Ruth Puttermesser is a retired lawyer in New York. She is the white-haired daughter of an emigre who had fled czarist Russia and had become lost to his Russian family during the Stalinist "silence". Out of the Muscovite void comes a phone call from a long-lost family member, a young biochemist named Lidia Klaudia Girshengornova. Lidia claims to be Ruth's cousin and pleads with her to "save my child!" Ruth arranges for this woman to come to stay with her in New York as she seeks asylum from the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union. Lidia moves in with Ruth and desperately seeks a job cleaning houses, despite being told she doesn't need to. She takes a job cleaning for a family in the same building. She also begins selling a bag of trinkets she brought with her. Lidia also gets an American boyfriend named Peter. Lidia fights with the woman vetting her for asylum over whether or not she can sell her trinkets, and she loses her job cleaning when the couple she works for takes her to a meeting where the speaker praises the dream of Communism, causing Lidia to exclaim how stupid everyone is there. Lidia eventually leaves New York to take the money she made in America back to her Russian boyfriend, which had been her plan all along. Her American boyfriend weeps as he sips vodka from a teacup with Ruth, as he did not know she had planned to leave him.