The Language of Sisters (38 page)

Nick is a take-charge sort of man. Masculine. Almost always when we had sex I followed his lead. I asked him about it once, asked if he wanted me to take charge, and he said, “Baby, you can do whatever you please. Lead away.”

Now and then I wanted to lead, but the truth was that Nick led so well ... with such talent and warmth and this totally wild passion. It was like going along for a sex ride, although he would have called it a making love ride.

He laid me on the couch, followed me down, and we stripped off the rest of our clothes, my jeans taking longer because they were way too tight. I wrapped my legs around his hips and took that naked ride for multiple orgasms and a hundred kisses.

This time, afterward, when we talked, and he kissed me, gently, tenderly, then with more passion, and we ended up in my bed, upstairs, I curled into him and went to sleep.

I hadn't slept right since I'd last seen Nick, and when I woke up, he was still there, warm and strong, asleep, and I flung my arm across his waist, his fingers curled around mine, and I went back to sleep. In my tugboat, not his. Mine.

For the whole night.

* * *

The next morning I woke up, wrapped around Nick, warm and cozy, and I didn't feel guilty at all. I started to sniffle and tried to hide it from him, I was so happy he was back, but he woke up and said, “What's wrong, honey?” And I said, because I couldn't hide my honesty, “I missed you so much, Nick.”

“I missed you, too, Toni. Every day. Every night.”

We took a tumble again, soft and loving at first, then on full throttle.

* * *

Afterward, on the pretense of making coffee, I grabbed my sneaky binoculars and hid them in the back of my pan cupboard.

20

 

We were talented pickpocketers, the three of us sisters. Lightning quick, whispers, drifting smoke, a breeze.

Bogdan and Gavriil's training was excellent.

Valeria would fake tripping, fake being lost, cry in front of a wealthy man or woman. They would move to help her, and I would move to remove their wallets. Valeria would stop crying, thank them, and before they knew they'd been robbed, we would disappear.

The problem came in explaining to our mother where the money came from. The solution came through sewing pillows. We sewed pillows, often using fabrics from our late grandmothers' dresses, as we couldn't afford new fabric, or find it to buy, even on the black market, to sell to my mother's customers. When we dropped off the mending, we showed the clients our pillows, our stitches tight and precise, the pillows pretty with lace, rickrack, ruffles, embroidery. We told her we sold them for more than we did.

It was a secret between the three of us.

Pillows and pickpocketing.

For survival.

* * *

In the dead of winter, our windows frozen with ice, the heat in the building paltry and sporadic, the hot water gone for weeks at a time, my mother, sewing at all hours, became sick. A cold morphed into the flu, which morphed into pneumonia.

We went to school, then we raced home to our apartment building to take care of our mother, finish and deliver the mending, sew and sell pillows, stand in line for food, and pick pockets on the days we needed to.

“Is Mama dying?” Elvira asked, her face crumpling up.

“No,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Valeria asked, her hands twisting together.

“Yes.” No. I wasn't sure. She was burning up with fever, she was listless, she coughed as if her lungs were being ripped, shredded, and coming up.

We were feeding her, spoon to mouth, putting cool cloths on her sweating forehead and making sure she ate and drank. The chills made her fragile body rock back and forth in bed. We couldn't get her to the doctor, she was too weak. In addition, she was scared to go. She was, officially, an enemy of the people of the Soviet Union.

It was dangerous, picking pockets. The punishment for getting caught was nauseating.

We would never have picked pockets had we not been so hungry.

Had I known what would happen, I would have starved instead.

* * *

The pickpocketing in Moscow continued until I slipped my hand into the pocket of the wrong man on a snowy evening. We—Bogdan, Gavriil, Valeria, and I—always scoped out our victims carefully. We wanted them to be distracted, out of shape so they couldn't chase after us, and affluent. Fur coats. Fur hats. Shiny boots. Well dressed. Jewelry. We did not pick the pockets of anyone who appeared dangerous, and there were a number who did, nor did we pick the pockets of the poor, the old, or frail.

Valeria and I felt guilty for stealing, as if the weight of the Moskva River were drowning us, but our mother was still sick with pneumonia, her lungs filled, her fever continual, her chills head to toe. She insisted on sewing from bed until the coughing became too much, or she passed out from exhaustion.

My goal was to get money, get a doctor we could trust to the apartment, get medicine.

I slipped my hand into the pocket of the wrong man's coat right in front of the State Historical Museum, smooth as silk, as Valeria tripped in front of him. He grabbed my hand, twisted it around, twirled me in a half circle, and smacked me. Everything went black, then sparkly, and nausea overwhelmed me.

Valeria fought to get me away from him, but he backhanded her and she went spinning into the snow. He dragged me to the police station, my feet sliding on the ice, and demanded they arrest me. I lied and said I had not done it, no one believed me, and after being thrown into a cell, hitting my head, and having no food for six hours, I admitted it.

They called my mother. She hobbled in coughing, weak, but she had managed to do her hair, get dressed. She was a beautiful woman. She had had me when she was twenty-two. She was only thirty-two then. She cried when she saw me, blood on my forehead, sick from vomiting from fear. A policeman with a scary glint in his eye linked an arm around my mother's shoulders and pulled her out of the room. He smiled at her, rapacious, hungry. I vomited again.

When she came back to me, an hour later, her face was stained with tears, puffy. Her black hair was a mess and undone down her back, the buttons on her blouse buttoned wrong.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me out, swaying, awkward in her gait. The policeman laughed and said, “See you soon, darling. Thank you. I have not seen a woman with a figure like yours for a long, long time. Get rid of that cough, though, Mrs. Kozlovskaya. It's disgusting.”

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.

* * *

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 had 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.”