The Language of Sisters Read online

  “There he is!” Anya cried out, holding up her hand sanitizer spray, which she’d used on our table before we sat down. “Dolly Ann! Dolly Ann!”

  The room was packed, the candlelight flickering off the chandeliers, burgundy curtains hung on every wall. Everyone went crazy for Dolly Ann. Dolly Ann was hilarious. He sang with a baritone voice, a husky timbre, and a beat that wouldn’t quit.

  Boris was to my left. He’d taken a night off from being a “mechanic.” Tati and Zoya were to my right. They were both wearing negligees as shirts. They had arrived with dates we all knew we would never see again. The dates were charming and friendly and handsome, the usual.

  “This is our new line,” Tati told me. “Don’t you love it? Feel that silkiness, feel it!” I touched the silk at her stomach. “Soft, isn’t it? Like a camellia. That’s why we call it The Camellia. Get it?”

  “I get it. It’s one of your best.”

  Zoya’s lacy negligee was burgundy. “You gave me the idea for this, Toni, because you said you love this color. We call it The Toni K.”

  “It does me proud,” I said.

  Kai gave me a hug with one arm, his other arm around Valerie. He was funny and friendly as always, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Kai is my sister’s weakness. She is totally in love with him.

  Gino came in, handsome and well dressed, gave everyone a hug, bought us all a round of drinks, and had his arm around Ellie the whole night. He was smitten with her. I did not see the same from her to him, her smile tight, her arms close to her body. At one point she bent under the table and blew in her bag. To his credit, Gino bent down under the table with her.

  JJ arrived by herself in a silver-sequined shirt cut low and tight jeans. She met her “date”—her husband, Jax—and they pretended to pick each other up. JJ told him she was Stephi, a technology executive from out of town, here for only a night, and he told her he was Kyle, from Florida, a musician with the Florida Symphony.

  We all played into the imaginary date, shook “Kyle’s” hand, introduced ourselves, asked him about himself, where he lived, etc.

  They danced closer and closer all night.

  “He’s cute,” Tati said, joining in on the pretend date. “But he has a dadlike quality to him, which is not attractive to me.”

  “Stephi will sleep with him for one night and that’ll be that,” Zoya said.

  “I hope Stephi’s husband doesn’t find out about this,” Boris said.

  “She definitely shouldn’t marry him,” Kai said. “Too nerdy.”

  We listened to Dolly Ann sing, joined in when he invited everyone to sing along, and we laughed at his jokes. When it was time for audience participation, my family nominated me and dragged me to the stage. I ended up sitting on Dolly Ann’s lap, on top of her silken dress. I had had too much vodka.

  Dolly Ann, sparkling and glittering, sang a song about an Irishman in love with a mermaid with black hair and blue eyes, ogling me, then asked me what talent I had. I showed him. I did a drunken handstand, “hand walking” across the stage, my red shirt down, my stomach bared. The Kozlovskys about died laughing.

  The crowd went wild.

  Dolly Ann, drag queen, father of five, faced me and curtsied.

  * * *

  I walked up my dock at six in the morning to the parking lot above the marina to go to work. There had been a murder under the Freedom Bridge, so I was rushing. Rushing to a murder. I do not like this part of my life at all.

  “Shoot!”

  My car was gone.

  I have a sleek black MDX.

  I opened my phone and dialed a number.

  “Boris,” I semishouted. “My car is gone. Again. This is the second time—”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later Boris drove up with my car, followed by another man, bald and the size of a dump truck.

  “Sorry about that, Toni.” He gave me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Your mother would kill you if she knew you were still doing this, Boris, if your father didn’t kill you first.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Why are you still in this business?”

  “Lucrative.”

  “You’re going to jail again. They’ll catch you.”

  “I know. But my mechanic business is doing better and better. I’ve hired two real mechanics, they’re a fortune, but soon I’ll quit—”

  “Yes, I’m sure. As soon as I quit breathing.”

  “I have tickets for Madame Butterfly for Friday night. I’ve been asking you and you keep putting me off. Please, Toni, can you come?”

