There are some things you just cannot be prepared for as a parent. The other day Rebel Dancing Daughter said to me, “Mom, how would you feel if I started dating a vampire?”
Sigh. Well, gee whiz. I don’t know. Protect your neck? Stay away from Transylvania? They’re rather pale, are you sure?
Where was the answer to this question in all the parenting books I read?
Fun giveaway through my publishing house, Kensington Publishing, in New York City if you’d like to enter.
Copy and paste this link, log into facebook http://kensingtonbooks.tumblr.com/cathylamb
The Language of Sisters, Henry’s Sisters, and three vases.
Cheers and good luck!
Greetings, all!
Henry’s Sisters is now out in mass market paperback. So cheap, on sale, $4.58. The kindle edition is also on sale, only $4.99. Yet again, cheap.
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Henrys-Sisters-Cathy-Lamb/dp/1496707842/ref=tmm_mmp_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Here’s an excerpt, written from the point of view of Isabelle Bommarito, who truly has some issues:
I grabbed my lighter with the red handle from the kitchen, lighter fluid, a water bottle, my lacy bra and thong, and opened the French doors to my balcony. The wind and rain hit like a mini hurricane, my braids whipping around my cheeks.
One part of my balcony is covered, so it was still dry. I put the bra and thong in the usual corner on top of a few straggly, burned pieces of material from another forgettable night on a wooden plan and flicked the lighter on. The bra and thong smoked and blackened and wiggled and fizzled and flamed.
When they were cremated, I doused them with water from the water bottle. No sense burning down the apartment building. That would be bad.
I settled into a metal chair in the uncovered section of my balcony, the rain sluicing off my naked body, and gazed at the sky scrapers, wondering how many of those busy, brain – fried, robotic people were staring at me.
Working in a skyscraper was another way of dying early, my younger sister, Janie, would say. “It’s like the elevators are taking you up to hell.”
Right out of college she got a job as a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles and lasted two months before her weasely, squirmy boss found the first chapter of her first thriller on her desk.
The murderer is a copywriter for a big company on the twenty ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. In the opening paragraphs she graphically describes murdering her supercilious, condescending, snobby boss who makes her feel about the size of a slug and how his body ends up in a trash compactor, his legs spread like a pickled chicken, one shoe off, one red high heel squished on the other foot.
That was the murderer’s calling card.
No one reports his extended absence, including his wife, because people hate him as they would hate a gang of worms in their coffee.
Janie was fired that day, even though she protested her innocence. That afternoon she sat down and wrote the rest of the story, nonstop, for three months. When she emerged from her apartment, she’d lost twenty pounds, was pale white, and muttering.
At four months she had her first book contract. When the book was published, she sent it to her ex boss and wrote, “Thanks, dickhead! With love, Janie Bommarito,” on the inside cover.
It became a best seller.
She became a recluse because she is obsessive and compulsive and needs to indulge all her odd habits privately.
The recluse had received a flowery lemon – smelling pink letter, too. So had Cecilia, whose brain connects with mine.
The rain splattered down on me, the wind twirly whirled, and I raised the Kahlua bottle to my lips again. “I love Kahlua,” I said out loud as I watched the water river down my body, creating a little pool in the area of my crotch where my legs crossed. I flicked the rain away with my hand, watched it pool again, flicked it.
This entertained me for a while. Off in the distance I saw a streak of lightning, bright and dangerous.
It reminded me of the time when my sisters and I ran through a lightning storm to find Henry in a tree.
I laughed, even though that night had not been funny. It had been hideous. It had started with a pole dance and ended with squishy white walls.
I laughed again, head thrown back, until I cried, my hot tears running down my face off my chin, onto my boobs, and down my stomach. They landed in the pool between my legs and I flicked the rain and tear mixture away again. The tears kept coming and I could feel the darkness, darkness so familiar to me, edging its way back in like a liquid nightmare.
I did not want to deal with the pink letter that smelled of her flowery, lemony perfume.
I woke up yesterday and decided that I should plant 400 bulbs to make myself feel better. I needed to feel better.
I planted daffodils. Red and yellow tulips. Two frothy blue flowers.
And crocuses. I love crocuses because when they pop up I know that winter is ending.
It was me and the dirt and the sun and my 400 bulbs.
I planted most of them in the backyard as I’ve added a ton of dirt to a newly cut border.
