Some Possible Solutions (12 page)

Roo ignored me and kept typing. She typed her words:
Soft
,
Goldeny
,
Perfume-y
,
Nice
,
Pretty
, et cetera, which yielded, obviously, nothing relevant. Then she tried mine, misremembering “Redolent” as
Redundant
.
Colorless
, she tried.
Creepy
. Again, nothing. I shifted my knees because my legs were falling asleep, which made Roo slip off my lap and gash her head against the corner of the metal table.

I felt terrible.

“No big deal,” Roo said calmly.

“Oh god,” I said, looking at the blood, “oh god.”

“Just keep searching!” Roo ordered. “It's fine. I'm fine.”

I searched distractedly while listening to her rustling around in our bathroom, dabbing blood with toilet paper, hunting for Band-Aids in our nasty, chaotic drawers. I knew what she was doing as well as if I was in there with her. Pawing through rubber bands and scrunchies and hairpins sticky with spilled hair spray and old fluoride rinse. Mildew green between the pink tiles under her bare feet. The bowl of the toilet stained a permanent pale brown. The smell of a sour bathmat and cigar smoke from downstairs.

Halfheartedly, sick at heart to think of Roo finding only dismembered Band-Aids in those drawers, I typed
trees swaying
, which got us where we needed to go.

Roo emerged with a bejeweled butterfly Band-Aid on her forehead, a Band-Aid designed for the little girls we'd once been in this very room; a Band-Aid that would go over extremely well tonight because in order to disguise the Band-Aid on the forehead we'd have to place a matching Band-Aid on each nipple.

I read: “The perceptible natural movement of the air, especially in the form of a current of air blowing from a particular direction.”

“Yes! Yes!” Roo said, excited, jumping on the bed, throwing a pillow. “Exactly!”

“
Wind
,” I announced.

*   *   *

The next morning
(or rather, the next noon, since we were not allowed to come down to breakfast until we'd spent exactly nine hours in our room, for
Sleep is essential to beauty
; we were supposed to sleep precisely eight hours every night, plus a half-hour to put ourselves down and a half-hour to wake ourselves up, rules indifferent to our restlessness, our desire to go out into the ever-brightening day that we could sense on the other side of our miserly window), Mrs. Penelope was quite distressed to learn what we had encountered in the park. She threw the spatula across the room, where it left an eggy smear on the wall.

“For crying out loud,” she said. She was an erratic, moody woman who vacillated between playing the role of tender mother and fierce madame. We were unsure which version we preferred. On days when she resembled a mother she seemed to weigh ten pounds more than she did on the madame days. Today was a madame day. We could tell by her slimming all-black outfit and the faux emeralds in her earlobes, and by the undercooked eggs and burnt toast. Mrs. Penelope the Mother would never make such mistakes. We were the only girls at the table, the last breakfast shift. The novelty of the butterfly Band-Aids had meant that Roo was tied up till nearly 3 a.m., and since we never left the place except together, I had to wait shivering in sequins on the busted couch in the back room, a spring screwing itself into my thigh as I tried and failed to recall the series of sensations created on the skin by the thing we'd encountered in the park.

Since all the other girls had been fed, there was no one to witness the things Mrs. Penelope the Lady said to me and especially to Roo about first of all making up such lies about wind in the park when wind had obviously not been seen or felt or anything in the two decades since the city got climate-controlled, and where the hell would such a wind come from, where would a lovely little wind like the one we described arise from in a region that was covered in concrete, for crying out loud, now get, time for your constitutional, and she was ranting us right out the door, and as we passed the enormous jug we deposited into it as usual everything we'd made last night, because the front door wouldn't open until money was inserted. The sight of our coins and bills shut her up and joyfully she squirted us with expensive perfume as we stumbled down the concrete steps onto the narrow strip of sidewalk alongside the six-lane street.

We walked thirteen blocks to get to the park. We had heard rumors from other, less coveted girls that in the morning, when the sun was coming up, all the cars in the streets looked sleek and beautiful, but by the time we were released into the day the light had become flat and dull and the cars just looked gray to us.

