Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  Daisy jumped onto the couch. She put her head on my lap and looked at me.

  “Who is going to take care of you now?” I said.

  I had always thought that I would have to wait until college to be free from Sue. Before high school started, I had counted the days. The only thing I thought I knew for certain was that Sue and I would split up after high school. Now, I had an extra year. Only it wasn’t just a year. It was much more than that. It was the rest of my life.

  Sue

  Smita lived by herself in a two-story house off campus. She had graduated the year before and never left.

  “I love my house,” she said.

  Her house was an insane mess. Smita opened the door to the living room; the couch was covered with clothes and empty cheese doodle bags. I could see a path Smita had made through papers and magazines, more clothes, used tea bags. Newspapers were scattered in front of the fireplace, there were loose twigs all over the floor. The coffee table was covered with books and overflowing ashtrays and a small, neat pile of orange peel.

  “I fired the maid,” she said apologetically. “I think she was stealing.”

  Smita showed me around her house. Each room seemed more crowded with her things than the last. The kitchen was overflowing with dirty dishes. There was a laptop computer and stacks of papers on her bed, wet towels and empty shampoo bottles on the floor of her bathroom, and finally, a surprisingly clean, small room. Her office, Smita said. There was a typewriter on the desk. The walls were covered with posters of Indian movies, pinups of an Indian actor with dark, oily hair, the same man who was in all of the movie posters. There were magazine covers with this actor’s face tacked onto a bulletin board. He had a mustache in some of the pictures, in some he didn’t. His shirt was always open. He had a hairy, muscular chest and a fake, plastic smile. He was revolting.

  “My father,” she said, waving her arm toward the pictures.

  “Your father?” I repeated.

  He seemed even more outrageous than a six-foot-ten-inch-tall professional basketball player.

  “Total macho man,” she said. “Mr. Bollywood incarnate.”

  We stood in front of a poster where Smita’s father stood shirtless, with a purple turban on his head, wearing billowing purple pants. He had his arm around a beautiful Indian woman wearing a purple-and-gold sari.

  I looked at Smita.

  “It’s a totally different world out there,” she said. “My father is the equivalent of royalty in India. If he sets foot in public, the people go berserk. Women actually faint. They hold out their arms for him to sign.” Smita shook her head. “The pictures help me remember my childhood. Where and what I come from. Now that I am a modern young woman, educated first in England and then the United States, it’s easy to forget. It’s all for my book. I’m writing my autobiography.”

  I loved the way Smita talked. She was the smartest person I had ever met. Much smarter than Chloe, who did well at school but learned only what she was supposed to. Smita was different. She puffed on her cigarette. “I know that it might seem outlandish to you as I have only acquired twenty-one years. Eudora Welty wrote that we’ve experienced enough life material by the time we are three. And there are days when I feel like I am older than the planet.”

  “A lot has happened to you?” I said.

  Smita nodded.

  “That woman, Sarita,” she said, pointing to the movie star in the sari. “She was kind to me. She used to give me sweets when I visited my father on the set. She once hennaed my hands.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Dead. Run over,” Smita said. “Flat like a pancake. The roads in India are filled with maniacs. The curbs are lined with squashed peasants who fall asleep on the streets. The country is a strange and grotesque place. I was raised by a nanny and then sent to boarding school in England.”

  “That sounds like a story from a book,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Only I am real. So it should be, I hope, an interesting book. I’ve got all sorts of hooks: gender identity and class, sexual exploitation, coming of age in a foreign land. Self-realization.”

  Smita looked at me. “If you were older,” she said, “I’d offer you a cigarette. But it looks to me as if your development has been stunted enough.”

  We sat down on the futon in front of Smita’s father.

  “Raj Khan,” she said. She held up her middle finger to the poster. I held up mine. Both hands. I crossed my eyes.

  Smita laughed. “You are funny,” she said. “I like you.”

