Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

by Alice Mattison

  “Sending Edmund Doyle to prison accomplishes nothing,” he said at last. “It does only harm, no good.”

  “You could argue that upholding the law accomplishes something,” I said, even though it was what Gordon would have said. “You could argue that he did commit murder.”

  “I don’t see things that way,” Pekko said.

  I left Pekko in the tub and walked downstairs to feed Arthur and start supper. I wondered momentarily if Pekko would leave me. I’d done two wrongs, I thought, as I peeled an onion. I had told Gordon about Edmund, and I’d quit the play for fear of embarrassment. But I’m the woman who’s good half the time. I couldn’t turn into someone three quarters good. Still, I didn’t want to reduce my average. That night I called Katya to ask for my part back. She was glad. Angry but glad. “Ellen and Muriel wasn’t a combination that worked,” she said, after sounding angry for a while.

  We rehearsed almost every night for the final two weeks, and at last we had a play, which most of us memorized. Denise spoke in a singsong when given a script, but Katya was able to get her to improvise over again, so what she said came out slightly different each time but sounded natural. The play was to be performed with no backdrop but with several large, colorful props made by Daphne and friends of hers—cheerfully gnarled trees—and objects borrowed by Ellen, who knew how to get objects. Katya recorded some songs, and the play began with music. There was music as well in between scenes, and of course at the wedding, about which we had some disagreement. Tradition won out: we had Wagner for the processional and Mendelssohn for the recessional. “Definitely traditional,” I had said, my first day back. I was instantly full of opinions about the play, once again. I suppose I should have been humble, but I wasn’t. When I first walked in, Muriel took my head in her hands and held it so tightly it hurt, for a long time, staring at me. Then she ducked my head roughly into her chest and kissed my hair.

  “It’s funnier if it’s traditional,” I persisted, later that same evening.

  “Is the wedding supposed to be funny?” said Jonah.

  He was upset when he realized that Thea and Dora were having secular weddings. “It needn’t be Christian, if that’s a problem,” he said to me, and I realized that he’d figured out I’m Jewish, the only Jewish cast member. “We could have a rabbi perform the ceremony if you’d rather,” he continued. “But I think a religious wedding would be more seemly, don’t you?”

  “In real life, I’ve been married twice, both by judges,” I said, and Jonah looked disappointed, but the list of characters already included a judge (who was formerly a doctor), and we thought it would be confusing to have Denise play a minister, priest, or rabbi at that point. The cast also included a minister, Jonah, in the baptism scene, but by the time we reached the wedding, Jonah was one of the grooms—mine. We did add a nondenominational prayer, to be spoken by the only adult actor who was not in the wedding, Chantal. Chantal could sing gospel, it turned out, so we added a gospel song at the end of the wedding, just before Mendelssohn. It made me choke up every time, but I didn’t have to speak at that point.

  Katya had come up with a donation from a printer, and a friend willing to design a poster, and my mother did a good job with publicity. A week before the play, stories ran in the Register and the Advocate, and posters appeared in store windows all over town. We had eight performances altogether. I knew I wouldn’t feel bad about Gordon—not truly bad—until they were all over. It was good to postpone that pain (which, in its time, was considerable). Now I cared only about the play. I had vowed to behave myself, returning, but from the first I was arguing my complicated positions as forcefully as ever and taking people aside to give them hints. Chantal habitually said “flustrated” for “frustrated.” She looked hurt when I mentioned it, and at the next rehearsal she still said “flustrated.”

  “It’s not important,” whispered Muriel firmly, when I tensed up as that happened. We had just climbed into the blue dress and were pacing back and forth in the back of the theater, feeling our way into the rhythm of our double walk.

  “I’m cranky,” I said. Then, “Pekko’s mad at me.” He was distant, not angry. Muriel and I had a little time. Now that the parts were fixed, we weren’t needed much at the beginning of the play. Chantal and David played TheaDora’s parents, Denise was the doctor and the teacher. Before we got dressed, Muriel and I were extra students in the childbirth preparation class, and neighbors who commented on the two-headed baby.

  “What did you do?” Muriel said.

  “How do you know I did something?”

  “I thought you might have.” Pace, pace, pace. We were in sync now, but we seemed to be marching. That evening, we were working on a stroll. Muriel took my hand, underneath the dress, and we strolled together.

  A two-headed person would not have told Pekko’s secret, I thought. People are supposed to have two heads. I said, “I gave away a secret. It hurt someone.”

  “That wasn’t right, Daisy.”

  “No.” Why wouldn’t a two-headed person have told? Because if she simply couldn’t keep quiet, she could tell the other head.

  “But he’ll forgive you,” Muriel said.

  I tried to keep that, tried to maintain the resolve I formed just then. The rehearsal took a long time. “Forgive,” I said to myself, several times, and when I walked into the living room that night, I said, “Please forgive me.”

  “Daisy,” Pekko said, turning off the TV and dropping the remote. Then he started to cry while Arthur greeted me. “If only I’d kept my mouth shut,” he said. He stood and sobbed without reaching for a tissue. Finally I brought him the box.

