The Language of Sisters

  “I’ve handled my own money for a long time. And I don’t want to sit down and talk about money. I don’t want him, or anyone else, to tell me how to spend or save my money. I don’t want to have to ask for his permission to go out and buy a new coat or new furniture or if I need something for my business or if I want to go on a trip.”

  “Kai and I do that, though, Ellie,” Valerie said. “Not with everything. He buys clothes sometimes. I do, too. We both buy things for the kids and we don’t get approval for that from the other person, but we both know the budget, we both know how much we can spend. And I would double vasectomy Kai if he went out and bought a motorcycle or a car without discussing it with me.”

  “I know in my head”—gasp-gasp—“it’s reasonable for Gino to ask that we do that, but I don’t like it. It feels controlling to me. It feels like I’m losing my financial independence. I don’t want a man, any man, even my husband, telling me how to spend money.

  “Gino and I were also talking about family.” She put the bag down, her hands trembling. “And we were talking about, specifically, his mother, who is always complaining about something. Her back hurts. She has migraines. Her feet hurt. She’s in her seventies, and Gino jumps to her beck and call.

  “I’m glad he loves her, but she can’t stand me. I know it’s not personal. Gino told me she has never liked any of his girlfriends, but I don’t like being around her. His father deadens himself with alcohol each night and checks out. Anyhow, Gino said that when his parents aren’t healthy anymore, that he will want them to live with us.”

  “Torture. That is akin to torture,” Valerie said.

  “It would be like living with a battle-ax and a stoned aardvark,” I said.

  “I can’t imagine living with his parents. I told him that, too. I told him that if they weren’t healthy, they could go to assisted living, that we could be there every day, and he was angry. He said that family is family and he would never put his parents, or our parents, in assisted living.”

  She collapsed beside me on the couch, and I put my arm around her. All this bag blowing was making me nervous.

  “If I have to live with a woman who hates me and a man who drinks steadily to dim the noise and nagging of his wife, I will lose my mind. It will fly out the window and disappear.”

  “Then tell him no, Ellie,” I said. “I couldn’t do it, either.”

  “I did. We had a fight about it. It was unpleasant.” She put the paper bag over her face again. “I reminded him that I work, full time, at home. Who would take care of them? And he said that wherever we live we’ll make sure there’s a place for my business in the home, so I could take care of them and check on them during the day.”

  I threw up my hands. “So he wants you to give up your time, and your business, to help care for his mother, who hisses at you, and his father, a drunken man, when they’re ill.”

  “Yes. I think I want to die thinking about it. It’s making me feel like I can’t breathe.”

  “Watching you not be able to breathe is making me feel like I can’t breathe,” Valerie said. “I feel light-headed.”

  “Ellie, you have to work this out,” I said, fanning my face for more air. “They’re older, and they may well need help soon.”

  “I know,” she wailed. “I can’t, and won’t, do it. Gino knows how his mother treats me, and I’m angry that he would even suggest that I take care of her, that he would not understand, or refuse to understand, what her being in my home would do to me, to us.”

  “How did it end?” Valerie asked.

  “It ended with Gino angry and saying that I’m selfish, that he would help my parents. Am I a terrible person?”

  “No,” Valerie and I both said.

  “You’re saying that you can’t live with his parents because of their alarming dysfunction,” I said.

  “Because they’ll drive your brain out of your skull, and it will fly out the window,” Valerie said.

  “I love Gino but not enough to take care of his mother.” Ellie collapsed on the couch, exhausted from her anxiety attack. “Maybe I don’t love him enough.”

  “Yep. Give me that,” I said, and put the bag over my face and breathed. That helped.

  “Hand it over, sista,” Valerie said, swiping the bag and putting it over her face and breathing in. “I think I need a bag for this upcoming trial. The Bartons are psychotic.”

  We had a group hug on the couch. Ellie leaned against me and I leaned against Valerie, arms and legs entangled.

  “Love you,” we said to each other. “Love you more than Mama’s Russian tea cakes.”

