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From "The Last Chicken in America"

I think a supermarket is a poor place for a romance to begin.

We came to America in July, and now, in August, the supermarket is still a bit of a miracle, although our eyes are starting to adjust to the earnest pinks and yellows and blues in the packaging that spell out foreign to us. We don't have a car yet, and our trips to the supermarket are long processions along Murray Avenue past the BP gas station, the karate studio, and the funeral home. The Giant Eagle is at the far edge of Squirrel Hill, bordering on Greenfield.

Of the three of us, my mother is the most impressionable. While my father and I trail behind, she gets carried away with her shopping cart, marveling at the display of frozen pizzas, calculating the best price for a pound of apples. She follows the supermarket circulars as if they were a map to a treasure island, and soon we lose her. "Masha, where's your mother?" my father says.

We find her in the aisle of canned soups. She is talking to a wiry boy who looks my age -- seventeen, maybe eighteen, twenty.

"Alick is from Moscow," she says. "He came to Pittsburgh all alone."

"An exchange student," explains Alick. He shakes my father's hand, and I step back a little. He looks to be the kind my parents adore. The best student in class, always in the first row. A geek, a botanist, as we used to call them at my Moscow school.

Alick smiles at me, and it's the unpleasantly wholesome American smile. It emanates charm and fluoride, good fortune and good breeding, and you either know it's fake and don't trust it, or you trust it too much.

"You're living all alone? It must be hard," my mother says. "You must be missing your parents."

Yes, confirms Alick, he misses them a lot, worries about them stuck in Russia with the Russian economy forever plunging, worries practically every day, sometimes can't even sleep at night. My parents give me quick, chiding looks -- that's what children are supposed to be like.

He lives by the university, but his job is in Squirrel Hill. Four nights a week he works at Rosenthal's Pizza on Murray, a faded yellow building with blue lettering, nestled between the travel agency and Judaica Books. The following night he comes over, bearing a large cardboard box of leftover pizza slices -- a move sure to win over my parents. At dinner, he tells us about his job, about the Hasids who come to the restaurant for their kosher pizza, sweating in their heavy jackets and hats, their beards and payess slick and unclean. They leave miserable tips or sometimes no tip at all. Goddamn Jews, Alick says, and smiles. He is, like the rest of us, unmistakably Jewish, with his squiggly looks and black curly hair. We don't like Hasids either.

To my mother Alick relates the hurdles of his solitary life; to my father he explains the advantages of Visa over American Express. We learn that he is twenty, studies business at the University of Pittsburgh, and that both of his parents teach economics at Moscow State University.

"He's got a good head on his shoulders," my father says, when Alick finally goes home. "Unlike you, Masha."

My father is wrong and he knows it: I've always been a good student. In our class in Moscow, I was the fifth best in physics and in math; my composition on Fathers and Sons was sent to the regional Olympics; and if it weren't for chemistry, I might have graduated with a silver medal. This is what I think as I sit in my daily English class and practice dialogues from the Easy Steps workbook.

"No man will ever notice you if you look so sleepy," whispers Regina. She is sixty and well-preserved. She wears her hair up, twirled into a crown, and her makeup is tasteful. It is unclear what men she is referring to; the only men in our High Intermediate ESL are worn-out middle-aged engineers with bratty kids in Allderdice High School and loud wives in the Advanced Beginner class next door.

"Brighten up, Masha," Regina orders me. "Look at Larisa, how her eyes are always shiny." Regina likes to maintain contact with the younger generation. In our class, the young generation is me, Lariska, and Mila and Yana, the twin sisters from Donetsk.

At lunch, Lariska and I take our sandwiches and yogurt outside. Lariska is two years older than me, with dusky fuzz on the sides of her face and eyebrows grown together in a loose checkmark. She wears turtlenecks from the $9.99 store, and I don't think she is all that pretty. She's been here for four months and she tells me there are no appealing boys among the new immigrants. She is in love with an "old-timer," a mysterious distant cousin, Zhenechka. He has a girlfriend, but Lariska is working to fix that.

"Any progress?" I ask.

"He still doesn't know what's good for him," complains Lariska. She shows up at Zhenechka's house unannounced and ready to seduce. His parents adore her. "He's melting too," she says. "I think he's melting." When she is upstairs in his room, his parents don't disturb them.

"Do you know if you're supposed to wait to have sex after a yeast infection?" she asks me. "Because I think I'm going to sleep with him on Thursday."

I say I don't know. She has it all planned anyway.

Alick keeps coming over for dinner. Not every night, but often, three or four nights a week. He sits at our dining room table, all smiles and good behavior.

"Loans are good," he tells my parents. "That's how you build your credit history." He explains to them how credit history is important and how loans are "the American way."

"Now, what did you do in Moscow?" he asks my father, and listens to him mumble about circuits and resistors.

"I think you'll be able to get a good job here," Alick says with the confidence of a fortune-teller. "Do you know how to do a resume?"

I get up and go to my room, where I try to read F. Scott Fitzgerald without a dictionary. Then I walk outside, check the mailbox -- a few glossy flyers from a furniture store, a PennySaver, no letters.

Later, my parents scold me for ignoring Alick.

"What's your problem?" my father says. "He's a good guy, so what's your problem?"

"Can't you be a little nicer to him?" says my mother. "The boy is all alone -- show some kindness. How did you manage to grow into such a hard person?"

I tell them Alick bores me. I tell them I'm allergic to his cologne.

"You've never been allergic to anything in your life," says my mother...