Dual Citizens

by Alix Ohlin

  The dentist had been having an affair with one of his hygienists, with whom he’d moved to the South Shore. At the time Robin had said No loss.

  I sat back in my chair. She met my eyes now, her red eye verging back to white, her gaze direct and unblinking. I wished I smoked; I would have asked her for a cigarette, or taken one. “You never talk to me about what’s happening here.” In my words I heard an echo of Marianne, a hum of complaint.

  My sister shrugged again.

  “Robin.”

  “You seem to have enough trouble taking care of yourself,” she said. She caught the waitress’s eye and tapped her glass.

  “I’m better now.”

  She looked at me more closely then, as if sizing me up, and then nodded, her manner relaxing slightly. “I’m glad,” she said.

  “What will we do about Marianne?” I asked. “Is she okay?”

  “We won’t do anything. I have things going on, you know. Summer’s the most hectic time at the restaurant. I have my business.”

  “You have a business?”

  “I have a life,” she said, “that’s what I meant.”

  She reminded me so much of our mother in that moment: her quickness to irritation, her insistence on her freedom. I knew she came down to the city regularly to see friends and looked in on Marianne; what annoyed her was to be asked about it, to be drawn into anything except on her own terms.

  She lit another cigarette, and the waitress brought her another beer. The city around us was dressed for a good time, women in bright earrings and high-heeled sandals, men in sharp-angled suits exuding clouds of cologne. Two guys strolled by, one with a boombox on his shoulder, listening to some beats as if he hadn’t been told the eighties had ended long ago. Or maybe they were back again. Across the street a woman sat on a fire escape, trying to coax a kitten into her lap. When it wouldn’t obey she lunged forward, picked it up, and dangled it in the air as if trying to threaten it into good behavior. The kitten was nonplussed, and when she set it back down it licked itself as if nothing had happened.

  I reached over and moved a strand of hair out of Robin’s eye. She smiled at me then, absently, but still a smile. Her hands, I noticed, were weathered and scratched, with bits of red around the nails I’d thought at first were chips of polish but now saw were dried blood. She looked like a wild animal, and later I decided that was exactly what she wanted to be.

  * * *

  —

  I’d chosen the hotel for its low price and not its comforts and I didn’t sleep well. In the morning I read the news at a café, my eyes scanning the same lines over and over, the manifold facts of disaster and want. There was a typhoon in Asia, a volcano eruption in New Zealand. The situation in Syria was worsening. Another chunk of ice had disappeared in Antarctica. After too much reading and too much coffee, my nerves jangling, I walked along Saint Catherine Street, the strip joints and neon-lit bars of my youth mostly subsumed by shopping mall stores. A group of teenage girls wearing short skirts crowded the sidewalk in front of me, each of them making tiny adjustments as they examined themselves in store windows, straightening the fabric over their hips, slouching to hide their breasts or stretching to show them off.

  I stopped and picked up some pastries for Marianne, the chocolatines that were her favorites. Since her breakup with the dentist she’d moved back to our old neighborhood. When I rang the doorbell at her building, there was no answer. At last a man came out and held the door open for me without inquiring who I was.

  The entryway was musty, with a humid seep, the scent of cleaning fluids not quite victorious. Her apartment was on the third floor, facing the back, and when I knocked, I heard noises inside. She came to the door looking confused, as though we hadn’t spoken the day before, as though I hadn’t just rung the bell. She was very thin. She was wearing a blue shirt-dress and holding a feather duster, like a housewife from 1954.

  I kissed her on both cheeks.

  She stepped back to let me in, making no comment. In the past she’d been prone to messiness, draping scarves over the furniture, abandoning her shoes wherever she’d happened to kick them off, but this morning her home was the neatest I’d ever seen it. Not just neat: empty. The living room held a couch and a coffee table and little else. The walls were bare. There were no rugs anywhere. I handed her the box of pastries I’d brought, and she set it down on the coffee table, murmuring polite thanks. “Would you like tea?”

  I said I would. In the kitchen, also neat and spare, I opened the fridge, and when she made a hiss of displeasure, I closed the door, but not before noticing how little food was inside. She pulled down two cups, filled each with water, and put them in the microwave. Once the water was hot she dipped a tea bag in one after the other, and then left it on a small plate by the sink. I arranged the pastries on a plate and followed her back into the living room.

  We sat across from each other with our hands folded in our laps. She didn’t ask me how I was or why I’d come.

  “The last time we spoke, you seemed upset,” I said.

  “Did I? You always overreact. Displays of emotion unnerve you. You get this from your father.”

  This surprised me; she’d very rarely talked about my father, apparently not wanting to admit that I even had one. This more than anything made me worry about her state of mind.

  She tilted her head and eyed me, her expression darkly mischievous. “I used to hear from him, you know,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Your father. Todd.”

  “Really,” I said. I had no reason to believe her. She’d been erratic since my childhood, alternately hurtful and tender according to her own purposes, and I knew better than to trust any revelation that would come from her now. “What did he want?”

  “To know how you were. To be reassured that you hadn’t suffered from his abandonment. I told him you were so special that you didn’t need a father. And this was true. You never did.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ve never understood how special you are, Thérèse.”

