The Language of Sisters (32 page)

“For safety.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a working girl has to do what a working girl has to do.” She would not say more, but I got it. “And how are you doing, Toni?”

I told her about work, the articles I was working on.

“What about Nick?”

I closed my eyes. I was so confused. Nick. Marty. Nick. Marty. “I'm screwed up.”

“Because you're in love with Nick?”

“Yes. No. Trying not to. It feels wrong.”

“It's not wrong, friend.”

“I don't know what I want. I don't know what I should and should not feel.”

“When I don't know what I want, I read.”

“When I don't know what I want, I get in my bathtub and eat junky sweets, like licorice. Last night.”

“I hope you can fix this with Nick. I do, friend. He's a superb human being. Other men aren't like Nick, super stud with character.”

“I'm a wreck.”

“We're all a wreck. We're all a mess sometimes. I like you, Toni.”

“Thank you. You too.”

“You're honest. You're always thinking. You have morals. You don't judge me.”

“If I judged you, I'd have to judge myself and I'd hang myself way lower than you.”

We sat on the deck and watched the waves. I like having a friend who agrees we don't need to talk all the time.

“Life. Darn near breaks your heart, doesn't it?” Lindy said. “Have you read
Slaughterhouse-Five
? You have? Let's discuss it while slugging down another glass of wine. I would also like your opinion on John Steinbeck.”

Another glass of wine couldn't hurt.

* * *

Dmitry called, and we ended up talking about our father.

“We don't always get along, but I do love him, Toni.”

“I know you do.”

He choked up. “It's always been like this. Even as a kid, I sensed something between us. It was like a rock. And sometimes I didn't want to be with him, I pulled away, I was scared of him. I remember hiding from him so many times.

“And then that anger, in my teens toward him. I didn't get it. I still don't get it. It would come out of nowhere. He was always kind to me. He came to all of my games. He was the one who bought the camera for me. He taught me how to cook in the restaurant. But why was I afraid of him? He knows, I know he knows.”

I was sure he did, too.

“Why won't he tell me?”

“He doesn't want you to know.”

“That's the obvious answer, but why? In my dream last night I saw that gold locket again, but this time I opened it up, and nothing was there. It was empty.”

“No pictures?”

“No. But then the locket disappeared and I saw a knife and it slashed through the air and I saw blood. It was on me, warm, sticky. The dark shadow was there. Looming. I heard screaming.”

“Geez, Dmitry. No wonder you can't sleep.”

“My dreams can be a problem. I wrote a poem about it. I titled it ‘Nightmares in a Locket.' Want to hear it?”

I did. It was on his blog the next day. He played his guitar while he read the poem. People loved it, though it was dark, piercing, the arching shadow of death ever present.

The locket represented love gone forever.

17

What I learned when Marty was dying is that you discover a lot about a person's true character when they're on their way out.

Marty worked until two months before the end. He had the most advanced medical care the world had to offer. He had friends, specialists, all over the country, who wanted to help him. They flew in, they studied his charts, they held conferences with each other and with Marty's doctors here.

No one could save him.

It was not to be.

They cried.

I cried.

His parents cried all the time.

Amidst the tests, treatments, procedures, Marty still worked at the hospital with his patients. He wanted to help them as long as he could. He lived for that job, to help others in the worst times of their lives. In some sad way, it helped that he was bald, that he was going through chemo. Marty would cry with his patients. They knew he understood them.

Now and then he would get chemo right next to them, and they would play chess or Monopoly, talk.

“I have to work, Toni, as long as I can. I cannot abandon my patients. Being a doctor was what I was born to do. Helping people is what I was born to do.”

“But, Marty, you need to rest.”

“Rest? I have not lived my life resting, and I won't start now.” He hugged me close, then said, “Toni, there is no changing the end here. I'm an oncologist. I know. I want my life to matter to my patients, to me, so I need to work. Please, Toni. Please understand.”

He was anguished. Torn. Dying. “I understand, Marty. I do.” I did. I understood his passion, his dedication, I understood how he felt about his patients. I was not going to stand in the way of him doing what he wanted and needed to do.

“I love you, and you have a nice butt, Toni. Have I told you that lately?”

“Last night.” I sniffled.

“And your breasts, they're so ... full. Full and seductive. See, even now, I want those breasts in my hands. Come here, sweetheart.”

I laughed through the tears.

Though he worked, Marty spent time with me, too. He always made me feel important, special. He looked at me with love and lust.

One night he sprayed whip cream and a squirt of chocolate sauce on my stomach in bed, then said as he licked it off, “You sure took a long time agreeing to date me.”

“I did.”

“I was in hell. I thought you'd meet someone else and run off to the wilds of Montana and my life would be over.”

“And here we are. Whip cream and chocolate sauce.”

