Was this why Dad had given us the gun when we turned ten?
Dad had known what we hadn’t yet, what we were still learning, that men would always pursue us, then blame us and claim we had been the ones to lure them in.
We argued about the gun more than we fought about anything. We didn’t agree whether we should have taken his gift or not, almost half our lifetime ago, if it was an abomination or a necessary evil. The one who had packed the rifle that day asked, “What would you have done without me? Play ukulele to scare that creep away?”
“I never intend to be without you,” came the reply.
We emerged from the pond, shaken. We posed like another painting we had seen in art history class, in which the goddess of the hunt turns a spy into a stag, predator into prey. Then we made our way back to campus, shoving every prickly bush and limb clear out of our way.
Many of us sophomores had secrets. We had sworn we would keep ours from everyone except each other, but it became more and more difficult. Our father had killed his father. When our secret leaked out to a few friends, we pretended that killing was a metaphor.
Some of us had other secrets, and it took us twins more than a year or two to wrest these confessions from our classmates:
“I can’t stand for anyone to touch me after what happened. Not even to cut my hair.”
“I still can’t remember how I landed behind a Dumpster in an alley, my hair tangled up with pine needles.”
“I stole my mother’s pain pills and sold them on the street.”
“I have a learning disability.”
“I have generalized anxiety disorder and have self-medicated with every household cleaning product in the grocery store.”
“My father thinks he is the boss of the world.”
“I throw up after every meal.”
“I believe in witches, and I think you are one.”
“I still wet the bed.”
“I have supernatural musical abilities.”
“I turned a Peeping Tom into a stag.”
“I am the goddess of the hunt.”
Our boyfriends shared, too. They said that back in high school Colson had tried to kill himself with pills. Sebastian had helped him learn to meditate and counter dark thoughts with a runner’s high. Colson had promised he would never try again, and he and Sebastian had semicolons inked on their palms, reminding them to “pause but never come to a full stop.”
We loved them, of course, even more for their secrets. We never thought, though, that others could love us more for ours.
Some sophomores, we learned, had left behind a little brother who cried until their parents bought him a puppy to replace them. We had left behind a mother who might be eaten up by a lion escaped from the zoo. Or a moose.
We felt guilty for having chosen our life over hers, and we used up a whole box of tissues when we watched movies about mothers and daughters. We hugged at every good-bye, even when our new friends were only driving home for Thanksgiving and we were staying in the dorm with the international students and orphans. We cried at every little thing but not at what we should have. Not when we had left home. We covered our faces with our hands when the Tigers didn’t make the playoffs and sobbed when our goldfish went belly-up.
We took the same classes whenever we could, but we were starting to hate it when our professors couldn’t tell us apart. We read each other’s essays and said, “This is terrible,” whenever we thought, This is better than mine.
We sometimes crept into bed next to each other at night and lay silent, shining the light of our phones in our eyes, displaying the list of messages from Dad, which we never answered. The subject lines read: “hi,” then “call me,” then “urgent.” They progressed to “where R U?” to “R U dead?” Sometimes they wooed: “I have a present for you.” “I forgot to tell you something important.” They could be desperate: “PLZ PLZ PLZ.” Or “Call!” with an infinity of exclamation points. Finally, simply, “I am your father.” Darth Vader’s voice echoed off the letters.
We kept expecting him to barge in one day, appear at our door, or even jiggle the lock with a pocketknife and let himself in. He could do anything, we still secretly believed (and even almost hoped, more secretly still). So if he didn’t break into our dorm room or our apartment, we figured, his demands to see us must be all bluster.
We deleted the messages, unread. One of us even blocked his number from her phone. The other one yearned to respond when he begged to see us again. Hadn’t we punished him enough? He couldn’t hurt us anymore. But she told herself: Next time. Just give my sister time.
28
In the middle of junior year, we switched beds.
We had seen this plot on sitcoms: Twins trick boyfriends. Lesson of the episode: Young women, just as you thought, are interchangeable. Dime a dozen? They give themselves away for free.
We would prove the cliché wrong. We would change the ending to this: if even identical twins are distinct, think again before you lump all girls together.
We each had our own room in the house we had shared with two other girls since the summer after freshman year. Colson and Sebastian stayed over often. Why not play a little game with them? That night we entered the bathroom together in our sleep clothes—Paula in an oversize band T-shirt long enough to be a minidress and Artis in a cotton camisole and fuzzy Batman bottoms. We emerged, Paula in the cami and fuzz, Artis in the tee—to see if our boyfriends could tell us apart.
We slipped into bed. Wrapped our bellies around our sister’s boyfriend’s back. Turned off the lights, waited for these boys to notice the slight change in the indent of our hips, the difference in the smells behind our ears, the length of our fingernails, the heat of our breaths. We thought we would last, without detection, five minutes, tops.
Not all night.
Our bedrooms were separated by a thin plaster wall. We listened for thumping from the other side. The sound we had thought was jumping on the bed, when we had heard it from our parents’ room, when we were small. Our sister wouldn’t go that far, would she, just to prove a point? We had only meant to stay in the game until our boys recognized us for who we were.
