Gemini

by Sonya Mukherjee

  She looked so different these days. Her hair was all pearly blond and smooth, and she was even wearing makeup. After years of full-time motherhood, she’d just been hired as an adjunct lecturer, to teach the freshman writing classes that the full-time faculty didn’t want. Even though most of Sutter’s faculty were more casual-artsy-Bohemian types, Mom had decided that she had to look professional. She was busier now too. In the afternoons and evenings she would often sit on the sofa or at the dining table, with stacks of papers to grade.

  “There’s some mail for you on the counter,” she said, nodding toward a stack of papers. We divided the pile and flipped through it—clothing catalogs and college brochures, as usual. Today it was Anthropologie, Caltech, and UCLA.

  “You don’t have to save these for us. You can just recycle them,” Clara said, frowning at the image of a beautiful, ethnically ambiguous girl in a dazzling flame-colored dress, peering into a microscope. I couldn’t tell if that one was from a college or a clothing company. It didn’t matter; none of them were just offering us a dress or a biology class anyway. No, they were all offering the same thing: a life of glamorous individuality and perfection.

  On her laptop Mom played a clip from a morning news show. A surgeon and his team of twenty-four doctors and staff were getting ready to separate a pair of ten-month-old girls who were conjoined through the abdomen.

  My mom seemed to find these news stories about conjoined twins every couple of months. She would always search for all the information she could find and follow the stories for as long as possible. These twins were Americans, which was awesome for her because they would get way more airplay than, say, Zimbabweans. The operation was happening in San Francisco, just a few hours away from us. Bonus!

  Ironically, when Clara and I had been born, my mom had treated the media like devils incarnate. Instead of just concentrating on staying healthy through a high-risk pregnancy and delivery, she’d focused a crazy amount of energy on keeping almost all the reporters out of the hospital. We ended up with just a couple of newspaper stories, and maybe a mention on TV. If anti-publicity were a career, my mom would rock the hell out of it.

  But she was still a fan of everybody else’s news coverage. Like these babies now, who between the two of them shared only two legs, one pelvis, one liver, and one large intestine.

  The lead surgeon was trying to act all cool, but you could tell that he secretly felt like a little boy with a new box of Legos. The girls’ mother cried with joy. Their grandmother praised the surgeons, the nurses, and God, in no particular order. Everybody was celebrating. But the surgery hadn’t happened yet.

  Clara and I stood beside our mom and stared at the screen as the lead surgeon explained that nine to twelve months was the ideal age for separation, for reasons involving muscular, skeletal, and psychological development.

  My mom, predictably, said, “You have to wonder if anyone’s weighing the pros and cons. Have they thought about the fact that these girls will have prosthetic legs? That they’ll probably have less mobility than they’d have if they stayed together? Or all the health problems they’re going to introduce by splitting up their organs and their bones?”

  She grabbed a handful of chopped snow peas and tossed them into one of the pots.

  “They’re not thinking about quality of life,” Mom muttered. “They’re not asking themselves any questions. They’re just letting the surgeons have a field day.”

  She always went on like this, and we just listened. Or pretended to. But now, unexpectedly, Clara spoke up.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “A lot of people do just fine with prosthetic legs.”

  Mom looked up in surprise. Behind her, the clip from the news show ended and fed into a commercial for a supposedly magical fitness product.

  “All my life,” chirped the woman on the screen, “I dreamed of having the perfect body. And look at me now!”

  “Better than fine,” Clara went on. “People are running in the Olympics on prosthetic legs. They’re walking around and living their lives and barely getting a second glance from anyone. And plus, you know, a lot of separated twins do really well. A lot of them are thriving.”

  I squinted in Clara’s general direction. What was she getting at? That our parents should have had us separated as babies? That was a useless argument, and seventeen years later, it was certainly a moot one. No twins our age now, or anywhere near it, had ever been separated and lived to tell the tale.

