The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  “What? You mean the high school I didn’t graduate from?”

  “You could get your high school equivalency first,” Ginny said quietly.

  “Sure. I’ll get on that as soon as you do.” And that was the end of that.

  When Ginny came home from work, Bill was asleep on the couch, empty beer cans lined up on the rug beside him. It all looked so familiar that Ginny felt a sharp twist in her stomach, as if this was the way she always knew they would end up. Her mother barked over the phone, “Has that redneck found a job yet?” And Ginny couldn’t lie because it already hurt too much. Even when he was granted a conditional discharge with no criminal record, Bill still said nothing as he ate lunch. Ginny tried to talk about the weather or who was on Phil Donahue but then gave up.

  After a few months, there was no money left, only the bank account that Bill knew nothing about. Ginny stared at her transaction booklet and felt her face bloom red and angry. She was not going to pay for his drinking with her money. She had saved it. It was hers.

  She watched him fail over and over again. In the mornings, when she got up and looked at his sleeping face in the half-light, she could see how the failure was dragging down his jaw, the endpoint of his nose. He was drooping with defeat, and she hated it. No one was going to hire a man with a face like that. A man who stared blankly ahead like a friendless, homeless dog afraid of its next beating. Ginny couldn’t kiss him or touch him, couldn’t even look at him without forming fists with her hands.

  It wouldn’t be long before they had to leave this house and move into another apartment with walls that let the winds blow through as if they were huddled in a tent made of muslin. This house was where her girls were going to grow up. They had agreed, but now she knew: he was never going to match her contributions.

  The next morning, still in her navy blue work pants and white shirt, Ginny kicked Bill’s hand as it dangled over the edge of the sofa. His eyelids fluttered and he ran his palm over his cheek, spreading out the drool, shiny in the pre-dawn light.

  “Just five more minutes,” he mumbled, burying his head further into the cushions.

  “No. Wake up.”

  Bill’s eyes were wide open now. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”

  “It’s almost six.”

  “I’m going back to sleep.”

  Ginny bent down, cupped her hand under his chin and stared into his eyes. “You’re going to get up and have a shower. When you’re done, you’re going to pack up all your clothes and get out of here. I don’t care where you go, just leave before the girls wake up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sick of this, Bill. I can’t support all four of us. You have to go.”

  Bill sat up, knocking over beer cans as he swung his feet on to the floor. “Like hell I am. If you want to get rid of me, then you go.”

  “How will you pay the rent without me? How will you cook for the girls? How will you do anything?” Ginny crossed her arms in front of her.

  “Listen to you. So high and mighty just because you have a job. I had a job once too, you know.”

  “Exactly. You had one. You don’t anymore.”

  Bill’s rage wilted. He lowered his head and spoke into his chest. “I can find a job, Ginny. Soon. Just give me a chance.”

  “I don’t give out chances. This is my life too. And you’re not going to wreck it.”

  Ginny turned around and opened the hall closet. She pulled out an old duffel bag and threw it into the living room. “You can have this. I never liked it anyway.”

  When the girls woke up, Ginny told them that their father wasn’t going to be living with them anymore. Casey blinked and said, “Are you getting divorced?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s moved out.”

  Later that afternoon, she found a folded piece of paper in the kitchen. On the front, in Bill’s handwriting: “For Casey and Jamie.” Ginny held it for a long time, pressing down on the folds as she sat at the table, running her finger over the letters in blue ballpoint ink. She could smell the promises inside, the written evidence of Bill’s inability to do as he wanted. She knew that he was promising visits and gifts and love, always love. Maybe he could do it. Maybe he could live apart from them and still be the father they needed. Her lips twitched as she remembered how he had stared into her eyes on their wedding day, as if her face was the only thing he ever needed to look at to make it in this world. Love had never been their problem. She loved him still. But it hadn’t done any good. She tore up the paper without reading it and threw it in the trash.

