Sisters’ Saga Includes Buried Secrets, Salami
Walk into the Corti Sisters Italian Deli for a salami and stagger out with a family saga.
The sisters--Chris Corti, 49, and Jodeen Frank, 48--like to laugh and love to talk. Sometimes they finish each other’s sentences. Each wears a name tag that identifies herself as “the other sister.” They live together, they work the 14-hour days demanded by a new business, they moan about the pinched little rules that govern sinks and grease traps.
Until they were in their mid-30s, neither knew the other existed. Fourteen years later, they are business partners in Ventura, and they are knee-deep in provolone.
So who said life was predictable?
At a table set amid racks of fusilli and olives and cannellini beans, the sisters drink coffee and talk in still-awed tones about the complicated web that brought them together.
The accidental offspring of a lady from Texas and a gent from Arkansas, they were born 11 months apart. Each was adopted by a different family at birth--Jodeen by Dorothy and Bill Frank in Ventura, Chris by Angela and Gino Corti in Sacramento.
That is where it stood until 1984.
“My mom called me at work and said,’You’ve got a sister and she’s looking for you!’ ” Chris said. “ ‘Call her now!’ ”
From the family’s Italian grocery, she nervously dialed Jodeen--the sister she never knew she had--in Ventura. Days later, they met.
“We did the LAX-screaming-crying-hugging-each-other thing,” Chris said.
But it would be six or seven years before they would fly to Dallas and meet their birth mother.
Rayma Edwina Brown had not been pleased to hear from them. For 35 years, she had kept them a deep secret, even from her own sister. When the girls were born, she was single, and the babies were not viewed as blessed events.
“Her parents were very Southern Baptist,” Jodeen said. “You didn’t mess around, let alone get pregnant, let alone twice.”
At the time, Rayma was a waitress. She had taken up with Lester Quandt, an ex-fighter pilot who worked in a bicycle shop. It didn’t last.
When the sisters finally visited her, Rayma was gripped by Alzheimer’s disease. As she curled up on her living-room floor for a nap, a houseful of friends and relatives murmured about her hidden life.
Suddenly she leaped up. “Well, what does it matter who screwed who?” she demanded, every inch the no-nonsense jail matron she had once been. Then she sank back into her snooze.
It mattered to Chris and Jodeen, even if it was a matter more of curiosity than of aching need.
“I didn’t go there to meet ‘my mother,’ ” Chris said. “I already had a mother.”
Chris had grown up in a large, voluble Italian family. She had heard something about a possible half-sibling somewhere, but had never explored it.
Jodeen, however, was an only child, a lonely kid who remembers taking herself out to breakfast on Saturday mornings when she was 9 or 10.
She pursued a search more vigorously. She knew Rayma’s name from an adoption document her parents had given her. With that in hand, she sought information through classified ads and hired a private investigator.
She learned that in the latter days of her pregnancies, Rayma had bunked with an old high school friend in Ventura. And she found Lester Quandt’s name in Ventura County birth records. Scouring phone books in Texas and Arkansas, she found his family in Little Rock.
Eager to help, her adoptive mother steered her to the family’s longtime Ventura doctor--who, it turned out, had arranged both adoptions when the girls were newborns. That is when she learned about this sister in Sacramento, the daughter of the doctor’s dear old friends, Gino and Angie.
“At first it was such a weird thing having a sister,” Jodeen said. “Now it’s like, well, kind of normal.”
Through the years, the two grew close.
“We always talked about being two blue-haired old ladies in wheelchairs whipping around together,” Chris said.
Four years ago, she moved to Ventura.
Today, Rayma is in a nursing home. Lester is dead, but his children introduced the sisters around at a Labor Day family reunion in Arkansas.
“These are Lester’s girls from California,” one of his sons said. “Didn’t you know that daddy once had a little honey?”
“Why, that Lester!” an aunt marveled.
Divorced mothers of grown children, Chris and Jodeen keep in touch with four half-sisters and half-brothers. Jodeen’s adoptive parents have died, but the sisters see Gino and Angie frequently.
More urgently, they do the cooking and pay the rent and schmooze with the customers at their new deli on Thompson Boulevard.
Appealing to “Santa Polenta,” a priest blessed the deli last month. Then the sisters threw a banquet for 50, with lasagna, prime rib, roast turkey and Italian green beans.
Chris grew up in Sacramento’s famed Corti Brothers grocery, where her father loved to run around the counter with hunks of salami for delighted children. She knows her way around a risotto. She jokes that Jodeen “grew up thinking it’s OK to cook your pasta for 30 minutes.”
Jodeen has since learned the meaning of al dente. Still, Chris handles most of the cooking while Jodeen takes care of business.
“I’m the kitchen,” Chris said. “She’s the ka-ching.”