  It hurt my feelings a little—the idea that Clara would want to be away from me. I mean, it had crossed my mind before, but more as a momentary thing, mainly if we were having a vicious argument and I felt like storming out of the room.

  But even then, in those moments when I had those thoughts, I didn’t really want to leave. Even then, feeling the warmth of her body next to mine, the rhythm of her breathing—it was a comfort. Knowing that we would have to sort out whatever we were arguing about and be okay again. Knowing that in the end, nothing could change our closeness. To actually be away from her was a dark, cold, lonely thought.

  Is that cowardice? Maybe. But I like to think it’s just appreciating what I have. Because who doesn’t want unbreakable love?

  Anyway, I told myself now, maybe Clara was just trying out her ability to stand up to our mother. If so, I wasn’t about to stop her.

  The front door opened; from where we stood, we couldn’t see it, but we could hear it, along with the sounds of Dad walking in and dropping his keys and wallet onto the table, and his battered leather messenger bag onto the floor.

  Mom slapped her wooden spoon down on the countertop, turning to give us her full attention. “Didn’t you hear about that girl, just a few months ago? They cut her apart from her sister, and a full year later she died of complications. But that part of the story gets buried, doesn’t it? That doesn’t make any headlines.”

  “Of course I know about that,” Clara retorted, “but that’s just one case, and there are so many more where the outcomes are great. How come we never talk about those? How come we only talk about the ones who die?”

  Dad walked over and hovered just outside the kitchen.

  “Late office hours today?” Mom asked.

  He shrugged. “One of the students had a lot of questions. Smart kid. It was fun talking to him.” He tilted his head toward Mom’s laptop. “You guys watching something?”

  Mom jabbed her wooden spoon into the curry pot. “Another needless separation. And a news media so enamored of surgery that even the survival of one twin gets celebrated as a victory. Even when that separation means introducing a new set of disabilities. What no one seems to understand is that you can keep twins together and they can live perfectly happy, healthy, normal lives.”

  Clara inhaled sharply but said nothing.

  Dad nodded, looking at us for a moment, then back at Mom. “Of course you’re right,” he said. “Though it’s hard to imagine it until you see it with your own eyes.”

  “I never found it hard to imagine,” Mom retorted.

  He walked over to her, rested one hand on her waist, and kissed the top of her head. “I know. But you’re a visionary. Most of us need more help to get there.”

  She looked up at him, with what looked to me like wariness—like she couldn’t quite decide whether to take his comment at face value.

  Then she turned away, stirring the vegetables with one hand while she turned off both burners with the other, and at the same time called out cheerily, “Could you girls help me set the table?”

  We both held still a moment longer, and then, without saying anything, we began moving in unison. We went to get the silverware from the drawer.

  One of our house’s unusual things is its dining table. Since Clara and I can’t face in the same direction at the same time, sitting at regular tables can be a pain. Sometimes literally. Outside the house, we might choose a picnic blanket on the ground, or if there’s a backless bench and it isn’t too narrow, then one of us can face the t
able and the other can face the opposite way, holding the food in her lap. Or, like at the Sandwich Shack, we perch on the edges of two chairs, both angled away from the table. But at home we have a U-shaped conference table in the dining nook adjoining the kitchen. Hailey and I sit on the inside of the U, and our parents sit facing us.

  “Perfectly normal lives,” Clara muttered as she placed the silverware for herself and Mom, and I placed the silverware for myself and Dad. “I’m sure it’s perfectly normal to have to share the job of putting out silverware because we can’t be in two separate parts of the same room.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Really?” I asked, trying not to laugh. “That’s your sob story?”

  With a smile, she brought it up a notch. “I’m sure it’s perfectly normal to always balance off the side of the toilet while your sister is peeing.”

  I shrugged. “That’s a little better.” I knew I was egging her on.

