Half Life

by Shelley Jackson

  I couldn’t let that happen, could I?

  My revenge was private and paradoxical: I pinched myself to pinch her. I acted up so she would get a spanking. “Play nice, Nora!” said Mama.

  “I am!” said Blanche.

  “She is,” I corrected.

  “Who?” Blanche, bewildered.

  Still, sometimes (we were kids), we’d look at each other and stick out our identical tongues and run, while the quail flew with a frantic thrumming of wings into the bushes, whickering unhappily. I told knock-knock jokes, Blanche started rounds (“Are you sleeping?” “Nobody home!”). Blanche could hula-hoop, I could juggle (if she shut her eyes). Blanche could make up songs, and I could make up stories.

  A thing about Blanche: she was a good listener. When I told a story she had never heard before, she would stare at my mouth as if I were about to pluck a full-blown rose from behind a loose tooth, and she wanted at one and the same time to locate the threads and mirrors, and to believe it was real magic. She could take any poor, dry flake of a story and eke it into splashing life, and she believed everything I told her. A thing about me: I took a keen joy in being believed, and that joy was all the keener when I was lying, for then the credit was mine alone, not shared with the truth.

  Many of my best ideas came from Granny. She knew a lot of stories, and when her memory failed, she filled the gaps with invention. Thunder, Granny said, was caused by Lithobolia, the stone-throwing demon. It was not the stone-throwing that impressed us—anyone could do that—but that hollow-bellied name. You could practically hear the stones roll. Blanche believed in Lithobolia, and I very nearly did. Sometimes, Granny would cock her head and sink laboriously to her knees. “Girls, listen!” Taking turns, we pressed our ears to the ground to listen to the borborygmi of the earth. I suppose, in retrospect, that the rumble we heard was an underground test at the Proving Ground. But it did seem to be groaning, “Lithobolia…”

  That we had heard the ground speak with our own ears lent credence to the story of the king who had donkey’s ears, and hid them under a hat, and the boy who saw them, and could not bear the burden of the secret, and dug a hole and told it to the earth, and the reeds that grew there, that when the wind blew, or when they were trimmed into flutes, sang, “The king has donkey’s ears.” The nature of things was often troublingly mixed, as we had seen for ourselves. We had no great difficulty believing that dirt could speak, or men wear horns or fur, especially as so many of Granny’s stories put across the same idea. Poor, resourceful Princess Donkey-skin, whose father (the same king?) loved her so much he wanted to marry her, had tricked him into killing his magic donkey, whose ears dropped gold coins every night, and then disguised herself in its skin and escaped. For a while, we watched Papa closely for signs that he intended to marry us, but he was so obviously, disgustingly in love with Mama that we discarded that idea with some relief, as we had no magic donkey. (“Though I don’t see why she couldn’t use a regular donkey,” Blanche said. “Or any old animal.” “Freud only knows,” said Granny.)

  The world was full of princesses in disguise, it seemed, though you could usually identify them if you listened to birds and were kind to crones at crossroads. Any woodshed might hold a Donkey-skin pulling a dress made of moonbeams out of a walnut shell. Princesses would be princesses. Like the one who cut off the head of her talking horse, but kept on telling it her secrets, eventually they gave themselves away. In their position, we agreed, we’d be more careful. We believed in secrets, though we had never had any. Granny, for example, was full of secrets.

  Granny was antic and interesting. She rocked from side to side when she walked, like a doll with no hip joints. She smelled of old cigarette smoke and gasoline and a third, sweet, indefinable smell. Granny belted songs about Shady Ladies at a piano in the back of the garage. Then she would scoot over and I would bang the keys, swaying, while Blanche sang odd, melancholy, meandering songs of her own invention. Granny did not always wash her hands after adjusting the points or tightening a fan belt. For a long time we thought all piano keys were black.

  Granny cherished her gas station like some old ladies cherish gardens or grandkids. She was an enthusiast of gas. Sometimes she bent over us, wild-eyed, to describe what might happen if someone dropped a lit match or even happened to be smoking while they pumped their gas. Granny didn’t like people to pump their own gas, she didn’t trust them. She always ceremoniously stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray before she went out to the pumps.

