The Language of Sisters

  “Toni, you must kayak again. You love the river, the animals, nature, the wind, the rapids. Do what you love, my love.”

  “No. I can’t. Not without you.”

  “Please, honey. Live when I’m gone. I want to know that you’ll be on the river again.”

  “ No. ”

  The sun came up, the light blues and butter yellows and sweet pinks blurred, that fuzzy light grew to golden light, and we went back to sleep, arms entwined, my head against his bald head.

  * * *

  Another night, sitting on our deck, the sun sinking, prophetic, an ending, we held hands, a berry pie off to the side that we’d eaten earlier with his parents. Marty pointed out the bright and shining tunnel from the ground through the puffy white clouds to the sun. “It’s a stairway into heaven.”

  “I hate that stairway.”

  He kissed my cheek and I turned, put my hands on his bald head, and kissed him back.

  “Thank you for marrying me, Toni. This has been the happiest time of my life.”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t,” I said. “I was lost when I met you, Marty, and now I feel lost again, and I don’t know how to live without you. I don’t know why this is happening. I don’t know how I can ever be happy again. I feel like I’m falling down a pit and here I am telling you my problems and it’s me who should be listening to you, but I need you. I need you to help me. Marty, please. I don’t want you to die, I don’t want you to die, I don’t want you to die.”

  I started getting hysterical, drowning in the type of crying you do when you are all broken up inside and you can’t take it anymore and nothing seems right because nothing is right and you are losing a person who is your heart and you will not see them again in this lifetime, you will live on and they will go and the world looks absolutely impossible and bleak and scary to live in and you wish you were going together. Together through that golden staircase into the clouds.

  “Honey ...” He held me close, those arms that had been so strong, now weak. That body that had been so healthy, now brittle, but his voice was still there, and his love. “You can do this. It will be hard, but you are a strong, brave woman ... I will always be in your heart and you in mine. I want you to be happy again, honey, I want that for you. Remember I said that. Please.”

  “I will not be happy without you, Marty.”

  “Try, honey. You must try. Don’t give up, don’t give in. Don’t quit.” His eyes filled. “Toni, honey, there’s something else we need to talk about.” His face crumbled, so I cried more.

  “What is it?”

  “I want you to get married again.”

  I moved back as if he’d hit me. “No.”

  “I want you to fall in love. But only with a man who will treat you with respect and kindness and love all day long, as you are an incredible and beautiful woman and you deserve it. When you find him, marry him, and know that I’m happy for you, and I want it for you. I don’t want you to be alone, Toni. I want love for you.”

  “I will never marry again, Marty.” It was ridiculous. It was sheer pain. The thought repelled me. “There isn’t going to be anyone else.”

  He tipped my head up and kissed me, and our tears mixed. “I want there to be someone else, Toni. There needs to be. I know you want kids. I wish we’d had them. We waited too long, we had so much fun, we thought there was time, but you can correct that. Have a bunch of them.”

  “Not without you, not without you, not without you.” That soul-crushing crying was back, and he held me until I could catch my breath again.

  “Yes, without me. I will be the angel who looks out for you and your kids.” He kissed my forehead. “But remember how awesome I am in bed.”

  “Why do you make me laugh when I’m crying? And I’ll never forget how awesome you are in bed.”

  “Nothing compared to you, sweet cheeks. You turn me on.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me—or where his eyebrows were as they were now gone. “You have done that for me since the very first time I saw you.”

  I was falling apart from the inside. The love of my whole life was pale, gaunt, his eyes shadowed. He was too thin, his chest concave, his cheeks hollow, despite the food that my family kept bringing, all of Marty’s favorites.

  My mother even learned to cook Chinese and Japanese food for Marty. Ellie was making fruit drinks for him. Valerie was making vegetable smoothies. The vegetable smoothies weren’t very tasty.

  “You are the best wife a man could have, Toni. The very best.” He turned to me. “But you have set the kitchen on fire twice... .”