  “I’m sure it’s perfectly normal,” she said, “to have to spend your entire life in the world’s smallest rural community so that no one will stare and point and laugh at you when you go out in public and see actual strangers.” Her voice dropped to a half whisper. “And it’s perfectly normal to terrify any strangers who do come to town.”

  We headed back to the kitchen for bowls and cups.

  “Are we going to talk about that?” I asked. “Because we don’t have to do that, you know. Stay here, I mean. There isn’t a force field around Bear Pass. We can cross the town line.”

  Dad, on his way to the dining table with a bowl of curry, stopped short. “Wait. Are you talking about going somewhere? A day trip, like I keep asking you to do? I’ve got a whole list of places we could go in Sacramento. Or if you want to do San Francisco, there’s even more. When do you want to do this? I’ve got this whole weekend free. We could see about tickets to some kind of show.”

  I glanced warily in Clara’s direction. Dad was so excited, I didn’t know what to say.

  Mom emerged from the kitchen with another serving bowl. “This weekend sounds awfully soon,” she said, her brow wrinkled with worry. “If you want to do something like this, we need to take some time to plan and prepare.”

  Dad looked at her quizzically. “Why?”

  Mom gave me a slow once-over. “For one thing, maybe you could go natural with the hair first. You don’t always have to hit people over the head with things.”

  “Mom,” I said, “you are rearranging the deck chairs on the world’s largest and most beautiful ocean liner. And I lined them up that way for a good reason, and it’s really, really important to me, so don’t mess with the damn deck chairs.”

  Dad laughed, but Mom frowned and shook her head. “You’re not the Titanic. You’re not doomed.”

  “Unless being stared at counts as doomed,” I replied, “in which case, we are our own iceberg. Or at least we’re attached to our own iceberg. The iceberg is our conjoined triplet.”

  Clara and I silently pushed past them to get the cups and bowls, while Mom and Dad put their serving dishes on the table.

  The last time we’d tried a day trip had been four years earlier, in eighth grade, and Clara hadn’t made it down two blocks of Old Sacramento before she’d fallen apart. The problem wasn’t so much the adults looking at us and then quickly averting their eyes, as if they couldn’t bear the sight of us, or urging their kids not to look, or hurrying them away from us with fierce whispers—a sight, apparently, too gruesome for the little ones to bear. And it certainly wasn’t the little preschool-aged girl who’d grabbed her mother’s hand and screamed, “What is that?”

  Those things had upped Clara’s stress level, sure. And yeah, okay, mine too. But what really did Clara in was the group of kids our own age who poked one another and giggled and gasped like idiots. They were pretending to be quiet, like they thought we couldn’t hear them or understand. Like they were trying to be discreet, or they told themselves they were trying, but it was all mixed up with hidden meanness. That was the thing that made Clara run and hide and never go back.

  And yeah, okay, if I’m totally honest? Maybe it was also the thing that made me not fight her on it as hard as I should have.

  Because those idiot Decepticons had a power over me that I’d never meant to give them. I knew that each one of them was weak and flawed and full of secrets—because who isn’t?—but they could hide it all behind a veneer of lip-glossed, plucked, and flat-ironed sameness. And I couldn’t. Like an animal at a zoo, I was on display, and I didn’t get a vote about that. Only, unlike a zoo creature, I didn’t have any bars or barriers between me and the crowd. They could walk right up to me. They could poke and prod. And I didn’t have any teeth or claws to fight back with.

  That was before I dyed my hair pink, before I got the tattoo and started wearing a lot of thick eyeliner and black clothes. I know I’m still on display. I know I still have no weapons. But a kind of armor, maybe. A gesture toward controlling the conversation.

  As soon as we returned with the cups and bowls, Mom leapt back into the argument. “People don’t stare at you as much as you think they do. You exaggerate it in your heads. You think of yourselves as more set apart than you really are. If you would skip the outlandish getups, you’d hardly be noticed.”

  She said this with what sounded like total sincerity. Sometimes I wondered if she could even hear herself.