  * * *

  I have three kayaks. Two singles and a tandem two-seater. I keep them in the little house/shelter on my deck. I loved kayaking. Being outside, in nature, was my peace. Being one with the river, sunk down into it, along with the river animals, watching the leaves flutter above me, the sun shine on the water, the wind blowing through my hair ... well, there’s nothing like it.

  I won’t kayak again.

  * * *

  Going to work downtown, in the Oregon Standard’s boxy, four-story, concrete and glass building in the middle of the city, was getting harder and harder. Each day I left my tugboat, said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Quackenbusch, and Dixie the blue heron if I could see her, who reminds me of him, and headed into a full day of crime.

  From blue herons to drive-by shootings.

  From Sergeant Otts to robberies.

  I meet regularly with William to discuss my long-term projects, my short-term projects, and any story I am working on for that day. I often sit in mind-numbing meetings, then head straight out whenever someone commits a crime. The crime gets me out of the meeting, which is the only positive aspect.

  When a reportable crime is committed, I interview the police, witnesses the perpetrator, and the victim if he or she is willing and still living. Interviewing dead people is difficult. I then attempt to carefully talk to family and friends to figure out what happened, the back story, the angles, the people involved, and the motives, especially if I sense a broader story or need to dig deeper to find something I’m suspicious about. When I know someone is lying to me, I go into pit bull mode and don’t let up.

  Sometimes people want to talk to me, sometimes they don’t. A few times they’ve shown me how much they didn’t want to talk by holding up a gun. That usually has me flying off the front porch as if I could sprout wings on the way down.

  I also write about court proceedings.

  For longer or more in-depth stories, I talk to prosecutors, including my sister (quietly), defense attorneys, judges if I can get at them, detectives, FBI agents, DEA agents, victims’ and perpetrators’ families, friends, neighbors, schools, anyone involved in their personal lives and history, etc., to get the whole picture and quotes.

  Some crimes appear to be one crime, but you do your research and you’re looking at an entire criminal network. If not a criminal network, you’re often looking at a total breakdown in one part of society.

  There’s nothing easy about my work.

  I majored in journalism and English at the University of Oregon, then earned a master’s in journalism at Columbia. I started working for the Oregon Standard when I was twenty-five years old.

  At first I wrote obituaries. That bored me to death. What a way to put it. I started looking for human interest stories to throw at one of the senior editors, William.

  I found a homeless teenager and wrote about him and his life, why he was on the streets, why he’d meddled in drugs, what his hopes and dreams were. “I know I can be someone. I just need help,” he told me. The story got him help. Counseling. An apartment. A job. A scholarship for community college.

  I found a woman who was transgender, man to woman, and wrote about her. She was a biologist. “When I was three years old I refused to wear swim trunks. I wore a bikini, like all the other little girls. I tried to pull off my penis when I was five.”

  I found a man who fought in Vietna
m and worked as a peace activist. He told his war stories, wrapped around his belief that war was never an answer. “Once you’ve seen a man destroyed by shrapnel and you hold him in your arms as he dies, you know that war doesn’t solve a damn thing. It makes all of us worse.”

  William loved the human interest angle of the stories. He grunted, edited; we worked on them together. I didn’t have to write obituaries anymore.

  I like truth. It stems from my childhood, particularly from my mother. Professors, doctors, musicians, journalists, writers, and artists, and my uncles and aunts, bringing my cousins with them, all crowded into our apartment in Moscow.

  They ate my mother’s chopped herring salad, or fried potatoes with what few eggs she could find that day, while she and my father talked about freedom of speech, religion, press, the right to protest, a fair judicial system. They were adamant that a free press was the pillar of a free society, and they were vociferous in their belief that they should be able to worship, as Christians, in the open, with no fear.

  “No religious freedom, you smother the soul. No freedom to vote, you suffocate and endanger your population. No free press, no truth,” my mother would say, as people nodded. “When the government controls the press, they smother reality.”

  I exposed the truth. I loved journalism. I loved writing. I loved the awards I now and then won for my longer, more in-depth pieces.

  I do not love it anymore.