  “Ffwumpp!” she would say, spraying me with spit. “Ffwumpp!” This represented the whole tank going up. “That would be one heck of a boom! The gas station would be gone like that.” She snapped her fingers in our faces, twice. “And half the county with it! Sky-high. Duplicity County would be one big hole. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

  “Wow, Granny,” said Blanche, sucking up.

  “Sure, Granny,” said I, which earned us a slap for smart-aleckyness.

  Blanche might have been about to protest this injustice, but a troubling thought intervened. “Then…won’t you blow up too?”

  “Not me!” said Granny. “I’ll be cashing my insurance check on the way to Mexico. Oaxaca, I think,” she mused. “Balloons and chapulines in the zocalo…”

  Incantatory words! Chapulines I took to be a kind of dessert, and pictured a dainty pointed hat of puff pastry, full of cream. A zocalo might be a restaurant or even, judging by the balloons, a circus! I almost hoped the gas station would blow up.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  Twice Blessed Books is holding their annual

  HALF OFF SALE!

  Just a few of the great titles we have in stock:

  A Couple Of Clowns

  All Together Now

  Altar Ego: My Twin Took Holy Orders

  Beating Yourself Up: Violence between Conjoined Twins

  Bi and Bifurcated

  Binary Stars: Crystal and Beverly Bless

  Compromise for Life

  Cooped Up Together and Loving It

  Disappearing Twin Syndrome: Dealing with the Guilt

  Division or Diversity?

  Double Dealing: Coping with Stress for Conjoined Twins

  Dual Citizenship: Legal Help for Twofers Facing Discrimination

  Duality for Dummies

  Fat in Spite of Myself: When One Twin Overeats

  Finding Yourself Twice

  First Person Plural

  For the Love of a Twin

  For the Two Of You

  Hello, Self!

  I Love Me! (and You)

  Idiot’s Guide to Self-Esteem for Siamese Twins

  Life Plus One

  Making Ends Meet

  Me Two: When Jealousy Strikes Conjoined Twins

  My Better Half: Loving Your Twin More Than Yourself

  My Conjoined Twin Is a Cross-Dresser!

  My Conjoined Twin Is an Alcoholic!

  My Conjoined Twin Is Drug-Addicted!

  My Conjoined Twin Is Gay!

  My Conjoined Twin Is Mentally Ill!

  Putting Two and Two Together: Love between Twins

  Same Difference

  Second in Command

  Self Esteem Times Two

  Siamese Sex Secrets

  Split Ends: When Twins Fight

  Swinging Both Ways

  Take Two: When You Love a Twin

  Thank You for Being Me

  The Both of You

  Together Again

  Twice Blessed

  Twice Shy

  Twice the Woman

  Two for the Price of One: Twin Fashions

  Two for the Road: Twin-Friendly Hotels and Restaurants Across America

  Two Way Street

  Two-Timers: Monogamy and Marriage for Siamese Twins

  When S Is M: Sadomasochism Between Conjoined Twins

  SELF-HELP

  I was comparison-shopping glue sticks in the all-night Walgreens at quarter to two in the morning when someone grabbed my wr
ist. “No, you don’t, Lefty!” The tube clattered to the floor.

  “I was just trying to decide whether to go acid-free!” It was Trey, who looked so disappointed that I bought him a drink at the Elephant Walk and then two more come last call. He maundered on about experimental fashion, how he thought he had it in him to do cutting-edge things but maybe not. “With, I don’t know, pets.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Renaissance ladies used to keep little dogs in their sleeves. Or ferrets. Now that’s relational couture, man. Why do clothes have to be so lonely?” We were both drunk by then. I felt like a heavy golden clapper was slowly swinging inside me, as if I were a bell. The clapper just touched my inside walls at the extremes of its arc, and rather than a dong it raised a low hum that sustained itself without diminution in the room and made my throat ache. Trey was sniffling. “Woe,” he actually said. “Woe.”

