Twins

by Marcy Dermansky

  Two weeks later Daniel loaded his car and drove off for college and I moved into his room. Sue sat on her bed, glaring at me as I packed my belongings. I could feel her eyes pounding into the back of my head as I folded my clothes, and every once in a while, the pain became so intense that I had to close my eyes.

  The week before school started, I went shopping for school supplies, and every night before I fell asleep, I would look over my purchases. I bought a pink three-ring binder and two thin spiral notebooks made from recycled paper, two boxes of extra-fine pens, one black, one purple, a box of number two unsharpened pencils, two packages of pastel-colored index cards, file folders, a lime green stapler, three pink highlighters, and a translucent pink pencil case. I had filled this pencil case with one purple pen, one black pen, a pink highlighter, an eraser, and index cards. I had also bought an introduction to French book and a French-English dictionary, a Webster’s New World Dictionary, and two SAT study guides.

  I hid these supplies under my bed, but Sue found them. I had no lock for the door, and Sue found them one night when I was in the shower.

  “You used to buy makeup,” Sue said, tapping a pink highlighter on top of the dictionary. “Clothes.”

  I shrugged.

  I used to be interested in clothes and makeup, but all that seemed hopeless now. Lisa Markman was gone. Even though she wrote every once in a while, I knew that we would never be friends. Even if Lisa continued to like me, Sue wouldn’t allow it. No one who got close to me would ever be safe. That summer it began to feel ridiculous to worry about my appearance if I could not expect to have either friends or a boyfriend, so I decided that I would be smart instead of pretty. Every night, I studied for at least an hour before I went to sleep: irregular verbs for the French class I would take in the fall, vocabulary for the SATs.

  “They have nothing to teach us at school, you know.” Sue flipped through the pages of my SAT guide. She was rough with the book, purposefully ripping pages as she went. “I say we run away, join the circus or maybe go to Alaska on a fishing boat.”

  Sue put down my SAT guide and opened a new spiral notebook, uncapped a new purple pen, wrote “Chloe and Sue’s Adventures in Alaska.” The notebook was ruined.

  “You can have that,” I said. “If you want it.”

  Sue looked at it, looked at me, and then tossed the spiral notebook across the room to the trash can.

  “You are fucking out of your mind,” she said. “Studying in the summer.”

  My eyes stung. “That was mean. I am never mean to you.”

  Sue tossed my SAT guide into the trash too. “I hate that you think so much about high school,” she said. “You’re going to go to all of your honors classes and forget you have a twin sister.”

  “How could I possibly forget?” I said.

  It came out sounding sarcastic. I wasn’t surprised to see the tears streaming down Sue’s cheeks. My head started to hurt like it always did when she cried, but Sue couldn’t see headaches.

  “That wasn’t nice either,” she said.

  I shrugged. Somehow I was glad to see Sue cry. I had done everything she wanted for the last two months, and still, it was not enough. I had to promise her my entire life.

  “I could never forget about you, Sue,” I said.

  “You couldn’t?”

  “I love you.”

  Sue shook her head. “You don’t,” she said. “You hate me.”

  It was true. Sometimes I did hate Sue. I wished that when she fell off her unicycle, her head would crack on the hard sidewalk and she would not get up.

  “Look,” I said, knowing what I had to do. I pulled my nightshirt up above my underwear to remind her. I had thought that the tattoo would always remind Sue what I would do for her. “Look.”

  I reached for Sue’s hand, leading her fingers to the tattoo. She pressed the palm of her hand on my back. We sat that way quietly until Sue stopped crying. She had started to trace the letters of her name on my back, again and again and again. I knew, without looking at her, that she was fine.

  My eye wandered to the trash can. Sue owned me, but it was only for the summer. I felt so sad, looking at the ruined notebook. School had not even started. I wondered if Sue would ever let me go to college. I wondered if I would let her stop me. I longed to take two aspirin, but I realized that if I were to get up, risk upsetting the peace I’d created, she might start again.

  College was still four years away.