“Here we are. That smile of yours. See how you're doing that? Smiling? That turns me on.”

“Let's see how turned on you are.”

He flipped over. He was mightily turned on. I sprayed whip cream on him.

One day we took a drive and watched the sunset. “My favorite thing to do is be with you, Toni.”

“Me too, Marty.”

“You're smart, but you're not smart enough to know what I want now.”

I laughed. We were parked alone on a hill, in the dark. “I think I know.”

“No, you don't.”

“Yes, I do.” I unsnapped my bra and threw it at him.

“I want chocolate mint ice cream.”

“Ah. Not this then.” I pulled my shirt open and flashed him.

“Well.” He pretended to think. Ponder. Analyze. “I'll have that first, then chocolate mint ice cream.”

And that's what we did. I jumped the poor, bald man fighting for his life in the back of our car.

Marty loved it.

Me too.

Then we bought chocolate mint ice cream.

* * *

As a joke, I made Ellie a wedding dress out of paper bags for Pillow Talk night. I stapled them together and created a long paper bag train. Valerie and I presented it to her one night at ten o'clock, the soonest that Valerie could meet because of the trial.

“Very funny,” Ellie said, then put it on. We took pictures. Valerie and I stood beside her as her bridesmaids dressed in black plastic trash bags. We held pillows in front of us as flowers. We are ridiculous, we know this.

Ellie took one of the bags off to breathe into. “Gino and I had a fight.”

“What about?” We settled in with our wine and our pillows. I was making a purple peacock pillow. I had made the body of the peacock in green and blue fabric squares, then had gone to the craft store and bought fake peacock feathers.

Ellie was painting a sunflower in about ten different shades of yellow and gold on a yellow background. Valerie's pillow was in the shape of a white cat. She would add a multitude of sparkly, shiny buttons for the collar.

“We fought about a lot, a whole list of problems. He wants to move in with me before the wedding or he wants me to move in with him.”

“You don't want to?” Valerie asked.

“No.” Ellie fiddled with her paper bag dress. Then she started taking the dress apart, bag by bag, and throwing the bags to the ground. I'm not even sure she knew what she was doing. “I don't mind spending a weekend with him or going on vacation together, but I don't want him around all the time.”

“Sheesh, Ellie,” Valerie said. “You're going to be married. That means you live together.”

Ellie put a bag over her face. Inhaled. Exhaled.

“Why don't you want to live with him?” I put my peacock pillow on my lap.
Come on, Ellie. Talk it out. Be brave. See this through. Come to the answer you know is there.

“Because I'll feel smothered.”

Then shut this down.
“Do you think you would feel this way with any man?”

“Probably. I think I'd feel smothered with anyone around all the time, except for you two. I like being alone, a lot. I like working on my pillows, my business. I like going downtown by myself. I like going to movies by myself. That was the other reason for a fight. Gino asked me to go see this action movie and I said I had already seen it and he got his panties in a twist because he wanted to see it with me. That makes me feel as if I can't even walk out the door and go see a movie without checking with him first. I don't want, or need, that kind of control in my life, and I won't ask anyone for
permission
to do anything.”

She blew into her bag. “Except, sometimes, Mama ...”

“What else did you fight about?” Valerie asked.

“He wants us to live closer to the city to make his commute shorter. I don't want to move. I have my house and my business in one place, on the river. I like it here. I have a five-second commute. He wants to vacation in America only, saying that we have enough to see here. I want to travel all over the world, as I already have. That his mind is so closed to travel, to other cultures, other people, bothers me. It says something about him that I don't like.”

She blew into the bag.

“Gino loves me. He's honest, he works hard, he's reliable, he's smart and thoughtful.”

“Seems a little controlling to me,” I said.

“Maybe he's just not for you,” Valerie said.

“He should be, though,” she wailed. “What's wrong with me?”

“Nothing's wrong with you,” I said. “Nothing.”

It is truly hard to break up with people sometimes. It's emotional chaos wrapped up in a mental hurricane. And you can't push anyone else to do it, either. They have to get there themselves.

Valerie and I sewed as we watched Ellie take the wedding dress apart bag by bag.

* * *

We met at Daisy's houseboat for a meeting on the possible closure of our dock. I wished that Nick were there and not working. I tried not to worry about him. I hoped he was safe. I hoped he wasn't getting beat up again. I hoped I wasn't madly and wildly in love with him, because that would be a betrayal.

Daisy's light purple houseboat is two stories tall, no interior walls except for bathrooms so that she won't be reminded of her drunken father who locked her in a closet. Her sons have a housekeeper coming in once a week to clean and organize so it's immaculate.

I had had a conversation with Daisy the day before at the end of the dock.

