Sisterland (7 page)

None of us attended church, and my mother, despite her own upbringing, didn’t seem to be religious, but she was superstitious; if we spilled salt, she made us throw some over our left shoulders, and if the sun came out while it was raining, she’d say it meant the devil was getting married. My mother’s one great happiness was her Christmas records, the ones she’d brought up on the bus from Risco: Perry Como singing “O Holy Night,” Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. We listened to them from mid-November to mid-January.

On the weekends, our father would drive Vi and me to P.S. Video on Jefferson Avenue, where we each got to select one movie to rent. We could spend easily half an hour considering our options, picking up and returning various empty cardboard cases to the shelves—the actual cassettes were stored behind the cash register—and there are movies from this time
period that I never saw but still feel a kinship for just from holding their cases in my hands:
Good Morning, Vietnam
and
Mannequin
and
Rumble Fish
. Often, the movies we picked were ones we’d already seen:
The Secret of My Success
, which featured a young and handsome Michael J. Fox, or
Class
, which featured a young Rob Lowe, who was so far beyond handsome, so perfect in every possible way, that it hurt to watch him. In a scene in which he bit into an apple, the juice clung to his lips in a way Vi and I found devastatingly sexy; we’d rewind the video several times per viewing just to torment ourselves.

During the week, after school, Vi and I watched vast quantities of television. By middle school, our two favorite shows were
Divorce Court
and the soap opera
Santa Barbara
, both of which we viewed while eating either Cool Ranch Doritos, Wonder bread toast topped with butter and cinnamon sugar, or tiny pieces of American cheese melted in the microwave onto Triscuits. We shared a radio–cassette player on which we listened to Y98, and there were certain songs we’d become obsessed with—“Take My Breath Away” and “Walk Like an Egyptian”—and try to tape, though we rarely succeeded in pressing the Record button until several seconds into the songs. Soon after getting our ears pierced in sixth grade, we began pleading to get our right ears double-pierced, which our parents let us do as a twelfth-birthday present just before the start of seventh grade, and around this time, Vi also wanted an asymmetrical haircut—it would be chin-length on the left side of her face but cropped above her ear on the right—which our mother said she was allowed to do only if she lost ten pounds. Toward this end, Vi intermittently did sit-ups in front of the television, which I’d join her for because it felt more festive that way, though what’s notable to me about the bargain in retrospect, when I look at old photos, is that Vi wasn’t heavy then. She weighed ten pounds more than I did, but I was skinny.

It was also in seventh grade that one night at dinner, Vi said, “Want to hear a clean joke? Bob took a bath with bubbles. Want to hear a dirty joke?” Without waiting for anyone to respond, she said, “Bubbles was the lady next door.” There was a long silence, and then my mother leaned forward and slapped Vi’s face.

“That didn’t hurt,” Vi said, and my mother said, “Go to your room, you spoiled brat.”

I got up with Vi, and neither of our parents objected.

In late October, Vi gave herself an asymmetrical haircut, and the first thing I thought when I saw her was that our mother would forbid her to attend the Halloween dance and I’d have to go alone, but Vi wasn’t punished. Instead, my mother just pursed her lips before saying, almost with pleasure, “No boy will want to dance with you like that.”

Vi and I had only one real friend, a girl named Janie Spriggs, who lived a block away and regularly joined us to play Commercial; in turn, Vi and I would go to Janie’s house to ride her mother’s stationary bike and try on her mother’s fur coat, sometimes doing both simultaneously. Janie had an older brother named Pete who had Down’s syndrome—Vi and I referred to him as retarded, as did our parents—and every time he saw us, by way of greeting, Pete would say in a singsong, “You’re twins because there’s two of you.” Interestingly, though, Pete could always tell us apart, long before the asymmetrical haircut and the weight difference, back when many of our teachers and the other students couldn’t.

Vi and I were included in classmates’ parties only when everyone was invited, but I didn’t feel the sting of rejection; after all, I wasn’t staying home alone. I think our classmates considered us a benign oddity. Twins weren’t nearly as common then as now—this was prior to widespread fertility treatments—yet we’d been going to school with many of the same people since kindergarten, which meant that we were both familiar and strange. Until Marisa, we also were viewed, I’m pretty sure, as a package deal; if another girl were to have one of us over, she’d have to have both of us, and we weren’t beloved enough to be worth two guest slots.

