by Liz Astrof
Stunned—like pretty much everyone else—I pointed to Mitzy across from his chair, now lying on the floor next to Cathy (heat rises). Cathy laughed nervously, a hehehehe chuckle as a reaction to my dad talking about his dead child like a coroner on Law and Order.
It was entirely possible that this could be the last conversation my father would ever have with me, I knew. So, I forged ahead.
“So . . . was she complete?” I asked. “I mean—did she have all of her . . . parts?”
My dad had been focused on Mitzy, but now he looked at me. “What?” he asked.
“My sister,” I pressed him, “was she, like, formed?” I really wanted to picture her now.
He picked up his napkin spear, examining it like it was something much more interesting than a napkin spear.
“She’d been dead a while,” he said. “She was a little smaller than you—but she was formed, yes.”
“She was a baby,” I said faux-casually, mostly to myself. Until now, I’d thought she was like a blob of cells or one of those cysts with teeth and hair that might even pop out of my neck if I lost enough weight. Not an actual baby . . . person.
Todd put his arm around me reassuringly and squeezed my shoulder kind of hard—almost aggressively, which I appreciated because he knows I hate soft touching. If you want to show me affection, give me a noogie or punch me in the arm. Or, like Todd was doing at the moment, dig your knuckles into my flesh, which I was pretty sure was bruising as I imagined my wet little baby sister. Kind of blue, I guessed, due to deadness, with little baby arms and legs and shoulders and feet. An intricate system of veins and arteries that led to a still baby heart that once had a beat.
“Bummer,” I said. Which was a deliberate understatement—I’d had a full-sized sister.
But for some reason—maybe because I couldn’t disappear into a Facebook wormhole on my phone—I was determined to know more. And now that I’d broached it, I treated the topic like I was taking on a quart of ice cream that’s begun to melt: I might regret it afterward, but I needed to get to the bottom of it.
“So, what did they do with her?” I asked. Was there a plot somewhere? A mosque? A morgue? Was she in a drawer? A jar on a mantel?
“I don’t know!” My father was becoming exasperated. “Stop it—it was a long time ago, no one remembers.”
He laid down his napkin spear and straightened his pant creases, looking on proudly as Mitzy uncrossed and then recrossed her paws. He knew every move his dog made, yet he had no idea what doctors did with his dead human fully formed daughter who had been my two-legged, two-armed sister.
In between giggles, Cathy said, “Why ask now?” And offered Mitzy her bare foot to lick, and the conversation fizzled into humid silence.
Since it was up to me to concoct an end to my curiosity, I conjured a fantasy of my sister’s funeral—a sendoff complete with her little body enshrouded in a pink blanket. Maybe a doll dress. A burial in a place where babies like her went, where the doctors and nurses cried and held our sobbing parents’ hands . . .
“They threw her out!” my dad suddenly remembered triumphantly, jolting me back into reality.
Threw her out.
I could almost hear Orthodox Tom Cruise’s jaw drop. Or maybe it was my jaw dropping. Or Todd’s knuckles grinding harder into my shoulder bones.
“Like in the garbage?!” I asked, when I found my voice. Actually, I must’ve shouted it because all of Anatevka at the long table stopped talking for a moment before resuming their heated debate. Legs crossed, arms crossed, I tightened my grip on myself and swallowed hard.
“So . . .” I spoke slowly, “was the doctor just like, ‘Are you done with this baby?’ And you guys were just like, ‘Sure, chuck her’?”
“What did you expect?” my father snapped, suddenly hurt and on the defensive. “It was the seventies, Liz.” As if it being the ’70s was an excuse for discarding a baby in a garbage can.
I laughed my giant guttural laugh to deflect the horror of it all. Cathy joined in with her nervous laugh.
“Hahahahhahahah!”
“Heheheheheheh.”
“Hahaha!”
“Heheheh!”
I heard Orthodox Tom Cruise ask Todd if this was all for real. Todd, who at this point had pulled his phone out and was openly playing Words with Friends, assured him it was.
