The Language of Sisters

  What? We were not in trouble for cutting our braids off?

  “And we are not wearing dresses again,” Valerie announced, though tentatively, not wanting to hurt our mother’s feelings. She had stayed up, late at night, sewing those dresses. “No one wears flowered dresses here, Mama, I’m sorry.”

  My mother’s face ... Oh, that hurt. I saw my father pat my mother’s hand. My sisters and I had to bite our lips not to cry out.

  But then ... my mother smiled. “Your uncle Vladan said that he is bringing us clothes for you all tonight. A collection from the church was taken. Perhaps there will be clothes in there that you like. As soon as we have a little money, we will take you to get new American clothes.” She raised a finger. “Not expensive.”

  “Really?” I said, breathless.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes. Okay-dokay,” my father said, then laughed, and went back to Russian. “That’s a new phrase I learned today. You can dress like American girls. This is my final word.”

  “We are proud Americans, from Russia, and you can dress how the girls do here,” my mother said. “Thank you, Jesus, he brought us here safely. May all the people who hurt us in the Soviet Union find that their feet are infected, their tongues flattened, their hearing dying.” She smiled so sweetly at us, then flung out her arms for a hug. “Praise Mary, mother of God.”

  “Praise Mary, mother of God,” my sisters and I said, hugging her close. She was the best.

  And that was it. My parents were smart enough, open-minded enough, not to force the old ways on us here in this country.

  We found jeans in the pile of clothes that night. Tennis shoes. T-shirts. Sweatshirts. The next day we went to school in American clothes, our hair brushed straight down. We changed our names. When the kids made fun of us, we punched them.

  I loved clothes from then on out. Fashion, for me, allowed me to blend in at school, blend into America.

  Clothes helped me then, and now, to fake confidence. To fake that I’m strong and brave, when often I feel neither. To fake that I know what I’m doing at work when sometimes I don’t. To fake that I am an insider when I don’t feel that I am. I’ve lived here for over twenty five years, but old insecurities cling like crimes.

  I always search for bargains and sales, I always pay cash, and if there’s a coupon, it’s in my hand. My parents are strict savers, and it was drilled into all of us that we should save money. One of the Kozlovsky favorite family mottos: “Save your money so you will not starve to death.”

  It’s a helpful motto, and I do save.

  Another helpful motto, this one from my mother? Always put on lipstick and earrings before you leave the house, unless the house is on fire.

  Clothes are my armor.

  There was only one time when my love of clothes fell apart and I didn’t care anymore.

  That was when everything tumbled into hell.

  * * *

  He called late the next night.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Mexico. I needed to move on from India.”

  He had been volunteering in an orphanage in India for months. “On the beach now?”

  “Yes. I’m volunteering in a local school and talking to people.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “No.” He laughed, but it was sad, too close to the edge. “Currently I’m being followed by the vegetable garden again.”

  I would laugh, but it wasn’t funny. He was haunted by a vegetable garden.

  “I’m also being followed by someone scary. I wake up all the time to this black, lurking presence and screams. Not my screams, a woman’s screams. I don’t get it. Why is all this getting worse these last months? Why am I seeing all these things more lately?”

  Maybe it’s because you know you’ve been lied to all these years, you’re twenty-eight, and you’re searching for the truth and I am a disloyal sister. “Are the memories making any sense?”

  “Not much, but I can feel my mind opening up. I’m getting snatches of memories here and there. I keep seeing a rocking horse that’s rocking on its own, no one on him. It’s creepy.”

  I shivered. A rocking horse that rocks alone. A blue ceramic box with a fancy lady on it, and a red and purple butterfly that flies toward scary woods.

  No wonder he thought he was losing his mind.

  “I think it’s all from my childhood, but it’s the blood that’s the worst, Toni. I see it on my hands in my dreams. It’s driving me straight out of my mind. Why do I have blood on my hands? How did it get there? Was it mine? Was it someone else’s? Was it hers? Or is it all in my imagination?”

