Dual Citizens

by Alix Ohlin

  I lay down on the pull-out couch, which maintained the lumps where it was used to being folded, like a person unable to fix his bad posture. Wheelock placed himself on top of me, his feet on my feet, his hands on my hands, so we were splayed together. His breath smelled of marinara. Although his hair was grey now, his eyes had the same feverish energy I’d seen in the dark bar when we met almost ten years earlier.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like You’re welcome,” he said. “Like Lawrence, these have been the best years of my life. That kind of thing.”

  I frowned at him. I never called him Lawrence. Nor did I ever think about whether the past decade had been the best of my life, though I never regretted it or doubted my decision to join him in Pennsylvania. It would have been like doubting the decision to breathe oxygen, or walk upright. The choice had been made long ago, and not by my conscious mind. “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “Min thinks I’ve done you a disservice, keeping you tucked away in Briar Neck. She thinks I should at least marry you.”

  “I didn’t realize she was so conventional.”

  Wheelock laughed, then sighed. He rolled off me and rubbed his chin. “It’s that Jake,” he said. “I wanted her to find stability, and now that she has it I’m afraid she’s going to move to Schenectady and become a housewife.”

  “It might not be the worst thing.”

  “Is she right, though? About you?”

  “I like Briar Neck,” I said.

  “And the other thing?”

  “I never thought about it,” I said.

  Wheelock put his head in my armpit and nudged me until I was on my side. He wrapped himself around me, arms and legs everywhere, his cheek scratching my ear. At three in the morning I woke up to the sound of car horns outside, and he was still wound around me, so tightly I could barely breathe.

  7.

  It was Min who got married, three years later, and she wanted to do it in Briar Neck, which she insisted on calling her “ancestral home,” in a tone somehow both archly ironic and sentimental. Because I lived there, I was pressed into service for the logistics. With Wheelock away traveling, filming a special on the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan, Min, Jake, and I looked at venues together, eventually settling on a renovated barn.

  “People from New York are going to think it’s twee,” Min said, and I nodded, not sure whether this was a good thing or not. “What do you think, Jakey?”

  Jake, who spent most of his time outside taking work calls on his cell, smiled and gave a thumbs-up. He gave a thumbs-up to everything. The only part he had strong opinions about was the food. He and Min had spent two hours deliberating over a pea-shoot appetizer. They’d had a very intense whispered argument that involved ricotta salata. They didn’t ask me to weigh in; Min said I was a non-believer, a food atheist, and she was right.

  Min designed the floral arrangements and the invitations, and her mother sewed her wedding dress, hand-embroidering it with tiny freshwater pearls.

  The morning of the wedding, Min, Soo Jung, and I had breakfast at the house while a hairdresser wove flowers into Min’s hair. Wheelock and Jake were off at the barn, overseeing final decorations, and two of Min’s rowdier bridesmaids were passed out on the couch after drinking too much the night before. Soo Jung spoke to her daughter as if I weren’t there. I don’t think she was jealous of me; she just wasn’t convinced that my presence was important enough to acknowledge. Fidgety and fretful, Min kept asking over and over how she looked.

  “You’re gorgeous, you egomaniac,” Soo Jung told her. “There will be a million pictures of your perfection, don’t worry.”

  “I feel bloated.”

  “You look divine,” her mother said impatiently. “You have the face of an angel. Et cetera.”

  “My face is an oil slick,” Min said. “And I have a zit on my chin the size of a kumquat. I think I might throw up.”

  “Here, drink this,” her mother said, holding out a flask. She was wearing a purple silk dress, and over it a canvas apron decked with pockets, from which she’d been producing useful items all morning—a makeup brush, safety pins, tissues, and now booze.

  “Mom,” Min said. “I haven’t had a drink in a decade.”

  “Maybe it’s time to reconsider,” her mother said.

