The Language of Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  My mother was now hacking, feverish, and sweating. She leaned hard against me as we hobbled home through Red Square, a blizzard of snow coming down, covering our shoulders.

  “Stealing is wrong, Antonia,” she wheezed.

  “I know, Mama, but you’re sick, you need a doctor.”

  “Stealing is wrong unless you are starving to death.”

  “We are starving to death, Mama. You need help.”

  She sighed, then stopped, leaned over, hand against the wall of a building, and coughed until I thought her stomach would come up. We trudged toward home. On the way, we went to see a friend of hers, a pharmacist, at my insistence. He took one look at my mother and surreptitiously handed her a bottle and pills in a bag.

  “Svetlana, I will come and check on you.” He turned to me. “Make sure she takes that medication, Antonia. Four times a day.”

  I nodded. I half carried my rapidly weakening mother home, hardly able to see through the snow, then climbed the stairs of the apartment building, the elevator broken. My sisters were in a panic thinking of me in jail, of Mama going to get me. We put Mama to bed and gave her the medicine, toast, and a bowl of watered-down stew.

  The back of her dress had a red stain.

  Mama closed her eyes, then collapsed back on the pillows, ghastly pale.

  “Is that what a monthly looks like?” Valeria whispered.

  “I guess so.” But I didn’t really think that. I had a vague idea of what a monthly was, not much, but why was it all over the back of her dress?

  “What happened to Mama at the police station?” Valeria asked.

  “Her shirt was on wrong, her hair was messed up,” Elvira whimpered.

  “I don’t know.”

  We were children. We could not have conceived what happened to her. Later, older, we understood her sacrifice.

  But the next day, after school, in our uniforms, Valeria and I were out pickpocketing again. We didn’t have a choice, and stealing is wrong unless you are starving to death.

  Elvira took care of our mother and gave her the medication. We used the money to stand in line for hours and buy food in the freezing wind, and sewed pillows that night.

  I would later learn where the blood came from.

  * * *

  The medicine from the pharmacist started to work. He knocked late at night, clearly scared of being seen with an enemy of the people, and brought another bottle of coughing syrup.

  In five days she could sit up. In two weeks she was up and walking around, but dead tired, as if her bones had softened. She sewed for most of the day. Her cough was less frequent, not so deep. What changed was her attitude, her personality. When she was sick she still had a smile for us, gave us hugs, tried to be brave.

  It was as if she weren’t home in her own mind anymore. She was hollowed out. I found her sobbing, wrenching, raw sobs emanating from that tiny, exhausted body many times, as did Valeria and Elvira. She would say she missed our papa, but we knew it was something else, too. Her hands trembled. She was frightened by loud noises. She woke up screaming in the middle of the night and we had to race in and calm her down.

  And yet, through pneumonia and her sobs, she still sewed and we delivered her mending and the fancy dresses. We smiled at the fancy women who bought the fancy dresses. We hated them, their wealth, their clothing, their cars, when we had nothing, our father imprisoned by the men they were married to, our mother ill. The bigger we smiled, the more our pillows sold.

  My mother sold her mother’s pans one morning. She put them in a large box and left the apartment, tears in her eyes. She came home with money and sent us out to stand in the lines for bread and chicken. We were able to get butter, too, and potatoes. The money from the pans fed us for a week. I know she missed those pans. They weren’t just pans, they were her mother’s pans. They were part of her history, part of her family, all dead. My sisters and I said nothing.

  Our mama started throwing up in the mornings. By noon, she was fine. I asked her if she had pneumonia again and she said, lifting her head from the toilet, “No, Antonia, my love. Go and check on Elvira, I am fine.”

  My mother left the apartment one afternoon on her own, then came home within the hour. We asked her where she went, and she said she went out for a walk. We knew it was a lie. Our mother was too weak to walk, and it was snowing.

  The next day an older woman with white hair and kind, sad eyes came to our home, holding a leather bag. She and Mama went to her bedroom.

