Perfume (3 page)

She put a spoonful to her mouth and thought, If I eat this, my stomach will be full of eyes.

She went to school hungry.

In school, Dove could see and recognize all her friends. She was able to say hello and respond normally when they said, “Hey, how are you?” But in the thickness of her head she felt cramped and distant, as though she actually occupied some other place, and had to communicate with her friends long distance.

The flutter in her head got up and looked around.

Dove wanted to scratch the inside of her brain. She knotted her fingers to keep from ripping out her hair.

This is how stags feel, thought Dove, when they first get antlers, and have to rub themselves against the trees to get the velvet off.

What would they do if she rubbed her head against the classroom walls?

“The brain, you see,” said the biology teacher, “is similar to an onion.”

Dove detested onions. If you chopped them, your hands smelled. If you cooked them—and the Daniels often did; her father was fond of small white onions in thick white sauce—they were like baby golf balls soaked in glue.

“There are also many layers to the brain,” said the biology teacher.

Dove connected with that. Her brain
did
have many layers. She could feel the flutter inside her head lifting each brain layer, like blankets on a bed, deciding where to rest for the night.

At the table they shared, Laurence moaned slightly. Laurence was adorable to look at, but tiresome to be around. He had been that way since they were little kids, and was unlikely to change. Girls were always getting crushes on Laurence and then changing their minds. Laurence was proof that looks were not everything. “Wrong,” murmured Laurence. “There is nothing layered about the brain. Convoluted, yes. Layered, no.”

Dove raised her hand. The teacher, always eager to coach an inquiring mind, recognized her. “Yes, Dove?” he said happily.

“You know how sometimes babies are born with two of something?” said Dove. “An extra heart or an extra kidney?”

“An extra eyeball,” agreed Timmy O’Hay, pretending to have one. Timmy was the opposite of Laurence: tiresome to look at but terrific to be around. After a while you forgot that Timmy was rumpled and wrinkled and just enjoyed him.

The teacher sighed. “I have never actually heard of extra hearts, Dove, but yes, sometimes there are major deformities at birth.”

“Have you ever heard of an extra brain?” she said.

“Dove, please. Let’s be logical here. There isn’t room in a skull for an extra brain.”

“Sure there is,” asserted Timmy. “Take Laurence here. The trick is that both brains are very small, see. They don’t take you very far. Won’t be long, Laurence’s brains will fold up shop. It’ll be an institution for Laurence, a bed with rails and a nurse with injections to keep him calm.”

“Timmy,” said the teacher tiredly.

The fluttering had been replaced by footsteps. A second person was walking around inside her head. Insectlike. As if her second person had more than two legs; had eight, perhaps.

“What if you really did have a second person inside you?” said Dove.

“If you really did have a second person inside of you,” said the teacher, “you would receive a mental diagnosis. Schizophrenia, perhaps. You would be on heavy-duty, industrial-strength medication, and very probably live out your unfortunate years in the state institution to which Timmy hopes to send Laurence.”

The class laughed.

“Oh,” said Dove. She decided against describing what was going on inside her skull. The world did not sound sympathetic.

Her next class was ancient history.

It was an elective, for people who had done especially well in American history the year before. She could have taken current world, but since Dove’s family watched the news every night during supper—they never talked; the only talking done in her house was by television commentators—Dove felt too acquainted with the current world already. She opted for the ancient world, and now they were doing Egypt.

A sharp hard pain began in the exact center of Dove’s skull.

The second person had taken up residence. The person was hard, like a piece of gravel in a shoe. Just as the biology teacher had said, there was not enough room up there. Dove’s mind was shoved against the wall of her skull, her thoughts pressed closer together, like recycled newspapers jammed into a container on the sidewalk.

“There is evidence,” said the teacher, “that the ancient Egyptians did brain surgery. Skulls in tombs have been found in which holes were drilled, probably to relieve pressure from brain tumors. Or possibly it was thought that during a psychotic episode, the evil influence could be given an escape hatch. The technique is called
trepanning
.”

Dove could visualize this perfectly.

There would be a surgeon in a white linen skirt and a golden necklace shaped like a scarab. He would have a long drill, which he would hand-turn, and the patient would be fastened down on a board, head resting on a stone pillow, and the Egyptian surgeon would drill a hole into the skull.

What a relief it must have been to the patient.

Dove wanted to lie on one of those Egyptian couches and have her head drilled. Get this second person out of her head.

It would probably be a relief to the second person as well. An escape hatch.

Perhaps a lid could be put on: a scalp flap.

No, because then the second person could come back in. The second person would treat the skull like a hotel. Come back when he felt like it and tuck himself in.

Dove touched her hair, feeling for the soft spot where the hole could be drilled.

Through the silk of her hair, the rubberiness of her scalp, and the hard bone of her head, Dove felt an answer.

Dove did not need to drill holes.

The person inside was going to come out by itself.

N
IGHT FELL.

Where there had been gray, there was black. Where there had been soft edges, there were no edges at all.

Only darkness.

Dove was aware of her parents as she had never been before.

First, there was her mother. Not very old. Thirty-six. As slim and fit as she’d been in high school, Dove’s mother still looked like a teenager. Brilliant in math, she was a busy accountant for a tax firm. How boring and strict the numbers seemed to Dove; how demanding and how dull taxes must be. But Dove’s mother loved her clients, sorting out their business expense problems and giving them better ideas.

Dove thought that her mother’s brain was filled with numbers instead of words, and that it clicked like an adding machine.

Dove’s mother detested cooking and rarely did any.

Her great pleasure was clothing. She had taken a job in a large, polished firm because it was a great excuse to dress beautifully and differently and expensively every day.

Dove loved her mother.