  “Who’s Thérèse?” I said.

  “I meant to name you Thérèse. It’s a beautiful, pious name. Your father wanted otherwise.” She shook her head. She’d placed the feather duster on the couch next to her and now she palmed it, fondly, like a pet. “Names are acts of domination, and you and your sister are proof of that. I should never have given in.”

  The conversation was like standing on a boat and watching the shore recede: for a moment, as you watch, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s you or the land that’s moving. All you know is that distance gathers. It had always been like that, with Marianne. There was no point in trying to pin her down. I looked out the window at the bird feeder she’d hung, the presumed site of the squirrel-versus-bird battles. No animals fought there now; maybe she’d chased them all off.

  “Who’s winning the resource war?” I said.

  She looked at me like I was crazy and didn’t answer. We sat for a long time in uncomfortable silence, the chocolatines untouched on the coffee table.

  I searched my brain for something to say. “Let me help you.”

  “Help me with what?” she said suspiciously.

  I looked around at her spotless home. “I can help you clean,” I said.

  At this she brightened. She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made.

  18.

  I stayed in Montreal for a week. Walking around our old neighborhood I recognized no one; the block had shifted, now occupied by sushi places and tea shops and thrift stores with dusty merchandise artfully displayed in the windows. Mrs. Gasparian’s house had been torn down, and in its place was a Mauritian restaurant with no customers. When I was a child this blo
ck had been a universe to me, its borders unknowable, and it was unsettling to see how finite it was, how easily escapable.

  Some days Marianne greeted me with wary diplomacy, like a visitor from a previously hostile nation. Other days she seemed not to react to my presence at all, and began speaking in the middle of a sentence as if picking up a conversation we’d started the day before, although we hadn’t.

  On one of my walks I stopped into an electronics store and bought, impulsively, a small hand-held video camera. The next time I returned to Marianne’s apartment I asked if I could film her. I’d thought she might protest but instead she seemed to preen a little, straightening her shoulders. She left the room and came back with her face powdered, lipstick crookedly applied. Looking at her through the lens, instead of face to face, felt natural to me, and she also seemed to relax. With the camera between us we spoke comfortably, though the conversations were hardly substantial. She talked about Montreal, her neighbors, a newspaper article she’d read about arsenic in rice. I didn’t labor over the composition of the shots or the lighting in the room. In some respects the filming was a pointless exercise—and yet it wasn’t, because it put us both, strangely, at ease.

  On my last morning in Montreal, when I went to her apartment, I found a box of dishes outside her door.

  “I’m giving them away,” she told me when I asked.

  “But what will you eat on?”

  “The table,” she said, as if it were a stupid question.

  “But—”

  “I’m not throwing dinner parties. I’m not that woman. I eat take-out now like everybody else.”

  She stood with her arms on her hips, her chin jutting out, waiting for me to argue with her: she was the same Marianne she’d always been, refusing demands I hadn’t made. I kissed the air next to her cheeks and said goodbye.

  At the hotel I packed my bag, preparing for the flight home. And then, without deliberation or permission, I changed my mind. Instead of heading to the airport I got on a bus and rode north, into the cool air of the Laurentians, where I disembarked at Sainte-Agathe, called my sister, and announced that I’d come to stay.

  * * *

  —

  Robin picked me up in a red truck splattered in mud. Her property, which was forty-five minutes outside of town and down a long dirt road, had once been a farm; it included a small white house and, a few hundred feet away, a weathered barn that used to shelter dairy cows. Inevitably I thought about Wheelock’s farmhouse, and the day he picked me up that first summer; it seemed both recent and forever ago, at once someone else’s life and my own.

  The previous owners of Robin’s property had given up on farming and moved to the city, Robin told me, and when she discovered it, both buildings were almost falling down. “It’s taken some time, but everything is solid now,” she said. I had the impression she’d done the repairs herself, and wondered where she’d learned these skills. There was so much about her adult life that I didn’t know. When I complimented her, she shook her head dismissively, but I could tell she was pleased.

  Her house had a small kitchen and sitting room with a fireplace downstairs, and a warren of small bedrooms upstairs. The one she showed me to was cozy, with a rag rug on the floor. Through the open window came the crackling rupture of trees. My sister extended an arm in the general direction of the view. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “I have things to do.” Before I could ask what those things were, she was gone.

  19.

  I opened my laptop and imported the footage of Marianne. With the volume down I examined the cracked, pale landscape of her face; I watched her lips silently move. She was better at meeting the camera’s eye than she’d ever been at meeting mine. Seeing her this way, present and yet at a remove, was oddly lulling, and I lay down on the bed with her next to me and dozed off. I woke up shivering, with a crick in my neck. Outside was the thin high light of summer, but the breeze through the window carried fall. I could smell food cooking and hear voices, and I pulled on a sweater and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Robin was stirring something in a big pot. With her were two men, one taking a loaf of bread out of the oven, while the second set the table. The table-setter was tall and spindly and bald, with large brown eyes. The combination of his youthful eyes and pocked skin was jarring; he looked like one of those tragic children with an aging disease that makes them accelerate in years. When he saw me, he smiled broadly, revealing brown and jagged teeth, and he came over and wrapped me in a hug that smelled of pine trees and cigarette smoke. The first man, the baker, nodded at me quickly but said nothing; he was staring at the loaf with a critical eye, as if his handiwork had fallen short of expectations.

