Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  “Swish,” he said when the ball slipped through the net. He pressed the rewind button, and we watched it again.

  That is how I spent Christmas night and New Year’s Eve, alone with Mr. Markman, watching basketball in his living room in Hawaii. I learned about his career from beginning to end. He was more than just an excellent shooter. I was able to appreciate his strength as a rebounder and the generous way he always passed the ball to his teammates so that everyone could score baskets. I felt honored to be allowed to sit in the same room with him. I could not believe that the awesome basketball player on the TV screen was the same kind man who cooked my meals and said good morning to me when I drank my juice.

  By the time we were ready to go to the airport, Lisa and Todd were outright ignoring me.

  Sue was waiting for me in front of the house, riding her unicycle. It was a relief to see her, pedaling up and down the street, alive and ridiculous and unembarrassed. She was Sue. I couldn’t wait until the car stopped so I could be with her; until that moment, I had no idea that I was so worried about her. But then, just as fast, I felt exasperation. Sue and I, we were nothing alike. It was a dirty trick, having been born an identical twin with someone like her. The sidewalks and lawns were covered with snow, reminding me how far away I had been. Sue had gotten amazingly good; she pedaled back and forth, staying in the same place as if she were treading water, while the limo was stopped in the middle of the empty street to let me out.

  “That girl is a total psychopath,” Lisa said when she saw her. “Welcome back, Chloe, to your own private hell.”

  Mr. Markman looked at Lisa, confused. There was nothing more he could do for me now that we were back. By the end of the trip, he had begun to notice our deteriorating friendship, the way Lisa and Todd would go to the beach without me and leave me out of their conversations. Lisa got worse when Mr. Markman reprimanded her manners. Our friendship, my first and only friendship, was over. Lisa might have been able to tolerate the fact that I would not fool around with her brother, but she could not forgive me for getting along so well with her father.

  Mr. Markman patted my shoulder. “You take good care of yourself,” he said. “We’ll see you soon.”

  Todd and Lisa rolled their eyes. We all knew that Lisa would never invite me back to her house.

  Mr. Markman gazed out the window at my sister. She made crisp turns around the limousine. Her posture was straight, her cheeks were pink from the cold. She wore her hair in long, girlish braids.

  “Will you look at her?” he said. He whistled between his teeth in admiration.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Markman,” I said. “Thank you for the wonderful vacation.”

  I opened the door to the car. Sue circled around me while the chauffeur opened the trunk and handed me my suitcase.

  “So you didn’t die,” Sue said.

  “I could say the same thing to you.”

  I thought we might hug each other, but we didn’t. Sue was unreachable on her unicycle. The limo honked its horn twice and then pulled away. I said a silent good-bye to Mr. Markman. Sue gave the car her middle finger as it drove down the block.

  “You’ve gotten so good,” I said.

  Sue turned to me. She directed her middle finger at me, and when she was sure I understood her feelings, she rode off in the direction of the limousine.

  My father, I would soon find out, had left the house the day before. My mother was taking a nap. Daniel and his girlfriend, Yumiko, had gone back to college. He had left a dirty sock, some Jockey underwear, and a three-pack of condoms in my top dresser drawer. My pink silk pajamas were missing. I also found a pink lace bra in my bed. It wasn’t mine, though I had one like it.

  Sue stood in the doorway, watching me unpack.

  “You probably thought that I was going to miss you. But you were wrong. More and more, Chloe, you are wrong about things.”

  Of course I thought Sue would miss me. She’d stood in the same spot two weeks ago, threatening to kill herself if I went to Hawaii. She didn’t think I could have forgotten that. I knew I had done a horrible thing, leaving the way I did. I had gotten away from Sue, but now I was back, and there she was, staring at me with hate in her eyes. “I didn’t miss you,” she repeated.

  She twirled the end of a braid around her finger. She was lying. She always lied to me. Without me, Sue was all alone.

