Some Possible Solutions

by Helen Phillips

  * * *

  Again, there was wind in the park.

  It rose up when we reached the center of the lawn, just as it had yesterday. Again the park was abandoned and again we alone stood in the middle of the movement, our synthetic hair swirling around us. I understood now that wind was due to an interplay of hot and cold air.

  From whence did it rise? I stretched my mind out across all the repetitive blocks of the city, stretched my mind to the outermost edge of my memory, blocks and blocks of gray buildings, gray streets, gray cars. That landscape, and the almost unbearably green landscape of the park, were the only landscapes I knew. Where could hot and cold meet and interact here? Nothing fresh arose from those temperate city blocks with their bags of trash piled high.

  Yet this wind, this so-called wind, was as fresh as—I had little to compare it to. Roo coming out of the shower? Once-a-month vanilla bean ice cream?

  “Damn,” Roo whispered in awe, and I whispered it too. Not a word we were supposed to use. Damn because we hadn’t merely imagined the wind. Damn because it seemed like the kind of thing that would get us in trouble. Damn because it was so intensely pleasant, a new item to add to our list of longings.

  Something else the wind did, and this I knew because I could look at Roo and see myself: it pinkened our cheeks, it brightened our eyes.

  * * *

  Before we went out we would each be led into a freezer large enough to hold one girl. We had to stay there for sixty seconds, chattering in our sequins, so that when we emerged into the crowd our nipples had the proper quality and we looked adequately forlorn. The customers reacted positively to the combination of sequins and despair. If we shed a tear due to the pain of the freezer it was even better; damp eyes had an enticingly luminous quality. So it was more rebellious not to cry than to cry. Roo and I had discovered a way to control ours. We imagined God’s fingers gently pinching the ducts so no tears could emerge, and thus we never cried.

  * * *

  The next day Mrs. Penelope the Mother was flipping flawless pancakes when we came downstairs to eat. She wore a baggy saggy flowered dress and had curlers in her thin hair. She embraced both of us in one hug and then stepped back and looked us over. She smiled kind of sadly, as though she did not quite approve, and we felt awfully guilty. That’s why it was a toss-up between Mrs. Penelope the Mother and Mrs. Penelope the Lady. The Lady might make you feel stupid or clumsy, but she’d never make you feel like a disappointment.

  “Nice day,” Mrs. Penelope said, gesturing to the same flat gray light as always that came through the narrow kitchen windows.

  We ate the hot pancakes with lots of butter (Mrs. Penelope the Lady would have been horrified) and, for a short time, felt warm and content.

  “Boy,” Mrs. Penelope said as we dipped our forks in the leftover syrup on our plates, “I’ve never seen you girls looking quite so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  “It’s because—” Roo stopped herself.

  “Because why?” Mrs. Penelope demanded. “Because why?”

  “Because it’s a nice day,” I said. “As you said.”

  Mrs. Penelope eyed us suspiciously, suddenly more Lady than Mother. Roo and I squeezed hands under the big wooden table, stood up, and headed toward the hall closet where our sweaters hung.

  “Stop,” Mrs. Penelope said. “Have you excused yourselves?”

  “May we please be excused, Mrs. Penelope?” we said in unison.

  “No you may not,” she said. She continued to eye us. “You sit down and stay right there.” She stormed out of the kitchen and down the hallway to her suite. We’d never been inside but we’d heard rumors of velvet drapes and jewelry boxes and two hundred pairs of shoes.

  Nothing like this had ever happened. Not in ten years had we ever been told to stay at the table after breakfast. We took turns cutting thin, unnoticeable slices from the stick of butter and placing them on our tongues to melt.

  The doorbell rang just as Mrs. Penelope the Lady emerged from her suite in a black dress. We poked our heads out from the kitchen. There was a fat policeman on the other side of the door. Mrs. Penelope rubbed up against him. The policeman came toward us with handcuffs and Mrs. Penelope was grabbing us and pinching our upper arms and Roo and I were clinging to each other and crying. But when he handcuffed us to each other, we calmed down. Other twins had been separated. We’d heard about it and knew about it and never spoke of it or imagined it.

