Pekko didn’t speak and didn’t move, and then he did move, and made a sound—the sound a child makes, breathing in so as to get enough breath to sob, the undercry before the crying. But Pekko didn’t cry. He walked into the other room, and I stood and followed him. Now I stood while he sat down heavily in a lounge chair I’d bought him for his birthday the first year we lived together. He said, “Daphne’s claiming there’s trash in the backyard of her building.”
I was glad to change the subject. “Is there?”
“Sure. I’m paying someone to take care of the place, but you only get so much.”
“I guess she wants her kids to play outside.”
“She says she wants to put in a garden.”
“She has a lot of energy.”
“Energy to leave phone messages.”
But he wasn’t changing the subject. “When you start looking at things the way Skeetling does,” he said, “and I don’t mean just because he’s a professor—when you start doing that but you can’t see the whole picture, you get it wrong.”
“Daphne gets things wrong?”
“I have to allocate the resources I have. How does she think I charge cheap rents?”
“Daphne’s not like Gordon Skeetling.”
“A partial view,” he said, sitting up and clamping his hands on his knees. “She’s not like him. She just doesn’t know, and she’s not too bright. He’s very bright.”
“He’s very intelligent. Why are you assuming this conference is Gordon’s idea? Really, Pekko, it’s mine. Fight with me if you want.”
“It sounds like him. It’s a way of looking at things as if they weren’t attached to one another. If it’s your idea, you had it in his office.”
I said, “So he’s a manipulator and you’re not? You think you’re aboveboard and he’s sneaky? What about Denny Ring?”
“Denny Ring?” said Pekko. Denny had introduced me to Pekko in the first place, one summer night when Denny and I were walking and we stuck our heads into Pekko’s frozen yogurt store. Pekko and I began dating, if that’s what to call it, and he was enraged when he found out that I’d slept with Denny, that Denny wasn’t just a young friend I counseled and helped. “Aren’t you the one who did a little manipulating in that department?” he said now.
“I mean his death, Pekko,” I said quietly. I hadn’t mentioned what Charlotte had told me a few weeks ago. I’d been saving it. Now it would let me put together this conference in peace. Maybe. “When he died, you told me he broke into the store.”
“And he did.”
“You didn’t tell me he was in the habit of breaking in. That he broke in every night. That he lived there.”
“How did you know that?” said Pekko, rising, troubled; his face changed. How can I put it? His beard was suddenly sticking out at a different angle or something. “How did you know that?”
He had kept it a secret, and I knew he’d mind that I knew. He likes his secrets. “You’re not the only one in this city who hears things and knows things,” I said. “And I wish you’d leave me alone to act on what I know. To try and make sense of what I know.”
He left the room. He barely spoke to me for days, but then he said nothing more about the conference.
I wrote the above and then walked around the house for an hour, picking things up and putting them down, trying to remember exactly what I knew about Denny in the months before his death, years before that conversation with Pekko. Why didn’t I know then that he was living in the store? If I had known, would I have considered it a problem to be solved, or just one more charming fact about that youngster, that dangerous child? I loved him for his unpredictability, his strangeness, his madness. He needed social workers and agencies, and I provided sex, talk, and an appreciation of his imagination, in his last months. Once, he rang the doorbell of my apartment at six in the morning. Pekko and I were seeing each other a few times a week then, but not living together. I’d sworn to Pekko I had nothing to do with Denny, and often I didn’t. I never knew when I’d see him. That time, I was furious at being awakened, then interested in being lured out so early. He didn’t want sex that day, just a walk in the dawn and breakfast out—which I could pay for—as soon as someplace opened. I don’t remember asking where he’d spent the night. If I had, he’d have lied. But if he hadn’t lied—if he’d told me he spent it in the back of Pekko’s store—I might have thought sleeping there regularly was a good plan for this mercurial person. Maybe it was a good plan. If Denny had lived, settled down, and become, say, a drug counselor—or settled down still further and finished college—we’d consider the period when he lived in Pekko’s store a helpful transition. Pekko would be a benefactor because he let it happen, pretending he didn’t know. Which is surely what he thought at the time. The day Denny woke me at six, he wanted to look at birds: it must have been spring, when itinerant songbirds pass through East Rock Park. “I didn’t know you were a bird-watcher,” I said.
