The Language of Sisters Read online

  “I see your mouth, Mama.”

  “I taste this. That Italian leave bad taste right there.” She switched to Russian and muttered a few words.

  “What did you say, Mama?” I knew what she said, but I simply had to make her repeat it for entertainment purposes.

  “I say to you, I can taste people. I know good taste, bad taste. You see? This Italian stallion, you say like that, he not right for my Elvira. I worry. You talk to Elvira again.”

  “She loves him—”

  “Ack.” The spatula flew back up into the air, and she swore in French. “No, she not. She has to have bag on face. That mean she don’t love. Why marry then, I ask that?”

  “I don’t know, Mama.”

  I gave her a hug. She held me tight, then took me by the shoulders, the spatula right by my ear. “You do something. Already the family want to plan that party for the bride. What it called again? Bridal bathtub party?”

  “Bridal shower.”

  “That right. They call me, I say not yet, I no know who does it. Already, the family is fighting. Who gets to do which party? Bridal bathtub party. Bachelorett-y party with the naughty things. The dinner on the rehearsal night. The lunch breakfast after the wedding. You stop this right now, Antonia. You talk to that girl. I talk, she not listen to her mama.

  “Ah, see here. Here come your Papa. I surprise I walk today. That man, your papa.” She glowered at me as if I had put him up to it. “He tire me out in that bedroom last night. I try to sleep, can’t sleep ... he can’t stay away from—” She indicated her body, boobs to butt.

  “Mama, please.”

  She glanced in an entry mirror, patted her hair, swiped on red lipstick, and pushed her boobs up. “Alexei!” She opened the door, smiling. “My life. You are here.” She hugged him tight, kissed his lips.

  You would never guess my balding father with the barrel chest, who was devoted to his children, was a roaring love machine.

  “Svetlana. So beautiful today. God gift me. And here she is. Our Antonia, our daughter.” He hugged me like a bear would.

  “I not see you for a week!” my father said, aghast, then started in on the questions. “So, start with the Sunday. What you do ... okay, yes ... now tell me, what on Monday? What happen ... your job? ... Now Tuesday ...”

  When we were done discussing my week in minute detail, I sniffled. I do not know how I got so lucky. Two parents, loving people.

  “What wrong with our Antonia?” my father said to my mother, worry creasing the lines in his face.

  “She needs tefteli,” my mother declared. “Meatballs. My special sauce-y.” All would be right with her meatballs, she knew it.

  “Yes, you are right, Svetlana,” my father said, so proud of his wife. “You always know what right for everyone. I tell you, Antonia, I am lucky man.”

  “I make tefteli, meatballs for the restaurant tomorrow night,” she said. “I name them, Svetlana’s Meaty Balls.”

  I coughed. Svetlana’s Meaty Balls. Oh, the phone calls I would get.

  I saw my father pat my mama on her butt. She swatted his hand away. “Not now, Alexei. We have a child here. Wait.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  * * *

  I will not discuss the calls I received two days later about “Svetlana’s Meaty Balls.” Apparently, though, they were delicious.

  * * *

  I wrote up my resignation letter. William would have a fit.

  I had not heard from Ricki, the editor of Homes and Gardens of Oregon. Ricki is a rough-talking, head-knocking sixty-year-old woman with vivid red hair and chronically stylish high heels. We get along well, and I would have liked to have worked with her, but I assumed I had not been chosen for the job.

  I wrote “Sincerely, Toni Kozlovsky” at the end of the e-mail.

  I was burned out, fried, and exhausted. I would take a break. I would figure out what I wanted to do.

  Maybe I would work in a different field altogether. Maybe I’d work with my parents for a while at Svetlana’s Kitchen and learn how to not burn desserts.

  Maybe I’d work with Ellie. She was constantly asking me to come to her company. Maybe I’d learn to paint. Maybe I’d be a ceramicist. Maybe I’d move to a farm and grow blueberries. Maybe I’d sell everything and move to a quiet cabin in the backwoods of Montana and have a nervous breakdown. Being a hermit had its appeal.