  The next day, I told my mother that I needed glasses. She looked at me with concern, and before I knew it, I was crying.

  “What are you?” Sue said. “A retard?”

  I already knew that I would not be popular in high school. I knew that I would not have friends, because having friends was not a safe thing to do with Sue as a twin sister. I also knew that smart girls wore glasses, and that it was my intention to be smart. Wearing glasses would make me look like an ugly smart girl, and I had never wanted to be ugly. I only hoped that glasses would stop the headaches.

  “Honey,” my mother said. She looked at me for a moment before wrapping her arms around me.

  She planned a special day for us. She made an appointment with an ophthalmologist, took the day off work, and made lunch reservations for just the two of us. But when the day of the appointment came, I heard Sue approach my mother in the hallway upstairs and tell her that she was ready.

  “Right on time,” my mother said. “It’s a shame you needed a doctor’s appointment for me to take some time off.”

  I was in the bathroom, brushing my hair.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t believe it. We had the same features, but Sue and I did not look alike. I was an eighth of an inch taller. I brushed my hair and tucked in my clothes. My clothes were clean. For a moment, everything went black. I stood still until my vision cleared.

  I listened in disbelief as they walked down the stairs. My mother did not know that she was talking to Sue, who babbled about her progress on the unicycle. I heard the front door open and close. I listened to the ignition of the car. I knew that I had plenty of time to run after them, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to spend the day with my mother anymore, not if she didn’t even know who I was. I could get used to the headaches. I put down my hairbrush, went into my room, and climbed back into bed.

  It was quiet in the house. I realized that I never got to be alone. Sue never wanted to go anywhere without me. I pulled the blanket over my face, and it was dark. Daniel’s room had proven to be a disappointment. He’d left his drawers and the closet full of clothes, a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall, his books on the shelves. I didn’t know what to do with his things, so I left them where they were.

  But still, I wondered what it would have been like to eat alone in a restaurant with my mother. She once said that she liked to eat steak, but we never ate steak at home. Maybe I could have ordered a steak too. Women at lunch, I supposed, ordered salads. Spinach salad or chicken salad or mixed greens with goat cheese. I lay in the bed with my eyes closed. My headache was slowly going away. I closed my eyes and pictured a steak on a plate, with a baked potato on the side. I put my hand on my stomach and rubbed it. I must have fallen asleep, because I didn’t hear the door to the house open and I was surprised to see Sue standing over me, laughing.

  “She had no fucking idea,” she said.

  I blinked, confused, because I was staring at myself. Sue was wearing my clothes. She had brushed her hair and put on my lip gloss. She even smelled like me; she had put on my perfume.

  “Now she is pissed,” Sue said, “because you are going to be late for your appointment, and she just wanted to relax for a change. On her precious day off.”

  “She is pissed at me?” I said.

  “She is just pissed,” Sue said. “She can’t even tell her own daughters apart. She feels like a retard. She had this idea of a special mother-daughter day, only she had the wrong daughter. I would have pulled it off if I hadn’t started laughing. She was askin
g me about the honors classes, and I told her it was all bullshit.”

  “What’s bullshit?”

  “The idea that good grades make you smart.”

  I got out of bed.

  “This isn’t funny,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “I need to go to the eye doctor. I get headaches.”

  “I bet you a hundred dollars there is nothing wrong with your eyes.”

  “You don’t have a hundred dollars.”

  Sue’s arm snaked around her back. She was touching her tattoo.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “The bitch in the silver Mercedes is pissed.”

  I found my mother reading a legal brief while she waited.

  “Whoa,” she said when we got into the car. “I better get my eyes tested, because I’m seeing double.”

  The plans had changed, and my mother had invited Sue to come along with us. I got in the front and Sue hopped into the back.

  “That’s a terrible joke,” I said, putting on my seat belt.

  My mother nodded.

  “I’m sorry about the mix-up before, Chloe.”

  I shrugged. Once I let myself get angry, I’d never be able to stop.

  “Why aren’t you sorry to me?” Sue said.

