Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  It started to rain when I left the office. The sky had gotten dark. I slipped into the café where I had once gotten a tattoo and bought myself a cup of coffee.

  I sat next to Louise the next day at James’s graduation. She clutched her program, tears in her eyes as James stepped onto the podium to accept his diploma. She stood up to snap his picture when he threw his cap into the air. The day before, she had only bad things to say about him, so I felt reassured to see that she loved him anyway. It occurred to me that if Louise were my mother, she would have come to all of my basketball games. I wondered if my parents would come to my high school graduation. I wondered if Sue would graduate from high school.

  Louise came back with us to my house. She walked up the stairs, running her hand along the banister, poking her head into the rooms. She and James had lived in a small, two-bedroom garden apartment.

  “Who will cook James dinner?” Louise said.

  “I will?” I said, giving the answer I thought she expected.

  “Don’t you dare.” Louise’s voice turned surprisingly fierce. “You make my son toe the line. You make him pay his own way or he will suck you dry.” She made her way back into the living room, examining the big-screen television and the stereo. “I told you he was a taker. I bought that boy anything he wanted, hundred-dollar sneakers, a Game Boy, a Tommy Hilfiger jacket, I made sure he got it. When he was ten years old he wanted a trumpet, so I scrimped and I saved until I had enough money to buy James a trumpet. The boy played it one time and decided to quit. He said it hurt his lips.”

  “Please, not the trumpet story,” James said, leaning against the wall, taking off his tie. “You always go on and on about the trumpet.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and began to steer her downstairs toward the door. “I’ve done good, Mom. I made it through high school, I’m living with my girlfriend. It’s time for you to go home.”

  Louise pointed to the kitchen. “I thought we would have a quiet dinner,” she said. “To celebrate. I brought us a casserole.”

  “Not another casserole,” he said. “Sweet Jesus. I’m starting my new life with Chloe, here. We want to celebrate.”

  I had told James he had been lucky to grow up with a mother who loved him and looked after his teeth, but he did not see it that way. His father had died skydiving when James was only six months old. When James had enough money, he wanted for us to try it.

  “We will call you,” I told Louise.

  I was surprised when she came over to me, giving me a hug. I was certain that she must hate me.

  “You can call me any time,” she whispered into my ear. “In the middle of the night. At work. You can call me any time.”

  James slammed the door triumphantly behind her.

  I looked at him, his eyes shining.

  James was my prize, but I wasn’t feeling the sort of happiness that I should have. I had hoped that Louise might stay with us, that we could have sat at the dining room table and eaten her casserole. She could have made a toast to James’s graduation, and then another to our future happiness. But maybe I didn’t want happiness with James. Really, I still wanted more than that. I heard Louise’s car pull away and was tempted to run after it.

  James pulled me to him.

  “Did you think she would ever leave?” he said. He slid his hand up my dress. “You can call me night or day.” James mimicked her voice. “My God, what does she think is going to happen?”

  “Don’t you want to eat the casserole?” I said.

  “Are you insane?” James pulled the flowered dress I wore for his graduation up over my head and threw it on the couch. We were standing in the middle of the living room. I knew that I looked sexy to him, but I was no longer amazed by this fact.

  “I love this bra,” James said. He could open the clasp with his teeth. This trick used to make me laugh, but now I was worried about the open curtains, the neighbors who could see us. He leaned over and popped it open.

  “That’s so awesome,” he said. “I wish Sue were here so that I could watch you pop open her bra with your teeth.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” James grinned at me. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if James was sweet or a little bit brain-damaged. I wished that I could just love him completely, never think any critical thoughts. I also wished that he wanted to have sex a little less often.

  “Not here,” I said, and I ran up the stairs for the bedroom, knowing that he would chase after me. We had been together for almost a month, but I still felt self-conscious naked.

  I jumped under the covers of my parents’ bed.

  “You have to let me see you naked now,” he said, pounding on his chest, pulling off his white graduation shirt. “I am the man of this house.”

