Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  The tow truck was better than a job on some shitty factory floor. He was his own boss. An entrepreneur. Mom didn’t need to drive, since her daycare babies came to her. He said all this in the smoothest voice, the one he used to make her purr. He sat next to her while we pretended to do our homework. He stroked her pulse point under the ear, and she closed her eyes and sucked in her lips. He cupped her chin, stroked her down to the clavicle. She said, “Mmmm . . .” He pushed his chair closer and lifted her legs over his knees. She leaned into him, now soft as rain.

  But in the darkest part of the night, once we all lay in bed, we heard him say, loud as hail, “I can’t take it back.

  Dad took us for rides through blizzards, when no one else dared venture out. “Now you know why I love Alaska,” he said as we sped over dirt roads and asphalt, concrete and slippery side streets. “This is like riding on the back of a moose.” Between customers, he taught us how to shift gears and steer, how to pump brakes on ice and always check our blind spots.

  The tow truck was the Batmobile and Santa’s sleigh. In it we flew through the thickest, stickiest weather. We dredged up flimsy cars and even 4 × 4s fallen into ditches. We pulled and salvaged poor schmucks begging for help.

  We felt sorry for them—a mother with a toddler whose car had given up the ghost on the roadside. We berated them mercilessly. “Oh, help me, Moose! I drove too fast and went in the ditch!”

  Moose Tows made money, too, while it lasted—before Dad’s road rage turned his customers away. Enough to treat us and Rex to burgers and fries at the drive-through. Enough, apparently, to buy fried chicken for strangers.

  In other words, too much.

  We stared so long we burnt the whole tray.

  Dad and a boy, all gangly limbs like an octopus, had appeared in the dining room at Downriver Chik-N. We hid in the kitchen, where we could watch without being watched. Dad must have forgotten we worked here full time now, the summer before senior year.

  They ordered biscuits. The cashier said they would have to wait for the next batch.

  “You burn them, you buy them,” our boss told us, dumping into the trash our once-tender lumps turned hard.

  They ordered chicken, too. We watched them lick and suck. Fingers, bone, and skin. Extra-crispy and spicy, every last cranny, their tongues and lips so loud they drowned out the crackling of the deep-fry fat, all the way back in the kitchen. We swore we heard them lick each other’s fingers, but now, half our lives later, we couldn’t be sure that was true.

  “Who’s the kid?” we asked each other. His big eyes and sharp chin looked familiar. His face, statue smooth, unmarred by even a minor infestation of acne. With such clear skin, he should have been in a movie. Maybe he was. Yes, that must be where we had seen him before. On the big or small screen, in a magazine—that’s what we wanted to believe.

  He was more our age than Dad’s. Should have been our friend, not his. If that’s what he was.

  He wore Dad’s baseball cap backwards. His favorite, the one he never let us wear, with a cartoon of a moose.

  Dad was smooth shaven, biceps glistening, his white wifebeater pocked with sweat. He was slimmer, more boyish than we had ever seen. He paid for Octopus’s food. Our lunch was always deducted from our paychecks.

  We wiped our own sweat from our hairnets and pulled up the sagging elastic-waist pants of our brown polyester uniforms.

  Their arms brushed each other’s. The boy hovered closer to Dad than he should have. Not that middle-aged guys didn’t try to sidle up to us. All the time. Sugar leeched out of our gum and left our tongues dry.

  Dad could be bi. We had thought we were too, at twelve. Sometimes still did. Just because we hadn’t heard about him having affairs after Pixie didn’t mean he wasn’t.

  Maybe Octopus Boy was Octopus Man. People often said our friend Haley’s mom looked like she was her sister.

  We held our stomachs to keep the food from rising up. The buzzer rang, and we pulled the new biscuits from the oven. The cashier offered them to Dad and Octopus Boy, who sat in a corner next to the window. Steam floated from plates. They buttered for each other, even dripped the same honey pouch and licked their fingers, then bit into the flesh of the flaky food we had baked.