“Birder,” said Denny. “Let’s find the black-crowned night heron.”
“Where is it on its way to?”
“Oh, it lives here.” But we couldn’t find it that morning, and Denny got hungry before long.
For TheaDora’s grown-up dress, Muriel and I went to Horowitz Brothers, where we first examined tall rolls of African cottons, tables of velvet and corduroy remnants, patterned upholstery fabrics rolled on long cardboard tubes. “I have to see what’s new,” Muriel said, moving with her usual abruptness from table to table, then stopping to grasp silk in her hands—briskly, as if she considered steel. Now that it was summer, Muriel’s purple jacket was gone and she wore a purple tunic with her jeans. Her hair still stuck out in all directions. She had told me she worked as a crossing guard when her children were young, and that notion was so right I wondered if I’d ever driven past her corner. I could almost say I remembered a somewhat younger Muriel making the cars stop in every direction, holding them with her taut stance, her swiftly raised hands, while children scurried. Muriel and I bought eleven yards of a dark blue muted cotton print, and two yards of white piqué for trim. I had favored red and yellow, but Muriel talked me out of it. The dress would have long, roomy sleeves with French cuffs. Elastic at her wrists, Muriel said, would make TheaDora look like a rag doll or a child.
I thought French cuffs would be too hard, but Muriel scoffed. “Interfacing to give them shape,” she said. She leaned on a counter near men’s suitings, where it was quiet, and drew diagrams. Both of us avoided telling the salespeople what we were doing. We chose thread and zippers—two neckline zippers and one huge one, intended for upholstery—and half a dozen big white buttons.
Muriel had come to Horowitz Brothers by bus, so I drove her home, to a small brick house in Hamden. “Do you have time to work on it now?” I said, when we drew up to the curb. “Can I stay?” It was about five.
“I figured you’d help.”
Inside, we had a glass of water, standing in her kitchen—which looked more conventional than I’d have expected—then moved to her daughter’s old bedroom, with matching maple furniture I didn’t care for. In a hurry to begin, Muriel spread the fabric on the desk, then began cutting out the sleeves, measuring on her own arm, snipping and tearing the cloth. “Sleeves are the part I’ve done before,” she said. “Sleeves are like any sleeves.” Then she said, “But roomier. Dolls don’t have to move.”
She made the French cuffs, and I hemmed them into place, once she’d approved of my hemming. I started moving toward the door after that was done, but Muriel said, “You stay while I think this bodice. I have to think aloud.” She didn’t give me another job for a while, except listening. The phone rang, and she closed the bedroom door. I could hear her voice raised. She was flustered when she returned, and almost stumbled, snatching at a chair back. I went for Chinese takeout, and we ate a quick supper in her kitchen, which was full of appliance covers appliquéd with apples. Other than that, I sat on the bed with my shoes off and watched.
The sleeves waited, drape
d on a chair back. Spreading the dark blue fabric on her daughter’s old desk, cutting and pinning, pressing every seam on an ironing board, Muriel made two fronts with deep bust darts and sewed them together. A line of white buttons would run down the front of the bodice, but the dress would open in back, with the upholstery zipper. The waist could be nipped in a bit, even though there would be two of us, because TheaDora would have such wide shoulders. Muriel had me sew on the buttons, checking to make sure I spaced them evenly. “Did that phone call upset you?” I asked.
She stopped and looked at me, her glasses flashing in the light so she suddenly looked older, almost an old lady. “Family.”
She cut two wide pieces for the back, swiftly positioning her shears and gliding them boldly through the fabric. Then she stitched the big zipper in place. She pinned the front to the back, turned it inside out, brought a plate from her kitchen, and traced two evenly spaced necklines between the shoulders. “Our heads have to be far enough apart so we don’t get our earrings tangled,” she said, as if she was sure she and I would wear the dress. Muriel wore big hoop earrings, and I like dangling ones. She took her big shears and cut two arcs, then slashed straight lines down the back below each neckhole. “For the zippers.”
