by Jenna Blum
“The nanny wasn’t too bad either,” says Kevin, impassive behind his aviators.
Charles grins. “Noticed that too, did you, Wieb? That’s good. So you’re not totally whipped yet.”
“Hey!” says Karena.
Charles flaps a hand at her and unslings the canvas bag he’s carrying over one shoulder.
“Woman,” he says, handing it to her, “walk behind and carry the food. Let the men talk.”
“Oh boy,” Karena says again. “Whose bright idea was this? I’m going home.”
But she lets Kevin take the bag and falls behind so the two men can stroll in front of her, conferring about something with their heads together, casually kicking stones. She can’t stop smiling. Karena has envisioned a lot of outcomes for this outing, running the spectrum from lukewarm to atrocious, but she would not have believed what has actually happened, which is that from the moment Kevin showed up at the house—nervous, Karena deduced from the careful parting in his damp hair and the amount of Old Spice he’d doused himself in—the men looked at each other and lifted their chins, and Charles said, Wieb, and Kevin said, Hallingdahl, and instantly they were a boys’ club of two. It makes sense, since after all Charles and Kevin have a friendship quite separate from Karena’s relationships with either of them, close enough so that at one point, Charles has told her, they considered forming their own tour company: Wiebke and Hallingdahl, Chasers-at-Large. Karena can’t remember the last time she was so happy to be excluded.
They reach the dock in front of the band shell and walk all the way to the end, then set out their picnic. Charles has made everything: curried tofu salad, tabouli, hummus, cherries, veggie sandwiches on whole wheat pita. There are also a couple of bottles of his special algae drink, which Karena passes up. She made the mistake earlier of trying one, and she won’t do that again. Luckily, there is also beer.
“Think fast, Wieb,” Charles says, tossing a bottle at Kevin. “Organic, brewed by Trappist monks. Better for the baby,” and he slaps Kevin’s stomach.
“Charles!” says Karena, but Kevin just uncorks the beer and drains half of it, then rubs his belly.
“Hoo-ah,” he says, “baby’s thirsty today. Thanks, Hallingdahl. You’re a prince among men.”
“Don’t mention it, Wieb,” says Charles, and they settle down to eat. Kevin picks suspiciously at his sandwich.
“Jesus, Hallingdahl,” he says, “is this eggplant?”
“Just eat it, Wieb, you fucking puffball. When’s the last time you ate a vegetable, in a past life?”
“Never,” says Kevin, slinging the eggplant into the lake, where it promptly attracts a swarm of minnows. “How many times do I have to tell you, Hallingdahl? Vegetables are what food eats.”
Karena leans her back against Kevin’s and dangles her feet in the water, warmish and green-gold this close to the banks, laced with shimmering orbits of light. She devours her sandwich. And the salad. And the tabouli, and the hummus, and some cherries. They have a pit-spitting contest, trying to hit the nearest sailboat, and Karena wins easily, pinging its side. Even Charles pretends to be impressed. Then she reclines on her elbows on the sun-beaten boards and belches.
“Ugh,” she says, “excuse me. I think I ate too much.”
“That’s what I love about you, sistah,” says Charles. “You’re so ladylike. Such a delicate flower.”
“Fuck off, Charles.”
“See,” Charles says to Kevin, “how abusive she is? Man, I hope you know what you’re getting into.”
“Oh,” says Kevin, stroking Karena’s hair, “I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“Jeez, you kids,” says Charles, “do you never stop?” But he helps himself to another sandwich and chews thoughtfully, gazing out across the lake.
“I haven’t been here in years,” he says. “Remember how Uncle Carroll used to take us here every time we visited, K?”
“I remember,” Karena says drowsily. Uncle Carroll, Siri’s brother, has been dead for five years from a stupid accident, slipping in the shower and fracturing his skull, dead for three days before a neighbor found him. Every single person’s nightmare. But before that he lived quite happily in his little bungalow, surrounded by fascinating samples, books of carpet and wallpaper swatches, rainbows of paint strips. Carroll was a decorator who’d worked in New York for several years, then returned to Minneapolis with a mustache and huge square smoked sunglasses. He had a laugh that soared into the upper registers when something was really funny. Karena remembers Carroll sitting on his couch, wrapped in a cowhide blanket, roaring until he squeaked at an episode of All in the Family on his rabbit-eared TV.