  It seemed illicit, watching them. Like hovering over a first date, unseen. Listening to someone talking in his sleep, spilling the name of a bad crush—a teacher or best friend’s boyfriend. Eavesdropping on a stranger vomiting her dinner into a plastic bag as you walked by her car. Looking through the trees when someone squatted in the woods. There are things we avert our eyes to. Or should.

  That night we told Mom we had seen Dad with a teen at Downriver Chik-N. She was boiling water for pasta, dangling her face over the hot pot to open pores. She didn’t turn around when we started to talk.

  “Must be helping with odd jobs,” she said, into the steam.

  “How odd?” we asked.

  Nothing.

  Then we hovered on each side of her and repeated our question. Maybe she just hadn’t heard us before.

  Her only response was to lower her face so far we thought she might jump in.

  23

  At sixteen, we had been old enough to take care of ourselves. Old enough to drive. Old enough to marry. Old enough to have kids. Old enough to quit school. Old enough to do all the things our own parents had done at that age.

  Even old enough to choose not to.

  Now that we were almost twice that age, we finally saw how young we had been. What babies we were when we started turning our backs on Dad, what unformed things when we had decided we already knew enough. Now we were sure of less and less, each minute we lingered here in the funeral snow.

  That’s what one of us said, with her eyes. The other just spoke with a single middle finger.

  The clouds yawned. Sparks crackled from the sky and tingled our lungs as we breathed them in.

  We were old enough and smart enough now not to try to punch the brick church wall we leaned against. Instead we dug a hole in the snow with our boots and punched the frozen grass. The earth puckered for a moment, then settled into an indent the shape of our fists. We were finally as strong as Dad. We could tell because the dents we left were now as big as his.

  24

  We gave each other back massages and foot rubs. We nitpicked each other’s hair and cascaded it into fish tails, double-Dutch braids, and French twists. We knocked knees and locked hips, offered fist bumps and high fives. We pulled out our sister’s splinters and painted her nails, black with gold tips. We were girls, so we were allowed to touch. The boys at school stiffened next to each other, swayed to opposite sides, even if they were brothers.

  But touching each other felt too much like touching ourselves. What we needed was a foreign body. Preferably with a fringe of stubble on his chin and a curve in his spine like a question mark.

  “You’re so lucky,” people told us. “You never have to be lonely. You always have each other.”

  How could we make them understand? That the two of us together only made one whole person. That they, the singletons, were the lucky ones. They never split in half.

  We longed for someone we hadn’t yet met. Someone we couldn’t share with our twin but still had to. The calculus was too complicated. So we shrouded ourselves in oversized hoodies and pretended not to look at boys.

  Yet the crushes came. On the boy we called Superhero because he drew comics of giant insects with special powers. The one we called Hair, who sang in the high school musical dressed in drag. Weatherman, who looked like an emo version of a TV meteorologist. Two came backstage on talent night after we played, a sprinkle of stubble on their chins, just the faintest hint of manhood. One: hair pulled back, except for a wayward curl across the forehead. The same band shirt we loved to wear to bed, with nothing but our tiny panties. The other: a suit, his signature look, paired with a form-fitting black T-shirt and red high-tops. These boys gifted us with M&M’s, then watched us bite into the green ones.


  We watched them chew the reds with their sharp canines. We all sucked the other colors, warm chocolate busting from the shell and sliding down our throats. Blood rushed around in all the right places. Our breath steamed in front of our hands. We reached for more candy, and our short tops slid up, exposing slivers of belly—one hard, one tender. We followed the boys’ eyes as they chose which one they wanted.

  We loved the smell of their skin, briny the way we imagined ocean air, though we had only ever been to freshwater lakes. We loved the oily musk of their hair, the branches of their bodies dangling off chairs, the way they flexed their fingers over pens, ferocious and focused. We loved the look of their shoulders and clavicles and eyebrows, but we didn’t love these boys. How could we? They didn’t know our secrets. We didn’t know theirs. We twins were so inseparable, it was impossible to be alone with a boy long enough to call him our boyfriend.

  Weatherman and Superhero didn’t care. “Call us whatever you want,” they said. “Just don’t stop doing what you’re doing.”

