by Patti Abbott
I sat on the porch steps, not wanting to go into the house. It wasn't long until Zentz, nearly as weathered as his truck, came out of the barn to introduce himself. He thanked me for allowing him the good fortune of having first pick of the farm equipment.
"I'll sell what I can't use. Happy to give you the profit."
I was telling him for what seemed like the fiftieth time that this place had nothing to offer me, when a younger version of Farmer Zentz came running out of the barn with a tattered tan satchel in his hand.
"Pa. Pa. What do you make of this?"
He reached the porch and remembered his manners long enough to tip his hat to me.
"Pa. Look."
He set it down on the ground between his father and me. Satisfied he had our attention, the boy used his kerchief to clear away the layers of dust along the inflexible rim and he pulled the sides wide open. Dust billowed out, as if making room for sunlight that flooded into the bag and reflected on ancient bones. Tiny bones. Tucked among them was a green rubber pretzel.
Granny kept her promise. My little girl still has her remembrance of me.
†
Wendy came home at six, done-in after six hours of unpacking donations at the Center. There was always at least one "ugh" moment—which was why the receiving clerk was advised to wear gloves. Today, badly stained baby clothes had been pitched into a soggy-bottomed carton. Spit-up, pureed peas, and sweet potatoes, Wendy guessed, tossing the whole thing into a recycling bin. She'd be assigned to some other task after tomorrow, thank God. It was an awful job, paying minimum wage, but the only sort of work available after her previous employer, a fine arts book store, closed overnight.
As she hung up her jacket in the foyer, Wendy could see the girls were sitting on the sofa doing that cat's cradle thing again with a skein of maroon yarn. A pointless exercise as far as she could tell, another excuse to entwine themselves in a way that couldn't be called odd—though it was. It was weird when they were eight, weirder still at thirteen.
Tying knots was another recent obsession. They'd come home from a library book sale with an old Boy Scout handbook and learned to tie each of the fancifully named knots. They'd insisted on buying the recommended gauged rope at a marine supply store, so everything was by the book—or shipshape—as the guy behind the counter said. She'd no idea there were so many types of knots and worried that a future as dominatrices awaited the girls. Where did these interests come from?
Unlike other mothers of teenage children, she'd give anything to have them texting friends, listening to questionable music, watching movies on their phones. The girls didn't need electronic devices to communicate with each other; they didn't even have to open their mouths. It was as if an invisible wire went from one head to the other. What did that doctor call it? Idioglossia? But idioglossia used signs and made-up words. The twins used a sort of telepathic communication. Shaking her head, she ignored their cradling—having been told many times that disregarding it was the best way to handle minor behavioral abnormalities.
"Do I draw the line at knives?" she'd asked only last week. "That's the next chapter in the book. The proper care and handling of penknives. I called the B.S.A. and was told there was no official policy on the use of knives. It appears that camp-crafting is dependent on penknives for various tasks. It's strictly a troop decision. I didn't have the guts to tell the guy it was two girls following the manual—not an official troop."
"The Boy Scout organization dates from a different era," her therapist told her. He had that soothing tone in his voice again. "Pioneering skills were practical a century ago. Many of the kids came from rural areas. They often belonged to the 4-H group too."
Did he really think she didn't know all of this? "Next I think they're on to building campfires. Don't you think all this interest in potential weaponry is leading to something?" She could feel a rope tightening around her neck.
"You're allowing your imagination to run away with you. Save your concern for behavior with a violent or misanthropic aspect to it," one doctor or another (she changed doctors frequently) had told her whenever she mentioned the mind games they liked to inflict on her, or the way she was excluded from their inner lives. There was plenty of worrisome stuff to discuss. She flopped down on his or her sofa once every fortnight and spilled her guts for 50 minutes. Her ex-husband paid for it as part of the divorce settlement. He'd put up almost no fuss when the item "therapy for Wendy" appeared on the settlement papers.
"Don't you think it's the girls who need therapy though?" he asked her. But they seemed quite content in the world they'd created. It was she who suffered from insomnia, anxiety, self-pity.
"Hey, girls! No homework tonight?" she asked with a false gaiety, beginning to remove the items she needed from the fridge. She could swear she'd bought baby carrots, but only a bag of limp regular-sized spears greeted her. The girls only ate certain foods and baby carrots were a staple. Like two blurry rabbits, they dashed back and forth to the fridge all day long loading up on them. She could hear them crunching from their bedroom at night, the sound rising as her insomnia took hold.
"It's Friday," they said in unison, laughing at both her forgetfulness and their spontaneous response. Judith's voice, as usual, was a half-note ahead of Lilith's. She was always the leader, and in the rare instances the two were separated, Lilith seemed unsure of what to do—as if her plug had come undone.
"Of course. Silly old me." Now that she worked six days a week, Friday night had lost all of its meaning.
They looked up for a minute, and she felt their otherness flow across the room. It was like something physical—a current perhaps—and she stepped back. Their faces showed little interest in the object of their gaze—their mother. Their respect had disappeared when their father left, swirling down the drain even more quickly when she took the job as an hourly worker at the resale shop. Wendy looked enviously at mother-daughter duos coming into the store to peruse the racks together. Just the other day, she watched a teenager share a text message with her mother. Oh, for such inclusion. Producing two of them insured her future as a useless appendage.
