Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (42 page)

"Vi, you're making that one up," Rose protested, seeming to flush, and looking aside.

"Oh, no, I'm not, as you know very well," Vi laughed, bringing her head around to look her twin straight in the eyes. "I thought so. Somehow that's the first thing everyone reads."

Rose squirmed.

Vi grew thoughtful, the distance coming back into her eyes. She mumbled, "I wonder if that would be the animus – a female with a penis? The grand hermaphrodite. Or would that be the anima? Or neither?" She looked behind her towards the night outside and said more clearly, "You know, Rose, when I was at that window with that bird, I had the strongest feeling of the presence of one of the archetypes."

"So did I too!" Rose blurted out tensely. "It was very scary, something beyond the flashing lights and pain."

Vi embraced Rose reassuringly, one hand upon her shoulder, the other on her cheek, pressing her other cheek against her own. "There, there," she breathed and Rose was comforted.

Vi gave them both a little more brandy and said, "Remember how you said you'd like to be some man's anima and torture him?"

Rose nodded. "Though I don't think any more that I'd be up to it."

"So? Well, I was once my foster father's anima. After he raped me I knew I was going to leave home for good, but I wanted to get my own back at him first – or should I say our own? I got ready to leave – money and clothes, an address in New York – and all the while I watched him like a hawk. For a while he held off from me. He was afraid, of course, he might have got me pregnant. He hadn't – I had my period a week later, though I took care not to let either of them know. A few nights after that he tried the same trick again – getting my foster mother dead drunk and all – but I was ready for him and I kicked him in the balls (I'd kept my shoes on) so that he squealed and fainted."

Rose breathed, "My God."

Vi continued, "The next couple of days my foster mother kept asking him why he was walking bowlegged and bent over. He said it must be rheumatism inherited from his great grandfather, who'd fought in the Civil War.

"You'd have thought he'd have had enough by then, of course, but he kept trying – men are such fools, or rather they have an endless blind persistence when it comes to
that
. This time he changed his tactics. After he'd put my foster mother to sleep again, he presented me with a dozen red roses and a real diamond ring and the
cutest
black silk peekaboo panties and half-cup brassiere – he even had the right size.

"And this time he'd decided he had to get me drunk too because I was such a smart and worldly little bitch. I played along with it, pretending to get soused with him and promising him that just in a little while longer I'd model the brassiere and panties for him. He kept stumbling around after me in circles. The music throbbed, the lights were low, and every little while I'd dump a little whisky down my neck to make me smell as if I had been drinking.

"Eventually he passed out blotto flat on his face on the floor. I took what cash he had and what more he and his wife had around the house and brought down my bag – it was already packed – and then I hauled down his pants and greased my old toothbrush and rammed it up his ass, bristles first, all the way in."

Rose gasped, "My God.
My God
!"

"And then," Vi finished, "I scattered the dozen red roses over him and departed that place."

She took a deep breath and let it out. Rose sat frozen, as if in thought or shock.

Vi asked, "So how does it feel to have a twin sister who's a criminal, who rips off loose cash and sees that the men she disapproves of get buggered?"

Rose shook herself a little, smiled nervously, and said quickly, "Oh, no, it feels all right. It's just that my own foster father was so very different. He was very gentle, almost timid with me. I can't remember him ever touching me. He treated me like a little stranger princess. He read me fairy tales and books like
Winnie the Pooh
and
The Borrowers
and
Little Women
and, later on,
Wuthering Heights
. He had poor health and couldn't get good jobs. He would have liked to be a beatnik poet. I thought he was perfect until – but that came later on. No, it was from my foster mother that all the violence came, the things that frightened me and ruled my life."

"That figures," Vi said. "I mean, you said she was possessive and bossy?"

"She was more than that, Vi. She was the power and she was the law. She was almost – My first memory was of her leaning over my bed and smiling down at me fiercely like the sun, bare to the waist and with her arms and breasts thrust out to either side like Theda Bara, as if she were trying to imprint her personality on me. She called her breasts her wings."