  —

  Ginny found a second job waitressing at a diner during the breakfast rush. After her shift at the hotel, she went straight to the restaurant five blocks west on Hastings. There, she worked until ten thirty and then walked home, her shoes like hooves, hitting the sidewalk loud and heavy. She slept until the girls came home and sat with them while they ate their snacks. Casey was in high school now and said very little, even though Ginny asked about her day every afternoon. Instead, Casey stared out the window and chewed her cheese or carrot sticks or cookie silently. Jamie never shut up.

  “Today, Miss Humphrey brought in a real live chameleon. And we’re all going to take turns bringing him home on the weekends. We get to feed him dried brine shrimp. Cool, right?” Jamie looked hopefully at her older sister. Casey shrugged.

  “The grade seven dance is tomorrow, Case. Will you help me pick something to wear?”

  The silence felt suspended above their heads, stormy. Ginny looked at Casey’s expressionless face and then back at Jamie’s disappointed one.

  “I can help you, Jamie. I can alter one of my dresses for you if you want.” Ginny smiled.

  “Oh. Sure. Thanks, Mom.”

  But Ginny knew this wasn’t the same. Her clothes weren’t right. They never would be.

  Out of the silence, Ginny heard Casey’s voice. “Why did he leave?” Casey tilted her chin up and stared at her mother. “Is it because of something you said?”

  Ginny started to speak, but her words tangled in her mouth. The answer was in her throat. Why couldn’t she just say it?

  “It’s because you were nagging him, isn’t it?”

  “Casey, it’s not that simple.”

  “Maybe it is, Mom. Maybe you’re the one who makes everything complicated. Maybe if you had just stopped bugging him, Dad would be sitting here right now.”

  Casey’s face was starting to contort and she was trying her hardest not to cry. Ginny reached out and put her hand on her daughter’s wrist. “Even if he was here, what would he be doing? Would he be talking to you? Or would he be lying on the couch, drunk again?”

  Casey shook off her mother’s fingers. “You have no idea what we talked about when you weren’t home.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then? I want to hear what you have to say too.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Casey stood up, leaving her plate on the table.

  “Try me.”

  The phone rang. Ginny looked at the clock and saw that it was close to five. It was probably her boss at the hotel, calling to tell her that she needed to come in early, or that she needed to pick up some more Windex on her way to work. She stood up and reached for the receiver hanging on the wall.

  Casey grabbed the phone and hung it back up so violently that the bell inside rang loudly and briefly, like a yelp. Ginny stared.

  “What are you doing? That was probably my boss.”

  “Don’t you see? It’s all about work for you. Work at the hotel or the diner or work at home. You like work. You like working and eating and sleeping and then starting all over again. You’re a psycho.” Casey wrapped her arms around herself. “If that’s what life is, then I don’t want to live it.”

  Ginny extended a hand to draw her daughter into a hug, but Casey just spun in her spot
, shoulders hunched, out of reach.

  “Your life doesn’t have to be like mine,” Ginny said. “You can finish school, get training, do whatever you want.”

  “Come on, Mom,” Casey muttered. “We all know that’s not how it works. How would we pay for university? How would I even get into university? I’m almost flunking already.” She looked up at her mother’s face and blinked hard. “I don’t want a cleaning job or a restaurant job. I want nice jeans and hoop earrings. I want to be happy.”

  Ginny wanted to tell her that she did understand, that she felt these same things when she was younger. But it wasn’t true. She knew, deep down in her belly, that she had only gone from job to job, from the apartment she could afford to the house she could barely keep, never thinking about the possibilities that existed outside of Chinatown, outside of cleaning and replacing toilet paper rolls in small, bare bathrooms. She bought her mother’s groceries every week and swept out her dark, L-shaped room in the boarding house around the corner. She balanced her chequebook. She rotated household chores—Monday for floors, Tuesday for laundry, Wednesday for dust and tidying . . . When she slept in the middle of day, she didn’t dream. She just sank into a darkness that simultaneously pulled and pushed her down. She had never wanted anything else than this. She had never found the time.