  “It’s not in your imagination.” I remembered the blood.

  Never tell, Antonia, never, ever tell.

  “They know more than they’re telling me,” he said.

  “Yes, I think they do.”

  “I need them to talk to me.”

  “I know. They will.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  * * *

  When the moon was high in the sky, I walked over to his craftsman-styled houseboat. I brought a bottle of wine. “Tired, Nick?” I asked when he opened the door.

  “Not for you. Come on in, baby.”

  Nick Sanchez’s houseboat was modern and streamlined. Wood plank floors, darker wood kitchen cabinets, quartz counters, open shelving, and an island in the middle. It had one open room downstairs, and then his bedroom, a guest bedroom, and an office upstairs, which was lined with books. It was a manly-man houseboat.

  Nick had made manicotti and a salad and heated up bread. He is a thoughtful person, kind, even though he often resembles a blond criminal, depending on where he’s working at the moment.

  We ate in bed, then we had sex, then I went home.

  He sighed as I let myself into my tugboat.

  “I heard that, Nick.”

  “I heard it, too. Come back if you change your mind.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “I’m always up for a night in your tugboat.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll keep you warm.”

  “I have heat.”

  “Not personal heat.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “A night soon?”

  “Nick—”

  He held up a hand. “I won’t push. But I’ll miss you. My bed is way too big without you in it.”

  “Your bed is way too big, period.”

  He laughed.

  I shut the door to my tugboat. I do not spend the night at Nick’s, and I don’t allow him to spend the night at my place, either. The answer is no. What I am doing is already bad enough.

  * * *

  Nick said hello to me on the dock when I first moved in.

  “Hello,” I said, then froze. Nick was an intimidating giant. He has blond hair and light blue eyes, and those eyes stayed on me, full attention. The blonde and blue eyed part makes him sound pretty, but there wasn’t a pretty bone on him. His hair was down to his shoulders, and he had a mustache and a goatee.

  He was all man, rugged, tough, pretty serious. He had a faded scar on his left cheek and a faded scar on his right temple. He had nice teeth. I don’t know why I noticed his teeth.

  “I’m Nick Sanchez.”

  “Toni Kozlovsky.” When he shook my hand, I felt that my hand was going to be permanently lost in the size of his.

  “Moving in?”

  “Yes.” He had on a black T-shirt, jeans, and black boots. It appeared that he might have a criminal history of slamming heads together.

  “Welcome. I hope you like it here.”

  “I think I will.”

  “I live right there.” He nodded toward his houseboat.

  “I love your home.”

  “Thank you. I love your tugboat. Creative way to live. If you have to, you can probably haul my home down the river.”

  “Probably. It’s a retired tugboat, t
hough, so to speak. It’s tired. It doesn’t want to work anymore.”

  “I feel the same way sometimes.”

  I laughed. “Me too.”

  “I like the yellow paint and the red trim.”

  “Thank you. It’s ... it’s been remodeled on the inside. I’m not living in a real tugboat. Well, it’s real. But not real in a ... tug-boatty type of way.”

  He smiled. I caught my breath. Wow. I remember thinking. Wow. Full lips. Not so scary when he smiled.

  “I bet it’s interesting to live in. A lot of river history there.”

  “Yes, it is.” That would have been the moment to invite him in, but I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. What to say to a man like that? How could I invite another man into my home, anyhow? I couldn’t do that.

  “Are you from around here?” he asked.

  “Yes. We live, well, I lived, I sold our house.” Simple question, complicated answer. “It’s about thirty minutes from here.”

  “Ah.” Something flashed in his eyes, covered up quick. He caught my confusion. He wondered about the true answer behind it all.

  “Yes. So now ... here I am at the tugboat. I’m here.” I decided to study the deck. I had lost confidence in the last long months. I had been humbled to the floor. I had been gutted. I was not myself. I didn’t think I’d be myself again.

  “I see you have a kayak. I love kayaking. There are a lot of animals and birds right here, but if you kayak that way”—he turned and pointed downriver—“it gets quieter near the curve and there are even more.”