  “My dears,” Mrs. Penelope murmured, sticking her head in the window of the police car, for a moment more Mother than Lady, “you shouldn’t have seen what you saw. You shouldn’t have felt what you felt.” She squeezed our cheeks. The policeman squeezed Mrs. Penelope’s tits. She gave him a pumpkin doughnut and a travel mug of coffee. We buried our faces in each other’s synthetic hair. The handcuffs linking us were chilly on our wrists.

  * * *

  As we passed through the repetitive city blocks, the policeman wanted to play a game. He described each of his buddies—he’s got a huge mole on his ear, he’s got a tiny wang, he’s got a glass eye—and we had to tell him how frequently this guy came to the place and what he asked for and how much he tipped. At first we said we couldn’t remember, which was true, because any given customer was as memorable as any individual water droplet that poured over you in the shower, but he was getting cranky so then our memories were jogged and we did remember that one, yes, we did remember that one, big tipper, small tipper, aggressive when drunk, jovial when drunk, et cetera, et cetera, and at every revelation the policeman would give an enormous belly laugh and offer us two peanut M&Ms from a large bag he kept up front.

  Then, very shyly, he asked if we remembered him.

  Oh yes, yes, we did, hadn’t that been a time, boy oh boy, the two of us and him.

  Then he got sullen and said how could we remember him if he’d never been there, he was an upstanding family man with two daughters of his own in fact, and were we just a pair of lying little sluts or what, and could he please have back the M&Ms he’d loaned us. Then we got nauseous thinking about all the M&Ms we owed him that were deep inside our guts now.

  * * *

  Eventually the endless gray blocks put us to sleep and when we woke it was sundown. The police car was parked in front of a small lopsided wooden cabin, and across from it an even smaller hut. Beyond the cabin, a grove of trees, like an image from the Internet. The policeman was nowhere to be seen. I would have been scared but Roo’s hand was in mine. I tugged on her hand and she turned toward me. Her hair extensions were snarled. Her face was wet and luminous.

  “This has been the best day of my life,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, the best day ever,” I joked along with her.

  But she shook her head at my sarcasm. “The best, best day,” she murmured.

  “What?” I said, pulling my hand away.

  “This whole day,” she said, her eyes radiant with tears, “we drove out of the city and then we came to a different kind of place.”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “You were asleep.”

  I yanked on the door handle.

  “Locked,” Roo said.

  “Shit,” I said, expecting Roo to say it simultaneously.

  The door of the crooked cabin opened and the policeman came out. It looked like a joke, such a fat man emerging from such a tiny doorway. A small, thin man with black hair and features sharp as pencils followed the policeman. The policeman pounded this man’s back in a friendly, exaggerated fashion. We were trained in reading lips because we had to be able to understand a customer’s requests even when the place was at full volume; we could interpret desires from across a crowded room. So I could see the policeman saying to the man, “You know what to do.”

  The thin man came up to the window of the police car. He cupped his hands around his face to look directly in at us. His eyes were urgent, like the eyes of a monster.

  * * *

  The ripe strawberries were clustered among the
unripe ones, so each plant required some effort, to harvest the reds without disrupting the greens. For the first row it was not so unpleasant. There was the novelty of kneeling on the damp dirt in the rising sun, which cast light more yellow than gray, and the satisfaction of a huge tin pail beginning to fill with fantastic redness. Even our potato-sack garments held a certain charm. I didn’t mind moving down the row on my knees beside my sister, smelling the smell of overripe strawberries, a smell not unfamiliar to us, for we’d had strawberry jam in our day.