"Jesus, how corny," Vi commented. "What a kook."

"I can see that now," Rose said. "She studied Zen and karate and shaved her legs and armpits with a straight-edge razor. She said the books my foster father read me were romantic crap and that he was trying to make me weak like him. She was always bawling him out for not being successful and showing more manhood."

"I'll bet," Vi said, "especially in bed."

"She fussed a lot about my health and keeping clean and not getting infected and not touching myself or letting anyone touch me. But she was always touching me herself for inspection or instruction, especially my private parts (she called them, but they were anything but private to her, you can believe me). She made me do her exercises with her. And she was always quick to give me slaps, which always made my foster father wince, although he never did anything to stop her. She said I needed reminders – it was Zen. But every once in a while she'd snatch me up and hug me fiercely, holding me high as if I were some sacrifice, or as if she were trying to inspire and terrorize me at the same time. I was plain scared to death of her. As soon as she came near, I'd tighten up."

Vi shook her head. "The things they do to us, one way or another."

"For a long while she scared me off other children. I made up an imaginary playmate, a little girl exactly like me except her mother was dead." Rose's eyes widened. "Oh, Vi, do you suppose I somehow knew I had an identical twin? Or that there's been telepathy between us?"

"Could be," Vi said thoughtfully, "but maybe most imaginary playmates are like that."

Rose continued, "But eventually I got to have a real girl for a pal, a black girl who was very slender and had narrow hands and long fingers like ours. I think she must have had Watusi blood. At first it was because she had a kitten. We'd play together on the way home. She loaned me Wonder Woman comics and Vampirella and Pantha."

"I used to read those," Vi said. "Was Pantha the one who'd change into a black panther to destroy her parents and teachers and men who bothered her?"

"That's right. One dark afternoon we dared each other to go into a park we weren't ever supposed to. A storm was coming on but we kept daring each other to stay. It started to rain a little and we took shelter under some trees on a hilltop. Then thunder growled and the wind blew hard, tossing the leaves and branches, a siren started to wail down in the city, and we got this feeling that there were great dark wings over us. We both got very scared and held each other tight. And then it quieted down and we were touching each other.

"Oh God, Vi, to be touched with love! Not like my mother, as if you were something she owned and could handle exactly as she pleased, but something that's respected and understood and cherished."

"I know," Vi said softly, coming closer again, their hands lightly meeting. Rose went on, "For a while we were very happy, but what happened next, as you'd expect, was that my foster mother found out about our friendship. She was too smart to make it a racial thing – my foster father was very leftist in some ways – but that my little pal was light-fingered. She pretended to catch her stealing and called up her parents. There was a row and we were not allowed ever to see each other again. And then I found out that she'd also seen us touching and once kissing because she gave me an awful spanking, to teach me, she said never again to risk getting infected and that, although there was nothing wrong with black girls, they could never help me to be successful.

"And after that she seemed almost to be more worried about girls touching me than boys. Of course it all put me off other kids again and I read a lot and even tried to write poetry and stories myself. That brought my foster father and me quite close for a while. He still read to me and we even talked about writing and things, although my foster mother watched us like a hawk and kept ranting about success and the main chance and how we both would be better off in mental hospitals.

"But she couldn't object to my next girlfriend (who came three years later) because she was from a wealthy Northshore political Irish family (her father was a state senator) and wore very expensive clothes and was white of course. My foster mother even tried to get palsy with her at first. But Siobhan could be very snotty in a ladylike way.

"Siobhan always had lots of spending money. With that and her hauteur she got us into adult X-rated movies. Jane Fonda was our idol. We ate up
Klute
and
Barbarella
too. We romanced about becoming spacewomen and call girls. Under her snotty shell she was in many ways näive as I and lonely too. One of us would pretend to be Snow White and the other would wake her. It was together that we learned French kissing and to pet to climax. And once we smoked some marijuana she'd snitched from her brother. I was wildly happy, but also very scared too from time to time – I'd get that dark wings feeling. Vi, would you be mad at me if I had some more brandy?"

