The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb

despite the double guilt. I danced and laughed for the first time in too long. “Sure. Yes. Thank you, Boris.”
    He stood up on his toes, thrilled. “I love Madame Butterfly . So emotional. The costumes, the cultural differences, the history, the music, the poetic words and heartbreak. The deepest betrayal.”
    â€œYou know all about opera and yet you run a chop shop and steal cars.”
    â€œI don’t steal them.”
    â€œGive me a break.”
    â€œI’m giving you a hug instead.” He hugged me, then his voice became pleady. “Toni, do you have any of your mama’s pryanikis in there?”
    â€œI do.” I gave him the baggie of honey spiced cookies, glazed in sugar. I would miss those cookies today.
    â€œThank you.” He kissed my cheek and headed back to the bald man the size of the dump truck. The bald man got out of the car and walked toward me, not smiling. “Hi, Toni. Sorry about the car. New guy.”
    â€œHi, Mac.”
    He gave me a hug then headed back to the car. He turned around. “Were those your mama’s pryanikis?”
    â€œYes. Tell Boris I said to share.”
    The dump truck smiled.
    * * *
    On my way to and home from work, I drive by a one-story white house with a red door. Often the garage door is open. Inside, up on some type of wood platform, is an old tandem kayak. I see the husband working on it sometimes. The red paint is chipped. He has a wife. They are white, but their two young boys are black. Everyone always seems happy. I’m happy for them, being so happy, but it’s a stab in my gut, and I look away quick.

6
    Moscow, the Soviet Union
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    We lived in Moscow in an apartment complex owned, as all were, by the government. We were able to live there because my parents were professors at the university. It took years for my parents to get the apartment. Before that, we were in a dormitory room— one room —with one kitchen on the floor that was shared with ten other families.
    Our apartment building was concrete, many stories tall, and one of many other concrete jungle apartment buildings. It was a middle-class lifestyle.
    However, middle class in Moscow should not be associated with middle class in America.
    We had a small bedroom for my parents, and a miniscule bedroom for my sisters and me, which fit a double-sized bed that took up most of the room. My father built a wood table, which took up much of the family room/kitchen. There was room for a couch and one chair.
    The walls of the apartment were cracked and bulging here and there as if the apartment wanted to come down on us. My mother painted them yellow, “to add the sun,” she told us. The wind, like an invading cold army, would swoosh through, rain would leak around the windows; and when it was snowing, ice froze on our windows on the inside, making us feel as if we were in a snow cave. We were not able to adjust the heat—that was done centrally.
    When the hot water stopped flowing, it could be gone for days, weeks, or months, same with the heat.
    In Moscow, the sky was often dark and moody, or overcast and snowing. Snow, snow, snow. Cold to the bone it was, the cold slithering through your body and into your marrow where it stayed all winter, an icicle pulsing through your blood.
    We were near Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral, which I loved because the tops looked like soft, swirled ice cream in blue and white, green and yellow, and red and green, the crosses perched on top.
    My mother told me that Ivan the Terrible had had it built. “He was insane, brutal. May he be stuck in the circles of hell, suffering for every soul that he tortured.” The name alone scared me, but the colors and swirls enthralled me.
    I liked the State Historical Museum, too, all red with white on the top of its spires and points, as if were holding perpetual snow on the outside, while the inside held perpetual treasures. In my mind it was a red