  “I can’t,” Min said. “I’m pregnant.” Suddenly in tears, she smeared her face with her palms, twisting her eye makeup into Cubist lines. “I’m pregnant and it’s twins and Jake wants to move to Schenectady for the schools.”

  Soo Jung and I stared at each other. With slow deliberation she held out the flask to me, and I took it. We drank the whole thing, the two of us, before the ceremony began.

  * * *

  —

  In the end Min looked lovely, walking down the aisle on Wheelock’s arm, with no sign of nerves or other distress. Her face had been repainted; her hair was exquisite. Everyone said the food was delicious. I waited for Jake to give her a thumbs-up after the vows, but he didn’t. Wheelock, at the reception, gave a funny toast in which he managed to avoid the topic of marriage completely and spoke instead about Min as a little girl, her appetite for adventure and art. Min listened, her eyes shining with unshed tears. Outside the barn fireflies freckled the night. His job done, Wheelock paced outside in the gravel parking lot, examining the tiny rocks and picking a few to store in his pockets.

  “God love you,” Soo Jung said drunkenly, materializing by my side. “He is one weird dude.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  Inside the barn Jake’s family was leading everyone in the hora, Min laughing as she was lifted above them.

  “I suppose you don’t mind, being high priestess of his cult.”

  I blanched, edging away, and she grabbed my arm. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Weddings make me so mean.”

  “Because you never had one?”

  “Fuck no,” she said. “I just hate them.”

  We stood for a moment watching Wheelock meander around, peeking under the wheel beds of cars on a hunt for who knew what treasure. Inside the guests hooted and danced, the klezmer horns rioting in the night. The next day Min and Jake left for the Amalfi coast and Soo Jung and I packed up all their wedding gifts and shipped them to Jake’s family in Schenectady, which Soo Jung insisted on calling, with the heavy irony she’d bestowed upon her daughter, “the promised land.”

  At the UPS store she briefly put her hands on my cheeks and leaned toward me as if for a kiss. “You are not a non-person,” she said. “You deserve better than this.”

  I was irritated by her judgment of my life. “Than UPS?” I said.

  “Don’t pretend you’re stupid,” she said, and then she got into her rental car and drove away.

  * * *

  —

  We met again seven months later, at the hospital in the promised land, where Min’s twins, a boy and a girl, were born premature and confined to the NICU. They lay in their ventilators under lights, their yellow skin pinking more each day. I was fascinated by their tiny bellies and perfect fingernails and thatches of fine dark hair. The labor was difficult, and Min spent the days after it weeping with hormonal rage and post-operative pain. No one could calm her.

  Soo Jung and I held the babies, sang to them. We knew the nurses by name, the mean daytime one and the nice night-shift one. We took turns fetching sandwiches and coffee. Jake’s parents were there too, Sarah and Artie, and the four of us sometimes went out for dinner after visiting hours ended, sitting in the warm neon bustle of the Schenectady Olive Garden. For this moment, suspended in the orbit of the hospital, we acted as if we were all one family.

  Wheelock, who was in Japan, took almost a week to arrive. When he did, he held Min’s hand and tried to show her footag
e of the Fukushima power plant until I took his laptop away. “What?” he said, puzzled. I dragged him to the NICU and showed him the babies, and he and Soo Jung smiled and shook hands, congratulating each other formally, as if concluding a business deal.

  Then Min was ready to go home, to the house she and Jake had bought, where the nursery was decorated in buttercup yellow. Soo Jung had painted a mural on the wall, bunnies and squirrels and birds, a lovely tamed wilderness. Wheelock and I prepared to say goodbye and return to Briar Neck. At the last moment Min grabbed my wrist hard, with a strength that reminded me of my sister’s, and whispered in my ear, “Don’t leave me to this hell.” I laughed, thinking it was her typical irony, but she was serious, her eyes panicked and wide.

  “It’ll be okay,” I told her.

  “Will it?” she said.

