Only a few days in New York, I was sure, would change me. Maybe a few days in New York would make me fall out of love with Tashkent, forget it so, that I might never want to return. In New York, I would forget that solitude and alienation that I’d feel being around a lot of people that you don’t think like, those hours sitting alone in the kitchen, with a bottle of beer and a cigarette looking out at the stars. In fact, in New York, you couldn’t see the stars in the sky and the people were people who I felt a part of. And in retrospect, when I had had anxieties about whether Yulia would not be acceptable to my friends and family -- that was really beside the point. The point was that she was unacceptable to me.

I thought the plane would give me some time to think things through, to think about the big issues, big issues like who I was and where I stood in relation to these two places – the place I was born into and the place that I had adopted and lived in and never quite fit into.

But the plane ride afforded me no such time for reflection. Instead, there was Natasha sitting in the seat next to me. I thought I had been fortunate to get one of the only seats on the plane with an empty neighboring seat. But unfortunately, Natasha approached. I couldn’t place her at first – her appearance had these curious contradictions -- the undoubtedly Russian bottle blonde hair – and yet, she had full figure, flat shoes and suburban American bland, but tasteful jeans and sweater. Perhaps, I wondered, she was an American who had lived for a while in the region .But as the expatriate community was so small, it struck me as unlikely that I would never have seen her before. Or, she might be a local Russian who had spent a lot of time around foreigners or living abroad. It was difficult to say, but then again, I could imagine that the same could be said about me. I pretty much had her pegged for one of those women who work for American companies and therefore spend time around foreigners and scoff at the self-imposed discomforts her compatriot women put themselves through, such as walking through the pitted sidewalks of Tashkent in three inch stiletto heels. When she addressed me, she asked in both Russian and accented English if I knew whether we would have to get off the plane in Frankfurt and board a different craft. I didn’t know.

I’m not in the habit of talking to people on planes, but Natasha was pretty forward. She had many questions for me, who I was, where I was from, what I was doing in her country. How was it possible that I could like her country, which, I quickly understood, she hated. I responded laconically, clearly not to her satisfaction, that I liked Uzbekistan. I learned that Natasha had left a province of Uzbekistan three years ago to marry an American man. I supposed that she was probably younger and thinner then and probably like one of the girls who Yulia provided services to. I’d seen some of these websites full of photographs of tidy, proper looking women, often past the very young age that is considered in Uzbekistan a woman’s prime. Natasha was clearly one of them. I suppose she just expected that I would understand, that I could read between the lines, but she would not outright say. Instead, she volunteered much information just short of that, for example, of how she had arrived in the US three years earlier, not speaking a word of English, to a town in rural Nebraska, with a population of three thousand, where everyone smiled at you on the streets, that she had a son from a previous marriage to a man who drank.

Now, Natasha was a year short of receiving her US citizenship, living in Orlando, Florida and loving her new life, loving America, hating returning to her native country, to her native town. She had come home for three weeks, the second visit back to Uzbekistan since she left, and like the last time, three weeks seemed to last forever.

“This is a miserable place,” she said. And now that she lived in Orlando Florida, where there was no winter, she brought all her winter clothes back to her native town and gave them away to her friends, who would need them for the coming winter, another winter, as always in which there wouldn’t be enough gas to heat the house or even boil a pot of water for tea..

For Natasha, what was most disturbing was how I could possibly enjoy living in her country. I said that I didn’t live in her small town, but that I lived in the capital. And the capital, Tashkent, was different. In the capital, there usually was enough heat in the winter. And in those winters, I never had a problem boiling a kettle of water for tea. Natasha said she didn’t really know the capital. She had been there three or four times as a child on class trips, and then once again when her husband-to-be came to meet her and she took him around the country. Life in the capital, she said was nice, that is, if you had the money to be able to afford it.

She asked me, of course, about my age and if I was married. And the first thing she asked when I told her that I was single was, “but who does your cooking and cleaning? “

“I do it,” I said.

“I would think you would find yourself a nice girl here, who will cook and clean for you.”

I didn’t even know how to respond to that. I thought about shocking her and telling her that I was gay. But she was provincial, from provinces in Uzbekistan, to provinces in the US. I was almost sure that she wouldn’t take well to the gay thing.

“I can do it all myself.”

“You know how to cook and clean?” She asked, with genuine astonishment.

“Of course I do. And most of my friends do too. In fact,” I said kind of making this up, “that’s the way people live in the capital. And frankly, I think that there are a lot of girls in the capital who don’t really want to have anything to do with housework.”

“And you wash your own clothes?”

“I do,” I said. “I have a washing machine.”

“Ok,” she said, almost as if throwing down a gauntlet. “You may have a washing machine, but do you have a dryer?”

“No,” I said, she had defeated me. “I hang up my clothes to dry on the balcony, just like everyone else.”

“But you see,” she said, “people have dryers – I have a dryer.”

“I’m sure there are people here with dryers, in fact, I think I may know them.”

“Ok, but do they have dishwashers? I have a dishwasher.”

I admitted that I did not know of anyone with a dishwasher. In fact, at the one nice supermarket with western products, I don’t ever recall seeing a box of dishwasher detergent. So, I kept silent. Natasha’s company and conversation was grating on me. She had, I felt, stated her position and made her point.  ¶ 1:17 AM