  “Do not come in, girls,” my mother said, her eyes huge in a painfully thin face.

  “I am a doctor,” the woman said. “I am checking up on your mother’s health. I heard she had pneumonia?” We nodded, she smiled. “I’ll listen to her lungs. You girls start making dinner.”

  We grabbed potatoes and started making dinner.

  I saw the bloody cloths in the woman’s hands before she took them outside to the garbage bin.

  The doctor returned and went back into the bedroom with my mother.

  We didn’t understand then what had happened, but our mother did not get out of bed for five days after that. There were more bloody cloths.

  My mother’s eyes went blank. She didn’t smile. She did pray. I heard her one night, after I’d gone to bed. “May you kill that policeman, Lord, for what he did to me and what he has done to other women, and may he suffer badly, so help me, Jesus.”

  * * *

  I am almost positive that my father does not know what happened to my mother.

  I would never tell. It’s not for me to tell. I know my mother, too. In her mind, it would be, “Why upset my Alexei? Why hurt him? Why make him so angry he wants to kill someone? After all he has been through, my poor Alexei! It would come between us, what happened in that police station, and who wants that? It is over. It is done. Let it lie in the past.”

  We have many secrets in our family.

  I will always feel guilty about what happened to my mother. It was my fault. I was stealing for money for us, survival stealing, the intent was there to help, to take from wealthy people what they had taken from us, but she had to pay the price.

  That guilt haunts me sometimes, like a ghost, in a police uniform, with a gun, following me around Red Square in my head, cackling.

  * * *

  Nick and I went back to being us ... but there was something missing. I felt it. I knew what it was. Nick was coming to an end with us, as we were now. He wanted something more, I wasn’t going to give it, and he was going to cut out soon.

  He made love to me the same way, we had that same passion, but one time he had tears in his eyes. One morning I woke up and he was watching me. I saw the pained expression on his face, which he hid quickly. When we had dinner on his deck, he held my hand, but now and then he turned away and I could tell he was getting emotional.

  I pretended not to see it, but in his own way he was saying good-bye to the relationship.

  I pretended it wasn’t there.

  Pretending never helps.

  I was hurting Nick, that was the truth, and he was going to choose not to live with it much longer. If I were him, I would not be with me much longer.

  I wanted to change. I wanted to be open to more. I felt like I was defeating myself, but I couldn’t make myself take a step in the direction that Nick wanted me to take. There was a dead husband between us.

  * * *

  He left.

  I heard Ellie’s voice in my head. I was on my way to an interview for Homes and Gardens of Oregon. The woman, Sheila, had transformed a pole barn into a Japanese-style oasis, complete with red paper cranes hanging from her ceiling, a tree trunk to sit on in the shower, Japanese letters on her kitchen’s tile backsplash, and accordion screens painted with Japanese landscapes.

  I called Ellie from my headset.

  “Gino left?” I asked.

  “Yes. We had a fight last night. He’s upset because I keep waffling on the wedding date. He’s upset because of all the arguments we’ve h
ad about how I don’t want to combine money or be told how to spend it, his critical mother moving in with us someday, kids, and how I know he hopes I’ll give up my business and be a full-time mother. Gino’s also mad about sex because we’re not having it as often, and I told him it was because it’s hard to be attracted to a sexist caveman who wants a Stepford wife with a lobotomy. He slammed his way out of my house. The door hit so hard, he knocked fabrics off one of my shelves.”

  “That must have triggered your temper.” No one messes with Ellie’s fabrics.

  “Oh, I was fit to be tied in a thousand knots. It was a stack of fabrics from India and Thailand.”

  “How do you feel about his leaving?”

  “Relieved.”

  “Have you had to use your paper bag since he left?”

  “No. Not once.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  I knew she was smiling.

  “I love breathing like a normal person, Toni, it’s so much easier.”

