But it was Sue I wanted to call. She had been gone for so long. I wanted to know how she did it. I had been so afraid for her for so long. Afraid when I left for Hawaii that she would kill herself. Afraid that when I left for college she would come after me and sleep on the floor outside my dorm room until I let her in. Instead, Sue had left before I did. For the first time in our lives, Sue had gone first.
Louise fumbled in her purse for her car keys. I just looked at her and kept crying. Sue was gone. I could cry enough for two identical twins. James was going to leave me, not a single person in the world cared if I lived or died, so I did not care if I was making Louise uncomfortable. I would cry and cry if I wanted to. I was surprised when Louise came to me, wrapping her arms around me. I hated Louise Patterson with all of my heart, but I let my head fall into her chest.
“Shhh, shhh,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Do you have any aspirin?” I asked.
“In the bathroom,” Louise said. “You go wash your face. Take your time.”
I went to Louise’s bathroom and I washed my face. I took a deep breath, looking at myself in the mirror. My eyes were puffy and red, with dark circles underneath. I swallowed two aspirin, still staring at myself in the mirror. My hair was long and blond. I took my comb out of my purse and combed until it fell straight and shiny. Sue used to stare at me, dumbstruck, when I brushed my hair.
I found Louise at her desk in the living room, sorting through a pile of catalogs.
“James can start taking classes in the spring,” she said. “He’ll have only missed a term. It’s not too late for you children to get a fresh start.”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
I was certain that James would not come back home after I told him to leave. I couldn’t see him attending classes at a community college, wearing a clean shirt, and taking communications courses. James and Jamal would start again, somewhere else. I had heard them talk about Florida.
I put on my coat, smiled a fake smile, and walked to her car. I buckled the seat belt and smoothed my hair.
Sue
Smita wanted me to go to school, so I went. It was a private school. It was expensive. Daniel sent my parents the bill, and they paid it. They sent a letter that said, “Good for you, Sue.” I did not write back. I was a senior, the new girl in town, the only new student in my grade. I was practically a celebrity. I would come home from school and tell Smita about all the girls who talked to me, which ones invited me to do things with them on the weekends, who sat with me at lunch. A girl named Carrie Lind had baked me mint brownies. She lent me CDs and her favorite book of poems. She laughed, amused when I called her a moron.
“I don’t know why,” I said, showing Smita the things she had lent me.
“Because she likes you,” she said. Smita put the CD in the stereo, and we listened to the band that neither of us had ever heard of.
“Everyone always liked Chloe,” I tried to explain. “Not me.”
But Smita had never met Chloe. She said she often forgot that I was a twin. “You are weird enough on your own,” she told me.
At my new school, riding my unicycle was considered a form of expression. For an elective period, I co-taught a circus class with another student, who was also a gymnast. I wasn’t the bad twin anymore. There were no standardized tests, no grades either, just teacher recommendations. Even the teachers liked me. “Relax,” they said. “Relax.” No one seemed to worry about the classes I had failed in my former life. “What can you do now?” they wanted to know.
The new Sue loved going to school. I got my ears pierced so I could wear Smita’s dangling earrings. Smita said they looked good with my boyish haircut. Two girls at school cut their hair short like mine. I woke up early to go over my homework. For the first time, I wanted my teachers to love me—the way teachers used to love Chloe. I loved mornings in Smita’s house, sitting at the kitchen table, reading for school while Smita drank her dark tea. When she finished her tea, she would go into her room and find something for me to wear.
Before long, Smita started talking about my going to college. She was fairly certain I could get into Hampshire, even though I had only one year of respectable academic activity.
“It’s an alternative school,” she explained. “They make exceptions.”
It was hard to believe Smita could be right about this. I wasn’t the kind of person who could do well on my own. I had always figured I would go wherever Chloe went.
Lisa came to see us every weekend. She stayed with me in Smita’s office, the two of us spooned together on the single futon, safe and warm beneath the poster of Raj Khan and the newspaper story about Chloe. Lisa and I had used up her father’s supply of pain pills, but we were more alert without them, giddy when the time came for Smita’s tuck-ins.