  I was going to stay no. Then I could be alone. Or with Nick.

  “I’m going to take that slightest of slight hesitations as a yes, Toni. Meet you at The Grill first?”

  I changed my mind. It was fun to be out last night, despite the double guilt. I danced and laughed for the first time in too long. “Sure. Yes. Thank you, Boris.”

  He stood up on his toes, thrilled. “I love Madame Butterfly. So emotional. The costumes, the cultural differences, the history, the music, the poetic words and heartbreak. The deepest betrayal.”

  “You know all about opera and yet you run a chop shop and steal cars.”

  “I don’t steal them.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I’m giving you a hug instead.” He hugged me, then his voice became pleady. “Toni, do you have any of your mama’s pryanikis in there?”

  “I do.” I gave him the baggie of honey spiced cookies, glazed in sugar. I would miss those cookies today.

  “Thank you.” He kissed my cheek and headed back to the bald man the size of the dump truck. The bald man got out of the car and walked toward me, not smiling. “Hi, Toni. Sorry about the car. New guy.”

  “Hi, Mac.”

  He gave me a hug then headed back to the car. He turned around. “Were those your mama’s pryanikis?”

  “Yes. Tell Boris I said to share.”

  The dump truck smiled.

  * * *

  On my way to and home from work, I drive by a one-story white house with a red door. Often the garage door is open. Inside, up on some type of wood platform, is an old tandem kayak. I see the husband working on it sometimes. The red paint is chipped. He has a wife. They are white, but their two young boys are black. Everyone always seems happy. I’m happy for them, being so happy, but it’s a stab in my gut, and I look away quick.

  6

  Moscow, the Soviet Union

  We lived in Moscow in an apartment complex owned, as all were, by the government. We were able to live there because my parents were professors at the university. It took years for my parents to get the apartment. Before that, we were in a dormitory room—one room—with one kitchen on the floor that was shared with ten other families.

  Our apartment building was concrete, many stories tall, and one of many other concrete jungle apartment buildings. It was a middle-class lifestyle.

  However, middle class in Moscow should not be associated with middle class in America.

  We had a small bedroom for my parents, and a miniscule bedroom for my sisters and me, which fit a double-sized bed that took up most of the room. My father built a wood table, which took up much of the family room/kitchen. There was room for a couch and one chair.

  The walls of the apartment were cracked and bulging here and there as if the apartment wanted to come down on us. My mother painted them yellow, “to add the sun,” she told us. The wind, like an invading cold army, would swoosh through, rain would leak around the windows; and when it was snowing, ice froze on our windows on the inside, making us feel as if we were in a snow cave. We were not able to adjust the heat—that was done centrally.

  When the hot water stopped flowing, it could be gone for days, weeks, or months, same with the heat.

  In Moscow, the sky was often dark and moody, or overcast and snowing. Snow, snow, snow. Cold to the bone it was, the cold slithering through your body and into your marrow where it stayed all wint
er, an icicle pulsing through your blood.

  We were near Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral, which I loved because the tops looked like soft, swirled ice cream in blue and white, green and yellow, and red and green, the crosses perched on top.

  My mother told me that Ivan the Terrible had had it built. “He was insane, brutal. May he be stuck in the circles of hell, suffering for every soul that he tortured.” The name alone scared me, but the colors and swirls enthralled me.

  I liked the State Historical Museum, too, all red with white on the top of its spires and points, as if were holding perpetual snow on the outside, while the inside held perpetual treasures. In my mind it was a red castle. The Kremlin, along the river, with its wall, twenty towers, cathedrals, and palaces, was overwhelming. My mother talked about how Moscow was filled with “Stalinist architecture,” which I did not understand as a child.

  The impressive architecture did nothing to alleviate the stark quality of life, however. The streets were crowded, fear hung heavy. We often didn’t have enough food, and it was the same food all the time. Plus, there were long lines out of each store. I waited with my parents, my sisters, for hours in line, it seemed like every day, and sometimes we’d get to the head of the line and there would be no more bread, or dumplings, or chicken, or whatever we had been waiting for.