But it wasn’t as if we invited anyone to our house besides Janie. Our birthday usually fell during the week in August when we drove to visit our father’s relatives in Omaha, so we had cake there and never held a celebration back at home. When Vi and I were younger, I suppose it was our mother who didn’t initiate social activities on our behalf, and when we were older, we didn’t initiate them because we had realized, without ever speaking of it, that we were colluding to conceal a certain fact about our
family. This was not the fact of our “having senses,” as Vi and I called it from a young age. Rather, it was that, from the time we arrived home after school until a few minutes before our father arrived home after work almost three hours later, our mother remained in bed with the door closed, the shades drawn, and the lights off. Vi and I referred to what our mother did in our parents’ darkened bedroom as napping, though we understood that she wasn’t asleep—often the TV was on, sometimes set to the same program Vi and I were watching in the living room—and in rare instances, we’d knock on the door to ask her a question.

The first time we came home from school to find our mother in bed, Vi and I were eleven, and this turn of events made us decidedly nervous; we inquired as to whether she was sick and when she ignored the question, we heated a can of chicken noodle soup and carried the steaming bowl into her room on a tray. Our father returned every evening from work at five forty-five, and that evening, when it got to be five o’clock and our mother showed no sign of emerging, we took matters into our own hands. Using a recipe from one of the index cards our mother kept in a white tin box on top of the refrigerator—she herself had copied the recipe by hand from the
Post-Dispatch
in 1977 and made it frequently—we prepared broiled chicken breasts, as well as buttered rice and an iceberg salad with Kraft ranch dressing. Optimistically, we set the kitchen table with four places but were surprised when, at five-thirty, our mother appeared before us, fully dressed, seeming like an only slightly more preoccupied version of her usual self. “Oh,” she said when she saw that dinner was almost ready. “Well, I hope the chicken’s done all the way through.” When our father arrived home, we ate as if it were a normal night. At the end of the meal, he wiped his mouth with a napkin and said, “That was good, Rita.” This was what he said at the end of every dinner, and none of us corrected him.

Astonishingly, this pattern continued every weeknight for the next six years, until we left for college, by which point we’d long ago forgotten how odd it was that our mother spent each afternoon in bed and that Vi and I pretended—to ourselves, I think, as much as to our father—that she’d cooked dinner when she hadn’t. Vi and I rotated among three dishes: the broiled chicken breasts of the first night, creamed chicken breasts, and
orange juice pork chops. These other two recipes were also ones that had been our mother’s staples and were located in her tin box. Our sides were always—and I truly mean always, 100 percent of the time—the iceberg salad with ranch dressing and either the rice or baked potatoes. On Friday nights, we ordered pizza; on Saturday nights, our father grilled steak; and on Sundays, our father took us without our mother—ironically enough, so that she could rest—to either Hacienda for Mexican food or King Doh for pot stickers and General Tso’s chicken. (Our mother didn’t care for what she referred to as un-American food.) At some point when Vi and I were at school, usually on Monday or Tuesday, our mother went to the grocery store, an act that, in retrospect, seems to me to deepen her complicity in the unspoken pact to deceive our father. In high school, after Vi joined the tech crew for school plays our freshman year, I’d cook dinner alone for weeks at a time while she was at rehearsal.

Once, shortly after Jeremy and I moved in together, I decided to make him the orange juice pork chops. As they baked, I opened the oven door, and the hot, meaty, orangey smell assaulted me, the smell of my adolescence, of my parents’ house, of my mother’s depression that we never called depression. I wanted to turn off the heat and dump the chops in the trash, but to do so would have been melodramatic. Instead, I let them finish cooking and served them on beige plates. When Jeremy and I were seated at the high little table we used before we had children, I cut a small piece with my knife and fork, speared it, put it in my mouth, and began to cry. “Sweetheart?” he said. It took me a while to explain, and after I had, he picked up both our plates and set them in the sink, saying, “We’ll never eat pork chops again.”

