Two Sisters: A Novel (6 page)

“My beautiful
kochanie
,” Lidia once said to a grown Pia at the family dinner table, petting her silky hand as if it were a rabbit’s foot. “The only pain you ever caused me was your grand entrance into the world.”

“Was I grand, too, Mama?” young Muriel had asked. “Was I? Was I?”

“Nine months of indigestion.”

Reaching her sausage fingers across the table, Muriel tore off another chunk of babka.

“I’m here if you need me or ice cream,” Joanie told her friend into the phone. Muriel smiled. To her, Joanie Frankel was eiderdown. A soft place to land. It didn’t matter that she was ten years older. Or perhaps that was the one thing that
did
matter. In a motherly way Joanie engulfed Muriel in warm squishy embraces; never once did she expect her to be anyone other than her flawed self. Joanie would never ask Muriel to keep ugly secrets or pretend she didn’t know something that she absolutely did.

T
HAT HALLOWEEN NIGHT
, well, Lidia had been nothing short of mesmerizing. While they slow-danced on the pale pink carpeting in her parents’ living room, Owen wanted to ask her, “Do you think I’m somebody else?” He seemed so far out of her league. What would a girl like her want with a guy like him? Not that he was entirely inexperienced. Madalyn had offered herself quite willingly. And she was certainly not his first, in spite of God’s disapproval. He was a college grad, after all. Engineering students seem more buttoned up than they actually are. Especially at quad parties with kegs. But sex with Madalyn was not unlike a grocery list.
Lips?
Check.
Neck?
Check.
Breasts?
Check.
Penetration?
Exclamation point. That ought to suffice until next Saturday night.

With Lidia, sex seemed to ooze from her pores. When she danced, her hips moved in a rhythmic figure eight. Eyes closed, lips apart. Oblivious to the electrical current that raced to Owen’s loins whenever her pointed breasts brushed his shirt, she grazed him time and again. And when she walked him out to the car at the end of the night and pressed her body against his and stood on her tippy-toes and whispered, “Kiss me,” he felt positively hyperthermic. The very taste of her was exotic. Beery, of course, but something waxy and fruity, too. Lipstick, perhaps? His own lips felt softer after they kissed.

“See ya,” she said, waving her fingers seductively behind her as she swayed those figure-eight hips back up the driveway lined with all those carved pumpkins. Unable to turn away and find his car, Owen simply stared, limp armed, until he saw the shiny black door to Lidia Czerwinski’s home shut with a definitive
whump
.

The following week at work, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Even on date night with Madalyn (who playfully accused him of taking virility supplements), he envisioned Lidia’s swiveling hips and strained to recall the feathery feel of her warm breath on his ear.
Kiss me.
Lord Almighty give him strength.

Chapter 6

I
T WAS AN
altogether ordinary day early in November. Owen pulled his wrinkled lunch sack from the bottom drawer of his desk. Suddenly he felt a presence behind him. Without even looking, he knew she was there. Lidia Czerwinski appeared at his cubicle holding a picnic basket in both hands and seductively twisting that elfin waist of hers.

“Come with me,” she said in a slightly commanding way.

Dumbfounded, Owen sputtered, “Outside?”

“I brought a blanket. Wool.”

To Owen, each word seemed infused with sexual innuendo. The word “wool” itself made him blush as red as the McIntosh apple in his tired brown lunch bag. Conrad, one of the idiot engineers in Owen’s department, hung his ape arms over the tweedy partition and said in a clearly suggestive manner, “Don’t forget your jacket, O-Man.”

Leaping up, Owen grabbed his coat and hurried Lidia out of the office before the other engineers had a chance to gather like hyenas at a freshly killed carcass. “Bye,” Lidia said to Conrad, wiggling her fingers over her shoulder. It was the second time Owen had seen her do that. Obviously the behavior of a woman who knew she was watched from behind.

Cogswell Tower in Jenks Park was the focal point of Central Falls. Such as it was. High on Dexter’s Ledge, the old stone clock tower was Rhode Island’s own Big Ben, on a much smaller scale, of course. Lidia suggested they eat lunch there, which struck Owen as patently reckless. Not only was it cold out, they would most certainly be alone. Or worse,
not.
What if a band of hoodlums waited on the far side of the tower? Was he expected to fight them off? He was wearing leather-soled loafers! The only scuffle he’d ever been in was years earlier when the class bully purposely hit him in the face with the tetherball at recess. His bloodied nose had camouflaged the tears streaming down his cheeks. The massive amount of red on his face scared everyone. The bully ran, screeching, “Hemophiliac!” For the rest of the school year, Owen was mentally tortured with the nickname “Hemo.”

Pasting an optimistic smile on his face—and surreptitiously pushing his wallet to the very bottom of his front pocket with the heel of his hand—Owen gamely carried the picnic basket along the rambling walkways into Jenks Park, careful not to huff and puff up the hill. Always slim, he’d never been one to work out, believing he’d achieve more success in life if he exercised his
brain
. If nothing else, the tetherball incident had taught him as much. At that moment, however, what with the multiple stressors, even his brain was flabby, unable to conjure up a single intelligent thing to say.

“Nippy,” he blurted out, twice, turning away from Lidia and wincing.

As she had at the Halloween party, Lidia seemed unfazed by Owen’s social feebleness. She chattered on about crispy leaves and chubby squirrels and the way residents walked right past the beautiful tower every day without looking up. “The way New Yorkers who live on Staten Island blithely pass the Statue of Liberty on the ferry every morning without so much as a glance. Know what I’m saying?”

