“That’s it,” Sue said. “The faster, the better. It tastes horrible, but then you brush your teeth, gargle some mouthwash. All gone. I’ll go first if you want.”
“Are you sure?”
The door was closed and locked from the inside. I was afraid that our parents would wake up and find us.
“I’ll show you how,” Sue said. “I promised I would. I keep my promises.”
We looked at each other.
Sue knelt in front of the toilet seat, leaned over, stuck her finger down her throat, and just like she said, the vomit followed. I watched, revolted.
“Good-bye, pizza,” she said. She rubbed her hands together.
I closed my eyes. I did not know what to say. I had made a mistake. I did not want to be throwing up in the middle of the night with my identical twin. I wanted to start the day all over again.
“We’ll give you a nice, clean bowl,” Sue said. “I know you like everything to be clean.” She flushed the toilet. “It’s really easy,” she said. “You just have to be quick. Switch places with me.”
I got up and knelt where Sue had been kneeling. The toilet bowl gave off the chemical smell of the chlorine ball I’d bought to keep it clean.
“It’s okay,” Sue said. “Fast.”
I was embarrassed that I needed lessons from Sue. I leaned over the toilet and started to put my finger down my throat but pulled it right out. I was terrified that I would gag, that the vomit would only come up halfway and I would die gagging. Was I willing to risk my own death because of three slices of extra-cheese pizza? I leaned back on my heels. Sue rubbed my hair.
“I can’t choke to death, can I?”
Sue looked at me. “Your hair is so soft,” she said, rubbing my head. “The faster you do this, the better.”
I took a deep breath, resumed my forward kneeling, and gently put my finger inside my mouth. I was certain that if I threw up, I would die. I pulled my finger out of my mouth and sat back up.
“I think I won’t do this after all,” I said.
“You have to,” Sue said. She put her hand on my shoulder and pushed me back down toward the toilet bowl. “You have to. I threw up tonight for you. To show you how.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
“I threw up for you,” Sue said.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
And then the tears came; not mine, of course, but Sue’s. “I can’t believe you would do that. That you would back out like this after I threw up for you. I hate throwing up. I threw up for you and now you won’t do it.”
Her voice was getting louder. I thought of our parents asleep in their bed. They needed their six and a half hours of sleep each night. They would be unhappy if we woke them. They would set up another meeting, and they would threaten us with the therapist, again. Tears streamed down Sue’s face. I ripped off a long piece of toilet paper and crumpled it in her hand.
“Sue,” I said. “Please.”
“I wouldn’t treat you this way,” Sue said. “I would not. I do not.”
I put my hand on my stomach; it was bloated. My stomach was big and bloated as if I had swallowed a basketball.
“Fast?” I said.
Sue nodded.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” she said.
I looked at Sue, her red face, her tangled hair. This would not be a good time to accuse her of stealing my textbooks, of destroying my homework assignments. We had had a nice night together. She was my identical twin sister. I had been lonely without her.
I got back on my knees, leaned over, closed my eyes, and stuck my finger as far back down my throat as it would go. The vomit shot up through my throat and out my mouth into the toilet bowl. My throat burned. My eyes filled with tears. But the pizza was gone, it was out of my stomach, and I was glad.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
Sue rubbed my hair.
“I would do anything for you,” she said.
She flushed the toilet.
Daniel did not come home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or spring break. My parents were on a television news show about the legal emancipation of child actors. My perfect grade point average was ruined by a B plus in French. Sue rode her unicycle to school, unconcerned about what other people thought. We had started a new, uneasy friendship.
When Sue and I threw up our pizza together, I realized that something was horribly wrong with us both. I pictured the two of us at a mental institution, standing in front of a room of student psychiatrists, a roomful of men and women wearing white jackets, taking notes on their clipboards. “Here we have an interesting case,” a young doctor would say, reading from an index card. “Twin bulimics.”
Sue was thrilled to eat meals with me, though she hated the fact that I served steamed vegetables and brown rice almost every night.
“Glub, glub, glub,” she said, chewing with her mouth open. “This sure ain’t lasagna.
“You know,” Sue said, throwing her brown rice into the air and then trying to catch it in her mouth, “it was really horrible when I was raped in detention hall.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You were never raped.”
“I might have been raped,” she said.
“You also might have gotten your period.” It felt good to say this.
Sue glared at me, and I knew that she had been lying.
“You have no self-worth,” she told me. “Zero self-esteem. You care too much about what everyone thinks. You think it is important that we brush our hair. You have the personality of a goldfish.”
Our new friendship was complicated. We had begun to insult each other with increasing regularity. Sue began to wash like a normal person, and in exchange, I did her homework, washed her clothes, and walked the dog. Sue had also started to behave at school, but I knew that it was on the condition of my continuous affection. She gave me massages when I got my headaches, but her hands on my back made my skin crawl. I often wondered if I was better off lonely and afraid.
I was still occasionally invited to a party by someone from Lisa’s old crowd, but I never went, and as the months passed, the invitations stopped coming altogether.