Then there was her father. His body had thickened over the years, and he was constantly on a diet. He stuck to each diet by day and caved in by night, when it was nothing for him to consume four or five desserts. He was always joining a health club or starting up a swimming membership, or taking up running, but he would lose interest within a month. He worked for the phone company, and unlike Mother, Father did not like his job. He had never liked his job, and it was a mystery to Dove why he stayed with it. It was a mystery to Father, too, and reaching for that line of desserts seemed to be linked with the eight grim hours of a job he loathed. Dove could not understand why he did not quit and find something better.

Dove loved her father deeply.

And yet she was not close to her parents.

They rarely chatted, or talked of intimate things, or shared stories of what happened that day. It seemed to Dove that her family lay on the surface of family life; they shared a house, a dinner table, and a television screen.

She did not know who her mother’s best friend was, or what her father did on those days he came home late, or what made them love each other.

More and more, as Dove grew up, she saw that these parents of hers were not only total strangers to her, they were total strangers to each other.

That night, she asked for a story.

Her mother’s elegant eyebrows lifted. “A story?” repeated her mother, amused.

“About when I was little,” said Dove eagerly. She loved stories about herself. There weren’t many. She had not been an exciting child. “Or when you and Father were in college,” she added, giving them an out. Their own lives would be an easier story for them.

Her parents sighed slightly, privately. Separately they seemed to remind themselves that every parent must expect to exert him-or herself occasionally. Dove’s mother glanced at her watch. Dove’s father rested his magazine at an angle from which he could still read the large print of the captions, if not actually the articles.

She knew that they did not think of themselves as Dove’s Mother and Dove’s Father. They thought of themselves as Jan and Rob. Sometimes she thought of them that way, too.

“Well, of course,” her father began, “we had expected two. They said your mother was going to have twins.”

The familiar sadness of having disappointed her parents even before birth filtered through Dove. The sadness felt as visible as the vapor from Dry Ice, damp and infinite.

“Ultrasound showed two,” said her father, smiling at the memory, “and we bought two of everything: two bassinets and a double carriage. It seemed very efficient to have two at a time.” Her father approved of efficiency.

What had happened to the extra carriage and bassinet? For that matter, what had happened to hers? Her parents kept nothing. There were no keepsakes in this immaculate condominium, no attic, no cardboard boxes of the past, no trunks or forgotten drawers full of interesting memorabilia.

“One daughter would be Dove,” said her father. “Soft and gentle and cooing with affection.” He surprised Dove by resting his hand on hers, and for a moment the vapors lifted and she was safe and dry.

“The other would have been Wing,” added her mother. “Beating free and flying strong.”

Hard to imagine such methodical people thinking of romantic unusual names. You would have expected them to utilize names like Emily and Mary, which parents had leaned on and been sure of over centuries.

Wing and Dove.

Suddenly the two names were horrid. Almost evil.

A Dove was whole. A complete bird, a complete child. Whereas a Wing—that was just a portion. A limb, so to speak, wrenched off, and lost forever.

How could they have done that? thought Dove. How could they have chosen such a set of names?

For how could a Wing be born alone? Fly free and be strong! Quite the opposite. Without its identical match, a Wing was nothing.

No wonder it wasn’t born, thought Dove, how could it be?

“I still think about Wing sometimes,” offered her mother.

This was not part of the story. Because Dove never knew what her mother was thinking, she leaned forward, hoping to catch another molecule of understanding about this unknown woman who had given birth to her.

“We used to sing to Wing and Dove,” said her mother, smiling now, “your father and I.” She did not look at Dove, but into the past, fifteen years ago. She seemed more interested in Wing, who did not exist, than in Dove, who did. “We were sure Wing and Dove could hear,
in utero
, so we’d read aloud from important books. We’d play great music on the stereo, and oh! how carefully I would eat! We wanted Wing and Dove to emerge from the womb sophisticated and intellectual and perfect.”

The order of the names, too … Wing first. Dove second.

I’m a second, thought Dove. A factory second. Irregular.

“However,” said Father, shrugging, “Wing split.”

“Split?” repeated Dove, and suddenly, the familiar story became unutterably horrible.

She thought of Wing, safe in the tiny sea of their mother’s body, listening to her strange name being called from the other side of the flesh. She heard Wing whisper to herself—No, I don’t think so. I’m not going to be born.

Splitting.
The word was evil.

“How did you know it was Dove who was still around,” asked Dove, “and not Wing?”

“Well, it was very strange,” said her mother, “but we never had a question about that. Dove was born and Wing vanished.”

The phenomenon was actually called that: vanishing twin syndrome.

If they did not lose interest in the conversation, her parents would move into the biology lecture portion of the story. Twins were often predicted in the first weeks of pregnancy but failed to grow after all.

Her parents lost interest, as they always did, and sat silently engaged in their own thoughts and television shows.

The moment of closeness had vanished like the other twin.

Dove trembled with the heaviness of being alone.

Do other people feel this alone, even with their families in the room? she thought. Or do I know in my bones that I am missing a sister, and therefore I am more alone than most girls? What would I have done with her if I had had her? What would she have done with me?

If she never lived, how could she have split?

Where did she vanish to?

That night, Dove did not look under her bed.

All her life, she had looked because the truth of the event was that she knew it was safe to look. There could not really be anything bad under there. Nothing was under any bed except carpet and lost socks.

But it was no longer safe to look.

There
was
something bad under there. There was something bad under her entire fifteen years.
Wing.

By the next ancient history class, Dove no longer believed that Wing had vanished.

Wing had been there all along, waiting. Incubating like a disease.

Wing was ready to come out.

Would she drill her own hole, this twin her mother still thought about?

Would she slide out of Dove’s head like a breath of air through her nostrils?

Would she be vapor or would she have a body of flesh?

Whose body would Wing use?