The Language of Sisters

  “Antonia?” Bogdan said again. “Do you want money?”

  “Yes.” I did.

  Bogdan showed me. It wasn’t that hard, and I was trained by the boy who was trained by the best, his father.

  Bogdan and Gavriil trained Valeria and me how to pickpocket and Elvira how to be a distraction. They trained us using their own pockets. The boys were competent teachers. They were patient, skilled, and they helped us with every movement. Gavriil told us how to study people, to watch for the signs that indicated they were wealthy, that they would actually have something to steal.

  In that time of stagnation in the Soviet Union, the Cold War an economic icicle, it was easy to see who had what. Most people had nothing. We were not after them. We were after the ones who did.

  I was scared to death the first time I pickpocketed. I felt as low as the sidewalk under my feet. I had been taught not to steal, yet there I was.

  My first victim was a well-dressed woman in a fur coat and hat who I saw walking through Red Square, St. Basil’s Cathedral, with its ice-cream tops, in front of her. Bogdan and Gavriil said to me, “She has money. See her purse. See her rings? Diamonds. She could sell one and we could live off of it for six months.”

  My stomach rumbled. I thought of my mother that morning, sewing at the table, swearing in French when a stitch went wrong, working, working, working.

  I followed the woman, Valeria beside me, Elvira behind her. We skipped along, singing, our bows on the tops of our heads bouncing around. I accidentally bumped into her. I slipped my hand in and out of the woman’s purse. She had forgotten to zip it, which was why we targeted her.

  “Excuse me.” I smiled. Valeria smiled, too. The woman smiled back, went on her way.

  Guilt, and fear, hit hard. I cried over the wallet I held in my hands. I knew I was now going to hell and the devil would burn me with his tail, so help me God, forgive me. We rushed around a corner, then another, and hid in an alley, making sure that no one was following, as Bogdan and Gavriil had taught us, then we hurried to the meeting place.

  At the meeting place, between two buildings, outside of Red Square, I sat down and covered my head, a dancing devil with a burning tail skipping through my mind.

  “Antonia,” Bogdan said, getting to eye level with me. “I know you’re upset. You don’t have to do this. You can go home. I understand.”

  I sniffled, wiped my sleeve. Beside me, Valeria stared straight ahead, stricken. Elvira, only six, snuggled into me.

  “But your family’s broke. Your papa’s gone. He’s in jail with your grandfather, our father told us. We don’t know if, or when, they’re coming back.”

  “They’re coming back,” I cried.

  “They’ll be back soon. You’re stupid.” Valeria tried to kick Bogdan. He dodged. She tried to kick him again, and he dodged again. So she ran after Gavriil, fists up. “Stop running. I hope your eyes fall out of your head, Gavriil. I hope your legs run you into a wall, Bogdan, and your brains squish out.”

  To their credit, neither brother hit back, despite her swinging fists. They simply ducked, put up their arms to protect themselves, then circled back to us when Valeria’s anger petered out. We were three miserable Kozlovskaya girls in a heap.

  “There are wealthy people here,” Gavriil said, “all in the party. They have houses and cars and jewelry and vacations that you can’t believe. They take all the money. They make all the money. It all goes to them. My father told us. That’s not the way it was supposed to work. They’re the wealthy, we’re the poor. They took your papa and grandfather for what? Because they talked about a new kind of government. They talked about being able to say what they wanted, and write what they wanted. And they took them because they’re Christians. I don’t believe in your God but it’s okay if you do. We’re taking back what they have taken from us.”

  “Who do you think put your papa and grandfather in jail?” Bogdan said. “That’s right. They did. The wealthy. The people who are running this country. The KGB. The government. Communists.” He spit on the ground. “My father hates them.”

  I thought of my father and grandfather, suffering in jail, for doing nothing wrong. I nodded. “I want to take back what they took from us.”

  “Smart girl.” Gavriil helped me up.

  Bogdan smoothed my hair down with his hands. “There.”

  I smiled at him. He smiled back. He was so handsome.

  “Me too,” Valeria said. “I’ll steal from the people who took my papa.”

  Gavriil approached Valeria again, and she didn’t hit him. He patted her on the back. Elvira stopped crying, and we got back to work.

  Picking pockets. Stealing rubles.

  Soon I was talented at pickpocketing.

  I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.

  I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.

  I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.

  I was desperate. We were desperate.

  Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.

  Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.

  * * *

  “Monster creeps.”

  “Who is?” I asked Daisy as we sat on her deck and watched a motorboat cruise by.

  “My sons.” She wiped her hands together as if wiping her hands clean of her sons. “I am rid of them now!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They took my ammo.”

  “Ah. That. Yes, uh ... that’s too bad... .”

  “They took it all. Thieves! Thieves! They even took my bullet treasures from my negligee drawers!”

  Drawers? Plural? “Sorry to hear that.” I so wasn’t sorry to hear that.

  “How am I going to shoot without ammo?”

  “Who did you want to shoot?”

  “Spiders.”

  “Maybe you can simply smash them with your foot?”

  “I hate spiders.”

  “Spiders are irritating.”

