“Do you think she buried it?” said Blanche.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I bet she ate it. That’s what I would do. To absorb the virtue of it.”
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what we would do.”
Granny called us “the girls,” “the twins,” and knitted us matching sweaters, and could not understand why they wore out so slowly. She would not accept that we were conjoined. She didn’t believe in growing up, either. When we were a sturdy eleven, she gave us two miniature sailor suits, thus proving her stubbornness on both counts. I thought I saw a triumphant look on her face when we snapped the ribbon on the box. Mama pressed her lips together and said to Papa later that Granny was trying to undo all the work she, Mama, had done to help us feel good about our condition.
But Granny was right, I thought. We were not one, we were two. Our bones knew it, tugged in opposite directions by warring muscles. Singletons, have you never felt such violent indecision that you stopped in your tracks, looking one way and then the other, not so much standing still as suspended between equal and opposite forces? That is the condition we woke into every morning.
When we needed a rest, we read. Sometimes we shared a book, but that led to other battles, smaller but still heated, about when to turn the page, or with which hand, or at what angle to hold the book, and where. So more often we read two different books at once. Then sometimes we turned the pages in strict unison; sometimes, pinching them up and slapping them down with the same hand, we raced. But eventually we forgot each other and slipped singly into new company, that other, more voluntary twinship we could find with books. Then both sets of pages turned with a mesmerized slowness, each leaf drifting down and settling of its own weight.
This left a peculiar legacy. I cannot reread a certain energetic tale of derring-do without a feeling of melancholy bushwhacking me in the middle of a gunfight, at just the point her sob story made her bawl. Or read a particular love scene without bursting out laughing. Every book seems to me to have a second story under its skin, a narrative not of incident but of emotion, at odds with the one on the surface. Even when, for school, we had to read the same books, I reached the sad parts with a feeling of déjà vu when she had been there a page before me; she scooped every story, except the ones I scooped first. More often, it was a matter of chuckling or weeping over a grammar book. And when we found the battered Playboy by the highway, the day before a math test, made my pulse gallop, and still does.
Audrey’s Bookshelf: Partial Catalog
Getting to AND
Joseph and Josiah Venn: A Speculative Biography Autogeminophilia
The Geminist Manifesto
The Bicameral Self
The Natural History of Sex
The Fourth Sex
Adopting the Plural Form
The Hyphenated Self
The Indefinite Pronoun
Free the Twin Within
The Boolean Search for the Soul
Transspecies Consciousness
Sex and the Transsingular Girl
Single No More
Elective Identity: The Surgical Solution
Doctor-Assisted Transsingularity
Makeup for the Transsingular
Me, Two
The Making of a We-Male
I Am an Other
Begging to Differ
Glenda Blender’s Household Hints
Twofer Impersonators in America
Same-Self Relations
The Interself
Différance
Drag Tween’s Tips and Tricks
VENN
I turned to Audrey. I was ready to subject my consciousness to raising, I told her. “Great!” she said heartily. “There’s a session this afternoon. Come help me pick out a Jell-O mold for Dogfish Does Dallas at Goodwill and we’ll hit the meeting afterward.”
Among faded popsicle forms and sippy cups I had spotted an unusual mold and reached for it before I recognized the double Bundt shape as the ubiquitous linked rings. Twofer? But it dated to the fifties, at least, before the Boom. I shook my head. I was making things up!
Audrey came up with a Santa mold in one hand and what looked like a Klein bottle in the other. “Find something good? I’m set.”
Aluminumware at war in the back seat, we rattled down Van Ness, performed a perilous U-turn under the overpass, and braked sharply to make the turn up the steep spiral on-ramp to Highway 101. “Where exactly are you taking me?” I said.
“Berkeley.”
“Couldn’t you have found something a little closer to home?”
“I specifically wanted you to meet Vyv. She’s taught me a lot.”
“Well, I wish you’d warned—wait, you’ve been going to a twofer support group? Why?”
“It’s for anyone with a dual subject position. Not just biological twofers.”