  “Not bad fires, though.” I sniffled. “Small ones.”

  “I think when the fire department came the second time, the captain called you by your first name... .”

  We laughed again. Laughter, tears, back around.

  The golden staircase waited.

  * * *

  Two weeks later we sat together in our two-person kayak, in our living room, pretending to be on a river, near sunset. Marty was breathing hard, the effort to get up at that point a strain, but this was what he wanted. We rowed, but I rowed backward so I could see him. We talked about our trips, the rapids, the times we flipped over, the beavers we saw, the wolf, the golden and bald eagles, Montana, Mexico, the Rogue River, Alaska. We talked about the food we ate, the campfires on the side of the river, the people we met, the shooting stars we marveled at, the moon that shone, the sun that warmed our shoulders.

  We talked about our lives together, how we dated, our wedding, our love life.

  We laughed, we drank wine.

  I got him back into bed, and we watched the sun go down together, the golden staircase glowing again, from the hills, through the sky, to the white puffy clouds, up to heaven, an omen, a sign.

  “I love you, Toni.”

  “I love you, too, Marty. I love you so much.”

  I waited until Marty was asleep, then hugged him closer. About two in the morning I finally went to sleep myself, ragged, grieving.

  Sometime during the night, his heart stopped. Just like that. A last breath. A whisper of good-bye. A soul leaving.

  I hugged him all night long, and when I finally woke up, he was cold.

  My own husband was cold.

  He was gone, up the golden staircase.

  He was dead.

  I was dead, too.

  * * *

  When I see golden staircases climbing into the sky, through puffy white clouds, up to heaven, I turn away. Every time.

  * * *

  I told my sisters, in my head, that Marty was dead.

  They both called. I didn’t answer. They waited and didn’t call me again. They respected the time and the quiet I needed with Marty. They gave me space, to cry until my body ached, my head throbbed. We are close sisters, we are not invasive.

  They were with me in spirit, and I knew it.

  I called Marty’s parents first, and they came over, hardly able to walk. They had lost their son. Their only child. Inconceivable.

  Two hours later, after the funeral home came and Marty’s parents were back at their house, collapsing, I called my sisters. I didn’t need to say a thing. Both of them said immediately, “I am coming.”

  They came. My parents came. Dmitry flew out. We cried together, for my husband, Marty Romanowsky, my life and my love, gone.

  18

  “I started working in clay when I was sixteen. I had to create. I had to make something. School had no interest for me at all. Art was, is, my destiny. It’s my life’s work. I want to bring beauty to people’s lives.”

  Zelly Ostrander was a well-known ceramic artist. I was sure readers of Homes and Gardens of Oregon would love her, her home, and her art.

  Zelly had white, curly, long hair. She was “seventy-five and proud of my wisdom,” thin and almost six feet tall. Her art studio was in her backyard—one room, a pitched roof, two sinks, and filled with clay, a hundred different paint colors, brushes, drop cloths, equipment, and two pottery wheels. She
made her own art and taught at the university.

  Zelly Ostrander’s art was stunning. Think of blue flames, mixed with a rainbow, swirled up with a magical spoon, and you had her work. Her specialty was bowls. Bowls for cereal, bowls for fruit, bowls for salads, bowls that you would build a glass fronted armoire for and display as art.

  But Zelly’s bowls weren’t ... normal. Some tilted at an angle. Others had an almost lacy rim. She had a blue and pink bowl with three dragonflies perched on the edge; bowls with a green and blue swirling design with a ruffly edge. She painted butterflies on bowls so detailed they looked as if they’d flown in from the window.

  Zelly told me about her life growing up with her parents in an apartment in San Francisco. Her mother owned a gun shop, her father worked on the docks. “They loved me, but glory be, they were tough people. My father fought for the union. Those men didn’t mess around, they got the job done, and if a few skulls were cracked, that was the way it had to be. My mother was not above a fight, either, but I was their soft spot.”