  As we drove away from the suburbs, I felt sick and sad. Soo Jung, who stayed behind for another month, emailed pictures of the babies, now released from the NICU and swaddled at home, arranged in Min’s too-full lap as she bared her teeth in a wan smile. Wheelock immediately went back to work, and I surprised myself by falling apart.

  I went to sleep crying and woke up crying. In the mornings I got up, drank coffee, and then went back to bed. Sometimes I lay there the whole day. At night, unable to sleep, I watched talk shows on the couch. Wheelock asked me what was wrong; I told him the truth, which was that I didn’t know. I said I missed the dinners with Sarah and Artie and Soo Jung, and he offered to take me to Olive Garden anytime I wanted. I shook my head, still crying. Wheelock gave up and returned to the office. He wanted to help but he needed me to tell him how to do it; this was both fair and impossible.

  One night I called Soo Jung. “Just wanted an update,” I said with forced casualness, as if I’d ever called her before. “What’s going on there?” I could hear an odd squeak in my voice, lurching with still more tears.

  Soo Jung’s voice was brisk as ever. “Sleeping and pooping, mainly,” she said. “You sound weird as hell.”

  “I’m fine. How’s the jaundice? Did the belly buttons fall off yet?” At the hospital I’d learned that the umbilical cord, once cut and tied, left behind a stump that would eventually dry up and drop away; I’d been fascinated by this information, and disappointed to leave before it happened.

  There was a pause on the line. In the background I could hear a baby’s wail rise and then drop into silence, then another wail, either the same baby or the other one.

  Soo Jung said softly, “And finally it happens.”

  “What happens?”

  “You’re feeling it. Life is crashing down around your ears. Poor Lark. I’m sorry for you, honey, really I am.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “The babies,” she said, her tone minus its usual acidity. “The babies.”

  8.

  She was right. It was the babies who wrecked me. I was thirty-five years old. I had no desire to be married; I’d lived for years in happy monasticism with Wheelock, wedded to my job. I’d declared myself content in Briar Neck, with my friends and my routines, my days in the editing room, imposing order on hours of footage. It was the perfect life for me, until it wasn’t.

  A space opened in me that couldn’t be filled by work. I can’t explain how the desire for motherhood had lain inside me, dormant and unfelt, for so long, only to wake up in a cataclysm that demanded I take action. Had I lacked interest because my own mother was so disinterested? Did I want a child now to fill some past void? Or was it because of Marianne that I’d suppressed the urge so long, believing that you couldn’t imitate something you’d never known yourself?

  I don’t know the answer to these questions. I can only say that once I wanted a child, the want became overwhelming and undeniable, an ache in my body like a permanent migraine. I was never a little girl who dragged around a doll, pretending to bathe or nurse it; I’d never imagined the children I would have, giving them names or imagining their faces. Yet it was also true that I’d thought of myself as a mother to Robin, had taken over from Marianne who had no passion for the task. And now, as an adult, I knew exactly what I felt; however unexpected it was, the feeling was accompanied by certainty.

  Soo Jung said it was because of my age, that I saw the window closing and knew that soon it would be too late. “The time is now, my friend,” she told me on the phone.

  There was a clatter on the line and then Min came on. “Don’t do it,” she said. “It’ll ruin your life.” One of the babies started babbling, and the other joined in; according to Min, they were forever waking each other up. “Seriously, though, you’ll be a great mom, Lark. Come join our tribe.”

  I hung up. When Wheelock came in from the office, I was showered and dressed. We ordered a pizza and ate in dull, mechanical quiet, until I told him I wanted to have a child.

  “What, now?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  “Really?”

  “I want you to be happy,” he said.