  In that moment, she knew this was Bill’s problem. He wanted stuff. A nicer home, a flashy car, a job he could brag about, a wife who was happy. But there was no way for him to get any of those things.

  “You can be happy, honey. We can figure something out. You’re so young. You have so much time.” But even Ginny could hear the falseness in her voice. There wasn’t time. Casey could leave school and be working within the year. Wringing out grey mops in grey water. Ginny shivered.

  “Sure, Mom. Whatever you say.” Casey’s body seemed to crumple under her baggy sweatshirt. “I’m going to my room. I’ve got homework.” And she left, her thin socks dragging on the floor.

  Jamie stood up too. “I guess I should go.”

  But Ginny caught her by the arm and pulled her into a hug, Jamie’s face squashing against her chest. She said to herself, “I hope they never know how hard it is to be a grown-up.”

  Jamie squirmed and pushed back from Ginny’s body. “Did you say something, Mom?”

  If she thought it would help, Ginny would have told Jamie everything she was thinking. Do more than I did. Think and learn. Leave Chinatown. Run if you have to. But these were abstractions, words that would mean little to a twelve-year-old girl who went at her tasks one at a time. There was no way for Ginny to tell her all of this in a way that she would understand, remember and use when she grew older. She would have to wait for the right time, for the exact moment that her advice might mean the difference between a bad choice and a better one.

  Ginny smoothed down the top of Jamie’s head. “Never mind. Get going on your homework. Dinner is at six. And then I have to go to work.”

  SEVEN

  AT FIRST, GINNY DIDN’T KNOW WHERE BILL WENT, although she assumed he must have gone to stay with his old high school friend Wayne, who still lived with his parents on the other side of Chinatown. Bill didn’t phone. He didn’t send any letters. This relieved her. His total absence was like a tonic, a complete cleansing of his existence. In the morning, when she returned home from her shift at the hotel, the house was quiet and clean, everything as she had left it. She could almost believe that she had never been married at all, and that the girls had been conceived by her alone.

  That didn’t stop her, of course, from changing the locks. In the afternoons, Ginny’s mother came from her apartment to stay at the house, usually watching television and dozing in the old armchair in the living room. When Ginny was getting ready to leave after dinner, her mother was often asleep and Ginny had to shake her by both shoulders before she would wake up. Her eyelids trembled, and Ginny wondered if this was how her mother was going to die—shaky, thin-skinned, just barely aware of the people around her. If someone broke the glass in the back door and slipped inside, he might not even notice the sleeping old woman wrapped in a knitted vest and fraying quilt.

  In the early evenings, when she saw Casey, Jamie and her mother sitting at the kitchen table together, she exhaled and closed her eyes, content.

  One morning two months later, she walked home in the blue winter light, the hood of her parka blowing fake fur against her cheek. She opened the gate into the front yard and looked at the living room window. The curtains were slightly open. When she had left, she had closed them tight, like she did every evening. Ginny’s stomach turned. She ran up the walk. Her hands shook as she unlocked the door.

  Inside, her mother was asleep in the armchair. Ginny rushed to Casey and Jamie’s bedroom. Empty, with just the usual mess of clothes and shoes, the way they always left things before school. She stepped out into the hall and sat on the floor, head on her knees. Her lungs heaved, pushing against her ribs. After a few minutes, she raised her head and put her hands on the floor beside her to steady herself as she stood up. The fingers on her left hand felt something sticky. She squinted but couldn’t see anything in the unlit hall. She bent down and sniffed. A drop of drying beer. As if someone had walked from the kitchen to the living room sipping from a full, dribbling can.

  Ginny shook her mother. “Ma! Wake up. Ma!”

  “Ginny. What time is it?” she asked.

  “Was he here? Was Bill here?”

  Her mother rubbed her eyes with her knobbly hands. “No, of course not.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure he didn’t come while you were sleeping last night?”

  “I might be old, but I’m not stupid. I fell asleep while the girls were watching a show. You know, the one with all the horses. Dallas? I made them breakfast and they walked to school. And then I thought I would take a little nap before I went home. Nothing else happened.”