  How she came to art? “I didn’t speak until I was six. Until then, I drew pictures to show how I was feeling. That’s where it started.”

  On her day-to-day life, “I create art. I read. I see friends. I have a whiskey every night, like my mother. She had a cigar, I don’t. I travel the world twice a year. I must see this planet before I die.”

  On her home? “I’ve only had it for three years, but I feel like I’ve been looking for it my whole life. A home isn’t only wood and concrete, is it? It’s ...” She spread her arms out. “A bowl. A colorful, clean, safe bowl with a roof where you live your life.”

  “I love your work,” I said. “I have two of your bowls. One is white lattice with snowflakes painted along the side and another is an ocean wave.”

  “Ah. You bought during my freezing year and my drowning year. My mother died during the freezing year, the snowflake year. I still miss her. The ocean bowls I made when I felt like I was drowning. I suffer from bipolar depression. I’m not embarrassed for you to print that, either. Please do. Others need to know they are not alone.

  “It comes in like an invisible, bio-chemical avalanche. A wave, hence the ocean. As I get older, I know how to handle it better, but it’s never easy. It’s like living with a tsunami. Sometimes it comes and gets you and you have to swim to the surface and not let it get you thinking that you’d rather die than deal with the swimming for one more day. It’s a hard-fought battle every time.”

  “I love these.” I pointed to rows of flowered bowls. The bowls simply opened up like flowers: roses, camellias, tulips, daffodils, lilies, violets, orchids.

  “I’m in a flowery time of life, so I make flowers.”

  Made sense to me. I bought a set for Marty’s parents.

  Maybe I needed to work on embracing flowers again. Maybe.

  * * *

  The next day, in my head, I heard Valerie say, They scare me.

  I called, got her voice mail. She was in trial. She called about eleven that night. Nick and I were reading in bed, a new book, discussing it as we went.

  “What are the Bartons doing now?”

  “They’re furious, naturally, that I’m trying to put their murdering son/brother/cousin in jail and insist he’s innocent.”

  “Do they not know him? Are they not listening to the evidence?”

  “What people don’t want to believe, they won’t. To them it’s a conspiracy. We’re out to get them. We’re on the side of a corrupt government. The evidence is a lie, manufactured. They glare. They snicker when I’m in front of them. Today the judge told them to be quiet or they would be escorted from the courthouse. He then put two guards there, either side of the row, to glare at them.”

  “Did it quiet them down?”

  “No. They were removed from the courtroom.”

  “Tough lot.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something more. I can tell.” I felt that chill of a snake winding around my spine yet again. “What is it, Valerie?”

  “There was a dead possum on my back porch today.”

  I was speechless for long and stunned seconds.

  “I thought there were security cameras. You’ve called the police?”

  “They came in through the shadows, hoodies on. The police can’t identify them.”

  “I thought the police were also driving by?”

  “They are. They snuck like lice over the back fence.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. This guy has to go to jail.”

  “We’ll be scared together. You’re carrying a gun?”

  “I am now. Love you.”

  “Love you, too, more than Mama’s Russian tea cakes.”

  I hung up the phone and leaned back against Nick. He held me while I shook.

  The cold spine snake slithered, head poised, ready to bite.

  Moscow, the Soviet Union

  Things went rapidly downhill for our family after our father and grandfather were arrested. Valeria was in bed for days, aching from being thrown against the wall, clutching her head. My mother, also with a splitting headache that lasted a week, as did the nausea, pulled herself together, attended to Valeria, and went to the police station. She demanded to see her husband and her father-in-law, Konstantin. They refused. They pretended they didn’t know where either one of them was.

  By then, we were all alone. Uncle Vladan, Uncle Yuri, Uncle Sasho and their families—all gone. Uncle Leonid dead, though the Communist Party would not confirm it. Friends volunteered money for gas, and my mother drove hours to a prison that she thought my father and grandfather might have been taken to. She demanded to see them. They put her in a cell for three days. Told her not to come back and said she was lucky not to be locked up, too, for being an enemy of the people. “Pray to your God now,” they mocked my mother, exhausted, starving, as she hobbled out.

