Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  “And you weren’t identical,” Smita said.

  I reached around, touched my tattoo on my back. I could almost feel the letters raised on my skin, even thought the spot was smooth. We had never been identical. Chloe would always be an eighth of an inch taller.

  “Would you take my picture now?” I said.

  Smita nodded. “I would love to.”

  “Why did you never ask me about Chloe before?” I asked.

  “It’s your story to tell.”

  “I don’t have a story.” I took the saltshaker from Smita. The potatoes were all smashed. I salted them. “I’m boring.”

  Smita laughed. I liked to hear Smita laugh. She ground some pepper over my mashed potatoes. “You’ve got to meet some more people, Sue,” she said. “If you want to know about boring.

  “Boring,” Smita repeated, her eyes shining. “That’s brilliant.”

  My eyes were still wet with tears. Smita had never been mad at me before. I had felt my whole world collapsing around me, but just as quickly, everything went back to being fine.

  “I want to see Chloe,” I said.

  “You should see her,” Smita said.

  “I don’t want to be a cruel person.”

  Smita shook her head. “I never actually said you were cruel.”

  “I was mean,” I said. “I once broke Lisa Markman’s nose with a tennis ball.”

  Smita smiled at me. “I’d like to take your picture, right now.”

  I leaned back in my chair, closing my eyes. I would go see Chloe. Smita would take me to her. Smita could take our picture, together. Chloe could wear anything she wanted. Smita went upstairs to get her camera.

  “That was the best thing,” I said to myself. “Smashing Lisa’s nose.”

  Chloe

  The house was quiet after James left. Jamal and Tashika went with him. James had kissed me on the forehead. “You can call me, too,” he said, leaning forward at the last minute, whispering into my ear. “I’ll be staying at Jamal’s cousin’s for a while.”

  He wrote the telephone number on the back of a pizza box.

  I was not sure if I was happy. I had wanted them gone. Louise Patterson had come into the house and taken control of the situation like she had promised. James didn’t even seem surprised. It had been so easy. They packed their things that same night. I let them take the stereo, the blender, and a camel hair coat my father had left in the closet. I had thought that James might try to fight for me. I had even thought, if he really wanted to stay, I might change my mind.

  I poured myself a tumbler of whiskey and sat on the kitchen floor, surveying the mess they had left me. My ears were ringing from the quiet. I did not feel like I was any happier. I swallowed four aspirin with my whiskey, resting my hand on my stomach. My period was late. I had always been careful about using condoms, and I had recently peed into a cup at the doctor’s office. But it was late nevertheless. I already shared my DNA with one other person, and I didn’t know how to be myself.

  I took a sip of whiskey.

  I could feel it in the pit of my stomach right away. James and Jamal had said all of my father’s booze was top of the line. I thought how funny it was that my father had always believed Sue was the problem twin. After Sue got arrested for shoplifting, he assumed that the drinking and the drugs and the sex would all come later. Instead, she learned how to juggle. It was my life that had turned to shambles. My father was not the smartest of men. He was not the most impressive of fathers. I would never go to Harvard Law School. I would have to find something else to do.

  The telephone rang.

  “The phone,” I said.

  I realized that I could talk to myself if I wanted to. I was all alone in a three-story house.

  “The phone, the phone, the phone,” I said in a singsong voice.

  I could not remember the word for telephone in French. Maybe I had never learned it. Maybe it was something easy, like le téléphone. Once Tashika moved in, the phone had never stopped ringing, but it was never for me. I had a feeling this call could be for me. I took another large gulp of my drink and crawled across the kitchen floor, steadily making my way, but the phone stopped ringing before I could answer it.

  “Quel dommage,” I said.

  I was surprised that I still remembered any of the French I had learned. I was pleased. I did not want to be stupid. I had almost liked being smart.

  “Je m’appelle Chloe,” I said.

  The phone started to ring again. I sprang to my feet, answering it right away this time. The caller hung up.

  I slunk back to the floor and waited. When the phone rang again, I grabbed the cord, pulling the receiver down to me so that I would not have to get back up.

  “Hello?” I said. “Sue?”

  The caller hung up. My heart was beating fast. I knew it was Sue. It had to be her. I realized that I wanted nothing more than to talk to Sue. Where had she gone? What was she doing? Why didn’t she miss me? How was it possible that she could survive without me? Still off the hook, the phone started to buzz in my lap. I made my own buzzing sound to go with it. I could not hear the noise in my head. I considered lying down on the floor, but I had a feeling that I would not have been able to get back up. This is what it had all come down to. I could fall asleep on the floor, and when I woke up, I would be that much closer to the refrigerator. I could have been a star on a television sitcom. Sue and I could have gone on double dates with James and Jamal.

  I could feel the whiskey, warm and angry in my stomach.

  “Here we go,” I said.

  It seemed fitting that I finished my first night alone in the house down on my knees, in front of the toilet, throwing up. I was certain I was purging my system of the alcohol. I hoped it was not the side effects of alien cells multiplying in my body. I wanted to believe that I was throwing up the last year of my life. The next day, I would let myself start all over again. I would wake up and I would wash and condition my hair.

