The Unfinished World (2 page)

The twins are blond with big heads, skinny bodies dangling below like strings under balloons. They are that mysterious age, not nymphets but not quite children; the age when awkward figures leave open the question of what they will develop into in a few short years. They lack grace but have a kind of buoyancy. It worries their mother, as does everything else under the sun, from animal attacks to the Oriental influence to modern bathing costumes.

It has been in all the papers, the menswear salesman tells the mother. Grown women wearing bathing costumes in the middle of the park, the palazzo, the promenade; gathering en masse in bathing costumes and eating pizza. Lips smacking, thighs jiggling, arm fat flapping—the salesman shudders and stops, unable to go on. The jazz babies' mother does not own a bathing suit, and in church the next Sunday she prays, in her nervous, insincere way, for the souls of the sinners that do. She also prays for her first husband in heaven, for the neighbors' yappy dog to drop dead, and for a new wireless set.

The jazz babies' parents forbid them to continue their dancing on the porch. Once it was adorable, a sweet novelty to watch the two little girls, indistinguishable but for a small splotch of birthmark on the left heel of the eldest twin, hoofing it to the sounds of Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, and Jelly Roll Morton. Their big finish had always been “Hard-Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah),”
though the only reason they got away with it was that their mother, unfamiliar with Theda Bara, thought the lyrics were about chastity.

Now, however, they are attracting a different kind of crowd: leering men, drawn to the gangly girls' early puberty and no longer quite innocent hip flares and flashes of skin. They went from the Charleston to the Black Bottom to the Lindy Hop—this last one, with its obscene shimmies and twists, giving their mother and the menswear salesman fits. Now when they shake what god gave them while Dolly Kay belts out “She's a gal who loves to see men suffer,” the whole scene takes on a distinctly unwholesome tone. Grown men begin hanging around the bungalow after dark, watching the girls catch fireflies. They follow the girls to school, offer to carry their books, make marriage proposals behind hedges. It is as if these men—most of them well past forty and fathers themselves—can sense a sort of dormant, smoldering sexuality and want to be first on the scene when it bursts into full bloom. After the babies' mother catches two men climbing through the bathroom window to wait for the inevitable, she quickly and hysterically puts a stop to the whole thing.

No more Lindy Hop, no more jazz, she tells them. No more vulgar public displays. If you want to dance you can take ballet lessons like every other nice little girl.

We're not nice little girls, says jazz baby number one. Her name is Patience, but everyone calls her Patty. She's the twin with the birthmark, just a minute older than her sibling.

That's right, Mother, says jazz baby number two. Her name is Charity, but everybody calls her Cat. She, born second, always agrees with her elder sibling. We aren't nice and we aren't little girls, either.

I don't care what you are, says the menswear salesman, I'm not having the pair of you prancing around like showgirls. I paid for this
place by the sweat of my brow and by god, I won't have you girls turning it into a house of sin. The menswear salesman, like many middle-class men of his age, is always talking about his house: the work he's done on his house, how much he paid for his house, and the sweat and tears and blood that flooded the purchase and upkeep of his house. The twins like to mock these bourgeois concerns. They are bright girls, emerging razor sharp through the fuzzy haze of puberty, and not the sort to forgive sentimentality. They are hard-hearted Hannahs, Cat and Patty. They are emblems of this new age, tricksters unable to be tricked. And as they go into temporary retreat after the belt and the broom are threatened, they start making plans to kill their parents.

They change their imaginary stage name, from the Blue Falls County Jazz Babies to the Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies. They wonder how much an ax weighs and if they are strong enough to wield one. Separately? Together? They draw detailed pictures and check out all the books about Lizzie they can find in the library. They discuss ways to blame a killing on intruders. They discuss ways they could charm the police. They play their records on the gramophone, over and over, and dance the Lindy in the sad solitude of their bungalow bedroom.
“To tease them and thrill them, to torture and kill them, is her delight, they say . . .”
They study hard and get good grades, to deflect suspicion. They take ballet lessons.

Then Cat, Cat the second, Cat the accomplice, starts dating a boy. He is a nice, clunky-looking thing, half-formed in that way most young men are, and he is sixteen and strong and Cat thinks he is beautiful. He stops by the house to court her, and the menswear salesman likes the creases in his trousers. No bad young man, he tells his wife, would wear such sharp creases. Besides, his father is a wealthy farmer in the next town over, and they own a brand-new
mahogany-colored Model Q. The menswear salesman approves of modern consumerism, if not modern music.

Patty approves of none of this. For the first time in their whole lives, she refuses to speak to Cat. She feels like driftwood, like something dragging along—a useless appendage. She feels betrayed. Cat cries all night, offers to introduce her to the young man's cousin. She begs her twin to speak to her again. Patty slips her a note: “
GET RID OF HIM
.” Cat cries again, but refuses. She believes she is in love. She believes that, for the first time, her heart is kindling, her body a brightening blaze. For the first time, her fingers and toes are no longer numb, her heart no longer frozen in the confusion of youth. Her heart is a little oyster shell, opening, opening.

Patty, meanwhile, continues to make plans. But she no longer shares them with her sister. Every day after school she heads to the library, where it is assumed she is studying diligently, but where she is really researching the Borden murders. She wishes her family were wealthy so there would be a maid to blame. She wishes she were just a little bit bigger; there is no way for her to swing an ax alone, and anyhow, her mother and the menswear salesman do not own an ax. She makes lists of poisons, and how to attain them. She saves her pocket money. She is, though she refuses to believe it, desperately lonely for the first time in her life. She has not yet decided if she will poison her sister, too.