Teary eyed, she watched her blonde-haired daughters merge in a swirl of late afternoon sunlight and dust motes. They especially enjoyed sitting on that sofa, knowing somehow that the mellow light of late afternoon enhanced their beauty, that the soft apricot fabric was especially flattering. The mirror, on the wall across from the sofa, made their number swell to four. Every few minutes, one or both glanced in the mirror, smiling at what they saw. Wendy wondered what it was like to take such pleasure in your image. Oh, how empowering to be confident of just rewards and certain outcomes. Her mother had drummed such assurance out of her long before thirteen, convincing her that she was careless, untidy, thick-headed.
If Bill were still available for household chores, she'd have him take the mirror down and replace it with her grandmother's wedding ring quilt—a piece of work that reflected a hardscrabble life during the Depression, where beauty and warmth were made with your hands, not found in a mirror.
On learning they were expecting twins fourteen years ago, Bill was so taken with the idea that he tracked down a woman out west who made bronze casts of pregnant bellies. The woman advertised her sculptures as "stomachs of copper" that would be a permanent celebration of the months of pregnancy. They'd sent for the material, called a Mama's Belly Casting Kit, and spent an evening laying plaster strips across her belly. The cast pulled away after a while, and then they packed it up and mailed it off, wrapped in the simple pages of newspaper recommended by the sculptor. Six weeks later, the twins already born, it came back, a copper bowl with a gong. It was grotesquely large to her, never having really seen herself full on. It was a miracle her abdomen hadn't split open like a fallen watermelon.
According to the website, each bowl made a different sound. Theirs was quite deep and resounding. She'd been skeptical, but the bowl was lovely despite its almost macabre presence in their house. She never found a pr
oper place for it so it drifted from the dining room table, to the fireplace, to the coffee table. Sometimes she filled it with flowers; other times fruit. At Christmas it was stuffed with pine cones and greens. But mostly it sat empty now, a sad reminder of the hopefulness from that period of her marriage. Occasionally they'd demonstrate the gong, mostly to explain its purpose to a visitor. Whereas once it sounded reassuring, it now made the loneliest sound she could name.
After studying the literature on twins fourteen years ago, Bill and Wendy decided to dress the girls differently and gave them individual, non-gender specific toys, trying to encourage separate identities. As soon as the twins could remove their dissimilar clothes, they did so, running naked through the house until she gave in and bought the identical outfits they craved. They shared a single toy at a time, passing it back and forth, fashioning clothes for the stuffed rabbit or bear or dog they preferred to play with from the clothing they no longer wore.
Strange incidents and interests were commonplace with the girls. They'd come upon a set of jacks, tucked away in a box from Wendy's mother's childhood, and played the game incessantly between the age of eight and ten. They liked games where they could work together, and if the rules didn't offer that option, they altered them. With the game of jacks, one of them tossed the ball and the other scooped the jacks.
"But you're missing the point," she told them. "It's doing both things at once that's the trick. Whoever picks up the most jacks without dropping the ones in his hand wins."
They looked at her like she was speaking Portuguese.
"Oh, Mother," Judith finally said. "Where's the fun in that?"
Starting very early on, both girls refused to answer to their given names: Charlotte and Sophie. By the age of eight, they'd renamed themselves, announcing they were to be called Judith and Lilith.
"How did they come up with those names?" Bill had asked her. "Wasn't Lilith some horrible creature?"
"Lilith was a demon," Wendy said. "And Judith beheaded a man."
"Nice," he said. "You've got yourselves some girls there."
Bill often ignored his role in the procreation of their children. Sometimes she wished she'd beaten him in his flight—wondering what her life might be like without the girls. But mothers can't do such things without becoming a pariah. And he'd have murdered the twins by now, having only the vaguest affection for his daughters.
"Can someone set the table?" she asked now, turning the skimpy chops over in the pan. Chops like these would never have turned up on her table four years ago. She looked up. "Girls?" she said, raising her voice.
In their former home, one that Bill paid for with his large salary as a trial attorney, it might've taken some time to find the twins, and they might not have heard her call. This house, however, was less than 1000 square feet, and they could hear her bellow from any corner. Sullenly they returned to the room, silently setting the table. How much longer would they even pay attention? Could you make a sixteen-year old set a table if she didn't care to? Lilith perhaps. But never Judith.
But then her mood lifted as she remembered that she had a date tomorrow night. Something good had actually happened. And right at the work place she so dreaded. A nice-looking man came in, carrying several boxes of kitchenware.
"I can get a tax receipt for this, right?" he asked, struggling to lower the boxes without the top one slipping off.
She waved the form at him. "You bet. Just fill this out and I'll sign it."
"Do you guys put a value on the stuff? Is that how it works?"
"No. But you can find a list of the amounts you can claim online," she said. "A general idea of what the government allows."
"It's my mother's stuff," he said when he saw her eyeing a robe. "She died a few months ago, and I am just getting her things sorted out."
