Dual Citizens

by Alix Ohlin

  Robin was still watching me. “You’ll be fine, you know,” she said, and I nodded and gripped the arms of my chair as the world around me fluttered, slid sideways, and flew.

  12.

  The savings I’d accumulated in Briar Neck were considerable, and Wheelock, I learned, had paid the hospital bills, which had been mailed to my old address in Briar Neck. He must have considered this charity a gift, proof of his integrity, but it felt more like a net that still bound me to him, and I wanted to be released. While the doctors said I’d eventually be able to resume my editing work, for now I was forbidden to look at any kind of screen. My vertigo ebbed, but effects from my head injury lingered. Sometimes the world was clear and sometimes it was not; sometimes I was attacked by headaches so vicious that I threw up.

  Min came to see me in Brooklyn, with the children in tow. She was as thin as she’d been before pregnancy, though the angles of her face were ever so slightly softened and there were light purple circles under her eyes. Her twins were a perfect mixture of their parents; they had Jake’s nose and round cheeks but Min’s dark hair and mischievous eyes. Somehow they were toddlers already, and they climbed on all the furniture and jumped off, banging their heads on the tables and floor, then howling and starting it all up again. Though Min looked the same to me, her gestures were all new: picking up her daughter, she placed a pacifier in her mouth, then took away from her son a wrought-iron candlestick I’d neglected to put away. I apologized and she shook her head, unbothered. Motherhood had channeled her nervous energy into constant action. She opened a plastic container of crackers for one twin, sniffed the backside of the other. Robin said, “I don’t enjoy young children,” and left without saying where she was going.

  Min laughed. “I wish I could just walk out sometimes,” she said.

  As I limped around the apartment making tea she told me that she and Jake were moving to California to open an artisanal donut shop. It was Jake’s dream, one Min was willing to indulge if it meant getting out of Schenectady. When I heard the news my face crumpled. I hadn’t seen Min much lately, and now I’d never see her at all.

  “Oh please, please,” Min said anxiously, reaching out her hands. She wanted to hug me but the toddlers were grabbing her ankles, trying to pry them apart into a tunnel.

  “It’s okay,” I said. Turning away, I poured the hot water into two cups and missed, scalding my hands. “Stand back,” I said sharply, not wanting to hurt the children too.

  “Lark cry!” said Alma, interested in me for the first time since their arrival. “Lark cry!” Alvin came over to investigate. He grabbed my leg to steady himself, his grip surprisingly strong; they were both strapping children with round healthy bellies, no trace left of the tiny preemies they’d been at birth.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping my face. “Lark cry.”

  My fingers stung. The pain distracted me. Also, Alvin was pulling so hard on my pants I was afraid they might fall down.

  At last we were settled in the living room with our tea, and the toddlers amused themselves ripping pages out of a magazine. Alma sat on my lap, surprisingly heavy, comfortable with me as with furniture. I smelled her sweet-sour skin, touched the hair at the nape of her neck, like a person exploring a new neighborhood where she might buy a house; when I placed my palm on her back, I couldn’t believe how fast her heart was beating. Min watched me without comment. We spoke for a while about California and their life there. The conversation funneled down into the minutiae of real estate prices and school districts, calming in its tedium, and I stifled a yawn. “We’ll go soon,” Min said, and I apologized again.

  She asked how long Robin was staying, and I said I didn’t know. She asked if I’d made plans for what to do next, and I said I didn’t know. We didn’t talk about my desire to have a child, though it remained inside me, low-burning and constant as an underground fire. I wanted it as much as ever and yet in my current condition I could hardly take care of myself, much less another person. I’d lost the momentum of my new life before it had even gotten under way, and whenever I thought about it I felt seized by failure. Min must have sensed something of this. She’d teased me for years, searching for a sore spot; now that she’d found one, she kept her distance from it, and I loved her for that.

  “You’ll find something,” she said instead. “My dad never gave you enough credit, you know. You practically made his work for him.”

  “You think things will fall apart now?” I said, hating the hope in my voice.

  She shook her head. “I think he’ll hire ten people to take your place.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Min.”

  “Awesome! A midlife crisis. You should buy a convertible and start sleeping with twenty-five-year-olds.”

  I frowned, and she laughed. “Don’t listen to me. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in two years and I’m not sure I’m wearing underwear.”

  “I didn’t need to know that,” I said. We sat smiling at each other, lingering at the end of our friendship. “I’ll miss you,” I said.

  “Mama cry?” her daughter said excitedly.

  “Just a little,” Min said.

  For days after they left I kept finding reminders of their visit: Cheerios under the couch, a tiny plastic dragon behind the toilet, a red splatter of juice on the baseboards in the kitchen like a miniature crime scene. As if the children had been determined, in their chaos, to leave a mark behind.

  13.