We were identical twins, tall and blond and beautiful, but somehow, Sue and I had become invisible. Our birthday was coming up again. First our birthday, and then another summer. We would be fifteen. I did not know how I would bear another summer.
My father had called a meeting to discuss birthday gifts. He wanted to avoid last year’s confusion. Sue wanted another unicycle. She pulled out a catalog. It was six feet high and cost twelve hundred dollars.
“Request denied,” my father said, staring at the picture. “That looks both dangerous and unseemly.”
“You asked me what I wanted,” Sue said.
My father turned to me.
“And you, Chloe, do you also want a circus unicycle?”
I shook my head. I wanted to throw my unicycle in the Hudson River, pretend that I had never learned how to ride the thing. I could not believe how badly the year had turned out. Every day, the more time I spent with Sue, the happier she seemed, and the more tired I felt.
My father was pleased with my answer. “With all this new technology, the circus is a dying art form,” he said, grinning at Sue. “Riding a unicycle won’t get you a job, for instance, and it certainly won’t get you into Harvard Law School.”
My mother snorted. “The last thing the world needs is more lawyers.”
I looked at her, surprised. She worked long hours every week at her practice. She loved her work more than she loved staying at home. I had always assumed that she loved her job.
“You don’t want me to join the firm?” I asked. “After I get my degree?”
“I wanted to be a poet,” my mother said.
This time, my father snorted.
“But unfortunately,” she said, “there’s no money in poetry.”
“So you’re a sellout,” Sue said.
&nb
sp; My mother pulled a nail file out of her red leather bag.
“I was a mediocre writer,” she said.
“Any other requests?” my father said, looking at Sue.
Sue did not seem surprised that he would not get her the unicycle. Maybe my father felt proud of himself for telling her no, but I knew that whatever Sue really wanted, she got for herself.
“Money,” Sue said. “Lots of it. My own credit card. A pink cockatoo.”
My father sighed. We knew that he would give her none of these things.
“What do you want, Chloe?” my father said.
“She wants a dildo,” Sue said. “She wants a vibrator. Chloe is a dirty girl.”
I blushed. “No,” I said.
This had been one of the less effective meetings. My father tapped his fingers on the table. My mother smiled at me encouragingly. But I didn’t know what I wanted for my birthday. Once I’d decided not to have a life, I lost interest in everything. It made me sad just to look at my makeup. Every once in a while, after I watched Sue pedal away on her unicycle from outside my window, I would put on some lipstick and then wipe it off with my hand.
In the end, my parents did what they wanted. We both received gift certificates from J. Crew, but Sue also got one hundred dollars cash, and I got a pink cell phone that I did not want or need. No one called me, and I had no one to call. I had asked my parents for a summer job at their firm, but my father had just interviewed a new batch of interns. Sue wanted to take acting classes. She believed I was hers again and that before long we would be on television, where we belonged. We spent another dull summer at home, riding our unicycles all over town.
In the fall, we went back to school. The classes were different, my teachers were new, but somehow, it felt exactly the same. I had no idea it was possible to feel so bored, so flat. My hair grew longer than it had ever been. Sue could spend hours braiding my hair into tiny little braids. I continued to study, to do well in school, but I stopped participating in class. I wouldn’t be able to get into an Ivy League college without extracurricular activities, but my expectations were steadily dropping. Any accredited school would do. Anywhere I could go without Sue.
We made it that way until spring, when Sue went on a broccoli strike. She went back to eating only ice cream and candy bars. I had tried to feed her healthy food. I had told her why bingeing on fattening food was wrong, but she grinned at me, methodically licking the chocolate coating off her ice-cream bar. Her face was dirty, smeared with chocolate, and I couldn’t bear to look at her.
I pretended not to hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night.
I thought of my life as a jail term, counting down the days until I started college. I kept count in my head. I did our homework in front of the TV while Sue watched sitcoms. She seemed happy, perfectly content in our nonexistence.
And then one day, not long before our sixteenth birthday, my cell phone rang.
Sue and I stared at it. She turned the sound off the television.
“Wrong number,” she said.
“Probably,” I said.
“Who,” Sue said, “would want to call you?”
I shrugged. Sue watched me as I answered the phone. She reached behind her back and touched her tattoo.
“Hello?” I said.
My heart had started to beat faster. I wanted so much for the call to be for me, though I knew that Sue was right, that disappointment lay ahead. No one ever called, not for me.
“Did ya miss me, Chloe baby?” the voice on the phone said. I had not heard from her for over two years, but it was Lisa. Lisa Markman. “I bet you missed me like crazy.”
Sue
Chloe went to Hawaii for Christmas vacation with Lisa Markman. I said I’d kill myself if she went without me. She didn’t flinch.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Then I’ll kill your ugly friend,” I said. “You don’t know what I might do.”
I had already broken Lisa Markman’s nose with a tennis ball. I didn’t know why Chloe didn’t understand. She should have been afraid of me. She had no idea that I had also stolen Lisa’s Armani purse or that a security guard had caught me attempting to pry open a back window of the Markman house. Nothing had happened. The guard was nice to me. He gave me an autographed picture of Mr. Markman and told me to get lost. It was almost impossible for me to go home every day and know that Chloe was with Lisa. It was more than feeling excluded. I worried that one day I really would have to hurt her.