  The bright sunlight shone in through the windows. I laughed. James could always make me laugh. He jumped under the covers and made a loud, smacking fart sound with his mouth on my stomach. I would laugh at the stupidest things when I was with him.

  James pulled the covers off the bed.

  “No,” I screamed, covering myself with my arms.

  “Yes,” he said.

  James jumped on top of me. “I command you to uncross your arms.” I shook my head. We wrestled on the bed, until James had my arms pinned over my head and we were kissing.

  “I am crazy about you,” James said, putting his hands in my hair.

  “You are?”

  I felt serious all of a sudden. I often wondered what James thought of me. There had been so many times when I thought he might tell me that he loved me.

  I held my breath while he unwrapped the condom.

  “I am crazy about you,” he repeated, putting himself inside me.

  After we were done, James fell asleep. He could do that, close his eyes and fall asleep. I had never known him to worry about anything. I quietly got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I took a long, hot shower, and when I was done, I wandered into Daniel’s old room. Jamal’s things were strewn all over the floor. His bong was on the dresser, his Nike sneakers on the bed. He’d hung a poster of Bob Marley over the bed.

  This was my life now. James and Jamal. They were a package deal, more like twins in spirit than Sue and I had ever been. I backed out of the doorway and went next door, into Sue’s room. I lay on her bed, staring at the pictures on the walls. Chloe and Sue. In Sue’s favorite picture, we were at the beach, wearing matching pink bikinis, our tongues sticking out toward the camera. We had our hair up in matching pigtails. We really did look like such happy little girls. According to Sue, we had always been happy. Deliriously happy.

  Sue

  My status had changed. I wasn’t a runaway. I wasn’t broke either. Even so, Smita said that if I wanted, we could keep things the same. I loved being Smita’s maid. Making her tea, bringing her an afternoon snack.

  “This is comfortable,” Smita said. “Our arrangement.”

  “You’re happy that I’m here?” I said.

  “I am happy that you are here,” Smita said.

  It seemed like she was, but I could never really believe it. I often woke up thinking, Today she will make me go home.

  I was gaining weight. That was my job, Smita said, more important than the cleaning. Smita wanted me to eat. She wanted me to change my relationship with food. I also had to take good care of Daisy and be nice to my brother, Daniel. Those were Smita’s rules. By the middle of the summer, I’d gained twelve pounds. I couldn’t fit into my clothes; my jeans wouldn’t zip. Sucking in my stomach, I started to cry.

  “No,” Smita said. “Not that. Look at yourself. Really look.”

  I looked at myself closely for the first time since I had moved into Smita’s house. I was amazed by how much I had changed. I’d lost that tragic, cancer girl look. My eyes didn’t bug out of my face. My hair had begun to grow in; white-blond strands that came down to my ears. I stared in the mirror, and I thought maybe I was even a little bit pretty. Not Chloe beautiful,
but nice.

  Smita dressed me in her own pretty clothes. The flowing white shirt with little mirrors sewn on the bottom and a pair of baggy black pants.

  “How is this?” she said, fastening a choker around my neck.

  It was the most wonderful necklace, silver elephants holding each other’s tails. I bounced up and down as Smita fastened the necklace, looking at myself in the mirror. Grinning like a moron. I could see Smita in the mirror, standing behind me, smiling at my smiling face.

  “Are you happy?” she said.

  “Oh, Smita.”

  I touched a silver elephant. I couldn’t begin to tell her. I couldn’t begin to tell Smita how much I loved her. How I loved her food and her house and all of her pretty things, her ceramic bowls and her wooden boxes and the colorful baskets and the tapestries on the walls. I loved Smita’s small college town, where I was known at the bike store and the bookstore and the library and the health food store where I bought Smita’s fancy blue-cheese cheese puffs. Where everyone smiled at me and said, “Hi, Sue,” as if the town had been created as a place to please me.

  I couldn’t get over how fast I had gotten over Chloe. I didn’t think about her. Ever. Thinking about Chloe was against the rules. Like throwing up. She was an unmentionable. She was a bad dream. A previous life.