  Robin, too, was getting ready to leave. I could sense her distraction, an ever-greater restlessness. Even on rainy days she went for long walks, without an umbrella, and returned soaked, pink-cheeked. She’d found a cemetery she liked and spent hours tramping around it, looking at birds. She told me about the woodpeckers there, how she’d spotted one defending its territory, swooping aggressively over and around another, then returning to chisel its tree with holes. One evening she talked about a woman named Phoebe Snetsinger who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was spurred to become a competitive bird-watcher. She traveled the world and became the first person to spot over eight thousand species.

  “And seeing all those birds somehow healed her?” I said.

  “Actually, she died in a bus crash while bird-watching,” my sister said.

  I laughed, and she frowned. New York was making her cranky. A few doors down from us lived a professional couple in their thirties with a subscription to The New York Times. On recycling day Robin would pick up their newspapers and every morning I’d find her head in hand at the breakfast table, a cup of tea at her elbow, reading the events of the previous week and shaking her head in dismay. She ranted about Obama’s weak environmental policies and the American military-industrial complex. Her disagreements with Thomas L. Friedman’s views were intense and long-winded, and I had a hard time following them. Mostly, I understood, she thought America was violent and corrupt and the president was all style and no substance.

  “You’ll notice he still hasn’t closed Guantánamo,” she said. “Even though it was one of the first things he promised to do. Not to mention the secret CIA prisons in Europe. Remember that old slogan—Yes we can! What a meaningless slogan. Yes we can what? Continue the ways of the old regime?”

  I wasn’t used to thinking about regimes. “He says change takes time,” I said tentatively. Words came more readily to me now, and I could manoeuver them into simple sentences, but I wasn’t sure I could advance a complex argument.

  “His notions of change are completely superficial,” she said. “All he does is make beautiful speeches.”

  “I like his speeches,” I said, and my sister sighed heavily.

  “You don’t even notice the emptiness. You’ve been living here too long,” she said. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Not that bad,�
� she echoed, shaking her head again.

  Sometimes I thought we argued about politics because, fraught as they were, these debates were easier than talking about personal realities. I knew there must be more to her life in the Laurentians than she was telling me, and I withheld from her the pit that chasmed in my stomach when I considered the possibility that I might never have a child. The subject was too tender; if she’d mocked or questioned it, I couldn’t have withstood the conversation. So we spent each day together, and yet evaded each other too.

  Sometimes I thought she picked arguments on purpose, cleverly, to pave the way for her departure. To make me glad to see her go.

  * * *

  —

  Spring came to Brooklyn, and despite the lack of trees in the neighborhood there were flowers everywhere, sprouting in medians and window boxes. On the street Robin found a broken charcoal barbecue, two of its three legs collapsed like a half-killed spider, and she repaired it with wooden splints and a hefty round of duct tape. She called to Elena, who as usual was watching us from upstairs, and Elena came down with a macaroni salad and two bottles of homemade wine given to her by a cousin in Queens. “He says it’s a merlot mix,” she said doubtfully, handing them over. “All’s I know is it’ll get you drunk, same as any other wine.”

  Robin used old copies of the Times to light charcoal briquettes, producing large startling flames that flared and then died, over and over. When the coals finally caught she went inside the apartment and emerged with several garlands of Christmas lights, which she strung from the fire escape over to the back fence. People kept showing up: the man who owned the thrift store where Robin had bought all those postcards; the couple whose newspapers we’d been reading; a guy I was never introduced to but who sat happily on an overturned garbage can, strumming a guitar and humming songs none of us could hear over the chatter.

  I sat on the steps, sipping a cup of tea and watching everyone. A middle-aged woman with curly brown hair settled herself next to me and asked how I was feeling.

  “I’m fine,” I said, “how are you?”

  She smiled oddly. “I mean really, though. How are you really?”

  “Really fine,” I said. “Would you like some wine?”

  “Got some,” she said, leaning down between her feet to pick up a plastic cup. She was wearing a purple T-shirt that said I Am the Kingdom and the Glory and I wondered who she was, where Robin had found her. She followed my gaze and settled on my sister. “Robin’s so great,” she said.

  I agreed that she was.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “My sister’s a crack addict who lives with her fourth husband in a van in Florida. The only time I hear from her is when she needs money.”

  I said I was sorry to hear that.

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “Nobody’s family is perfect, am I right?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Her question wasn’t hostile, but informational. She was a short stout woman with intelligent eyes that looked straight at me, gauging my response.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m Karen Madorsky.”

  I wasn’t helped by this, and she knew it. She patted my knee, and as she did I noticed for the first time her long fake nails, decorated with yellow daisies on a blue background. She’d been one of my nurses in the hospital.

  “You’ll get back to normal,” she said. “At some point.” Then she heaved herself off the steps and went to pour herself more of the homemade wine.

  Robin was busy turning food on the grill and serving it on paper plates. Later she and the guitar guy sang a duet of “Four Strong Winds,” her voice as sweet and soaring as ever. At midnight people were still there, at one o’clock and two o’clock, and finally I went to bed. The last I saw of her, my sister was sitting in a corner of the garden sunk deep into a conversation with Elena that looked private and intense, Elena talking urgently, Robin nodding. When I woke up I saw that Robin had left me a note: Had to catch my bus, didn’t want to wake you. The backyard was clean and the recycling full to bursting with paper plates and plastic cups. The holiday lights were still strung across the space, invisible in the morning sun.