  I would wait a couple of weeks, finish two long-term stories I was writing—one about a family with one kid in a gang and how they’d turned him around, and another about a woman who runs a women’s shelter—and I’d wrap things up.

  I was shaky. Crumbling on the inside. Fighting back depression. I was almost, but not quite, in free fall.

  Again.

  I was done here.

  * * *

  The kayak house beckoned me again, about one in the morning. I opened the door and pulled the tandem onto the deck. I climbed in.

  I didn’t cry.

  I pretended to paddle. I’m sure I looked ridiculous. Paddling a kayak, on the deck of my tugboat. I really couldn’t have cared less. That I was even able to sit in the kayak felt like the tiniest of accomplishments in a terrible way.

  When I was done paddling, I cried. I had to. Sometimes I do this. I put myself in a situation that I know will make me cry. If I don’t, the tears get all backed up and they come out at times when they’re not supposed to come out. I can control things better this way.

  When I went back inside I didn’t put the kayak back in its house. Before I went to sleep, I peeked out at it.

  Still there. Still alone.

  * * *

  I went to Madame Butterfly with Boris.

  We both cried. He handed me his silk handkerchief. The costumes, the cultural differences, the history, the music, the poetic words, the heartbreak, the deep betrayal.

  It was too much.

  * * *

  He called at eleven that night. He knows I can’t sleep. He can’t sleep, either. He asked how I was, what I was doing, what I was writing.

  “How are you?” I pulled my comforter up to my chin.

  “Fine.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “I don’t remember the orphanage at all, Toni.”

  I wanted to tell him what I knew, what I remembered, all those years ago, in another land, another time, but I had promised I wouldn’t.

  “I would think I would remember kids, a whole bunch of kids, cribs, food, something. I’ve read what those orphanages are like, though. Maybe I blocked it out.”

  You didn’t, I think, but I don’t say it.

  “And the other day I saw potatoes and beets, together, side by side on a plate. I thought I was going to be sick. What is wrong with me? I try to put all this behind me during the day, but at night, when I’m sleeping, it all comes out in my head. Disjointed things, but I think they’re tied together. I’m getting afraid to go to sleep.”

  “I love you, Toni,” he said thirty minutes later.

  “I love you, too.”

  I wondered if he would still love me when I told him what I knew, about the blood, and how I, the secret keeper, his adopted sister, had never told him.

  Never tell, Antonia, never, ever tell.

  * * *

  “Those sons of trash, lice in hats, and weasels with buck teeth,” Daisy Episcopo announced in Vanessa and Charles Oldham’s houseboat. The living room, with a wall of windows overlooking the river, was comfortable, like an indoor pillow, with wide couches and plush chairs, fuzzy throws and soft blankets.

  Vanessa’s schoolwork as an AP English teacher was on one table, and Charles’s history books were stacked in bookshelves that stretched up two stories, with a ladder attached to read the highest books. “I’m a book nerd and proud of it,” he said.

  Lindy, high-priced call girl, fellow book nerd, stared in awe at those books as Daisy spoke. Lindy loves going to the library and staring in awe at books. Charles, Vanessa, and Lindy were always exchanging books, then would disc
uss them over wine. I often went, too, if I wasn’t working late or getting naked with Nick.

  “Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee are my enemies. And I’m not moving my boat!” Daisy was wearing a fisherman’s hat with a red daisy in it, a yellow dress, a hunting jacket, and black boots that I knew cost two hundred dollars, a gift from her sons so her feet wouldn’t get cold.

  “I’ll get those trash-eating vultures.” Daisy grabbed a fake daisy from a pocket in her dress and pretended to use it as a gun. “No one’s kicking me into the river to talk to the whales before I’m ready.”

  There were many people in the Oldhams’ home, people who lived on houseboats all over the marina. They were not happy. Some were baffled by Daisy.

  “I’m confused about how Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee can shut down an entire dock, an entire marina,” Jayla said. She was still in scrubs. Beth nodded beside her. Both looked exhausted. There had been a train wreck the night before, and they’d both been on shift. “I know they’re slumlords and for some reason they’re getting away with it in other parts of Portland, but how can they do this?”