This summer gardening fever hit hard, the Garden Nerd in me cackled her way out, and I bought a red camellia, two magnolia trees (one died. Waaaa!), blue delphinium, soft pink hydrangeas, a cherry tree, and a bunch of flowering plants that I bought on the side of the road in the country for three bucks.
I didn’t know what they were, I bought them anyhow. Mystery plants.
Gardening takes my stress away. There is something about being covered in dirt, digging a hole with a shovel, and planting something that you know will grow that is soothing and comforting.
Gardening makes my life better, and so often I cannot make anything better.
Sometimes my problems can be fixed, resolved, eliminated, healed.
And sometimes it’s just a matter of living with them the best I can.
Sometimes I cannot write. I don’t have writer’s block exactly, but the words on the page are such crap I wonder why I don’t quit. Or I can’t get a character to move. Or I’m burned out and frazzled.
Sometimes life gets too stressful. Stressful enough that getting enough air down my lungs becomes a challenge. Negative enough to make me want to move to Montana and call it a day.
But a garden…now I can make that better. I can fix it.
In an hour, weeds can be picked and an area that wasn’t pretty is now pretty.
In half a day pots can be filled with geraniums, Alyssum, petunias, impatiens.
In a full day a new border can be dug, dirt dumped, arching trees and purple butterfly bushes added.
I can see improvement. I can take something dull and brown and fill it with delicate fuchsias, spiky ferns, and a gentle red rose.
I have so much more work to do in my garden, in my tiny patch of Earth. In fact, on the left side of my house I simply dumped part of a dump truck full of bark dust down to smother those incessant, pesky weeds.
But one day I want to build a patio and trellis so I can watch the sunset because I truly think that sunsets are a daily, shining gift and I too often miss out on that gift.
One day I want to cut out a curving design in the center of my grass so I can plant a pink tulip tree and add purple sage, blazing stars, hostas, and black eyed Susans.
One day I want to transform a stark corner with a wire fence around it into a book reading area.
But, for now, I’m delighted.
I have planted 400 bulbs.
I cannot wait for spring so I can see them again
Friends,
I almost forgot!
Such A Pretty Face is on sale today for only $2.99, on Kindle.
How would you feel if you lost 170 pounds? Stevie Barrett did. Her whole life changed.
This is the second chapter of the book…
I am going to plant a garden this summer.
With the exception of two pink cherry trees, one white cherry tree, and one pink tulip tree, all huge, I have a barren, dry backyard and I’m tired of looking at it. I almost see it as a metaphor for my whole life, and I think if I can fix this, I can fix my life. Simplistic, silly, I know, but I can’t get past it.
So I’m going to garden even if my hands shake as if there are live circuits inside of them and a floppy yellow hat dances through my mind.
I’m going to build upraised beds, a whole bunch of them, and fill them with tomatoes, squash, zucchini, radishes, lettuce, carrots, peas, and beans. But not corn.
I’m not emotionally able to do corn yet, too many memories, but I am going to plant marigolds around the borders, and pink and purple petunias, rose bushes and clematis and grape vines.
I’m going to stick two small crosses at the back fence but not for who you think. I’m going to build a grape arbor with a deck beneath it, and then I’m going to add a table so I can paint there, as I used to. I’m also going to build three trellises for climbing roses over a rock pathway, one arch for me, Grandma, and Grandpa, which will lead to another garden, with cracked china plates in a mosaic pattern in the middle of a concrete circle, for Sunshine.
This may sound way too ambitious.
It is. But I see this as my last chance to get control of my mind before it blows.
I can wield any type of saw out there, and I have to do this, even if it takes me years. That I can even think in terms of a future, when I used to see only a very short, messy future, is a miracle.
Why? Because two and a half years ago, when I was thirty two years old, I had a heart attack
I used to be the size of a small, depressed cow.
The heart attack led to my stomach strangling operation and I lost one hundred and seventy pounds. Now I am less than half myself, in more ways than one.
My name is Stevie Barrett.
This is a story of why I was the way I was and how I am now me.
I am going to plant a garden.
