Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

three-year-old . . . You don’t want to? Well, just stand there like an idiot, then!”
    Vladimir was looking at her drawn and tired face, a residue of anger still pulsing along the upper lip. She was waiting for him, her patience ebbing, a slender laptop perched by the bedside urgently bleating for her attention. He wanted to comfort her. What could he do?
    Perhaps, he resolved, perhaps he could improvise his own kindof love for his mother, cobbled together from past memories of an earlier mother—a harassed Leningrad kindergarten teacher and her love for her half-dead boy, the Soviet patriot, the best friend of Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe, the ten-year-old Chekhovian.
    He could take her twice-a-day phone calls, pretend to listen dutifully to her screams and sobs, while holding the receiver several centimeters away from his face as if the telephone itself could explode.
    He could lie to her, tell her he would do better, because even the invention of the lie meant he knew what was expected of him, knew that he was failing her.
    And, undoubtedly, he could do one other thing for her.
    It would be the least he could do . . .
    VLADIMIR WALKED OVER to his mother, his feet a pair of Hebraic automatons steadily crossing the crisp parquet, wishing that he could Jew-walk his way back to Manhattan.
    “Show me how it’s done,” Vladimir said.
    Mother kissed both his cheeks and rubbed his shoulders, poking with her index finger at his spine. “Straighten up, sinotchek, ” she said. My little son. He had been out of her good graces too long: that one word made him wheeze with pleasure. “My treasure,” she added, knowing he would belong to her for the rest of the day, never mind the 4:51 train to Manhattan. “I’ll teach you how it’s done. You’ll walk like me, an elegant walk, everyone knows who they’re dealing with when I walk into a room. Straighten up. I’ll teach you . . .”
    And she taught him. He took his first baby steps to her delight. It was all in the posture. You, too, could walk like a gentile. You had to keep your chin in the air. The spine straight.
    Then the feet would follow.

PART II
GIRSHKIN
IN LOVE

6. THE RETURN OF
BEST FRIEND BAOBAB
    SEVEN YEARS AFTER graduating from an elite math-and-science high school along with his best friend Vladimir Girshkin, Baobab Gilletti looked very much the same. He was a pale redhead of admirable physique, although the demise of a teenager’s metabolism had left him with a new coat of fat, which he constantly tugged at, not without a sense of pride.
    Tonight, having returned pink and glowing from his Miami narco-adventures, Baobab was educating Vladimir about his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Roberta. How she was so young and promising. How she wrote avant-garde film scripts and acted in and around them. How she was doing something.
    The boys were sitting on a broken mohair couch in the living room of Baobab’s Yorkville tenement, watching little Roberta squirm into a tight pair of jeans, her bare legs as veined as a newborn’s, her mouth full of braces and Wild Bordeaux lipstick. It was too much adolescence for Vladimir, who tried to look away, but Roberta waddled up to him anyway, her jeans around her ankles, and shouted, “Vlad!” kissing his ear and deafening him with her pucker.
    Baobab examined his girlfriend’s salaciousness through anempty brandy snifter. “Hey, what’s with the jeans?” he said to her. “You’re going out? But I thought . . .”
    “You thought?” Roberta said. “Oh, you must tell me all about it, Liebschen! ” She rubbed Vladimir’s grizzly cheek with her own, watching with pleasure as the young man giggled and tried, unconvincingly, to push her away.
    “I thought you were staying home tonight,” said Baobab. “I thought you were writing a critique of me or a response to my critique.”
    “Idiot, I told you we’re filming tonight. See, if you ever actually listened to me, I wouldn’t have to spend half the day