by Rachel Hulin
“You know, I had a twin who died. I think about him a lot.”
This was a strange statement to make, as Jane did in fact have a twin, a brother. But he was very much alive. Perhaps he was a professor at a state school in Connecticut. Perhaps they were very close.
As soon as she uttered this made-up lie, Jane realized she had entered uncomfortable territory and started to rescind it. “Just kidding!” she was sure she was about to exclaim, and order them another round as an apology for her silliness.
But the crush spoke first, leaning in, eyes wide, bright with something like excitement, with new interest in her, an extreme intensity.
“I had a twin who died, too! That’s crazy! What are the odds?! He had leukemia. We were ten.”
And then she was stuck.
And REALLY. Was this all her fault? Because what WERE the odds???
Jane moved in with the crush soon after this incident, their bond strengthened by their mutual truths, which they had never told anyone else in the city. They spoke about their twins often. It was why he loved her, and the only reason they had a real future together.
Jane was very very anxious about this.
THE END.
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Hey Matilda,
So I take it you’re Jane Doe. This is pretty intense, even for you.
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Harry,
I know. Jane’s been practicing a lot of deep breathing and self-medicating. It’s been almost a year since that night and the situation is becoming a touch suffocating. I don’t know how to help her. Do you have any ideas?
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Matilda,
Aren’t you bringing this guy home for the holidays? This is going to be a shit show. Why would you say I had died? That’s really super disturbing, Matilda.
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Harry,
You’ll act as my cousin who is very close to the family! It will be OK, he won’t need to know.
I don’t know why I said it, Harry.
Don’t things ever just come out of your mouth like a surprise? Like you’re writing the novel of your life as you live it—narrating the present, as you just told me to do?!
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Matilda,
I save the fiction for my fiction, Matilda. Don’t twist my words.
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Harry,
I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I told you I was worried about telling you. But you don’t have to take it so personally.
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Matilda,
What if this relationship doesn’t end as I predicted? You’re going to keep my existence a secret forever?
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Harry,
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
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Matilda,
You will cross that bridge. You can leave me out of your games.
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Harry,
There was a tub of holiday popcorn in the dentist’s waiting area today. What is wrong with people, they just WANT you to fail? Caramel, Harry!
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Matilda,
I’m not in the mood.
Here’s the deal: You either need to tell your boyfriend the truth, or break up with him. Either way, you should go back to therapy. I feel like you’ve sort of upped the ante here. This can’t conceivably end well with him, aside from my own irritation.
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Harry,
Therapy continues to cost money. I’m OK. I can never tell him. And who breaks up with someone they have a dead twin connection with?? Don’t be crazy. I’d rather convince everyone ELSE I have a twin who died. Maybe we were triplets?
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Matilda,
No. Just suck it up and admit what you did.
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Harry,
I feel like there’s a way to avoid that particular path.
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Matilda,
You’re physically unable to admit fault. Your father’s child.
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Harry,
That’s not true! I feel faulty all the time!
I mean, am I even a good person? Often my first instinct is not the moral or ethical choice, and very often I go through with it. I once stole lip gloss from my best friend, Harry—and then COVERED IT UP. I was twelve. Maybe I’m bad to the core.
I think I should make a list.
GOOD:
• Organ donor
• Empathy (I feel terrible for people in unfortunate situations.)
• Kind to parents (mostly)
• Good listener for friends
• Door holder
• Smiler at strangers
• Bag own groceries
• Always tip 20% even when broke
BAD:
• Can’t make eye contact with elderly animals or humans (too sad)
• Sometimes go on Match.com just to see who else is out there (just to shop a little)
• If I do something bad, my first instinct is to obscure the truth. (When I ate a chunk of our fifth-birthday cake I blamed it on the dog.)
• I pee in pools. (But so does everyone.)
• If I drop a napkin and no one is there to see, is it littering?
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Matilda,
At least you are trying to be honest with yourself and are working to be a better person. Though—notice that you qualified every statement on your “Bad” list. Just own your badness, I think.
But you shouldn’t fucking litter.
You’re not the only one grappling with self-doubt; I’ve been at a creative standstill the last few weeks. I’m doing a lot of staring at my typewriter and blank piece of paper.