  The ophthalmologist told me that I had perfect vision. I did not need glasses. My mother seemed relieved when she heard the news.

  “You are perfect,” Sue said. Her voice was cold with hate.

  At the Italian restaurant afterward, my mother ordered the capellini with shrimp and peas. I don’t know why, but somehow, this made me feel sad. There wasn’t any sort of steak on the lunch menu. I felt too tired to eat, but Sue insisted I finish my Caesar salad. She put butter on my bread and made me eat that too.

  I was good at school. I sat in the front row of my classes, and I took careful notes. Lisa Markman didn’t return home in the fall and the postcards stopped coming, but I assured myself that I was relieved. I told myself it was too dangerous to have friends, not with Sue always lurking around. I spent lunch periods studying in the library. The teachers praised me and called on me constantly to answer their simple questions, but no matter how well I did, I was not smart enough. I stayed up into the middle of the night studying and still got B’s on pop quizzes in French.

  Always, I tried to keep my distance from Sue.

  She cut her classes to stare at me though the glass windowpanes of the doors of my classrooms. One time, my history teacher stopped in the middle of a lesson to ask her to leave, and I watched, amazed, as Sue slapped the woman in the face and ran wildly down the hall. Sue was given a week’s detention. Not long after that, she got put into detention again for smearing worms in Brittany Lopez’s hair during biology lab. Sue was failing all of her classes.

  I walked home from school alone. I hated myself for feeling lonely. My mother had started going to Pilates after work. My father was handling the divorce of the deputy governor, his stockbroker, and the masseuse at his gym. He came home late each night. For Valentine’s Day, he gave us an enormous, heart-shaped box of Godiva chocolates to share, but Sue flushed them down the toilet, one by one by one.

  “Look how fat you’ve gotten,” she said.

  I looked at the chocolates sadly. I didn’t know who she was talking to.

  Sue came into my room and asked me to trim her bangs. Her face was wet with tears. We had not talked in weeks.

  “Your bangs?” I said.

  Our bangs had grown out a long time ago. I had loved the way I looked with the short bangs; coy, I thought, like a girl from a magazine. But once Sue had copied the style, I didn’t want my bangs to be short anymore.

  I looked at Sue, her desperate face and her greasy hair.

  “Yes,” I said, slowly, unsure of what I was agreeing to. “If you will cut mine too.”

  Sue grinned at me.

  Chloe and Sue. Our lives could be so simple if only I gave up on the idea of having a separate life. I knew that we could be dazzling. On the outside, we were blond and tall and thin. If I could let myself be the twin sister Sue had always wanted, we could be starring in our own sitcom.

  “I missed you like crazy,” Sue said. “You cannot even imagine how much I missed you.”

  “You could have talked to me any time.”

  Sue wiped her face clean. She looked at me with her big blue eyes, my big blue eyes, and I smiled. It didn’t make any sense for us both to be so miserable. I would make Sue take a shower. She would wash her hair. We would trim each other’s bangs, and maybe tomorrow, we could go shopping at the mall. We could eat nonfat frozen yogurt in the food court. We could start again.

  “Are you hungry?” I said.

  Sue looked at me. “I am always hungry,” she said.

  I nodded. “So am I.”

  “Why don’t we eat something?” Sue said.

  “We’ll have dinner,” I said.

  “I have money,” Sue said. “We can order something.”

  She pulled five twenty-dollar bills and my old mascara from her back pocket. Sue always had money.

  “Let’s have pizza,” Sue said.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten pizza. Pizza was strictly off-limits. There was no such thing as low-fat pizza.

  “Pizza?” I said. “Can we really eat pizza?”

  Sue nodded her head. “Yes, absolutely. We can eat as much as we want.”

  I felt my heart beating fast.

  “If you eat too much,” Sue said, “you can always throw it up.”

  “You do that?” I said.