We swept over the bay bridge, past the driftwood sculptures, loading cranes, and cooling towers of the marina, up the Eastshore Freeway to the Ashby exit, and into a traffic jam. We inched past a lot choked with old-growth redwood burl coffee tables. A rearing grizzly sawed from a single hunk of wood menaced a pelican.
“Hold on,” said Audrey grimly, zipped up to the light on the wrong side of the road, accelerated left down San Pablo in front of the oncoming traffic, and rolled into the beige haze of Berkeley’s stucco flatlands. We coasted to a stop under a eucalyptus tree, crunching over pods and bark, outside an Indian grocer’s whose shadowy shop window enshrined three supercilious Fates in iridescent saris. A small sign on the door said, “Hypnobirthing has been moved to Sunday at 2:30.” Electric bell a cattle prod to my heifer heart. A little girl’s fringed eyes stared over the counter, her guilty fingers frozen on an orange pretzeloid.
Audrey led me back through the cumin-scented shadows past burlap bags with rose and tangerine labels and open tubs of yellow dal and mung beans. A man with a fat, lacquered mustache poked his head through a curtain and watched us up a flight of stairs to a landing with two facing doors flanking a corkboard shingled with multicolored flyers. Audrey opened the one on the right to the sudden glare and chatter of a skylit room full of twofers. A tiny singleton overdressed in black velvet pantsuit and matching choker swept forward. “Vyv Hornbeck, V.D., Ph.D.,” she said throatily, covering my hand with hers, which was sharp with rings.
While Vyv directed the placement of chairs, I beckoned Audrey out onto the landing. “V.D., Audrey?” I inquired.
“She’s guild-certified for integrative coaching using the Venn method. Of course she practically founded the guild, so she uses the honorific more to dignify it than to claim more authority for herself.”
A memory clicked into place. “Venn diagrams.”
She nodded. “That’s part of it. We make Venn diagrams of our conflicting aspects to help us visualize areas of common ground and then grow them with directed affirmation. Where do you think you’re going?”
“To see what it will cost to buy Charmaine off.”
“Oh, Nora, could you open your mind a chink? Vyv’s had a lot of success applying Venn’s texts on Boolean logic to spiritual wellness, and there’s textual basis for it, too. She got a Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley on the basis of her Venn scholarship before she decided to open a practice. Venn was a complex figure, educated as a clergyman, obsessed with symbolic logic. He invented a cricket bowling machine! It’s almost certain that he was a twofer, though for Vyv that’s of interest only as gossip. There’s mention of a Josiah Venn somewhere, though his mother was only brought to childbed once before she died. Vyv hates Siamese essentialism, but it seems to me that being a twofer must have influenced his work on set theory, the way it accommodates simultaneous sameness and difference. I think you should check it out.”
She took my arm and steered me back in. I did not bother to tell her that Venn had nearly cost me my philosophy BA: I had twice failed the logic requirement because I had proved unable to recognize any overlap between categories. The cells of my Venn diagrams ha
d floated separate and inviolate in the universal set, neighbor moons with divergent orbits.
The chairs had been arranged into intersecting rings. I took a seat at the aphelion of one ring. We chanted what I dimly recalled as the Boolean operators AND, NOT, OR, and the somewhat Martian XOR (“Exclusive or,” whispered Audrey. “Either but not both”) while Vyv swooped around, distributing worksheets. “Diagram your relationship with your twin aspect as you see it today,” she said. “The two of you may identify different areas of commonality, and confronting this will be an important step later in the process, but please, darlings, for now no peeking.”
I drew twin planets N and B. Vyv swept them up without comment and took a position in the eye of the rings. “Where are you today in your search?” she asked. “Everyone please identify your operator.”
There was a chorus of ORs and ANDs.
“OR,” Audrey said. “Sometimes AND.”
“XOR,” groaned Tom Tom. “It’s all black or white with me.”
“That’s a fine place to begin,” Vyv said. “Discontinuity is the synaptic gap. No gap, no spark. Trying to close the gap is an aspect of NOT thought, i.e. not thought, i.e. naught thought, empty bubble, the big zero.” Rotating to take us all in, she went on, “There’s a time to expand your search and a time to limit it. It’s not just go with the flow. There will be fissures, interruptions.”