“God, I loved visiting Carroll,” says Charles. “It was like the height of sophistication. Remember his glass coffee table we made forts under? And the rainbow painted across his bedroom wall? I thought that was so cool. And how he let us stay up as late as we wanted and made us those drinks?”
“I remember,” says Karena. Carroll had favored old-fashioned ice cream and liqueur concoctions like Grasshoppers and Golden Cadillacs, and when Frank and Siri were out at a show or dinner he gave the twins each their own in a Dixie cup.
“One for you, Vanilla,” she imitates him, “one for you, Rum Raisin, and one-two for me.”
Charles laughs. “That’s right, I forgot he used to call us that. Did I ever tell you about the nude male aerobics videos I found in his closet?”
Karena opens her eyes and looks over.
“You did not,” she says.
“I did,” says Charles. “After he died and Mom was going through the house. It was just like Richard Simmons except all the guys were stark nekkid. Oh, except they had sneakers. And those braided head-bands.”
“You are a total liar,” says Karena.
“I’m not,” Charles insists. He jumps up, overturning his plate into the water, and starts doing high kicks, batting the air with his palms. “One! Two! Come on, boys! Let me see you sweat! Sweat! Lunge! Lunge! Flex those pecs! Flex those buttocks! Ow.”
He sits back down, breathing hard.
“I think I sprained something important,” he says. “But you get the idea. Can you imagine what effect that had on a poor small-town boy of thirteen?”
“I think it explains a lot, actually,” says Kevin.
“Oh, Wieb,” says Charles, leaning over. “Give me a kiss.”
Kevin pushes his face away. “Not on a full stomach, Hallingdahl.”
“But that’s what you love about me, Wieb. My spontaneity.”
“Okay,” says Karena, laughing, “why am I even here?”
She closes her eyes again. The sun is hot on her face, red through her lids. She listens to Charles and Kevin talk, now about sports, now about storms, now about chasers they know. Kevin breaks out the cigars he has brought and the smoke drifts out over the water. A jet ski buzzes past and waves slap the underside of the dock. Kevin toys with Karena’s hair.
She wakes when the sun moves off her face. A breeze has come up, riffling the surface of the lake. The boats rock, their bells chiming. Kevin is watching her, his face hanging over hers like a moon, but upside down.
“Morning, Laredo,” he says. “You got yourself a nice little sunburn here,” and he rubs a thumb over the fat pads of Karena’s cheeks.
Karena smiles up at him, closing first one eye, then the other. She’s always amazed how much the perspective changes when she does this. “Where’s Charles?”
“Went to get ice cream. Or seduce more jailbait. Not sure which.”
“Oh, be nice,” says Karena. “Are we jealous now, Mr. Wizard?”
“No reason to be,” says Kevin. “No reason in the world,” and he bends down to kiss her. It’s an awkward angle, but his lips are cool and smoky and salty against Karena’s sun-hot face.
“You have to admit,” she says when they come up for air, “Charles is being really good. Isn’t he? Isn’t he being great?”
“Sure,” says Kevin, smoothing Karena’s hair back fr
om her forehead. “I never said he wasn’t. When Chuck’s good, he’s very very good. When he’s bad . . .”
He lets the sentence trail off and raises his eyebrows. Karena turns her head, just in time to see Charles trip-trapping down the boards toward them.
“Hey, kids,” he says. He’s carrying a soft-serve twisty cone in each hand. “Whatcha talking about? Whatcha doing? Just loafing around?”
Karena sits up so quickly that she almost bangs her head on Kevin’s chin. She slits her eyes fiercely at Charles: Don’t you dare. Charles widens his at her: What? Karena darts a glance back at Kevin, behind her. Charles looks puzzled for a second, then understands: Ahhhh, the Loaf. He shakes his head—no no no, K, didn’t mean it, sorry—and grins.
“Wieb,” he says to Kevin, who has been collecting the picnic leftovers and stuffing them in the bag. He hands Kevin one of the twisty cones and Karena the other. “There you go, kids. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
“Thanks, man,” says Kevin. “Where’s yours?”
