by Kit Reed
“Which is it, lady?”
“Actually, it’s twins.” And if you do go for it? It is a holding action only. Like rings in the core of a California redwood, recording the march of centuries, you see the beginning rings around the neck. “Remember, I phoned?”
“And you are …”
“Marg.” Like it or not, she is tumbled into the present. “I mean, Margaret Abercrombie. I called an hour ago?” Truth? She got home at eight but it was eleven by the time she gave up on Ralph. If Ralph had come home he would be making this visit. He would have made the damn call.
Once again the sergeant moves those ursine paws over the folders on his desk, shuffling them like the cups in a shell game. She has the idea that he’s in a paper-full office instead of a paper-less office because his fingers are too fat for the keys. He squints at a Post-it. “Oh, the twins. Elizabeth and Daniel, it says here.”
“Danny. Their names are Danny and Betz.”
He looks up. “And the last time you saw them was when?”
God help her the question leaves her flustered. She doesn’t know! Poor Marg.
Face it, Ralph and the children are like mismatched stars in a messed-up constellation. The Abercrombies orbit fitfully, coming and going on their own tracks and only occasionally colliding. In passing. In the kitchen. Usually in the hall.
She supposes it’s her fault. It’s hard when you’re gone all day, but if she didn’t have the college to go to, she’d be starved for the sound of another human voice. They’re never home. Ralph is terribly busy. Their best conversations take place in restaurants, when he has Marg put on her best to entertain some client he’s trying to impress. When Ralph’s client walks in the door he wants that person to see a happy couple talking animatedly, as though they enjoy each other’s company. In the moment after they sit down before that evening’s mark arrives, things actually get said. At least she and Ralph still have this in common, but the kids?
Marg lost their attention when they stopped being her sweet, manageable babies, dependent on her for every little thing. They are big and intimidating now. In the months before the Dedicated Sisters took her away, poor Annie turned into a bundle of hostility, slouching around in her big clothes with a secret that Marg will take as a personal betrayal no matter what Annie tells her when the Dedicated Sisters finally let her out. The twins are as cute as any mother could hope but they are wrapped up in their own lives, some sport Danny’s into, not sure what, cheerleading for Betz, which is a social plus but between activities and their friends and the TV her children never talk to her. Worse yet, since the twins think she and Ralph sold Annie down the river, they aren’t speaking to her.
The sergeant is losing patience. “Ma’am, your missing children. When did you see them last?”
“Um. Recently. I.” She sees them, of course, when they pass through the kitchen on their way to Whatever. Betz and Danny grunt when they’re spoken to, but that’s pretty much it. When they’re home in time to sit down to the nightly take-out dinner they keep their heads down and won’t look at her. Were they up last night, when she and Ralph came home from dinner at Scozzi with the architects from Milwaukee, were they drinking Coke and scarfing Hot Pockets in front of the TV or were they already in bed? She doesn’t remember. For all she knows, they weren’t even home. When they were little, she used to check. It’s been a long time since she went in to see them sprawled in their youth beds and longer since she pulled up the covers and kissed them good-night in their sleep. They are different children now. Young and arrogant and glossy. Physically perfect, for now. The sergeant is drumming those hairy fingers like so many tarantula legs. Did she see her twins at breakfast today or did they grab their PowerBars and slip away while she was in the bathroom working on her face? What makes her think they came home at all? Uncertainty makes her evasive. “Officer, when I got home from work they weren’t there!”
“When was that?”
“Five. Six. You know.” She’s embarrassed. It was almost eight.
He sighs patiently. “You’re going to have to come back tomorrow, Ma’am.”
“It already is tomorrow. Look at the clock!”
“Ma’am, we don’t consider a person missing until it’s been twenty-four hours.”
“But these are my children! And they’re twins!”.
“Double trouble,” he says. Everyone does.
“Twice as much worry. Oh, please.”
Sighing, he pulls out his checklist and follows procedure. “I have to ask, have they ever run away before?”