The room began to burble with affirmations, for it seemed we were, every one of us, OK, in spite of failings obvious to everyone in the room, not to mention private failings we still hoped to keep hidden. I let my mouth hang open, not to be too obvious about not affirming. Vyv took the floor again. Not really listening, I watched a wing of shadow flutter across her lips. “…a stable subject position without resorting to reductive identity formulations based on a Hellenic sense of the absolute, integral, atomic One. A post-nuclear psychology, you might say. What Venn anticipated, we experience…. No need to claim him as a twofer, though the evidence is not all in; I urge you all to move beyond literal, biological…” I looked up and saw a dead pigeon slumped on the skylight. Or wait, there was some movement—but no, that was the wind. There was a dime-sized disc of already congealed and blackened blood under the grey head. “…to recast as an opportunity…without excusing the obvious atrocities, or overlooking real, personal pain…” Above, one wing lifted and dropped with a soft thud on the glass.
I was standing up. “NOT,” I said. “NOT, NOT, NOT.”
“Nora?” Audrey said.
“Fissures,” said Vyv calmly, “interruptions.”
I walked out to a parting chorus of “Good honesty!” and “Go with that impulse!” and “Blanche and Nora, you’re OK!” from a roomful of strained faces registering fear and doubt. The door opposite was open, revealing a group of ordinary-looking singletons who were also expressing the hope that they were OK in spite of everything, and on the corkboard was a sign saying that Tuesday’s Healing Meeting of Affirmations for Perpetuators of Toxic Ingrained Societal Violence in an Intimate Setting had been pushed back from six to six-thirty by the expected overtime of Spastic Is Fantastic. Obviously there was an affirmation for everyone, which by my calculations meant that affirming had zip to do with whether you were actually, verifiably OK or not. I clattered downstairs and up the cosmetics aisle. Somewhere between Glory Black Henna and Fairever Fairness Cream I decided that I’d rather not be OK. By which I don’t mean I affirmed myself in not-OK-ness, more like I wallowed. And decided to keep wallowing.
I sat down on the still-warm hood of the Volvo and stared at the seedpods littering the asphalt. Some of the pods had four apertures, some had five, some had two, all were full of seeds. Theoretically they could all sprout at once. But in a given patch of earth only one would become a tree.
“Well, what did you think?” Audrey asked.
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
The Boolean Search for Self, Exercise #1
Using the figures below, diagram the relationship between yourself and your twin a. as you see it today and b. as you would like to see it tomorrow.
THE DOLLHOUSE
For everything I remember, more has been erased. We took down our impressions on an Etch A Sketch, then dropped it under the bed and ran outside to catch the first fat drops of rain before the storm broke. The silver sands slithered across the glass, and we forgot. But a few traces remain. With a little imagination I can reconstruct a simple shape. The diagonals are notched and quavery, but I recognize it anyway.
The dollhouse looms over my childhood as if it really were as big as it seemed the day we splashed down in its front yard. I remember its chimney pots silhouetted against our bedroom window; there was a flaw in the window glass I could pretend was a plume of smoke. It seemed realer than our own house, more perfect. The only thing it lacked was a dollhouse of its own, so I carved a copy out of a bar of soap stolen from under the sink. Sometimes we persuaded Papa to carry the dollhouse outside for us and set it up near an ant den, where the spectacle of ants the size of a doll’s roller-skates racing incuriously over the settee, armoire, walls, ceilings, miniature jelly mold, braided bread loaf, and occasionally staging small skirmishes with warring tribes was a source of strange sensations, and I would squat and watch them for as long as I could force Blanche to stay. Once we came back from lunch to find that squat, sluggish lizard we called a horned toad draped across the master bed, phlegmatically devouring every ant that came through the door. We brought Mama and Papa to look. Papa guffawed and dropped to his knees. “How about that! That deserves a photo. Someone run get the camera.” In my close-up, the lizard is a grey, vaguely reptilian blur, the ants not visible at all. For the next shot, I had taken a few steps back, and the lizard had vanished into a general foreground haze, but behind the house a giant in perfect focus has his arm around a lady giant, who regards him woefully and furiously over a hanky.