  I work long, harsh hours, as one cannot predict when crime will occur. Criminals do not schedule their criminal activity with me. Full moons are bad nights. Heat waves are grueling. Gangs pissed off at each other as leadership shifts are a mess. Wives leaving controlling, narcissistic husbands might mean I’m up at two in the morning as they take off running ... and so do their tormentors.

  The crime and justice beat is all negative, all the time. It’s senseless. Whenever someone says to me, a pious note to their voice, “I believe that everything happens for a reason,” I see an incredibly naïve and shallow person who has no idea what’s going on outside her front door.

  A woman named Ricki Adelman is the editor for Homes and Gardens of Oregon. I have heard nothing about my application. I would love writing about homes. Why?

  Because it all ends happy. Someone gets a remodeled kitchen with handles in the shapes of teacups on their cabinets. Someone else repaints an old dresser red and adds a Picasso-type design. A living room wall is decorated with reclaimed wood from a barn.

  If I don’t get the job, I’m leaving. I will have a nervous breakdown if I don’t.

  * * *

  To keep my nervous breakdown at bay, I indulged in Keeping The Monsters At Bay: Shopping Defensive Strategies after work. I bought a pair of pink tennis shoes and red skinny jeans. That night I made peanut butter cookies and ate them in my bathtub. I put a glass of milk on the rim of the tub and accidentally dumped it in the water.

  5

  There are six houseboats off our dock in the marina. There are more houseboats all around us, off on different docks, and moored boats, but when I walk down the main dock, then hang a left onto my dock, which is down aways and off on its own, there are six floating homes.

  A miserly, fish-faced man in his eighties, Herbert Shrock, used to own the marina, under the umbrella of his company Randall Properties, but he died and now his grandsons, Shane and Jerald Shrock, smarmy and ignorantly arrogant and too immature to know they’re ignorantly arrogant, have caused us a huge problem.

  I will probably lose my neighborhood.

  Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee, as we neighbors refer to them, want to build a condominium complex on the land behind us and do not want the dock and houseboats in front. What they truly do not want is to make the sewer, electrical, gas, and dock repairs and updates that have to be made, that the city, and we as a neighborhood, were insisting upon.

  Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee were also slumlords, left over from their grandfather. They owned apartment complexes slung up in poor neighborhoods all over the city that had problems with electricity, inadequate water pressure, mold, safety hazards, repairs that weren’t made, and fire hazards. There were lawsuits pending.

  I sighed and cursed Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee.

  The first houseboat, which actually branches off our dock onto its own dock, belongs to Lindy Hughes, a high-priced hooker. She goes by the professional name of Desiree. Even she rolls her eyes at that. Her white houseboat somewhat resembles a two-story Queen Anne home, complete with white gingerbread, a wraparound porch, and a purple wisteria vine that drapes around the house. Her front door is blue. Lindy and I are friends. I wish she wouldn’t do what she does, she knows I wish that, and we move along and have wine, cheese, and crackers and talk about our mutual passion: books.

  Vanessa and Charles Oldham are next. They have a traditional, two story, large, light blue houseboat. Vanessa is white and a high school English teacher, Charles is black and a college professor. Charles likes to grow vegetables, so he has two raised beds on his back deck. I love the vegetables—radishes, tomatoes, corn, chives, carrots—that he gives me.

  Next to the Oldhams is Jayla OHearn, a nurse in the ICU at the hospital, and her wife, Beth Diaz, who is an emergency room doctor. They’re in their thirties. Both are very social. I’ve been to their houseboat, they’ve been to mine. Their houseboat is new and modern, with a huge semicircular window above the front door and lots of glass. It looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, only on the water.

  Then it’s me, in my yellow, three-story tugboat.

  Next to me is Daisy Episcopo. Daisy’s house is light purple, white trim, two story. She has planted an abundance of daisies, all colors, in flower boxes and pots that surround her home.

