by Terry Reed
It didn’t deserve it. Not even due to longevity. Boarding school itself would last much longer. Though as it would turn out, not all that long.
It was really nothing that was said.
I was doing my best to ensure dead silence through sheer force of bad attitude, and by the time we reached the Ohio border, my parents had stopped the small talk. Mother tried one more time in Pennsylvania, asking bravely what my new roommate had said in her letter, but blowing it by forgetting there were two of them. I gave her the one-word answer. “DottiandDitto.”
“Oh, dear. Of course. The Twins.”
If the point of my banishment to boarding school was to remove me from the influence of the likes of Mary Parker, I wished, if we were speaking, I could tell them it was backfiring. The farther I got from Cleveland, the more I thought about her, the books she had assigned me to read and the knowledge she’d tried to impart. I thought to myself, If they only knew I’m sitting here thinking, The cradle rocks above the abyss.
It was from a book, but it wasn’t on the reading list. Mary Parker told me the story. A man sees a home movie shot before he was born. Sees his own baby carriage on his own front porch. Realizes with dread that he once totally did not exist. Feels about as thrilled about seeing his own carriage as he would his own coffin.
It was death, see, except in reverse. But the worst part: the people laughing and waving in the home movie, his own family, do not seem in the least distressed by his absence.
That’s what I was contemplating as we sped through the tunnels of Pennsylvania, staring at the back of my parents’ heads, leaving home, the family now reduced to the three essentials, me and them, as if hurling forward to a time when the rest of them would inevitably fade away, and you’re back to where you started. Them. The end. Just like the beginning.
And there’s nothing to be done about it, you just sit and look out at the other cars, and wonder a little about the people inside, but just for as long as it takes them to pass.
In New Jersey, I felt sorry for them. My cursed magnanimous nature.
But I knew it was treacherous to speak. They might take it as a signal not to suffer anymore for sending me to boarding school. My words would have to be carefully chosen, and well spoken. Finally: “Mom? Dad? The cradle rocks above the abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
There.
They turned to look at each other. Due to her scarf and his shades, I couldn’t judge how much eye rolling was going on. But then Dad winked in the rear view mirror. “Ah, Nabokov,” he said. “Speak Memory”
Well, you had to give him credit for it. I looked out the window. A swift gray Porsche was passing like a self-possessed ghost on the right.
“There’s a great line in there. A funny one.”
Yeah, Dad? I’d love to hear it.
He waited for a ten-ton oil transport truck to pass, with the word HAZARD flapping furiously on every wheel flap of every wheel. Then with a grin back in the mirror: “Man as a rule views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.”
Mother looked at him. Maybe we were over her speed limit now.
“Thanks, Dad. I’ll remember that at boarding school.”
I would be running away from there, for sure.
I mean not immediately or anything, I’d go through the motions for a while, then try not to make a big drama about it—I would probably just pack up a few essentials one night and slip out some fire door. I already knew the most memorable part about it was the drive there, and I wouldn’t bother going into it further, if it weren’t for Dotti and Ditto, and the strange visits from my parents that fall, and my unusual correspondence with Mary Parker.
• • •
So I’m not going to say how they left me there. I’ll just say I had my personal plans to mourn their absence, and the loss of my childhood and my brothers and sisters and boyfriend and best friends and all that, my own plans to see them off at the Buick, then go cry like a baby about it out by the school pond. The minute I had seen it when we drove onto that ivy-covered postcard of a campus, I had it all staked out as a good place to go drown myself in tears. Forget that I’d claimed to Cabot that I was a guy inside who didn’t cry. But it never happened as I planned, because I’d forgotten to factor in Dotti and Ditto.
My parents came up to put my things in my room. The Twins were there, sitting at the ends of their beds, flanking mine with the bare ticking-striped mattress. All exactly as in the photograph Andrew John had brought just a few days before in the mail. When my things were all put away and my parents said to come downstairs and say good-bye now, The Twins thought that meant them too, and they stood up, smoothed their skirts, and trailed us down to the Buick. So it wasn’t tearful at that point, because of Dotti and Ditto.
