter her, that she’d be delighted by the mere fact she’d been deemed suitable for a youth talk show. And worse yet—she did, for an instant, feel flattered. Like when the driver of the car next to her at a stoplight sent her air kisses, like when men in foreign airports occasionally turn to look at her (and she could be completely sure that they didn’t recognize her, that the lit-up looks and the uncontrollably loose grins were meant not for a TV star but simply for a beautiful woman, because at home you could never tell the difference—men look at attractive women and celebrities in the same way), like when a black Lexus sped up and slammed on the brakes next to her in the street, sending a fan of water into the air, so she barely managed to jump out of the way, and from behind the rolled-down window appeared the mug of a boy umpteen years her junior to say, in a leisurely Russian, like a restaurant order: “Leave your phone number, miss.” (And only when she laughed into his face, could she see by his changed expression that he recognized her, fired up with a different, more preemptive interest—here it is, the power of the media: “Wait...don’t you...don’t you work on TV?”)
    Such things always pleased her, she won’t deny it; they gave her new zest. For a moment, she was almost hypnotized, listening toher boss tell her about herself: they’ll style your hair into braids, for a “frisky,” as he put it, look, and dress you more casually, youthfully, from Benetton, something informal, a little top, shorts and over-the-knee boots, a miniskirt. What paralyzed her was not so much his tone of an old seducer as her own eternally feminine eagerness—to submit, spellbound, to the hands of a designer, stylist, makeup artist...anyone who would make her different, better; and the audience, ready to appreciate their efforts, is right there. The salesgirl hands you a few more skirts that go, in her opinion, with the jacket you’re trying on in the fitting room, while the man sits with his newspaper in an armchair waiting for you to come out and sashay around the store, turning in front of the mirror and smoothing the skirt over your thighs and behind, as though molding your own body—you’re your own Pygmalion, the outfit your marble: What do you think? For that one moment, in yesterday’s entire conversation, she did feel ashamed, but she won’t tell her mother about it, no way, and her mom wouldn’t understand it anyway. She’s never set foot in an expensive boutique and, really, it’s not like Uncle Volodya could sit in that armchair waiting for the shape-shifting séance with the Sphinx smile of a man who will pay for everything in the end. No, their generation did not get to experience as many of life’s joys as ours, and isn’t this precisely what makes us, in our heart of hearts, look down on them?
    “That’s right, Mom, and that’s exactly what I told him—and that I won’t be made into a public spectacle.”
    That was not what she said, not what she said at all. She only knocked him off his tone—a bed-broker’s business tone in which he proceeded to wrap her up and tie her with a bow. She went to the