  Smita smoked and I watched her. We listened to the rain. My clothes were almost dry. There was crusted blood on the knee of Chloe’s jeans. Across from the wall of posters, there was a big bookshelf, filled with books. There was a skinny clay vase holding dried flowers, a little blue box painted with white stars. I liked Smita’s house. It was messy, but I had always liked messy. Smita’s house didn’t feel sad or doomed. There was no sad poodle following your every step, making you feel guilty for being alive. No twin sister who ignored you, laughed at your misery. Smita’s house was full of pretty and interesting things. Her shirt had little round mirrors stitched into the bottom.

  “I was going to cook you dinner,” she said. “I came looking for you this morning, to invite you over for some aloo saag. But now that you are here, it has occurred to me that the kitchen is filthy. I keep putting off cleaning that dreadful room. Some people say writing is the hardest thing to do in the world, but I can write and write and write. The words come streaming out. But get me to do the dishes, oh no. Anything but that.”

  “I can be your maid,” I said. I wanted to stay with Smita. “I can sleep here on this futon. I’ll clean your whole house.”

  Smita looked surprised. “You don’t understand. I need someone to do my laundry and fold my clothes. I need someone to pick up my papers, and stack them into orderly piles. I need someone to vacuum the floors and do the dishes. I love to cook, but I make a ton of dishes.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “I’m great at cleaning. I can clean like you wouldn’t believe. I’m the fastest cleaner. I once won a contest for vacuuming. I clocked two floors in less than eleven minutes.”

  I had watched Chloe clean the house for years.

  Smita smiled at me. She had two rows of perfect white teeth. Smita was much more beautiful than Yumiko. She was nicer than Lisa Markman. Wherever I went, there was someone new.

  “Have you run away from home, then?” she said.

  Smita looked at me with concern: not like I was an art project or a pain in the ass. I touched my head. I was still bald. I had left home. I had left Chloe behind.

  “You need a maid,” I repeated.

  Smita leaned forward. She pulled her knees to her chest, staring at me. She stared so hard I started to blush.

  “I am a terrible pig,” she said.

  Even then, Smita did not stop staring at me. Finally I looked away from her. I pretended to be interested in a black-and-white photo of her father. He was winking at the camera. It felt like he was winking at me. Cocksucker, I thought.

  “You cannot interfere with my book if you were to stay here,” Smita said.

  She touched my chin, gently turning my face so that we looked each other in the eye once again.

  “I would never,” I said.

  Every day, I wanted not to miss Chloe.

  Smita and I went to the supermarket. She bought cleaning supplies, potatoes, yogurt, and spinach. She decided that I would start in the kitchen.

  “I’ll cook for you when you are done,” she said.

  I looked at the Ajax, the Fantastik, and the Windex. The green and yellow sponges, the steel wool. A big bottle of yellow Joy lemon fresh dish liquid. Bleach. A new mop and bucket. A roll of garbage bags. Mousetraps. I could not believe how many cleaning products existed. “We need it all,” Smita said. She bought baking soda for the refrigerator. “I must confess,” she said. “I fired the maid quite some time ago. She used to b
ring her own supplies.”

  The sink was stacked full of dishes. The counters were covered with dishes. On the table there were plates of unfinished food. There was dried, crusted food on the floor. The garbage spilled over the trash can. I couldn’t possibly clean this. “Do I use hot water?” I asked.

  Smita shrugged her shoulders.

  “You’re all right then?” she said.

  I stood with my arms at my sides. I wanted to be Smita’s maid, but I had no idea how to clean. Smita went upstairs to write. I filled the sink with hot water, poured in the Joy. “You soak,” I said to the dishes. I pretended to be Chloe. I remembered her scraping scrambled eggs into the trash. I took out the full trash bag, put in a new one. “I can clean,” I said out loud. There was a dead roach floating in a cup of cold coffee. I screamed. Then I covered my mouth with my hand. Smita was writing. She would hate me. But Smita didn’t hear. I put spices into the cupboards. I took a deep breath and started doing the dishes. I dropped a blue teacup, watched it smash to pieces. I found the broom. Swept it up. I shoved the broken pieces into the trash can. “Be careful, Sue,” I said.

  After a couple of hours, Smita came downstairs.

  “Brilliant,” she said, smiling, taking it in. “You’ve got the whole counter cleared.”