  “Your hair looks nice that way,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I am a fascinating person.”

  I nodded. I had to be careful with Sue. When I looked at her, I remembered how she hit Lisa Markman with a tennis ball, how she kicked Daisy for no reason by the swimming pool. As my father once noted in his tape recorder, Sue had the potential for violence. I felt cornered by her, sitting on the bed, following my every move. Any second, she could pounce. Her fingernails were ragged and uneven.

  “I got arrested while you were gone,” Sue said.

  I nodded again. I already knew. My mother had left a bulleted list in a sealed envelope on my pillow, informing me of the events that had taken place in the short time I was away. Item one was my errant father. Item two was Yumiko, Daniel’s girlfriend, who “seemed wonderful but had taken an unhealthy interest in Sue.” Item three was Sue’s arrest at the shopping mall. Sue’s upcoming therapy session was item four. Item five suggested that the therapist might be interested in talking to me in future sessions. Item six was Daisy, underlined and in bold, with a request that I walk and feed her, as these responsibilities were “being neglected as of late.” Item seven explained that my mother was exhausted and offered an apology if she would not be emotionally available for the days to come.

  It was a concise, impressive list that fit on one page. But the list did not answer any of the questions I would have had for my mother had she not been asleep when I got home. It was the middle of the afternoon and confusing to me that my mother should be asleep. The idea of my parents not being married also did not make much sense. They drove matching silver Mercedeses, and wore the same small wire-frame glasses. They were partners at the same firm and could finish each other’s sentences. It occurred to me that my parents had seemed more like twins than Sue and I. I did not understand why I needed therapy when it was Sue who had been arrested. I did not understand why so much had to be so radically different when all I had done was go away for a vacation.

  “Look,” Sue said, pulling a plastic ID bracelet out of her back pocket. “I rode in the back of the police car, I got fingerprinted. I sat in a holding cell for two hours.”

  “Why are you so happy about it?”

  “You can’t believe how pissed off our respectable father was. Pissed off! Lawyer’s daughter arrested! Oh, the shame. Get this crazy girl off to the therapist! Cocksucker. It’s fine with me. Yumiko believes in therapy. She thinks I might like it. She says that any halfway intelligent person should jump at the offer of free therapy. Yumiko thinks I’m smart.”

  Yumiko explained the bra in my bed and the condoms in my dresser. In other people’s families, someone would have made my bed before I came home. The sheets would have been changed.

  “Yumiko doesn’t love Daniel,” Sue said. “She is much more interested in me.”

  My head had started to hurt the instant I got back home. The bottles of pills were lined up beside my bed like always: generic aspirin, Advil, Excedrin, Tylenol, Bayer. They made my room look like a place for a sick person. I decided to keep them in my closet from now on.

  “You don’t have to worry about me bothering you anymore,” she said.

  “You don’t bother me,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”

  Sue smirked at me.

  “You are such a bad liar,” she said.

  After two weeks of Lisa and Todd Markman, Sue seemed a little less terrible. On the flight back, as Todd caressed my hand and told me that it was not too late to change my mind, I realized I was looking forward to seeing Sue. I had not called home once. My family had Mr. Markman’s phone number, but no one
had called to wish me a Merry Christmas or a Happy New Year or even to explain about the divorce. I felt heartbroken, though I wasn’t sure why. They had never paid enough attention to me when they were married, and now, I knew, they would be busy litigating their divorce. Sue was lashing out at me, and I had no one.

  “I like Yumiko better than you,” Sue said. “She appreciates me. She says perfect is pus and guts.”

  “Who,” I asked, “is perfect? What are you talking about?”

  But Sue had slammed the door in my face. The noise was sharp and loud. I heard the sound echoing in the back of my head. I was home. I didn’t understand how Sue could have told anybody that I was perfect. I had gotten a B minus on my French midterm. I had lost my only friend.

