by Rachel Simon
“One’s got funny legs.”
“I know. In the newspaper they said that one of these girls didn’t grow right, and that the other one has to carry her around.”
Brenda wondered if Lisa Cumbermiller’s baby wasn’t growing right. Maybe it had bad legs too, or a bad head. She said, “If I’d been like that, would you of gotten rid of me before I was born?”
“How can you even ask me that?” her mom said. “You’re my baby and I love you, no matter what.”
“Well, Lisa Cumbermiller thinks she’ll get rid of her baby if something’s wrong.”
“That’s Lisa. I wouldn’t do that.”
Brenda bit into her hot dog and chewed for a minute. Then she asked, “Mom, can Siamese twins come apart?”
“I don’t think so, most of the time. I think they usually share something too important. Like their stomachs, maybe.”
Brenda considered that. Since the other person had to eat too, and there’d be only one stomach between them, Brenda would have less space for food than she had now. That didn’t sound so good.
“Why don’t you talk to them?” her mom asked.
“I don’t know,” Brenda said. “It’d be weird. I wouldn’t know which one to talk to. I wouldn’t know what to say. Anyway, I have all the friends I need. I was just wondering, that’s all.”
After that first day, Brenda tried not to stare at Ramona and Remmie. She’d look their way every time a new song came on the radio, but that was just to see if they liked it. Only they never noticed the songs. All they did was talk to each other, real low and quiet. Sometimes they’d laugh and shake their heads. Brenda couldn’t hear their words. Ramona did the label work and Remmie looked on. Everyone except Brenda and Edgar kept their eyes on the twins as if they were watching a TV set.
At night Brenda talked to the dogs. She asked them if it was OK to act like nothing had changed at Horizons. She asked them if she was doing the right thing. Ramona and Remmie didn’t seem lonely, so she didn’t have to talk to them. But for some reason she began to want to. Maybe it was because they wore pretty dresses and smelled like flowers. She didn’t know. But she didn’t do anything, and the days kept passing and passing, and she just felt a little worse all the time.
Time went fast that summer, faster than Brenda had ever remembered it going. And a lot seemed to happen. The biggest thing was that Marty and his family moved away to Detroit. Brenda didn’t even get a chance to buy him a present.
She cried when he got off the van that last day. So did Edgar. He leaned across the van seat, and they waved bye to Marty out the window. After they drove away, Edgar told Brenda that Marty used to help him in the bathroom. She asked who’d help him now, and he said no one. He said he just wouldn’t tuck in his shirt so you couldn’t tell that his pants were unzipped. Brenda told him she’d help if she could, but she couldn’t because she was a girl.
Around that same time Lisa Cumbermiller got rid of her baby. She told them all at lunch, even though they didn’t want to hear about it. She said it happened fast and was hardly sloppy at all. She laughed. Brenda threw her lunch in the garbage when she told them. The next day Lisa Cumbermiller moved away from their table so she could sit with the other fat ladies at Horizons. Good, Brenda thought. Let them stuff their faces together.
Then one of the little kids on Brenda’s block fell off his bike and broke his head open. She saw it happen from the living room window, the ambulance taking him away and everyone in his family crying. A week later they brought him home with a big white towel wrapped around his head. He didn’t look the same. And whenever Brenda saw his mother, she’d be crying. Soon she began calling Brenda’s mom every night. They’d never spoken before this, and now it was like they were best friends. They’d talk a long time, and Brenda’s mom would make a mess of the kitchen. After they hung up, the table would be full of fat books that didn’t have any pictures, only letters and drawings of bent-up black lines that made Brenda think of lightning.
Brenda’s garden did real well that summer. She kept the rows neat and tidy. She cleaned out the weeds every day, sprayed the plants with a hose when the ground got dry. Her mom said it was the best garden she’d ever grown and sent a picture of it to Ellie. Ellie wrote back and said it looked like Brenda knew what she was doing and that maybe she should go work at a real place, like the Shop-Rite, so she could make enough money to move out on her own. Brenda’s mom shook her head when she read that. The whole idea sounded strange to Brenda, since she’d never seen gardens growing in the Shop-Rite. But who knew what it was like where Ellie lived.