Thanks to Huffington Post and writer Brandi Megan Granett for this interview. I can’t seem to copy and paste the original to here…technology can be tricky for me. So baffling. So confusing. Here’s the original link to it:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-language-of-sisters-an-interview-with-cathy-lamb_us_57c5be66e4b0c936aabaf407
The Language of Sisters: A Conversation with Cathy Lamb
By Brandi Megan Granett
In Cathy Lamb’s beautiful new novel, The Language of Sisters, she weaves together a tale of family, following sisters, Toni, Valerie, and Ellie Kozlovsky, as they grapple with their family’s past in the Soviet Union and their own futures.
The Kozlovsky sisters find the power of love to carry them through, and readers will be swept along on the journey, too!
The Language of Sisters features such a diverse cast. How did you pick these women to create? Who did you have the most fun with?
I am one of three sisters. And, I’ll have to say, so peace can be maintained, and no swords will be wielded, that none of the sisters in my book are based on me or my sisters. Truly. BUT, I do understand sisters, sister friendships, and sister dynamics. It can be a complicated and semi – crazy relationship.
I wanted each sister in the story to represent something, or many somethings, in women’s life journeys. For example, Valerie is a prosecuting attorney with two kids. She’s juggling full time work, a demanding career, kids, and a husband. That’s hard, it’s really tough.
Ellie Kozlovsky owns a business designing pillows. She’s engaged, but is wrestling with whether or not she wants to be married…at all. What will marriage give her? What will she have to give up? Does she want to give that up? Marriage asks for compromise and sacrifice. Does she want to do either? Is something wrong with her for not wanting to get married or is it perfectly fine that she is most happy on her own? Does she want to have kids? Really? Is she allowing society’s messages to push her into marriage?
Toni, through whose eyes the story is told, is struggling with losing someone she loves, which happens to all of us, very unfortunately. She lives on a yellow tugboat on the Willamette River in Portland, and she’s a reporter for a newspaper. She’s trying to breathe again after her life fell apart. Most of us have been there with Toni– the life falling apart and the trying to breathe again part.
Together the three sisters are part of a huge family, immigrants from Russia, with a ton of quirky and odd members who do quirky and odd things. They’re funny. They cry. They fight. They laugh. So, it’s sister dynamics, and family dynamics, and all the complexities and laughter therein.
I had a lot of fun writing about the girls’ fiery mother, Svetlana, the Russian restaurant she owns, and how she puts the family’s problems up on the Specials board every night and admonishes her kids through her recipes for all to see.
Are secrets always dangerous?
No. Secrets aren’t always dangerous at all.
I absolutely think that some secrets should be forever kept.
Some secrets are dangerous to keep, obviously, if someone else could get hurt, there’s something illegal blah blah blah. We all know when secrets shouldn’t be kept.
But I also think that almost everyone has secrets. Why share? What would be the point of sharing? Will it cause someone else pain? Will it wreck a life or relationship? Will it bring in more honesty, more wisdom? Does it need to be shared for comfort, for reassurance? Will it cause someone else great happiness if it’s told?
Ya gotta think of all those things…
In The Language of Sisters there’s a whopper of a secret. Where did Dmitry, the adopted brother, come from? No one has wanted to talk about it, no one has been allowed to talk about it. But the secret has followed the Kozlovsky family from the Soviet Union, twenty five years ago, and it’s about to explode. In a good and bad way.
What did you need to learn about tug boats to write about Toni’s unique living arrangements?
Oh, I learned more about tugboats than I thought I would ever need to know. But, most importantly, I went to a tugboat that was being used as a home. It, too, had been remodeled. In fact, Toni’s yellow tugboat on the Willamette River is much like the one I saw in Portland. The crew quarters are now a closet. There’s an office that used to be the office for the tugboat captain, the bedroom was expanded, the wheelhouse has been remodeled, etc.
You write beautifully on social media about your own daughters. What did raising them teach you about creating sisters on the page?
Raising daughters is a lovely privilege. And it’s tricky. You want to raise independent, strong, courageous, interesting, smart daughters who absolutely will not buy into this dangerous and ridiculous media – based image of what beautiful is.
When I created the three sisters in my book, I wanted them to be as I described above. But I wanted them to be real. I never write characters that are perfect. No one is, my characters aren’t. Really, if I wrote a character who was perfect and had a perfect life, everyone would hate her, right?
The sisters really screw up sometimes. They also love to have fun. They go skinny dipping. They go to a bar and Toni does cart wheels across the stage. They go to family parties and, one time, end up in a bathtub together. There’s a fight on a floor with one cousin over a hair brush, and they sew pillows together.
