My romantic mom defied the Soviet byt (daily grind) by heroically fleeing to zagranitsa. Dad beat it in his own crafty way.

But he wasn’t simply a crafty do-nothing sloth, my dad.

The dinner invitation that December 1987 sounded almost like an awkward, weirdly formal marriage proposal.

“I would like to… er… receive you,” Sergei told Mom on one of our walks. He meant to infuse the stilted “receive” with his usual irony, but his voice shook unexpectedly.

Mother shrugged. “We can just drop by for tea sometime.”

“Chai wouldn’t do,” my dad pressed. “But please give me a few days to prepare.” The anxiety in his voice was so palpable, I accepted on Mom’s behalf with a grinning American “Thank you.”

“Amerikanka,” Father said, touching my raccoon coat with something approaching paternal affection. Ah yes, of course: Russians never dispense grins and thank-yous so easily.

For the visit Mom wore much more makeup than usual. And she too smiled, prodigiously, flashing a perfect new dental crown. At Dad’s doorstep she managed to look ten feet tall.

Sergei had long since moved from our Arbat apartment to an atmospheric lane across the cement-hued Kalinin Prospect. His snug thirty-five-meter one-bedroom overlooked the Politburo Polyclinic. From his window I peered down on the lumbering silhouettes of black official Chaika cars—hauling infirm nomenklatura for some quality resuscitation.

I stared at the Chaikas to avoid the sight of the blond, Finnish, three-legged table. It was a relic from our old life together. Familiar to the point of tears, there was a scratch from my eight-year-old vandalism, and a burn mark from Mother’s chipped enameled teakettle—the kettle of my American nightmares. On the heavy sideboard sat the pewter antique samovar Mom and I had found in the garbage dump one rainy April, carried home, lunging over the puddles, and polished with tooth powder. My insipid childhood watercolors were up on Sergei’s walls as if they were Matisses. I noted one particularly anemic still life. The faux-rustic vase filled with bluebells had been painted by Mom.

“I think he constructed a cult of us after we left,” she hissed in my ear.

As Dad scurried in and out of the tiny kitchen in his slippers, his wife, Lena, prattled in a clear, ringing Young Pioneer voice. Unsettlingly, she had the same build and short haircut as my mother, but with a turned-up nose, far less makeup, and pale eyes of startling crystalline blue. In those crystalline eyes I saw flashes of terror. She was here: the dread First Wife. Resurrected from exile, returned in triumph, and now semireclining on Dad’s maroon divan in the pose of a magnanimous Queen Mother.

“Lenochka,” Mother said to her, “can’t you persuade Sergei to get dentures?”

We’d already unloaded the gifts. Proust for Dad, choice nuggets of ninety-nine-cent American abundance for Lena, plus an absurdly expensive bottle of Smirnoff from the hard currency store, where there were no enraged mobs.

To our swank, soulless booze my toothless father replied with home brews of staggering sophistication. The walnut-infused amber samogon, distilled in Mom’s ancient pressure cooker, suggested not some proletarian hooch but a noble, mysterious whiskey. In another decanter glimmered shocking-pink spirt. Steeped in sugared lingonberries, it was known (I learned) as nesmiyanovka (“don’t-laugh-ovka”) after Alexander Nesmiyanov, Russia’s leading chemist, at whose scientific research facility the recipe had been concocted by his savvy associates. Miraculously the lingonberries softened the hundred-proof ethyl harshness, and in my stomach the potion kept on—and on—blossoming like the precious bud of a winter carnation.

“The canapés—weren’t they your favorite?” cooed my dad, handing Mom on her divan a dainty gratinéed cheese toast.

“Friendship Cheese, cilantro, and, what, adzhika (spicy Georgian chili paste)?” she commented coolly.

“Made the adzhika myself,” noted Dad—humbly, almost abjectly—as he proffered another plate, a wonder of herring and egg thingies.

His next salvo was borscht.

It was nothing like Mom’s old flick-of-the-wrist vegetarian version, that small triumph coaxed out of tired root vegetables and a can of tomato paste. My mother was a flighty, impulsive, dream-spinning cook. My deadbeat dad turned out to be a methodical, determined master craftsman. He insisted on painstakingly extracting fresh juice from carrots and beets for his borscht, adding it to the rich rounded beef stock, steeping the whole thing for a day, then flourishing a last-minute surprise of pounded garlic and shkvarki, the crisp, salty pork crackling.

Dad’s satsivi, the creamy Georgian walnut-sauced chicken, left me equally speechless. I thought of the impossible challenge of obtaining a decent chicken in Moscow. Of the ferocious price of walnuts at the Central Market near the Circus; of the punishing labor of shelling and pulverizing them; of the multiple egg yolks so opulently enriching the sauce. With each bite I was more and more in awe of my father. I forgave him every last drop there was still left to forgive. Once again, I was the Pavlovian pup of my childhood days—when I salivated at the mere thought of the jiggly buttermilk jellies and cheese sticks he brought on his sporadic family visits. This man, this crumple-mouthed grifter in saggy track pants, he was a god in the kitchen.

And wasn’t this dinner his way of showing his love?

But all the juice-squeezing and pulverizing, the monthly budget blown on one extravagant chicken dish—it wasn’t for me. It was not into my face Dad was now gazing, timidly seeking approval.

The living-slash-dining room suddenly felt stifling and overcrowded. I slipped off to the kitchen, where Lena was glumly chain-smoking Dad’s Yavas. Her glass held pink lingonberry spirt. Unwilling to let her commit the cardinal sin of drinking alone, I offered a dog-eared toast.

“’Za znakomstvo!” (Here’s to getting to know you!)

“Davay na brudershaft?” she proposed. Drinking na brudershaft (to brotherhood) is a ritual in which two new friends interlace arms, gulp from each other’s glass, kiss, and thereafter address each other as ty (the informal, familial form of you). We emptied our shot glasses, kissed. Lena’s cheek had a gullible, babyish softness. We were now co-bottlers, Dad’s new wife and me.

Pals.

Back in the living room I found Sergei murmuring away at Mom’s side. “In those days,” I overheard, “food tasted better to me…”

Mom smiled the same polite but regal smile. It never left her face the whole evening.

We drank the last, parting ritual shot. “Na pososhok.” (For the walking staff.)

“Marvelous dinner!” Mom offered in the cramped hallway as Dad longingly draped the pseudomink rabbit coat over her shoulders. “Who knew you were such a klass cook?” Then, with it’s-been-nice-seeing-you American breeziness: “You must give me your recipe for that beef stew in a clay pot.”

“Lariska!” muttered Dad, with barely concealed desperation. “It was your recipe and your clay pot. The one I gave you for your birthday.”

“Da? Really now?” said my mother pleasantly. “I don’t remember any of this.”

And that was that. Her empty Americanized smile told him the past was past.

“Bravo, Tatyana!” I growled to her in the elevator. “Stanislavsky applauds you from his grave.” Mom in her makeup gave a worn, very Soviet grin involving no teeth.

My “Tatyana” reference was to every Russian woman’s favorite scene in Pushkin’s verse novel, Eugene Onegin. Tatyana, the ultimate lyric heroine of our literature, meets up again with Onegin, the mock-Byronic protagonist who’d cruelly scorned her love when she was a melancholy provincial maiden. Now she’s all dressed up, rich and cold and imperious at a glamorous St. Petersburg ball. Encountering her after years, Onegin is the one who’s dying of love—and Tatyana is the one who does the scorning. The sad part? She’s still in love with Onegin! But she’s now married, has moved on, and the past is the past. The sadder part for Mom? It was Sergei who was married.