  “How can they make us move our homes?” Vanessa said. “It’s not right. You couldn’t force people to move from their houses if they lived in the suburbs.”

  “No,” Charles said. “It’s not right. We need to rally against Shane and Jerald Shrock and Randall Properties.”

  “I’ll write a mass letter to the city and everyone else I know in government,” Vanessa said.

  “I’ll talk to the mayor,” Jayla said. “I know him because my father used to be his chief of staff. The problem is that this is private property, owned for decades by their grandfather, so Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee may have been grandfathered in under different rules and they can shut it down... .”

  The ideas flew on how to save our water neighborhood. “I’ll call the assistant to the governor. My brother dated her years ago. Uh. No, wait. I won’t. Bad breakup, I think there was a stalking charge against her... . I’ll call the mayor’s wife. My mother and she drink martinis together... .”

  I would contact a reporter I knew at the Oregon Standard, too. I wasn’t happy. I was worried. I had a sweet deal here at the dock. I liked living here on this blue-gray ribbon of river, being in nature, watching the weather. I liked my river pets, most especially my blue heron, Dixie, who reminded me of him; Mr. and Mrs. Quackenbusch; Anonymous, who I hadn’t seen for a while; Maxie, who soared by to say hello; and the Sergeant Otts. I liked my neighbors, especially my favorite neighbor, Nick.

  “Those scruffy badger boys have a stick up their buttocks, big as a tree,” Daisy said. “The tree wiggles, and they pee. I’m going to go see the president of the United States of America about this and give him a piece of my mouth.”

  “Don’t bring that gun, Daisy,” Lindy said. “The Secret Service won’t like that at all.”

  “This here gun?” Daisy pulled a gun out from behind her back. Most of the people in the room hit the ground. The rest of us knew there were no bullets.

  “Let me tell you something, streetwalker.” Daisy did not mean this meanly—she and Lindy get along fine—but a number of people looked confused by the “streetwalker” accusation, as Lindy kept her business quiet. “I am not afraid of jail. I’m not afraid of those bull dykes in there, the dumb-ass criminals, the white trash, the space aliens, the gang banger wasters, the hos, the ghetto women.”

  I sighed. Filter for Daisy? Gone.

  “This is our neighborhood,” Daisy announced. “We got a black guy who can’t dance, that’s you, Charles, who should be able to dance because he’s black. He’s living with a white woman who is an older hippie and smokes a joint now and then when she gets her panties in a twist. They’re an Oreo cookie. We got two lesbians, both pretty. Most lesbians look like dykes. These two don’t. We got a hooker running a business out of her houseboat.

  “We got a man who disappears sometimes and he’s packin’ a pistol in his pants and looks like he could kill someone, but he is a man I want to make a human sandwich with and I’m the toast and he’s the banana, and we have Toni.” She pointed at me. “News reporter. Tough. Something bad happened to her. Huge family all over the place. Svetlana’s, my favorite restaurant. Russian mafia food. Her cousin steals cars and her sister locks criminals up. Sometimes she’s sad and she cries in her kayak, and then we have me.” She pointed at herself. “I’m crazy. Crazy Daisy. I think my mind might be flipping and flopping, hello whales, I don’t know.”

  Those of us who lived by Daisy were not thrown by her rant, but the other people, from different areas of the marina and downriver, were. Silence descended.

  “Hey,” Daisy said to Jayla and Beth, leaning forward, the red daisy in her hat bouncing. “Now I’m sorry about that. I don’t think you two lesbians are bull dykes.”

  “Thank you,” Jayla said.

  “We appreciate that,” Beth said.

  Daisy started crying. Beth put an arm around her, and so did Jayla.

  “Now, now,” Jayla said.

  “It’s okay, Daisy,” Beth said.

  “What’s wrong?” someone whispered.

  “I don’t like when I hurt the lesbians,” Daisy cried. “I don’t mean to.”

  “Don’t cry, Daisy,” Beth said. “We’re not hurt.”