They survived their dangerous childhood in the Soviet Union. The sisters stick up for each other. They’re great friends. They love each other dearly. That’s what I want for my daughters, and my son, that forever love and friendship.
A very short summary of The Language of Sisters…Three sisters. One brother. A secret that is chasing them down.
A little longer summary:
1) Toni Koslovsky lives on a yellow tugboat in the Willamette River in Oregon. She needed space to breathe.
2) Toni has two sisters. They can sometimes hear each other in their heads, a message coming through. It’s odd, it’s inexplicable. It’s a gift handed down from the Sabonis family line through their widow’s peaks. Their mother had it, too.
3) The family immigrated from Russia when Toni was a little girl. They left a lot of secrets there…and the secrets have been running after them ever since.
4) The family has many crazy members and the dynamics can be mind blowing. You might relate to some of them.
5) Toni has something hidden in a little shed next to her tugboat. She doesn’t want to look at it. She doesn’t want to think about it. But she does.
6) Love. Laughter. Funny stuff. A blue heron, a woman named Daisy, a DEA agent who lives down the dock, a restaurant, a scary man. Pillow making, skinny dipping, too much wine. More laughter.
She could make delicious birthday cakes shaped like treasure chests and frothy chocolate milk. She didn’t mind when I came in dirty from head to toe from playing outside or if I had a butterfly or a roly poly in my hand to show her.
Bette Jean loved my dad, my sisters, my brother, and me, and she loved books, that I knew for sure.
When I got the Scholastic book order form at school all I had to do was circle all the books I wanted with a purple crayon and she wrote a check. The books would come and I would get a whole stack of them. It was like Christmas morning, every time.
I remember the Beezus and Ramona books. Narnia. The Little Princess. Pippi Longstocking. The Secret Garden. Who could forget, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?
One time my sixth grade teacher took one of my Judy Blume books away and called my mother. She told my mother I shouldn’t read it. My mother said I could read whatever I wanted and sent me right back up to school to get the book. She was my book champion.
Though I grew up in a fairly strict Catholic household, she did not believe in censoring what her kids read.
My parents were very conservative with money. They had four kids and my mother stayed home with us. Their own parents had lived through the Depression and had given them dire warnings. They believed that it wasn’t if a financial disaster would strike, it was when, and one should be prepared so one didn’t starve or lose the house.
That’s why my mother only had three dresses when I was very young. The budget was too tight and they were saving for the imminent, looming disaster.
But books? Yes to books.
My mother literally sacrificed dresses so her kids could have more books.
When I was a teenager, my mother became an English teacher at my middle school. I was scared to death the first day she started teaching there. I was sure that she would run screaming from the room, as the kids would surely turn into wild Tazmanian devils and create tornados of disruption. I could hardly breathe.
Nothing of the sort happened.
Everyone loved her. Kids started talking to me who had never talked to me before – an uncool and gawky kid – because they loved my mother.
It was also the end of her limited wardrobe. She bought elegant dresses, tapered slacks, stylish sweaters and high heels that you put in your closet and gaze at in wonder. Gone were the days of only three dresses. She knew teaching kids was a worthwhile career, and a privilege, and she dressed for it.
First she gave her own kids a love of books, then she passed it on to thousands of kids over her long career as an English teacher.
Through the years we always loved talking about books, and we swapped them back and forth. Mysteries. Historical Fiction. Nonfiction.
Bette Jean was a huge reader and, also, the healthiest person I have ever met. She ate organic foods, she walked all the time, and she was slim. She never smoked a day in her life. She died of lung cancer at sixty, fourteen years ago.
I still miss her. There’s still that raw ache, still that hole in my heart. Sometimes, when I’m reading a book I’ll think, “Mom, you would love this book because…” and I’ll list the reasons, as if she were right there, sitting with me.
In recent years, finally, those thoughts bring me peace instead of tears and grief, and I am glad for that. It is the same with her books. I have so many of her favorites on my shelves, some from her mother, and I treasure each one of them.
Yes, Bette Jean gave me a love of books, from childhood until the day she died.
It has stayed with me for a lifetime.
It’s a gift, it truly is. A loving gift, from mother to daughter. I’ve passed it down to my daughters, Bette Jean’s granddaughters.