  “I’ll go that way.” No, I wouldn’t. I would not get in my kayak and do that. I glanced down again as his eyes were seeing too much of me and I was not up to handling someone tall and studly like Nick. “Thank you.”

  “Sure.” He held out his hand again. “Nice to meet you, Toni.”

  “You too.” His hand was warm. My hand was cold.

  He walked off the dock as my parents headed down, holding boxes.

  I watched him go.

  I heard him say hello to my parents; they said hello back, smiled.

  My mother put a box down on the dock and hugged me. My father wrapped his arms around both of us. My mother lightly tapped both of my cheeks with both hands, put her widow’s peak to mine, and said, “Okay. Now we have things to do, things to get done. No?”

  I wiped away tears and kept unpacking, my sisters coming down the dock with boxes, too.

  That’s what Kozlovskys do. We brush away the tears, and we get on with life. We always have things to do.

  * * *

  “How are you feeling about the wedding?” I asked Ellie.

  “I feel perfectly pleasant and peaceful about it.” Ellie, at her sewing machine, continued to sew white lace around the edges of the light blue fabric. When she was done, she was going to paint blue irises and lily pads on the pillow. “Be one with your life,” she whispered to herself. “Embrace your fear, then let it go floating into the sky.”

  “You sound perfectly and pleasantly insane,” Valerie said.

  The three of us were at Ellie’s house sewing pillows. Some women meet for lunch. Some women go away to Vegas and be naughty. My sisters and I sew pillows and talk, so we call it Pillow Talk.

  When we were younger, we sewed pillows to make money in the midst of a long and blisteringly cold and starving winter in Moscow. Then we sewed for our lives; now we sew because that’s what we do when we’re together.

  All the pillows the three of us make during Pillow Talk go to a children’s hospital in town, so they have to be extra special. We all work on them at home after our Pillow Talk nights. When we get a bunch, we bag them up, haul them over, sometimes give them out to the kids ourselves, then we go back to Ellie’s, have a couple of celebratory vodka straight shots, and make more pillows.

  Ellie lives in a two-story blue home in a quiet area on the Willamette River. It’s set back from the river about twenty feet. The home was old, so she had the whole thing gutted and had all the walls painted white. That was where the boredom ended.

  Ellie loves fabrics. She has floor-to-ceiling window treatments in the most lush, intricate fabrics on every window, all different designs and bright colors that somehow blend. She has taken fabric from India, China, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, etc., and framed it for her walls and used it as furniture slipcovers. The world looks like it landed in her home.

  Upstairs she knocked out a wall between the living room and kitchen, so it’s one large room, with two bedrooms down the hall and a bathroom. Downstairs she knocked down four walls, so the daylight basement, with two sets of French doors, is completely open. This is where she runs Ellie K’s Pillows.

  She has four women who work for her. She sews and sells her pillows all over the country. Ellie has a Web site where all of her pillows are pictured. I sometimes get on the Web site to relax myself because the pillows are so creative, fun, funny, bodacious. She also has a page about her, her life, her home, her cats, the river, and her pillows in progress. She’s made her business personal, a slice of her life on the river, in the woods. The business grows each year.

  “That’s it?” Valerie asked. “That’s all you want to say, Ellie? I would think we’d get some bridal gushing, some enthusiasm, some wow—wow, I can’t wait for the legal bang bang.” Valerie bumped her fists together. Her pillow would have a country scene with white and black chickens that wore red velvet top hats. “Get what I mean?”

  “I think we get it, Valerie,” I said. “Since we do have brains.” I was cutting out leaves from many different fabrics from around the world, then I would paste them onto a tree on a three-foot-long blue, rectangular-shaped pillow.

  “The wedding planning is going well,” Ellie said, standing up, breathing deep, her hand to her widow’s peak, which is what she always does when she’s nervous. “Except that Mama and Papa don’t like Gino. Family war.”

  “Not a war,” I said, choosing my words oh so carefully. “We have ... concerns.”