Somehow the twins begin to grow, quite literally, apart. It is as though the rift between them has taken on a physicality, a kind of separation that finds itself in form as well as function. Cat continues with ballet and remains buoyant, floats long and lean, while Patty takes up tennis and becomes muscular and compact, all her grace anchored firmly in the earth. Cat is lovely and serious; Patty is sensual, all smiles and come-hither stares. She steps out with
men older than the menswear salesman. She goes to wild parties, takes up smoking, hems her skirts above her knees, hides racy novels under the mattress. Cat reads Molière and dreams of marriage with the wealthy farm boy. She has never had to carry a conversation; that was Patty's job. She feels, always, at a loss for words. She is sometimes content, but often she thinks she may drift away entirely, so unmoored she has become by the loss of her sister. Patty feels cleaved, still lonely, but liberated. She learns how to work a previously underutilized dimple on her left cheek, and fine-tunes the tones of innuendo in her pretty, deepening voice. She becomes popular. She decides to become an actress, though she does not tell her mother and the menswear salesman, who have definite opinions of women who “go onto the stage.”

The jazz babies still listen to jazz but are no longer an act, no longer a pair. They still share a room but Patty has strung a bedsheet across the middle of it, halving it neatly, and they do not cross into each other's spaces. Patty keeps her pearls and poison lists and Gershwin records stockpiled in a locked drawer, and Cat has no idea her sister still has nefarious notions. Cat keeps her toe shoes and Fats Waller records in plain sight. Neither sister knows where Hard-Hearted Hannah has gone. It seems somehow to be the part of the sisters that disappeared in the split.

One night, Patty comes home very drunk from a party and passes out on the divan. The menswear salesman and their mother are due back any moment from bridge club, and Cat does not know what to do. She looks at the clock, at the door, at her sister's face, sweet and young in such sleep, even under the rouge and the lipstick and the jeweled headband. She dithers and waits—she has not touched her sister in months, not a kiss or a hug or a caress—but finally she hoists Patty by the armpits and half-walks, half-drags her to their
bedroom. She is surprised by her twin's weight—when did Patty get so solid? But they finally make it, and Patty is laid out on the bed, and Cat removes her boots and stockings, her dress and girdle, as gently as a lover would. Patty snores like an old woman. When she is laid out, fully bare, Cat stares at this new body, no longer a mirror of her own. They have different muscles now, different thin and fat places, different soft and hard places. Cat pulls the covers up to her sister's chin and kisses her forehead. Patty's eyes pop open, just for a moment, flicker into consciousness. I think, she says to Cat—the first words she has spoken in six months to her twin—I think I will let you live.

Later that night, when Cat is tucked in her own bed and dreaming of riding in the wealthy farm boy's Model Q, her sister suddenly intrudes. In the dream, they are driving around a sharp corner, and Patty appears just around the bend, planted in the middle of the pavement. They stop the car and realize, too late, that Patty is holding an ax behind her back. She swings, and swings, until the farm boy is a bloody blur on the road, and then she turns to Cat. I think I will let you live, she says, and Cat kneels on the pavement beside the farm boy's remains. She puts her trembling hands over his body, butterflies over flame. His body is so warm still, her own hands warm over the heat of it. Behind her, the car is dead, its arteries grown cold.

The Cemetery for Lost Faces

L
ouise and Clarence are pinning butterflies to a board. Louise's eyes are wide in appreciation of the markings, orange and gold, but Clarence's are closed. He doesn't want to see the flightless wings. Louise takes his hand and squeezes it, tells him it's okay. The pins don't hurt them, she says. They're dead.

Clarence understands that his older sister is brave and he is not. And even at two years old he adores her. Even at two he knows she is the sky and all the stars scattered over it. He squeezes back. The siblings are beautiful in the light, golden and brown sprites in tattered jeans. Their mother frowns and says to their father, They should be in school, with other children. This is when their mother was still speaking to their father, if only just.

School! Their father laughs. This
is
school. And they're learning what's important, not a lot of nonsense. They're learning how to live in the world.

Are they, their mother says. Or are they learning to leave it?

You would know, says their father, and for just a moment the sun falls out of the sky. The two parents make stone figures, faces
turned downward; life-sized gargoyles against the gray. Pain ripples through the space where they stand, frigid air in the lungs and nostrils.

Then suddenly, the sun is back, and the warmth is back, and the blue and brown and gold is back. Their father laughs, and the world is tipped back toward summer once more.

It just goes to show, people said later. It just goes to show how fairy tales always stop too soon in the telling.

Others said it was never a fairy tale at all. Anyone could see that. They were all too lovely, too obviously doomed.

But the wisest said, that's exactly what a fairy tale is. The happily-ever-after is just a false front. It hides the hungry darkness inside.

The funeral was the first thing they'd ever wanted to forget. Yet with the bodies came the unbidden hoarding of memories, the desire to consume and digest their parents' histories whole. With the bodies came the beginnings of silence, too, though neither of them much minded. Preservation of the past requires a monastic sort of quiet. A hushed pause in dusty rooms.