She would be delighted. I know that for sure, too.
Originally Printed In Great Thoughts, Great Readers with Andrea Peskind Katz http://www.greatthoughts.com/2016/08/cathy-lamb-1.html
Greetings, everyone!
If you need an end of summer novel, my new book is out today.
A short and sweet summary:
1) Toni Koslovsky lives on a yellow tugboat on the Willamette River in Oregon. She needed space to breathe.
2) Toni has two sisters. They can sometimes hear each other in their heads, a message coming through. It’s odd, it’s inexplicable. It’s a gift handed down through the Sabonis family line through their widow’s peaks. Their mother had it, too.
3) The family escaped from Russia when Toni was a little girl. They left a lot of secrets there…and the secrets have been chasing them down ever since.
4) The Kozlovsky family has many eccentric and odd members and the dynamics are complicated. You might relate to some of them.
5) Love. Laughter. Funny stuff. A blue heron, a woman named Daisy, a DEA agent who lives down the dock, a family restaurant, a scary man. Pillow making, skinny dipping, too much wine. More laughter.
The first chapter is below.
I so hope you like it.
If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, I’ll be speaking at Powell’s Books, Cedar Hills, in Beaverton, on Monday, October 3 at 7:00. I would truly love to see you there.
Happy day to you.
Cathy
Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0190HGQR4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1#nav-subnav
Powell’s Books http://www.powells.com/book/the-language-of-sisters-9780758295101
Barnes and Nobles http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-language-of-sisters-cathy-lamb/1123105717
Chapter One
I was talented at pickpocketing.
I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.
I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.
I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.
I was desperate. We were desperate.
Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.
Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.
But we did. We survived. My father barely, my mother only through endless grit and determination, but now we are here, in Oregon, a noisy family, who does not talk about what happened back in Russia, twenty-five years ago. It is best to forget, my parents have told us, many times.
“Forget it happened. It another life, no?” my father says. “This here, this our true life. We Americans now. Americans!”
We tried to forget, but in the inky-black silence of night, when Mother Russia intrudes upon our dreams, like a swishing scythe, a crooked claw emerging from the ruins of tragedy, when we remember family members buried under the frozen wasteland of the Soviet Union’s far reaches, we are all haunted, some more than others.
You would never guess by looking at my family what some of us have done and what has been done to us. You would never sense our collective memory, what we share, what we hide.
We are the Kozlovskys.
We like to think we are good people.
And, most of the time, we are. Quite good.
And yet, when cornered, when one of us is threatened, we come up swinging.
But, pfft.
All that. In the past. Best to forget what happened.
As my mother says, in her broken English, wagging her finger, “No use going to Moscow in your head. We are family. We are the Kozlovskys. That all we need to know. The rest, those secrets, let them lie down.”
Yes, do.
Let all the secrets lie.
For as long as they’ll stay down.
They were coming up fast. I could feel it.
Happily Ever After of USA Today shares an excerpt from The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb (no relation!) The Language of Sisters arrives tomorrow (Tuesday).
by Joyce Lamb
original link: http://happyeverafter.usatoday.com/2016/08/29/language-of-sisters-excerpt-cathy-lamb/
About the book:
Toni Kozlovsky can’t explain how she knows exactly what her sisters are feeling—only that the connection seems to happen out of the blue, just when they need it most. Since Toni, Valerie, and Ellie were little girls growing up in Communist Russia, their parents have insisted it’s simply further proof that the Kozlovskys are special and different.
Now a crime and justice reporter, Toni lives on a yellow tugboat on Oregon’s Willamette River. As far as her parents are concerned, the pain of their old life and their dangerous escape should remain buried in the Moscow they left behind, as should the mysterious past of their adopted brother, Dmitry. But lately, Toni’s talent for putting on a smile isn’t enough to keep memories at bay.
Valerie, a prosecuting attorney, wages constant war against the wrongs she could do nothing about as a child. Youngest sister Ellie is engaged to marry an Italian, breaking her mother’s heart in the process. Toni fears she’s about to lose her home, while the hard edged DEA agent down the dock keeps trying to break through her reserve. Meanwhile, beneath the culture clashes and endearing quirks within her huge, noisy, loving family are deeper secrets that Toni has sworn to keep—even from the one person she longs to help most.