"Of course not, Rose," the other said. "I'll have some too. To tell the truth, I was more shaken up at the window than I let on."

"Why? What was it?" Rose demanded uneasily.

"At first the thing that was caught there seemed too big and yet somehow too insubstantial for a bird – as if it were a frantic invisible being in a cloak of bright black feathers."

"Oh God! But it
was
a bird?"

"It was a bird," Vi assured her. "Here's our drinks – ah, that's better. Now how did your mother manage to wreck things this time?"

"She went to Siobhan's father at his office (she told me this when she confronted me) and made a big scene there, accusing Siobhan of corrupting me sexually and getting me on drugs and threatening to go to the other political party and their newspaper if he ever let Siobhan see me again. Of course he denied everything, but actually she'd hit on just the right way to throw a scare into him. Siobhan was taken out of school and sent to one in the East, I think. At any rate I never saw or heard from her again.

"And then my foster mother headed home, breathing fire, and confronted me with my foster father there, telling him his Little Miss Innocent and Fairy Princess was nothing but a dirty little lesbian bitch and demanding that he whip me with her razor strap and when he wouldn't, jeering at him and telling him then he could watch her do it.

"Oh God, Vi, it was awful. He pleaded with her, or rather he kept repeating that he didn't think it was wise or right – things like that – but, oh God, Vi, he didn't even try to stop her and he didn't run away, he stayed."

"And you just stood still and let it happen," Vi observed gently.

"No, Vi, I didn't," Rose sobbed, tears spurting from her eyes. "I fought hysterically then but – just as with you and your foster father –
she
was stronger. She twisted my wrist behind my back and forced me over, making it weirdly sexy, and then she whipped me. It hurt like hell, God how it hurt, there was some blood, but the worst thing was that I knew he was getting a thrill out of it. His little princess, and he was getting a thrill!"

"There, there, it's over," Vi said soothingly, drawing Rose's head towards her shoulder.

"But it wasn't, Vi, that wasn't the worst," Rose said, dry-eyed now, pulling away. "After that happened I knew, like you, that I had to get out of there. And I guess my foster father knew that same thing, because two days later he ran away with a young hippy woman it turned out he'd been having an affair with, but oh God, Vi, he didn't take me with him.

"I could have forgiven him being a coward and afraid to stop her – I was scared to death of her myself. I could even forgive him having sexual feelings seeing me whipped – I'd had sexual feelings myself, and not always at the nicest things, but oh God, Vi, he didn't take me with him! He ran away and didn't take me with him."

Vi did not move to comfort her this time. Instead she studied her cooly and thoughtfully, missing nothing, not the track of one tear, as if Rose were an artist's model taking a pose and Vi the painter. Her pale blue eyes were at once sympathetic and merciless, and the distance within them was very great.

She said at last, "Not to be loved, to find yourself betrayed ... it's a very dry pain, isn't it? As if you were being tortured on the rack for witchcraft and then they stop, the instruments relax their poignant grip, the blinding light recedes and the tormenting endless, nagging questions come to an end.

"At first all that you feel is blessed numbness and a great enfolding silence. You think with quiet joy that perhaps you are dead at last.

"And then every last injury they've done you comes to excruciating life. There's the refinement of the cruelty –
they
don't have to do anything to you at that point; your body does it all, remembering. Yes, each hurt they've ever inflicted on you begins to throb unceasingly, the pitch mounting and mounting, until you think the agony can't become greater, but it does.

"And then you pray that they will start torturing you actively again – anything,
anything
, to disturb the embrace (as if it were a second skin) of that dry, fiery shroud."

"You must have been there too," Rose said quite quietly. "Well, after my foster father ran away, my foster mother became quite insane in her hatred of all men ... and of all girls too. She acted as if all the males in the world and every woman younger than herself, but especially the teen and sub-teen girls, the nymphets, were in a vast conspiracy against her. She kept threatening me with reform school and the mental hospital and she whipped me again.