“Bang, clang, crash, pop, smatter. It's all”—she made a twirly motion with her pointer finger next to her ear—“noisy. Lots of things going on in there. Like the sea. Mermaids. Mermen. Talking whales. Undersea castles. Fighting sharks.”

Daisy told me she had walked to downtown Portland that day, and said, “I saw a lot of black people, Africans; brown people, Mexicanos; Yellow people, Japs; Pink people, white trash; and white people, ghosts. They were all nice to me. Nice.” She was wearing a white-and-yellow bikini top under her blue-and-white daisy coat, and when she became hot at Pioneer Square, in the center of town, she took her coat off.

“Lucky I had my Wednesday bikini on,” she told me.

It was Tuesday. “That was a stroke of luck.”

She also told me she had seen a cougar in the trees on the way home from Portland. “He talked to me, but I don't like cougars, so I threw three rocks at him.”

Daisy greeted everyone at her home wearing a hat like Marie Antoinette might wear. It was about two feet tall, covered in flowers. The hat tied in a red, fluffy bow under her chin. She was also wearing a sweatshirt with a gray, grinning cat on it. The cat had human teeth.

Our attorney for the Dock Fight, Heather Dackson, was there. She is a bulldog, complete with a loud mouth and the admirable ability to file and send a mountain of paperwork. It did not appear to be working. Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee's attorneys fired back, and we all received another notice reminding us that we needed to make arrangements to have our houseboats towed.

“I'll be honest with you again, as I've been before,” Heather said. “I'm fighting for you. I am on your side, but I can't guarantee a win. This is a neighborhood, but it's also a private dock. This land was bought decades ago, and the dock was built under different rules and laws then. The Shrocks can choose to not pay for the repairs that are needed, which would render this place unsafe, and it would be closed down for them.”

Charles and Vanessa had been quoted, and pictured, in the story in the
Oregon Standard
. They sounded educated, reasonable, and persuasive. The paper had also quoted Beth, who said that it was wrong to destroy someone's neighborhood. Unfortunately, the reporter had also run into Daisy, who said, “Those (expletive) developers. They want to ruin (expletive) everything. I hope they turn into (expletive) whales and drown in the ocean.”

Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dum Dee had been quoted as saying that there were extensive structural, plumbing, and electrical repairs that needed to be made that they could not afford. They said, “We're sorry that the people in the houseboats are unhappy. We understand. Still, they are all renting slips from us. If you own a home and you want your renters to leave, you have the right to ask them to go. It's the law. We have that right.”

“I keep telling you,” Lindy said, crossing her legs under her long beige skirt and pushing her glasses up her nose, “don't worry. You will not lose the dock. You will not have to move your homes down the river. Make no plans to leave. I have them handled. I'm only here for the dinner and hopefully to talk about books if anyone has read anything interesting?”

“I don't understand, Lindy,” Beth said. “You keep telling us not to worry. What do you know that we don't?”

She waved her hand. “Don't worry.”

“I worry,” Charles said.

“I worry about hauling our houseboat down the river and it breaking in two in the middle of the Willamette,” Jayla said.

“None of this will happen,” Lindy said. “More wine anyone?”

Oh yes to that!

The meeting droned on with the attorney and her legalese, then Daisy stood up and announced, “I see them! Here they come! It's time to eat a cow and a lobster now!”

We exchanged confused glances until the doorbell rang and Daisy opened the door, her Marie Antoinette hat wobbling.

Four people, dressed in black, carrying huge foil containers, walked in. Caterers. They smiled.

“Lobster feed!” Daisy yelled, forming her hands into two pronged lobster claws and snapping them together. “Come and get 'em. They were alive an hour ago, but they were conked and thunked, boiled and oiled, and now we eat!”

I couldn't believe it. Charles's mouth was hanging open. Jayla said, “Oh, this is going to be delicious.” Lindy said, “I can smell the butter and garlic sauce.”

We ate on Daisy's deck.

She sang “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, which we all sang along to, and “Memory” from
Cats.

“Memory” made us all choke up. Then she taught us a drinking song, and we laughed again.

I missed Nick. I hoped he was on some back country roads and would be here soon so we could make some memories.

* * *

Fifteen minutes after I got home, Nick knocked on my door.

“Care for a houseboat date?”

“Yes.”

I walked straight into his hug, then pulled back and studied him, head to foot.

“What?” he asked, smiling.

“I'm making sure you're not hurt.”

“I'm not hurt, baby.” We walked down to his houseboat.

Daisy pounded on the door and yelled out, “Pistol Man, are you home?”

We both laughed.

“Hello, Daisy, come on in,” Nick said.

“I brought you a lobster and a cow,” she said, handing him a foil-wrapped box. “Mr. Pistol in His Pants. Have you had dinner?”

“No, not yet. Come eat with us.” Nick is so kind to Daisy.