Dual Citizens

by Alix Ohlin

  What frustrated me the most about Marianne, in these conversations, was when I mentioned some aspect of the past; I talked about movies we’d watched together, or about how she used to play us Stevie Wonder on her Magnavox turntable.

  “I don’t remember that,” she said. “I was never a big admirer of Stevie Wonder.”

  “You loved ‘Superstition,’ ” I insisted. “You knew all the words.” I hummed a little of the song, though I was embarrassed at how off-key it was and quickly stopped.

  “I don’t believe that,” Marianne said, as if insulted. “Now, Donna Summer I liked. ‘Hot Stuff.’ ” Her voice thickened with nostalgia. “My girlfriends and I used to dance to it at a club.” Her fondness for the past, I felt, was restricted to a version without us in it, and I changed the subject. I asked how the weather was in Montreal, about which she harbored endless comments. In those years I often knew more about the forecast there than where I lived.

  Meanwhile Robin bussed tables in Spain, sheared sheep in New Zealand. She never said how long she planned to stay or where she was going next. Once, Wheelock and I attended a film festival in the Stockholm archipelago; we boarded boats late in the evening, as the sun finally set, and watched images projected from the shore, rippling in the wind. Afterward I made a trip to Resarö, as if following in Robin’s footsteps. I saw the plaque at Ytterby and bought a cinnamon bun at a café. There was no trace of her there, of course; she’d left no mark behind. Every so often I imagined running into her at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof or Orly airport, the two of us just happening to pass through security at the same time or to use the ladies’ room and suddenly, while washing hands, catch a glimpse of the other’s face in the mirror above the sink. But my fantasies never went any further than that, because I never knew what I would say.

  * * *

  —

  “Now I think it’s birds,” Wheelock said beside me.

  “Our train hit birds?”

  “Possibly ducks,” he said.

  I opened the laptop again and clicked through our itinerary. We had a three o’clock flight, which the train delay was bringing uncomfortably close.

  “We’re going to be late.”

  Wheelock shrugged. He was never anxious about travel arrangements, having effectively annexed all his worry in me.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said, and put his hand on my knee, which he’d never done before. He had always made me feel simultaneously essential and invisible. I said nothing, shifting in my seat. The backs of my legs were sticking uncomfortably to the plastic.

  “Lark,” he said. “Lark.”

  “Why do you keep saying my name?” I said. The train was too warm, and we were sitting too close together. An announcement gibbered over the loudspeaker. The laptop was hot on my thighs and heavy and I bent over in our tiny space, angling it with difficulty into my backpack. He moved his hand to my shoulder.

  “Lark,” he said again, his voice taut and insistent, and when I sat up, he kissed me.

  * * *

  —

  We were less a couple than a unit of force. We didn’t date; we didn’t eat in restaurants or go to the movies. But we lived and worked together, we breathed the same air, and we reached for each other when we needed it, in his bed or mine. To my surprise, Wheelock turned out to be good at sex; he was both attentive and casual, in the sense that there was never any pressure. His expectations of me were nil, other than that I enjoyed myself. If I was tired or not interested he didn’t seem upset. In bed he was playful and we sometimes tussled like puppies or children, rolling over until we were knotted in the sheets, short of breath, and laughing. It was a side of him that I would never have guessed at, and this was one of the things that drew me to him, and kept me there. Every year I knew him unfolded some new aspect of his personality. Every year he turned into someone else.

  2.

  Not all the revelations were easy to take. Just before we outgrew the yellow farmhouse and moved forty miles over to Briar Neck, I found out who the other occupant of the garden shed had been. We were packing boxes—or I was packing boxes, while Wheelock was doing something upstairs—on a bald, lusterless day in late March. Spring was slow that year; the trees had yet to bud and the yard was still glazed with the last dirty remnants of ice. I heard an engine rumble down the gravel driveway and I assumed it was UPS; nobody else ever came to the house. But some movement out the window caught my eye, and I saw a slender, dark-haired girl in a motorcycle jacket emerge from a black SUV, cross the yard, and open the door of the shed. For a second, my heart plummeting and then rising, I thought it was Robin. I wrote to her every few months, first by mail at the Tunnel and then at an email address she seemed to check only sporadically. I confined myself to brief and concrete particulars about my life. In return I received occasional postcards and, once, a clipping from a gossip item in an Italian newspaper with a picture of a marginally famous American actress sitting at a fancy party next to a man in a silk scarf. The man was Boris Dawidoff. Robin had drawn on the photo, giving him devil horns.