In the latest episode of Salman the Duck, Salman had to travel third class because there was only one seat left in first class, and the Indian princess in the car was allergic to duck feathers.
“Salman’s lucky the princess didn’t eat him,” Lisa said.
“Fantastically lucky,” Smita answered. “The girl was not Hindi, and I’ve heard it said that duck curries are very delicious when served with mango chutney.”
Lisa was wearing a red silk slip. She always brought something sexy to sleep in. Not me. I had on a Hampshire T-shirt and Chloe’s pink silk pajama bottoms.
“What happened to Salman in third class?” Lisa said.
In third class, Salman found a pregnant bride hiding under a pile of coats who was traveling to Bombay to meet her husband. The girl was afraid that she might be in labor, but she was ashamed to have her baby in a train car full of people.
“Did Salman help the girl deliver her baby?” I asked.
Smita shook her head. “Salman had dropped out of medical school. He knew nothing about delivering babies.”
Instead Salman read to the young woman from a fairly recent Rushdie novel about a rock star who could shake the earth with her music. The pregnant girl was so engrossed in the duck’s narration that she could not be bothered to have her baby.
“Books are that powerful,” Smita said.
Smita’s stories often came packed with a lesson.
When the pregnant bride and Salman arrived at the station, they were met by the young woman’s husband, a computer programmer who wore aviator glasses.
“Isn’t that a stereotype?” I asked.
Smita nodded.
“Some stereotypes,” she said, “exist for a reason.”
The nerdy husband, who had four ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket, thanked Salman repeatedly. He called Salman “Sahib,” which is a form of master in India. He also gave him several juicy oranges to eat. He offered to upgrade Salman’s computer, but as Salman was a traveling duck, he did not have a computer, not even a laptop, and he said his good-byes. He did not want to be around when the labor pains began.
“Is that a feminist story?” Lisa asked.
“Why not?” Smita said. “Young women get married. After the baby was born, they moved to England, where the girl got her degree in social work.”
“To help improve conditions on the railways?” I asked.
“Quite possibly,” said Smita. “Salman went on to the sea to relax after all the excitement. Salman loved to look at the stars, and where he went, a beautiful coastal town called Mamallapuram, the sky was jammed full of them.”
Lisa and I both giggled.
“It sure is exciting being a duck,” Lisa said.
“It certainly is,” said Smita.
She kissed us both on the forehead, pulled the covers up to our chins, and said good night. “Be good, children,” she said, and we giggled some more.
Smita paused in the doorway for a moment. “That is a quite a nightgown,” she said to Lisa, and then she flipped off the light. We knew that Daniel was waiting for her in her bedroom. He was only allowed to sleep over on weekends. It was a new rule. Smita wanted Daniel to stu
dy, but mainly, I knew, Smita wanted her privacy.
“You have to fight against life’s distractions,” she had told me. “Good and bad.”
Weekends were marked by huge meals and hushed sexual activity behind closed doors. Smita and Daniel never said anything, but they knew that Lisa and I did not lie together chaste and innocent like sisters. Except that Chloe, my sister, would have never, ever let Lisa crawl into bed with her.
Maybe Chloe had always known I was funny about girls.
Most of the time, it was just me and Smita and Daisy. Lisa finished her senior year back home. If she saw Chloe at school, she didn’t tell me about it. I tried not to ask.
We were the perfect combination. Daisy was wild about Smita. She followed her around the house with her tennis balls, wagging her tail whenever Smita approached, licking Smita’s face, licking Smita’s hand. Smita cooked dinners for just the two of us. I would ask her to make aloo saag, the first dish she had ever cooked for me. Sometimes, we would eat it five nights in a row.
“It’s the new macaroni and cheese,” I said.
“I like having you here so much,” Smita said.
I dropped my fork on the floor. I didn’t want Smita to see my face if I started to cry.