At last we crowded in front of the dresser mirror and put our heads through. Muriel had placed the holes correctly, and we could turn our heads, standing side by side with our inner arms not quite touching, our earrings in no danger.
“We’re the same height,” I said. I discovered that I wanted badly to be Thea or Dora. I liked the look of Muriel and me in the mirror, our black and white faces—both bossy, but each in a different way—her poky, graying hair and my longer, blond hair. We backed up carefully and began to laugh at the discovery that, because the row of white buttons marked a middle, we did look like one person. We looked like a woman with two heads.
“Now I can finish alone,” said Muriel, and for a second I felt the kind of desolation I supposed Thea or Dora would feel if the other said that. But it was close to midnight. I’d have stayed up all night to be the first to see the whole dress, but along with the rest of the cast I saw it finished a few days later, at the rehearsal. Muriel arrived slightly late, carrying a garment bag from which she drew the blue dress, holding it high and fluffing it. We laughed and cheered. She’d made two demure white collars at the necklines, she’d sewed in the neckline zippers, attached the sleeves, and sewed the side seams. The skirt was lightly gathered from a dropped waist. It fell to the floor with a deep, tightly gathered flounce to conceal four shoes.
All the adults tried the dress on—all possible pairs, even men—while Justine and Mo watched quietly and Cindy instructed everybody. Two by two, we carefully unzipped the big back zipper so as to climb in. We clutched each other and took care not to step on the fabric. As each pair took it off, the next two would withdraw a bit, turn aside, give each other advice, and put on the dress. Someone would run over and zip them up. Then we’d watch, and they’d walk toward us.
The men seemed tense but excited at being in the dress, and the women loved it. It was a dress out of a child’s daydream, a daydream of being grown-up in a distant time, when women flounced and were glamorous. But being a two-headed person felt right, too, like something we dimly recollected from before birth. Were human beings once two-headed? Would a two-headed skeleton in a cave be the next discovery of some paleontologist?
For those not wearing the dress, perception suddenly changed, over and over. Two people were lost, laughing, in a swirl of cloth. And then a two-headed woman—a great big two-headed lady, with white buttons down her front—would stride across the room toward us. Over and over, we’d clutch ourselves, as if to make sure that, sitting there, we continued to retain the uncertain status we’d thought, until now, was inevitable—the privilege and doom of being one.
When my mother had a cold, around that time, she asked me to substitute for her at the soup kitchen, and there I found Daphne, who explained that she still owed some hours of community service. She happened to be standing between two fat people, behind a big vat of salad, and she looked tiny. But Daphne was tough, quick to refuse requests for extra tomatoes, shaking her head side to side so her light brown hair swung. I stood between her and a woman serving spaghetti. I handed out spoonfuls of canned peas, which many turned down. Daphne seemed just like Cindy, with Cindy’s pointy roughness, like a tree that remains stubbornly twiggy and unleafed, deep into spring. I realized how intimately I’d come to know Cindy, her quick speech and hard little elbows, her body bumping into me as we all sprawled on the floor or scrambled to our feet. But I rather liked Cindy, while Daphne unnerved me. As before, her face when she wasn’t speaking was defended, a little too flat. She concentrated on serving. “You got four pieces of tomato. You have nothing to complain about, Frank.”
The line speeded up, then slowed. I had time to look over the room, where a few dozen people, mostly men, ate their supper, some in conversation with those around them at the long tables, others looking down at their aluminum trays. As always, I noticed the incongruities—the people who didn’t look to me like street people—and as always I sensed calm in that room, a shared noncommittal glance that did not make judgments, at least about feeling—that let me, for one, feel what I liked, though I always feel what I like. What I liked feeling that day was desire for Gordon.