  I swung my glass from two fingers. The golden liquid swung in counterbalance. I began to feel very moved by my skillfulness, and for a while I got lost in watching. I was aware, though I did not look up, that this languid movement had an exact complement in the mirror behind the ferns and that myriad points of light on bottles and glasses were ticking in time. When I set the glass down, finally, I did so clumsily, and the hum and the swinging were disturbed. “I would love to be lonely,” I said.

  He squinted at me. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  I squinted at my knuckles. They squinted back.

  “It’s kind of funny, you against Blanche,” he mused. “It’s like you’re thumb-wrestling your other hand.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “But isn’t it sort of like you’re fighting yourself? If you win, don’t you also lose?”

  “Blanche is not myself.”

  He held up his hands. “Hey, sorry, don’t shoot me. I just never really thought about it before.” He slumped over his drink. Then he brightened. “Trey just might have a solution to your problem.”

  “I doubt it.” He had an expression I didn’t like; it was the one he wore when he was closing a shady deal.

  “It’s a bit drastic. I’m warning you.”

  “Stop with the suspense.” I was keeping an eye on my left hand, which was running its fingertips along the frayed edge of the pages of the paper. It drove in its thumb, lifted the rest of the paper on the back of its hand and flapped it over, then struggled the paper open. It did this, or I did it?

  “I’d better whisper.” His head blundered toward me, and our skulls gently conked together. His whisper was a hissing confusion and bedewed my ear.

  I sighed, put the steak sauce to the side, and heaved myself partway across the table toward him. “Tell me again. Don’t whisper, just speak quietly.” Pinned against the table under me, my left hand squirmed.

  “I’m not telling you anything, just repeating what I’ve heard, capeesh?” He fell back in his chair and eyed me cleverly. “I’m not advocating nor am I saying nay. I’m only the conduit. The conduit,” he repeated, pleased by the sound of it.

  “Get to the point, Trey,” I said wearily, sitting down again. I should know better. The faith that every problem had a solution, maybe ayurvedic orgone rolfing in a past-life pyramid, drove the sorrier side of San Francisco’s tireless self-reinvention. Behind that (raw, organic) carrot-on-a-stick trotted a population of snake-oil addicts. You’re a sucker, I told myself. What herbal soak will peel away a second self ? The naked taproot of the I: another fucking carrot.

  But Trey leaned forward again. His face was avid. “They find a head in a bog in a bag in England, right? In a bag, in a bog. So they look around for the body. They search high and low but they don’t find it. Do you recognize this face, the papers ask. Finally they get an anonymous call. What a story! Beheading victim still alive! The supposedly dead guy had come back to his flat in London to pick up his mail and the caller dude, who was his neighbor, saw him. The caller said, like, ‘I noticed he didn’t have two heads no more. I figured it was a different bloke but when I saw the picture in the paper I put two and two together.’” Trey regarded me cunningly.

  I sighed. “Some nutcase cuts his other head off. This is your solution?” Trey just looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Hello, do you not know that in the US of A it’s illegal to commit”—The bartender glanced up from her tip jar and I lowered my voice—“an act of surgery against your other half, even if she is deaf, mute, an idiot, or insane, unless she’s also gangrenous and leaking pus out of her ears? And even then you have to get a court hearing and the consent of, like, everyone in the world: parents, both dead and alive, spouse, pet goldfish, next-door neighbor, kindergarten teacher, and five total strangers who looked at you once on the street.”

  “It is of England of which we speak. Of.”

  “It’s illegal in England too, Trey. It’s illegal everywhere.”

  Trey winked laboriously. “Did Trey say anything about legal?”

  “I’m not going to some chop shop to be sawed up with a dirty bread knife.”

  “Nore. Trust your uncle Trey. The beheading was professional. It was done by a surgeon.”

  I caught a glimpse of my face amid the ferns, like a horrid little fruit. I wore an unfamiliar look—pinched, apprehensive. I softened my brow and shifted my head so I could no longer see myself. “I find this whole story very unlikely and possibly offensive.”

  “This renegade surgeon. I’ve been hearing about him. He’s an outlaw, like Robin Hood. He was working at a big National Health hospital politely carving away at hernias and ingrown toenails and then all of a sudden, one fine day, he went—”

  “Crazy.”