But it wasn’t for real. It was surreal. I was starting to feel a vague panic I couldn’t quite identify.
I asked my father how long she’d been dead before they took her out. I dreaded the answer but figured if my dad barely remembered they’d chucked his baby, he couldn’t possibly know how long I’d floated around my mother’s womb with a dead body.
I watched him actually start to do the math.
“You were born two months early. . . .” He calculated. “And they said they thought she died two weeks before that.”
“Fuuuck,” Todd said. Fuck, indeed.
“Shit,” Orthodox Tom Cruise said. Shit, exactly.
“How’d they know she was dead? Did the smell start to float into the hallway?” I asked, wincing at my own impulse to make a joke, even through my horror at living with a dead body.
“Her body started filling up with toxins, poison, and she got sick.”
My father nodded enthusiastically, the details coming back to him. He sat upright, pointing to his middle.
“Her umbilical cord was wrapped around her here . . .” he continued. “And it was in a way that kept her from growing anymore, so . . . she died.” He threw his hands up. It was the first show of emotion he’d demonstrated.
Cathy was folding a Soy Delicious wrapper into a neat little square. “That’s common,” she said. (How would she know? And where the hell did she get ice cream?)
My father nodded sadly. I immediately regretted bringing it up. I opened a can of (kosher) worms, on the New Year. Not the fun one, but still a New Year.
Orthodox Tom Cruise looked at me. “Do they know if you were fraternal or identical?” he asked. He knew I couldn’t possibly know the answer, but he was so personally thrown by the morbid turn the story had taken that he wanted to get the question out there.
“I don’t think you can know,” I answered.
“Oh no,” Cathy chirped. “They know.”
My dad had settled back in his chair. A yawn escaped him, and he closed his eyes.
“One sac means identical, and two means fraternal,” he said, and without opening his eyes, he gestured in my general direction. “They were in one sac,” he mumbled sleepily.
“Sac,” Todd said quietly and smiled a little, then contritely dug his knuckles deeper into my shoulder. And then, my other shoulder—to even me out of course. I wondered if my twin had the same need for symmetry before she dropped dead.
So, I had been a they. As they as they come. Identical. Another me. It seemed fun, like looking in a mirror. And terrible, like looking in a mirror. Identical meant she would’ve also had my “tragically short” legs, as my friend Julie once described them, even though I didn’t ask for her opinion. Maybe I wouldn’t have needed a friend as brutally honest as Julie at all, because I’d have had my twin sister, who would have also had baby-fine hair that refused to stay feathered or stand up on its own without a full can of hairspray. She’d also have been allergic to hairspray. And eye shadow. Like me. She’d also have been tested by the school nurse every year for scoliosis because her ass stuck out so much. She’d also not have had scoliosis but just a big ass.
We would have been inseparable. My younger twin cousins Emily and Jackie were. I’d always been jealous of the way they finished each other’s sentences and felt each other’s pain—from far away even. They always had each other to play with and talk to. They fought like crazy growing up, and still did—one time Emily threw a card table at Jackie’s head over a stretched-out bathing suit—but then five minutes later they always acted like nothing had happened because they were twins.
And Emily and Jackie wer
e only fraternal (though just by virtue of being twins, none of us could ever tell them apart). My sister and I were identical; we had shared the same space for two weeks after she died.
Maybe I held her as she died. Maybe I’d held my dead sister for two weeks, until we both emerged—one alive, one dead—from our mother.
Our mother.
The intense but vague panic I’d been feeling suddenly homed in on its source. The thought of carrying a child almost to term only to have it die in the last few weeks was unbearable to me.
That hateful, filthy, horrible witch of a woman had experienced something I would wish on no mother, not even my own. In that moment I found myself sympathizing with her—maybe I would be the same way if I lost a child?
No wonder she kidnapped me and made me look at that cesarean scar—a crime scene, literally and figuratively. I was pulled out of there, alive. And then she didn’t get to even keep me.