“I’d been alone for too long,” Smita said. “I think perhaps I was turning a bit odd.”
I remembered how Smita’s house used to be. The roaches in the kitchen, the piles of clothes on the floor, her fear of the refrigerator. Maybe it was true. Maybe Smita had been unhappy before me. Maybe I made Smita a little happy too. All those dinners Smita cooked for me, she got to eat them too. We had made it through the winter.
“You think it’s bad to be alone?” I said.
Smita shrugged. I caught my breath. Smita didn’t shrug. It was Chloe’s shrug. Chloe.
“It wasn’t a good thing for me,” she said.
I had started calling Chloe regularly, riding my unicycle to town, dialing from a pay phone. The strange male voice never picked up again. Chloe always answered. She would say hello. I hung up every time.
I thought about Chloe living alone in our house. The upstairs and the downstairs, all those empty rooms, the backyard and the front yard. No one to clean up after her the way I did for Smita. No Mr. Markman to grill her hamburgers or help her with basketball. No one to ask about her homework or edit her essays. No one to eat dinners with. Maybe Chloe did not even eat at all. Maybe she was back on a diet with no one wonderful like Smita to tell her about the medicinal power of spinach.
Sometimes, Lisa would run her hands up and down my back, her fingers passing over my tattoo, and I would think about Chloe. I would clean the toilet bowl with Lysol disinfectant and I’d think about Chloe. How I’d made her throw up. How I made Chloe eat. I looked at Daisy licking Smita’s face and remembered how angry I’d gotten when Daisy licked Chloe. Daisy used to shit and pee in the house, and Chloe had cleaned that up too. I’d look at Lisa Markman, who drove all the way to Massachusetts to see me, and think about how much I liked her. I hadn’t let Chloe have her own friend. Lisa had told me that they did not even have a good time together in Hawaii.
Still, I was happy. Crazy happy. Smita loved me, I was doing well in school, I had a girlfriend. I was pretty. I was smart. But if I relaxed for even a second, my stomach started to hurt. What about Chloe? My other half. The better part of me. I didn’t want to think about Chloe. I tried to remind myself that she had been the reason for my misery. She had wanted me gone. She went to Hawaii. She joined a basketball team. Anything to get away from me. Only now I was the one who was gone. Chloe could do whatever she wanted, wear whatever she wanted, be whoever she wanted. I didn’t care. I was having dinner, alone with Smita.
I pushed my aloo saag back and forth on my plate.
I wasn’t hungry, and it was my favorite dinner. I couldn’t eat, and it was Chloe’s fault. Chloe was still making me crazy. I smashed a potato flat on my plate with Smita’s blue ceramic saltshaker.
“Do you think,” I asked Smita, “that it’s bad for all people to be alone?”
“I do,” Smita said. “Even monks who take a vow of silence don’t live alone. But tell me. What people do you mean?”
I smashed another potato. Then I wiped the bottom of the saltshaker clean with my napkin.
“Chloe,” I said.
“Chloe,” Smita repeated.
I had lived with Smita for almost a year, and never once had I talked to her about Chloe. Smita made me eat, she made me go to school and be nice to Daniel, but she had never once asked me about my identical twin sister.
“I think,” I said, slowly, twisting a longish lock of hair around my finger, “I think that I was mean to Chloe.”
“You think you were mean?” Smita said.
She was repeating after me like she was a retard. She smashed a potato on her plate and then ate the mashed potato with her fingers.
“Yes,” I said.
All the cruel things I had ever done were coming back to me. Stealing Chloe’s clothes, calling Chloe stupid, following Chloe through school, making Chloe get a tattoo.
“How were you mean to your sister?”
“I wasn’t mean on purpose.”
“That’s beside the point,” Smita said. “Intention is irrelevant.” She lit a cigarette. Smita never smoked with dinner. She was breaking her own rule. “My father thought he loved me when he molested me in my bed every night when I was six years old. He called me his little princess and gave me sweets and pretty dresses to wear.”