  “And slugs. I want to shoot slugs. There was a slug on my hosta the other day. Where it came from, I don’t know. I went to get my gun and I shot it, but no ammo. Monster creep sons.”

  “They love you a lot.”

  “Oh, piss off. I love them, too, but they shouldn’t interfere with my bullet shots.”

  Daisy sang that night, her voice carrying down the river. She sang “Over the Rainbow” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard” and “The Sound of Music.”

  Jayla and Beth, Vanessa and Charles, and Lindy and I sat behind her as she stood on the edge of the dock, a white daisy in her purple hat. No one said a word. We listened. We closed our eyes.

  I was not the only one tearing up that night.

  * * *

  I sat in my and Marty’s tandem kayak in the river by my tugboat the next afternoon, the sun warm, the wind soft. I knew exactly what he would say to me if he were here, “Come on, Toni. You can do it.”

  I did not turn around and look. There would be no Marty there. None. I tried to breathe, my eyes shut.

  For the first couple weeks after Marty died, my family would come to our house—I later learned they had a schedule—and help me get up. They all knew where the hidden key was, and they’d use it and put it back.

  They would get in bed with me and I’d cry and they’d cry, too. My cousin Boris and my cousin Zoya were particularly weepy. Poor Uncle Vladan. He could hardly control himself. Somehow it felt better to cry with someone than cry alone.

  They would force me to get up, literally pushing me into the shower. None of the men stripped me down, but my sisters and female cousins and my mother had no qualms about standing me up in the bedroom and stripping off my clothes before manhandling me into the shower.

  “Don’t forget t
o wash your hair,” JJ would say. “You wash it, I’ll fix it.”

  “I feel bad for you being alone in there,” Tati would wail. “Do you want me to shower with you?”

  “When you’re done we can draw pictures of monsters being arrested,” Ailani called to me through the door. “And you can use my new crayons.”

  I thought about never going back to work. Marty had left me a life insurance policy, and I didn’t have to work. I thought about shutting down, cutting out. It took all my strength to get through every single day, but I did it.

  I am a different person in many ways than I was before Marty died. I am more compassionate. I understand the anger and bitterness that people experience when someone they love more than the universe dies.

  I’m stronger than I used to be. I appreciate laughter more, and the love and friendship of my family and my friends, who were there for me. The people who were not there for Marty and me when Marty was ill, I simply don’t see anymore. Either you are a friend, good times and bad, or you aren’t.

  On the other hand, people can irritate me much more quickly than they used to, though I have always been on the snippy side. I have little patience for listening to inane problems and people whining over them. I am acutely aware of what is a problem and what isn’t.

  I’m a better person than I was when Marty died, and I’m worse.

  Both.

  Sometimes life asks for too much. It knocks you down, and when you try to get up it kicks you in the teeth again. It gets so tiring, trying to get up. Sometimes it seems easier to give in, but that’s an emotional train wreck, too, to stay that far down in the trenches of excruciating pain.

  Tough place.

  Mr. and Mrs. Quackenbusch, always together, quacked at me and headed up to my deck. In the distance I could see the new home Big Teeth and Big Tooth were building for their new life.

  I wanted to kayak. I wanted to be on the rivers again.

  I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I didn’t want to be locked into the knocked-down place.

  I wanted to change. I had to change because I wanted to live, I knew that.

  Knowing something and acting bravely on it can be two different things. I wasn’t feeling brave.

  I tilted my head back to the sun. It was warm, the wind soft. Maybe I would try to be brave.

  * * *

  I went to a grief group for widows one time. I had to. I was reeling from grief, rage, loneliness, aloneness, and the utter unfairness that Marty had died. All of them said that the first time they made love to a man who wasn’t their husband, they cried.

  Some cried because they missed their husbands.

  Others cried because they felt guilty.

  And a few cried because they were so happy to be having sex and they didn’t miss their mean, belittling, difficult husbands at all.

  * * *

  Sitting on Nick’s dock, as the sun went down on a Saturday night, I talked about Marty. Maybe it was because I was feeling closer and closer to Nick. Maybe it was because I trusted him. Maybe it was because of something I didn’t want to admit yet.

  I told him how Marty and I met, how I didn’t want to date a man my parents picked out for me, how I gave in. I talked about kayaking. Our friendship. Our love. Our wedding.

  I talked about how I had felt so overwhelmed with grief, I could hardly function.

  I paused now and then, to make sure it wasn’t too much for him, too much emotion, too much loss, too pathetic, but it wasn’t.

  I told him how guilty I felt for sleeping with him and how it made me feel like a bad wife. That it was too soon, that I had betrayed Marty and our vows. I didn’t talk on and on and on. I told Nick what I thought he needed to know, what I knew he wanted to know.

  I studied Nick’s light blue eyes when I was done. That hard face with a couple of scars. The huge shoulders. He looked like a dangerous man, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t dangerous at all except to my heart and my guilt level.

  Nick pulled me into his arms, I actually saw tears, and he whispered, “I am so, so sorry, Toni. I am.”

  We did not have sex that night. Nick would have called it making love, but I couldn’t. Marty was between us. Nick held me until I left, then walked me to the door of my tugboat.

