The Orphan Sister (4 page)

My mother is fond of calling us her three wishes—she always said we were the first multiples in the family since before the
Mayflower.
Supposedly there were several sets of practically prehistoric twins, but we were the only ones in recent history. If you asked my dad whether multiples run in his family, he’d answer, “Only multiple intelligences,” and launch into a subject-garroting lecture on frontal-lobe electrical impulses or his colleagues who ignored the hand-washing mandate in favor of less effective squirts of sanitizer.

Our first house was in Oakville, New Jersey. Before the money. The radiator covers looked like flowers if you stared at them, or like birds in flight, or the thousand disgusting geometric seeds of a green pepper. We spent hours listening to our five
records on a kiddie record player we received collectively for our birthday.
The Jungle Book, Free to Be You and Me, Hair,
which was completely inappropriate, but no one noticed, James Taylor’s
Sweet Baby James,
and
Abbey Road.
When I was eight, I wanted to be a rock star, or to sing on Broadway. I wasn’t sure how these were dissimilar, but I stood in the center of our room being a powerful entity, collecting all the heat and light from the world by giving it song. Of course, in chorus at school I sang quietly, afraid to make loud mistakes.

“Cut it out!” said eight-year-old Olivia, marching in, holding Odette’s hand as easily as one might hold a pen when writing.

“Too loud,” said Odette.

“I thought you two were playing four-square in the driveway,” I said, hoping they’d go away, and wanting them to stay. It was a crowded Sunday, and time alone in the room was precious. When they were with me, I felt squeezed and possessed—like a swaddling: comfort colliding with desire for freedom.

“We’re done. We’re playing Sorry now.”

“I don’t want to.”

“We do. You’re yellow,” said Odette.

“Ha ha, you can’t make me play,” I said.

“But you want to,” said Olivia, and sadly she was right. Odette soothed me more; Olivia saw my darknesses and light. I lifted the record player arm from “William Wants a Doll” and sat on the circle of green nylon rug Mom had bought to match our pale green bedspreads at the store in town where you could get stick candy in the front if you were a good customer. We loved the lemon stripes.

We played Sorry. There was an unspoken balance; if you
bumped a sister back to start, you turned for the other sister next, even if you had to reverse your progress to do so, even if you had to give up a good play in the name of silent fairness.

That time, though, Olivia bumped me twice. The second time I glared at her, feeling both an inexplicable peace and expected fury.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to go back to start, and I don’t want to be yellow and I don’t want to play anymore.”

“Spoil,” said Olivia.

“Sport,” said Odette, but she smiled. “I don’t blame you. Yellow always loses.”

“No,” said Olivia. “Clem just doesn’t want to play fair. And she didn’t want to play in the beginning.”

“So you’re punishing me?” I laughed and rattled the board, just enough to disturb the little Hershey’s Kisses shaped pieces into chaos.

“We don’t punish.” Odette looked at Olivia. She was saying something silently, and I couldn’t hear it. I hated that. I squeezed my eyes shut to listen, but all I saw, all I heard, were the fireworks of squinched eyes and the percussion of Mom emptying the dishwasher. I suddenly longed for my mother, who braided our hair, who made mine French braids because my hair was easier to manage, because I wanted them. My mother who sent me kisses from across the room, who didn’t read my mind.

“What?” I said, but I wasn’t asking. Olivia had moved in close to make me play, but now she shifted away. Odette packed up the game. Odette could never bear to let a fight erupt into full volume.

“Clem doesn’t have to play if she doesn’t want to,” said Odette.

“But she did, she wanted to.” Olivia gripped the box top.

“I don’t want to do things just because you say I do,” I said.

“But I only say so if you want to in the first place,” said Olivia. Odette pulled at the box top and the corner tore.

“I’m tired of being so known,” I said.
Not really,
said my sisters, and I heard them, and they were right. I kicked the box when I left the room, in search of a privacy I would never have and never wholly wanted, either.