In the fall a terrible flu came around. Brenda’s mom said walking the dogs made her as healthy as a St. Bernard, and she must have been right, because Brenda didn’t get it. But her mom did. She missed three days of work.
At Horizons, people started dropping all around Brenda. Poor Edgar got it so bad he had to go into the hospital. The counselors called a special class and told them ways to fight it off. They said they should try extra hard because the sort of people who work at Horizons get sicker than most people. But it didn’t help much. Every day fewer and fewer people came in.
Brenda thought about Edgar and Marty all the time; she missed them something awful. Her mom let her call Marty once, and then wrote his name on envelopes so Brenda could mail him some of her pictures. A few days later her mom took Brenda to see Edgar in the hospital. Tubes were twisted all over him, and his parents told her he’d filled in eleven coloring books. He could hardly breathe when she saw him. He smiled but when he started coughing, they rushed Brenda out. At lunch every day, she’d think about him.
Pretty soon most everyone got sick from the flu. All over Horizons, all day long, it was quiet. Brenda could even change the radio from that show with the guy she didn’t like, because no one who liked him was around. She thought that’d make her feel good, but without Edgar there to be glad with, it didn’t much matter.
Finally there were only a few of them left. Brenda, Elise Sandover, Ritchie Vailer, and those twins. Brenda didn’t like to eat alone, but she had no choice. Elise made funny burping sounds all the time, and Ritchie’s nose was sort of near his ear. And, even though Brenda had been noticing the twins looking her way, she was too scared to ask them to sit with her. She wasn’t sure why they were taking note of her — if they wondered whether she had the flu or what. Maybe they were looking because they were jealous that Brenda had a friend, or because she was normal. She didn’t have a twin. She was her own person.
So Brenda ate by herself at a table in the corner. There wasn’t much to watch. Just the walls and Elise and Ritchie.
Brenda was hunched over her tuna fish sandwich, humming one of Edgar’s favorite songs and thinking about trying to visit him in the hospital again when someone touched her shoulder.
“Can we sit here?” a soft voice said, and Brenda smelled that nice flower smell. She looked up and saw Ramona and Remmie. They’d come over to her! At first she didn’t know what to say — no one’d ever come over to her except Lisa Cumbermiller. And Brenda hadn’t wanted to talk to her.
“Yeah, sure,” Brenda said. She moved her food over so Remmie could sit on the table. After Ramona set her down, Remmie leaned over and spread their lunch out next to her. There were bologna sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and chocolate milk. Food like Brenda ate.
Remmie’s bangs were pinned back with blue and green barrettes that sparkled, and all the rest of her curly hair just hung on her shoulders. Ramona’s hair was straight as always. Her ponytail was tied up with purple ribbon. When she sat on the bench, Brenda said, “You two are real beautiful. You should be models.”
They looked at each other. “I don’t think people who hire models would be too receptive to us,” Ramona said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Remmie gave Ramona this look, like she’d done something wrong. “She means they might not find us pretty. We’re too unusual.”
Brenda looked down at her food.
She still had half a sandwich left and she didn’t know what to say.
“You like dogs?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Remmie said, “we have a German shepherd and a very old —”
“Very old mutt,” Ramona said. They said “very old” at the same time. Brenda wasn’t sure which one to talk to. She looked from one to the other the way she used to watch her mom and Ellie play Ping-Pong.
“I like dogs that have papers,” Brenda said. “They’re better-looking that way.”
Remmie twirled one of her curls in her fingers and said, “Actually, our mutt is very good-looking.”
Ramona said, “Yeah. And in general, pedigree dogs tend to be more neurotic than mixed breeds.”
“What’s that?”
“Neurotic?” Ramona said, scraping the floor with her feet. “That’s when someone’s unstable emotionally.”
