Her Fearful Symmetry (5 page)

Robert shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I just wanted something of you.”

“Like the Victorians? It’s a pity it isn’t longer. You could make earrings or a brooch or something.” She laughed. “You could clone me.”

He pretended to consider it. “But I don’t think they’ve worked all the bugs out of cloning. You might turn out morbidly obese, or flipper-limbed or whatnot. Plus I’d have to wait for you to grow up, by which time I’d be a pensioner and you’d want nothing to do with me.”

“The twins are a much better bet. They’re fifty per cent me and fifty per cent Jack. I’ve seen photos, you really can’t see him in them at all.”

“Where are you getting photos of the twins?”

Elspeth covered her mouth with her hand. “Edie, actually. But don’t tell anyone.”

Robert said, “Since when are you in touch with Edie? I thought you hated Edie.”

“Hated Edie?” Elspeth looked stricken. “No. I was very angry with Edie, and I still am. But I never hated Edie; that would be like hating myself. She just-she did something quite stupid that bollixed up our lives. But she’s still my twin.” Elspeth hesitated. “I wrote to her about a year ago-when I first got diagnosed. I thought she ought to know.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I know. It was private.”

Robert knew it was childish to feel hurt. He didn’t say anything.

She said, “Ah, come on. If your father got in touch would you tell me all about it?”

“I would, actually.”

Elspeth put her thumb in her mouth and bit gently. He had always found this highly sexual, a huge turn-on, but now it was somehow devoid of that power. She said, “Yes, of course you would.”

“And what do you mean they are half you? They’re Edie’s kids.”

“They are. They are her kids. But Edie and I are identical twins, so her kids equal my kids, genetically.”

“But you’ve never even met them.”

“Does it matter so much? All I can say is, you haven’t got a twin, so you can’t know how it is.” Robert continued to sulk. “Oh, don’t. Don’t be that way.” She tried to move towards him, but the tubes in her arms overruled her. Robert carefully set her feet on a towel, wiped his hands, got up and reseated himself on the arc of white sheet next to her waist. She took up almost no space at all. He placed one hand on her pillow, just beside her head, and leaned over her. Elspeth put her hand on his cheek. It was like being touched with sandpaper; her skin almost hurt him. He turned his head and kissed her palm. They had done all these things so many times before.

“Let me give you my diaries,” Elspeth said softly. “Then you’ll know all my secrets.”

He realised later that she had planned this all along. But then he had only said, “Tell me all your secrets now. Are they so very terrible?”

“Dreadful. But they’re all very old secrets. Since I met you I’ve lived a chaste and blameless life.”

“Chaste?”

“Well, monogamous, anyway.”

“That’ll do.” He kissed her, briefly. She was more feverish now. “You ought to sleep.”

“Do my feet more?” She was like a child asking for her favourite bedtime story. He resumed his place at her feet and squeezed more oil onto his hands, warmed it by rubbing it between his palms.

Elspeth sighed and closed her eyes. “Mmm,” she said after a while, arching her feet. “That’s bloody marvellous.” Then she had slept, and he’d sat there holding her slippery feet in his hands, thinking.

Robert opened his eyes. He wondered briefly if he had fallen asleep; the memory had been so vivid.
Where are you, Elspeth? Perhaps you’re only living in my head now.
Robert stared at the graves across the path, which were dangerously tilted. One had trees growing on both sides; they had lifted the monument slightly off its base so that it levitated an inch or so in the air. As Robert watched, a fox trotted through the ivy that choked the graves behind the ones on the main path. The fox saw him, paused for a moment and disappeared into the undergrowth. Robert heard other foxes howling to each other, some close by, some off in the deeper parts of the cemetery. It was the mating season. The daylight was going; Robert was chilled and wet. He roused himself.

“Goodnight, Elspeth.” He felt silly saying it. He got up and began to walk back to the office, feeling much the way he had as a teenager when he realised that he was no longer able to pray. Wherever Elspeth might be, she wasn’t here.

