The peacock squawked the warning first. Better than the watchdog, that bird. Seconds later, car tires scrunched on the gravel drive. “Sissy” Turner’s stomach clenched. With the 100° heat – no breeze in sight – and Belle finally birthing her first, an overdue and oversized calf, at three this morning, she didn’t know if she had the energy to contend with her baby sister. But LaVonne had cleared her calendar for this. Sissy had no choice but to spend the day with her sibling dividing the items not mentioned in their mother’s will.
Peeking through the living room curtains, she watched LaVonne slip out of the low-slung pearl grey convertible parked next to the beat-up farm truck and brush her lamé capri pants. She smoothed her cornrow-coiffed hair and minced her way in 5-inch stilettos through the gravel walkway to the house. Sissy took a calming breath and waited a good five seconds after LaVonne rang the bell before opening the door.
She rushed inside. “Whew! I had forgotten what a hellhole this valley can be in August, Sissy!” Tossing her wrap toward the bench in the entryway, she snatched up an Ebenezer Baptist Church hand fan from the hall table and began fanning her face. “Can you believe I had thison when I left my beachfront hotel?” She pointed the hand fan at the turquoise-blue pashmina now draped half on the bench and half on the parquet floor.
“Who knew Santa Monica could be downright cold in August?” She stopped fanning. Ran a manicured finger over the 18-inch-tall samovar on the table. Smiled.
Sissy, too, loved this piece above every other possession in the house, even her piano.
As LaVonne caressed the samovar, her melodious voice dropped an octave into a croon. “Almost no crazing on the enamel work. The delicate multicolored florae really popagainst that rich turquoise background.” She took a breath. Fanned the back of her neck. “There’s not a single amethyst or garnet cabochon missing. And the —”
“You’re sounding like a Sotheby’s auctioneer, LaVonne.” When had “cabochon” and “florae” entered her sister’s vocabulary? Was she researching antique samovars? With the goal of selling this one? A chill ran down Sissy’s spine. A gift from an exiled eastern European noble family Louie and Patrice entertained during their first world tour, the samovar symbolized the rich life her parents experienced in their world of music.
LaVonne’s eyes glistened as she patted the miniature Russian Imperial eagle perched near the gilded spigot. “Such craftsmanship! And I find it remarkable that a fancy teapot, more than a hundred years old, still has silver trim that’s not tarnished. And that flawless gold accenting simply gleams.”
Spinning around, LaVonne glared at Sissy. “How long has this been sittin’ here in the open, right near the front door where even the pizza delivery guy could snatch it?”
Sissy shot back. “Been there for years. Mom and Dad liked people to see it as soon as they walked in the house. Said the samovar made a good talking point if conversation with visitors flagged.”
Turning, Sissy stepped down into the living room. “It’s been a while since you set foot in this house, LaVonne.” Her throat tightened as that shrill, condemning remark slipped out. With a long day ahead of them, she softened her tone. “I made some sweet tea and cardamom cookies with local pistachio nuts yesterday. But if it’s not too early for you, there’s also cold beer in the refrigerator.”
“Still Little Missy Prissy?” Even with her back to LaVonne, Sissy could sense the smirk in her sister’s voice. She froze. Let the comment pass.
“And it hasn’t been that long since I was here. Twice last year,” she continued, slinking past Sissy and heading towards the kitchen. “But neither time was in a San Joaquin Valley heat wave.”
Sissy followed, feeling her fingernails cutting into her palms at her sister’s flippant reference to her visits. “True.” She paused. “Your first visit was for Dad’s funeral. January 18. A cold, foggy day.”
“Right. I flew in for the service and took a redeye to São Paulo that night, so couldn’t stay for the repast. Raced like hell to Fresno airport. Barely made my connection at LAX.”
“You were back on April 15. Beautiful spring day. Mom’s funeral. Couldn’t make that repast, either. Busy with European jazz festivals and a boiler problem in your London flat, as I recall.” Sissy began tapping out the piano left-hand fingering of a Chopin prelude on the cool soapstone countertop, concentrating on deep breathing to keep her bitterness at bay.