Yet now we had something more than cars on our minds. We walked along silently, thinking the same thoughts. We did not linger outside the bodega as we usually did, gazing at the dusty rows of candy and packaged doughnuts. Even the dark, dank, concealing clothing we had to wear to the park—wool skirts that went down to our ankles above heavy, practical shoes and shirts that buttoned up to our necks beneath navy blue sweaters—did not seem quite as oppressive as usual.

*   *   *

Again, there was
wind
in the park.

It rose up when we reached the center of the lawn, just as it had yesterday. Again the park was abandoned and again we alone stood in the middle of the movement, our synthetic hair swirling around us. I understood now that wind was due to an interplay of hot and cold air.

From whence did it rise? I stretched my mind out across all the repetitive blocks of the city, stretched my mind to the outermost edge of my memory, blocks and blocks of gray buildings, gray streets, gray cars. That landscape, and the almost unbearably green landscape of the park, were the only landscapes I knew. Where could hot and cold meet and interact here? Nothing fresh arose from those temperate city blocks with their bags of trash piled high.

Yet this wind, this so-called wind, was as fresh as—I had little to compare it to. Roo coming out of the shower? Once-a-month vanilla bean ice cream?

“Damn,” Roo whispered in awe, and I whispered it too. Not a word we were supposed to use. Damn because we hadn't merely imagined the wind. Damn because it seemed like the kind of thing that would get us in trouble. Damn because it was so intensely pleasant, a new item to add to our list of longings.

Something else the wind did, and this I knew because I could look at Roo and see myself: it pinkened our cheeks, it brightened our eyes.

*   *   *

Before we went
out we would each be led into a freezer large enough to hold one girl. We had to stay there for sixty seconds, chattering in our sequins, so that when we emerged into the crowd our nipples had the proper quality and we looked adequately forlorn. The customers reacted positively to the combination of sequins and despair. If we shed a tear due to the pain of the freezer it was even better; damp eyes had an enticingly luminous quality. So it was more rebellious not to cry than to cry. Roo and I had discovered a way to control ours. We imagined God's fingers gently pinching the ducts so no tears could emerge, and thus we never cried.

*   *   *

The next day
Mrs. Penelope the Mother was flipping flawless pancakes when we came downstairs to eat. She wore a baggy saggy flowered dress and had curlers in her thin hair. She embraced both of us in one hug and then stepped back and looked us over. She smiled kind of sadly, as though she did not quite approve, and we felt awfully guilty. That's why it was a toss-up between Mrs. Penelope the Mother and Mrs. Penelope the Lady. The Lady might make you feel stupid or clumsy, but she'd never make you feel like a disappointment.

“Nice day,” Mrs. Penelope said, gesturing to the same flat gray light as always that came through the narrow kitchen windows.

We ate the hot pancakes with lots of butter (Mrs. Penelope the Lady would have been horrified) and, for a short time, felt warm and content.

“Boy,” Mrs. Penelope said as we dipped our forks in the leftover syrup on our plates, “I've never seen you girls looking quite so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“It's because—” Roo stopped herself.

“Because why?” Mrs. Penelope demanded. “Because why?”

“Because it's a nice day,” I said. “As you said.”

Mrs. Penelope eyed us suspiciously, suddenly more Lady than Mother. Roo and I squeezed hands under the big wooden table, stood up, and headed toward the hall closet where our sweaters hung.

“Stop,” Mrs. Penelope said. “Have you excused yourselves?”

“May we please be excused, Mrs. Penelope?” we said in unison.

“No you may not,” she said. She continued to eye us. “You sit down and stay right there.” She stormed out of the kitchen and down the hallway to her suite. We'd never been inside but we'd heard rumors of velvet drapes and jewelry boxes and two hundred pairs of shoes.

Nothing like this had ever happened. Not in ten years had we ever been told to stay at the table after breakfast. We took turns cutting thin, unnoticeable slices from the stick of butter and placing them on our tongues to melt.