  There were many things going on that I didn’t understand. My parents’ friends—other professors, artists, writers, musicians, doctors, scientists—were over all the time. They brought the food they had: chicken soup, potato cakes, Olivier salad, lamb dumplings, pickles, sauerkraut, braised cabbage, rye bread, sweet beets. My mother added a spice here, salt there, and somehow made it better. Everyone said so. They talked and laughed and argued around our wood table.

  And they whispered. “Hush ... quiet ... let me tell you, tell no one ... we need higher wages ... voting ... free elections ... religious freedom ... you must be careful, you must stop talking so much, Alexei ... You, too, Svetlana ... the time is not right for protesting ... still dangerous ... don’t trust the government ... you are being watched ... they are listening ... the newspapers, simply an extension of the government ... propaganda on television, always they lie to us ... it’s not safe for us ... no one knows what happened to Professor Popov ... to the priest ... to his brother ...”

  We were told, my sisters and I, not to talk about what we heard around that table. Our parents were, officially, members of the Communist Party. It was be a member or live a life of destitution with few job or educational opportunities. But we were secret Christians. In the Communist Party there was no God, no Jesus, no faith, no Christianity allowed.

  Had anyone known, my parents would have lost their jobs at the university. We would have been moved out of our apartment. My parents would have been able to find only low-paying jobs in a factory, if that. They might have lost custody of us or been sent to an insane asylum.

  Schools were state run and promoted and taught atheism. There were Russian Orthodox churches, more steeped in tradition, song, ritual, and liturgy, than God. In fact the KGB had infiltrated the Russian Orthodox church. They pretended to be priests and took confession. The Communist Party had demolished or closed thousands of mosques, temples, and churches over the years.

  We held church services in our home, with my uncles and their families. My mother’s parents, Lada and Anatoly, came, as did my father’s parents, Konstantin and Ekaterina, all loving people. My grandparents had known each other for decades.

  As kids, Valeria, Elvira, and I could smell fear around our family’s wood table, as well as our mother’s sugar-sprinkled pancakes. We could smell people’s pervading sense of distrust and hatred toward the government, alongside her baked cinnamon apples.

  It was a government steeped in corruption, cronyism, spying, paranoia, and violence. Suspicion and obsession with possible dissidents ran high. The television was used for propaganda, the press controlled. The KGB peered into everyone’s lives, and chased down and jailed without justice.

  The economy was stagnating, the government owned everything, the wages were pathetic, and a battle waged each day to buy enough food. Moscow, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, was suffocating and suffering. Life was too hard.

  But I was a child. I had loving parents who protected me from all they could. My mother and grandmothers taught my sisters and me to cook and sew. We loved to sit with them and sew small pillows using scraps of silk, cotton, even burlap. We lined them with rickrack, lace, or ruffled edges, or we embroidered flowers. We were taught to make our stitches precise, tight, and to use different stitches for different designs.

  Plus, I had my sisters who I could now and then hear in my head through my widow’s peak, the Sabonis gift coming down the generation to me. We had friends. We played outside, bundled in coats.

  We went to school in uniform, with strict teachers, and we were called Oktyabrenok—October children, in reference to the revolution in October 1917. We were to behave well and study hard and memorize the party lines and songs and when we were older, we could become Young Pioneers, and wear the red scarf of the Communist Party. We did what they told us to do.

  We tried to ignore that tingling, black, confusing shadow that swirled around us, the hushed voices, the unexplained tears from our mother, and our father’s tight face. We let it flow over our small shoulders.

  Then it all changed.

  * * *

  On Sunday I went over to my parents’ home for dinner. My mother was babysitting Ailani and Koa because Valerie had work to do for her upcoming trial and Kai had a late shift. She was outside playing with Koa, who was dressed as a white monster, while Ailani and I cut out sugar cookies on the train station table.

  Ailani is in fifth grade. She has long black hair and likes to talk to her mother about crime and court proceedings. She said that school was sometimes “boring” and that she got in trouble when she made a speech recently.