And then, if they didn’t follow me right out to the school pond. I tried to shake them off, I protested they’d get their feet wet or something, they’d get a chill, but they said they wanted to show it to me. And the worst part of it was, they were so nice about it. I mean they looked weird, for sure, with their big ruffled hair and their thick black glasses, but you’ve never met two nicer people who just wanted to show you a pond.
“That’s the pond,” said Dotti.
And Ditto said, “See? We told you. That’s the pond.”
I’m not saying they were perfect. They were sort of sad and expectant and worried, just like they photographed. And they weren’t brilliant company, nor did their constant presence either side of me instantly endear me to the cooler kids at my new school. They were a social liability I would only grudgingly be forgiven for, and were actually annoying as anything in their own right at night, with their heads bashing ceaselessly against the headboards until they finally conked out.
But really pretty decent once you got past all that. Smart too. You wouldn’t think so, with the repeated blows to the head since they were small. I knew all about that from boxers and Matt, but I figured they were one of those famous exceptions to the rule.
What could make you uneasy, though, they truly believed that I was the best thing that had ever happened to them and their room. They really wanted me to be happy there, so there was no small amount of pressure involved. Two people wanting nothing more in the world than your happiness. It was worse than your parents. It drove me crazy, to tell you the truth. It would have been easier if they had been evil twins. But what could you do, they weren’t, they were as nice as could be. So I spent a lot of time under the covers with a flashlight, writing long letters to Rey McDowell, Mary Parker, the two Mickeys, my brothers and sisters, even my parents. Besides, it’s not as if I could sleep, what with the racket the heads against the headboards made.
My parents didn’t write much, they mostly called. The main advantage there was it gave me another way to politely excuse myself from The Twins, because you had to take your calls in the old wooden phone booths down the hall. Rey McDowell wrote love letters, sweet and funny. And he called too, and always said he missed me. And the others also, all proved reliable and worthy and stalwart correspondents.
But Mary Parker didn’t call, and she didn’t really write either. That is, she kept her promise, she regularly sent me mail, but you couldn’t call it writing, or you’d be sadly deluding yourself. What she did was send postcards, that cut-rate blank kind from the post office, with the stamp preprinted on one side. Like Mary Parker thought communicating with me was worth about five cents. Although maybe while I was there, it went up to six. But I doubt it, because I already said, I wasn’t there that long.
And then on the other side of those cards, where a person really could write something if they wanted to cram, that side invariably arrived almost blank. In fact, technically, there was more writing on the side with the addresses, if you’re trying to prove your point by counting the return.
She sent solitary sentences. Sometimes just phrases. And as phrases go, they were among
the most mystifying ever heard.
Her first postcard arrived the first week I was at school. It said: When creating self, consider. And that was it.
Then, the next week, she finished the sentence: … That the limits generate the form.
This in answer to my twenty-seven-page letter describing every detail of my new school, the old oak tree outside Peabody Hall where we sometimes had English class if it was a sunny day and the teacher was in a good mood, The Twins of course, the dining hall where there was a lot of jockeying for social position under the pretense of just eating a bad meal, even the unusual field hockey uniform knee pads, and my thoughts about turning thirty years old. I’d written an essay about it, in the blank diary Mary Parker had sent me as a going-away present.
“Pure logical thinking” arrived. Which, let’s face it, was already suffering from overuse, but she still saw fit to send it three more eye-glazing times.
And here’s a memorable one: Hey, how’s your horse?
All I’m saying is, what kind of genius writes that? It wasn’t as if there was a picture of a horse on the other side, and Mary Parker was saying, Here’s a horse, and, Hey, how’s your horse? Or comical, like, Hay, how’s your horse? Nor was it even from a fellow horse owner, as in, By the way, my horse is fine, how’s yours? This was an otherwise blank card, coming with no frame or reference, out of nowhere, in your mailbox: Hey, how’s your horse?