It was the stuff of nightmares, of opera. Of my family. Of my mother, who was warped as they came, thanks to the two of us. Only I was the one who survived to experience the fallout.
As was my habit, and as my profession mandated, I obviously had to make a joke of the forensic nightmare I’d exhumed.
“It’s not like it was anyone’s fault, then,” I said a little too brightly. “I mean, if the cord was wrapped around her, that was just bad luck. It’s not like it was my fault. And at least mom had me!”
My father laughed, but not the kind of laugh I was going for. A bad laugh.
“Well, your mother sure as hell didn’t want anything to do with you when you were born,” he said, shaking his head, chuckling at the memory of the woman he hated so much.
“So, she hated me because my sister died? She blamed me? Like maybe I had something to do with it?” I asked him.
His bitter cackle was loud enough to rouse Mitzy, who had fallen asleep. Cathy shushed her husband. He continued in a softer, condescending voice, as if he were addressing the village idiot.
“Your mother’s problem wasn’t that your sister died,” he said matter-of-factly. “Her problem was that you lived.”
The words hung there for a bit, the silence broken only by a beardless Orthodox dude who came over and asked Orthodox Tom Cruise if he wanted to join in the Taschlich prayers—these are the prayers where you throw your sins (in the form of bread) into water (in the form of the LA River). My sofa buddy leapt to his feet, which to me was the most shocking moment yet—who would willingly leave a story about a dead twin to drown their sins in anything but alcohol?
“So, she didn’t go crazy out of . . . grief?” I asked, just to be sure.
My father shook his head dismissively.
“Your mother didn’t want children.” He liked to say your mother as if he had never been her husband. Like I had somehow conjured her just to torture him.
“You already had Jeff,” I reminded him. It wasn’t like my arrival changed everything—though to be fair, Mom was clearly no fan of my brother.
“My mother took care of Jeff,” Dad said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He tossed the napkin spear on the coffee table. “Your mother would park him at her house and take off. But Grandma couldn’t take care of both of you—they didn’t have double strollers back then, you know, and she was older. Your arrival made it a hassle.”
Maybe my sister had somehow sensed what we were in for and offed herself, just got up on a little amniotic stool, wrapped the cord around herself, and took off in search of a less poisonous womb, a better future, leaving me to hold the family bag.
Suddenly Caleb, my nephew, who’d inherited my brother’s sarcasm and comedic timing, appeared at the sliding glass doors to the backyard.
“Jesse fell in the pool!” he yelled, smirking.
As Todd and I bolted outside, Cathy called after us to make sure we closed the door behind us so Mitzy wouldn’t get out.
My father wondered aloud what the big deal was—the subtext being that it wasn’t like the dog had fallen in the pool.
And it wasn’t that Jesse couldn’t swim. He was actually a great swimmer. He’d even inherited the ability to cry and swim at the same time from me—which he was doing as he made his way to the side of the cold, leaf-filled pool. The trouble was that Jesse didn’t like surprises; they made him anxious. There was no going with the flow for Jesse—in the words of his school principal, he required “a lot of emotional unpacking.”
I could relate. Could I ever.
Todd pulled him out and ran inside to get a towel. Jesse stood there, his glasses crooked and dripping, the holiday outfit he’d assembled for himself—from the dressy plaid shorts and collared white polo shirt down to the white socks and loafers; he’d wanted to look “sharp”—all soaking wet.
He balled up his fists tightly—in addition to anxiety, he had sensory issues, and I knew he needed deep pressure if we were going to stop this forty-nine-pound potential volcano from erupting. Deep pressure helped at times like this—like from the large foam rolling pin we rolled him with before birthday parties. Or by my holding his legs in the air while making him walk on his hands, the blood rushing to his head, and which was actually a great ab workout for me.
Sometimes all I needed to do, all I could do, though, was just press down on his head.
I knelt down and bowed my head, like I’d learned to do to soothe my son. He leaned in and pressed his head against mine, like he’d learned to do to be soothed. And we silently pressed our heads against each other’s, shutting everyone else out.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” I said, softly, over and over.