J
ULIA AND Valentina Poole liked to get up early. This was curious, because they were out of school, unemployed and rather indolent. There was no reason for the twins to be up with the dawn; they were early birds who weren’t particularly interested in getting the worm.

On this particular Saturday in February the sun was not quite up. The twelve inches of snow that had fallen overnight looked bluish in the half-light; the huge trees that lined Pembridge Road bowed under the weight of it. Lake Forest was still asleep. The yellow brick ranch house where the twins lived with their parents felt quiet and snug under the snow. All the usual traffic, bird and dog noises were stilled.

Julia turned up the heat while Valentina made hot chocolate from a mix. Julia went into the family room and clicked on the TV. When Valentina came into the room with the tray, Julia was standing in front of the TV flicking through the channels even though she knew what they wanted to watch. It was always the same, every Saturday. The twins loved the sameness, even as they felt incapable of enduring it for one more minute. Julia paused on CNN. President Bush was talking to Karl Rove in a conference room. “Nuke them,” said Valentina. The twins gave the finger to the president and his aide in unison, and Julia changed the channels until she got to
This Old House
. She turned the sound up, careful not to blast it and risk waking their parents. Valentina and Julia settled onto the couch, wrapped around each other, with Julia’s legs resting on Valentina’s lap. Mookie, their aged tabby cat, sat next to Valentina. They pulled the plaid wool blanket over themselves, warmed their hands with their mugs of chocolate and stared at the TV, lost to everything else. On Saturday mornings they could watch four reruns of
This Old House
back to back.

“Soapstone kitchen counters,” said Julia.

“Mmm hmm,” said Valentina, entranced.

The family room was dim; the only light came from the television and the front window. But if the light had been stronger the room would have been hard to look at, because everything in it was Kelly green, bright red plaid, or related to golf. The entire house was aggressively decorated. All the furnishings were either overstuffed, covered in chintz, made of brushed metal or frosted glass, or painted in colours with names that sounded like ice-cream flavours. Edie was an interior decorator; she liked to practise on their house, and Jack had given up trying to have any say in the matter. The twins were convinced that their mother had the most egregious taste in the entire world. This was probably not true; most Lake Forest homes were decorated in more expensive versions of the same. The twins liked the family room because it was their dad’s, and therefore ironically hideous. Jack took a certain pleasure in acquiescing to the demands of his tribe as long as he was comfortable.

The twins themselves looked odd in this house. Actually, they looked odd everywhere they went.

They were twenty years old, on this winter Saturday. Julia was the older twin by six (to her, very significant) minutes. It was easy to imagine Julia elbowing Valentina out of the way in her determination to be first.

The twins were very pale and very thin, the kind of thinness that other girls envy and mothers worry over. Julia was five feet, one and a half inches tall. Valentina was one quarter of an inch shorter. Each twin had fine, floating, white-blonde hair, bobbed at their ear lobes, hanging in spiderweb curls around their faces, giving them the look of dandelions gone to seed. They had long necks, small breasts, flat stomachs. The vertebrae in their spines were visible, long straight columns of bumps under their skin. They were often mistaken for undernourished twelve-year-olds; they might have been cast as Victorian orphans in a made-for-TV movie. Their eyes were large, grey, and so wide-set that they appeared almost wall-eyed. They had heart-shaped faces, delicate upturned noses, bow lips, straight teeth. Both twins bit their fingernails. Neither had any tattoos. Valentina thought of herself as awkward, and wished that she had Julia’s splendid air of belonging. In truth, Valentina looked fragile, and this attracted people to her.

