Death of a Trophy Wife by Laura Levine Page A

furrowed at the sight of me.
    Following in the proud Trotsky family tradition, she greeted me with a grunt, simultaneously crushing a walnut in her beefy paw.
    “I go help Aunt Minna in the kitchen,” Vladimir said. “You stay here, Jaine, and make friends with the cousins.”
    With that, he dashed off, leaving me stranded with Boris and Sofi.
    I sat down gingerly on an armchair littered with walnut shells and plastered on a stiff smile.
    Making friends with these two wasn’t going to be easy.
    My break-the-ice gambit (“So how do you like living in America?”) was met with a deafening silence, which continued for the next ten agonizing minutes, broken only by the occasional crunch of a walnut in Sofi’s fist. Not one of which she offered to share, by the way.
    At last Vladimir came bouncing back into the room.
    For once, I was actually thrilled to see the guy.
    “Food is ready!” he announced.
    Sofi pried herself from her armchair, sending a small shower of walnut shells onto the floor. Boris reluctantly abandoned his soccer game but turned up the volume so he could keep track of the score.
    We trooped through an archway into a dining area, where a white lace tablecloth was set with dented silverware and a colorful collection of paper napkins filched from various local eating establishments. Mine was from Polly’s House of Pies.
    Dinner Chez Trotsky turned out to be an eclectic affair.
    First course was a watery cabbage soup featuring an Uzbek version of tortellini called chuchvara . Now I’m sure nine out of ten Uzbek housewives make a dynamite chuchvara. Sad to say, Aunt Minna was Housewife Number Ten. Hers were white doughy blobs the consistency of ping-pong balls.
    “So,” Aunt Minna asked as I tried to hack off a piece of my ping-pong ball, “how much money you got?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Money! If you going to marry Vladimir, you got to pay dowry.”
    Sofi looked up from her soup, scowling.
    “Who says she’s going to marry Vladimir?”
    “She will,” Vladimir assured her, “just as soon as she falls in love with me. Any day now.”
    “Vladimir,” I protested, “I already told you. There’s not going to be any wedding—”
    “Not for at least a week,” Vladimir said, ever the optimist. “Maybe two. So enough questions, everybody. Let my beloved Jaine eat her delicious cabbage soup in peace.”
    “You got any cattles?” Aunt Minna asked, not willing to let this dowry thing go. “Cattles okay if you don’t got money.”
    “Please,” Vladimir begged. “Not now, Aunt Minna. We’re eating.”
    Well, not all of us. By now, I had given up on my ping-pong balls, and Boris had temporarily abandoned the table for his soccer game.
    Eventually, the soup dishes were cleared away, and Aunt Minna waddled in with the main course—Domino’s pizza topped off with big white blobs of what turned out to be an Uzbek yogurt called katyk .
    A note to the culinary adventurous: I don’t care how adventurous you are, do not under any circumstances try pepperoni pizza and katyk. You will, I guarantee, live to regret it.
    Somehow I managed to swallow a few mouthfuls, washed down by Aunt Minna’s homemade pomegranate wine, a piquant little vintage with the distinctive kick of nail polish remover.
    This trip to culinary hell seemed to go on forever, with Vladimir blathering sweet nothings in my ear, Sofi and Minna shooting me dirty looks, and Boris periodically jumping up to check the soccer score.
    On the plus side, in between shooting me dirty looks, Aunt Minna and Sofi kept muttering about how “skinny” I was.
    The last time I’d been called skinny was, well, never. So frankly it felt rather nice. And indeed, compared to Minna and Sofi, I was a bit of a waif.
    I was hoping the meal might perk up with dessert. Perhaps a little something from Polly’s House of Pies. A banana cream pie sure would go a long way to erase the memory of that yogurt pizza.
    But alas, for dessert, Minna trotted out