Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (16 page)

My body isn't smart,
Lucy deadpanned.
It's dumb.

There were risks.
You could have a bad reaction to the anesthesia. You could have problems breathing during the procedure. You could bleed heavily or get an infection during the surgery. You could get a blood clot. You could have damage to your kidneys or liver or other body organs from the anti-rejection medications. You could have a Heart attack or a stroke. You could have Heart rhythm problems, or wound infections, or an increased risk for infections from the anti-rejection medications.
The cardiologist sounded like the side-effect voice-over in a medicine commercial, reciting very quickly. Lucy half-expected to see attractive, SAG-member sexagenarians playing Frisbee with dogs through the doctor's office window.

Lucy asked,
these are all possible?

Well, not too probable,
the cardiologist reassured.

Phew!
Lucy laughed. Lucy loved to agree with people, no matter her turmoil inside. Playing along was one of her worst habits.

When she got home that night, Lucy wrote everything the cardiologist said to the best of her memory in her diary.
I could bleed heavily . . .
She searched Google for
what does a Heart transplant feel like?
She lost herself in Wikipedia holes. Then she reread what the cardiologist said at least twenty times. It was hard to believe the cardiologist said this. It was even harder to grasp that what she said might actually happen to her.

She looked in her bedroom mirror. Her symmetrical body and face. The idea of symmetry comforted Lucy. For instance,
heaven forbid, if her parents ever lost her, they'd still have Natasha and Carly: an older daughter and a younger daughter. It didn't mean things would even out in the end, but it came close.

-
Get over it, -
she told herself, and closed her eyes, touching her head of glorious, fabled hair. Hair the flush of cider ale.
My hair is about eighty percent of my personality,
she used to joke, figuring she probably had ten times as much as any other girl. Carly's was thick and funerary. Natasha liked to keep hers short.
All-business,
Natasha would describe, never letting it grow past her chin.

Lucy and Natasha shared penny-size noses and heavy cheeks. They puckered their lips when they thought hard. Both had eyelashes veiling their crescending noses, blushed cornmealy shades, and gave identical looks when bothered. Their body hair grew fast, legs fuzzy after a day's neglect. Lucy and Natasha were both blessed with chests filling C-cups and asses their lewd-rude-crude classmates worshipped in a slanderous, expropriating way. Despite their curvature, Lucy and Natasha barely had fat—lanky as Giacometti sculptures. Their gay friends wrote
OK model
and
stop
on their Facebook profile pictures.

Carly's body was taut and androgynous. She needed to shave only once a week. Her whole life, Carly had been two full heads shorter than her sisters. Her security was that
short people can hide easier.

I want to be short,
Lucy sometimes said because they always wanted what the other had.

Whenever they ate alphabet soup, they'd spell out words and phrases until the soup turned the temperature of the room. One afternoon, Natasha spelled out
celluloid
, letting her twin
l
's kiss. Carly wrote
maroon
. And Lucy assembled
CPR
, which as an acronym technically didn't count, but her sisters forgave her because she'd been hungry and most of her letters were inside her, shyly digesting. Round two was phrases. Carly spelled
blind animal
. Natasha wrote
meteorite blue.
And Lucy wrote
my perfect body
.

Perfect? Please.
Carly grabbed a fingerful of her sister's hip skin. What propelled this lack of finesse: they were all skinny enough to call each other and themselves
fat
without having it be of any emotionally destructive value. These had been their problems, and they'd been so lucky.

Well, it works, doesn't it?
Lucy shrugged, back when she was healthy.

T
he moment Mathilde was no longer able to help her daughters with math had been defining. Lucy was in sixth grade. Mathilde stared at the homework problem like it was at the bottom of a highball glass. This was beyond her. She felt pitiable in a newfangled context, like a grandparent with a smartphone.

They teach math differently these days.

Why?

Beats me. How about you show your sister?
Mathilde was thankful for Natasha, who never needed any help with numbers.

So Lucy showed Natasha, and Natasha explained it in a way that was both smart and reachable to her younger sister, and Lucy aced her homework and the following test. She learned that her mother didn't know everything. But maybe Natasha did.

When she was seven Natasha asked her parents where heaven was on a map of the world. When they tried to explain how it was more of a transcendental state than a literal place, Natasha said,
I don't get it.

Try to picture it as a state of mind,
said Claudio,
instead of a place with angels sitting around and playing harps.

Sometimes bad things happen in my head,
said Natasha.
So do bad things happen, even in heaven?

Little lovebug, I don't know,
her father said,
but probably not.

Is Janis Joplin in heaven?
asked Natasha.

Um,
said Claudio.
If not, it's not a heaven I want to be in.

Maybe we can all hang out in heaven together,
said Natasha.
Or if heaven's not real, then we won't exist together. And when you're dead, maybe that's kind of like hanging out.

When you go to heaven, will I get a new daddy?
asked Lucy.

No,
Claudio laughed,
but hopefully it will be so far into the future that you won't need one.

Huh?
asked Carly, sideswiped.

The next year, Natasha found out from some drip in her class the truth about Santa Claus. Her parents told her yes, the presents under the tree came from Mommy and Daddy, but Saint Nicholas was once a person in history. He delivered presents to children a while ago.

So he's dead, then, yeah?
asked Natasha.

He can still be real in your guys' imaginations.
Claudio heard these words come out of his mouth, then cowered. Who was he, Mr. Rogers? (A grammatically incorrect Mr. Rogers.) But Saint Nicholas had been real, and probably a nice guy. Just like Jesus Christ.

Natasha said,
imagination is the most pathetic thing I have ever heard in my life!