“It’s not
all
pork chops,” I said. “Just this recipe.”

“Life’s too short.” He reached into the pocket of his pants and jingled his keys. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get sushi.”

Surprising as the
invitation to Marisa Mazarelli’s slumber party was, I did understand its genesis, and that genesis was fraudulent. Two weeks earlier, in a performance conceived of, choreographed, and directed by Vi,
she and I had lip-synched and danced to Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right” in the Nipher Middle School talent show. Because I had so little to do with the act’s creation, I feel that I can say without bragging that we brought down the house. The song started with the sound of glass breaking, then the ramping up of the electric guitar, then Billy, as Vi and I called him, singing in his bravado-filled way about crashing a party. Per Vi’s vision, she was dressed as a fifties greaser, in penny loafers and white socks, jeans rolled at the cuff, and a white T-shirt; her hair was slicked back, and she wore mirrored aviator sunglasses. I, meanwhile, was supposed to channel Marilyn-Monroe-over-the-grate, except that instead of relying on a subway, I was responsible for swishing my own skirt; I wore a white halter dress of our mother’s from the seventies, and fake-leather white high heels, also our mother’s, with socks stuffed in the toes, and I’d applied heavy makeup and used a curling iron to create ringlets. The real coup of our performance was that Vi had convinced our science teacher, Mr. Dummerston, to let us use his motorcycle as a prop; he himself was waiting in the wings with us before we went onstage so he could help wheel it out, and as soon as the lights went up and the students saw the motorcycle—he was the only teacher who drove one, and it was immediately recognizable because of its yellow frame—they began to scream. Then there was that thrilling sound of breaking glass and Vi strutting around the stage, fearlessly inhabiting her greaser persona: getting down on her knees and gesticulating forcefully with her arms, pleading with me to give her a chance; being wounded by my rejection, stalking away, then returning to plead some more. All I had to do was dance in place, shake my head dismissively, wag my index finger, and bat my eyelashes like I was conceited, which, of course, the more I could feel the enthusiasm of our audience, the more I really was. Every time the chorus came on, Vi and I would seek each other out and dance together, waving our arms, nodding our heads from side to side, linking hands and stepping forward then backward, in exactly the way we’d practiced night after night for the last two months.

A feedback loop occurred wherein I was aware of the audience’s perception of us shifting from
I never really noticed the Shramms before
to
They
sure look like they’re having fun
to
Oh, I wish I were a twin!
And it was true—we
were
having fun, being a twin
was
a great thing—and having an audience for the greatness only made it truer. To receive adulation just for being ourselves, albeit our costumed and choreographed selves, was both disorienting and miraculous.

When the song was over, we got the only standing ovation of the night. The next person to go on was a seventh-grade boy performing a magic act, and a minute in, as he was fumbling with playing cards, a good-looking soccer player named Jason Trachsel yelled, “Bring back the twins!”

After the talent show’s conclusion, there were cookies and juice and mayhem as the teachers chaperoning tried to get the students to fold chairs before all the kids dispersed to their own or one another’s houses. Vi and I were going home; our father would be waiting outside in his Buick to pick us up. I’d put on a sweatshirt over my mother’s halter dress but was still wearing my heavy makeup, which made me feel glamorous as Vi and I were mobbed by classmates and even teachers wanting to congratulate us. And the fraudulence first dawned on me as I accepted these congratulations: It wasn’t just that Vi and I got equal credit for a performance that had been in almost every way her idea. Rather, I received more credit for the sole reason that I had played the girl and she’d played the guy.

Marisa Mazarelli, whom I hardly ever talked to, shoved aside two seventh-grade girls who’d approached to examine my curled hair and high heels. “That was awesome,” she said.

I smiled. “Thanks.”

She gestured toward Vi, who was standing a few feet away talking to Janie Spriggs, and said, “I never realized before tonight that you’re the pretty twin.”

There were, I see now, insults for both Vi and me embedded in this comment, but I was so caught off guard that all I could say, in genuine confusion, was “But we’re identical.”