  Outside, the shed door slammed. Wheelock came running down the stairs, blitzing past me without a word, faster than I’d ever seen him move. In the windy yard he talked with the girl, who was now facing the house. It was not my sister. She looked quite young, maybe college-age, wearing dark lipstick and a leather choker rimmed with silver spikes, and she was beautiful. Wheelock was speaking to her animatedly, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, or tell whether his hand gestures were angry or pleading. I wasn’t surprised to see how he occupied myself when I wasn’t around; some part of me even expected it. I did feel uncomfortable at how young she was, and how tiny; she barely came up to his collarbone. Wheelock threw an arm around her and kissed her black, shiny hair, guiding her into the house. She was crying, burying her head in his armpit. An unlovely gob of snot hung from her nose, and she wiped it on his sweater.

  When they came into the living room their cheeks were livid from cold.

  “This is my daughter,” Wheelock said. “Min.”

  “I hear you’ve been sleeping in my bed,” she said. “Like fucking Goldilocks.” Her accent was obscurely foreign, hints of British melded with something else.

  “I’m Lark,” I said. “The—assistant.”

  “Jesus, I know. Your presence has been explicated.”

  “Easy, Min,” Wheelock said.

  “Easy,” she repeated, mocking him. “Is there any booze in this shithole?”

  “If I’d known you were coming I would’ve laid in some grain alcohol and barbiturates.”

  “Ha ha,” she said. “You’re the only dad in the world who thinks rehab jokes are funny.”

  They interrupted this seemingly angry repartee to grin at each other with undisguised delight. In that moment I saw the resemblance between them. Min flung herself down on a chair, spread her legs over the side of it, and sighed with exaggerated weariness. “This poor woman. She probably thought you were normal up to now.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Wheelock said.

  * * *

  —

  I produced one of my typical dinners, a sorry affair of gluey rice and rubbery chicken. As we ate, Min told me she was “on a break” (duration unspecified) from “school” (location unspecified), and she and her mother “needed space” (reason unspecified).

  “Also I got my heart broken by some moron,” she said, tears welling up to contradict her scornful tone, “and last time I got my heart broken I self-medicated to excess.”

  Wheelock put a hand over hers. I’d never seen him like this before, solicitous and paternal, and I was impressed by how natural he was at it.

  Min’s mother, Soo Jung, was a wardrobe designer who worked at a theatre in London. “It’s not as glamorous as you think,” Min confided, though I hadn’t said anything. “It’s a lot of sniffing people’
s smelly armpits while you’re sewing them into decrepit velveteen dresses.” She was even younger than I’d thought, maybe eighteen, her sophistication spackled over her nervous energy. After dinner Wheelock said calmly, “I’d better call your mother.” Min and I did the dishes, or I did them while she leaned against the counter and talked. She told me all about her school, how she planned to be a painter, that she was the product of a “brief flirtation” (length unspecified) between her parents and had never known them together. She and her mother had moved abroad when she was ten, first to the Czech Republic and then to England, which accounted for her accent. Her Korean grandparents were scandalized by her patchy academic performance and time in rehab. Wheelock had no living parents to be scandalized. His only brother had been killed in a factory accident when they were both in their twenties. “He never talks about it,” she said. “But if you watch carefully in his films there’s almost always a moment when industrial machinery suddenly, like, looms. It’ll go from normal to really threatening and scary. He can’t help but see it that way. It’s like a ghost he doesn’t realize is haunting him.” In the two hours Min had been around I’d heard more about Wheelock’s life than in the previous two years. I rinsed out the saucepan and deposited it in the rack, drying my hands on a grubby dish towel Wheelock and I kept forgetting to wash.

  “So,” Min said, peeling a strip of black polish off her thumbnail, “what do you do for fun here in Hicksville, anyway?”

