I’m 33, and drunk, I proposed to the 55-year-old cook from our cafeteria. He agreed. I sobered up in the morning, but we were already at the registry office. And then the CEO summoned me to his office with the words: “Do you even know who you married?”
Nelli Lvovna Klimova was known at the “Titan” holding company as a woman who achieved everything on her own. By the age of thirty-three, she held the position of Marketing Director at one of the largest enterprises in our region, managing three dozen employees. She drove her own Lexus and lived in a spacious apartment in a new residential complex with a view of the river, from where a panorama of her hometown’s lights opened up in the evenings.
But as soon as she crossed the threshold of her parents’ house in a village in the neighboring district, all her achievements lost their meaning before the single question from her mother, Natalya Ivanovna, asked with an unchanging melancholy in her voice:
— Well, sweetie, when is it going to happen?
In the village, where every old woman knew by heart whose cow had calved, whose daughter-in-law had argued with her mother-in-law again, and whose daughter was still unmarried, Nelli’s single status had long turned into a family tragedy, discussed on every bench by the well. Natalya Ivanovna perceived her daughter’s loneliness as a personal insult inflicted by her neighbors, who, upon meeting, would invariably inquire about Nelli’s successes with such thick sympathy in their voices that one wanted to turn around and leave, never to return to that house again.
— Verka just married off her youngest, — her mother would say on the phone every Sunday, drawing out her words so that her daughter could feel the full depth of her maternal disappointment. — She’s three years younger than you, and look, she found someone. Not some director, just a simple mechanic, but now she has a family….
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