Chapter 7 Kapusniak
Snapping The Language of Flowers closed on Monday afternoon, I sit quietly and think about Victoria and all the sorrows in her life.
How they make mine pale in comparison. She built a fortress around her heart but had to since the day she was born and abandoned.
She didn’t even know her actual birthday.
Beyond tragic and yet she overcame it all.
In a trance I throw on a fresh shirt, as I can’t remember when I last changed it.
I haven’t been able to do anything but read or think about reading since I first cracked open the book.
I lay a hand over the hard cover and feel the connection to Victoria’s world of flowers and their meaning.
Love vibrates up through my palm. Books are the thing that slip easily into my bubble and they fill the empty spaces.
I step out of my room and my mother is sitting in her usual chair at the kitchen table. Her eyes follow me, but she doesn’t say anything. Perhaps because I was immersed in my book, I only now realize she hasn’t spoken to me all weekend.
Keeping the hurt out of my voice, I say pleasantly, “Hi, Mama.”
She inclines her head in my direction.
Sighing, I take a bag out of the closet and start putting the ingredients into the bag for kapusniak.
I hope Vee is in good spirits today, as I need her to pull me out of my doldrums. Aching for Victoria and her difficult life and feeling the sting of my mother’s disapproval of me stretching my wings, I hope a nice soup will make me feel better.
Although merely thinking about a visit to Vee improves my mood.
I honestly think we are becoming friends.
Vee is in an upbeat mood, and we have fun making and then eating the sauerkraut and sausage soup.
When Jake comes back from class, he inhales appreciatively. “Well, it isn’t crepes or perogies. What is it?”
I hand him a bowl. “Kapusniak.”
Jake repeats gamely, “Ka-pus-niak.”
“Sauerkraut and sausage soup, if that’s easier,” I say.
“Oh, I’ll get it. Kapusniak!”
I beam, marveling at our simple exchange. Only a short time ago, I had barely spoken a word to this person—or if my father is to be believed, the devil incarnate. Now we are playfully pronouncing Polish words and breaking bread. The world is a wondrous and mysterious place.
Jake keeps practicing his pronunciation of the soup until he sounds like someone right from the old country. He shares a funny story about one of his students that keeps us all in stitches. The soup has worked its magic on all of us.
When he is done with the soup, Jake hefts his briefcase onto the kitchen table and takes out a few papers.
“What do you teach?” I ask.
Jake responds dismissively, “Bio to a bunch of snot-nosed premed students. God, they are awful.”
“Weren’t you a snot-nosed premed student just a few years ago?” Vee chides.
“I never was as obnoxious or as pretentious as these kids. If they’re our next generation of doctors, we’re all in trouble.”
Vee gives a loud snort and adds, “Jake is going for his doctorate, so we will all have to call him Dr. Henderson one day. As my mama likes to say, ‘He’s getting a little too big for his britches.’”
I scrunch my forehead and breathe out a soft, “Wow.” Jake is going to be a doctor. That is so impressive.
Hating having to leave the warmth of the kitchen, I hang around for as long as I can without being obvious. It’s feeling like a cozy blanket I get to wrap myself in each time I visit. This is what I imagine friendship feels like.
Somehow, after one short week, I’ve broken out of my protective shell without even realizing it. Calling Vee, Vee doesn’t feel strange anymore and I respond without a thought to my nickname Em.
Saying my goodbyes, I drag myself away and head back to my dull existence, back to living in the shadows.
Somehow it feels even bleaker, now that I have seen the bright colors that shine just next door.
I’ll be back in two days, I remind myself.
It is so wonderful to have something to look forward to.
I continue to “babysit” Vee for the next few weeks, and I like her more and more.
Some days she is down and other days she’s just fine.
Whatever her mood is, she is beautiful inside and out.
Sometimes when she talks about modeling, she sounds tough as nails, talking about the girls who throw up to stay so thin.
Other times, she sounds lost and lonely.
I share details about my life with her, and Vee listens and seems to understand.
“How does one get into modeling?” I ask today.
She is curled up in one of her graceful balls, and for the first time, she doesn’t immediately change the subject. Instead, she gets a wistful look on her face. I wonder if she is nostalgic for the remembrance or rueful, wishing it never happened.
In a small voice, she shares, “I was discovered at a mall in Mississippi when I was just seventeen.
One minute I was hanging out with my friends, and the next minute my mother and I were in New York City trying to figure out what the hell this all meant.
It was overwhelming. My mom was a tiger, but not really in a good way.
She wanted success at any cost. And it turns out the cost was me.
But back then, at the beginning, she was beyond thrilled, and I went along with everything because it made her happy. She came to every job with me.