Suddenly, LaVonne threw back her head and wailed, her manicured hands covering her face. “How was I to know they would both pass so soon?”
Sissy observed LaVonne’s tears. Felt no pity. Unlike LaVonne, Sissy had cried herself dry. Now she swallowed the hard lump that burned like a white-hot coal in her throat.
“Maybe their deaths shocked you,” Sissy said, “because the last time you saw them, they were fit, witty, and fun, but –”
LaVonne cut in. “Lord, yes, Sissy! That night when Daddy and Mama hauled out those Gibsons and the harmonic, they righteously got downwith “Midnight Train.” Remember how Daddy made that mouth harp chug and whistle just like the Amtrak clackin’ through Jackson, Mississippi? And when they cut loose on “Chicago Bound Blues,” everybody went crazy!” She laughed, shook her head, and swiped her tears.
Sissy remembered that night over two years ago all too well. She and her parents had worked their asses off for three days cooking for LaVonne’s anticipated visit. Friends and relatives from Tulare, Visalia, and Fresno came to the farm to celebrate her homecoming. Their traditional down-home feast began with a whole pit-roasted pig and ended with peach cobbler and banana pudding.
After the meal, on a homemade stage, their parents performed the class act of raw, authentic Delta music that had made Louie and Patrice Turner household names in the blues-loving community around the world.
The clink of the lid placed back on the cookie jar pulled Sissy’s thoughts from that joyful night and her countertop Chopin. LaVonne holding a saucer of cookies and a tall glass of tea, stared at her with a cocked head and wide-eyed stare that said, “Well?”
Sissy led the way back into the living room. She would have loved to slide onto the bench of the grand piano on the other side of the room and lose herself in the moody grandeur of a Rachmaninoff concerto, but instead she sank into her father’s rocking chair. LaVonne sprawled on the Barcalounger and pressed the remote to lift her legs.
“I guess you remember, too,” Sissy said, continuing the thread LaVonne had interrupted, “that two months after your visit, Dad fell and broke his hip.” LaVonne’s last memories of their parents were filled with joy. She hadn’t been there to change soiled bed sheets or to measure out morphine tablets at three in the morning.
LaVonne stared at the walnut side table as if determining exactly where to place her glass, finally setting it down with a clunk. Ignored the coaster. “You called me when the whole damn set of dominoes started fallin’. But how was I to knowhow serious it was?” She held her palms out as if checking for rain.“I had a whole series of gigs from Montreux to Bergen, and Daddy had always been so strong!With you just twenty minutes away in Fresno, I knew everything would work out fine.”
Sissy let the silence speak and rocked. She had phoned countless times during their parents’ decline, but LaVonne heard, not what was said, but what she wanted to hear. True to her sister’s style, LaVonne spent most of their phone time effusing over her sold-out shows at the Casa del Jazz in Rome or how French men were falling all over themselves for her at Le Caveau des Oubliettes in Paris.
Creak. Creak. Sissy concentrated on the rhythm of the rockers on the wide plank oak floor.
LaVonne turned her gaze to the window, studying, it seemed, the hundred-year-old live oak shading the house. After a silence filled only with the creaks of the rocking chair, LaVonne gulped, “You knowI would have been home on the first thing smokin’, Sissy, if I had really known how badoff Daddy was.” She stopped and swallowed. “But then, before I knew it, bam! Like a slap upside the head, Daddy’s gone.Another bam! And Mama. Gone, too!” she moaned.
She would have come “home” on the first thing smoking. Sure.
Except for whatever time she needed in SoCal for recording sessions, for LaVonne, home was a chic London flat. She had moved beyond the dusty nine-acre hobby farm outside Fresno where they had grown up. Fishing for crawdads in the slough and stuffing themselves with wild blackberries until their bellies hurt, were hardly memories for the sophisticated international jazz singer.