  14.

  Without Robin in it, the apartment seemed both quieter and noisier; I heard creaks and scraping sounds I’d never noticed before, and even traffic and conversation from outside seemed louder, as if her body had cushioned it. I had a hard time sleeping. I’d read once, I couldn’t remember where, that people who grow up by the ocean can never sleep well anywhere else. Its rhythms can’t be reproduced. Robin’s presence was something like that for me. In the evenings, my headaches came back, and I’d lie flat on my back as the room swayed, wishing she hadn’t gone.

  Sometimes I called her, but she rarely answered her phone, and I felt she wanted a break from me in any case. So I called Min or Marianne, but it was painful to hear the abundant, chaotic background noise of Min’s house, her exasperated laughter as one child or the other ran amok, the soundtrack of a life so far from my own. As for Marianne, she always greeted me with a tone of surprise—“Oh, it’s you,” she’d say—and then she’d launch into lengthy, impenetrable commentaries on local news stories I wasn’t following. I didn’t mind this; but invariably she’d come around to asking, “So—what are you going to do now?” It was a question I had no answer to, and in response I’d end the call, feeling even further adrift.

  I still wasn’t allowed to watch movies or television; it was the longest I could remember ever having gone without films in my life, and this, too, made me feel unmoored, detached from the habits of the past. In an art class at Worthen I’d learned about an American pilot who was injured during the Second World War. Mostly paralyzed, made to lie flat, he spent the years of his hospitalization teaching himself to paint, and went on to become a well-regarded Abstract Expressionist with exhibits throughout Europe and Japan. At the end of his life, suffering from cancer, he continued to work, painting very small pictures using only his left hand. I wished I could paint; I even tried to draw a cat, but the result was stupid and distended, a monster with crossed eyes and the belly of a whale.

  Instead I went for slow, ginger walks. Step by slow step I explored the neighborhood, limping past playgrounds and hardware stores and diners. The next day I repeated the route, and the day after that. I began to see the same people at the same time of day—a man sweeping the sidewalk; a woman herding her children to school—and when they nodded at me with recognition, some part of my brain that had been scrambled was straightened.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually I was able to read the newspaper, look at a computer, and use words in the proper order. I was anxious to return to work; my life needed scaffolding, and work had always provided it. Over my years with Wheelock, despite living out in Briar Neck, I’d come to know a fair number of people. I was nervous to contact them at first, mostly because I feared having to explain my current circumstances, but once I did, I found that everyone already knew about them. One ripple effect of Wheelock’s reputation was an enduring interest in his personal life. When I emailed people that I’d moved to New York the responses were immediate and enthusiastic. Everyone wanted to have lunch. Everyone wanted a drink. What they also wanted, I found out at the restaurants and cafés and bars where we met, was gossip. After twenty minutes of small talk the person would lean on an elbow and ask, voice lowered, what really happened. I offered the dullest possible answer—“It was time to move on,” I usually said—and changed the subject.

  There was no work; everyone was out of work; that was why they had so much time to meet for cocktails and coffee. Film jobs were non-existent because no one went to films anymore. I was an hour deep into a sushi lunch with a producer I’d hoped might hire me when she leaned over and fished her resume out of her bag, flushing a little. “Maybe you’ll have somet
hing for me sometime,” she said, smiling grimly.

  I sent my editing reel to a guy who’d been involved in public television before moving on to commercials. I’d once done him a favor, recommending him to a network executive, and when I didn’t hear back from him I pressed him. “I loved your work,” he said on the phone, without apologizing for his failure to respond. “I don’t get to see that kind of languid beauty anymore.”

  On I went, crossing names off my list, until I reached Javier Fernandez, who’d been my assistant in Briar Neck. I’d given him his first job and taught him how to edit and argued with him about Baz Luhrmann, whose films he worshipped and I thought represented mediocrity with the noise turned up. Javier was now working on a reality TV show about circus performers. It was called American Freaks and best known for the tattooed lady, its star, who was dating a rock musician and often featured in gossip magazines.

  “You finally got around to me,” Javier said on the phone, his tone arch. “I heard you’ve been making the rounds.”

  “I’m looking for work,” I said.

  “And you’re asking me? But you’re the Lark Brossard, muse and manager of the great Lawrence Wheelock, and I’m just little Javier.”

  “You don’t have to be snide,” I said. “I bought you bourbon and taught you AutoCAD.”

  “I’m not being snide,” Javier protested. “I just don’t understand what’s happening here. You’re basically famous in the editing world.”

  “There’s no such thing as famous in the editing world,” I said. “Can you help me?”

  “You hate all spectacle, and this job is basically crafting spectacle.”

  “Knowing Moulin Rouge is unwatchable dreck doesn’t equate to hating all spectacle.”

  On the other end of the line he paused, cleared his throat, making up his mind. “Lark,” he said quietly, “I was always scared of you.”