  But I knew that, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t forget Chloe entirely. Smita worked so hard not to forget her horrifying father. She had a room full of pictures, just so she wouldn’t forget. I hung a newspaper clipping next to the poster of Raj Khan in the purple turban. “She Shoots, She Scores” read the headline. There was a picture of Chloe, in her ugly uniform, her cheeks puffed out, jumping toward the basket.

  My whole life, Chloe had been the reason for my misery. Now I knew it had been Chloe’s fault. Because I was not a miserable person. That wasn’t me. I had been happy as a child; we had been happy, but Chloe had turned on me. She’d turned my love for her into poison. She couldn’t blame me now if she was all alone. With Smita, I was happy again. Crazy happy.

  “I love this necklace more than anything else,” I said.

  Smita kissed my forehead.

  “It’s yours,” she said.

  Smita was like that. What I didn’t understand, more than anything else, was why Smita chose to like me. She didn’t talk to Yumiko anymore, though I knew that Smita had once liked her too.

  My favorite part of the day was going to bed. Before I went to sleep, Smita came into my room to tuck me in. She told me bedtime stories. They were different every night. She told real stories from her life: the time she had ridden on an elephant at her fifth birthday party. Her first math class at Hampshire College, where she had asked to borrow a rubber, which she told me means eraser in England, and how the whole class had laughed at her. But the best stories were the ones Smita made up, about a duck named Salman, who could not fly or swim because of a bullet wound to his wing. Instead he traveled through India by rail. Salman was named after an Indian writer whose early novels Smita said she admired.

  Some nights, Daniel came over for dinner. One time, he stayed late to watch a movie, and when I asked Smita to come tuck me in, he tried to come with her into my room. “You are off-limits,” I said.

  “I want to hear about the duck,” he said.

  “You are out of your mind.”

  At first, I was nice to Daniel only because Smita insisted. Smita liked Daniel, and she wanted me to like him. We started spending more time together. He was my source of money; if I wanted cash for anything—clothes, books, a rubber chicken at the toy store—I asked Daniel and he gave it to me. He was taking a squash class, so we practiced together at his gym on campus. I liked to smash the ball as hard as I could. Sometimes, we would run into Yumiko, and together, we jubilantly ignored her. One time Yumiko saw us and dodged behind a soda machine.

  When we were done with squash, Daniel would drive back to Smita’s. He always wanted to stay for dinner. I liked the aloo saag; Daniel liked Smita’s vindaloos. Smita could make curries so spicy they made my eyes water. Daniel and Smita would wash the food down with beer, but not me. I didn’t even ask to try. I wanted to be a good girl for Smita. I didn’t want to drink or smoke or do anything that Smita might say was bad for my development.

  “This is nothing like home,” Daniel said, sopping up his sauce with piece of nan, Indian bread Smita made herself. We had escaped. We both knew it. Daniel loved Smita’s cooking as much as I did. He also loved Smita; I never said anything, but I could tell from the way he looked at her. From the way he checked himself out in the car mirror before we went into the house. We became vegetarians just to be like Smita. She said that such heroic gestures were unnecessary. “You tell that to the cow,” Daniel said.

  I learned to like cauliflower. Chloe could eat all the grilled hamburgers with Mr. Markman she wanted.

  After our dinners, I washed the dishes and Daniel dried them. Then I walked Daisy. When I got back to the house, Smita would have put on some music in the living room. We played board games and watched movies, or sometimes we just sat around and read. Smita gave me books to read, so that I would feel ready for school in the fall. One night I watched as Smita put her feet on Daniel’s lap, and he started to rub them. Smita looked at me, and I looked back down at my book. I would gladly have massaged Smita’s feet. I would have rubbed her shoulders, brushed her hair. Smita shrugged her feet away from Daniel’s lap. He kept reading as if nothing had happened. I got down on the floor and rubbed Daisy’s tummy.

  Later, they both came into my room for my tuck-in. Daisy came in too, jumping on the bed. Smita sat on the edge. She pulled the quilt up to my chin. Daniel leaned against the door.

  “You’re a couple,” I said to Smita. “It’s fine.”