Chapter 1
I was talented at pickpocketing.
I knew how to slip my fingers in, soft and smooth, like moving silk. I was lightning quick, a sleight of hand, a twist of the wrist. I was adept at disappearing, at hiding, at waiting, until it was safe to run, to escape.
I was a whisper, drifting smoke, a breeze.
I was a little girl, in the frigid cold of Moscow, under the looming shadow of the Soviet Union, my coat too small, my shoes too tight, my stomach an empty shell.
I was desperate. We were desperate.
Survival stealing, my sisters and I called it.
Had we not stolen, we might not have survived.
But we did. We survived. My father barely, my mother only through endless grit and determination, but now we are here, in Oregon, a noisy family, who does not talk about what happened back in Russia, twenty-five years ago. It is best to forget, my parents have told us, many times.
“Forget it happened. It another life, no?” my father says. “This here, this our true life. We Americans now. Americans!”
We tried to forget, but in the inky-black silence of night, when Mother Russia intrudes our dreams, like a swishing scythe, a crooked claw emerging from the ruins of tragedy, when we remember family members buried under the frozen wasteland of the Soviet Union’s far reaches, we are all haunted, some more than others.
You would never guess by looking at my family what some of us have done and what has been done to us. You would never sense our collective memory, what we share, what we hide.
We are the Kozlovskys.
We like to think we are good people.
And, most of the time, we are. Quite good.
And yet, when cornered, when one of us is threatened, we come up swinging.
But, pfft.
All that. In the past. Best to forget what happened.
As my mother says, in her broken English, wagging her finger, “No use going to Moscow in your head. We are family. We are the Kozlovskys. That all we need to know. The rest, those secrets, let them lie down.”
Yes, do.
Let all the secrets lie.
For as long as they’ll stay down.
They were coming up fast. I could feel it.
Chapter 2
“A Italian!” my mother, Svetlana, howled, slamming a cast iron pan to her stove. “What is this? My Elvira marrying a Italian? Why not a Russian? What wrong with Russian? I been cursed. Like black magic spell.”
English is my mother’s fourth language. Russian and Ukrainian come first. She is also conversationally fluent in French, which is the language she likes to swear in. Her English is never perfect, but it goes downhill quickly based on how upset she is.
“That sister of yours, Antonia,” – she put her palms up to the ceiling – “Elvira is a…how you say it? I know now the word: rebel. She a rebel. I pray for her, but I knew when she born, your aunt Polina say to me, ‘This one, she will cause your heart to cry!’ And see?” She pointed at her chest. “Tears.”
“Mama. Your heart is not crying. Ellie says she is in love with Gino.”
“Love! Love!” she scoffed. She pushed a strand of her black hair back, the same color as mine, only mine fell down my back in waves and hers was to her shoulders in a bell shape. Our blue eyes were the same shade, too. I looked at her and I knew what I’d look like in twenty-two years. Definitely encouraging.
“I know about love. I have it with your papa. I know about this passion I have for him. He and I, we have the, what you call it?” She lowered her voice, for effect. “The biology in the bedroom.”
“Chemistry. You and Papa have chemistry.” I rolled my eyes and braced myself, then ate one of her chocolate fudge cookies. They are beyond delicious.
“No! Not chemistry. That chemicals. I say we have the biology in the bedroom because biology is body. He cannot stay away from me, from this.” She indicated her body from neck to crotch with one hand, head held high. My mother is statuesque. She curves. She still rocks it, I have to say.
“I cannot stay away from his manly hood, either. I say that in the truth.”
I was going to need many chocolate fudge cookies that afternoon, that was my truth.
“But Antonia, your sister”—her voice pitched again, in accusation, as if I were in charge of Elvira—“she cannot have the biology for a Italian. She has it, it in her blood, for a Russian! A strong Russian man.”
My mother started banging pans around, muttering in Ukrainian. I loved her kitchen. It was huge, bright, and opened up to the family room. There were granite counters, white cabinets, and a backsplash with square tiles in every bold color of the rainbow. My mother loves bright colors. Says it reminds her, “I am no longer living in a gray and black world, fear clogging my throat like a snake.”