The doorbell rang just as Mrs. Penelope the Lady emerged from her suite in a black dress. We poked our heads out from the kitchen. There was a fat policeman on the other side of the door. Mrs. Penelope rubbed up against him. The policeman came toward us with handcuffs and Mrs. Penelope was grabbing us and pinching our upper arms and Roo and I were clinging to each other and crying. But when he handcuffed us
to
each other, we calmed down. Other twins had been separated. We'd heard about it and knew about it and never spoke of it or imagined it.

“My dears,” Mrs. Penelope murmured, sticking her head in the window of the police car, for a moment more Mother than Lady, “you shouldn't have seen what you saw. You shouldn't have felt what you felt.” She squeezed our cheeks. The policeman squeezed Mrs. Penelope's tits. She gave him a pumpkin doughnut and a travel mug of coffee. We buried our faces in each other's synthetic hair. The handcuffs linking us were chilly on our wrists.

*   *   *

As we passed
through the repetitive city blocks, the policeman wanted to play a game. He described each of his buddies—he's got a huge mole on his ear, he's got a tiny wang, he's got a glass eye—and we had to tell him how frequently this guy came to the place and what he asked for and how much he tipped. At first we said we couldn't remember, which was true, because any given customer was as memorable as any individual water droplet that poured over you in the shower, but he was getting cranky so then our memories were jogged and we did remember that one, yes, we did remember that one, big tipper, small tipper, aggressive when drunk, jovial when drunk, et cetera, et cetera, and at every revelation the policeman would give an enormous belly laugh and offer us two peanut M&Ms from a large bag he kept up front.

Then, very shyly, he asked if we remembered him.

Oh yes, yes, we did, hadn't that been a time, boy oh boy, the two of us and him.

Then he got sullen and said how could we remember him if he'd never been there, he was an upstanding family man with two daughters of his own in fact, and were we just a pair of lying little sluts or what, and could he please have back the M&Ms he'd loaned us. Then we got nauseous thinking about all the M&Ms we owed him that were deep inside our guts now.

*   *   *

Eventually the endless
gray blocks put us to sleep and when we woke it was sundown. The police car was parked in front of a small lopsided wooden cabin, and across from it an even smaller hut. Beyond the cabin, a grove of trees, like an image from the Internet. The policeman was nowhere to be seen. I would have been scared but Roo's hand was in mine. I tugged on her hand and she turned toward me. Her hair extensions were snarled. Her face was wet and luminous.

“This has been the best day of my life,” she whispered.

“Yeah, the best day
ever
,” I joked along with her.

But she shook her head at my sarcasm. “The best, best day,” she murmured.

“
What?
” I said, pulling my hand away.

“This whole day,” she said, her eyes radiant with tears, “we drove out of the city and then we came to a different kind of place.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“You were asleep.”

I yanked on the door handle.

“Locked,” Roo said.

“Shit,” I said, expecting Roo to say it simultaneously.

The door of the crooked cabin opened and the policeman came out. It looked like a joke, such a fat man emerging from such a tiny doorway. A small, thin man with black hair and features sharp as pencils followed the policeman. The policeman pounded this man's back in a friendly, exaggerated fashion. We were trained in reading lips because we had to be able to understand a customer's requests even when the place was at full volume; we could interpret desires from across a crowded room. So I could see the policeman saying to the man, “You know what to do.”

The thin man came up to the window of the police car. He cupped his hands around his face to look directly in at us. His eyes were urgent, like the eyes of a monster.

*   *   *

The ripe strawberries
were clustered among the unripe ones, so each plant required some effort, to harvest the reds without disrupting the greens. For the first row it was not so unpleasant. There was the novelty of kneeling on the damp dirt in the rising sun, which cast light more yellow than gray, and the satisfaction of a huge tin pail beginning to fill with fantastic redness. Even our potato-sack garments held a certain charm. I didn't mind moving down the row on my knees beside my sister, smelling the smell of overripe strawberries, a smell not unfamiliar to us, for we'd had strawberry jam in our day.