All about Skin (3 page)

Still, despite our writers' many publications and prizes, our chief qualification was that the writers present interesting, well-crafted stories, and the stories we have selected are purposefully diverse. The stories in
All about Skin
represent the myriad ways women of color are approaching short fiction, and we've included stories that are grimly realistic (Joshunda Sanders's “Sirens”), brilliantly comic (Emily Raboteau's “The Rapture”), and delightfully surreal (Xu Xi's “All about Skin,” from which our anthology takes its title).

Readers often complain that we need new voices. But, with more than twenty stories by women writers of Asian, African, Latin, and mixed-race descent, we feel
All about Skin
acknowledges the diverse voices that already exist, ready to be heard.

Part 1

Coming-of-Age

Patricia Engel

T
he detective wanted to know if Aida was the sort of girl who would run away from home. He'd asked to talk to me alone in the living room. My parents stood around the kitchen with the lady cop and the other detective, an old man who looked to be on his last days of the job. They were telling my parents Aida would walk through that front door any minute now. She probably just got distracted, wandered off with some friends. Our mother wasn't crying yet but she was close. I sat in the middle of the sofa, my thighs parting the cushions. The detective sat on the armchair our mother recently had re-upholstered with a
fleurde-lis
print because the cat had clawed through the previous paisley.

He looked young to be a detective. He wore jeans with a flannel shirt under a tweed blazer even though it was August. He wanted to know if Aida ever talked about leaving, like she had plans beyond this place, something else waiting for her somewhere.

I shook my head. I didn't tell him that since we were eleven, Aida and I had kept a shoebox in the back of our closet that we called our Runaway Fund. The first year or two, we added every extra dollar we came across and when our piles of bills became thick and messy we took them to the bank and traded them for twenties. We planned to run away and join a group of travelers, sleep under bridges beside other refugee kids and form orphan families like you see in movies and Friday night TV specials. Those were the days before we understood how much our parents needed us. Aida insisted on taking the cat with us. Andromeda was fat but could fit in her backpack. Aida had lied to our parents and said she found the cat alone one day by the river behind the soccer field but she'd really bought her at the pet shop with some of our runaway savings. I didn't mind. The cat always loved her more than me though.

“Does she have a boyfriend? Somebody special?”

She didn't. Neither did I. Our parents told us boys were a big waste of time and we kept busy with other things. School. Sports. Jobs. Painting classes for Aida and piano lessons for me. Our parents said just because we were girls who lived in a small town didn't mean we had to be small-town girls.

“Did she have any secrets?”

“Not from me.”

“Even twins have secrets from each other.”

He made me tell him all over again what happened even though I'd gone through it several times in the kitchen while the old man detective took notes and the lady cop leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded across her blockish breasts. The young detective said he'd keep whatever I told him in the strictest confidence. “If there's something you left out because your parents were around, now is the time to tell me, Salma.”

“There's nothing,” I said, and repeated all I'd already told them. How Aida was coming off her summer job as a gift-wrapper at the children's department store at the bottom end of Elm Avenue, while I was sweeping and cleaning the counters before closing at the coffee shop on the top end where I worked the pastry case. We had this routine: whoever finished their shift first would call to say they were on their way to the other. Or we'd meet halfway at our designated third bench on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Park and we'd walk home together. That night, a little after seven, Aida had called and said, “Sal, I'll come to you.” When she didn't show up, I took my purse and walked across the intersection to the park. I sat on our bench for a few minutes before walking the periphery of the park to see if maybe she'd run into some kids from school. Aida was friendly with everyone. Even the dropouts most everyone in town avoided though they hung around the bus station and liquor store and you couldn't walk through the park without getting a whiff of their weed. Aida had a smile for everyone. People liked her. Sometimes I got the impression they just tolerated me because we were a package deal.

I called her phone but she didn't answer, then I tried our parents to see if they'd heard from her. It started from there. The calling around. Probably for the first time ever, the town employed that emergency phone chain where each person is assigned five others to call, to see if anyone had seen Aida. Around here, you can't get a haircut without it being blasted over the gossip wires, but nobody knew where she was. This is a town where nothing terrible ever happens. There are perverts and creeps like anywhere else but never an abduction or a murder. The worst violent crime this town ever saw beyond an occasional housewife wandering the supermarket with a broken nose or split lip was back in 1979, when one sophomore girl stabbed another with a pencil in the high school cafeteria.

The old man detective reminded us we had the good fortune of living in one of the safest towns on the East Coast. “This isn't some third world country,” he told our mother. “The likelihood that your daughter was kidnapped is extremely remote.” He told our parents it was common for teenagers to test boundaries. If he only had a dollar for every time a parent called looking for a kid who it turned out had just taken off to a rock concert at the Meadowlands or hopped in a car with some friends and headed down the shore. And it'd only been four hours, he emphasized. Aida couldn't have gotten very far. Our mother argued that four hours could take her to Boston, to Washington, DC, so far into Pennsylvania that she might as well be in another country. Four hours was enough to disappear into nearby New York City, her dark pretty face bleeding into millions of others. But the old detective insisted, “Four hours is nothing, ma'am. You'll see. You'll see.”