  “Maybe they won’t send him to prison,” I said.

  “They’ll send him to prison. Look, I have to forgive both of us.” He blew his nose. “My friend goes to prison, and I shed a tear and go to bed with my pretty wife,” he said. “It’s kind of disgusting.”

  “He did commit murder,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I can learn, I can change—but only so much.

  “He was a boy. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “Then it won’t be first degree.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pekko, do you want to stop being married?” I said, feeling afraid.

  For a long time, he didn’t speak. Then he said, “Sometimes it doesn’t seem to work.”

  “So . . .”

  “Do you want to end it?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “No, I never wanted to end it.”

  “Then we won’t,” said Pekko.

  We did go to bed. It did feel as if we’d been let off easy, though we hadn’t committed murder and Edmund had. You may feel—whoever you may be—that I should have taken the opportunity to tell Pekko exactly why I had told Gordon. I did not tell him.

  And that’s where I stopped writing, about a week ago. Then Stephen called. He called when I stood up to fix myself a cup of coffee after the words “tell him.” He was coming to town to see Roz the next day. I told him I’d been writing.

  “Oh. That thing you’re writing.”

  “That thing I’m writing.”

  “I want to see it.”

  I don’t know what I’ll do with this thing I’m writing, but at that moment showing it to someone, someone I loved, was enticing. “All right,” I said, and the next day I printed out everything I had and dropped it off at Roz’s. I saw Stephen for just a little while; I had dinner plans he persuaded me not to break. I think he likes being alone with my mother, whom he takes to a restaurant, lately, when he comes. Roz is a year and a half older than she was at the beginning of this narrative, half a year older than when I began writing, and like a child she is noticeably older, now, each year. It was a warm day. When I arrived, they were on their way into her house. They’d been sitting on chairs they’d carried outside. Roz walked while Stephen hovered over her, turned back to fuss with the chairs, watched to make sure Roz made it up the two steps into her front door before he turned again to retrieve
them. I was impatient, and I also thought maybe he was right to watch carefully. I handed him my big package. “What’s that?” said Roz.

  “Something about that conference I did,” I said half truthfully.

  After that I didn’t add to the narrative for days, and I wondered whether I should have shown it to my brother. He called tonight. “It’s interesting,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean you were a loser, Stephen.”

  “Oh, I am, in a way.”

  “You read the whole thing?”

  “Daisy,” he said, “I don’t think you understand it. You felt powerless but you had the power, you were the one who had the power. That man wasn’t breaking up with you.”

  “Didn’t I say that somewhere? Don’t I understand that?”

  “But that’s what you did wrong,” said my brother. “You failed to know you could make things happen. That you could hurt.”

  “You don’t mean Gordon?”

  “Edmund Doyle. What happened to Edmund Doyle?”

  “The trial hasn’t happened yet,” I said.

  “Why did you tell?” said Stephen. I didn’t answer, but I thought, I told the secret to keep everyone away. I was a whore who doesn’t know the name of the man in bed, a killer who turns a person to a thing.

  The houselights went down to complete darkness, and the audience hushed. Piano music by Schumann: happy-sad. Stage lights.

  “Did you sign up for childbirth preparation?” said the husband of the pregnant woman.

  “Shut up, I’m cooking.”

  The doctor was no help. “May I dance? May I eat?” said the woman.

  “None of the above.”

  “Leave me alone,” said the wife. “I want to suffer.”

  “I’m scared I’ll kill the baby,” said the husband.

  The doctor disappeared under the wife’s dress and came out holding a two-headed baby. The baby’s arms were slightly bent, and her legs were cutely plump. She wore a yellow nightgown. She had one dark head with black hair and staring black eyes, and one fair head with yellow hair and staring blue eyes.

  The doctor said, “She’s going to die. Better not love the baby.”

  A neighbor said, “If you nurse only one head, maybe the other will drop off.” A minister baptized the baby. “We must examine our thoughts about this child,” he said. “We must destroy prejudice in our hearts.” An uncle proposed cutting off one head. But the baby grew older and learned to talk. “I don’t like being squashed together with somebody,” said Thea, a forceful, dark head in a red dress.

  “You think I like it?” said Dora, a cool, blond head.

  “I don’t want you breathing on my face.”

  “I hate you.”

  Thea said, “I hate me too. I don’t want to be the same person as this white girl! Nobody understands what this is like!”

  “We have to go to the bathroom,” said Dora, now grown, in a big blue dress with Thea.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Thea said.

  The foreman at the construction project said, “You are not only a woman, you are of mixed race!”

  “We are two women,” said Dora.

  “No, we are a woman,” Thea said.

  And each fell in love, one with the foreman, one with another worker. They fought and left the job, brokenhearted. As they wandered in a forest, Dora witnessed a murder. The prosecutor and the defense attorney were their old boyfriends. The judge was the old doctor. The doctor said they were twins.

  “It’s not exactly a happy ending,” said Thea, “but at least we can marry two men.”