  I smiled at him. We were sitting on the couch, wiping the grease from our hands with delivery napkins. Wheelock swept one across his mouth and crumpled it into the pizza box. He was clean-shaven and healthy; in the past month he’d mostly been home in Pennsylvania and taken up hiking, returning from his ventures with pockets full of pine cones. His hair, which had gone almost completely white, hung below his ears. He looked weathered and distinguished and athletic, like an old-fashioned sportsman aristocrat—say, Edmund Hillary. I remembered that Hillary, during his lifetime, was voted the most trusted man in New Zealand. His first wife died in a plane crash, and his second wife, June Mulgrew, was the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died after having replaced Hillary as speaker on a sightseeing flight to the Antarctic, which also crashed. I’d read a long biography of Hillary one winter in Briar Neck, following him around the world, on all his perilous journeys, while I nestled safely at home.

  “So what are you doing to do?” Wheelock asked politely.

  I folded my hands in my lap. Then I folded my knees under my chin and crossed my arms around my shins. I was making myself smaller and smaller. I hadn’t realized until that moment that for him the discussion was theoretical. He didn’t expect to be involved. It might sound strange that—after all the weeping of the previous days—I didn’t cry, but I didn’t.

  I remembered Richard, my old boss at the Worthen computer lab, and how we used to laugh about Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, making his crazy demands of Kim Novak. Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.

  “Would you ever—” I said.

  “My Lark.” Wheelock’s voice was firm. “I already have a child.”

  Nothing in my life with Wheelock had prepared me for the look on his face, which was one of great and radiant pity. Pity mixed with love. I couldn’t stand for him to apologize to me. To describe his self-absorption, with which I was already intimately familiar. I couldn’t bear for him—a person I knew better than I knew myself—to tell me that he’d stolen my youth, when I was perfectly aware I’d given it to him freely, had thrust it, with despairing enthusiasm, into his hands.

  9.

  I quit my job with Wheelock as abruptly as I’d started it. When I left Briar Neck, I took only samples of my editing work and a suitcase of clothes. In all the years I’d worked for him I’d never paid rent, so my bank account was full. While he was at work I wrote him a note saying I’d be using his apartment for a while. Since Min moved to Schenectady the place had mostly stood empty, and I knew he wouldn’t object.

  In New York, I threw everything out of the apartment except the sofa bed. All of Wheelock’s flotsam and jetsam, the record of his walks through the city, the men’s shoes, the pennies and pebbles: I got rid of it. I tried to extinguish him from my thoughts, but at night I often dreamed of him and us, dreams in
which we were perpetually in transit, strapped into airplane seats, or leaning into each other as trains veered away from the coast, never arriving anywhere. The meaning of these dreams was obvious and mundane, and I was irritated at my unconscious brain for not generating more arresting imagery. Once I’d cleaned the place out, I began walking the city myself. I visited museums and meandered across bridges and climbed to the tops of buildings that were said to have noteworthy views. I didn’t call or email anyone I knew; I wasn’t ready to tell the story of what had happened, and I felt suspended between the old life I was mourning and a new one whose form I couldn’t yet see. The few calls I received, mostly from Min, I didn’t return. The only time I used my phone was in a Gristedes where I’d gone to wait out a rainstorm. I was leafing through some magazines when I came across a picture of Boris Dawidoff, on the right side of an image separated via lightning bolt from his actress girlfriend, who was now quite famous. They’d broken up, the caption said. Boris’s face was round and pink, his tousled hair grey. I took a picture of it and texted it to Robin.

  The text didn’t go through and I thought I’d resend it later, but then I forgot about it as I continued my wanderings. New York was drab and rain-struck, the dull brown of early spring gathered around the city like a trench coat. One day I went to see our old apartment, the Tunnel, and was surprised that I didn’t remember the number of the building. The neighborhood itself was unrecognizable, shiny with expensive clothing stores and Asian fusion restaurants. The place where we used to order egg drop soup for two dollars a bowl was now a nail salon offering hot-stone pedicures for forty. At a Starbucks I sat watching two children fight over a hand-held gaming device while their nanny vainly protested. She saw me staring and hustled them out quickly, sneaking a glance back at me over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether she thought I might yell at them or abduct them, and I flushed with sad self-consciousness at the idea that I was a threat either way.