  Valeria, Elvira, and I were so relieved to see her after three days alone, we cried and clung to her.

  My parents had always saved what little they could, but life in Moscow was rough and it would not last for long at all. In addition, my mother was worried that we would be taken away from her, now that she had been exposed for being a Christian.

  My mother started sewing for people, a skill her mother, Lada, an expert seamstress, had taught her. She had put it aside as a college professor and a mother.

  She went to the people she knew, professors, colleagues, students who came from wealthy families. She offered her services. My mother, a woman with a PhD in Russian Literature, a college professor, scrambling for work to mend someone’s torn pants.

  She put her pride aside, and she did it, though I heard her swearing in French now and then. Many of the people were too scared to give her work, but some did, quietly, secretively. She picked up the work late at night, at their back doors, and they handed her the money. Some people took advantage of her desperation. “I hated Professor Gerasmiov when I worked with him, and I hate him more now, may he die in pain, alone with no one but cackling hyenas to watch him writhe.” He negotiated the work down to a pittance in payment, because he could, knowing she needed every ruble.

  Others were fair, a few generous. “One of my students, Vada Utkina, comes from a wealthy family. They pay more than I ask.”

  My mother quickly decided that the way to make more money was to start selling fancy gowns for wealthy women—all wives to high ranking Communist Party members, of course. It worked. The money started to come in, but we still struggled, the pantry often bare, the refrigerator not much better.

  Bogdan and Gavriil’s father, Stas Bessonov, came down one night, and offered my mother money. My mother told us to go to bed when Stas arrived. We did but, as usual, I snuck out, along with Valeria, and listened.

  “I cannot accept it,” our mother said. “But thank you, Stas.”

  “Svetlana, you must. I hear you are making gowns for the enemy.”

  My mother bent her head. “I ha
te them, too. I have no choice.”

  “I do not blame you at all, Svetlana. It is for food, it is for the girls’ survival, but take this. It’s what I have now. Pay me back when you can.”

  “Stas, it is wrong to take this money. I can provide for my family.” She bent her head, covered her face, her shoulders shook.

  “Svetlana, please, don’t cry. I don’t know what to do when women cry. It makes me nervous.”

  “I cannot take it. I doubt I will ever be able to pay you back.”

  “Then don’t. It’s yours. Here. A tissue. No more tears now. Don’t make me nervous.”

  Stas put the money on the kitchen table, tapped it with his finger. My mother, full of pride, integrity, a woman who had been fired from her university position, a husband and father in law in jail, no living parents nor brother, a mother with three girls to feed, took it. She hugged him.

  “Svetlana, your husband has always treated me with respect, as have you. I am a man from nothing. You know my business. I have appreciated the friendship. Plus the children are friends. I am helping many families now. It is a horrible time, and I will do what I can for you.”

  This gentleness from a man who regularly whacked people and dumped them in the river.

  “I am trying to get Alexei released. It takes time, it takes bribes, it takes the right person signing off.” He cracked his knuckles.

  “Thank you, Stas.” My mother was close to breaking, but she wouldn’t, because that’s not what a Kozlovskaya woman did. She had told me often, “We stand strong, always, Antonia. Don’t you forget that.”

  There was more help coming from the Bessonov family, which Valeria and I found out later that week.

  “Do you want me to show you how to get some money, Antonia?” Bogdan asked.

  I had witnessed my mother crying the night before. I was hungry all the time, my stomach eating itself, growling, but I didn’t want to tell my mother.

  Hunger is a scary thing. It hits at the root of your life: You get too hungry, and you’ll die. Worse, the people you love will die. You can’t think, you can’t plan, you can’t dream if you’re hungry. Elvira resembled a walking sheet. Valeria was moving slowly. My mother was down to bone.