"Must be an awful job."
In fact, she knew this to be true. Her own mother had died last year. The hardest chore had been deciding what to do with photographs of relatives that no one, including Wendy, could put a name to. Throwing these photos out, disposing of perhaps the last proof of their existence, seemed wrong. In the end, she shredded the pictures of relatives she couldn't name, along with half the ones she could.
Now that the boxes sat on the table, she could see there was no band on his finger. "Are you doing this all by yourself?"
"Looks like it. My brother's doing the financial stuff. Lena—my sister's—filling out various forms. So I probably got off the easiest." He smiled. "But I'm the one with the muscle."
"I can see that," she said.
Somehow they moved on to a time to meet for a drink after work. She panicked over what to tell the girls. In the four years that Bill'd been gone, she'd never been on a date—or even out much at night with friends. So she lied, telling the twins she was meeting a fellow employee for coffee. They seemed supremely uninterested. A few days went by, and then Craig called her, suggesting dinner on Saturday night.
Friday night dinner with the girls was the silent affair it usually was—with her, unsuccessfully, trying to get a conversation going. If the girls talked at dinner, it was with each other. Wendy was only called upon for money, her approval of a school trip, a car ride to some event, help with a task they couldn't complete on their own. They never shared anything important with either parent.
They put the dishes in the dishwasher while she wiped the counters and table. Finally, in desperation, she turned on the kitchen radio. Her go-to station played music from the eighties, a period the girls loathed. She saw them rolling their eyes.
"Do you mind if I change the station," Judith asked. Before she could answer, Judith had found something unpleasantly riotous, driving Wendy from the room.
Just as life seemed about as desperate as it could be, the phone rang.
"Checking in to see what sort of food you like," Craig said, his voice deep and soothing. Since Bill left, her life was composed almost entirely of sopranos and she'd missed the baritone she now heard.
"I like any food that someone else prepares," she said. Did that sound desperate or funny? There was a line between the two that she couldn't find with a map.
"How about Italian? That's usually a safe bet."
They agreed on a time, and she hung up feeling good. She liked the idea that he'd consulted her before making a reservation. Bill never had—just assuming whatever he liked was appealing to everyone. If he ever thought about it at all.
The phone rang again.
"Listen, can the girls come next weekend instead of this one," Bill said, not bothering with any niceties. "Something's come up."
"This is like the third time this month that you've disappointed them."
"Do you really think they give a shit, Wendy?"
"Actually, I have plans."
Not even bothering to ask what, he sighed. "Look, okay, I'll have to pick them up early though. And I might have to go out for a few hours. They can stay alone, right. They do it all the time after school, don't they?"
"Of course. They are thirteen." Another woman, she thought to herself. He went through women like a horny teenager.
"Last time they were here—well look—is thirteen this witchy with other girls?"
For a split second, she considered asking what they did. But when Bill said the very things that she herself thought, it always made her mad. And this was no exception.
"You know, Bill, both girls feel your disapproval—you give off a vibe—even over the phone." There was a lot more she could say, but she stopped there. One of the doctors had told her that if she stopped speaking—just a sentence or two before she felt finished—she'd avoid airing her most hostile and hurtful remarks. It did work when she could bear to do it.
"You can't tell me they aren't weird. We've known that since they were two. Maybe even earlier. Last time they were here, I caught them performing some sort of ceremony with candles out in the garden."
"They just do it to get you going." At least, she hoped that was true. "Look
, at thirteen, I wrote poetry about death. Kids stuck anonymous letters in my locker at school. My mother refused to let me shave my legs or wear makeup. I was the last kid I knew to see "Thriller" on MTV. Thirteen's tough." Wendy remembered applying makeup after leaving the house, but those hairy legs were more difficult to deal with.
"Jeez, if I'd known all this twenty years ago we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. I might have still married you, but I wouldn't have had kids." He chuckled. "What were the anonymous letters about?"
What were they about? Maybe her hairy legs. "Oh, just kid stuff," she told him. But thinking back on it, more than one note accused her of being a witch. Some of the kids had called her Carrie, in fact. Had she been as strange as her girls? She wished her mother was still alive to ask. Or had she guarded her secrets as closely as the twins guarded theirs? Her mother had not been the type of woman a teenager confided in. Was she?
"And as for your hairy legs. They kept me warm on winter nights more than once."
Like a heat-seeking weapon, he never shied from the kill. "You did call for a favor, right?"
"Yeah, I'll pick them up right after gymnastics. Still into that, right?"
"It's practically the only time they leave the house."
Both girls were extremely agile so gymnastics made sense. She would've preferred them to take up a team sport—like softball or soccer, but gymnastics was better than nothing. They didn't really care for the competitions though and often claimed to be sick in order to avoid them. Their coach chided her for not pushing them harder.
"They could win trophies at a lot of these meets," he told her. "Boost the program and their team mates."
Wendy didn't care that they didn't care. She was happy to get them out of the house for a few hours three or four times a week. Both girls excelled in the floor exercises and the vault. They'd worked up a joint floor performance, which was strictly illegal according to the International Federation of Gymnastics.