  “Please. Let’s not hide behind politeness,” Valerie said. “We think you’re making a mistake. Let me spell mistake for you. G.I.N.O.”

  “Please stop it, Valerie,” Ellie said. She took another deep breath and chanted, “I don’t need a paper bag. I don’t need a paper bag. I am in control of my lungs, my air, my breathing, my life, and my calm demeanor. I am in control of myself.”

  “I’m glad I’m not warring with Mama,” Valerie said. “I don’t want to have to deal with her evil eye and curses and muttering. She does mutter a lot. I think she’s muttering more the older she gets.”

  “And she’s swearing more in French,” I said, crossing my legs on the couch. The couch had a slipcover made from fabric from India. Red. Elephants. Gold trim. “Back to the wedding. Ellie, I want you to be excited.”

  “I ... am,” Ellie said, chanting once again. “Breathe, Ellie. Relax. Bring the peace of the world unto yourself. You’re happy.”

  “You’re not,” I said.

  “You’re a stupendously poor liar,” Valerie said. “I would rip you apart on the stand. Like a lion shredding flesh and swallowing it whole. I hope you never commit a murder. In fact, if I went back to being a defense attorney, I wouldn’t even let you testify, because you’d incriminate yourself. Spill your guts, Ellie. Tell us the truth.”

  Ellie stopped working at the sewing machine, leaned way back in her chair, then came up right. “Gino is ... he’s ... I’ve never met anyone like Gino. He walks into my house and everything lights up, and I light up, he’s like electricity, and he’s exciting and fun, and we’re always doing exciting and fun things and it’s entertaining and exciting and fun.”

  “I think my cat is entertaining, I’m not going to marry her,” Valerie said.

  “I think I’ve had all the excitement and fun I can take,” I said. “Do you love him?”

  Ellie hesitated. That infinitesimal hesitation. “Yes. I do. I wouldn’t marry him if I didn’t love hi
m.” She then whispered, “Don’t get uptight, Ellie, breathe in slowly. Feel your soul. Arrange your aura. Reach for serenity.”

  “Ellie, keep sleeping with Gino,” Valerie said. “Have your fun and excitement with a condom attached to his pistol at all times, but fun and excitement does not carry the day. Or the years ahead. I tell ya, I find sexy in faithful and loyal. Somebody who listens. Kai may not light up a room and suck the light right out of it from everyone else, but he shines a light for me. Last night, this is so funny, he brought a flashlight into the bedroom and we got under the covers and—”

  “I don’t think we need to know about flashlight sex right now,” I said

  “Fine,” Valerie said. “But I want you to have this look of total lust and passion on your face whenever you say the word ‘Gino,’ and you don’t have that, sister.”

  “Gino and I have a physical passion together... .” Ellie gave up. She grabbed a paper bag that she had stashed under the emerald green cushion of a chair and started breathing into it. “Capture your inner calm, Ellie. Decide that you are in control. Embrace your harmony... .”

  I groaned.

  Valerie groaned, too, then tapped the armrest of a chair. The chair had pictures of the Eiffel Tower on it.

  Ellie doubled over with the bag, then stood up, pale. “Gino is nice to me. He pays attention to me. He always wants to be together.”

  “And what would be wrong with that?” I asked. “Did you want him to head for the mountains screaming when he saw your face?”

  “It’s a bit ... suffocating. I turn around, he’s there. It’s leechy. I can’t believe I used the word ‘leech’ to talk about my fiancé. But he started talking about us and how things will be after the wedding.” She made a wheezing sound.

  “Sit down, Ellie, you’re making me nervous,” I said. “Now I feel like breathing into a bag.”

  “There were things he talked about, like money. I’ve never told him how much I make. He’s told me what he makes, and he makes more than I do, but he wanted to sit down and make a budget and talk about savings, retirement. He said that from now on we should both talk to each other before we make purchases, not the little ones, but medium-sized purchases and the expensive ones.”

  “That sounds like a plan to me,” I said.