  “Oh, uh.” I could hardly wait to hear the topic. “What kind of trouble?”

  Ailani’s forehead furrowed as she pressed the rolling pin down on the dough. “Not bad trouble. The teacher, Mrs. Phillips, said we all had to stand and talk for one minute. A lot of the kids were scared to be up in front of the class. Like they were afraid of getting bullied or something. I wasn’t scared, because I knew what I was going to talk about.”

  “Which was?”

  “Defensive wounds.”

  Oh, my Lord. “A fascinating topic for a fifth grader.”

  “Yes!” She grinned at me and picked up a flower cookie cutter. “You get it, Aunt Toni, I knew you would. You know what defensive wounds are, right?”

  I sure did.

  “I also told the whole class how to defend themselves against a kidnapper—poke out his eyes, bite his hand, smash his face up, stomp on his inner foot, scream your head off. I showed them how to put their weight on their left foot and bring their right foot up superhard into the man’s nuts, and all the kids practiced kicking a kidnapper in the privates and poking out his eyes and then I had crime photos that I ... uh ... I ... uh ... borrowed from Mom ...”

  “Like for props?”

  “Yes!” Way to go, Aunt Toni! Ailani smiled. Then she frowned. “That’s when I got into trouble. The teacher said the photos weren’t appropriate. I hate that word: appropriate. But I said you don’t want to end up dead like this, and the teacher said no more photos. Some of the kids said they were scared, and a boy started to cry.”

  Whew. Well, that’s our Ailani. I picked up a cookie cutter. It was a four-leaf clover.

  “Then I wanted to talk to the kids about how to get out of the trunk of a car if they got kidnapped, but the teacher said I had run out of time. She looked kinda tired.” Ailani’s face was confounded. She frowned, then she smiled. “But I think I’m getting an A because it’s important to know about defensive wounds and how to escape from kidnappers, right?”

  I hardly knew what to say.

  My mother o
pened the door to the backyard, and Koa toddled in.

  “Hey, Koa!” Ailani bent down and hugged Koa the monster, then said, “He tried to eat my lizard today.”

  “You tried to eat a lizard today, Koa?” I clamped my lips together and tried not to laugh.

  He smiled at me, not a lot of teeth. “I eat lizard.”

  I brushed the hair back from his cowlick. “No, don’t. They don’t taste good.”

  “Taste good.” He giggled.

  “You need a lid that he can’t lift off the lizard aquarium, Ailani.”

  “I know. Mom’s getting it.”

  “If you don’t, Mr. Grins here is going to eat him for lunch.”

  “Brass knuckles,” she said, rolling out more cookie dough.

  “What?”

  “The lizard’s name is Brass Knuckles. You know. The weapon.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And I named my new goldfish, too.”

  “I can hardly wait to hear their names.”

  “Nunchucks and You’re Arrested.”

  “You have a lot going on in your head, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Sometimes it’s too much and I have to lay my head on my pillow to get my mind turned off.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It gets bad sometimes, Aunt Toni,” she whispered. “My brain is too fast.”

  Ailani went off with Koa the monster to read him a book on being a detective. I stuck the cookies in the oven and poured myself a cup of my mother’s coffee. I resisted the urge to check my chest to see if the strength of the caffeine had made me sprout hairs.

  My mother turned and shot me a stern glare, and I knew I was in trouble. For what, I didn’t yet know. It could be several things.

  “I think you not try hard enough, with this wedding of Elvira, Antonia. It is no.” She made a chopping motion with her hands. “No wedding.”

  “Mama, I have tried. I’ve talked to Ellie. She’s in her thirties, remember? She owns a business. She can do what she wants.”

  “Ack! No!” My mother shook a metal spatula at me. “She cannot. You not try hard enough, Antonia. Why my Elvira still marrying that Italian? Italian stallion, that joke I hear. I need no stallion for my Elvira, I need real man. I feel here”—she pounded her heart—“he not make my Elvira happy. You see my mouth? Right here?” She pointed to her mouth in case I had forgotten its location.