  Smita bit her lip and I knew it was true. They probably hadn’t told me sooner because of Daniel. He would have told Smita that I was a violent monster, that I had crying fits, threw temper tantrums, and when that didn’t work, I’d hit the dog. But that wasn’t me anymore. I was a new Sue. I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even jealous that Daniel had started spending so much time with Smita.

  “Really?” Smita said. She laughed. “I don’t know why I was so bloody nervous.”

  I nodded. Smita was nervous because she was Smita. Because she was good. Because she was the best person on the planet. Better than Chloe could ever be. “I love you, Smita,” I whispered.

  Smita blinked. Then she kissed my forehead. We looked at each other, our faces serious. “I love you too,” she said.

  I bit my lip.

  Smita loved me. It was not a given. Our DNA was one hundred percent not the same. Smita was not obligated to love me.

  “Wow,” Daniel said. “That’s it? That’s all you girls have to say? Where’s the violence? Where’s the drama?”

  I gave Daniel the finger. If Smita wanted to sleep with my brother, that was fine. That was what Smita wanted. I was not a drama queen. But only Smita got to tuck me in. Daniel could not listen to our stories about Salman, the traveling duck.

  Smita seemed to understand without my saying a word.

  “I’ll tell you a story tomorrow then,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  Chloe

  A call came from an administrator at the basketball camp I had enrolled in wondering about my absence. I was supposed to have spent six weeks at a university in North Carolina. Jamal spit up his beer looking through the glossy pamphlet I showed him. “You were going to spend your summer playing basketball,” he said. “You paid for this?”

  Coaches from the best women’s college teams taught at this program. Players from the WNBA gave demonstrations. Mr. Markman had said that many top players attended such summer programs. But the more time I spent with James and Jamal, the sillier it had seemed for me to care so much about basketball. James first started to like me watching me play, but he never knew how hard I worked or how important it was. Nobody understood besides Mr. Markman, and he had stopped caring. I
would never make the Olympic team.

  I had a new project, something to take as seriously as the SATs or basketball. I was determined to become a new and improved Chloe, the kind of free-spirited girl who got drunk and high with her boyfriend, always willing do to anything for a good time. It was hard work. I was afraid taking hits from Jamal’s bong. The thick smoke that came through the tube made me cough so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  I spent the summer in our backyard by the pool, working on my tan. Every day I settled out on a lounge chair in the sun, glistening with coconut oil, reading glossy magazines. I thought spitefully of Sue and her stupid unicycle. I wondered what she would think if she saw me in one of my new bikinis, James and Jamal dunking each other in the deep end, James spreading lotion on my back. I had stopped playing basketball just in time. I had a beautiful body, James told me, and he was glad that I wanted to show it off.

  “You look hot, baby,” he said.

  James even thought that my tattoo was hot. He told me to show Jamal, as if he were proud.

  Jamal said that my tattoo was the most boring thing he had ever seen.

  “If I didn’t know about your twin,” he said, “I’d think that you were into lawsuits or something.”

  Jamal had a koala bear on his shoulder.

  “Why,” I asked him. “Why a koala bear?”

  “Fuck,” he said. “I went to Australia last year and got shitfaced drunk. I wanted something Australian, so the tattoo artist made a koala. They really are the cutest fuckers you’ve ever seen.”

  “I hate my tattoo,” I said. “I always hated it.”

  “You can get it removed,” James said. He seemed surprised that I felt so strongly. I had never explained to him about how things had been between me and Sue. After Jamal had become part of our daily lives, I never really talked to James about anything.

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  When I was thirteen, I had never heard of laser surgery. I believed I was branding myself for life, imprinting Sue’s name into my body. I had been willing to do that for her. I was never sure why. I had been frightened by her desperation, how she had sat on the floor, weeping. Now that she was gone, I hoped that maybe I had gotten the tattoo because I really and truly loved her more than anyone else and wanted her to believe me. Removing it now would be almost like murder. Sue had been right; I did not want to forget her. Maybe there were times when Sue looked at her tattoo and she remembered me.