It’s like the inverse of twins, I thought. Instead of a dividing egg, it was two eggs fused together.
It was just like the houses Eric had studied in architecture school, the kind we’d driven by and dreamed of inhabiting. We agreed to put in an offer on it, even though he had only seen it in images. “I trust you,” he said.
At the inspection, I asked the seller if it had been difficult to turn the two apartments into a single home. “It was tricky,” he said. “The wall that separated them was load bearing, so we had to find another type of support so the ceiling wouldn’t cave in.”
“What did you do?”
“We put a steel band all the way around it,” he said.
“What kind of a band?” I asked, imagining something horizontal. The rings of Saturn. A band of quartz in a metamorphic rock.
“Here,” he said, and got a Moleskine journal out of his jacket pocket to draw me a picture.
“Ah,” I said, sliding an imaginary ring onto my finger. “Like a wedding band.”
I bring Eric to our new house for the first time. It is dark inside; the previous owners have taken the lamps. Eric runs his hand along the wall, looking for a switch, and turns on the overhead lights.
It is all the houses we lusted after. The Mieses and Corbusiers; the Philip Johnsons. The kind of house people warned us about—nowhere to hide. We are on display to the houses across the canyon, to people on the street below, to each other. Perhaps we’ll thrive under this scrutiny, protected by the watchful eyes of the world. Or maybe the exposure will burn.
The house is an art gallery. Clean lines and white walls. It is the ballet studio of my youth—a rectangle with glass panels on one side. But these are not mirrors. They are windows. We look out, not back.
I drop my bag in the center of the room, and though it’s been years, I wind up for a series of fouetté turns.
A fouetté is a one-legged turn, perfect for Zeus’s disobedient humans. The ballerina whips one leg in a circular motion from the front to the side and then into passé (toe to knee) while turning and rising on and off pointe on the standing leg. The turns are done in place. She rotates 360 degrees, but she does not roam. Planetarily, it is a series of days, not a year.
In Swan Lake, Odile does thirty-two of them. I’ve read that it’s proper to start clapping at twelve. They come at the end of the Black Swan pas de deux when Odile and her partner take turns impressing the audience. Pierina Legnani, an Italian, was the first to perform the thirty-two fouettés in Swan Lake in 1895. Italian dancers were more athletic than their French and Russian counterparts and they also knew how to spot when they turned. Spotting means you focus on one fixed point, whip your head around, and return to that point. It keeps you from getting dizzy. In ballet class, you spot your face in the mirror. When you’re onstage there is no mirror, just a single red light on the wall at the back of the auditorium.
In the house there is no red light. There is nothing stopping me. I spot Eric’s face. I go round and round but I always come back to him. The spotting steadies me.
I can’t do thirty-two but I don’t care. I stop after six and we laugh. He grabs me and I hold on to him and we sway in the bareness of the room.
Spotting can be a symptom of a vanishing twin. It is only light bleeding. Sometimes they call it breakthrough.
Thank you to Yuka Igarashi, Monika Woods, Sarah Manguso, Chris Daley, Darri Farr, Rick Sittig, and everyone on the Counterpoint/Catapult/Soft Skull team who helped bring this book into the world. To Karolina Waclawiak for publishing my essay on BuzzFeed. To my parents for their love and support in all my artistic pursuits. To everyone who provided inspiration and encouragement along the way, especially PV and CW, but also DV, MA, KK, AT, NC, EGS, and ALW. Thank you to John Houck for all of this and more; for your passion and devotion to your work—it makes me take my own more seriously—and for your equal if not greater passion and devotion to me and Freja. We thrive because of your care. Thank you for the ink beneath your skin. A knot that isn’t pulled tight, a deliberate mark, a thread, a yarn. Our story on the tenderest part of your arm. I’ll trace it over and over.
LEAH DIETERICH’s essays and short fiction have been published by BuzzFeed, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Offing. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Vanishing Twins Page 17