I felt the tension leaving my son’s body, his fists starting to open. Relief.
Your mother’s problem wasn’t that your sister died. It was that you lived.
If ever I feared I was anything like my mother—which I did, every moment of every day—it was moments like this, moments of knowing what to do for my child and wanting to do it, that proved to me that I wasn’t anything like her.
“Elizabeth, you pamper him too much.”
My father had come outside.
“You’re gonna make him weird,” he scolded, and turned to go back into the house. He stopped when he saw Cathy standing in the doorway.
“Where’s the dog?” he asked her.
“I thought you had her,” Cathy said in a sudden panic.
“She’s in the pool?!”
My niece Sasha was pointing at Mitzy, who was swimming—or possibly trying to drown, Ophelia-like, her pink bow floating toward the drain.
“Goddamnit!! Jesus Christ Almighty!” my dad yelled, alienating at least two-thirds of those gathered around the dining room table.
Jesse’s mood lightened, and soon he was cracking up along with his cousins as Dad and Cathy melted down and the dog continued to elude them.
I thought, Too bad my sister isn’t here to see this. And then, Well, fuck her anyway, she left.
Jeff came over. “Thanks for coming over today,” he said, and he meant it. He put his arm around me and wished me a Happy New Year.
Squeezing him tight, I wished him the same.
And I meant it.
Out of the Basement, Into the Fire
* * *
On an early summer Saturday afternoon in Seaford, Long Island, something happened to me. The type of thing therapists dream about. It’s actually the first story I tell therapists upon meeting them, just so they know what they’re dealing with going in. Real first-appointment material. They listen attentively and nod empathetically, visions of new waiting room furniture and the trip to Nepal they wanted to take or a cruise (on one of the fancier cruise lines—the ones that make you forget you’re on a cruise) they couldn’t afford filling their heads. I’m pay dirt.
What I tell them is this:
I was twelve, and from deep in the cool, shag-carpeted basement of our split-level house I could smell the lilacs and the freshly cut grass outside, and could hear our neighbors Rubin and Anna scr
eaming at each other on their porch.
Everyone was enjoying the beautiful weather in their own ways. I was drawing my warmth from the staticky heat that rose off of the TV set downstairs, lying on the tiny brown suede couch, legs dangling over the side, occasionally making my way to the fold-out wet bar that was home to one of my many secret junk food stashes. It was the only room in the house that bore any semblance of life Before Cathy, who was no longer quite the fairy princess she seemed when she first moved in. Beautiful Kind Clean Cathy had certainly brought normalcy to our lives, but slowly her preferences began to take over both the house and my father. Everything got “nicer,” “neater,” and more “presentable”—shorthand for “less comfortable.”
Our living room, once for “living” in, now had pristine matching twill couches, a glass coffee table, and a sculpture of a ballerina no one could walk within fifty feet of because it was something called a Lladró. It was one of those things that was so valuable, it needed to be separated from the rest of the words in a sentence.
“Keep your sticky hands away from my . . . Lladró.”
“Don’t let that dog near my . . . Lladró.”
“Who cracked the . . . Lladró?!”
A broken-off piece of a ballerina’s pinky with a tiny red painted nail remained hidden in the deepest pocket of the Smith’s carpenter pants I was wearing when I just wanted to see if the ballerina’s fingers bent. They didn’t.
This is why it was best I stayed downstairs. The basement, my own little refuge. I considered it to be like Jeannie’s bottle or Fonzie’s apartment above the Cunninghams’ garage. When my best friend Rachel Schein would come over, we’d play Love Boat down there, turning the room into the ship’s bar or the Pirate’s Cove (did Isaac ever get time off?). I’d be Julie McCoy, and Rachel liked being a glamorous guest star, and together we’d pretend to slow-dance with our dates, arms wrapped around the air, to France Jolie’s “Come to Me” until, exhausted from the exertion, we’d call it a day, dip into the snack stash, and laugh hysterically, to the point of almost choking on our Razzles or Twinkies, at some silly private joke, like best friends do.