FOSTERED DESIRE
By Misha Firer



I spent my second teenage year, student-exchanged in Berkeley, California in a foster family of one member, a forty-eight-year old single woman of mixed Jewish and Italian ethnicity. Her name was Esther, a long-standing divorcee, a super-left radical, a professor of social science in UC Berkeley.
She resided in the gated enclave of the upper-middle-class lily-white couples. They, Esther promulgated with spite effervescing on her lips, as if acidic substance had run in her veins, had led a selfish, promiscuous existence, all until lately, when a certain phenomenon known as “midlife crises” overtook and tamed their egocentric hankerings.
We took many a walk over the snaking paths up and down the ridge, over which ocean-view side the wealthier part of town splayed with high disregard for the grid layout convention. Esther, besides likening to dab into pontifications over the designs and prices of the houses, hidden behind the impeccably-trimmed foliage, would, when occasion present itself, point out at the toddlers and children of color playing joyfully in the backyards, unaware of their social roles in this brave new world.
“Seeing these adopted children from the third world, Stas, corroborates with my viewing of the present decadence of this greatest country of ours. The tragedy is on the par with that of the ancient Greek plays, where audience is deliberately set to relish the pathetic tribulations its characters are driven into by a blind ambition, which certainly is a human folly is disguise.”
Esther’s own kids had grown up and conspicuously fled to New York, daughter to pursue her mock dream of becoming a stand-up comedian (with very modest success), son with even more amorphous disposition of mind, but with credentials from MIT, to surf over the cutting high-tech edge (quite successfully, if to commensurate exposure with a paycheck). And thus I was a surrogate transplant to Esther’s emptied nest.
Let me digress and switch the narrative for duration of a few paragraphs to Moscow, Russia, where I hail from. In my first teenage year, which coincided with the farce coupe that wiped out last vestiges of the post-glasnost communism, I was still naively unaware of my virginity. The communists proclaimed at the genesis of their system seventy years before, that sex was non-existent in the Union of Soviet Republics. I was raised and bred in the asexual atmosphere, where the immoral behavior was never brought up to public attention, and was practiced discreetly, behind the closed and latched doors.
My libido, of whose existence I had absolutely no knowledge in the first place, lay dormant somewhere under the dull clockwork routine of school days and evenings, spent solitarily, reading smut-censored fiction books. My single mother, with her two jobs (that of an engineer and dress seamstress for private clients) had barely enough time to be monogamous, albeit had had managed to sustain a steady relationship with a boyfriend. I believed throughout the years that he was my mother’s friend, without prefix “boy.”
As to the question of where the children come from, I had no curiosity of seeking the answer to. For all I cared, it must have belonged to the same dubious group of questions: where the wind blows from, or where the river Moskva originates, or where do we go after we die. In other words, I let the adults worry about the matter.
At the time I was transported via air to the country of the free, my latent libido manifested its initial signs of awakening. The full erections transfigured the organ, whose function I attributed solely to urination, into an inflated, steeled rod, on seemingly random occasions. Ubiquitous dreams I wouldn’t remember next morning left sticky stains on the nether side of the crotch pouch of my white underwear. Telltale signs of some foreboding energy building up in me electroshocked my imagination, and I was coerced to conduct a thorough investigation of its origins in order to learn about its repercussions.
Overcoming innate timidity, with already some accumulated data from secondary sources, my friends and etc, I requested my mother to present a detailed report upon the origins of procreation and its relation to the horrifying transfigurations of my “Little Petr.” Her clinical, and indeed detailed explanation left me utterly dismayed, indeed repulsed with realization of the scumminess of the act of love. Yes, they dared to refer to this despicable exchange of fluids in a comatose state of excitation derived from observing and touching the naked body of the opposite gender as to *love-making. Which functionality – the secret revealed – was to conceive babies.
I immediately had to admit the facetiousness of the pompous high-society costumed ball dancers, the glittering people of 19th century, portrayed so vividly in Russian novels: they too did this beastly thing in their bedrooms. And from the more modern fiction, Central Committee commissars wearing leather jackets and speaking in cardboard mottoes with distinguished airs of natural superiority, they did it too. As for the more real and modern people, my self-righteous, automaton teachers too engaged in fluid-exchange activities with their husbands. And my mother and her boyfriend, a nondescript nightshift bank guard who wore those ugly bi-focal glasses, he must have been *doing my mother during her lunch breaks. All people did it. And in fact animals did it too, which I could accept — they were animals after all. But aren’t we *human, and by that token are *evolved?
I still presided in the same state of mental agitation, when I found myself in the sultry month of August, far removed from homes, in a company of a gray stucco mansion owner, guided by her hand up to the peak of the hill to survey the spectacular panoramic view of Bay area. The view was indeed spectacular, and so was Esther’s whitewashed smile, her glistening with unhindered excitement hazelnut eyes. Esther said, “Do you enjoy yourself, Stas? This is, what, your sixth day in America?”
I nodded. I was culture shocked, but my English was decent, which saved me from totally fluking out in this strange environment, where I was on my own to battle alienation. “Yes. A lot.” Then I remembered the exchange student program coordinator, who lectured me on America, and tipped me that Americans like to be shown your appreciation perennially. “Thank you so much, Esther. I really, *really appreciate what you doing for me, driving me around the area, feeding me tasty food.”
We had started disembarking from the hillcrest, and strode slowly, with Esther setting the pace.