  “There used to be a guy who dealt drugs out of the feed store,” I said. “But he’s in grad school now.”

  “Aren’t they all,” she sighed, with more of her fake worldliness.

  “I guess we could play Monopoly,” I said. By the time Wheelock came back downstairs she owned all the hotels and had hundreds in the bank.

  * * *

  —

  Min stayed for six weeks. She slept until noon every day, seemingly unwakeable by any amount of noise. She turned out to be a skilled cook who could turn out everything from bulgogi to bangers and mash, and I gladly ceded the kitchen to her. She’d sit in the living room while I worked and ask me questions about my personal life, which I answered as blandly as possible. The version of myself I told her was stripped down and sedate. My sister lived abroad. My mother worked in marketing. I’d lost my father young and didn’t remember him.

  “You’re the most boring person I ever met in my life,” she told me once. “How do you stand it?”

  “I get by somehow,” I said.

  “Is that why you’ve glommed on to my dad, because he’s so much more interesting? You feed off his interestingness like those parasites that live in sharks’ mouths.”

  “Sharks?”

  “I seriously just learned about this in zoology. The resemblance is uncanny.”

  During the days Wheelock was as occupied with his work as ever, so it fell to me to entertain Min. I took her to the feed store and the ice cream parlor; we swam at the quarry; she pronounced all of it dull and stupid and yet she could have left anytime she wanted to, and she didn’t. On her last day she called Wheelock “Daddy” and burst into tears at the thought of leaving him. And she must have enjoyed herself somewhat, because she returned every six months or so for a visit, often picking up a conversation as if we’d just broken it off the day before. She gossiped indiscreetly about her mother’s love life and her own. She knew every single one of Wheelock’s films by heart and to my irritation could correct me on minor points about them. She was always right. She deduced it immediately once Wheelock and I “became intimate” and she often said “became intimate” to torment me, knowing how uncomfortable I was made by the phrase. She also loved to call me “Stepmom” in a voice drenched with irony, and in a salute to the Julia Roberts movie of that name would insist on singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” at the top of her lungs whenever we went anywhere in the car. She finished high school and was accepted to a prestigious art program in London. She once left, on my bed, a portrait she’d drawn of me in charcoal, so quickly that I hadn’t noticed her doing it. In the picture I was staring down at my hands, my hair falling across my cheeks. She’d made me more angular than I was in life, and, as a compliment or taunt, more beautiful.

  3.

  Min inspired Wheelock’s next project, on the cheery subject of rising global plagues. During one of her school breaks she and a friend traveled to Southeast Asia, through Thailand to Vietnam and Malaysia. Unlike my sister, she was an excellent correspondent, sending long, chatty emails about their drunken escapades on beaches and close calls they’d had weaving mopeds through chaotic traffic. It wasn’t until she was on the plane home that she started to feel ill, and by the time they landed at Heathrow she was unconscious with fever and had to be transported by ambulance directly to the hospital. The virus she’d contracted turned out to be a strain of bird flu not previously known to leap from animals to humans. Wheelock, grim-faced and mute with worry, got on a plane to be by her side. He was terrible at keeping in touch, and answered my questions over the phone with one-syllable answers. I was stuck back in Briar Neck by myself, researching the history of the flu. I read about how the 1918 flu epidemic killed nearly thirty million people, more than had died in the First World War. From its origins in China it coursed around the world, following every trading route and path. Children sang a rhyme: I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in-flu-enza.

  Min herself emailed me the first update of any length. Guess what, I’ll survive to bug you for a few more years. I look like a skeleton but my cheekbones are amazing. My career as a supermodel starts now.

  Despite the flip tone of this message, she emerged from the experience changed—more serious, even rigid, in a way that reminded me of her father. Though she recovered with a speed that impressed her doctors, her body was different after the flu; she’d always been thin, but after the illness she was almost skeletal, permanently so, her body whip-like and wiry. She developed a slight hunch, her shoulders forever pushing forward as if against a world that had robbed her of her invulnerability. The next time she came to Briar Neck, she threw out everything in the garage and converted it into a studio. She’d work there for hours at a stretch, making charcoal sketches I never saw because she ripped them up at the end of each day, dissatisfied, and burned them in the fireplace. But she didn’t seem to mind. She said transience was part of her process. “If I leave here with nothing,” she said, “it’s perfect. Because that’s how we leave this planet, right? With nothing. I’m like one of those monks with sand art that gets destroyed as soon as it’s finished.”