  Smita walked to the table and started bringing over fresh dishes for me to wash. “It had gotten so bad in here,” she said. “I was scared to come into the kitchen. I used to go see Yumiko just to get out of the house.”

  She stood at my side, whistling to herself, drying as I washed.

  “It goes quite quickly, doesn’t it?” she said. She looked at her nails. They were painted gold. “It’s quite shameful, I know, but until I came to college, I always had servants looking after me.”

  I emptied a big pot full of red goo. Green mold was growing on top.

  “Curry. With chickpeas,” Smita said, holding her nose. “You did the cleaning at home? Like Cinderella?”

  I shrugged. I was proud of how well I had done.

  Chloe wouldn’t believe it. Chloe had always thought I was useless.

  When we had finished in the kitchen, Smita wanted to do laundry. “This is so fantastic,” she said.

  Smita sorted the clothes into piles. She lent me a pair of jeans and a shirt so I could wash my own dirty clothes. I carried everything down to the basement, where there was a washer and a dryer. There were instructions on the bottle of laundry detergent. When I came upstairs, Smita was stretched out on the couch in the living room, reading a book. “I might never ever leave this house,” she said. “Once it’s clean.”

  Later, she hummed to herself as we folded her clothes.

  For dinner, Smita cooked aloo saag. It was made with the potatoes and spinach we’d bought at the supermarket, plus some onions and Indian spices I had never tasted before. There was a yogurt sauce to put over it. Raita, she called it. I tried to eat slowly.

  “This tastes delicious,” I said.

  “I’m glad,” Smita said. “It’s important to enjoy your food. For as long as you stay here, I’ll cook and you can clean up. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Spinach,” Smita said, “is loaded with protein.”

  Yumiko hadn’t fed me anything. She had gone to the dining center, and I’d waited for her in her room. When I got hungry, I ate candy bars from the machine down the hall. I told myself I was glad Yumiko didn’t feed me. Two candy bars a day was an easy way to diet. But now I was eating, real food, a delicious meal. Chloe had never gotten fat from all that eating. Three meals a day, and instead of gaining weight, she made muscle.

  I never could keep up with her.

  I locked the door to Smita’s bathroom. I wanted to look at myself. Really look and see. I had stopped looking at myself, turned away when I passed my reflection in a window. Crumpled Yumiko’s drawing before I could see how awful I looked. Smita seemed to like me. Without my hair, without Chloe. Smita was not like Lisa Markman, who wanted me for a Chloe replacement. My entire life, when I looked in the mirror, I saw Chloe. And when I looked at Chloe, I saw a better version of myself. But now, I’d become some strange, sick, weird girl. I wasn’t beautiful Chloe anymore. My head was a stubbly mess. My pretty blue eyes were buggy, too big for my face. I had a pimple on the tip of my nose. I had bones popping out of my chest. I didn’t know how Smita could look at me and smile. When I felt done looking at my face, I lifted my pajama top, twisting around so that I could see my tattoo in the mirror: Chloe’s name in pink block letters. The tattoo was still there. Our DNA was still the same.

  I washed my ugly face clean. I washed the bloody cut on my knee, remembering how Chloe took care of me when I fell off my unicycle. I rubbed on antibiotic cream I found in Smita’s medicine cabinet. I put on a Band-Aid. There were no pain pills. I sat down on the floor in front of the toilet. I put my finger in my mouth but didn’t go through with it. I felt sad about throwing up the delicious food Smita had cooked just for me. The light was on in her room. Plus, the toilet in Smita’s bathroom didn’t smell very good. I decided I would start with the bathroom tomorrow. I could wait another day.

  I fell asleep on the futon beneath the poster of Raj Khan in a bright purple turban. Smita’s father was creepy. Smita had given him the finger. Lisa Markman also hated her father, but I thought that maybe he was all right. I wanted him to be. For Chloe. He seemed kind, the way he had smiled at me at Chloe’s games. I never forgot the hamburgers he’d made for me and Lisa. Smita was a vegetarian. “Hindus don’t eat cows,” she said. “Cows are considered holy creatures.”

  “What about dogs?” I said, thinking of Daisy.

  “No,” Smita said. “Dogs are like trash. Children beat them over the head with sticks.”