  The next time Sue called, I talked before she hung up. “I think about you,” I said. “At the weirdest times I wonder, What is Sue doing right now, where is she? Where does she sleep? Is she sleeping in my pink pajamas?”

  I held the phone, listening to the silence, listening to Sue breathe. I had no doubt that it was her. “You used to drive me crazy. I used to count the days until I could go to college so that I could get away from you, but now I just miss you.”

  I held the phone, wondering what to do next.

  “You don’t,” Sue said.

  I took a deep breath. I had not talked to her in so long. Her voice sounded so much like mine.

  “I do,” I said.

  “No,” Sue said.

  And then I smiled to myself. Because it was never easy with Sue. She would not believe me. She would not be nice, for example, and say something sweet, like, I missed you too, Chloe. She was still the younger sister.

  “I do,” I said.

  “What are you doing home now?” Sue said. “You’re supposed to be at basketball practice.”

  I pressed the phone between my shoulder and my ear, laying my hands on my flat belly, closing my eyes.

  “I think,” I said, nodding to myself, “I think I quit the team.” The coach had stopped calling. “I did,” I said to Sue. “I quit.”

  I remembered that I used to be ambitious. I had once been a talented athlete. I had once been a good student. But I had done all of these things to distance myself from Sue, and now, I simply wanted her back.

  “That’s impossible,” Sue said. “You love to play basketball.”

  “I do?”

  It seemed so silly, when I thought about it, to actually care about sinking a ball through a hoop, to get pleasure from the stupid sound it made when it fell through the net.

  “You’re such a fucking moron,” Sue said. “You are crazy about the game.”

  “I am?” I said.

  Sue sighed. “You love it,” she said. “Your face gets all aglow.”


  “It does?”

  I tried to picture Sue. My parents had told me she had shaved her head. They said she was going to private school.

  “Where are you?” I said, but Sue had hung up on me.

  But I knew where she was. In a college town in Massachusetts with my brother, Daniel, and his newest girlfriend. How, I wondered, would Sue know what I love? She knew nothing about me, my life. She did not know about James or Jamal. She had no idea who I was. The last thing that I wanted to do was play basketball.

  I would show them all: my father, who thought I had law school potential; Mr. Markman, who thought I’d play in the WNBA; Sue, who always thought I was a Goody Two-shoes. I would be an unwed mother. I would start smoking crack. I would be the bad girl Sue had always threatened to become.

  But Sue called again at the same time the very next day. “You’re not at practice,” she said.

  “I told you. I quit the team.”

  “Retard,” Sue said. “Go to practice.”

  “Why do you care?”

  A long silence followed. It was only our second phone call, and already I was exasperated.

  “Chloe,” Sue said. “You have to. You have to.”

  Something about the way she said my name, a familiar longing, a plea, broke my heart. I wished that she was with me, sitting on the floor next to me, so that I could comb the tangles out of her hair.

  I told her I would start the next day.

  It all came back to me.

  The basketball’s arc and fall, the mesmerizing swish the ball made as it passed through the net. I took my place at the foul line and shot continuous free throws; I felt that familiar thrill as the ball sailed from my fingers and sank into the basket. I remembered Mr. Markman telling me that I had a gift.

  I loved to play basketball.

  I had forgotten how much I loved it.

  I wondered how Sue had known this. She had always glared at me from the stands.

  The coach said, “Chloe, thank God you’ve come to your senses.” He surprised me by giving me a hug. “We missed you here.”

  Kendra smiled at me like we were old friends. “Hey, girl,” she said. “You’re back. I’ve seen you walking through the halls, looking like a zombie. I figured you must be pregnant.”

  “My period,” I said, “is two weeks late.”

  Kendra’s mouth opened wide. She had been joking, but I wasn’t. She touched my arm.

  “It could be nothing,” she said. “Stress can make you late.” She spun the basketball around on her finger, slowly, as if she was thinking. “Do you have three hundred dollars?”

  I nodded.

  “Then either way, it’s no big thing,” Kendra said. “A simple medical procedure.”

  Kendra, I would find out, was a terrifically practical person. “I will go with you to the clinic if you want me to.”

  I looked at Kendra in amazement. She was almost a full head taller than me, and according to Mr. Markman I was plenty tall for women’s basketball. It was easy to talk to her, and I wondered why I had not tried before.

  “Are you going to play in college?” I asked.

  “Of course.” Kendra nodded. “Aren’t you?”

  Kendra had started dribbling as we talked, moving the ball back and forth between her right hand and her left. I was back on the team. I had stepped out of my world, and now, I was stepping back in. I had not ruined my life. “I think so,” I said.

  Then I remembered I had not applied to any schools.

  Kendra stopped dribbling. She rolled her eyes at me. “You think so?” she said. “You’re the best player on the team.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

  “You can write your own ticket,” Kendra said.

  I nodded. The coach blew his whistle, and we lined up midcourt for a layup drill. I was first in line. I drove to the basket, making my first layup of the season. I hadn’t lost a thing. I had the footwork; I had control of the ball. I sank the ball through the net, again and again. I felt right with a basketball in my hand, my skin slick with sweat, my heart beating fast. Nothing else mattered, just putting the ball to the hoop. I could not believe how good it felt.