I got that and thought, How should I know? He’s in Ohio, and he never writes, he never calls…. If you think about it, and seriously, how can you not, this postcard was rather scary. I mean, maybe you tell me how’s my horse. Do you know something I don’t about my horse? It was like something out of The Godfather, which I had seen several times with Mary Parker, of course. Anyway, I got that one at my mailbox, and believe it, I was looking over my shoulder the whole way back down the long Administration Building hall.
“Fear is the opposite of love” arrived next. As relates to what, your guess is as good as mine.
I tried to get control of the situation. In my return letter to Mary Parker, I devised a P.S., cleverly phrased in the form of a question a normal correspondent would feel obliged to at least acknowledge, even if they said they’d have to get back to you later on that. “P.S.: Hey, how about The Twins?” I’d written a ten-page letter about them, describing what it was like at night in my room, which I’d referred to rather entertainingly, I thought, as “the ward.”
It worked, in a way. Mary Parker wrote back a long one, for her. That is, it still filled just one side of a post office postcard, but she did go into some detail this time. Just not about The Twins—about advertising on the radio. She informed me that there was a term in radio called frequency, not to be confused with the radio signal itself, and this frequency being the marketing theory that the more often, or frequently, a radio ad ran, the more it “saturated the market” and the psyches of the listeners, and therefore the more inclined people were to run out and buy your product. No matter how much they hated hearing your obnoxious ad for the hundredth time.
After that one, I fired off a post office postcard myself: The Twins, Mary. Not the radio.
She wrote me right back. The entire text of her correspondence consisted of one words: SPOTS.
I have to say, that one was mysterious.
I just couldn’t decode it. I spent weeks trying, but I just couldn’t figure why a genius would answer a question about two twins with the one word Spots. Then, I was in the Dean’s Lecture one day. The dean was standing up there in her red suit, with the fake gold buttons and chains she had such a miserable reputation for. She was giving a special, one-time-only lecture about teenage sex, which should have been quite interesting, but she was totally taking the circuitous route, slowly and painstakingly working up to what some girls later called the “money shot.” In fact, the dean was single-handedly turning teenage sex into about the most boring subject on earth. Like you didn’t want anything to do with it after all. Or at least forget it for once and take a nap.
But the dean would kill you if you did that. You could tell. She had a stiff white face, and hair so highlighted and so pulled back tight you could see shiny bits of pink skull underneath. And her eyes were like a bird’s, just not a pleasant one’s. A raven’s, I kept thinking. If you fell asleep, she’d probably peck your eyes out. So I was trying my best to stay alert, look lively, and I was doing it by making an enormous intellectual effort to figure out the word Spots.
And as a result of having the time and trying so hard, I actually did do it. I figured it out. See, when Mary Parker wrote Spots, she really was writing about The Twins. She was just doing it indirectly, by writing about the radio. Media ads, I now remembered because my father was in advertising, are called spots. So Mary Parker wasn’t ignoring my questions about The Twins. She’d never been ignoring it. She was simply asking in her own special way if I was buying them because there were more of them. Because I’d been a victim of frequency.
Naturally, I grinned the very second I figured it all out. I even chuckled a little, in awe of Mary Parker. But unfortunately, that was the very moment that the dean was about to deliver the money shot. And I was caught. Grinning. During a lecture about teenage sex.
The dean and I locked eyes, and I immediately wiped the smile off my face. But that didn’t stop her. She still stopped the money shot. “Miss Parkman,” she said, “you seemed amused by all this.”
Everyone looked to see if I was. “No, ma’am,” I stammered, “I’m not.”
“Stand up,” she snapped. “You’re being directly addressed.”
I shot to my feet. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
But her raven’s eyes were going mad on me. I couldn’t focus back in them, and didn’t want to, to tell you the truth. So I looked at the clock on the classroom wall.