  But Ginny had turned around and run into the kitchen. Her eyes examined the stove, the fridge, the table. Everything seemed fine. She opened the back door and stepped out on the porch. There it was, lingering and faint, but there nonetheless. Cigarette smoke. She looked down at the crooked wooden steps. A skinny trail of ashes.

  She didn’t know when he had come or left. But she knew the girls had let him in. Everything I do is for them, she thought. And still they want him. When they came home, she could ask them, but she knew Casey would lie and Jamie would too, or at least not say anything so as not to betray anyone. She had no phone number for him, had no idea where he was staying. How could she tell him what she wanted to shout in his face?

  You have contributed nothing. You don’t deserve them. If you hurt them, I will kill you.

  Four hours later, as Casey and Jamie walked into the kitchen after school, Ginny turned away from the stove and said, “If you ever talk to your father, remember that he makes a lot of promises that he never keeps. He loves you and he means well. But he’s not reliable.”

  Jamie was struggling with the toggles on her coat and didn’t seem to be listening. But Casey stared at her mother, her face pale under the fluorescent bulb mounted on the kitchen ceiling. She opened her mouth to say something, but then shut it quickly, pursing her lips together as if she were afraid a stray word might just fall out. Ginny placed two plates on the table. Grilled cheese.

  “Eat. There’s not a lot of time before we have to get started on your homework.”

  Ginny’s mother walked slowly into the kitchen through the back door. She sat down, her bones almost creaking out loud, and smiled. “Nothing to worry about. Everyone’s safe.” And she patted Casey’s arm with her brown, spotted hand.

  —

  It happened once, maybe twice a week. Ginny came home in the mornings and could see the outline of Bill’s body on their bed, an imprecise, man-sized dent on the quilt. If she bent down and sniffed the pillows, she could smell his hair gel—citrusy, tinged with sca
lp. Sometimes, she closed her eyes and imagined him holding her like he used to, when he had a job and she didn’t worry about what he was drinking or where he was going next. He had smooth arms, almost free of hair, and he would wrap them around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. At those times, he made her feel perfect.

  Casey and Jamie never said a word. Ginny’s mother slept through everything.

  When the crocuses began to push up in the back garden, Ginny saw that Bill was getting sloppy. She found a tin can with half a dozen cigarette butts right by the back door. A muddy bootprint on the mat on the front porch. She saw a dry spot on the street where a car had been parked all through the windy, rainy night. And the girls, especially Casey, were slower and drowsier after school, as if he had kept them up. Maybe he was telling them stories as he sat outside, smoking. Maybe they just wanted to look at his face and couldn’t sleep as long as he was there. Ginny wasn’t sure, but she cleaned up the crumbs on the kitchen table that smelled like pizza and rinsed out the cloth twice, in water so hot she had to wear rubber gloves.

  But the girls seemed happier. Casey began chatting again after school while Jamie showed off gymnastics moves she had learned that morning.

  “What if I got a part-time job, Mom? So I could get some new clothes?”

  “Sure, Casey, if that’s what you want. But you have to make sure it doesn’t affect your schoolwork.”

  “Mom! We should get a guinea pig!” Jamie said, sitting on the floor with her legs split.

  Eventually, Ginny began to expect Bill’s ghost around the house. Liked it, even. It was easy to love him when he was making the girls happy and when she wasn’t watching him drink beer after beer while he watched reruns of M*A*S*H late into the night. His smell was like a touch. Just enough.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS SUMMER. GINNY’S MOTHER DIDN’T NEED TO GET the girls ready for school anymore, so she no longer slept at the house. Ginny came home from work in the late mornings and made lunch for Casey and Jamie before going to bed. The bedroom grew cool when she opened the window, and a breeze that was mercifully fresh and not scented with the durians and barbecued pork of Chinatown swept past the curtains and over her face. Everything was quiet and Ginny slept, uninterrupted, until five, when she heard the girls calling for her from the hall.