She started letting her dark hair grow long again the year before she and her husband gave up on America for good and came home; it was the only way for her to avoid being marked as abnormal. The black has turned to a dull gray, and the circles under her eyes grow with every anxious, sleepless night. She slouches now, shoulders bowed and rounded; the burdens laid on her these last fifteen years, of memories and mundanity, have broken her, broken what was once a tall, strong, proud woman. She is a bare few centimeters taller than her daughter now, and her husband towers over her when once he had to look up into her eyes. She has been defeated, forced to run away from what she loved, her dreams turned to dust. She can remember when America was the ultimate destination, a mecca where she could compete with the best. Now it is a nightmare, and she grieves that her tall, talented Zsushka will never have the same chances that she had.

As if thinking of her daughter was a beacon, the door opens and Zsushka comes in, headphones covering her ears, wearing a pink "Mary is my homegirl" t-shirt. She inherited some of her parents' height, but she's still only five-ten. Her eyes are light blue like her father's and her hair is the same light brown as his. Her winning smile and joie de vivre, though, came from her mother- or rather, from her mother as she was before her life crumbled around her.

"Where have you been, Zsushka?"

"Moooom, I told you not to call me that!" Zsushka whines.

"I will not call you Stacy. Get used to it. Now tell me where you have been. It is past midnight, and you were to have been home two hours ago."

"Oh, hanging out at Alex's, watching some kick-ass shows he taped." Half of Zsushka's sentence comes out in her native Russian, half in English- American- slang.

"I told you that you were not to see Aleksei anymore."

"Moooooom, I'm 17!"

"Be silent! You still live under my roof, and so you live under my rules. There is to be no English in this house, and I've told you repeatedly that you are not to watch American television or listen to American music. I am more disappointed in you than words can say, Susana Teresa Anastasia. As soon as your father comes home and he hears of this, he will lay down your punishment. For now, I am sick of you. Go to your room, and I don't want to see your face until breakfast tomorrow."

Zsushka shrugs and slips her headphones back on- why not since she's already being punished for them? Completely oblivious to her mother's presence, she strolls to the corner of the apartment that they call her room.

The woman whose hair is gray and whose dreams are dead sighs in the darkness. Slowly, she opens the drawer of the table next to the couch. That's where they keep the old family photos, the ones that Zsushka begged them to put away because they were too embarrassing. She takes one out now, a picture taken at Christmas ten years ago. All three of them are laughing and goofing off, and Zsushka's hair curling out from under the hood of her jacket is as black as that of her mother lifting her high in the air.

She doesn't want to think about it, but she knows that the suspicions she's nursed for three years were true after all, and it cuts like a knife to the heart. Her daughter is slipping through her hands, slipping away towards America. Zsushka was her last hope for the next generation, named for two friends who would not surrender to an evangelical vision of normalcy and died for their courage, given the name Anastasia as an omen of rebirth; she was supposed to mean a new beginning for her dying mother country and the twisted nightmare of America. Instead, the nightmare has twisted her and made her a mockery of everything her namesakes stood for. How long now will it be before Zsushka stops complaining about her pet name and just doesn't answer to it because she doesn't think it's her? How long before her mother tongue becomes foreign to her, supplanted by American idiom? How long before she goes over the wall and becomes just another face in the homogenous crowd?

Bitter tears slip from the dark eyes of the horrified mother as thick, black grief overtakes her. She has failed her only child and the friends whose memory she has tried to honor. Worse, she has failed her country. Russia has been dying for twenty years now, its wealth sucked steadily overseas, its people dying of illnesses that even Third World nations have managed to defeat. Zsushka and the rest of her generation were supposed to put a stop to that and bring the country back to itself, but it's become painfully clear to Zsushka's mother and probably others of that generation that their children would rather be vapidly entertained by American garbage. Russia was doomed; even if America deemed it not to be a threat, the health issues that have dogged the nation even when it was the USSR have led to a precipitous decline in able-bodied population. Death hangs in the air with a sickly, horrible smell.

Rocking back and forth on the ancient and threadbare sofa, she sobs herself into a haunted, restless sleep full of things that once were and things that might have been.