The dean came a little closer to closely inspect me, I think. “We’ve all met Miss Parkman, haven’t we? She’s a transfer student this year. She’s brought us a joke. From Cleveland.” As if that were joke enough.
And then she waited. My heart started pounding. I thought she was going to make me do it, make me explain why I’d been smiling, and if I even attempted to explain the infamous Twins in terms of radio frequency, then not only was I the new girl from Cleveland, I was the new girl from Cleveland who was clearly insane. And as further proof, she has no use for teenage sex.
But the dean didn’t make me explain. She just stared at me for twelve seconds, according to the clock on the classroom wall. Then she said, Sit down and pay close attention, and I readily said, Yes, ma’am.
But I guess she wanted to make sure that I did it, because she wouldn’t stop staring at me. She just wouldn’t do it. I started wondering if she even could do it. You know when a bird gets interested, and can’t take its eyes off of you. So everybody else started doing it too, because they didn’t need to look at the dean, because the only thing the dean was looking at was me. So the entire room was staring at me when she finally delivered the money shot. “And the man takes his penis …”
Which I could have lived with. If only she hadn’t pronounced it wrong. What she really said was, “And the man takes his penace.” Which made it sound like penance, the punishment they give you for sinning and confessing it in the Catholic Church. But even if you didn’t know that, it was dead-on funny.
It was quiet as anything after she said it the first time, then, when she did it again, forget Cleveland, we had a legitimate joke. Everybody at the lecture knew how incredibly good it was. And everybody at the lecture knew that there was no way I could laugh. Other girls were coughing and choking and nudging me in the back, and here is the dean staring at me hard and cold like a raven each and every time she chirps “The man takes his penace” like that.
But the miraculous thing is, I didn’t laugh. I nodded back at the dean like “The man takes his penace” information was the most useful thing I’d heard in my life. I nodded at the end of every sentence, so she’d know I’d
absorbed. It took tremendous willpower. I was practically imploding or exploding or something when the lecture was over and the dean finally stopped staring at me, saying “The man take his penace” like that. All because of Mary Parker and the word Spots, and, of course, the source, the Spots themselves, who sat either side of me in class, looking worried as anything that I’d get kicked out. But the interesting thing is, I became quite popular after that.
I’m not saying I didn’t come to appreciate my postcards from Mary Parker. At first I’d thought, you know, this is not a major effort to communicate on her part. But then I don’t know, they came so often, so frequently, and they were so interesting in their own little post office postcardy way, and so mysterious, like something that had to be pondered and figured out. Treasured even, like a thought.
I kept them in a stack tied with black satin ribbon. And at night before lights out, I sorted through and made a selection of which ones to contemplate before sleep. One of the postcards even said: Even in our sleep, pain comes drop by drop upon the heart until comes wisdom, almost against the will of God. So while The Twins were brushing their hair and getting ready to bump their heads for the night, I went through my postcards.
There was one every night that always fell out of the stack. It was a different weight, which is why I guess it fell out. It had come inserted deep in the diary Mary Parker had given me, the one in which I wrote about turning thirty. The day I found it, I read it, and I put it in the stack. It was just a piece of paper, really, not even as substantial as a post office postcard. So it always ended up slipping out of the stack. As a result, I picked it up and reread it every night. Frequently, you might say. It said, simply, Avoid restaurant scenes.
At first I thought it was an odd thing for Mary Parker to write. Avoid restaurant scenes. It just wasn’t the kind of thing Mary Parker seemed overly concerned with. Propriety and good manners and such. Don’t get me wrong, she was very polite, even if her father hadn’t, our school would have made sure of that. But I just didn’t think decorum was one of her big talking points. It was more like something your mother would write. Avoid scenes in restaurants. Sure, Mom. No problem. I’m not so fond of food fights myself. It was only much later that I discovered that that wasn’t even what Mary Parker was talking about.