“Why would they run away?”
“Kids. You know. You never know.”
“Well, these are my twins and I know.” She is trying her best not to cry, but it is getting harder. “I mean, I ought to know.” Heaven help her, she sobs.
Something about her tone softens him—unless it is the perky auburn glints in Marg’s hair or the desperately charming smile that glistens because of the tears she’s trying so hard to blink away. “Don’t worry, Ma’am, they’re probably sleeping over at one of their friends’, have you checked?”
“How am I going to do that?”
“Ma’am, you need to make some phone calls. You do know who their friends are, right?”
She says helplessly, “They took their cell phones with them!” She means she has no idea. If the twins’ friends ever come over, it’s in the daytime when she’s gone. Sometimes at night a car stops out front and somebody honks and one or all three of her children run out. The only way she could find out who their friends are would be to work her way though all the buttons on their speed dials. It is embarrassing.
“Have you tried calling them?”
“Not really.” After Annie left, the twins got unlisted numbers, that’s how mad they were.
“Chill, lady. The other parents will know.”
She says evasively, “You know how it is. We get so busy.”
“Have you tried their beepers?”
“They left them on the counter.”
“Then we can rule out kidnapping.”
Her eyebrows shoot up.
“Ma’am, Ma’am! If I were you I’d start by checking the Megaplex. They could be out there sitting through the midnight show.”
“So you think they’re at the movies.”
The sergeant surprises her with a dirty grin. “Unless they sneaked into the Jumbo Jigglers.”
“They would never do that!” Would they? She doesn’t know.
He is just warming up. “Or they could be bingeing at one of those all-night tattoo parlors or out there on the strip getting their bodies waxed, new studs, some little thing. You know kids.”
“Not my kids.”
“Think again, lady. Nobody knows their kids.”
Marg considers. “OK, Betz might, but Danny would never …” Would she? Would he? She doesn’t know. Mother, face facts. She doesn’t know them very well.
Seeing her distress the sergeant says helpfully, “Scarf-and-Barforama, maybe? Like, any eating disorders under your roof?”
“Not my twins.” No need to tell him about Annie.
“Revival meeting?”
“What do you mean?” Inadvertently, she clasps her hands over her spreading belly.
“I mean, like, are they maybe a little out of shape? I heard the Reverend Earl is live tonight at the Crossed Triceps in Springdale.”
“They’re perfect,” she says and her voice quivers.
“For a nut like that, young kids are fresh meat.”
“He isn’t a nut!” Aghast, she covers her mouth.
“Well, it isn’t exactly Weight Watchers,” he says in that sarcastic, know-it-all cop tone. “Guys like that are only in it for the money.”
“That isn’t true.”
“He takes fat people for everything they have.” He is eyeing her squashy body. “Oh Ma’am, Ma’am, nothing personal!”
Does he think I’m fat? Marg chooses to misunderstand. “Officer, my kids can eat everything
they want and never gain an ounce. Their bodies are perfect. They don’t need the Reverend Earl.”
“Trust me, cults are magnets to kids.”
He does! She snaps defensively, “It isn’t a cult!”
Patiently, the sergeant spins scenarios. The twins are down at MacDonald’s, gorging on two-pounders; they’re outside the Lipids concert trolling for autographs or they went to the in-line obstacle course and lost track of the time. The car broke down or they got lost. Listen, they could be back home at this very minute, wondering where the hell Mom is. He lists search possibilities in such detail that Marg understands he is trying to get rid of her.
“Thank you,” she says finally. “I’d better go.”
“Don’t worry, Ma’am. They’ll turn up, and if they don’t, come back around this time tomorrow.”
“You have my number? In case?”
“M.” He could care less, he is intent on all those slithering papers again. He won’t look up as she goes.