He didn’t. An engineer, Owen constantly looked up at Cogswell Tower, marveling at the brick barrel-vault support, the clock faces on all four sides, the almost-feminine ironwork of the surrounding pergola.

“Or San Franciscans who pay no attention whatsoever to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s almost a crime.”

Owen nodded and attempted to arrange his features in a thoughtful way. Lidia was as opposite Madalyn as a woman could be. She was a runaway train, wholly unconcerned about who might be on the tracks. And she used words like “blithely” absolutely, well,
blithely
. From the start, she mowed him under. He was petrified of her. But he had never desired a woman more.

“How’s this?”

In a protected nook at the back of the tower on Dexter’s Ledge, where Owen would never
dream
of sitting, much less eating (no doubt kids smoked marijuana and did God knows
what
in that very spot), Lidia didn’t wait for an answer. She spread out the thick wool blanket that she’d packed along with lunch and opened the picnic basket with her slender expert fingers. Quickly, Owen darted around the perimeter of the tower to make sure they were indeed alone. They were. A fact that both relieved and unnerved him. Upon his return, Lidia—settled on the ground with her legs tucked petitely beneath her coat—handed Owen a corkscrew and a bottle of Polish wine. “You like red, right? It’s what you brought to my party.”

So flattered that she’d noticed he hadn’t arrived at her home empty-handed, Owen missed the natural window of opportunity to tell her he never drank at lunch. Wine made him sleepy and he had a meeting that very afternoon with a new client who didn’t fully trust his competence yet. The cork let go with a
pop
and he shakily poured two glasses.

“
Na zdrowie
!” Lidia said, raising one arm in a “Hail, Caesar!” kind of way. Owen stared, blank faced. “It’s Polish for “Cheers,” she said.

“You’re Polish?”

Admittedly, it came out wrong. Too much emphasis on the latter word, as if there was something distasteful about it. He’d meant to marvel at his own stupidity for wondering where the name Czerwinski came from when she’d introduced herself in the movie line. At the time he thought she said, “Zerwinky,” and it seemed some sort of circus moniker.

With her lovely lips curled in only the slightest hint of a sneer, Lidia said, “My family is American, of course.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. Oh geez. I didn’t mean—”

“Babka?”

Holding a braided loaf of golden brown bread in the air like it was the infant son of Christ, Lidia said, “Fair warning. It’s addictive.”

Just like that, she was back to her seductive self.

They drank and ate and fell into conversation. An oniony aroma of homemade meat loaf rose into the chilly air and intertwined with the yeasty smell of fresh bread. “My family owns the bakery in Pawtucket,” Lidia said. Owen took the mouthful Lidia handed him. Amazingly, the bread was still warm. Almost as sweet and fluffy as cotton candy. He took another bite and felt it travel through his chest. When they clinked glasses he said, “Here’s mud in your eye,” desperate to avoid a repeat of the “Cheers” incident. To himself he thought,
What an oaf.
When Lidia fluttered her eyelashes and replied, “I’d hate to see mud in those gorgeous green eyes of
yours,”
Owen nearly burst into tears he was so thankful.

Really, he never stood a chance. Lidia Czerwinski was not the kind of woman a man like Owen Sullivant could refuse. Certainly not when she so clearly had him eating out of her hand.

Chapter 7

O
WEN HAD BEEN
the perfect gentleman. That first date in November, when he returned to work with Polish cabernet on his breath, he stoically endured Conrad’s chiding.

“What’d you have for
dessert
, O-ween?”

All he said was, “Has the temp put on a fresh pot of coffee?”

The following week, flushed and wrinkled from another alfresco lunch, Conrad demanded details. Owen simply said, “Get lost.”

“Lost in her
hair
,” said Conrad, the moron that he was. With a hint of condescension Owen wondered if perhaps Conrad never did attend keg parties in the quad. Quite possibly he was a virgin and would be thus until the day he died. Certainly a woman of quality would find fault with those horsey teeth. Owen took to patting Conrad’s shoulder sympathetically when they passed each other near the water cooler.

Of course, Owen had a larger problem than his idiot coworker.
Madalyn.
As his relationship with Lidia deepened, his weekly date night with big-haired Madalyn freighted him with guilt. Not that she noticed. As thick as a two-by-four, Madalyn mistook Owen’s sexual invigoration as a step closer to the wedding she’d been planning since third grade. Good heavens, just last weekend she’d hinted at a joint vacation in Florida after Rhode Island’s winter settled in.
Joint
, as in one bathroom and one bed in one hotel room. Three meals a day together. Chitchat from soup to nuts. He had to break it off soon. Wasn’t it a known fact that whomever you kissed at midnight on New Year’s Eve would be the person to whom you were bound all year?

Owen groaned. If he didn’t act fast, that woman would find
some
way to latch her lips onto his as the clock struck twelve. He knew it as certainly as he knew he would die if Lidia Czerwinski was not wrapped in his arms as they entered a new year.

“Madalyn?” He made the call from work. “You free Saturday night?”

“Of course I’m free. You think I’d make plans on our only night together?”

“Yes, right. Well, about that . . . um, I’ve made a dinner reservation at Le Chez.”

“That fancy place in Providence?”

“It’s quiet there. We can talk.”

“Ooh. Talk about what?”

The hopeful tone of her voice made his heart sink. “Nothing important,” he said, quickly. “Just, you know, stuff.”

“Like what
kind
of stuff?”

“You know. Stuff.”