The money came after Dad finished his residency; this was stipulated in some kind of trust, and even more came when our grandparents—my mother’s parents—died. I had a limited repertoire of memories about my Me and Da, as Mom taught us to call them. I remember Me had musky mink coats and wore dark red lipstick and diamond-chip earrings. I remember Da smelled of limy cologne and pipe tobacco, and that he coughed like a sick seal. They always brought us dresses with crinolines and gave us savings bonds in crinkly, flag-embossed envelopes, which Mom put in the Accounts ledger and we never saw again. We were meant to make a big show of thanking them, though it meant nothing to me at the time, savings bonds. Once when we learned to play Monopoly (Odette and Olivia arbitraged and traded the best properties so they each could purchase hotels), I asked my mother if I could use my savings bonds as get-out-of-jail-free cards in Monopoly. She laughed and held her hand to her thin, white throat, Mom’s nervous gesture. She didn’t answer, which meant I wasn’t supposed to ask.

Even then, my mother and father went away without us sometimes.
Our father often had business trips, conferences, doctors’ retreats that I now know were sponsored by drug companies. We never went along, though we were invited. There were a few family vacations, but they were mostly at some mysterious relative’s house in the Hamptons, or, after the money, the house on the lake in Vermont.

When they left us when we were young, Me or Da or my mother’s sister, Aunt Lydia, would come to care for us. Lydia still lived in Manhattan and was six years younger than Mom, which meant it was almost okay that she wasn’t married and had a job in an advertising agency as an artist. Lydia wore silver rings on every finger and braided our hair. She brought a hatbox full of makeup and tweezed the twins’ eyebrows. I was tempted to submit to all that attention but was repulsed by the idea of tearing out hairs. We always stayed up late with Lydia, but she would suddenly become an authoritarian when we became too silly, rolling on the floor and saying potty words to delight each other.

“Up to bed,” she’d say, slapping her thigh. At that moment, we didn’t know whether she was being funny anymore.

“I mean it,” she’d say, making no eye contact. So we went. That slap on the thigh made it seem as if she might actually strike us, though she never did.

The weekends with Lydia were fabulous, though. We made homemade wheat-crust pizza and ate sauce and cheese from the bowls while it baked. The sauce came from a jar but tasted like metal and mouthfuls of basil.

Lydia always brought art supplies—sketchbooks and Cray-Pas and charcoal sticks that sat light as a bird in the hand. I wasn’t very talented, but I loved watching her hands move. My drawings
were lumpen, rigorously wrong, but she never wiped away my work or said anything other than “It’s all about the process.”

She sat with me, sketching, even after Odette and Olivia lapsed into boredom and traipsed off into their collective world of stick forts beneath the hemlock trees. Lydia would set up a still life of pears, grasses from the backyard, a cracked rubber Pinky ball we never played with anymore.

“We’re alone together!” I said to Lydia.

“Like sisters.” She grinned, her mouth barely asymmetrical, like Mom. She liked the idea of being one of us.

“No,” I said. “Sisters are together but not alone.”

I didn’t feel as if I had to be one of three when O&O would talk without words, looking at each other across the lawn to communicate—
we’re going biking, we’re playing hide-and-seek—
and there was someone else who didn’t always know what was going on without asking. It was a pleasant feeling, but naked, off-kilter, like having one eye covered while dancing.

Once, we were left in my grandparents’ care at their apartment in the city. I remember this because it was unusual; because Me wasn’t the kind of person you climbed onto or engaged in play. She was a person who sat in white chairs. She had clothes that crinkled if children looked at them. And yet I thought she was beautiful in an old sort of way; I aspired to her calm and elegance. I couldn’t get mad quietly, but Me couldn’t get mad any other way, as far as I could tell.

That time we went to the apartment—which was larger than our entire house—for a weekend so my parents could have some kind of anniversary celebration. Even then I knew there was something of a currency to it, sex between them. We knew about
sex; our parents had explained it matter-of-factly when we were young enough not to be disgusted, and it just seemed like an ordinary piece of information until our friends began to learn, and then we squealed along with them and made gasping noises when they brought out books with pictures. Still, even at eight, I knew how much my mother worked at being attractive; I knew my father was in charge of almost everything, but when it came to romance—or later, I realized, the act itself—my mother held the purse.

That stay at my grandparents’ was a long weekend of enforced quiet and enforced fun. We were nine years old. We each slept in our own twin bed (mine was a cot squeezed between my sisters’ matching lilac duvets, but I didn’t mind, because the cot seemed adventurous, like camping), in the room my mother and her sister had shared as children. It was hard to imagine Lydia and my mother talking with each other at night—did they discuss boys, or play dolls together? How could Lydia pierce my mother’s formidable silences?