I smashed the pieces of yellow potato on my plate, one by one. The spinach was already flat. “That’s not fair.”
“No.” Smita blew smoke into the air. She took the saltshaker from my hand. “It’s probably not. I just want you to know that cruelty is cruelty.”
“I said I was mean. Not cruel.”
Smita smiled. “You think there is a difference?”
Of course there was a difference. There had to be.
“You hate me?” I said.
“You are not like my father,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that. Obviously there are varying degrees of cruelty.”
But I wondered if maybe I was as bad as Smita’s father. Maybe I was a monster.
Smita smoked quietly, and I waited for whatever it was she would say next. I could see her thinking. I wished I hadn’t mentioned the name. Chloe. Now Smita and I could not go back like we were before. I watched Smita inhale her cigarette, the puff of smoke that she blew from her mouth.
“I never showed you the photos,” she said. “The ones I took the day I first met you, with Yumiko. I developed them right away, but I didn’t think you were ready to see them. Would you like to see them now?”
“No,” I said.
Smita went upstairs and came back with the pictures.
“I don’t want to see them,” I said.
Smita handed them to me anyway.
“I am naked,” I said.
The bones of my pelvis stuck out from the rest of my body. I could hear Yumiko, so fucking pleased, telling me what a great pelvis I had. There were dark, dark circles under my eyes. I was bald. My arms were crossed over my skinny chest. I was staring past Smita’s camera way off into the distance. I flipped to the next picture. It was my back. The picture started at the base of my neck, a big, knobby bump, and then, one by one, all of the little bones that made up my spine, and finally, where the bones stopped, the small of my back. My tattoo. The simple pink block letters: C H L O E.
I knew the tattoo was there. I didn’t have to see it to remember. I had made Chloe get the tattoo so she would never be able to forget me. I gently touched the tattoo on the photo with my finger. I had trained myself to stop rubbing my back.
Smita watched me.
“I look much better now,” I said.
“You do,” Smita said. “It used to hurt just to look at you.”
Smita had hennaed my hair red. It had grown in, wispy and soft. I looked like a different person.
“I like my hair,” I said.
There was one more photo in the stack.
“Go on,” Smita said.
It was of a younger Smita, sitting on a park bench, wearing a green hospital gown.
“I was eighteen,” she said. “My weight was down to seventy-two pounds. They had to feed me intravenously.”
I looked across the table at Smita, pretty Smita, her dark hair shining, the dangling earrings, her confident face.
“You were anorexic?”
I never knew why it mattered to Smita that I ate. I thought it was because Smita was good, because she was the kind of person who did good things for no reason at all.
“For a long time, I couldn’t swallow food,” Smita said. “I was in therapy, and I started to remember things about my childhood. About my father. Things that I had made myself forget. My father forcing his penis into my mouth. And after that, I couldn’t eat. I would gag on my food.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“I never told you.”
I stared at Smita’s picture. Her hair hung down to her waist. She looked hollow, small. If you’d kicked her, she would have shattered into a million, billion tiny pieces. Smita had told me before that her father had molested her, but what that meant had never registered with me. She had never told me how he hurt her, damaged her. I could not believe this girl in the picture. I looked at it, and I looked at the pictures of me. I touched my hair, and I looked at Smita, in front of me, beautiful. Smita laughed all the time, and sometimes, she danced while she cooked. She loved blue cheese cheese puffs and jasmine tea. Smita was fine.
Smita touched my hand, and I started to cry. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I had never meant to be cruel. I did not want to be a cruel, awful person like Smita’s father. I didn’t know I was being horrible. I had only wanted Chloe to love me. I wanted Chloe to love me the way I loved her.
“Chloe was always on a diet,” I said. “I started throwing up so that I could stay the same as her. No matter what, I would not let Chloe get thinner. And then, she started to eat again, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t even that she ignored me. Chloe didn’t care that I was alive. So I shaved my head.”
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