Her: A Memoir (9 page)

Chapter 7

We only pretended to
be each other once.

We were in seventh grade and had just moved back to Albany. We invited our boyfriends over for the evening to watch television. The room was lit by the glow of low-wattage lightbulbs and the ambient gleam of a game show. The boys ignored us and dipped their hands into the large plastic bowl of popcorn between them. Cara and I got up and went into the kitchen.

“These guys are lame,” she said. “Let’s teach them a lesson.” Cara pulled her shirt over her head and passed it to me. I did the same. We wore matching jeans and brown oxfords.

“Let me fix your hair,” I whispered, my heart beating hard in my chest. “Can we really do this?” I asked, a flutter of remorse caught in my throat.

“Give me one reason we shouldn’t.”

“It’s wrong,” I said and pulled the band from my own hair and tied hers into a tight ponytail on top of her head.

“Don’t be so serious,” Cara scolded. “It’s all in good fun.” She fluffed my bangs with her fingers and smoothed my fly-aways. She patted my cheek and pulled me toward the living room. We walked in together, coy, our hands in our pockets.

I sat down next to Cara’s boyfriend and waited. A quiz show began at the top of the hour. We all shouted answers. Her boyfriend yawned and stretched, placing his arm over my shoulder. Cara looked at me, hot with jealousy. “I’m so sorry,” I mouthed to her, hoping her boyfriend could spot a decoy.

But then my boyfriend put his hand on Cara’s leg, above the knee. She picked it up and moved it to the inside of her thigh. I glared at her and she smirked back at me. I tipped my head against Cara’s boyfriend’s forehead and kissed him with my tongue. I hoped Mom wouldn’t catch us.

Cara stood up and grabbed my hand, pulled me up off the sofa, and twisted my fingers back against my wrist until I cried out in pain. Our boyfriends looked worried. “You’re dumped,” she said to her boyfriend, “for kissing my sister.” Cara undid her hair from the style I’d made for her and shook her long locks over her shoulders, dramatically exposing her true identity.

Our boyfriends sat stunned. The blinking blue screen of the television flickered on their faces.

“Whatever,” one of our boyfriends said to the other. He got up to leave. “They’re the same chick anyway.”

*   *   *

Identical twins are not exactly alike. They begin in the womb, at conception, with a single egg and sperm. Twins are made after the egg is fertilized and splits. Similarity is a result of how long the egg takes to divide. The longer it takes for the egg to split, the more alike a set of twins will look. We must have split early. My feet and nose were larger than Cara’s. As adults she usually outweighed me by fifteen pounds. Identical twins share the same DNA but do not have identical DNA. The egg splits into two halves to form identical twins, but the DNA does not divide equally between the two cells. We were like an apple sliced in half: two halves of the same fruit, one with more seeds, one with fewer.

We constantly teased each other for our differences. She called me “Big Foot” and “Horn Nose.” I called her “Piggy.”

Cara bought me a present the summer before I was married: two pairs of shoes. Converse All Stars: one pair black, one pair red. She’d picked them up for me because they were priced to move, at a 60 percent discount. Cara, like all the women in our family, couldn’t pass up a sale. She bought the shoes in a women’s size 9; I wore a size 8. Cara wore a size 7. She’d razzed me throughout our childhood about my “Bozo” feet, my “flippers.” In her loving gift, she revealed her opinion of my feet—they were huge. My feet were the one feature I possessed that made me less dainty than she. Cara cherished them. She was more than happy to dress my boat feet; the shoes were her thank-you for my being imperfect.

Cara couldn’t resist the shoes. She stole the black pair from my closet even though they were two sizes too large. She was raped in those shoes, and in a sweater of mine she stole; the shoes were lost in the forest, sliding off her feet as she was dragged. The police kept them as evidence. She should have laced them tighter.