It seems the more I want to make things, the less I am able to. I really need to publish something in the next year. Anything. Preferably two things, in a well-respected journal or magazine.
When I want to write, I find I can’t even read. It’s truly paralyzing.
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Harry:
1. Write on a computer like a real person, you dolt. Don’t be so romantical.
2. Hole up with some Shackleton documentaries. There’s nothing like Shackleton to give you a little perspective. That guy had it way worse than you. And you can relate to him; you both like to eat beans from a can.
2a. Do you think Dinty Moore is a real person? “Dinty” almost sounds Waspy.
“Dinty Moore was born into fortunate circumstances. His father was a very successful merchant, his mother a blue-blooded beauty.”
3. Make sandwiches. My new trick is sandwich making. I make sandwiches when I can’t do anything else creative. I think a lot of people are doing this, I think it’s an epidemic.
I would almost say that sandwiches are back in a big way.
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Matilda,
I thought you’d never made yourself a sandwich. Or is that a lie, too?
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Harry,
I’m always in flux! Always learning new things! Three honey turkeys on rye with aioli and a tuna melt (Gruyère and capers).
Delicious.
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Matilda,
I’ll make a beet Reuben. Beets are all the rage out here in the sticks.
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Harry,
I said make something delicious, not a snack that tastes of dirt.
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Matilda,
Perhaps you should take a multivitamin. Vegetables help us keep our brains and minds happy, you know.
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Harry,
Time magazine’s 30 under 30 issue came out today. So today shall henceforth be known as Drinking Day.
Three younger people from college are on the list.
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Matilda,
See my previous message. Also, imbibing alcohol during daylight can’t be good.
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Harry,
Maybe it would be good for you, Harry, doing something wildly inappropriate like day-drinking. The last time you did something truly naughty was when you went for a month eating Froot Loops every night
for dinner while Mom was having divorce distraction. And you only did that because I dared you.
Without me you’d be a hopeless priss.
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Matilda,
I think I just might surprise you someday. Anyway, I find anxiety an unfortunate distraction. Because—as you are so quick to point out—we’ll all be dead soon enough.
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Harry,
I wonder if my life would feel empty without anxiety, like a central character from my life was suddenly absent.
Like there’d been a death.
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Hey Harry,
I’m back from that wedding upstate. Not a bad one, though it initially took me a while to find the bride. They keep them in a room, you know, before the ceremony. I call it the holding pen. The bride hangs in there before it’s time for her to approach the gangplank.
It was at the end of a long hallway that smelled palpably of brown paint. It reminded me of the time they remodeled the high school with the spoiled varnish. (It made us so dizzy we couldn’t read Middle English properly for weeks.)
As I approached the bride, my hands and feet started to tingle, like I was about to encounter the Dalai Lama. The allure of a bride is not to be discounted, especially in the off-season when you only see them periodically. They put you in that dress and suddenly everyone wants to touch and see, like a blond redhead in Japan before airplanes.
The bride (Caroline) was birdlike, brunette. She had a tiny veil.
I was only in the room maybe five minutes when I noticed something on the periphery of my vision. Something annoying, like a blackfly that dips at you repeatedly while you’re trying to enjoy the lake.
I ignored it until I just couldn’t stand it anymore and turned to see a tween on a stripper pole in the middle of the room. (The room was a former dance hall run by nuns, you see. They needed poles for their lessons.) The girl was age twelve, max. Turns out she’s Sydney, sister of the bride. Sydney was dressed in a little girl’s dress that was so polite and boatnecked that the child’s gyrations made it seem more lewd than if it had been strapless and short. Like a costume from teenage fetish porn.
“Do you want to see what I can do?” Sydney said to me, backing up slowly to the far wall, presumably gearing up for a dance finale of some sort.
“No,” I said.
Sydney took a little hop and started in a dead run back toward the mirror and toward her sister. In the middle of the room, she jumped. It was wild and unruly, really, a little midair hop with a frenetic kick finish. One movement that illustrated the huge chasm between imagination and reality that embodies most calamitous childhood feats. But what caused her to crash wasn’t her ineptitude but the hidden bottle of Dom she tripped over on her way down, which took one foot out from under her and sent her sprawling into the bride, who was just then seated on a stool applying her own blush.