  Music by Wagner. A double wedding. “Do all of you promise to live as decently as you can in an extremely tight situation?” asked the judge.

  “We do,” said the brides and grooms.

  “And how about you in the audience?” the judge continued, stepping away from the bridal couples, because in the end, though I still wanted no moral, I was outvoted. “You’re also more closely connected than you might want to be. You also can’t get away from one another. Do you also promise to live together as decently as you can?”

  “We do,” said the audience. Mendelssohn. A recessional march, led by the brides and grooms, joined by brave or exhibitionistic members of the audience. Applause. Pekko and Roz watched from a back row, then joined the procession, she smiling, he unsmiling. Charlotte and Philip clapped, too shy to stand up and march. I clutched Muriel’s hand, wondering how I’d do without her when the performances were over, fearing I wouldn’t keep her. When the music stopped and the audience dispersed, Ellen came to hug us first. Maybe I’d keep Ellen, in the fast approaching future. Muriel’s moist body pulsed with excitement next to me. Her hand held mine, then let it go, and in the emptying theater we stood beside each other, tired and hot inside our big, white wedding gown.

  Acknowledgments

  Warm thanks to Paul Beckman, April Bernard, Susan Bingham, Donald Hall, Susan Holahan, Andrew Mattison, Edward Mattison, Zoe Pagnamenta, Jennifer Pooley, Sandi Kahn Shelton, Lezley TwoBears, and Claire Wachtel. Thanks also to the MacDowell Colony.

  All New Haven murder victims in this book are real except Marie Valenti. Everyone else is imaginary except the Shakespeare Lady, who is Margaret Holloway, and Henry Berliner of the unforgettable Foundry Bookstore.

  The following books were helpful:

  Anthony Griego, Patrol Officer, Department of Police Services, City of New Haven, “. . . Above and Beyond the Call of Duty: A Brief History of Policemen Who Have Died in the Performance of Their Duties, 1855–1970.” Unpublished book in Local History Room, New Haven Public Library.

  Rollin G. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638–1938. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.

  “Shooting Death of Malik Jones on April 14, 1997.” Unpublished book in Local History Room, New Haven Public Library.

  About the Author

  ALICE MATTISON grew up in Brooklyn, studied at Queens College and Harvard, and teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of three previous novels, three collections of short stories, and a volume of poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Agni, New York Stories, The Threepenny Review, and The Pushcart Prize. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  PRAISE FOR

  The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

  “Mattison’s voice is intelligent, spare, and without pretense. She lays out Daisy’s story in a way that makes it seem as if not much is happening, while quietly weaving in four or five intriguing subplots, including a murder mystery, a rent strike, and, toward the end, September 11. All these stories press in on Daisy in some meaningful way, each playing a role in her quest to come to terms with herself.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “[A] quietly splendid novel. . . . Alice Mattison has an instinct for the nuance of small moments between people; she captures each subtle shift in Daisy’s character with quirky insight.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Mattison’s writing gives the humdrum an edge we didn’t know it possessed.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Mattison beautifully describes the arc of the affair, as Daisy slips from woman in charge to woman in need. In Daisy, she creates a complicated woman who shows us self-discovery is a never-ending journey.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The confidential voice of this novel’s complex main character draws readers into [her] world with an almost magnetic power.”

  —Boston Herald

  PRAISE FOR

  The Book Borrower

  “In deceptively quiet, guileless prose, she has described the mind-numbing routine of child care and the fraught, complex relations of men and women. Only Margaret Atwood (in Cat’s Eye) has written as knowingly about the friendship between women. Emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized work.”
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br />   —New York Times Book Review

  “This excellent novel weaves the story of a 1921 trolley strike. . . . Mattison is concerned with the small decisions and coincidences that alter the course of our lives. Are they accidents, or impulses born of something deeper? Mattison’s observations are so minutely compelling that each one feels like a shiny object, once lost but found unexpectedly.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Extraordinary.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  PRAISE FOR

  Hilda and Pearl

  “Forgiving and wise, Hilda and Pearl is a memorable novel about love’s resilience.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Engaging . . . intuitive. . . . Mattison takes no shortcuts, but leads us down the long road her characters travel in learning to accept and endure.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Small fireworks of surprise detonate at intervals in this compelling narrative.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PRAISE FOR

  Men Giving Money, Women Yelling

  “Alice Mattison is a charmer. She’s one of those uncommon writers who is genuinely tickled by the ids and egos they commit to paper, and her characters bask—rather than squint—in the sunshine of her affectionate scrutiny. Men Giving Money, Women Yelling (is there an award for book title of the season?) is Mattison’s third collection of short fiction, and it’s crammed with characters—teachers, lawyers, social workers—who pop cleanly, if a bit frantically, off the page.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “If Mattison’s spry language and light touch belie her careful framing of events, they also blithely pave the way for her finely hewn endings, which in almost every story capture the unspoken charm and mystery of a character or a moment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mattison treats each of her loony, alternately bored and besotted characters with tenderness.”