At Daphne’s left, a tall, gray-haired black man served bread and pastries. I’d seen him each time I was there, and once he told me he was a retired school custodian and now volunteered at the soup kitchen several times a week. “So how are you doing, Miss Daphne?” he asked, when the line subsided.
“Can’t complain,” Daphne said, and then both said in chorus, “But I do!”
He laughed silently, and I wondered if the joke was his or hers or even my mother’s. “You know my mom?” I asked him. “Her name is Roz.”
“Gabby,” said Daphne.
“Oh, sure, Gabby. We call her Gabby,” said the man. “She claims she’s older than I am.”
There followed boring joviality about my mother’s age, my age, and so on. Daphne said she was forty-four. Then she said, “Your mom isn’t the easiest lady I ever worked for.”
“No?” I said.
“The easiest lady I ever worked for,” she said, “wasn’t a lady at all. She was a transvestite. I was supposed to think she was a lady. That was the only hard part.”
“You mean a man?” said my neighbor on the other side.
“What did you do for her?” I said.
“I cleaned, but she didn’t care, she just wanted to talk. Your mom likes to talk, too, but she’s mad if I don’t get anything done.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Regular girl stuff. Men.”
“I didn’t think my mother had much to say about men.”
“You’d be surprised. We talk about Pekko a lot, of course. You can always talk about Pekko. She tries to figure him out. I gave up long ago.” She seemed to think I’d take it for granted that Pekko had been her lover.
I was furious. I was supposed to agree that figuring out Pekko is a challenging pastime, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t make friends with her, and certainly not over that. I had to say something, so I said, “He says you’re a good carpenter.”
Daphne had repaired and refinished that staircase in Pekko’s single-room-occupancy building, and had now moved on to other projects there. Pekko said she was doing a decent job, and cleaning up after herself, unlike her predecessors. My mother complained that Daphne was slow.
“I’m great,” she said. “I know how to make joints and everything. These jobs don’t use half of what I know.”
“Why don’t you work for a cabinetmaker?”
“Cabinetmakers are particular,” Daphne said. “I don’t do well with particular people.”
Suppertime was almost over, and soon we carried the remaining food into the kitchen. I found myself standing near Daphne again as we scrubbed a table
top. The room had emptied. “Pekko’s hitting on me,” she said, squeezing out a rag in a bucket of hot water. “I thought you should know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, you’ll have to deal with it,” I said, moving toward the kitchen.
Daphne spoke a little louder. I moved closer to her again, so she’d quiet down. “He’s trying to buy me off,” she said. “If I get good sex, I’m not going to mind having roaches in my kitchen and a leaky bathtub. Maybe that was me ten years ago, but now I’ve got kids. And I’m sorry to say this about your husband, but he’s not as attractive as he once was.”
“And I suppose you’re getting prettier every year,” I said. Yet she was ten years younger than I. I wasn’t going to cry, and I wasn’t so angry I’d scream, but I was hurt, hurt for my husband—and for myself. I glanced at my watch, said, “Have to leave,” before Daphne could answer me, waved a good-bye to the people who ran the place, and left the building. In the last weeks I’d sometimes imagined Gordon, Pekko, and me as a lighthearted movie trio, an unlikely but blessed grouping that would never saunter together down a street in Paris or New York but should. But in my mind now, interesting Gordon stepped confidently on along the sidewalk, while Pekko and I remained behind—old, clumsy, undignified.
It wasn’t Daphne’s opinion of Pekko that hurt, I understood the next afternoon. It was that she considered me so weak that she could wound me with a sentence or two. Lying in Gordon’s bed, I had a sudden nostalgia for the day, not long ago, when I’d planned to sleep with him only once more, and had even thought I might stop where I was and just save that last time. If I still had that choice, I thought illogically, Daphne couldn’t hurt me.
“What are you thinking, lover?” said Gordon from his postcoital position next to me, under the thick, ivory-colored sheet. Now he propped himself up on his elbow as if to see which lover I might be, his straight, gray hair flopping down on his forehead, his blue eyes studying me.
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 14