  By that time, junior year, we were hooking up. In the janitor’s closet, a sub shop restroom or alley, behind the lilac bush in the schoolyard, we bit our lips to squelch the sound of release. Buttons, zippers, panties, bras, jock straps slipped off under bleachers and dark viaducts.

  We weren’t the Slutty Twins anymore, we told ourselves. We had held back so long. We weren’t going all the way. We were just playing around. Conducting an experiment, to see if we could separate, a few moments at a time, from our twin.

  We coupled off, but only for a few minutes, the time it took to walk home from school. We kissed, we rubbed, we stroked. We could say stop and go, yes and no. Until we didn’t.

  We were so smart. We weren’t having sex yet. That’s what we said.

  No one had warned us how easy it could be to slip from hands and lips to thrusting hips. We had been told to stay in control. That we could choose which body parts we wanted where, border police blocking prospective immigrants. No one told us what to do if we wanted to let them in. To prove we were human, not Artemis and Apollo. Not a family with secrets so awful we couldn’t have sleepovers and wear short shorts when Mom was afraid the neighbors might see our bruises.

  So one day, on the way home from school, one of us took a detour. One of us let her boy lead her up the porch steps, through the door, down the hallway to his room. No time for slipping under the covers. No time like the present. Did he really say that, in his perfect-mimic weatherman voice, even though he was wearing soccer shorts, for a change, that showed off his bulging cross-country runner’s thighs? That day, sun bright, shades pulled, one of us could not help saying yes. Right there, just like that, yes, don’t stop. Just be gentle, it only hurts a little. No, it’s OK. Yes, my first time. What are you doing? Don’t be a tease. Like that. A little slower. Yes. Oh yesssssss. The sound of air whistling out of a tire. The inability to move, even lift a chin from the pillow. My sister, though. My sister will worry. Gotta go.

  Only at dinner, looking at Mom over the top of a glass of milk, did we wonder if this was how it happened before we were born. If this was how we were conceived, on a walk home from high school. If we were why she had never finished.

  But we weren’t her. She didn’t even know we were here, on our way to a tour of the University of Michigan. We didn’t tell her, because we didn’t want her to say we didn’t have enough money, with a second mortgage on the house and the tow truck business tanking.

  It was the fall of senior year when Mr. Haddad, our orchestra teacher, took us for a ride. We twins sat in the backseat in turtlenecks and ballerina buns. We didn’t wear his hat or let our arms swish against him. We didn’t want to be like Octopus. To have people think we were letting an old man take advantage of us. You never knew who was watching.

  Our teacher couldn’t believe we had never been to a college campus before. No one in our family believed in college, we explained. He laughed at that. “It exists,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  We meant we didn’t think college was for people like us, we said, people whose dad drove a truck, whose mom let her daycare money disappear almost as soon as she was paid. We couldn’t even afford the application fees.

  We were new to Ann Arbor, too. After forty-five minutes in Mr. Haddad’s purple Ford Focus, we arrived at an alternate universe filled with people like us. We didn’t know yet what that meant.

  College students spilled out onto the Diag, the convergence of three sidewalks surrounded by grass. Some of them lounged outside UGLI, the undergrad library. Some students talked philosophy. Some spoke foreign languages. Some smoked hash, and no one snitched. Some of them stared at a man who paced, reciting the Greek alphabet. Some gathered around the art museum, playing jaw harps or guitars. We leaned toward them, magnetized. “You should have brought your instruments,” our teacher said.

  The bell tower caroled the hour. We passed the Women’s League and the Student Union, ivy covered. Trees and shaded benches. Mr. Hadadd pointed out the Calder statue. Some of the students danced around it. We had never seen anything like it before. The dancing or the statue, which seemed to dance, too. We sisters held hands and shimmied with each other.

  Some of the students sang in acapella groups. We joined in. No one laughed at us, as they would have in high school.

  “Still think college is not for people like you?” Mr. Hadadd asked.

  We belted out the next tune, hitting each high note.