  Wheelock didn’t care for these remarks, finding them callow. He called her a ten-cent Buddhist, whatever that was, and the two of them argued regularly over dinner, Min having cooked a curry or stir-fry using spices she’d brought in her luggage, because the Pennsylvania supermarkets never had what she wanted. After she left, for lack of a target Wheelock began to argue with me, picking fights over everything from American foreign policy and the war in Afghanistan to the future of nuclear energy. I wasn’t a satisfying partner in these debates. I folded instantly, and anyway we held most of the same positions to begin with. I was less a combatant than an echo chamber. Wheelock grew ever more frustrated and irritable. He withdrew into his office and then went off to New York for a spell, and when he came back he informed me that we’d be working on a ten-part series about plagues, epidemics, and global health. It would take years.

  “All right,” I said.

  But I’d had enough of travel. I liked Briar Neck and no longer enjoyed the endless days of airport meals and waking in hotel rooms unsure what country I was in. I told Wheelock he had to learn to look after himself, and he consented. Over the next year we spent more time apart than usual. I spent my days with two assistants I’d hired fresh out of school, Bikram and Javier, who lived together in a tiny apartment behind the Elks Lodge. The two of them bic
kered endearingly and then hushed when I came in; they were obedient and a bit fearful, and as I taught them what to do, it was odd to realize that I was no longer the youngest or least knowledgeable person in the room.

  In the evenings, I went back to my college habit of patching gaps in my education in classic films, making notes in a small Moleskine Wheelock gave me for Christmas. I watched all of Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Fellini, keeping myself company with the flickering images. I wrapped my solitude around myself like a blanket, and I was cozy in it; which isn’t to say that I wasn’t overjoyed whenever Wheelock came home, laying his footage, that dubious gift, at my feet, like a cat presenting a dead bird.

  I watched so many hours of the footage that it grew emptied of content, and I became inured to the horrifying facts—pestilence, epidemics, antibiotic-resistant bacteria rampaging the earth—being presented. To be an editor is to systematize. To stitch and cut. To observe and connect, layering one idea on the next. I was good at it. By this point Wheelock and I communicated in shorthand, using terms no one else would have understood. “We need a bridge here like Texas,” he’d say, by which I knew he was referring to a montage from a piece about offshore drilling in Galveston several years earlier. We’d built a language together; we’d built worlds. Whenever I showed him a preliminary cut, he nodded curtly, but I could tell—having learned years earlier that he wouldn’t provide compliments, I’d gone scavenging for them myself, in the lift of an eyebrow or a tilt of the head—that he was pleased.

  4.

  After she graduated from art school in London, Min moved to New York, where she worked as a gallery assistant and went to parties with fashion designers and internet-famous indie musicians and then returned late at night to the apartment in Bushwick she shared with three roommates. When the city got to be too much, she’d sublet her bed—it was a loft apartment, so she didn’t have a room, just a mattress in a corner—and come to Pennsylvania for a month, making art in her studio and cooking meals for us, bringing with her a charge of energy that was both invigorating and exhausting. She showed up whenever she wanted, without asking permission or giving notice, and she didn’t care whether her father was there or not. She treated us both with a boisterous aggression that I understood was her form of love. She liked to mock Wheelock to his face for entering what she called his “sellout years,” joining the “tote bag tribe,” by which she meant anything that involved public television. Wheelock never seemed hurt by these accusations, though occasionally I caught him glancing at me, as if wondering whether I was hurt by them. I wasn’t. What did make me uncomfortable was when Min allied herself with me—sometimes because we were younger; sometimes because we were both women—and then switched to Wheelock, calling him Daddy and referencing trips they’d taken when she was a child, toggling between the two of us with ferocious speed. I don’t think she cared as much about playing us off each other as she craved the instability of the switch itself. Too much tranquility made her uneasy; she didn’t feel at home in it.