  “Underground, Nora darling. He heard a call. He felt a summons. He’s a man with a mission.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Trey.”

  Trey’s Bookshelf: Partial Catalog

  How to Make Driver’s Licenses and Other ID on Your Home Computer

  Where to Hide Shit

  How to Make Money: The Counterfeiter’s Companion

  Get Lost: How Not to Be Found, for Boys (and Girls) on the Lam

  Smuggling for the Complete Klutz

  Scam I Am

  Step by Step Stealth

  Skim a Little off the Top

  ABC’s of Forgery

  ID Made Easy

  Off the Map: Privacy and How to Get It

  New Identity (video)

  Scram!

  Ur-Ine Trouble: The Truth about Drug Tests

  Anarchist Cookbook

  No Lie: Passing the Polygraph

  Getting into the Gray Market

  Speak Like a Native

  Voice Masking Devices You Can Make Yourself

  Are You Being Heard? Surveillance-Testing Your Home

  Mind Control for Beginners

  Back-to-Basics Burglary

  Reborn in the USA

  Who Are You? The Encyclopedia of Personal Identification

  Little-Known Tactics of Identity Change Professionals

  The Loser’s Way to Win

  Advanced Lockpicking

  Backyard Bilking

  Getting Away with It

  Cheater’s Bible

  Hacker’s Bible

  Liar’s Bible

  Fucking Shit Up

  1001 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know

  Selling Stuff You Don’t Own

  Be Someone Else!

  AMAZON

  We used to sneak into Granny’s bedroom while she was playing the piano. As long as we could hear her, it was safe to work open her underwear drawer, which gave with a sweet, musty exclamation, and look at her panties and bras, welling up like water. We swam our hands slowly through them. Sometimes a pair of dun-colored stockings bound everything together with startling violence. Sometimes we found a cold dime on the bottom of the drawer.

  One day when we bumped open her door we stopped, aghast: one of her bras confronted us. Hooked over a chair back, it was as shapely as if it hosted a ghostly bosom. When we dared to approach it, w
e saw that one cup was stuffed with a sachet that shifted when poked, like a beanbag. “What is that?” whispered Blanche.

  “It’s a fake boob,” I said knowledgeably. “Do you know what that means?”

  “What?

  “Granny is an Amazon.”

  “Really?”

  “Amazons cut off one of their breasts so they don’t get in the way when they shoot a bow and arrow. I read it.” I savored her awe so much my mouth filled with water. “Don’t tell anyone. She’s in disguise.”

  That night in bed: “Nora, what’s an Amazon?”

  Later we found out Granny had made the prosthesis herself, and that it was filled with birdseed, which she periodically replaced. “It gives a more natural outline than foam,” she said. “A breast is not a geometrical figure, girls. It is neither a hemisphere nor a cone.” It was the mellow smell of millet and sunflower seed that wafted around her and hung in the folds of her clothes. We loved to breathe that smell. It hushed us. We felt safe knowing that Granny was a kind of knight, adept with the bow, of course, but also, we speculated, “The broadsword.” “The boomerang.” “The Bowie knife.” “Jujitsu.” “Poison darts.” “Ninja stars.” We watched her closely for signs of secret abilities, begged trouble to come to town—marauders, brigands. If an outlaw tried to hold up the gas station, he’d be in for a surprise. Granny would spring onto the desk, shuck her bra, and fit an arrow to her bow, aimed at his throat.

  One afternoon she pulled up her shirt to show us the puckered scar on her right side. Blanche, prepared by my stories, barely managed to show surprise. But I, who had privately considered that my account might be exaggerated in certain respects, was appalled at this evidence of the power of my words. For a few days, I felt sick with guilt, as if I had performed the operation myself.

  How had she done it? I was afraid to ask. I pictured a cutlass, or the oversized shears depicted in our dilapidated copy of Struwwelpeter. I saw Granny in a crude rendering, dowel-legged and knob-headed, dressed in bandages, and the breast hopping off as if it were glad to be set free, trailing three drops of blood as big as doves. Then I saw her sitting on a rock beside the fire in an outlaw camp, carving off her breast with a steak knife, while throwing knives at a barrel with her toes.