  “I am stupid. Stupid!” Daisy said, hitting herself in the head, twice, until Beth gently caught her hand. “Did I hurt your feelings, Charles, when I said you can’t dance?”

  “No, Daisy. You’re right, I can’t dance.”

  “I could teach you to wiggle to the beat. And I’m sorry you’re sad in the kayak, Toni.”

  “No problem,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It’s the truth. I’m working on it.”

  “I know you’re sleeping with the man with the pistol behind his zipper. And I don’t care that you’re a hooker, Lindy girl. I don’t. A girl’s got to do what she’s got to do, and you read books, too.”

  “It’s a steady job, not many hours,” Lindy said, “and I can buy my own health insurance.”

  “I’m a flying idiot,” Daisy muttered.

  “Let’s continue,” Jayla said, while Daisy blew into a Kleenex and I patted her knee.

  “You don’t need to worry,” Lindy said. “The marina is not going to shut down.”

  “How do you know ... why ... that’s not what we’ve heard ... we all received the notice ...”

  Lindy brushed a hand through the air. “Forget it. I’ll have it handled. All will be fine.”

  But Lindy wouldn’t explain that comment, so the meeting dragged on. What could we do, could we turn the marina into a co-op? Could we become the owners? How much money would we need? Could the city take over? Could we do this or that?

  Later, I stood with Lindy on the dock. “You don’t think the marina will shut down?”

  She grinned. “No. Don’t worry. I have it all ... handled.”

  “How?”

  “Trust me. I do.” She started off toward her Queen Anne houseboat. “I have a nine-er. Early for me, so have to go. Want to go out on my boat tomorrow evening? I have a four-er, that’s it. Maybe five-thirty?”

  “Yes. Thanks. I need some river time.”

  Hadn’t had that in too long.... I avoided my kayak as I went inside my tugboat that night.

  * * *

  Daisy stood at the edge of the dock about eleven and sang “Maria” from West Side Story, “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables, and “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady. It was like sitting in a concert hall, but there was no stage, only a river; there were no costumes, only an older lady wearing daisies. There were no other actors, only a woman whose mind was crumbling, door by door, shutting down, but the voice was still there, pitch perfect, melodious, the notes sailing all over the marina, wrapping us up in the magic of a musical miracle.

  * * *

  Nick’s arm tightened around me as I tried to get off of him on Saturday night. We had had sex
that was so seductively brain cell busting that I had accidentally fallen asleep on top of him, my head on his chest, his blankets covering me.

  “Let go, Nick.”

  “I would rather not, baby. Please stay. You’re warm. I’m warm. Together we’re warm.”

  “That’s why you have blankets.”

  “Take pity on me. I had a bad week and need a long night hug.”

  “I’m sorry you had a bad week. I’m still leaving.”

  “I’ll make you pancakes in the morning.”

  I paused. I love pancakes. “No. Thank you.”

  “One night, Toni. Stay.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Can’t and won’t. Same thing.”

  “I know. Good night.”

  I pulled back, he pulled me down into one of his kisses, and I sank into it until I could get the strength to leave.

  He got up and walked me to the door of my tugboat. I kissed his cheek. He was unhappy. I could feel the unhappiness and his anger.

  I was unhappy, too.

  I closed my door, the river around my home so lonely tonight.

  * * *

  The first few weeks after I moved to my tugboat, Nick would stop to chat when he saw me and I would try to utter something semi-intelligent, which often didn’t work. I didn’t have a lot to say, because all my words clogged in my throat when I saw him. By then it had been almost nineteen months and the fog was lifting, but only now and then.

  He told me later that he thought I had taken an instant dislike to him. That wasn’t true. I had taken an instant, lusty physical attraction to him, but at the same time he scared the heck out of me. I wasn’t ready to be attracted to anyone. I felt guilty being attracted to Nick. I felt lost and sad and overwhelmed.

  Nick was skilled, though, at conversation about the weather, the river, the animals, restaurants, politics, movies, work, etc. I liked him. I liked how he always asked about my day, not a flippant “how are you” and then when I said “fine” he moved on. No, he sincerely wanted to know how my day was.