But what if we married Sebastian and Colson? We would never know what it was like to be with another boy after him. This might be our only chance.
What if our boyfriends found out? But they wouldn’t. Look how clueless they were.
She was probably doing it. Why shouldn’t we? We didn’t want to know about it, though.
We heard animal noises through our window screens, but maybe it was the sound of skunks in heat or toms on the prowl. We heard moaning, which sounded like dreaming. We felt something, too. A current. A cupping palm, a thrusting hip, a wandering fingertip. Maybe just a reverie, the imagined pleasure of the other. We turned over on our sides and opened wide, careful not to squeak the springs.
We were as bad as Dad, weren’t we? My God. Cheating was too easy. We hadn’t meant to. Maybe he hadn’t, either.
Our boys traced their fingers over the birthmarks and scars we didn’t share. They cupped our bellies, one sinewy, the other supple. But they didn’t say they could tell the difference. They didn’t say a thing. The trick was on us.
Our eyes wouldn’t close. The night was like day, but we stayed still anyway, careful not to wake the house. Good was like bad. Fast was like slow. We wanted to do it again, but we also wanted to bust our own butts. We lay in the beds we had made for ourselves, only half understanding what we had just done.
Maybe we had really switched, as we had back when we were little and thought we were witches. Maybe we were, then and now.
The next morning, as always, we ran before dawn. The boys woke when we returned, our tiny clingy shorts damp with sweat.
“How did you sleep?” they asked.
We hadn’t slept. Keeping our bodies apart from theirs on such narrow beds required too much care, hour after hour, through a night as dark as the dark side we hadn’t known we had.
But we couldn’t tell them that, so we turned our heads. Not away from our boys, but from each other. We kept turning, too, every day, this new distance invisible to anyone but us.
Were they really that unaware? Had they sleepwalked through sex? Or pretended to be fooled, enjoying the temporary trade? We would never know. No way we would ever ask.
We divvied up our skirts and shirts. Mine. Yours. No more common drawers.
At breakfast, we plugged in earbuds and ignored each other. The wind chilled. Ice cream would not have melted, had we held it in our laps for days. The wind groaned through the cracks around the front door.
We played a regular gig at the Crypt, an open mic in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel on campus, Paula’s mermaid voice floating over her riffs on guitar or violin, Artis the muscle of rhythm on electric bass or cello, sometimes forgetting to plug in, though no one ever noticed if she did. No one would have noticed if she hadn’t shown up at all, but we both pretended we didn’t know that.
We returned from runs only as the dark evaporated into pink on the horizon. One of us wanted to join track, but the other said we didn’t have time if we wanted to keep writing songs. Wasn’t running every morning enough? Or too much.
“You don’t have to go with me.”
“It’s safer with two.” We both knew one was the scariest number.
We couldn’t agree on one focus, so we double-majored in music and environmental science. Outside class, we were either practicing with our band, with the string quartet led by Mr. Hadadd’s old professor, or plugging numbers into a database for our work-study job for a meteorology professor.
The numbers were grim. “In ten years,” our professor said, “the planet could reach a crucial threshold, causing drought, wildfires, and floods. Blizzards and hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes could all become as commonplace as summer thundershowers. We’re two-thirds of the way there.”
Ten years was half our entire lives. The time stretched out long in front of us, like an early morning shadow. Our boyfriends said we should change the name of our band to Weather Women.
Staver met Mom and Ya-Ya many times. Their family lived in the Metro area, too, so it was easy to hitch a ride home with them. We always chose a day Dad would be away on a hunting trip. The logistics were easy. He was gone more and more. Ya-Ya was sick, so we visited her whenever we could. Not just her body but her brain had slowed, which is why Staver wasn’t offended when she didn’t address them as “them.”
“That’s not the right word,” she said. “I don’t speak perfect, but I have good enough English to know that.”
Ya-Ya complimented Staver’s dresses as much as their ties and tucked-in shirts. Sometimes she got confused by the attire and thought they were two different people. That made Staver sway their hips and puff out their flat chest. “Two at least.”
No wonder we could sit in easy silence on those road trips together. No need to explain our own odd equations.
On Christmas break, our boys met our girls—first Mom, then Ya-Ya. As soon as we walked in, Mom handed us babies and asked us to spoon mashed overripe bananas and pulverized rice into their gummy mouths. Our boys were better at care and feeding than we were, which should have made us proud, but it scared us instead. Because we worried that our mother-parts were defective? Because we wondered if our sweethearts were really boys after all? Even years later, we still couldn’t put that shuddery jolt into words.
“Good workers,” Mom said as we left. Her highest praise. We were back in the car before we realized she’d been giving them a test.
“A package deal,” Ya-Ya said, when she first met them. “Just like you two.”
We cringed to hear her say those words, so unromantic, so transactional. And yet. She was still sharp.
In our boys’ shared car, we drove to their hometown, halfway between Up North and Down State, two hours up from the city. It was spring break, the cherry blossoms not yet in bloom, and dark, short days lingering like phlegm that can’t be cleared from the throat. Every year longer winters, weirder weather.