She had her favorite blue armoire, used by an old bakery to showcase their pies, built into the design and used it as a pantry. A butcher block counter was attached to a long, old wood table that had previously been used in a train station. Blue pendant lights, three of them, fell above the train station table. The windows were huge, at my mother’s request. She wanted to be able to look out and know immediately that she was in America, not Moscow. “Free,” she said. “And safe.”
This kitchen was where all of her new recipes for my parents’ restaurant, Svetlana’s Kitchen, were tried out. This kitchen was thousands of miles away from the tiny, often non-functioning kitchen of my childhood in Moscow. The one where I once watched her wash blood off her trembling hands—not her blood—in our stained and crumbling sink.
“Elvira should marry Russian man. She will grow to love him, like a sunflower grow. Like a turnip grow.”
“You were in love with Papa when you married him. No one asked you to grow to love your husband like a turnip.”
“Ah yes, that. I in love with your papa when I see him at university. I told my father after the first kissy, you must plan wedding for Alexeiand me right away, right now, because soon I lay naked with him.”
Oh boy. Here we go. I poured myself a cup of coffee. My mother makes coffee strong enough for me to grow chest hairs.
“I make the love with him.” She grabbed a spatula and pointed it at me. “I say that to my father.”
I imagined my mother’s sweet, late father, Anatoly Sabonis, hearing that from her. Poor man. I’m sure he momentarily stopped breathing. “I know, Mama, you told me.”
“It was how I felt. Here.” She put her spatula to her heart. “So in one month I am married to Alexei, but my father not let me be alone with him for one minute before wedding. And still, in the bedroom, your papa and I…”
“I know, Mama. You love Papa. Like Ellie loves Gino.”
“No! Not like that.” She smacked the spatula on the countertop. “Elvira fall in love with non Russian. A nonrusseman.”
“A nonrusseman?”
“Yes. I make that word up myself. It clever.”
“Is it one word?”
“Yes. One word. More efficient. More quickly.”
“Are you done?”
“No, I not done. Never done. That Italian not Russian. Does not have our genes. Our pants, you know? The jeans. Not have our history in his blood.”
“Mama, what’s in our blood is a lot of Russian vodka.”
“Yes, devil drink. Fixes and dixes so many Russians, but we are Russian American. American Russians. We marry other American Russians.”
“Unless we fall in love with Italian Americans, then we marry them. Or we marry Hawaiians, like Valerie did.”
“Kai is my new son.” She adores my sister’s husband. “Not this Gino. No and no. He not enough. I see them together and I no see the love.”
I didn’t see it, either. From Ellie to Gino, at least, but not the other way around. Gino loved Ellie. I decided to keep my mouth shut.
My mother whipped the spatula through the air like a lasso. “But she plans a wedding. Me oh my God bless, Mother Mary help me.”
“I like Italian food.”
“Italian food!” My mother gasped. “Italian food? At the wedding of my Elvira? No. Russian food. We have Russian food. If we not have Russian food, I not come.”
“Ellie wants you to come.”
She crossed her arms over her impressive bosom. “No. Not unless Russian food.”
“It will be Russian and Italian food, I heard. A blend.” I tried not to laugh and aggravate my mama
“That not happening.” Fists to air. She looked to the heavens for divine intervention. So dramatic. “It cannot be. I am good Russian mother. I be good to her and now! A Italian. My Elvira choices it. Where went I wrong?”
“Gino is not an it.”
I watched my mother in the kitchen as she yanked out more pans. Four of them. Her pans, cast iron, from my father, are her favorite possession. She cried when he brought them home many years ago, when I was a teenager, as did my father. It wasn’t about the pans. It was about loss, despair, and a promise kept.
My mother, Svetlana, loves to cook, and when she’s stressed she cooks until the stress is gone. The cooking and baking can last for days.
Need a book with humor for the last days of summer?
My Very Best Friend: Two best friends, one is missing. A Scottish village. A man in a kilt. Lingerie Bike Riding At Midnight. One small bar fight. Truth.
What I Remember Most: Her name is Grenadine Scotch Wild. Collage Artist. Painter. Former foster child. She doesn’t know what happened to her parents on a dark night in the mountains. She’s about to find out.
The Last Time I Was Me: Jeanne Stewart took revenge on her cheating boyfriend with a condom, an exacto knife and a glue gun. She had a nervous breakdown in front of 834 advertising executives and called them schmucks. Then she started her life over.
Cathy Lamb All rights reserved © 2011-2024 |
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