  I had found my first real friend in Kendra. I was careful not to talk about her when Sue called. I didn’t want to make Sue angry. She seemed pleased that I was back on the team. She kept track of my schedule. She asked me how many points I scored during my games. I thanked her for making me go back to practice.

  “I am not an awful person,” Sue said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to hate me,” she said.

  Sue had started calling late at night. Sometimes we would just listen to each other breathe. I would lie curled on my side in the bed, holding the phone to my ear. She did not call on the weekends.

  Kendra was nothing like Lisa Markman. She was both practical and kind, and though she was only eighteen, she already had the entire course of her life planned out. She thought of basketball as a means to an end, a full college scholarship. Kendra wanted to be an investment banker. She wanted to get married to a professional black man, have two children and a Labrador retriever she would name Happy. Kendra wanted to drive a Lexus. She loved her mother and father; she had never gotten drunk. She had never had sex. She was going to wait until she got married.

  “No one ever told you James Patterson was a fool?” she said. “It’s common knowledge. Why didn’t you ask me?”

  It was Kendra who bought me flowers after I got my period.

  “You are one lucky girl,” she said, watching me as I put them into a tall crystal vase.

  And for the first time, I started to think of myself in a brand-new light: lucky. I was blessed with an enormous talent, and I was not going to waste it. I had my whole life in front of me. If I wanted to, I could still hope for the Olympics, and I would be going not for Mr. Markman but for myself. Kendra was a big believer in female empowerment. I had missed the deadlines for college applications, but Kendra assured me that I could apply the following year. All the best schools, she said, had women’s basketball teams, all of them would want me. A year wouldn’t matter. Kendra often came to my house after practice, to do her homework on the new laptop computer my parents had sent me out of the blue.

  Kendra sat at my desk, teaching herself to use Excel.

  “It is always good,” she said, “to get ahead of the game.”

  I sat on the bed, with a notebook propped on my knees, writing a letter to Mr. Markman. Now that James was gone, now that I was almost talking to Sue, it was strange how Mr. Markman had begun to reclaim his place in my mind; he was with me at practice, he was watching me play, admiring my new technique. In my letter, I did not tell him that he meant more to me than my own parents or that Sue had stolen all of the presents he had given me. I wrote those sentences and then I crossed them out, started on a clean sheet of paper. Instead, I thanked him for the interest he had taken in my life. I apologized for my father’s rudeness and assured him that I had never doubted his intentions. I wrote that he would approve of my coach at school, who was transforming me into a power player. I told Mr. Markman that the coach said my shooting skills were out of this world, and so we were focusing on my being more aggressive. He wanted me to draw fouls and move in hard for rebounds. My new motto was “Be aggressive,” though every time I said the words in my head, I started to laugh. I wished Mr. Markman the best in life. The very, very best. I folded the letter, sealed the envelope, and Kendra and I walked together to the mailbox.

  “That was something when I saw you on TV with him,” she said. “No one on the team thought you were sleeping with him. You seemed much too mousy to do something like that. His daughter, Lisa, now she’s a real bitch.”

  I saw Lisa at school. She would sit in the cafeteria by herself, eating a sandwich and reading: first it was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, then The Color Purple by Alice Walker. She studiously avoided making eye contact with me, but I found myself wanting
to talk to her. I wanted to know what had happened to her. How she had become a different person. I imagined Sue had also transformed herself, living so far away for such a long time, living without me.

  Sometimes I walked through my clean, empty house and thought that I had made up James Patterson, that he had never existed.

  Between the two of us, we had a championship team. First we won our division, then the county. The state championship was next.

  “You should see the trophy,” Kendra said, cutting a tall space in the air with her hands.

  I felt calmer on the court than I ever had. Sue was not in the top row, watching with her cold, hard stare. James never showed up with his funny cardboard signs. And Mr. Markman was not in his regular seat, sitting upright at the end of the row. Winning did not matter; I did not tally how many baskets I had scored in my head like I had the previous season. I simply played for every shot.

  Kendra said my technique was very Zen. I was scoring between twenty and thirty points a game. The other girls on my team, Gabrielle and Patrice and Tiffany and Jessie and Eliza, they all liked to win, and because I was friends with Kendra, they liked me too. We went out for pizza after the games. I ate extra-cheese pizza. Sometimes, I would eat three slices.

  “You can write your ticket, girl,” Kendra said. “Anything you want. Look at you with your blond hair. You are blessed.”

  Sue

  Chloe told me about the state championships. I didn’t know if it was an invitation. She mentioned the day and told me where she was playing before I hung up the phone. I felt bad. I felt terrible. I looked at the faded newspaper clipping on the wall. “She Shoots, She Scores.” I had always liked watching Chloe play basketball. She was the best player on the court, serious and self-assured, running, passing, dribbling, shooting. She never laughed or cracked a smile. In between points, she smoothed her hair and looked at Mr. Markman. I used to be so jealous, watching the way her face changed when he smiled at her. I had been jealous of Chloe my entire life.

  I called right back.