So the thing is, Harry—she was fine (the bride). But I can’t get that kid out of my head. I think she was sent to me as a sign. A warning.
Harry, was I ever like that as a child? Overtly sexual?
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Matilda,
That is a trick question.
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Hey Harry,
I saw bright orange in the fridge today, and I thought, Cheesy Poof! But no. Old yam.
Related: Orange cats are the best kind of cat.
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Hey Matilda,
I hate cats.
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Hey Harry,
I’ve got my wedding-shooting uniform down to a science. I made an illustration for you. The trick is to dress fancy enough that they don’t treat you like the help, but not so fancy that you can’t walk.
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Hey Matilda,
Guess what?
I’ve been parting my hair on the wrong side, all this time.
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Hey Harry,
Did a girl tell you that?
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Hey Matilda,
Well, while we’re on the subject, there is actually someone who has caught my interest. But Mom won’t like her. She’s a shiksa.
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Harry,
Tell me MORE PLEASE. Will I hate her?
PS If you marry the shiksa it will be kind of like this book I read over the weekend, where the female lead is a half-human, half-vampire hybrid. And her mother, who is a repressed prude who had one youthful indiscretion (with a vampire but she didn’t know it), hates vampires even though the girl is part one. And then the girl falls in love with a full-blooded vampire, and the mom’s hating him. And the girl is all, “Mom, can’t you see? Everything you’re saying about him, you’re saying about *me*!”
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Matilda,
Yes, I’m dating someone, but it’s under wraps for now.
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Harry,
Remember in like 2003 when you called me “high-strung” and I got really offended? I take it back. You were right.
I’ve been fibbing about all sorts of things to the boyfriend to cover up my initial lie. It’s like I can see myself going to the dark side before my very eyes and there’s nothing I can do to control it.
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Matilda,
You’re going to have to tell him sooner or later.
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Harry,
I can’t. It’s gone on too long. I’m stuck in the purgatory of truthiness, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t go back, and I can’t go forward. It’s a mess. It’s a puzzle. It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
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Matilda,
You absolutely must talk to someone about this who isn’t me, because I’m just going to get too angry.
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Harry,
Heard an apropos radio piece today. On people who are truthful with themselves. Turns out those folks who are truly honest—like the swimmer who realizes “I may not be the fastest in this freestyle heat”—actually do worse in life, because they’re not lying to themselves all the time. They don’t win the heat, they don’t win at life, and overall they’re less happy.
What this tells me is I’ve got it BACKWARD. I’m lying to my boyfriend, but telling the truth to myself. I’m doomed.
I haven’t washed my hair in a week.
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Matilda,
I’ve booked you a therapy session and paid for it. I’ll send you the address.
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Harry,
Does anyone know what it is for love Meat Loaf won’t do? I’d sincerely like to know.
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Matilda,
Just break up with him. Clean start. You don’t even have to tell him why.
Then get right back on the horse. Go into a cheese shop and find the cutest cheese guy at the counter and ask him out.
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Harry,
That’s like racial profiling, except for dating and with mozzarella.
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Matilda,
Except this is entirely defensible.
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Harry,
I’m quitting photography. I have two excellent business ideas. I’m going to be a businesswoman. Choose which one:
1. Candy corn on the cob. Put that near every checkout counter in America on October 28, and you’re a multimillionaire by Halloween.
2. A restaurant called Wedding. The waiters would be dressed like caterers, and you’d have little checklists of appetizers to order, like maki. You could order one of each if you wanted. All the best tasty bites from weddings, like scallops wrapped in bacon and mini-hamburgers.
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Matilda,
I choose #3. What did the therapist say?
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Harry,
You know this therapist was our NEIGHBOR twenty years ago and knew Dad? Creepy. My takeaway was that it’s remarkable that the lie I chose to tell in this situation happened to coincide with his twin truth. I mean, the therapist was seriously knocked out by the coincidence. He basically said I’m a clairvoyant.
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Matilda,
Great. So you just charmed this guy. It’s like when Dad talked his way out of rehab. Who can even do that?
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Harry,
Maybe I should go to a psychic to confirm it? Look—I can prove my clairvoyance. I know who your girlfriend is. It’s Vivian Remember. She of two moms, one of whom she prefers, and a bright future.
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Matilda,
No comment.
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