Sighing, Marg leaves the station house. She’s felt more alone, she supposes, but not lately. With nothing to do but wait until the midnight show lets out, she does what you would do: she goes to the mall. The stores are closed but the doors stay open until the Megaplex closes, and she can sustain herself on coffee from the all-night café in the little indoor plaza—how many calories in a cappuccino with double sugar and real cream? No matter, she’s burned a million calories today just suffering, and without a little something, she’ll die. Juiced on caffeine and, OK, a megamuffin and a brace of biscotti—juiced and guilty—oh, Reverend Earl!—she sits down on a bench in front of the wrought-iron fountain and considers. The mirrored ice cream cart gives back multiple reflections of her ravaged face. The clock is ticking but she won’t do anything about it, she decides, until the twins come home and she gets Annie back. Never mind what Ralph wants. The Time Has Come can wait.
Ralph expects Annie to come home converted, a.k.a. cured, he wants her returned to them looking—not fat, never fat!—looking less like a skeleton and more like the pretty girl she ought to be. A beaming face in the annual Christmas card photo, a credit to the family. Bottom line? A credit to him.
All Marg wants is for Annie to come home well and not be mad at her, and if she has to choose between, all she really wants is for sweet Annie to be OK. Then, she thinks moodily. Then I can get this over with and have it done. There is as well the delicate and complicated matter of the Snow White phenomenon. A part of Marg still wants to be the fairest in the land which, in the unspoken secret relationship between even the most loving mothers and their daughters, makes Marg the wicked queen, but oh, poor Annie! The child is so skinny that it’s no contest. At the end she got so bad that her beautiful hair started coming out in clumps. She couldn’t go on the way she was, poor, sweet, walking skeleton. How can Marg even think about her face when Annie is starving herself to death?
But if I have it done, she tells herself, maybe it will bring Annie back. The question is whether to settle for the walk-in procedure Ralph booked to save time and cut costs or if she wants to take the Dedicated Sisters payoff money and cut to the chase.
“If I look better,” she murmurs, “things will be better.” Then she has to wonder, will it solve her problems truly?
It’s hard to know.
Looking ahead to the pain and suffering, the bruising and the valuable research time she will lose sitting in a darkened room (after these procedures direct sunlight can affect results); looking ahead to the forced inactivity, which will sabotage all her intensive body work (exercise during the recovery period can affect results), she isn’t looking forward to it at all. But she needs to have it done. Ralph hasn’t said anything directly but she knows he’s cooled to her. And when she goes in to teach a class she can see it in her students’ faces; they perceive her as retired from competition. Over. Translation: old. Professor Abercrombie is getting old. She can pass off their assessment—what do they know, they’re only kids. But only last week her best friends in the department took her to lunch. Celeste put it to her directly: “Listen, Marg. Do us all a favor, OK?” and Melody said, “Nobody wants to see you going around looking all doggy, like Jane.”
She is, after all, forty-two years old.
Weeping, she snapped, “You pick the worst times to bring things up!” But of course she couldn’t explain because so far Annie’s disgrace is her secret. If they knew, it would drive in the last coffin nail.
Celeste and Melody closed in on her with quick sympathy. “Marg honey, what’s the matter?”
Of course she lied. “Oh, nothing. You know, PMS.”
What would they say if they knew she had an anorectic kid? She knows it didn’t happen overnight but how did it happen without her knowing, and how did it get so bad? The ironic part is that Annie used to make her so proud. “I’m so glad,” she used to say, “I’m so glad you didn’t get fat the way I did at your age.” At Annie’s age Marg scarfed and barfed until her voice dropped an octave and her teeth had to be capped and the weight still wouldn’t go away although she managed to beat it into submission for long enough to capture Ralph. Even then she didn’t feel right about her body, she would have done anything to look like the girls in the ads, so when Annie came along, imagine how lucky she felt! A tall twelve, slender and beautifully developed, Annie was close to perfect with the diamond stud glittering in her sleek little naked belly and all the right curves showing through her tight little clothes but sometime after Christmas Ralph patted her tight butt, humming, “Can you pinch more than an inch?” The poor girl staggered like a gored ox.
