beautiful voice. Even when she was a child it was smoky and full-bodied, lending even her most banal statements a cunning, slightly sexual undertone.
'A person needs to use their best assets,' my father says. 'If she doesn't want to put out an album, she could maybe be a receptionist. All she'd have to do is answer the damned phone.'
But Tiffany isn't looking for career advice, especially from our father.
'I think she's happy doing what she's doing,' I tell him.
'Oh, baloney.'
When she was thirteen Tiffany got braces, and when she was fourteen she tried to remove them with a set of pliers. She was on the lam at the time, a runaway trying to distance herself from the class photo my parents had given the police. In trying to track down my sister, I spoke to one of her friends, a tough-looking girl who went by the name of Scallywag. She claimed to know nothing, and when I accused her of lying, she opened a Coke bottle with her teeth and spit the cap into her front yard. 'Listen,' I said, 'I'm not the enemy.' But she had heard stories, and knew not to trust me.
Following her capture, Tiffany was put in juvenile detention and then sent away to a school my mother had heard about on one of the afternoon talk shows. Punishment consisted of lying bellydown on the floor while a counselor putted golf balls into your open mouth. 'Tough love' this was called. Basically the place just restrained you until you were eighteen and allowed to run away legally.
After her release Tiffany became interested in baking. She attended a culinary institute in Boston and worked for many years in the sort of restaurant that thought it amusing to flavor brownies with tarragon and black pepper. It was cooking for people who read rather than ate, but it paid well and there were benefits. From midnight to dawn, Tiffany stood in the kitchen, sifting flour and listening to AM talk radio, which is either funny or spooky, depending on your ability to distance yourself from the callers. Tommy from Revere, Carol from Fall River: they are lonely and crazy. You are not. But the line blurs at fourA.M. and disappears completely when you find yourself alone in a tall paper hat, adding fresh chives to buttercream icing.
'Do you mind if I smoke?' Tiffany asks our cabdriver, and before he can answer, her cigarette is lit. 'You can have one, too, if you want,' she tells him. 'It won't bother me in the least.' The man, who is Russian, smiles into the rearview mirror, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth.
'Whoa, Daddy. We know whereyou bank,' Tiffany says, and I start to wish that one of us knew how to drive. Like our mother, my sister can talk to anyone. Were I not here and were she in a position to afford a cab, she would undoubtedly be sitting up front, complimenting the man on his signaling abilities and then, just for good measure, making fun of his ID photo or the name printed beneath it. Growing up, she had a reputation for dishonesty, and her relentless, often inappropriate truth telling is, to her, a way of turning that around. 'I'm not going to lie to you,' she'll say, forgetting that another option is to simply say nothing.
As we cross from Cambridge into Somerville, Tiffany points out a few of the other places she's worked over the past fifteen years. The last was a traditional Italian bakery staffed by aging war veterans with names like Sal and Little Joey. Throughout the day they'd invent excuses to fondle her rear end or run a free hand across the front of her apron, and she let them do it because: '(a) It didn't physically hurt, (b) I was the only woman, so who else's ass were they going to grab? and (c) The boss let me smoke.'
The money wasn't what she was used to, but still she stayed on for close to a year, until the owner announced he was going on vacation. His extended family was holding a reunion in Providence, so the bakery would close for the first two weeks of October and everyone would go without pay. Tiffany has no credit cards or long- distance service. All her money goes toward rent and cable, and so she spent her vacation in front of the TV, pounding her empty stomach and growing progressively angrier. At the end of the two weeks she returned to work and asked her boss if he'd enjoyed what she called 'your little Woptoberfest.' She's usually a pretty good judge of just how far she can push someone, but this time she miscalculated. We pass the bakery and she tosses her cigarette out the window. 'Woptoberfest,' she says. 'I mean, how could someonenot find that funny?'
After the Italians came the rickshaw and a return to the vampire hours she'd held years earlier at the fine bakery. These days while the rest of the world sleeps, my sister goes through their garbage. She carries a flashlight and a pair of rubber gloves and comes across a surprising number of teeth. 'But none like yours,' she says to our driver. 'Most of the ones I find are false.'
'Most?' I say.
She digs into her knapsack and hands me a few stray molars. One is small and clean, most likely a child's, while the other is king-size and looks like something pulled from the ground. I tap the larger one against the window, convinced that it must be made of plastic. 'Who would throw away a real tooth?' I ask.
'Not me,' says the driver, who's been in and out of the conversation ever since Tiffany gave him permission to smoke.
'Yeah,' she says. 'Well, we know about you. Anyone else, though, anyoneAmerican, would say their good- byes and toss it. In this country, once something's out of your mouth, it's garbage, Daddy.'
In addition to the teeth, my sister finds anniversary cards and ceramic ponies. Angry letters written but not sent to congressmen. Underpants. Charm bracelets. Small items are stuffed into her knapsack, and everything else goes into the rickshaw and, subsequently, her apartment. Someone dies and she'll make three or four trips in a single evening, carting away everything from armchairs to wastepaper baskets.
'Last week I found a turkey,' she tells us.
I wait, thinking this is only half of the sentence 'I found a turkey. . made of papier-mache. I found a turkey. . and buried it in the yard.' When it becomes clear that there is no part two, I start to worry. 'What do you mean, youfound a turkey?'
'Frozen,' she says. 'In the trash.'
'And what did you do with it?'
'Well, what do most people do with a turkey?' she says. 'I cooked it and then I ate it.'
This is a test, and I fail, saying all the boring things you might expect of the comfortable: That the turkey was undoubtedly thrown away for a good reason. That it had possibly been recalled, like a batch of tainted fish sticks. 'Or maybe someone tampered with it.'
'Who would intentionally fuck with a frozen turkey?' she asks.
I try envisioning such a person, but nothing comes. 'Okay, maybe it had thawed and been refrozen. That's dangerous, right?'
'Listen to you,' she says. 'If it didn't come from Balducci's, if it wasn't raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.'
That's not what I meant at all, but just as I try to explain myself, she places her hand on the driver's shoulder. 'If someone offered you a perfectly good turkey, you'd take it, wouldn't you?'
The man says yes, and she pats him on top of the head. 'Mamma likes you,' she says.
She's gotten him on her side, but unfairly, and I'm surprised by the degree to which it enrages me. 'There's a difference between someone offering you 'a perfectly good turkey' and finding a turkey in a garbage can,' I say.
'Trash can,' she corrects me. 'God, you make it sound as if I'm back behind the Star Market, burrowing through their Dumpster. It was just one turkey. Ease up, will you.'
She has, of course, found valuable things as well and formed relationships with the sort of people who are wont to buy them. These are the guys you see at flea markets, men with beards and longish fingernails who scold should you refer to a certain color of Fiesta ware as 'orange' rather than 'red.' There's something about them I don't trust, but when asked for a reason, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything beyond their general unfamiliarity. When meeting a friend of Amy's or Lisa's, I feel a sense of recognition, but the people whom Tiffany hangs out with are a completely different breed. I'm thinking of the woman who was shot seven times while evading the police. She's lovely, really, butevading the police? As my brother would say, 'That's some outlaw shit.'
The closer we get to her apartment, the more my sister engages the cabdriver, and by the time he pulls in front of the house I am left out of the conversation completely. It seems the guy's wife had a hard time adjusting to life in the United States and has recently returned to her village outside of St. Petersburg.