The thing that made the twins peculiar was hard to define. People were uneasy when they saw them together without knowing exactly why. The twins were not merely identical: they were mirror-image twins. The mirroring was not limited to their appearance, but involved every cell in their bodies. So the small mole on the right side of Julia’s mouth was on the left side of Valentina’s; Valentina was left-handed, Julia right-handed. Neither looked freakish by herself. The marvel was most evident in X-rays: while Julia was organised in the usual way, Valentina was internally reversed. Her heart was on her right side, with all its ventricles and chambers inverted. Valentina had heart defects which had required surgery when she was born. The surgeon had used a mirror to help him see her tiny heart in the way he was accustomed to seeing. Valentina had asthma; Julia rarely had so much as a cold. Valentina’s fingerprints were almost the opposite of Julia’s (even identical twins don’t have exactly the same fingerprints). They were still essentially one creature, whole but containing contradictions.

The twins sat attentively, watching a gigantic house near the Atlantic Ocean being reshingled, sanded, painted. Dormers were restored, a chimney rebuilt. A new inglenook replaced one that had been torn out.

The twins were avid for things that belonged to the past. Their bedroom looked as though it had once been part of another house, as though it had strayed and been adopted by this ordinary ranch house out of charity. When the twins were thirteen they had stripped the blowsy floral wallpaper off their walls, sent all their stuffed animals and dolls to AMVETS and declared their room a museum. The current exhibit was an old birdcage stuffed with plastic crucifixes, which rested on a crocheted doily draped over a small table which had been completely covered with Hello Kitty stickers. Everything else in the room was white. It was a bedroom for Des Esseintes’ sisters.

Outside, snow blowers began to roar. It was becoming a clear, blindingly sunny morning. As the credits rolled on the fourth episode of
This Old House
, the twins sat up, stretched, turned off the TV. They stood at the window squinting in their paisley bathrobes, watching Serafin Garcia (who had been mowing their lawn and blowing their snow since they were babies) as he cleared the driveway. He saw them and waved. They waved back.

They heard their parents stirring, but knew that this did not mean they would be getting up any time soon. Edie and Jack both liked to sleep in on the weekends. The night before they had been at a party at the Onwentsia Club; the twins had heard them come in around three. (“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Julia said to Valentina, not for the first time. “Shouldn’t it be us causing
them
anxiety?”) The twins moved on to the next part of their usual Saturday morning: pancakes. They made enough so that when Edie and Jack eventually did emerge, they could microwave some pancakes if they felt like eating. Julia made the batter, and Valentina poured it onto the griddle and stood staring at the pale yellow circles as air bubbles formed and popped. She loved flipping the pancakes. She made five baby pancakes for herself and five for Julia. Julia made coffee. They ate in the kitchen, sitting at the island surrounded by African violets and a cookie jar that looked like a gnome.

After breakfast the twins washed the dishes. Then they put on jeans and hooded sweatshirts with BARAT printed on them. (This was the local college; the twins had attended it for a semester and then dropped out, claiming that it was a waste of their time and Jack’s money. It was the third college they had attended. They had originally matriculated at Cornell; Julia had stopped attending classes in the spring semester, and when she was asked to leave Valentina came home with her. At the University of Illinois they’d lasted a year, but Julia refused to go back.) The mailperson trudged up the walk and shoved the mail through the slot. It landed on the floor of the foyer with a loud thud. The twins converged on it.

Julia grabbed the bundle and began to spew each piece of mail onto the dining-room table. “Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, ComEd, Anthropologie, letter for Mom…letter for us?” The twins rarely received mail; all of their correspondence took place online. Valentina took the heavy envelope from Julia’s hand. She stood weighing it, feeling the texture of the paper. Julia took it back from her. They glanced at each other.
It’s from a law firm. It’s from London
. The twins had never been to London. They’d never left America. London was where their mom was from, but Edie and Jack seldom spoke about that. Edie was an American now-she had gone native, or faux native; the Poole family lived in a suburb of Chicago that had pretended, from its inception, to be an English village. The twins had noticed that Edie’s accent tended to reappear when she was mad, or trying to impress someone.

“Open it,” said Valentina. Julia’s fingers fumbled with the stiff paper. She moved to the living-room window and Valentina followed her. Valentina stood behind Julia and put her chin on Julia’s shoulder and her arms around Julia’s waist. The twins looked like a two-headed girl. Julia raised the letter so Valentina could see it better.