  Not to mention the eating. We didn’t know if it was permitted, but we chose not to ask the thin man, who had awoken us by throwing a rooster into the bunkhouse where there were thirty-nine empty beds and one occupied, by me and Roo, since we always shared. Though the cabin had looked small at first, actually it was a long, low building, and we’d selected a bottom bunk at the end farthest from the door. The rooster marched all the way down the room to us and made his noise right in our ears. When we got out of bed the rooster strutted us over to these potato-sack garments hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall. We pulled off the heavy wool skirts and stiff oxford shirts we’d slept in and pulled on these strange tunics, our torsos goose-bumpy in the dawn. We emerged from the cabin feeling somewhat lighter than we’d felt. The thin man was standing outside with two stacks of tin pails. He smiled at us, revealing sharp, bloodstained teeth, and we almost screamed. He said: “Good morning, Rose and Roo.” How dare he know our names. He said it was time to harvest the strawberries. We looked at him blankly. “Harvest” was not a command we’d ever been given. He smiled again—those bloody teeth—and said: “You are correct to be surprised that strawberries are still in season. For a long time I have worked to develop a strain of strawberry plant that produces thrice over the course of the year: May, July, and September.” This meant nothing to us and we didn’t care, but he seemed proud to have taught us something. He grabbed all the tin pails; it was mildly impressive that such a small, thin man could manage such an awkward load. “Follow me,” he said.

  So here we were, my sister and I, in the strawberry field, in the crispness of morning, twenty pails to fill and explicit orders about red versus green, more fields spreading out black and green toward groves of trees planted not by a mastermind of city parks but instead just growing that way, their orange and pink leaves fluttering in what we now knew to call wind, wind coming off the stream between the fields, and in the distance the rooster a black-and-white dot clawing at the mud amid the tilting wooden structures of the farmyard, and the thin man heading toward the stream with a large knife in the shape of a half-moon. In any case, hungry and not in possession of instructions to the contrary, Roo and I ate strawberries, splendid, and it was then we realized that the thin man’s teeth had been stained not by blood but rather by strawberries.

  It came swift and sudden up the row, moving fast along the cool dirt, a snake three feet long and as large around the middle as Roo’s arm, greenish scales glimmering poisonously. A scattering of strawberries, an overturned pail, we ran, not looking back, crushing strawberries, leaping over rows, down toward the stream where the thin man strolled with his murderous knife, we landed in the thin man’s arms, pressed ourselves into his chest so hard that if he’d not possessed his uncanny sturdiness surely we’d have knocked him to the ground. But as it was he held us and smiled upon us with red teeth. He murmured things, I forgot to mention the snakes, my apologies, Roo, my apologies, Rose, they’re harmless, overgrown garter snakes, a by-product of the experimental strawberry plants, don’t worry, they’re everywhere, you’ll get used to them, all the while holding the half-moon knife in his left hand. I backed out of his embrace a few seconds before Roo; he touched her hair. When I turned and looked back at the strawberry field, I saw that it was alive with snakes. The whole field undulated with green bodies slithering among red strawberries.

  We returned to the strawberry field, our stomachs taut with cold water from the stream. We picked strawberries, filled pails. I attributed my stomachache to the snakes that kept sliding by; only much later would I attribute it to the sight of the thin man stroking my sister’s hair extensions. Late in the day, when almost all the pails were full, Roo reached out to touch a snake as it passed. She looked at me, grinned and giggled. My nausea swelled and overflowed. I vomited red water onto a strawberry plant.

  * * *

  My sister and the thin man put me to bed in the bunkhouse. They brought porridge. It was creamy and honeyed, but there was an aftertaste of salt that dried out my mouth and my gut.

  * * *

  My sister didn’t sleep with me that night or the next because I was ill; and then, on the third night, when I was better, she still didn’t sleep with me. She climbed up the ladder to the bunk above me.

  “Roo. What are you doing.”

  “Going to sleep.”

  “I’m better now.”

  “Good.”

  “Come down!” Ever obedient, she came down. “Sleep here!”

  “The mattress is so narrow.”

  “We always sleep in the same bed.”

  Roo shrugged and gestured at the abandoned bunkroom, the thirty-nine empty beds, as though to say, We’ve only slept together all these years because there was no alternative, before mounting the ladder once more.

  * * *

  Eventually our hair extensions grew out. The curls began to slide off our dull brownish hair, and soon became so loose we could remove them with the merest tug. These sheddings of synthetic hair got mixed up and mired in the muck of the barnyard, glimmering auburn amid chicken shit.