We met Colson’s parents for lunch, Sebastian’s for dinner. Colson’s father, a cardiologist with big ears, invited us to stay in his country house some summer. In Martha’s Vineyard. “Isn’t that expensive?” we said, and the parents laughed. We stared at our scuffed boots, thrift store beaded sweaters pilling under the arms, and socks woven with pictures of pizza slices with wings.
Colson and Sebastian wore khakis and polos when they visited their parents, leaving their usual black clothes and skinny jeans, their piercings and hair gel and snarky T-shirts out of their parents’ view. It had never occurred to us that it was possible to show a different side to your parents than you showed to everyone else, to reserve a private part of yourself they couldn’t mess with.
Colson’s mother, a high school English teacher with a radio voice, asked if we could read each other’s minds. We waited for the sly smile to creep up her face, telling us she was joking, of course, and there it was. People always were joking when they asked this question.
We didn’t tell her that when we were little, we said we could do mind tricks. That we could predict what card our sister picked but that we hadn’t tried it since then. We had been too good at it. The only witches people want to hear about are the ones in children’s books, the ones we all love to hate.
She asked if Colson had met our family. We told her both our boyfriends had met our mom.
“And your dad?”
“He’s always out of town when we come home.” We didn’t have to say we planned it that way.
We had been eating with them more and more. Fancy meals like we had never had at home. Truffle deviled duck eggs. Brick oven pizza with goat cheese and capers. Their houses had names, like “colonial” or “split-level.” They had separate rooms for playing piano and watching TV. They never stormed around or banged cymbals in the basement. They called the basement “the rec room.” They folded their napkins into swans and kept the music low enough to talk over. “We want to adopt your parents,” we told Colson and Sebastian after one of our meals.
“You don’t know them,” they said. “I bet we’d think your dad’s cool, if you’d let us meet him.”
“You want to?”
“Of course,” they both said at exactly the same time.
“Jinx! Pinky links!” We took a hand from each and entwined the little fingers.
They didn’t squirm at each other’s touch. They grabbed each other’s hands and squeezed, in public, boy to boy. That made us love them even more.
What could Dad do to us in front of our boyfriends? We could always leave the house and jump into the car.
So we planned a reunion. A homecoming. If home meant not where you came from but who. We would bring our boys for dinner, just one meal, we said. No other contact. Mom found a weekend when Dad would be home. “Not easy as peas,” Ya-Ya said.
One of us packed a present for Dad, without telling the other she had. A CD she knew he would groove to. She had also written him a song she planned to sing to him in person. She kept staring at herself in the mirror, practicing a soft gaze, a tender smile. The other just tried to forget she had agreed to such a stupid thing.
That Saturday we drove with our boyfriends to the city early enough to take Ya-Ya to the Greek festival first. Every week was a different country’s cuisine on the Detroit River. They called it the Ethnic Festival, which now sounded like something we would study in an anthropology class.
We wore band T-shirts, neon Converse, and headbands holding up messy buns. We drew cat eyes but left our lips bare. Colson and Sebastian wore tight ironic T-shirts we had picked out for them and black thumbnails they had let us paint. We slurped flaming cheese drizzled with lemon. Scooped up orzo with feta and olives. Tore into lamb with rosemary and mint. A bearded man in a cloak paced the length of the river, shouting out the Greek alphabet. He looked like the same one we had seen on campus the day Mr. Haddad had taken us for a to
ur. We thought, for the first time, that maybe Detroit wasn’t so different from Ann Arbor.
Then we saw Dad. He was smaller than we remembered. Thinner maybe, but not exactly physically. Off kilter, assuming he’d ever been on. But unmistakably him, the fire still sizzling at his fingertips. What we noticed most, though, was the way he was standing with his arms around the bare shoulders of a woman much plumper than Mom. We could see only enough to tell that her hair gleamed with diamond light.
Ya-Ya didn’t see them, and we whisked her away before she did. We didn’t want her to make a scene like she had that time at the shoe department at Penney’s.
He wasn’t supposed to be back in the city yet, we said to each other with our jutting chins. Mom had said he’d be out hunting until dinnertime. Hunting what, she hadn’t said.
After we dropped Ya-Ya back at her house, we went home to tell Mom what we had seen. Let the first time our boyfriends met Dad be the day that Mom left him.
But she didn’t. Instead, she swirled a spoon in her coffee and said, “Of course women love him.”
We dropped our own spoons at the same time. Our boyfriends chewed their lips.
“That’s all you have to say?” we demanded. “It’s always the woman’s fault?”
“He’s not an ordinary man. And he gives me what I need.”
Here we had to stop her. We didn’t want to know any more about our parents’ sex lives. We knew too much already, having grown up in this small house with thin walls.
Dad was not too big to fall. Like some kind of god.
We’d show him.
We changed our plans and piled into the car. Dad could wait. Let him stew. Let him guess we had found him out and decided to punish him. Somebody needed to. We blasted the music, bass amped to ten, and fled.
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