Last night, they celebrated the opening of a new play until four in the morning, so today her mother is more upset than usual, trotting out a longer list of toxic outcomes that await Sasha, leaping a full meter further than usual in her condemnation.

“When are you going to get married?” she demands as she cranks the handle of the meat grinder to make kotlety for dinner. “Look at yourself: no family, no children. Everyone your age is married, and some are even divorced by now. Not that I am promoting divorce,” she adds prudently, so that Sasha doesn’t get any wrong ideas in her head.

She has poked at the topic before by bringing up various young men she knows: heaping praise on a young anatomy professor at her medical institute, lionizing the engineer son of their neighbor on the third floor. Sasha doesn’t want to discuss with her mother the possibility of marriage, especially now. She doesn’t want to give her mother the advantage of being privy to what is swirling in her daughter’s heart, of sighing and pitying Sasha for not getting the man she wants. She keeps it all inside her, away from everyone’s eyes, because, as Grandma told her, what’s inside you, no one can touch.

“I’m married to the Theater,” she says, pushing back a headache.

“Don’t be so ironic with me,” her mother warns, letting her know that she is engaged in a serious conversation.

“I’m not being ironic. This is what my teachers told us at the drama school.” She thinks of her Dostoyevsky scene mentor, Polevitskaya, who warned them that Theater would take over their lives and bring them to ruin. As a spasm of nausea begins to creep up her throat, she is willing to admit that Polevitskaya may have been right. All of this—clouded in the bank of fog her mind has become—seems like a century ago.

“You need a normal life,” her mother says. “You need order. You need a family. Not a married man thirty years older than you.”