As children, I picked on Cara for her weight even though we were both undersized for our age. I remember sliding next to her on the floor one night when we were ten years old, preparing to watch a movie after dinner. Mom had spread out a blanket for us; she’d set out two bowls of ice cream: one for each of us. We lay down hip to hip, our small bodies too close; I wanted more room. I thought of the low-fat bacon commercial that played constantly on TV, and repeated the slogan. “Slide over, bacon. Make room for something leaner.” I pinched at the tiniest roll of fat on Cara’s upper arm. She looked at me and blinked sadly, moving over slowly, like a cow resigned to a prod. She scooched several inches to the right and stayed there. Years of dieting spoke for her from then on. She wasn’t alone in this: I had the bump in my nose filed and the bones on the bridge straightened while we were in high school. I gave the surgeon Cara’s senior portrait to show how I wanted it.

*   *   *

Starting in sixth grade, Cara was the prettier one. Yes, we were twins: we looked alike, but Cara had the kind of attractive sass that helped her pull off her imperfections.

I was bony, big-nosed, bucktoothed, and pimply. I had legs long enough that the boys called me frog, and my bulging, dark-circled, terrified eyes confirmed that the boys were right.

Cara’s nose was the perfect ski jump; her slender wrists were ringed with friendship bracelets. She’d filled her bra at eleven, stolen her first kiss at twelve, and in sixth grade she was voted Queen of the Dance—an honor akin to prom queen for the prepubescent nominees. On the sixth-grade dance floor my sister had the right moves and the attention of all of the boys. I stood on the sidelines, manning the punch bowl and handing out ballots for the sixth-grade presidential election, my name in bold letters at the top of the list of candidates.

When Cara won her crown, I helped her pin it into her hair. The gymnasium had been transformed into a disco, complete with a glittery turning ball. I was careful to set the tiara straight on her head and arrange it just so. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “I’m proud of you,” I yelled over the booming music.

“What?” she mouthed and pointed to a blasting speaker. “I can’t hear you.”

I pushed her out onto the dance floor to meet her king.

She was always ahead of me: born, lived, died.

Chapter 8

One weekend when
I
was in high school, I woke at noon to find my mother—who stands no taller than five feet two inches and weighs no more than 105 pounds—in the backyard wielding a chain saw, slaying a tree. Her long black hair fell away from her slender face at the nape of her neck and curled in a shiny S all the way to her waist. She blasted through the tree’s bark, a hacksaw dangling from her belt. Wood chips flew at her arms and face, fell at her feet, or were caught in the web of her mane. “Timber!” she shouted to the neighborhood. The tree snapped loudly against the earth. Tools and machinery were scattered around the lawn. Her smile was wide enough to be visible beneath her paper face mask.

Mom spent years learning how to build furniture and refinish floors and coffee tables. The grass was hers to mow. She cleared the snow-covered driveway with a push plow. Earning a living could be easily done: she took two jobs. Cara and I pitched in, but Mom took on the brunt of the housework. And she endeavored to be upbeat, as if to say, “Look how easy it is. It’s okay that your father is no good and your stepfather left us.”

When Mike left, Mom had yet to finish her degree program in laboratory technology at Coastal Carolina Community College, so for that summer we rented a modest house just off the base. She traded in her long hours as a waitress at the Officers’ Club at Camp Lejeune for longer hours hunched over science equipment: pipettes, syringes, circular petri dishes with shiny bloodred bottoms. She brought her schoolwork home. Petri dishes sat stacked like candies in our refrigerator beside the butter and milk. She’d swab our sore throats and incubate the bacteria, in steamy showers and on top of warm radiators.

It didn’t take her long to find a position in Albany after graduation, and her new degree brought a better life for us.

Mom tried to be both mother and father. We celebrated our mother on Father’s Day. We dutifully gave her drills and screws, barbeque grills and tanks of fuel—and overlooked the enormous pain of our father’s absence. If we expressed to Mom the sadness of our loss, she was hurt. She took our sorrow as slight.

*   *   *

Cara and I both had teachers in high school who took notice of our abilities in English and the arts and tried their best to foster the feeling that anything was possible. It didn’t matter to them that we’d grown up in a single-parent home without enough money to buy books. It was clear we both loved reading. It had been that way since we lived in North Carolina and Mom made sure we went to the bookmobile every week. The bookmobile was Camp Lejeune’s traveling library, a cross between an ice cream truck, an RV, and an armored vehicle, full of musty books with dog-eared pages. It came to Tarawa Terrace, our neighborhood on the base, once a week, curbside at 3 p.m. on the dot. Like everything marine, it was never late or absent. Books were not to be overdue, or a demerit for the marine, our stepfather, would be issued. But we read promptly out of love as much as out of fear. Cara and I raced to finish, so we could discuss our discoveries before having to slide the book into the abyss of the return bin, which was located directly beside the van’s fuel door.