  * * *

  I went to picket Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee’s Randall Properties on Saturday for the Picket Party Against The Pricks And Portland Slumlords. Their office is located on a well-traveled street in downtown Portland, right in the center. Almost everyone from the dock came. We held signs that read “Save our dock, Save our homes,” and “Don’t sink our houseboats!” and “Shrock brothers, get your hands off our neighborhood.” The news stations soon sent cameras and reporters.

  Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee thundered down, along with their minions, and ordered us to leave. “This is private property ... we’ll have you arrested ... disturbing the peace ... you have no right to be here ... affecting our business ...”

  Charles stood in front of them, crossed his arms, and glared. Charles’s two brothers, both former military, stood right by him, saying nothing. The two Tweedles backed down as the news cameras closed in. The Tweedles looked like frightened, guilty, wealthy, entitled men screwing yet another American.

  Daisy went up to the Tweedles and whispered, “Trash eaters, home wreckers,” and in a rare slice of lucidity she turned to the news cameras and said, tears in her eyes, her voice cracking and wobbling, “My name is Daisy Episcopo. I’m eighty-five years old. I’ve lived in my houseboat for more than thirty years. It’s home to me. The people on the dock are home to me. And these greedy Shrock brothers want to take it from me. How can Randall Properties take my home? How can the Shrock brothers kick my neighbors and me out? You couldn’t burn down a neighborhood in the suburbs, why can you here? I’m too old to move. I want to die on the dock. I want to watch the sunrises and the sunsets from the home I’ve lived in for so long. Please help me.” She turned on the waterworks. “Please. Help me in my fight against Randall Properties.”

  The news stations loved it, loved Daisy.

  As soon as she was out of sight of the cameras, Daisy walked over to me and said, “If you come to my house tonight, I’ll cook the shark. He jumped up on my deck this morning. A round of ketchup and he’ll be delicious. He told me to eat him.”

  We got a lot of publicity. No one likes sweet, old women being kicked out of their homes.

  Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee, we heard through our attorney, blew up like Mount St. Helens. We laughed.

  * * *

  We went to Svetlana’s that night and had a superb time. My parents greeted all of us. They were especially gracious to Nick when they saw us walk in with his arm around my waist. Both of my parents beamed; my mother clapped her hands. My father pumped his hand and semi shouted, “Welcome, Nick, welcome!” and my mother hugged him.

  We had the back room. About forty people, all from the dock, were there.

  Daisy led us in songs, mostly drinking songs, the daisies on her hat bopping about, the meal delicious. Our waitresses were pleased with their tips.

  My mother’s special that night, “Support The Dock,” and later, a chocolate dessert named “Hello, Nick!”

  Living on a Tugboat, Talking About Homes

  BY TONI KOZLOVSKY

  I met with a woman named Jo Jo Banks this week.

  Jo Jo used to love her suburban home. It was white on the outside and gracious on the inside. Two stories, two decks, huge fireplace. She raised five kids there with her husband.

  “My mother died when I was young, my father ran off, and I was handed around from relative to relative until I left at sixteen. I never felt like I had a home, and I told myself that one day I’d have one, and a nice husband, and a whole bunch of kids. I would have the love and stability I always wanted.”

  The dream marriage was not to be. As she described it, “I married at nineteen, too naïve to get married. He was ten years older. I was looking for a father figure. Think of a desert. That’s the marriage. Think of loneliness so intense you think it will kill you. That’s how I felt. Think of living with a man with a trigger temper. That’s flat-out scary.

  “But he went to the kids’ games, coached their teams, provided, and I didn’t want to break up a family and do to my kids what had been done to me.”

  One morning, after dropping their youngest off for his second year of college, Jo Jo woke up and studied her husband, this time with zero emotion.

  “I watched him eat his cereal and listened to that crunching noise he made, then I watched him drink his coffee and listened to him slurping. I had made him his breakfast and as usual he hadn’t said thank you.