  My father was not, as Sue liked to say, a cocksucker. He was busy and in love with a woman who was not our mother, but that did not necessarily mean he had stopped caring about us. I could give him a chance. My mother’s Mercedes had been blocked in by the snow during the holidays, so he came all the way home in his to drive her to their office. We had talked on the phone, and he had promised to arrive early so that we could talk in person.

  “Angel,” he said when he got out of the car. He was late. “Traffic,” he said. “It’s so good to see you.”

  I had taken notes in anticipation of his arrival. I had learned from my parents that it was important to prepare for even the most casual encounters, and I had many concerns: the ever-increasing mess in the house, my mother’s fourteen-hour-a-day sleep schedule, the empty refrigerator and the almost empty twenty-five-pound bag of dog food, and the worst thing, the sense of dread I had begun to feel whenever Sue entered a room. Not only did my head begin to ache but my entire body tensed. I tried to keep my distance in case she had the urge to lash out and hit me. My father was a lawyer, and I thought he must remain responsible for the quality of life in our house. If my mother wasn’t doing well, then he had to take her to the doctor and hire a maid; he had to be a parent to Sue because she had finally stopped listening to me.

  “You look so beautiful,” he said, holding my hands. “So tan.”

  I felt something in me let go. Someone in my family was glad to see me. I did not know how he could leave me alone with them. I abandoned the agenda in my head; I just wanted my father to save me.

  “I want to come live with you,” I said. “In your new apartment. Please.”

  My father let go of my hands.

  He looked at me.

  “Honey,” he said.

  It was such a wonderful idea I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me before. A new apartment, empty and clean, where I could be my father’s only daughter.

  “That is the sweetest thing I’ve heard,” he said. “But I need you to look after your mother and Sue.”

  “That’s your job,” I said.

  My father picked up a handful of snow. Sue watched us from the living room window.

  “This will get better,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Earlier, Sue watched me get dressed and comb my hair, telling me that I should not expect shit from our father. The word she used to describe him came back to me. It had always sounded horrible. But now I was glad for the word. Cocksucker. Mr. Markman would never abandon me with such complete indifference.

  My father molded the snow in his hand into a ball. “You must have liked the warm weather in Hawaii,” he said.

  I shrugged. My mother came out of the house. She walked carefully down the front path, which was still covered in ice. She looked fine. She was wearing a pair of sensible shoes, holding her heels in her hand. She looked like a lawyer again, dressed in a conservative gray suit instead of her dirty bathrobe. She looked like my father’s business partner. It did not seem coincidental that his suit was also gray. I could not believe that they were really getting divorced.

  “Right on time,” my father said. She was, in fact, five minutes early, cutting into my meeting with my father.

  “I am always punctual,” my mother said. “Why would that change?”

  “You’ve got a point,” my father said, looking at the snowball in his hand. “Anyway, it’s back to the old grind.”

  “Who’s going to handle our divorce, I wonder?” My mother smiled serenely.

  My father threw the snowball against a tree. “We can discuss that at the office,” he said.

  My mother kissed me on the cheek. “Make sure Sue gets to school on time,” she said. She got into the car, laying her briefcase on her lap.

  “We’ll talk more,” my father told me. His voice, at least, was apologetic. He took my hand in his, and I felt him press a bill into my palm.

  He got back in the car, closed the door, and without looking back, drove off: two lawyers on their way to work. Sue came out of the house and joined me on the sidewalk. She had her backpack on over her winter parka, a black ski cap covering her dirty hair. She held her unicycle at her side. I looked at the fifty-dollar bill my father had given me.

  “It is not even worth hating them,” she said, snatching the money.

  “I don’t hate them.”

  “Well you should.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Sue pulled a pair of gloves from her pocket. I looked at my empty hand.

  “I do. You are my twin sister.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know,” Sue said. “It is a given.”

  She hopped on her unicycle. She could get up and keep her balance effortlessly, without leaning on a tree or gripping my shoulder. She pedaled evenly, without looking back.