Sissy continued to rock.
Then LaVonne sniffed, took a bite of a cardamom cookie, and glanced at Sissy. “Did you know that’s a Brumby?”
“A who?”
“The rocker – a Brumby, famous rocking chairs made in Marietta, Georgia. Appalachian red oak. Jimmy Carter took five of them to the White House.”
“Interesting.” Sissy stopped rocking, at a loss for words. Damn. Did the woman have a running inventory of the whole farm down to the last White Leghorn in the chicken coop?
After a sip of tea, LaVonne shot a glance at her watch. “One o’clock already. The four-oh-five’s still gonna be a madhouseby the time I get over the Grapevine.” She sighed, “Well, we’d better get on with splittin’ up Mama and Daddy’s stuff,” and plucked an imaginary lint from her lamé capris. “I’ll take the samovar.”
“You’ll do what?” Sissy’s blood ran cold.
“You can have the Brumby, the silver, the china. It’s not practical to think of my movin’ any of it to London, for God’s sake.”
On the arm of what she now knew as the “Brumby,” Sissy started tapping out the right hand of the Chopin prelude. Tried to regulate her breathing. That samovar was her link to her parents’ adventures, her only connection to the exciting life that she never had.
“You know,” LaVonne added, “Daddy and Mama knew how much I lovethat samovar, and I have the perfect spot for it in my flat. Right in my entry where everyone coming in can see it.”
“Where the pizza delivery guy can snatch it?”
“Sissy, it’s only fair. You have everything here. You like milking cows and gatherin’ eggs. And you can play Old MacDonald all you want while your hired man does the heavy liftin’. I’m not demandin’ that we sell this place, which is appraised at well over a million dollars not counting the farm equipment and barn and could sell in a hot minute. Without that samovar, I wind up with nothin’.”
Before realizing it, Sissie blurted out, “Maybe that’s what you deserve.”
LaVonne tumbled off the recliner without lowering the leg lift. “What the hell do you mean by that? Look, all I’m asking for is the damn samovar. This family has always revolved around you.”
“Around me? You were the princess who showed up for dinner when it was on the table and your fingernails were dry. Perhaps it was our mistake. We took great pride in your career, but we indulged you, the cute baby doll, from the day you were born.”
“Indulged me?” LaVonne’s lips pinched into a narrow line, and she began pacing back and forth, pointing a trembling finger at the black-lacquered grand piano in the corner. “How many hours did I have to endurethat Rachmani-whatever and Chopin shit while Mama and Daddy sat there gaga over your musical brilliance and your general superiority at everything? And then you, of course, graduated with honors from the Boston Conservatory while I flunked out of City College. And –”
“And Mom and Dad pulled strings to enroll you in the Paris College of Music where you could study jazz.”
“Where I met that rat, Laurent, who broke my heart.”
“But Laurent opened the doors to launch your career, LaVonne. Mom and Dad worked the chitlin circuit in that beat-up VW bus for twelve years before they hit the big time. You were a hot commodity in three years, thanks to Laurent. Three.”
Sissy felt a stab of envy at her sister’s fast road to success. She had no Laurent to nurture her youthful ambitions. She had chosen the safer path of finding fulfillment by boosting her parents’ careers rather than trying to forge one of her own. “Count your blessings, girl!”
“But you were Mama and Daddy’s blessing. Without you, they would have kept on working that circuit until one of them dropped dead in a Mississippi juke joint.” Then Sissy saw an ugly distortion spreading like a shadow across LaVonne’s face. “But Little Missy Prissy knows how to make things happen, be it a perfectly baked cardamom cookie or the creation of the international sensation of Louie and Patrice Turner.”
“Mom and Dad were good. They just needed the world to see their gifts, so I did it,” she said, while knowing her carefully chosen words were not completely true.