“It was hard at first. You think fourth graders are mean? Models are the worst. They made so much fun of me and Mama’s accents and expressions. On my second shoot, I said ‘I was fuller than a tick’ because Mama and I had breakfast right before the shoot. That was the last time
I ever said that, or ate breakfast in fact, for years. They called me tick girl for a long time. It was mortifying.”
“Oh, that is awful. What does it mean to be fuller than a tick?”
“Oh God, no. I refuse to answer that question. I have wiped that part of me clean away.” Vee smiles, but then, looking pensive, says, “I worked hard to get rid of my southern drawl. I even took voice lessons, to get that cold, nasal twang just right. Half nose, half mouth instead of all mouth. Now my accent only comes out when I talk to Mama or Papa or . . .” she pauses, “when I drink.”
She closes her eyes and inhales and exhales softly. Her eyes flutter open.
She continues, “How did we get on this topic?”
“You were telling me about modeling and your Mama.”
“Oh right, things were good for a while, I was working nonstop. But the modeling agency and my mother didn’t see eye to eye on some things, and as soon as I turned eighteen, my agency started pushing me to ditch her.
” Vee shifts uncomfortably in her seat and bites a nail.
“Honestly, I was getting tired of her, too. She controlled everything: what I ate, how I dressed. It was getting annoying, and I figured I knew everything there was to know. I’d been doing it for a year now and I was eighteen and wanted to have a little fun instead of working all the time.
“So, I told her I was all set and she could go home. When you’re eighteen, you have no idea of the dangers out there.
Right? You think you’re unstoppable. I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face.
It was a lot of hurt with a dash of hate thrown in.
She never forgave me for pushing her away.
She loved modeling more than I did, and I took that away from her.
I now know I was young and stupid, but I can’t undo what I did.
And after my mom left, it became so easy to make the wrong decisions.
I started hanging out with a pretty wild crowd, and there were always drugs available. It was all too easy.”
I try to picture a younger Vee all alone, feeling sad and surrounded by a bunch of people who didn’t really care about her.
“That must have been scary. I never thought about not having my parents around. Mine are always around.” I try to sound like the girls in high school when they talked about their parents, with exaggerated exasperation, but it doesn’t ring true to my ear.
Vee sighs. “I’ve only realized recently how much I needed my mom. I knew I was getting out of control, and I wanted to fix things between us. So, a couple of months ago, I called her and asked her to come back up to help me.”
“Did she come?” I ask softly.
“Nope,” Vee responds, sounding lost and forlorn. “She didn’t even want to hear why I was asking. I’m not sure she would’ve been able to help me or if I even wanted her to come running, but when she refused to come, it hurt and made everything twice as bad.”
I look at Veronica, needing her mother, and instead all she has is Jake—and me, three times a week.
For the hundredth time, I wonder about their relationship.
I have yet to figure it out. There is something between the two of them.
The sun angles in the window, and Vee looks like an angel with her blonde hair framing the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.
I picture Jake and Vee all dressed up, heading somewhere fancy.
They would make the most perfect couple.
I push these thoughts out of my head. It doesn’t really matter. Jake is completely out of my league. A freakin’ doctor and rich.
Our unlikely threesome is working despite our differences. Jake and Veronica educate me on all I’m missing by not having a phone or being connected to the internet. I’m skeptical of the whole thing, but listen as Veronica states emphatically, “I would absolutely DIE without my phone.”
Jake admits, “I don’t think I would die without my phone, but I might not be able to live without it.”
I look at them and then at their phones and shake my head. I state simply, “I don’t find anything compelling about those contraptions. If I need to be connected to the internet, I go down to the library and use their computers. I can’t imagine needing one in my bedroom or my pocket.”
Jake stands up and flips open his laptop and responds with a challenge in his voice, “I may be able to change your mind. Look at this.”
He shows me the website for the NYC Audubon Society, scrolling through all the information on recent bird sightings, tours, and other information that makes John Foster’s guidebook come alive. The pictures are spectacular and much larger on Jake’s laptop than in my paperback book.
Captivated, I look into Jake’s smiling eyes and state sheepishly, “Well, maybe it would be nice to have a computer . . .” I take my book out of my purse.
“But this is still the best. That website doesn’t quite have the heart John Foster shares in his prose.
” I gush on, “He says that a true birder will always stop and glance up to see an ordinary bird they may have seen a thousand times because even a chipping sparrow is lovely and special.”
Jake visibly shudders. “What garbage!” he mutters.
The sharpness of his words hits me in my gut, and I take a step back. John Foster is special; I have a kinship with him and his musings. I would not have survived without his voice in my head.
Jake sees the hurt in my eyes.
“Don’t listen to me,” he says quickly. “What do I know? If you like it, that’s all that matters. A book that speaks to even one person is not to be taken lightly.”
Immediately, I feel better—but I guess I’ll stop quoting John Foster in front of Jake. He doesn’t seem to like it.