Remmie put her hands flat on the table between her and Ramona, and gave Ramona that look again.
“You mean sick in the head?” Brenda asked.
“No,” Remmie said. “Just troubled. Not crazy.”
Brenda wondered if her father’d been neurotic. He’d died when she was a baby. Her mom said he drank so much, it was like he was from Mars. “If someone’s like that,” Brenda asked, “do their kids get it too?”
“Sometimes,” Remmie said.
“It’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you acquire,” Ramona said.
“She means you become that way.”
“Oh,” Brenda said. “Did you two become that way?”
Remmie laughed, but Ramona didn’t. “No, we were born like this,” they said at the same time.
“So you’re not neurotic?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Remmie said, picking up a sandwich that was sitting on the table next to her, and smiled at Ramona.
“Can you ever come apart?” Brenda said. “I don’t think I’d like to be stuck to my sister, and I know she wouldn’t want to be stuck to me.”
“We don’t enjoy it,” Ramona said.
“But it has to be like this,” Remmie said. “If we had an operation to take us apart, I’d probably die. And I’d rather be stuck to Ramona than not be here at all.”
Brenda looked over at Ramona. She was picking the crust off the bread from her bologna sandwich.
Brenda couldn’t imagine being stuck to anyone. Not even Edgar. What if she was stuck to Lisa Cumbermiller? “You don’t have it so good,” Brenda said.
Ramona sighed. “Very perceptive,” she said, and she looked up in the air away from Brenda and Remmie and ran her fingers through her ponytail like a comb.
Remmie said, “It’s not so bad. The only times we have trouble are when I set my hair at night, because the curlers poke Ramona in the face while we sleep. And also when she drinks. I can’t stand alcohol. What makes her drunk sometimes makes me sick.”
Ramona peeled the top slice of bread off her sandwich, then bit into what was left. “I really hate being like this,” she said. “The only thing that’s good about it is that I’m never lonely.”
Brenda looked around the lunchroom. Elise and Ritchie were gone. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been lonely.”
Ramona crossed her legs. “Where’s your friend?” she said. “That guy you sit with all the time.”
“You mean Edgar? He’s sick.”
“Well, imagine how you’d feel if he never came back,” she said.
Brenda hadn’t considered that. She’d just taken it for granted he’d be back. But if he didn’t get better, it’d be awful, especially with Marty gone. No one to talk to, no one to eat with, no one to look at when a song she liked came on the radio. It made her think about how her garden looked in the winter, or how she felt in the living room, watching the kids outside. “I don’t know what I’d do,” Brenda said.
“You’d make new friends,” Remmie said. “I bet anyone’d be friends with you. You seem to be very considerate. That’s why we wanted to meet you.”
That made Brenda’s face warm, and she felt like she was in the sun. Then she remembered that her mind was not neat and tidy. “But most people aren’t like me,” she said.
Ramona said, “So make friends with people who aren’t.”
Brenda didn’t know if she wanted to do that. She didn’t know if she could. She put her empty Coke can in her lunch box.
“Girls!” A supervisor shouted into the lunchroom. “Didn’t you see the time?”
Brenda felt her cheeks turn red. She’d never been late before. Quick as she could, she packed up her lunch and went back to the workroom.
Brenda worked hard that afternoon so her boss would forget what happened at lunch. But Brenda didn’t forget, and she didn’t want to. Every time she looked up, she’d see the twins watching her. They weren’t just staring, either. They were smiling, Ramona a little, and Remmie a lot.
After she walked the dogs that night, Brenda went out to the garden. The pumpkins were coming up and there was still some squash left, but most everything else was gone. Red and yellow and brown leaves from all over the neighborhood had blown onto the yard and were covering the dirt. Brenda didn’t go over to pick them out. She just stood at the edge and looked.