  The thought of going to school gave me a headache.

  I did not know what I wanted to wear. Someone had gone through my dresser while I was gone. My pink chenille sweater, my favorite jeans, and the red Stella McCartney dress I had never worn were missing, in addition to the silk pajamas. Maybe Sue had taken these things, the way she stole my textbooks or the cash my father had just put in my hand, or maybe it was my brother’s new girlfriend, the Japanese kleptomaniac. I was shaking all over, looking for my missing things. If I confronted Sue, she would deny it. She’d laugh in my face. Now I would be late. I hated to be late to school. Being on time was something I could control, like brushing the tangles out of my hair or tucking in my clothes.

  I did not want to go to school.

  I went to the garage and found my unicycle hanging on the wall. I had not ridden it in over a year, but it came right back to me. I pedaled directly to the Markman house on the hill. Lisa and Todd were sure to be at school, and no one would know that I had gone there. I would not let myself hope to see Mr. Markman. I just wanted to see his house, to be near him.

  Mr. Markman was lying on the front lawn, making snow angels. They were the biggest snow angels I had ever seen. Mr. Markman seemed like the tallest person in the entire world, although he’d informed me that there were numerous players in the NBA who had several inches on him. I was surprised to see him playing in the snow. I had never seen an adult play in the snow. My parents were not playful people. I was not a playful person. I got off my unicycle and walked over to him.

  “Chloe,” he said. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Mr. Markman.”

  “So you ride that thing too?”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Markman laughed. He sat up from the snow, brushing the fluffy white powder from his lap.

  “You are not your twin, in disguise?”

  I laughed. “No, it’s me.”

  “But twins do that. Fool people?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I’d rather be recognized for myself.”

  “But you also ride a unicycle.” Mr. Markman laughed again. He stood up from the lawn, wiping still more snow from his pants. “Pretty twins like you could get a career going. Ride for the Ringling Brothers at the Garden during the off-season.”

  “I would never do that,” I said.

  “No?” Mr. Markman looked at me. “Why not?”

  “It lacks dignity.”
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br />   “Dignity?” Mr. Markman said. “And here I look like a grown fool playing in the snow.”

  “It looks nice,” I said.

  “Do you want to come inside? Watch a basketball game?”

  “Are Lisa and Todd at school?”

  I did not want go inside if they were home, but Mr. Markman misunderstood my question.

  “You don’t need to worry about being alone with me, Chloe,” he said. “I am a father. An honorable man.”

  I felt my face go red. We had spent so many nights alone in Hawaii, watching tapes of Mr. Markman’s games. He was six feet, ten inches tall.

  “I enjoyed watching basketball with you in Hawaii. Your presence soothes me.”

  “I enjoyed it too,” I said.

  “But you should be in school,” Mr. Markman said. “Earning good grades.”

  Mr. Markman was a responsible parent; it was an admirable quality, but I was sad to be denied the morning in his house, sitting on that comfortable leather sofa watching Mr. Markman play basketball. There were lots of games I hadn’t seen: his high school championship on Super 8, and the all-star game where he had been named most valuable player.

  “I practically get straight A’s,” I said softly, looking at my unicycle, wondering how long it would take me to ride back to the house and then walk to school. “I could miss a day.”

  It was useless, I thought. Mr. Markman and I could not be friends. He would send me to school. I belonged in school. I was the top student in my grade.

  “Have you had breakfast?” Mr. Markman said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Would you like some?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Mr. Markman led me into his house. We walked through the enormous living room, past the dining room and his office, and turned left into the kitchen.

  “I’m making sausages,” he said. “You want eggs with your sausages?”

  I shook my head. “Whatever you’re having is fine,” I said.

  “Let’s skip the eggs,” Mr. Markman said. Mr. Markman fired up a frying pan full of sausages while I sat on the table, watching. “These are chicken apple sausages,” he said. “Healthy and delicious.”