Got to do something about that, Marg thought. Got to do something about that someday, but thanks to Ralph it never came to that. Marg didn’t have to buy cute, tight clothes to motivate the child to diet, or stop her hand when it darted for the cake or offer ten dollars for every pound she lost, Annie turned herself around almost overnight. Because of Ralph.
It was the day after Christmas, everybody exhausted and a little bit bloated from yesterday’s dinner—four kinds of pie! Not the best time for Annie to try on her nice new bathing suit. One word from Ralph and she changed forever.
One word stopped sweet Annie in midparade and turned her around.
It wasn’t even a word. It was a song.
Sure she was a little chunky, all that holiday food but she didn’t deserve anything like this; she was only a little girl! She came into the TV room in her cute little pink checkered bikini and Ralph, that bastard, Ralph said …
Come to think of it he didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. It’s what he did. It was … “I wish I was …”
He started singing. She had to cut him off! It was …
“Ralph, don’t be cruel.”
This is how you turn a life around. So fast! Ralph kept on singing anyway. “An Oscar Mayer wiener …” It was …
This is what stops your daughter in her tracks. Poor Annie had no idea where it came from but she knew what it meant. She squeaked like a gored kitten.
It was the Oscar Mayer wiener song.
Marg whispered, “Brute.”
Ralph turned on her with a snarl. “Brute? Brute?” Weeping, Annie fled the room.
Interesting what you’ll put up with when you think the man you love is still in love with you. Or when you haven’t figured out how to live without him, Marg can’t be certain which. Rigid with anger, Ralph glared. Quickly, she stroked his cheek. “Shhh, dearest,” she said—what was she fending off? “I didn’t mean it, honey, shhh.”
Sure Marg was secretly thrilled when Annie began taking off the weight and she liked the way Ralph praised her, like it was something Marg had done, she just wishes he’d slacked off on Annie a little bit but he kept it up long after her hip bones had begun to show. And sure it was a pleasure to buy her little shorts sets with bare midriffs and flip skirts to go with her spaghetti-strap tank tops but … You can say one thing about Annie. When she sets her mind to a thing, she follows through. Once she got st
arted, it was all she thought about. It’s all she, did. Sweet Annie has a beautiful mind and college expectations, she wants to be a vet, but she let the whole shooting match go just for the sake of her image—and, poor baby, she took it to extremes. She took it to extremes and she did it while they weren’t even looking and now look at her!
How did it get so bad?
Marg doesn’t know.
Yes Annie got skinny, Marg told herself she was stylishly slim, and if she seemed to be living on lettuce leaves, wasn’t that the ideal diet for cute girls her age, especially when you knew they were mainlining calcium at the Baskin-Robbins in the mall? Marg loved her so much and she fed Annie’s frail ego with little cries of encouragement. “Keep going the way you are and when you grow up you’ll be a supermodel, riding around in convertibles with your hair flying, and you’ll get top dollar for being photographed in beautiful clothes which, PS, you get to keep.” Who wouldn’t want that for her child? Who wouldn’t want to be famous for beauty in this day and time? “And look, no weight problems, sweetie.” She did not add: “Nothing like the ones that have ruined my life with your dad,” nor did she have to say, “And if you do this right, you won’t follow in your mother’s footsteps and get old!”
Women in the beauty business stay beautiful. It is a rule of life.
So what if your daughter is a picky eater, the hollows in her cheeks are the dramatic kind that turn girls into stars, listen, what would you give to have a beautiful concave belly like hers?
You can kid yourself for only so long. First Marg caught Annie in the bathroom. She looked like a stick figure made of bent coat hangers. My little girl! It was terrible. Worse even, because by that time she suspected that Ralph’s anger was a smoke screen to hide—what? Something. There was something going on.
When Ralph caught Annie, he hit the roof. The family image. The family shame. She couldn’t go on like this! He vowed to fix this thing. It was intense. All three of them caught with their faces down. Ralph was so mad that he forgot and promised Marg he would fix that other thing too.