  “I realized then how much I hated that crunch and that slurp and how I could not live one more day of my life with it. I couldn’t live one more day of my life without a thank you. He was reading the newspaper, he was holding it up in front of my face as he’d done for decades, and I’d had it. I was done.

  “I went out to my garden, I loved my garden, and said good-bye. Good-bye to the oak trees I’d watched grow for twenty-five years. Good-bye to the rhododendrons I’d planted myself. To my goldenrod daisies, peonies, hostas, rose gardens, and the pathways I’d laid. Good-bye to my kitchen, which was old and dingy, but my husband wouldn’t let me remodel it, though he had a boat and a whole bunch of other man toys. Good-bye to my bedroom, which was a barren place. Good-bye to the kids’ rooms.

  “I started packing. I didn’t take much. I wanted to start over. I didn’t want anything except treasures from the kids and photograph books. I realized I didn’t even want my clothes anymore. They were so blah. So ugly. He came up in the middle of it and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  “And I said, ‘I’m leaving.’

  “And he started to cry and get hysterical. He was down on his knees by the time I left, but it was too late. Why couldn’t he have treated me well all the years we were together? I had to call the police because he was blocking me from leaving. They came, I left. I filed for divorce.

  “When we were sitting with the attorneys hammering out who got what, he said, ‘I want the house.’ He didn’t want the house, but he thought I still loved it and would fight for it, and he wanted to take it from me or force me to move back in. I said, ‘It’s yours.’ You could have heard his jaw drop to the table.

  “He said, ‘But you love the house,’ and I said, ‘Too many bad memories in it.’

  “I bought a small condo downtown in the city with cash and started over. I went back to my maiden name. New home. New clothes. New friends. New activities.

  “It feels freeing. I have a view of the city. I never went to plays and concerts, because my husband didn’t want to go and didn’t want me to go because it was ‘too expensive.’ Now I go by myself or with new friends. I never traveled, because my husband said, ‘It’s a waste of money.’ This year I’ve been to India, Paris, and Texas for a rodeo. I even bought a pair of purple cowgirl boots. My husband used to say that purple was the color of tramps.

  “I guess I’m a happy tramp. I lost fifty pounds after I moved, and I went to a stylish store where I had never bought clothes before, because my husband said I didn’t need clothes
like that. I’d been buying my clothes at Goodwill and at stores that also sell bananas and diapers. No more. I’ve bought leather boots, new sweaters, jeans, and heels.

  “People say that life is like seasons. Well, I’m in spring. My condo has changed my life. My home was old. My kitchen was old. The furniture was old. Everything was out of style. And I felt that way about myself. Old. Out of style. Dowdy. Sad. Well, I’m not old. I’m not out of style, I’m not dowdy, and I’m not sad anymore. But I had to move away from a home with negativity and loneliness in it to find myself and move on with a happier life.”

  * * *

  I loved the photos the photographer took of Jo Jo and her condo. The view, the spaciousness, the clean and modern lines, the color. The readers would love it, too.

  I saw my ex-editor, William, in the hallway of The Oregon Standard.

  “Ready to come back, Kozlovsky? Dying of boredom yet?”

  “No, but gee, thanks. It’s hard not to be working for a grump anymore.”

  “I might like your columns.”

  “You just made my day. How does that feel?”

  “Don’t get all gushy with me. It’s irritating.”

  “Got it. Nice to see you, Lopez.”

  “Come back when you can’t stand talking about granite countertops for one more second. I’m predicting that’ll be soon.”

  * * *

  I knew it was coming.

  Nick closed his eyes for a second, his chest rose and fell, then he leaned back against his kitchen counters and crossed his arms. “We need to take a break.”

  I was unprepared for the instant, pounding pain in my chest, the feeling of falling and hitting cement, face-first. “Why?” But I knew why.

  “Because this relationship is killing me.”

  “Nick—” Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

  “Toni, I can’t be a substitute for another man anymore. I can’t be the stand-in.”

  “You’re not a substitute.” He wasn’t. “You’re not the stand-in.”