Our mother and father arrived late to parenthood. Our mother was a spoiled Colombian diplomat's daughter who spent her childhood in Egypt, India, Japan, and Italy. She never went to university but was a dinner party scholar, a favorite guest, and indulged her international friendships for two decades of prolonged escapades in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, London, Marrakesh, and Barcelona. She had many boyfriends, and was engaged three or four times but never married. She was a painter for a while, then a photographer, and an antique dealer. She sometimes worked in boutiques or found a man to support her, though she never wanted to be tied down. She was thirty-eight when she met our father in a Heathrow airport bar. He was a shy history professor from Marseille who'd written three books on the Marranos of the sixteenth century. She thought he was boring and lonely yet stable, tender, and adulating, everything she needed at that particular moment in her life. They married and tried to have a baby immediately but our mother had several disappointments until she received the good news of twin girls at the age of forty-four. We were born during our father's sabbatical year in Córdoba. Our mother said those prior broken seeds had been Aida and me but neither of us was ready for our debut.

“You were waiting for each other,” she told us. “You insisted on being born together.”

Our father never liked when she talked that way. He said she was going to make us think we had no identity outside our little pair. Our mother insisted this was the beautiful part of twinship. We were bound to each other. We were more than sisters. We could feel each other's pain and longing and this meant we'd never be alone in our suffering. When Aida was sick, I'd become sick soon after. Our father blamed it on practical things like the fact that Aida and I shared a bedroom, a bathroom, and ate every meal together. Of course we'd pass our germs around, be each other's great infector. But our mother said it was because we were one body split in two. We'd once shared flesh and blood. Our hearts were once one meaty pulp. Our father would scold our mother for her mystical nonsense and our mother would shoot back that he was always dismissing her; just because she didn't have fancy degrees like he did didn't make her an idiot. She'd cry and it would turn into the song of the night with our mother locking herself into the bathroom and our father calling through the door, “Pilar, don't be like that. I just want them to know that if anything should ever happen, they can live without each other.”

He wanted us to be individuals while our mother fought for our bond. We knew we held a privileged intimacy as twins but Aida and I were never exclusive. We had other friends and interests away from each other yet it only made our attachment stronger, and we'd run into each other's arms at the end of each day, reporting every detail of our hours apart.

Ours was a brown Tudor house on a slight hill of a quiet block lined with oaks. Aida and I lived in what used to be the attic. It was a full floor room with slanted ceilings and strange pockets of walls so we each had niches for our beds, desks, bookshelves, and dressers, with a small beanbag area in the center. There was an empty guest room downstairs that either of us could have moved into but we didn't want to be separated, even as Aida's heavy metal posters took over her half of the walls and she started to make fun of my babyish animal ones. We liked living up there even though it was hot in summer and cold in the winter. We couldn't hear our parents' late night fights once we turned our stereo on. Every now and then we'd lower the volume just to check in, see how far into it they were so we could gauge how long before we'd have to go downstairs to help them make up.

Aida and I considered ourselves their marriage counselors. It was like each of our parents had an only child; I was my father's daughter and Aida belonged to our mother. When the fights became so bad we weren't sure they could make it back to each other on their own, Aida and I would assume our roles. I'd find our father alone in his study hunched over his desk or slumped in the leather reading chair staring out the window at nothing. Aida would go to their room, where our mother was always on the bed lying fetal in her nightgown. Aida would tell me that our mother would often ask her who she loved best, and Aida would declare her devotion to our mother and say that if our parents ever split, Aida and our mother would run off together to Paris or Hong Kong. Aida would always tell me this part laughing because we both knew she would never leave me, and I would never leave our father. That was our trick. That's how we kept our family together.

Flyers of Aida's face went up on every telephone pole and shop window in town. Though the detectives briefly tried the idea that she'd run away, it was a Missing Persons case. The police searched the town. The detectives made rounds of the homes of all Aida's friends. They focused on the boys, especially the ones with cars. But Aida wouldn't have gotten into a car with someone she didn't know. Our mother was mugged in Munich in the seventies and sexually assaulted behind a bar in Majorca in the eighties. She raised us on terror stories of vulnerable wandering women being jumped by aggressive, predatory men. We were each other's bodyguards, but when alone, which was hardly ever, we were both cautious and sensible, even in this stale suburban oasis. If held at gunpoint, Aida would have run. She had long, muscular legs, not at all knock-kneed like me, and the track coach was always trying to get her to join the team. Aida was a brave girl. Much braver than me. She would have screamed. She would have put up a fight. She would not have simply vanished.

A group of local volunteers quickly formed to comb the grass of Memorial Park, hunt for witnesses, go to every apartment and storefront with a view of the avenue and back alleys. The story made it to the evening news and morning papers, and a tip line was set up for people to phone in. Our parents didn't leave the kitchen. Our mother waited, an eye on the front door, for Aida to show up in yesterday's clothes. Several people called and said they'd seen her the night before just as the summer sky began to darken. She was in cut-off shorts, brown leather boots, and a white peasant blouse that had belonged to our mother. They'd seen her at the bottom of Elm and someone else had seen her further up, approaching the park. She was alone. But someone else saw her talking to two young guys. Someone saw her later on. A girl in cut-off shorts and brown boots walking along the far side of the park across from the Protestant church. But she was in a blue shirt, not a white one. That girl, however, was me.