  “Mom,” Clara said in a tight voice as we put down the cups and bowls and sat down, “we’re one of the rarest mutations in the human species.”

  Depending on who you ask, conjoined twins occur in something like one out of every two hundred thousand live births. And quite a lot of those die in the first day. I’m sure there are rarer conditions, but if you could come up with a formula for how rare it is plus how visibly obvious it is, we might win. The most common condition leading to dwarfism, for example, is somewhere around five to thirteen times as common as being born a conjoined twin, let alone surviving as one. Booyah.

  “I wouldn’t go with that choice of language,” Dad put in as he took his seat, “but I do have to agree that your hair is not going to have much effect on how much attention you get, one way or the other. It’s more a question of whether you can suck it up a little, right?”

  “And appreciate the fact that you’re able to have these options at all,” Mom added. “Appreciate your health and all the abilities that you have, and the fact that you’re both even here, alive. I’m grateful for that every day, you know.”

  I supposed she wanted us to say that we were also grateful—grateful to her and Dad, for making the decisions they had. We probably should have been. I just wasn’t sure if I could say it again right then.

  “Sometimes,” Clara said, “it seems like you’re so set on us being grateful and cheery all the time, you’re blinding yourself to reality.”

  “Oh, honestly.” Mom shook her head. “You’re two completely healthy girls. You go to school. You’re good students, you have friends, you do practically everything your friends do. You don’t think that’s a good life? You don’t want to be happy with that?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Clara said.

  But Mom went on. “You know, if you’d had surgery, there’s an excellent chance that at least one of you would have ended up paraplegic, with a colostomy. Or dead.” She bowed her head. “And I just keep thinking about that baby who died, and these two babies going in for surgery, with the parents knowing full well they might die too. I don’t understand these parents who just write off those risks in the name of looking like everyone else.”

  “And what I don’t understand,” Clara said, her voice rising sharply, “is these parents who just write off the costs of staying conjoined. You think we can do everything our friends do? When was the last time we went snowboarding with them? When was the last time we joined them for a nice day hike? When was the last time we danced ?”

  The answer, of course, was never. We had never danced. Honestly, I had never given it
much thought. But all of a sudden, I thought, Why? What was stopping us?

  We could walk forward, we could walk backward, we could shuffle sideways, and we could even run a little. Why hadn’t we ever danced? Why hadn’t I ever danced?

  “You know,” Dad said quietly, “some of those things you could do. Probably not the snowboarding. But we could work on the rest of it. Broaden your horizons. And I still think visiting a city might be a good place to start.”

  No one answered. Mom looked at Clara, then at me. She didn’t look upset, just thoughtful, like she was working something out in her mind.

  Then she said, “Hold on.” She went to her laptop and quickly plugged a cord into a set of speakers. A moment later a popular dance tune blasted through the kitchen and adjoining dining area.

  My mother splayed her hands out around her. “Go on then,” she said, grinning. “Let’s do it! Let’s dance!”

  Unbelievable. She’d heard some of Clara’s words, but not the right ones.

  When Clara stormed toward the speakers, I followed without resistance. She turned them off, and a loud silence filled the house.

  “No,” Clara said. “I’m not going to dance for you. I’m not going to dance for anybody, and I’m not going to pretend that I’m normal for you.”

  I drew in a breath.

  For seventeen years Clara and our parents had conspired to pretend that we were normal. If Clara was even halfway ready to stop pretending, it would change everything.

  “We’re not normal,” she said now, her voice harsh and thick with unshed tears. “You can say that we’re two totally normal girls six thousand times, and you can say it as fast as you can like a tongue twister, and you can say it every night before you go to bed like it’s some kind of prayer, but I’m sorry, none of that is ever going to make it true.”

  I didn’t say a word. But as I followed Clara out of the room, absorbing her fury and her frustration and her deep well of sadness, I understood those feelings, but I didn’t share them. Instead I felt a crazy tug of hope.