Charles puts his hands to the small of his back and stretches, grimacing.
“Are you serious?” he says. “I don’t eat that shit.”
They clop back along the boards. Karena’s face radiates. The evening is warm, and the ice cream melts fast, and she has to lick it off her wrist when it dribbles down. They turn onto the shady path toward her house, the men again ahead of her, the sun winking every so often as it descends into the tree line. Dogs run past with Frisbees, barking. People jog by with strollers, bicyclists dinging their bells and chanting, “On the left! On the left!” Charles asks Kevin if he’s staying for supper, and Kevin says sure, and Charles says they could watch some of his chase DVDs from this year, and Kevin says sweet. They amble along, the one tall and slender and sandaled, the other short and stocky and powerful, reminding Karena of—not Laurel and Hardy, exactly, but the cartoon where two starving men on a desert island look at each other and one sees a hot dog, the other a hamburger. Maybe this picnic has been an anomaly, is something Karena will look back on when she’s old as a day when she was happy. Maybe the three of them are just temporarily suspended in some shining bubble of time. But on the other hand, maybe things can always be this way, Karena thinks—people are happy sometimes, aren’t they? Maybe everything will be all right. When they pass the troll tree, Karena slips her penny behind the door.
45
About a month later, at the beginning of the third week of August, the first of Karena’s annual two-week vacation, she comes home from Saturday brunch with Tiff to find her house reeking of something foul. Tea. Charles’s so-called tea. Every few days he makes another batch of it, despite Karena’s begging him not to, using her good lobster pot to boil the mysterious contents of a package he receives each week in the mail. He left one of these unattended on the kitchen counter once, and Karena poked it cautiously, a supersize baggie bulging with twigs and knobs of wood and what look like slimy leaves. It’s a cleanser, Charles said when Karena asked, it balances my lymphatic system. And it’s a colonic besides. You want some, sistah? No offense, but judging from your complexion you could use some—and the Loaf too, he needs a colonic like nobody’s business. Karena had demurred and hastily retreated, the way she did when Charles was sage smudging, waving the burning brush around her living room, and he said, I’m ridding the house of bad spiritual energy, K, I’d think you’d appreciate that.
Karena has tried hard to live and let live. After all, just because she and Charles are twins doesn’t mean their habits have to be the same. But while Karena can handle the sage, and her house smelling on good days like a co-op, half incense and half medicine, and Charles’s meditation mat on the front porch and the army of algae drinks in the fridge, and his wind chimes and his incense and his herbal remedies and his special lotion and his chanting to meet the dawn every morning while banging his Lakota drum—all this Karena can tolerate, barely. The tea she has a harder time with. It smells like the rot on the undersides of mushrooms combined with old sweat socks, and she has to mouth-breathe until she gets used to it.
“Hey, Charles,” she says, walking into the kitchen.
Charles is standing over the stove, peering into the pot. He is wearing shorts and a madras shirt and numerous medallions on thongs around his neck, cowry shells and a rune symbol and a quartered circle he has explained to Karena illustrates the four quadrants of a man’s life in the Lakota tradition, his spiritual path bisected by the sun. He is also wearing a very old, faded red apron of Siri’s that says “Bitch Bitch Bitch” on the front.
“Sistah,” he says and drops the lid on the pot with a clang! Mercifully the smell diminishes a fraction, although Karena eyes the spatter of what looks like gray juice on the wall behind her stove.
“How was brunch?” Charles asks. “How’s Trog Number One?”
“Fine,” says Karena.