  I always wondered about all the ice cream Sue ate, the chocolate Häagen-Dazs bars coated with chocolate and almonds. Sue got up and put my mascara back onto my dresser. She pulled my missing calculator from her back pocket and lay that down too. “Sometimes,” she said. “Almost never.”

  “Let’s get pizza,” I said.

  Sue smiled at me. “That is so great,” she said.

  “But first I will cut your bangs,” I said.

  “Hooray,” Sue said.

  “Hooray,” I said.

  I had forgotten how easy it was to make Sue happy.

  When our parents came home later that night, we were eating pizza and watching television. I had a French test the next day, but I wasn’t studying. I was watching television like a regular girl. Anything Sue wanted to watch was fine: the sitcoms, the entertainment news, a TV movie about a mother and daughter who had the same lover, only neither of them knew. I looked for Lisa Markman in the commercials. I had not heard from her in so long, it was possible she had moved to Hollywood and started an acting career.

  “Junk food,” my mother said, sighing. “Is this how my lovely twins feed themselves while we work?”

  She put down her briefcase on the table, next to the pizza box, took off her heels, and sat on the couch next to me. She put her hand on my head for a moment, and then she reached for the last slice. I wanted to lean over and grab the slice from my mother’s hand. I felt fiercely protective of our pizza. It was our food. Ours. The depth of my anger surprised me. I had clenched my hand into a fist. My head started to pound.

  It was Sue who hated our parents.

  It was Sue who had violent impulses.

  I couldn’t sleep. I could feel the pizza silently spreading through my body. When I closed my eyes, I saw page sixty-two of my French text: the past tense of-ir verbs. I was a master of English vocabulary, I could absorb lists at a glance from an SAT guide, I had no trouble with science or sine and cosine in trigonometry, but no matter how hard I studied, I could not keep straight irregular verb conjugations. I lay my hands on my stomach, my fat, bloated stomach, and I wondered why I had listened to Sue in the first place. Then I got out of bed and walked down the hall to my old room. I bent to look through the keyhole. It was three in the morning; the light was on. I heard something dull thump on the floor.

  “I can hear you,” Sue said.

  There was another dull thump, and then another. I was surprised that the noise hadn’t eve
r woken me up before, or my parents, further down the hall.

  “Can I come in?”

  For a second, everything was quiet.

  “You were never supposed to leave.”

  I opened the door. The room was the same, the twin beds, the desk, the framed baby pictures over the desk, the matching beanbag chairs, the old rocking horse in the corner. But it also looked and felt like Sue’s room now; the floor was covered with clothes and ice-cream-bar wrappers and tennis balls and paper bags and books. My bed was covered with dirty towels. Sue had cleared some space in the center of the room, where she stood in the middle of a circle of mess, holding three colored balls in one hand.

  “You’re learning to juggle?” I said.

  Sue tossed the balls in the air: red, yellow, and green. She had them going for a couple of rounds, her body moving wildly to catch the balls that fell out of the arc.

  “You’re good,” I said.

  “No,” Sue said. “I still suck.”

  One by one, the balls dropped to the floor.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I shrugged. I never thought that I would set foot back in my old room again. Daniel’s room was not everything that I had thought it would be, but once I had left, I never considered going back.

  “My stomach hurts,” I said softly. “From the pizza.”

  “You want me to show you how?” Sue whispered.

  I shrugged again. “My stomach really hurts.”

  “It’s worth it.” Sue smiled. “We got to eat pizza. I’ll show you how. It’s no big deal.”

  I followed Sue into the bathroom, and we sat down next to each other on the tile floor, next to the toilet.

  “The quicker you do this,” Sue said, “the better. You lean over, put your finger down your throat, fast, and it comes.”

  Sue rubbed her back, touching her tattoo.

  “That’s it?”

  I had always done everything first. It was not just riding the unicycle, it was everything: walking, talking, learning how to read. Now Sue was giving me vomiting lessons, and I realized I didn’t trust her to explain everything properly. I wished I had looked it up on the Internet, though probably there wouldn’t be any useful explanations of how to induce vomiting. There would be only advice on how to stop.