The apartment wore the aroma of the blood-orange linen water my grandmother kept in a crystal spritzer on the tiny glass table by the door. Our pillows were goose down; you could feel the thin spines of the feathers if you pinched them. There was central air-conditioning—something we didn’t have in the Oakville house—so the rooms hissed quietly and the air felt dry and clean. Odette had an asthma attack and Olivia didn’t, an imbalance that rarely occurred.

My grandmother took us places in the back of a town car that visit, gliding through the streets in interior quiet. It was August, and women were wrapped in short dresses that showed the glitter
of sweat on their legs and arms. A deliveryman on a bicycle tapped the side of the car, leaning against it for balance, and Me gasped. Odette tried to scroll open the automatic window, but Me pressed her hand over my sister’s and pressed her lips together. “We do not,” she said simply.

We went to the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to stand by the water lilies because the longer I looked at them, the more I felt as though I could enter the watery cool of the painting, leave the sad lump of missing my mother and the strangeness of my grandmother’s house and the rules behind and dive into the swirl of blues.

“Let’s,” said my grandmother, her hand over my hand. She looked into my eyes, and I noticed hers were the same green as mine, only softened by age. Her hand wasn’t a reprimand the way it had been on Odette’s in the car.

“There’s so much to see,” she said almost kindly.

We went to Serendipity and Me let us order whatever we wanted. Odette and Olivia had butterscotch sundaes with maple walnuts, but I got an explosion of decadence called Forbidden Broadway.

Odette nibbled daintily at the nuts, complaining, disappointed that they weren’t what she expected.

“Yes, they are,” said Olivia, her mouth stuffed with warm butterscotch.

“What do you know?” Odette began spooning her walnuts onto Olivia’s dish, and Olivia flicked them onto the plate with her spoon. They were tired.
Punchy,
Me would later say, which meant Olivia grew bossy and Odette mercurial. They kept fighting, sniping silently, and I gave up trying to listen in.

My grandmother overlooked their scuffle and shared with me. For once, unlike when we offered a taste of dessert to my father and he took enormous bites that made me regret allowing his spoon, she shared in slow, pleasurable nibbles that made me slow down, chew the chocolate cake, the thick, buttery hot fudge, and notice more notes than simply sweet and cold. I held an iota of inherited elegance in my pinkie finger. Occasionally I could hear my sisters internally, but choose not to listen.

One morning, Me outfitted us at a boutique near her house, where nothing had a price tag. My sisters were well behaved, but I suddenly felt silly. It was the penultimate day of our stay, and I missed running around, missed the smell of my own house, butter cookies and lemony furniture polish.

“I want to try this!” I said, snatching a sailor blouse with matching skirt and cap from a display.

“Settle down,” hissed Odette, who had been reprimanded enough for all three of us during the stay. Me’s quiet, gentle, terrifying reprimands.

“And this!” I pulled a pair of high-heeled silver shoes from a top shelf, and ten pairs of shoes toppled on my head.

“Ow!” I yelled, and my grandmother’s forehead and cheeks pinked.

“Girls,” she said. “You must behave like ladies in here.”

“Well, well,” said Odette, looking at me, unable to resist. She pretended to sip tea, lifting her pinkie—what was elegant before was now ridiculous.

“My, my,” said Olivia, flapping one hand, pretending to be fey.

“La-di-da!” I said, feeling a part of a swell of pleasure in being rude. Olivia was thinking of torn cloth; Odette imagined stains. I
thought at them—chocolate-covered faces, a pile of rumpled fancy pantaloons, satin and velvet. I could hear them thinking back—spilled honey on a cashmere sweater, initials dug deep in the heirloom dining table.

“Girls,” said my grandmother, holding out three gingham dresses decorated with ribbons of happy Scottie dogs. We let her buy them for us, each of us guilty of the collective wild thoughts. We didn’t want these baby-girl clothes, but somehow knew it would help Me feel important, would somehow assuage our shame at feeling spoiled and ungrateful. We were nine years old already, and we’d accidentally scuff all three pairs of patent leather shoes on the back steps, coming home.