“Right. You ‘did it;’ fired their thievin’, incompetent manager and set them up yourself. Abracadabra.” She brushed her hands against each other in the gesture of a finished job. “They become international darlings almost overnight. Thanks to you. While I damn near burn down the kitchen while tryin’ to heat up a frozen pizza.”
Sissy was standing now, too, and in her sister’s face. “After you were born nobody even called me by my given name. I became ‘Big Sissy,’ then finally just ‘Sissy.’ Do you remember my name, LaVonne?”
“Don’t be silly!You’re…you’re…”
“Rochelle, LaVonne. I never traveled to Amsterdam or Montreux, or to the Paris Blues Festival, but I arranged the tours of Louie and Patrice Turner to do so. Managed the bookings, the contracts, the finances, and invested wisely for them over the years. I’ve never set foot in the George V in Paris but planned our parents’ elegant 40-year wedding anniversary party there that you attended.”
“Now who’s wallowin’ in a pity party? Don’t tell me, you couldn’t a come to Paris, Sis –Ro-chelle.”
“How? In April? With two full-time jobs? Managing the family business and teaching high school music?”
“Youchose your life!” LaVonne shrieked. “NotMama and Daddy or me orthe Fresno Unified School District!”
Sissy dashed to the piano and collapsed onto the bench. “You don’t understand. I had no choice,” she whispered and launched into the frantic-paced and demanding Chopin Prelude in B-flat minor. Her fingers flew as she lost herself in the emotional tumult of the piece.
LaVonne huffed over and slammed both her fists down on the lowest keys of the piano. As the dissonance caromed off the living room walls, she screamed, “Enough of that Chopin shit!”
Breathing hard, heart pounding, with tears streaking her face, Sissy felt her hands fall, two lumps, into her lap. With her eyes focused on the keys she murmured, “After graduating from the Conservatory, I qualified to audition for the International Chopin Competition. Two minutes into my performance, my mind went blank. I froze. After that failure I could only believe in Louie and Patrice, not in myself, so I made a perfect manager.”
LaVonne’s eyes widened. She gasped and eased onto piano bench close to Sissy. “But all your teachers praised you from here to yonder!”
“I never attempted another performance. Instead, I absorbed our parents’ stories, their experiences, until they almost became my own,” Sissy murmured, her eyes focused on the piano. “The tales they shared would start off with the story of the samovar performance in Poland and wander into other adventures. From Sicily to Moscow, they played everything from street corners to palaces and concert halls. My travel, my creative fulfillment, came through them.”
LaVonne rose. Held her hands as if in prayer against her face. Then she took a deep breath and said, in measured tones, “I don’t own a fancy flat in London. Where I live iselegant, but it belongs to my…my married…benefactor. And yes, I play Bergen and Rome and Paris, but I just open for the bigacts. I’m not the headliner.” She plopped back onto the piano bench next to Sissy.
“All things considered,” she continued, “I can’t complain, but I pumped up the stories to make you and Mama and Daddy proudof me. To believe that I was somebody. That I was settin’ the worldon fire.”
Sissy nodded. The two sisters sat in silence. Held hands.
LaVonne stood up and stretched. “Relax with some of your Chopin or whatever while I get me a glass of water.”
She returned, instead, with the samovar. Set it on the lid of the piano. “I think this is the perfect spot,” she smiled. “Safe from the pizza delivery guy.”
Sissy closed her eyes. Swung into Mom’s three-measure intro into a twelve-bar blues. “B-flat’s your key, right?”
LaVonne nodded and smiled, though tears glistened in her eyes. Then her seductive, smoky voice rang out to Sissy’s accompaniment:
Late last night, I stole away and cried,
Late last night, I stole away and cried,
Had the blues for Chicago,
And I just can’t be satisfied…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dorothy Edwards is a writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She is working on an adult mystical realistic novel set in the Caribbean and has published a children’s book, “Langston’s Moon,” available on Amazon. Click HERE to learn more.
About the Author
To my big sister Dot who has and will always be my hero. I love you, I’m proud to be your brother. Brad