Later, when we were bigger, it was Hurricane Norbla that stooped over the dollhouse, arms undulant twin tornados, and swept it up. We whirled it until our legs felt all cloudy, and then bumped it tipsily down into a southwestern sort of Oz, where baby horned toads were tucked tightly into bed so they couldn’t escape and wept bloody tears, and beetles taped on top of piano stools consoled them. Sometimes we left stray bits of furniture behind—a delicate chair on an ant den, a tiny candelabra. On a walk we once saw something glinting in a pack rat’s nest and waded carefully into the brush to see what it was. It was a tiny silver tea set. We decided to let the pack rat keep it, imagining a pack rat family sitting down to elevenses around it.
I had read somewhere that a scholarly gentleman of olden times might have a cabinet of curiosities. I pictured a rolltop desk with pigeonholes and secret drawers, ink, quills, and a small sharp knife for cutting them, a very hard green apple, an inchworm humping desolately across a polished wasteland crazed with reflections and reeking poisonously of lemon. I saw the dry shackled feet of tiny birds poking out of pigeonholes, and fastened to the tiny ankle cuffs a paper label with two unpronounceables and a spatter of periods: arx. phrynct. In a drawer, shells neatly affixed in rows to green velvet. One is loose, and rattles to the back and then the front of the drawer when it’s pulled out, the spot of glue, a little snot-colored cornichon, has a wicked-edged concavity on top where the shell once stuck.
It was not, then, as much of a surprise as it might have been when on one of our outdoor expeditions, after we tripped and dashed the house against the ground, loosening a hidden catch, we discovered a secret room under the roof. There were bookshelves full of tiny books, tables covered with bottles and test tubes. There were delicate miniature skulls, and a stuffed lizard of a species unknown to us playing the part of a crocodile dangled from the rafters. There was a telescope on a filigree base; a tiny lens like a little drop of water shone at the end of the tube. There was a terrestrial globe in a round case the inside of which was painted with a map of the heavens, and a functional scale, on which we could weigh jojoba beans, rabbi
t pellets, or dead ants. And in one of the cabinets (I’m sure Papa would have removed it if he had known it was there) was a sealed glass jar containing a pickled embryo with two heads. Probably it was made of rubber, but we thought it was real. We were very quiet at dinner that night, and Blanche wouldn’t eat her peas, which was unlike her, so I ate them, which was unlike me.
That jar was like the spinning wheel in the attic, Sleeping Beauty’s booby trap. The most diligent parents cannot baby-proof the whole world. And so, from time to time, we got a nasty shock. The state fair had a two-headed calf (dead), a two-headed snake (alive), and a Dr. Dolittle show for the kids with a plush Pushmi-Pullyu that came apart in the middle, to the shrieking delight of the audience, Blanche’s terror, and my bitter private satisfaction. I was appalled by the optical illusions in the ancient children’s book Granny got out to show us, confident in its power to amuse: page upon page of “changing heads” with peculiar mustachios and weird headgear, that turned, when you rotate the page, into other staring goons, with suspiciously long foreheads and unpleasantly squashed chins. Even worse were the dolls that hid a second pair of arms under their skirts instead of legs, and another head where the vulva should be. Red Riding Hood has a toothy surprise under her skirt (“What big teeth you have, Grandma!” “The better to eat you with!”) and Snow White is the wicked stepmother. Well, I suspected as much, after all that fuss about mirrors.
And one Christmas we received a chilling present. Our well-meaning uncle in Orange County, mama’s brother Del, who shopped from catalogs and had an instinct for the unnerving novelty (for a while, thanks to Del, a tinny plaint issued from our toilet bowl, “Hey I’m working down here”), somehow got Mama to collude with him to the extent of posting him some snapshots and a lock of our hair (“Look, I think you’ve got pine gum in your hair, no don’t touch it, you’ll just get more of it stuck—I’ll just snip it off and fold it into this piece of paper”), and next Christmas we duly received a My Twinn doll. It looked exactly like us, except it only had one head. “Because your child is unique,” it said in the brochure, astonishingly. We hated it, and kept it under the bed, where sometimes it frightened us, especially late at night.
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