Stalina

her shoulders.

“I like the wave in my hair,” I replied.

“I have a sister.”

“I have pity for her.”

“My dog is more obedient than yours.”

Making a judgment about my dog made me angry. Her miniature poodle, Trala, with the matted white hair and leaky pink eyes, may have been more cooperative than my strong-willed terrier, Pepe, but her dog was showy and obnoxious, just like her. My parents made me put up with Nadia and her dog.

“She lives right next door, she is smart, has good manners, and her family is well connected,” my mother would say.

She was well mannered in front of the adults, but she treated her friends like servants. No wonder my dog Pepe bit her. Soon after that incident, when Nadia and I were seventeen, both Pepe and my father were gone.

* * *

Pepe had been gone for a month the day my father disappeared.

My mother lied. “They needed soldiers to fight the fascists. Your father agreed to go.”

“When will he return?”

I asked the same question about Pepe. My mother’s answer about dog and father was to light a cigarette.

Amalia later told me the truth.

“Your mother has no idea what he was arrested for, so she made up the fighting fascists story. There are no fascists to fight—we beat them all in the war,” she said while we played cards.

“It’s not a story. My father is a soldier,” I responded.

“Your father is a writer.”

“So?”

“Writers are the worst, and on top of that your father wears that ridiculous hat,” she said, making a face and pulling her hands down over her ears.

My father wore a tight-fitting blue beret. He used to say it kept out the lies of his neighbors.

Amalia added, “And besides that silly hat, your dog bit Nadia.”

“My father punished Pepe,” I said, holding four aces, a jack, and a queen and king of hearts in my hand. “Amalia, I don’t think you shuffled these cards very well.”

“When was the last time your father published anything?”

“When he returns, he will write about the fighting,” I said, holding the photograph of my father in my hand along with my playing cards.

“You’re a duckling head,” Amalia said and sneered from behind her cards.

“Don’t call me names. Gin!” I said and put my cards down.

“Did you hear Nadia’s dog Trala disappeared?” she said, turning the photograph of my father around to face her and tapping it with her finger.

“Who cares?” I said. “She and her dog can go to hell.”

“Nice shovel he has there,” she said, holding the photograph close to her face. “I did not know your father was a gardener. Your deal.”

Chapter Eight: Makeovers

Life was so different at the Liberty Motel. I’ll now take a moment to describe the decor of my room designs. With these “Rooms for the Imaginative” I hoped to bring happiness to our small part of the world here in Berlin, Connecticut, a little bit of green (and yes, concrete), easy to get to from all the converging highways that feed into the city of Hartford. Berlin was like a young sibling in a struggling family—the town waited for the castoffs from big brother Hartford. Everything in the town from the road signs to the picket fences around the tiny front yards looked tired and worn.

Upon entering room number one, you encountered a bed on a raised platform with a six-sided gazebo built around it. I called it the “bed-zebo.” It had green ivy around the posts at the sides of the platform and thin strips of clear plastic attached to each of the six sides. With the air moving from the ceiling fan, the Mylar fluttered and gave the feeling of rain falling. Getting trapped in a gazebo during bad weather is very stimulating. Movies and novels are filled with such moments. Who wouldn’t want it? I decorated the roof of the bed with wood shingles, but it was what you saw upon looking up from the bed that made this a very popular room. There were six triangular mirrors fitted into the top turrets in the roof. The reflections broke into six different views from anywhere in the bed. Even though I had only been in the bed alone, I still found the angles and broken views quite stimulating. The sides of the bed and the platform were covered with green plastic grass. It was the same stuff like the mat outside Rosalinda’s fortune-telling salon. I put up a wallpaper trim that shows a woman in Victorian dress entering a gazebo. After the trim was in place, the room was complete. Total cost, sixty-three dollars and fifty-three cents.

There was a couple leaving the room. They were regulars, but this was their first-time experience with the new room. Perhaps they would comment. She was very skinny and wobbled in her high heels walking to his car on the gravel driveway. He wore a fedora and worsted pants, and he always wrote a different name on the card when he registered. Today he was “Ulysses S. Grant.” I thought he was a local politician. I was sure I’d seen his picture in the paper, but it was hard to tell with the fedora in the way.

“Interesting room,” he said without looking at me.

“Thank you, it’s my own design,” I responded proudly.

His hand shook slightly as he pushed the key through the half-moon opening in the bulletproof office window. The woman, standing by the car, wrapped her sequined sweater tightly around her small frame, impatient in the cold. He unlocked his side first, got in, and opened her door. In the car, they sat without looking at each other as the motor started. As they pulled away, she smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

There was another couple waiting in a car. No time to waste basking in my glory, I say. I needed to get Mara to clean the room. She was always sleeping in the linen room. Luckily the intercom was very loud.

“Mara! Room one is done! Hurry, we have a couple waiting!”

No answer.

“Mara!”

“I heard you the first time…chill out.”

“Don’t let Svetlana out. There are a lot of cars coming and going.”

“She’s asleep on the towels.”

I named the cat Svetlana for Stalin’s daughter, for whom I also felt great pity. One day the weak, abandoned kitten walked up the driveway and stood in front of the office, and I practically tripped over her when I was leaving. Now the cat was healthy, but she had a bad habit of running across the drive to play with pinecones under the trees. I was afraid she would get run over. Mara always let her out of the linen room when her hands were full with the vacuum and bucket of cleaning supplies.

“Mara—”

“I’m just fixing my hair.”

“I forgot to tell you I replaced the vacuum bag.”

“How dare you touch my vacuum.”

“I made a mess finishing the Gazebo Room. I cleaned up after myself.”

“Just kidding, thanks. I’ll be out in a minute.”

The intercom button got stuck, and I heard Mara say, “Hey, Svetlana, now that she’s a big fancy designer I’m surprised she didn’t ask me to clean up her mess. Come here, kitty, help me push open the door, my hands are full.”

There went Svetlana, right under the pine trees; she was obsessed with those pinecones. At least right now