When the school year started again, Chloe told me she was through doing my homework and taking care of Daisy. Lisa Markman was back from Europe. I had to watch my sister walk down the halls with that bitch, the two of them, talking and laughing like I did not exist. I felt numb, watching my world collapse. Chloe went to Lisa’s house almost every day. She’d gone sailing on Mr. Markman’s sailboat and to a movie premiere in Manhattan, where she wore a strapless pink dress. But Hawaii was where it had to stop. Hawaii was on the other side of the planet.
“How cruel can you be?” I said. “Don’t go. I’ll do drugs. I’ll inject heroin into my veins.”
“It’s just a short trip,” she said. “I’ll bring you back a present.”
Chloe was getting better and better at going places without me. A limousine came to the house to pick her up.
“You need to make your own friends,” she said.
I walked with her to the limo, I sat next to her on the black leather seat. Chloe stared out the window, purposefully ignoring me, and I started to cry.
“I don’t like other people,” I said.
I could not think of a single person I liked. There was no one but Chloe and me.
“I can’t be your whole world,” Chloe said.
“Too bad,” I said.
“I won’t be.”
“Too late.”
Chloe smoothed her hair.
“Well you better not scuba dive,” I said. “With your luck, your oxygen tank will explode, if you don’t die in a plane crash first. I hope you die a painful death.”
I got out of the car, slammed the door in her face. Then I watched the limo pull away. Maybe she was looking back at me, but I couldn’t see her through the tinted windows.
I didn’t know. I really could kill myself, if I wanted to.
There was no point in celebrating the holidays. My parents had been busy at the end of the year. Since Daniel went to college, we’d been skipping the Christmas tree. I didn’t want one; I didn’t want their pathetic presents either. There was nothing my parents could give me. With Chloe in Hawaii, my mother decided to keep things simple. She ordered sushi. The wasabi came shaped like a Christmas tree.
Daniel showed up before dinner with his new girlfriend, Yumiko. We were all surprised when he called early in the morning to say he was coming home. Daniel never came home. Last summer he stayed on some weirdo farm where he took care of goats and learned to make goat cheese.
My parents were angry. They didn’t like surprises. They spent their days reacting to family problems, and at work they got paid for their efforts. My mother was mortified that she had ordered Japanese food for a Japanese houseguest.
“You could have cooked a turkey,” I told her.
“I could have been a happy homemaker for that matter.” My mother frowned at me. “How long,” she said, “has it been since you’ve washed your hair?”
It had been twelve days. My hair was good and greasy. Chloe would be thoroughly disgusted.
Yumiko sat at Chloe’s place at the dining room table. She wore a white lace dress over a pair of blue jeans. I had never seen anyone do that before. Everything about Yumiko was fascinating to me. She had shiny black hair that fell to her shoulders. She was so little, she barely came up to my shoulders.
“You are staring,” Daniel said to me.
Yumiko didn’t care. She stared right back.
“I love a big American holiday,” she said, looking at the Styrofoam containers filled with s
ushi on the table. “Turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes. The gluttony of it all.”
“Pie?” Daniel said. “What about the pie?”
“Dessert is the best part,” Yumiko said. “When you are so stuffed you have to undo the top button of your jeans, that’s when the dessert comes around.”
I looked at Yumiko with admiration. She looked as if she weighed ninety pounds. She looked like a little china doll.
“Have you ever gone scuba diving?” I asked her.
“No,” Yumiko said. She looked right at me. “Have you?”
I shook my head. “I wonder how often people die. If they are not properly trained.”
Daniel looked at his hands.
“Here we go,” he said.
“Anything could happen,” I said. “Chloe could run out of oxygen, or she could get caught in a cave and panic. She could get eaten by a shark. There are great white sharks in Hawaii. She could get carried away by the current.”
My mother rubbed her eyes.
“Chloe won’t die,” she said.
My father leaned back in his chair. “After the holidays, you’ll start seeing that therapist. This has gone on for too long.”
“What has gone on?” I said. “This is the first time Chloe’s gone scuba diving. Clearly you don’t care. Maybe you’re the one who needs the therapy.”
“Are we going to eat or what?” Daniel said.
Daisy growled from underneath the table. She could always tell when something was wrong. She had turned into a weird dog, peeing in corners, flinching when I tried to pet her. I slipped her a piece of California roll.
“I’ve never seen a poodle eat sushi,” Yumiko said.
“You do not react to situations rationally,” my father told me. “I think we made a significant mistake the day you assaulted the Markman girl.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think,” I said to my father.
I smiled at Yumiko.
“Let’s not talk about that now,” my mother said. “We have other things to talk about.”
I wondered how horrible my parents must seem to Yumiko. She had a small, pretty nose. Dark eyes. Almond-colored skin. She was much prettier than Chloe.
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