  I kissed his cheek and shut the door.

  Nick.

  Marty.

  Nick.

  * * *

  Ellie and I were at Svetlana’s, back corner, grateful not to have been called into waitressing by our mother. The waitresses came by to say hello, but they did not take our order. We all knew our mother would be bringing us what she wanted us to eat.

  It was a full house, as usual. Charlie had decided he was going to play Mozart all night. Ralph came downstairs, the subdued lighting shadowing the dent in his head, saw Ellie and I, saluted, and went to the kitchen to clean.

  Tonight, up on the Specials board the dessert of the night was named “No More Wearing Black, Chelsea.” It was carrot cake. I laughed.

  “How are you, Ellie?” I picked up my wineglass. Yum. My father knew how to pick ’em.

  “Gino wants four kids, maybe five.” She rubbed her widow’s peak. Stressed.

  That one hurt. Four or five kids sounded like a fine number to me. Six was not out of the realm. I pushed my own feelings down. “Do you not want four or five kids?”

  Ellie brought the brown paper bag out. Inflate. Deflate.

  “Breathe, Ellie. And try this wine. It takes like Italy and hot bread and purple grapes.”

  She drank the wine, hand unsteady. “I don’t know if I can say it out loud.”

  “Try. Please.” She didn’t want kids, I knew it.

  She whispered, so low I couldn’t hear her. “What?”

  “I don’t think ... I don’t think I want kids.”

  I took another sip of wine.

  “You’re not surprised, Toni.”

  “No. But if you don’t think you want kids, and Gino does, you have an unsolvable problem.”

  “I know. We talked about it.” She fluffed her face with the bag. “I like kids. I like being an aunt to Valerie’s kids, JJ’s kids, and I feel like an aunt to Pavel because he’s so young, but to have my own kids? I don’t think I’m that maternal. Does that make me a bad woman?”

  “Not at all. It makes you honest. If you don’t want kids, you should not have them.”

  “I remember a lot of scary things that happened to us as kids, Toni, so maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I don’t want to inflict that on a child even though my rational mind says that’s silly. But though I love holding a baby and toddlers are cute, I get bored when I’m with them too long. Like in thirty minutes. And JJ’s teenagers ... hearing about Chelsea and Hope is enough to make my uterus shrivel. Plus, I know I would have to stop working so much. I know I would have to give up my free time. I know I would hardly sleep for years. Motherhood”—she breathed into the bag, back out—“doesn’t appeal to me at all.”

  “What did you say to Gino when he said he wanted four or five kids?”

  “I said, ‘How will we have four kids when I have a business?’ And he said that since I work at home, I could run the business while raising the kids, or I could give up the business and be a full-time mom. He told me he made enough for our family, and this would be his preference.

  “I almost threw a pillow at his face. I said, ‘Gino, why don’t you work from home and I’ll move my business out of the house and you run your business while looking after four or five noisy, temper-tantrum-throwing kids?’ And he said, getting all uptight, ‘I can’t do that. I have an office, downtown, I have clients to meet, calls, e-mails, projects ...’ and I said, ‘I have the same, Gino, do you not realize that? You want me to give up my business, but you won’t give up yours. Is that fair?’ ”

  How infuriating. “What did he say?”

  “He said that he hadn’t thought of it that way, that he assumed we would be like his parents and I would be at home with the kids and I said, ‘Yo
u want me to stay at home with four or five kids, drowning in housework and laundry and making macaroni and cheese while you get to build your career? You want me to give up the business that I love, that I built from nothing, in favor of burping babies and changing diapers? Do you not know and appreciate how much my pillow business means to me?’

  “Toni, the expression on his face while we were fighting. It was like I’d hit him with a sewing machine. He said, ‘Ellie, I didn’t think about it like that,’ and I said, ‘Well, you better start thinking.’ ”

  “Here, have some more wine.”

  She downed the whole glass. “It was so frustrating, Toni. I said to him, ‘Gino, you clearly don’t know me at all. You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to build this business and how much it means to me. How interesting it is to me, how intellectually stimulating it is, how I love it. How I love to design and make pillows and market and sell them.’ And he said, ‘I do know!’ and I said, ‘Then, Gino, what you have asked me to do is even worse. At first I thought you were simply dense and selfish in asking me to give up my business, but now I think you’re an asshole. Knowing how much I love my pillow business you would still ask me to give it up? Don’t you want me to be happy? Your solution is for me to run my company while taking care of four or five children. Do you want me to die of exhaustion? Don’t you care that that would be too much for one person?’ ”

  “I want to strangle him.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “It’s like he’s got a brick in his head.”

  “We kept fighting, and I screamed at him to get out.”

  “Did he get out?”

  “No, he started backing way up. He said that we could work it out, but I said how, and I really pressed him for answers, and all he said was that we needed to calm down and find a solution. Men will often say, ‘We can work it out,’ but really what they’re doing is waiting until you give in, until you make the sacrifice that they want you to make, and then they act all thankful, but really that was the goal from the start. To make you give in and they make no concessions. The ‘solution’ is for the woman to give up part of herself.”

  “How did it end with Gino?”