“She didn’t want to swing by and say hello?” Charles says, turning to open the fridge but not quickly enough to hide a grin, and Karena knows he is thinking of their get-together two weeks ago. Encouraged by the success of the Charles-Kevin experiment, Karena suggested she and Tiff and Charles take a walk around the lake—which made perfect sense in retrospect, like introducing two hostile dogs in neutral territory. But this time the setting did not work its magic, or it did until they were nearing the Rose Garden and Tiff—really, she started it—leaned past Karena to Charles on the other side and said, So, this is all very nice and civil and everything, but since your sister’s not gonna ask, I will: When are you going to start back on meds and get a real job? and Charles had said, That’s a very good question, maybe about the same time you do. Weren’t you supposed to be a doctor or something? and Tiff said, Yeah, so I married a doctor instead of becoming a doctor, you gotta problem with that? and Charles said, No, but apparently you do. Though I sympathize, it’s got to be hard being a suckling pig for, what, five piglets now? and Tiff said, Get on meds, Charles, and Charles said, Get a life, Shamu, and Tiff, who hasn’t been overweight for years, who has a personal trainer and does Pilates and is actually so skinny her head looks too big for her body, had colored to her hairline and said, You’re a douche, Charles, and Charles had said, Ever the lady, Deep Throat, and Tiff had turned and walked in the opposite direction. And that had been that.
So Karena says now, “No, astonishingly, she didn’t want to come in, Charles. I wonder why that is.”
A snicker comes from the refrigerator, which Charles is leaning into. He straightens up with an algae drink, chugs it, belches, and says, “Freaked if I know.”
“Charles,” says Karena. “You know, it’d be helpful if you could be a little nicer to her.”
Charles’s eyes widen in amazement.
“Me!” he says. “What’d I do? There I was just walking along, enjoying the nice day, trying so hard to let bygones be bygones, when she attacked me.”
Karena sighs. This is true. But she is thinking about the unsaid part of her sentence: If you’re going to stay here . . . She doesn’t want to play the heavy, enforce house rules under her roof. But as much as she loves having Charles here, it has become something of a strain too. The other night Karena woke on her foldout in the den at four thirty and heard the thud of base, and she thought at first it was the neighbor kids down the block who liked to park their beater in front of the house and make out. She had gone to the front door to yell at them, then realized the music was coming from upstairs. She went to the door and listened. Nn-tss-nn-tss-nn-tss, a club mix, overlaid with the chants of Gregorian monks. Karena tapped. Charles? she said. Nn-tss-nn-tss-nn-tss-whoompwhoomp-whoomp-whoomp-whoomp. Karena knocked again. Charles, she called, could you turn that down a little, please? No response. Karena had waited a while, weighing her options, uneasy, then gone back to bed.
Not that she wouldn’t have been up at that hour anyway. And not that she wants Charles to move out of the city. God, no. Karena wants him as nearby as possible. She’ll help him find a place, and she’
ll pay his rent, whatever he needs, until he gets acclimated. She could just use a little . . . space.
Charles turns back to his pot, stirring.
“So, sistah,” he says, “I’ve been thinking, I probably won’t be here much longer.”
“What?” Karena cries. Of course, now that Charles has said what she’s been thinking, she can’t stand for him to leave. “You can’t go! Where are you going? You’re staying in Minneapolis, right?”
Charles sips from a wooden spoon and makes a face.
“Not exactly,” he says.
“But where are you going?” Karena repeats. She feels as though some essential membrane in her chest is being ripped away. “And why? We could look for apartments in Uptown, starting today—”
Charles smiles sadly.
“That’s lovely you want me to stay, K,” he says. “And I wish I could. Believe me. But I’ve got something I have to do.”
“What?” Karena argues. “What could be more important than this?” She gestures around her steamy little kitchen, encompassing the two of them.
“Not much,” Charles admits. “But I have to do this, K.”
He leans against the counter.
“I’m going to turn myself in,” he says.
For a few seconds Karena doesn’t think she’s heard him correctly, that the switchboard in her brain has been scrambled. She stares at him, then laughs.
“Okay, Charles,” she says, “very funny. Except it isn’t. It’s not funny at all.”
“I agree,” says Charles. “There’s nothing remotely funny about a man’s death. Or my being responsible for it. I killed him, and I’m tired of living with it, and it’s time for me to pay.”
Karena stares at him, then shoves off the counter and hurries across the kitchen, kicking over a stool in the process. She shuts the door and locks it, cranks closed the windows despite the steamy reek of the tea. This is not a conversation the neighbors need to know about. Then she returns to the counter. Careful, Karena is thinking. Kevin was right. Charles is manic. Or hypomanic at least, working up to it, because how could he make such an insane suggestion otherwise?