But Natasha did have an imagination, assiduous and ruthless, like the rest of her. There were so many things Natasha knew. String theory. Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The Arts and Crafts movement. She could recite Greek mythology tales with detail and pathos. Nobody in high school knew the tale of Persephone and Hades better than Natasha, down to the etymology of their names and who celebrated their harvest festival in Sicily. She even knew the operations and mechanics of flying a plane.
And
she had a grade-A memory, correct and organized.

Lucy once likened her sister's memory to a filing cabinet.
One fat with papers,
she specified. Natasha loved nostalgia, inventing and playing the
remember
game.

Remember when Mom played Miss Hannigan in that off-off-off-Broadway production of
Annie
and we had a crush on the boy who played the apple seller and his only line was
apples, apples, two for a nickel?
And we tried to get his autograph after the show?

Or
remember the time during the elementary school winter chorus concert when they made us sing that song about Kwanzaa to be politically correct and that kid Jerry Lamins sang the solo and we called him Keebler because he looked like a Keebler elf?

Or
remember that one winter when all it did was blizzard and we watched that old 1990s show
Felicity
rented from the library and during one episode Noel said,
guys, not everyone has a beeper,
and we thought he was funny for dating himself?

In school, Natasha was eminent and discreetly discussed for being the
hot but boring girl with no life.
Nobody at school thought her looks (her squid ink hair; her structured, sensical face) fit her personality. She wasn't a cozy girl. She didn't mind being touched, even welcomed it with flattery, but didn't engage the authority of assuming such comforts with anyone else. Her sisters were contrarily physical—brushing each other's hair, leaning their heads against the other's lap or shoulder, invoking the other's synaptic summon. Carly was a self-proclaimed
hugger
, even deprecated herself:
god, I'm such a hugging whore.

For Natasha's whole life, she'd believed herself to be the prodigal daughter, reciting the alphabet before she could walk and knowing the names of almost one hundred dinosaur species when she was five. She took enriched classes at the middle school every morning in elementary school and enriched classes at the high school every morning in middle school. Natasha was supposed to have a lush, refined future. She was supposed to ace her SATs, earn a top grade point average, go to an Ivy League school.

Natasha took the SATs twice and applied to twenty-five colleges. She got into all of them, compiling a three-ring loose-leaf binder with her acceptance letters. When she felt unhappy, she
glided through the first line of each already bygone acceptance letter.

Dear Natasha, Let me congratulate you on behalf of . . .
Princeton, Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Dartmouth, Amherst, Brown, MIT, UCLA, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Columbia, Williams, Georgetown, Berkeley, Williams, Duke, Swarthmore, Boston College, Tufts, Michigan, Colgate, Lafayette, and Johns Hopkins. She knew little about them. Her family had gone on tours but the knowledge—campus traditions and dorm sizes and preference for which of the chirpy wayward-walking tour guides—pooled in her mind.

The news about Lucy arrived the month Natasha needed to place her deposit. She gave her money to Princeton because it was both exalted and close to home without being
too
close. She took out student loans, which made her feel like she must have a future if she was expected to pay them all back. And then she delayed her acceptance for the following year. This decision demanded a number of family discussions, but eventually, her family understood Natasha's apprehension.

Perhaps next year would be the year she could leave home. Now was her gap year, and for the first time, Natasha had nothing to do, nothing required of her.

Natasha put down her hairbrush to pick up a pair of her underwear. She'd been doing nothing the past half hour but brushing her hair, like a tragic Marcia Brady. This afternoon she accompanied Lucy to the hospital and met the cardiologist for the very first time, who'd raised her eyebrows at both of them and told them what pretty sisters they were. The cardiologist's voice sounded as though she was expecting them to apologize for being called pretty, for hearing words they'd heard all their lives—words that this frumpy, aubergine-haired doctor would never hear, perhaps had never heard, objectively.

The hip-huggers had phantom black lace. The tag read
STRUMPET + COQUINE CULOTTES
. Lucy and Carly gave her the pair for Christmas last year. Her sisters loved fun and frivolity. Lipsticks and French macarons. But fun and frivolity weren't intuitive for Natasha, who'd never been one for underwear that served a purpose of anything other than to uncouple her ass from her pants.

The hot but socially awkward girl with no life.
Natasha was still herself even when her stakes were highest, she was beginning to realize. Her inelegance continued to overpower the caring, resourceful girl she guessed she was supposed to be, whom she had hoped to be. Whenever somebody she knew mentioned death or illness, Natasha would feel her cheeks emblazon a shade of fig, something in her belly rock. -
Are they thinking of my sister? Do they know about us? -
How condescending, this small-change focus! She deserved to be in the penalty box for coping, or precipitated grieving, or whatever it was that she and her family were doing.

She brought the underwear to her bathroom sink, loosely dousing it with water. Was she supposed to wet silk? It seemed fragile, perishable.

Perish
: a slipshod declaration that brought to mind cities more than humans. But people could perish too. Three years ago, Natasha had been at a classmate's house, trying to work on a project about ancient Rome. Tommy Chase instead showed her a video he'd been making on his computer.

- What's Tommy Chase doing now?
- Natasha wondered. She pictured him nocturnal, drinking Mountain Dew and writing racist things on message boards just because he could, continuing to be that loquaciously unsteady kind of person.

A title had blinked.
ULTIMATE SNUFF FILM.
Before Tommy pressed play, he said
beware.
A compilation of .gif-splices of the deaths of Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il, Eugene Armstrong, Jack Hensley, Kenneth Bigley took over the screen. He fast-forwarded. Natasha in a regular-
motion voice told him that she knew about most of those deaths already. Even though she'd never seen them firsthand, she could recall how each one was killed or how each killed himself stringently based on her memories of history books and newspaper articles.