Cara wrote as avidly as she read. She won a state-sponsored contest in second grade with a short story about a girl who abandons her family to move into a hot air balloon. The girl floats above her small town for weeks and subsists on a stolen picnic basket filled with pies and cakes. Eventually the weather turns from fair to lightning and the girl falls ill with motion sickness, vomiting on the roofs of her neighbors’ houses. After Cara’s win, Mom set her hopes on Cara becoming a writer. Mom thought maybe I’d be an actress.

Ronald Milligan was the teacher who changed the course of my life. An ex-hippie with long white hair receding at the crown who taught in blue jeans and T-shirts, he was rumored to smoke weed and attend anarchist meetings; he was never afraid to swear in class or frown at football players. He’d ridden his bicycle across the country and back twice, raised a daughter who was a war reporter for CNN, and married and loved another English teacher at our school, Mrs. Legge, whose graying blond hair hung nearly to her knees. She was stern and big-eyed, his perfect opposite.

Ron Milligan was the hero I’d been waiting for.

He insisted that his students call him Ron. He taught me about Wounded Knee and Emma Goldman, kept me reading Steinbeck and Faulkner and attended to my class journal as if it were the greatest literature he’d read. I wrote three times as many pages as were required and turned them in every two weeks for comment. I went from writing about symbols and plot to exploring my relationship with my father and my seemingly bottomless fears.

When college application time rolled around, Ron helped me prepare the list of choices for the meeting with Mrs. Fairbank, the guidance counselor.

My mother went along with me and Cara to our meeting with Mrs. Fairbank, who welcomed us in and pulled out the list of colleges she had compiled, reading out the names of the more selective state schools that she had calculated were in our budget.

I had other ideas.

“By my calculations,” I told her, “we can afford Smith or Vassar or Bard.” I pulled the list from my purse. I showed her that all of these schools offered aid for less-well-off students. Ron had even helped prepare pie charts. “Given that we’ll both attend at the same time, we’ll certainly be given scholarships. It will cost less than state school.”

Mom looked at my figures and ran her tongue over her teeth. She always does this while she considers something important. “I was thinking more along the lines of community college,” Mom said, “Like I did. It makes good sense.”

I gasped dramatically, as only a teenager not getting her way can. “We’re not like you,” I said. I looked over at Cara and she nodded in agreement.

“We need you to get the most bang for your buck,” Mom said matter-of-factly.

“Bang for your buck?” I repeated, certain that other Bard College parents would never refer to financing their children’s education that way. I imagined Mom sporting jeans and tennis shoes while trying to mingle with parents who wore tweed blazers with leather elbow patches. I knew we were in for a long battle. I also knew that once we toured the campus and received award letters Mom would be swayed, and I was right. By the time we’d begun preparing to go off to school, Mom had studied our course catalogues and picked out all of the classes that she would have enrolled in had she had our opportunity at eighteen.

Ron was the first person I called when we were accepted to Bard through the early decision process.

I was to study poetry and Cara fiction. Unlike my friends’ parents, Mom had no worries about our major. We were the first in our family to attend a four-year college. A degree is a degree and therefore, my mother reasoned, good. She assured us that if we followed our passions we’d be fine.

Ron pulled me aside on our final day of class. He told me that someday not too far from then, he expected to come into a bookstore and find the first volumes of my sister’s and my memoirs sitting side by side on the front sales table. I promised that someday he would find that.

*   *   *

We decorated our first-year college dorm room like our mother’s house.

“The rug is a soft place to rest your studious feet,” Mom said as she removed the price tag and hoisted it into our small moving truck. It fell with a thud beside the Tupperware under-bed storage units. “You can never have too many shoes,” she said, “so I found you an extra place to put some.” She liked to playfully nettle us about our teenage vanities. “Big hair. Big star,” she’d say. And it felt like her way of letting me know that no matter how high I teased and sprayed my hair, I was still her girl.