  “What can I do?” I said.

  Robin nodded toward the cupboard. “Open the wine,” she said.

  I poured glasses for everyone. Robin and the baker drank their wine quickly, taking turns stirring the soup in between going outside to smoke. The door kept banging as they went in or out. Meanwhile they kept shouting back and forth, continuing a conversation that seemed to have been going on for a while—about politics, the rise of ISIS, and conflict in the Middle East. They argued about the Palestinian Authority and the possibility of a two-state solution. The bald man said little and smoked a lot, also going in and out to smoke. “Robin doesn’t like the smell of smoke in the food,” the bald man said to me by way of explanation, though I hadn’t asked for one. Outside it was seven and still light, the sky a strong, variegated blue that extended over the tall pine trees surrounding the house as if the day would last forever. It made me think of Frida Kahlo’s famous blue house in Mexico City, where she’d lived and painted and been confined to her bed, and which I had seen a film about but never visited personally, as with so many things in my life. I remembered in particular the shots of her bed, which had a painting of a dead child at the head, and at the foot a montage of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Engels, and Mao. I wondered how she slept in a bed like that, but then again, given the pain and suffering she endured almost all her life, maybe Kahlo didn’t sleep well anywhere.

  Finally we ate, and talked. At least Robin and one of the men, whose name was Derya, talked, while the bald man and I stayed silent. My sister’s fingernails were livid with dirt, her eyes red-rimmed with fatigue and maybe wine, yet she seemed alert and vibrant, her attention shifting and yet complete wherever it landed—on us, the food, the conversation.

  “So you’re sisters,” Derya said, shoveling soup into his mouth. He gripped his spoon in a fist as if it might slip loose, and bent his head low over the bowl, raising his eyes at me as he ate. I nodded. He looked at her, then me, then back again. “You’re older,” he said.

  “True,” I said.

  “I’m a twin,” he said.

  “You are not,” Robin said.

  “You don’t know this about me, but it’s true.” He sat back in his chair and smeared a napkin across his lips, then patted his belly, as if complimenting it on a job well done. “It was in the womb. At the beginning of my mother’s pregnancy there were two of us. And then one day my mother went in to the doctor and the other one was gone.” He bared his teeth, grinning. Robin was shaking her head. “The doctor said I consumed him. So he’s inside me now.”

  “You seem proud of it,” I said.

  “You always eat too much,” my sister said.

  “I’m a man of appetites,” he answered.

  The light had gone. Preoccupied with the conversation, I didn’t notice night arriving until all of a sudden a series of cries arose outside, in thin pained whistles, like babies abandoned or sick, and a shiver rippled across my skin, raising the hair on my arms. No one else reacted.

  “What’s that?” I said, and my sister answered calmly, “The wolves.”

  * * *

  —

  We ate dessert and drank coffee while t
he wolves howled. No one but me seemed to pay them any mind. I couldn’t stop imagining a pack of them roaming ever closer, drawn to the smell of food. Their cries were harmonic and irregular, slowing to periodic silence and then resuming, like choral singers engaged in a round. Each time I thought they’d finished, they started over, the ghostly music distant and then closer and then distant again.

  The two men went out to smoke. The open kitchen windows let in the cigarette smoke along with the cool evening air. Outside, the baker laughed, whether at us or something else, I couldn’t tell. Robin shifted in her seat, her mouth a flat gash of purple, and I thought she expected me to explain myself, my abrupt visit.

  “I wanted—” I said, then noticed her fish a cigarette out of her pack, tapping it on the table, ready to head outside. The two men came back in, and I stopped talking; I hadn’t really known what I was going to say anyway. I began clearing the dessert dishes, and the quiet man reached out a hand. Backing away from the table, I shook my head that I didn’t need help, and we jostled against each other. Two plates dropped to the floor and broke. In a mess of apologies we both crouched down and began picking up the pieces, piling the shards on the table. For one quick moment, down by the floor, he held my right hand in his. “It’s all right,” he said mildly. His eyes were wide and familiar, and at last I knew him: Bernard.

  * * *

  —

  The next day Robin took me on a tour. The soft late-summer morning was still and dense. Drowsy, laconic birdsong, branches barely moving, the lax contours of clouds. At her suggestion we patrolled her land in the pickup truck, at times veering off the road onto dirt roads or no roads at all. As she drove, she explained: the wolves we’d heard the previous night weren’t exactly wild—they were rescues. Of all her property Robin only occupied a tenth; the rest she’d designated as a preserve. Three different grey wolf packs lived there, separated by sturdy wire fencing to keep the peace among them, as well as foxes, bobcats, falcons, and other birds of prey. The packs were small, three or four each; when I looked surprised, she explained that they howled in varying pitches to make it sound as if there were more of them. She talked about how wolves required large territories, because they were travelers by nature and needed to move, and about their unearned reputation for violence.