  Daisy is eighty-five and has taken a short dive into dementia. She was always eccentric, as I understood from others, but I think she’s turned a corner the last few months and wandered down a curvy road. All the neighbors, on all the docks, watch her pretty closely. Daisy is about five feet tall, has white curls, and always wears a daisy. She sings at the edge of the dock almost nightly. She owns taverns that don’t have too many fights, two bowling alleys, a midpriced hotel, and a shooting range. They are all now run by her sons.

  Unfortunately, her sons are wealthy criminals, with their own “businesses.” They have been charged with embezzlement, fraud, money laundering, now and then assault against other bad people, etc. Periodically, they’re jailed, and they get slick lawyers to bail them out. Prosecutors have not been able to make evidence stick. Their crimes, to note, are never against women or children.

  They wear black, they’re tall, and they have pockmark scars from acne and scars from other “problems” on their faces. My mother saw them once and crossed herself. “Look like Russian mafia. Only these two, not Russian. Sicily. Yes, I say Sicilian.”

  She was right. Daisy’s grandfather came via Sicily. The oldest son is named Skippy. Skippy is not his real name, it’s what Daisy calls him and it’s what he invited me to call him. His real name is Arthur Episcopo, otherwise known as—wait for it—“Slugger.” The other son’s name is George Episcopo, otherwise known as—wait for it again—“Slash” because of the scars from a knife fight on his face that resemble slashes. Daisy calls him Georgie.

  Skippy and Georgie are devoted to Daisy, though I have heard, and seen, her upbraid both of them on numerous occasions, their heads bowed in shame. She even grabbed Georgie’s ear once and hauled him down the dock. Georgie greeted me as if nothing unusual was happening, “Hey, Toni, nice to see you. Skippy and I were down at Svetlana’s the other night. Had the special—the poached cod with parsley. I thought I was in heaven, which I ain’t never expected to achieve. How does your momma make cod taste that damn delicious?” His head was tilted down toward his little, haranguing mother. “She named it ‘Antonia Not Come See Me Enough.’ Is it true? Do you not visit your momma enough? You gotta go see your momma.”

  His own mother pulled harder on his ear,
and he winced.

  Skippy and Georgie were eager to meet me when I moved in. Both of them gave me all of their phone numbers, four each, and their e-mail addresses, two each. “Please let us know how our mother is. We give her a visit every day, but if she seems sick to you, tired, anxious ... or, uh, if she’s doin’ anything not normal, call, will ya? She, uh, seems to be gettin’ ...” Georgie paused, unable to speak the words, his face flushed.

  “We think there’s an old age ... problem.” Skippy tapped his head, then teared up.

  Georgie patted him on the back, took off his dark glasses, and took a swipe at his eyes.

  They both sniffled at the same time, then took out handkerchiefs and mopped up.

  I noticed they were both carrying guns under their $3,000 suit jackets.

  I assured them I would call. And, indeed, I have had to call them in the past.

  “Skippy,” I said, to a brisk, menacing ‘hello’ one morning. “This is Toni Kozlovsky.”

  “Who the hell’s bells is Toni? How’d you get this number?”

  Scary. I almost hung up. “Toni Kozlovsky. I ... I ... live next door to your mother, Daisy, in the tugboat.”

  “What? Tugboat? Yes! I know that. Toni! Toni! I’m sorry. Forgot my manners. Don’t tell my mother. How are you? Oh no oh no. Is somethin’ wrong with Momma? Is it Momma?”

  Momma wasn’t feeling well, I told Skippy. I saw her on the dock, sitting down, dizzy, singing like a flute but forgetting the words. I helped her inside her light purple houseboat, gave her some lemonade, put out a plate of fruit, told her I would call her sons.

  “Those boys are naughty!” Daisy yelled at me while I was on the phone. “Naughty.” Then she lay back on her couch and groaned. “I oughta smack them from here to the Dakotas on their behinds for what they done.”

  Within fifteen minutes, the naughty sons were both sprinting down the dock to their mother. Their guns were not hidden as their black designer suit jackets flew open, dark glasses on their worried, scarred faces.

  Despite her objections they hired round-the-clock nurses to be with her for a week to help her get over ... a cold. A doctor also confirmed some dementia.