With all the leaves there, the garden didn’t look so tidy anymore. But it was kind of nice that way, and Brenda didn’t want to clean it up. All she wanted to do was step in just far enough to get some pumpkins. Then she could go to the hospital and bring one to Edgar. She figured he’d really like it. And the lady down the street, the one with the little boy who’d been hurt. She might feel good if Brenda brought her one, too. Her mom would know for sure. Brenda could ask her if it was OK to give pumpkins as presents. And, if she said yes, the first one Brenda would pick would be for the twins. She could bring it to them tomorrow. The prettiest and most perfect-shaped one she could find.
Hearts
We think my father will die suddenly. We imagine a heart attack. He is a fat man, a lover of latkes and blintzes, who smokes cigarettes and is given to rages of such volume that my mother, sitting on the sidelines all these years, suffers from eardrum damage.
He frequently brings up his death at family gatherings. “I want to talk about my will,” he says. “You must use the money to care for your mother. She is not to live in a home.” Then he explains, once again, what each of us will get, how we should invest it so our mother can avoid taxes, what we should buy for her. Above all, we are told, we must never forget that every penny is to be spent on her. I always reassure him: “I will take care of Mama.”
At my birth, he named me Hermina, so his name, Hermann, could live on. But I will not be passing it on; I have never married and, though I date and on rare occasions have allowed a man to spend the night, I am beyond the age of childbearing. This angers my father, and is the cause, he says, of his sporadic chest pains. For years, he has sent me an unsigned card every Mother’s Day. I feel chest pains then, too.
It has long been understood that I will take my mother in after my father’s death. Early on, my sisters told me they would never allow one person to carry the entire burden. But, as each began to make her own family, I would be told in private: “I have too many other things in my life. And we must think of what is best for her.”
When I moved out of the house nine years ago, my father insisted my apartment have two bedrooms. He then furnished the second one for my mother without her knowledge, so that it will be ready and welcoming when the time comes. Sometimes men peer at the closed bedroom door and ask if I have a roommate. “Not yet,” I tell them, “but I will.” My sisters, married and therefore certain they are wiser than I, tell me that somehow I must want to make men fear entrapment; I make them run.
Following my father’s suggestion, I have been lining my shelves and filling my closets with gifts for my mother. He sends me lists of things she has always wanted but he has been too cheap to give her: Eastern European novels, an Israeli mezuzah, gilded Pesach dishes, embroidered
antimacassars, real linen sheets, crystal atomizers.
Given what it costs to pay rent on an apartment in a neighborhood that my father considers safe enough for my mother, I don’t have money for luxuries like a car and fancy clothes. My sisters visit reluctantly, and only during the day, when they have little to do. They click their tongues at how long it takes me to get home from work, at the pills on my sweaters, the outdated length of my hems. And when they discovered my stock of gifts for our mother, they shook their heads.
My mother pulled me aside last Saturday while my father was out buying cold cuts and my sisters were playing badminton with their families. “Hermina, I have been doing a lot of thinking,” she said, “and I realize that I don’t expect you to take care of me when your father dies. Just because we took in your aunt after the war doesn’t mean you have such an obligation. She spoke no English. She’d lost all her dignity. I’ll go into a home.”
“I will not hear of it,” I said. “It’s my responsibility.”
Later in the week, she calls and tells me what she has thought all these years: she does not want to live with me. She feels I should have a life of my own. She feels I have wasted too much of it already.
I tell her she is mistaken. We will both be happier if we stay together. “That’s what family is for,” I say.
There is a silence over the phone, and then she says, “I am going to cash in those bonds your father gets me for my birthdays. I plan to put money down at Merry Heart next week.”
“But he will be furious,” I remind her.
“I am not going to tell him,” she replies.
But he will know, somehow. And it will destroy him. It will destroy her.
When we get off, I walk through the apartment, taking out her gifts, setting them on the table. I sit and look at them and try to figure out how to stop her. I must protect my father. I must respect my mother. The gifts are beautiful, and so elegant. I cannot bear to think about what might become of them. They are nothing I can ever use.