  He had arranged for us to sit in on a strings class taught by his former professor. Why he did us these favors, we tried not to wonder. He didn’t stare at the skin on our arms, up our shoulders, or all the way down our necks. He ignored our freshly shaved bare legs under sunny yellow skirts.

  In the classroom, the professor breathed fire, and the music broiled. We loved Mr. Hadadd, but his class was nothing like this. Trills and staccato, loud gashes of vibrato. Fingers swept from one octave to the next without bridges between. We could feel the bows stroking our bellies, almost. We were the cellos. Basses, violas, violins. We were catgut and horsehair, the trees from which the wood was carved. The varnish that made it all shine. The music became us. We belonged here.

  At the end of class, Mr. Hadadd introduced us to his old professor. “My two best students,” he said.

  We didn’t think of ourselves that way. Dad always said we weren’t like other people, but now we were too old to believe in the tales he told. Our blip of YouTube fame felt like something he had conjured up, too. Since then, we had sensed our power leaking from our bodies like our monthly menses. We didn’t know there was anywhere we could go to replenish it again.

  Now we knew. This was home.

  Back in the Focus, Mr. Hadadd told us to quit our jobs and concentrate on schoolwork for our senior year. If we kept up our grades, we would be accepted, he said. Without a job, though, how would we pay?

  “Financial aid,” he said. The two most beautiful words.

  We always menstruated in sync, but then, one day, one of us missed. We watched the plus sign materialize on the pink stick stained with pee, and now we knew: We were women. Human. Because this is what women can do: We carry bodies in our bodies. Clusters of cells, multiplying. We generate, procreate.

  Mom made a plan right away, that night, never so quick and sure, never willing before to hide something from Dad. Her little body could not possibly hold all that adrenaline. Usually, it was filled with what she called “nerves,” but this was the opposite. No finger biting or feet jiggling, just minimal movement, Here, here, here, let’s get this done. Her beauty mark pulsed with energy. She called her Sunflower clients to say she would be closed the next day. Family emergency. Then Ya-Ya: Could she borrow the car in the morning? A birthday surprise, please don’t tell Moose.

  So late, yet Dad had still not come home. She admitted, for the first time, she didn’t know where he was, where he always went. Just as well. For once, she didn’t pace and peer out the window, a little dance she never
seemed to know she was doing. That night, she tucked us in like invalids, but we didn’t mind. She said, “Go to sleep, my two eyes and ears.” With those words, we were five again. This time, though, could it be that she was the one trying to protect us?

  In the morning, Mom tiptoed out of bed, not waking Dad. She lent us her cardigan sweaters and sensible shoes and pulled her hair into a tidy twist. She drove us to a clinic she found through a secret social media group and shielded us from gun-toters shouting us down on our way to the front door. Inside, she prepaid for the procedure with a stack of twenty-dollar bills from her customers. In a boxlike, stuffy medical room, one of us bristled at a shot of local anesthesia, swallowed a pill, and waited. Later, once she returned from the bathroom, we all could tell the other body inside her was gone.

  She was deflated but also lighter. Smaller, though she would never be as small as she had once been. There was no undoing this. She would not let it undo her. And yet. Her lungs collapsed with each breath, her feet too heavy to lift.

  “You deserve to make decisions about your own body,” Mom said once we had returned home. This from the woman who made animal sounds behind the closed bedroom door at night, the back of her neck scratched up by morning, as if from a cat we didn’t have.

  Her voice, from years ago, echoed in our heads, back when Dad weighed her on the bathroom scale and said she was not as small as she once had been: I was sixteen going on twelve. What did you expect? Our age when she had married him.

  Mom knew what to do. She threw her receipt in the clinic’s trash can. But at home, Dad saw the pain pills and asked what they were for. She said, “Appendicitis.”

  We, though, were careless. We left the post-procedure instructions on the table next to our beds. Dad found them and said, “I should have your tubes tied. You know, they do that with dogs.”

  Later, at dinner, forks scraped plates. Glasses spilled and no one bothered to wipe up the mess. Mom said nothing. All we could do was tap each other’s thighs and breathe in sync.