  The thin man said to us, “You have nice hair.” We gazed with some longing at our lost curls, sinking in the mud. “I mean the hair on your heads,” he said. There were no mirrors on the farm, but I could see Roo’s soft straight brown hair fluttering above her eyebrows and feathering at the base of her neck, so I knew my hair was doing the same. The thin man did not compliment us except that once. It was strange to go so long without compliments from men. It was kind of nice and then sometimes not.

  In the hut where he slept and where we all ate, the thin man brought out cards after the dinner porridge—playing cards, like those we’d seen a million times at the place, but now we got to handle them and examine them up close. The colorful, regal characters. There were games he taught us, and dried beans for betting. Yet, oddly, I tired long before Roo did—we always used to yawn at the same time, Roo and I—and though I tried hard to fight it so Roo wouldn’t be left alone with the thin man, still I’d retire to the bunkhouse early. At night the wind blew tremendously. It kept me up. Then I’d climb the ladder to Roo’s bunk but sometimes she wasn’t there. I’d pretend she was, putting the pillow just so to imitate the shape of her and clinging to it. I’d get so crazy and scared, like I was a tiny crumb of nothing cowering in the roaring universe. In the morning I’d wake to find Roo in my bunk and me in hers.

  “Did you hear that wind?” I said.

  “I love it so much,” my sister said.

  At times I had feelings toward Roo that were unfamiliar to me, and for which I knew no good words, but they were not pleasant.

  The thin man played banjo, peculiar songs from faraway, and one night when he pulled the banjo out after dinner, Roo sang along and knew every word of every song.

  The thin man taught Roo how to make the daily porridge, which was served at noontime with honey and at nighttime with cheese. Also we ate things grown on the farm. Strawberries, of course, and vegetables from the garden. Soon Roo’s porridge surpassed the porridge of the thin man.

  * * *

  One day I looked over at my sister and looked down at myself and realized our appearances had begun to diverge. Roo was plumper now, her breasts larger than mine, her skin a deeper shade of tan. Her hair was light brown and now that my hair was long enough to pull over my shoulder I could see it was several shades darker.

  “What color are my eyes?” I said to Roo. Hers were brown flecked with yellow. It was wo
nderful to have them gazing so thoughtfully into mine.

  “Gray,” she replied after a moment.

  Dismayed, I insisted that we ask the thin man. We stood before him in the barnyard, our eyes wide open.

  “Both of you have hazel eyes,” he said, and I was filled with giddy relief, “but yours are more gray,” he said to me, “while hers are brown like honey.”

  There were other things, too. Her fingernails grew faster than mine. Freckles appeared on her forehead but not on mine. We noticed a difference in our heights—I perhaps an inch taller—that had been lost on us before. We’d always been so interchangeable that Mrs. Penelope had often just referred to us as R.

  Yet still our voices were identical, with the exact same cadence. Still our collarbones were a perfect match.

  * * *

  I couldn’t grow accustomed to the wind and I couldn’t grow accustomed to the thin man. But I grew accustomed to the snakes among the strawberry plants; I scarcely noticed them anymore and when I did it was with a feeling of fondness.

  It was easy to forget certain things about our former life. What was the name of the last street we used to cross before entering the park? What was the weekly breakfast served by Mrs. Penelope on Wednesdays? Exactly how long did we have to stay in the freezer before going out to the customers?

  Time passed. We ate porridge with herbs. I watched a brown bird reclaim a strand of synthetic hair from the freezing mud. Roo and I dug for carrots and placed hay over the dying strawberry plants, working side by side. A series of eerie notes plucked on a banjo, my sister whispering and singing. In the firelight, the Jack of Hearts winking at me. Voices heard as though from afar, the voice of the thin man and the voice of my sister, the same as my voice, but the words drifted over and around me, the fire warming the unpleasant feelings out of me.

  * * *

  One morning they were gone. I woke to the wind, and the rooster scratching. The rooster wandered lonesome over the frozen dung of the barnyard. My sister and the thin man were not in any bed. That was my first thought; I anticipated finding them entangled, I began to understand the vague hatreds I’d felt. It was something of a relief not to discover them, his bed empty and tidy—but they were nowhere else either, not in the fields, not down by the river, not in the groves.