  I was the best maid ever. I cleaned places that had not been cleaned since Smita moved into the house. I dusted the tops of her books. I vacuumed beneath the beds. I pulled the stove away from the wall and swept up old food. I defrosted her freezer. Everything was dirty. The bottom of Smita’s toilet needed to be scrubbed. I watered her plants, I fluffed her pillows, I brought her cups of tea, which I left outside her office door. Smita could never drink enough tea. I went up and down the steps.

  “You are the best maid ever,” Smita said.

  She liked to open her refrigerator just to admire the neatly packed produce drawer. I had refilled her spices, pouring turmeric and cumin and fennel seeds from messy plastic bags into glass jars. Sometimes Smita took breaks from her writing, just to watch me work.

  “To tell the truth,” she said once, in response to nothing, “the maid quit. She complained that I was too slovenly. But I bloody well paid her to work. She charged me a fortune. Certainly, I should not have to clean in order that the maid could clean. For instance, she would do my laundry only if it was in the hamper. She picked nothing up off the floor. The truth is, the woman didn’t like me. I am certain she hated Indians. She could not accept the fact that she worked for an Indian woman, even though she had the intelligence of a flea.”

  In exchange for my cleaning, Smita cooked wonderful things. When Smita wasn’t writing, she was cooking. She made vegetable curries and Indian breads. She made banana fritters and vegetable samosas, rice biryani, and vegetable korma, which was creamy and mild, with little slivers of almonds. I could only guess at the calories. Smita insisted that I eat. It was part of the deal we had made.

  “Besides the food,” Smita told me, “I miss nothing about India. Nothing. Not the bloody weather, not the people or the starvation or the culture or the fighting or the AIDS, not even the landscape. Nothing. Let the people kill themselves testing their bloody missiles. Most Indians are like children. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  Days went by, and then a week, and Smita never once talked about sending me home.

  I could never throw up my meals because Smita was always around. She stayed up late, reading in bed. One night, after gorging on three vegetable samosas and two plates of korma, I set the alarm fo
r four in the morning. I dragged myself out of bed, into the bathroom I had cleaned, and threw up as quietly as I could.

  “I know all too well about the purge cycle,” Smita said the next morning. She opened my mouth and looked at my teeth. “I forbid you to defile your body,” she said. “Ruin your teeth.” She lit a cigarette. “Weaken your bones, stunt your development.”

  Smita puffed hard on her cigarette. She never ate breakfast. She smoked and drank dark tea.

  “When you start eating properly,” she said, “you can take up smoking. When is the last time you got your period?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not once?” Smita bit her lip, staring at her lit cigarette.

  I shook my head.

  “Brilliant,” she said, still angry. “What about your twin? Has she gotten her period?”

  I tried not to lie to Smita. She’d seen me at my worst, head shaved, riding my unicycle in the rain with nowhere to go. She had seen the tattoo on my naked back. She had seen me naked.

  “Almost three years ago,” I said. Our birthday was in a week. We would be seventeen. I had never wanted to get so old. Everything had turned awful when we started middle school. We had been beautiful children. Our lives used to be golden. “Maybe I have cancer,” I said.

  I had believed my period would come the day after Chloe’s. DNA was supposed to mean something. Our insides were supposed to be as alike as our outsides. Our hearts and livers and kidneys, the same. But I had not bled. Maybe I really did have cancer. The chemotherapy wouldn’t be a problem because I didn’t have any hair to lose. I bit my lip, wishing for a drag on Smita’s cigarette. I was crazy about Smita, but I didn’t want to die in her house, without Chloe or my dog or a stash of pain pills. I stared at my feet, confused. I didn’t want to be dying.

  Tears sprang to Smita’s eyes. “No,” she said. “No, you don’t have cancer.”

  Smita hugged me. Rocked me in her arms the way Chloe used to rock me. I buried my head in her chest and started to cry with her. I loved to cry. It felt so good. “You don’t have cancer,” Smita repeated. “It’s plain old malnutrition. Just like in the third world. Except in this country of plenty, girls starve as a matter of choice. You are all bones, Sue.”