Some Possible Solutions (13 page)

Not to mention the eating. We didn't know if it was permitted, but we chose not to ask the thin man, who had awoken us by throwing a rooster into the bunkhouse where there were thirty-nine empty beds and one occupied, by me and Roo, since we always shared. Though the cabin had looked small at first, actually it was a long, low building, and we'd selected a bottom bunk at the end farthest from the door. The rooster marched all the way down the room to us and made his noise right in our ears. When we got out of bed the rooster strutted us over to these potato-sack garments hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall. We pulled off the heavy wool skirts and stiff oxford shirts we'd slept in and pulled on these strange tunics, our torsos goose-bumpy in the dawn. We emerged from the cabin feeling somewhat lighter than we'd felt. The thin man was standing outside with two stacks of tin pails. He smiled at us, revealing sharp, bloodstained teeth, and we almost screamed. He said: “Good morning, Rose and Roo.” How dare he know our names. He said it was time to harvest the strawberries. We looked at him blankly. “Harvest” was not a command we'd ever been given. He smiled again—those bloody teeth—and said: “You are correct to be surprised that strawberries are still in season. For a long time I have worked to develop a strain of strawberry plant that produces thrice over the course of the year: May, July, and September.” This meant nothing to us and we didn't care, but he seemed proud to have taught us something. He grabbed all the tin pails; it was mildly impressive that such a small, thin man could manage such an awkward load. “Follow me,” he said.

So here we were, my sister and I, in the strawberry field, in the crispness of morning, twenty pails to fill and explicit orders about red versus green, more fields spreading out black and green toward groves of trees planted not by a mastermind of city parks but instead just growing that way, their orange and pink leaves fluttering in what we now knew to call
wind
,
wind
coming off the stream between the fields, and in the distance the rooster a black-and-white dot clawing at the mud amid the tilting wooden structures of the farmyard, and the thin man heading toward the stream with a large knife in the shape of a half-moon. In any case, hungry and not in possession of instructions to the contrary, Roo and I ate strawberries, splendid, and it was then we realized that the thin man's teeth had been stained not by blood but rather by strawberries.

It came swift and sudden up the row, moving fast along the cool dirt, a snake three feet long and as large around the middle as Roo's arm, greenish scales glimmering poisonously. A scattering of strawberries, an overturned pail, we ran, not looking back, crushing strawberries, leaping over rows, down toward the stream where the thin man strolled with his murderous knife, we landed in the thin man's arms, pressed ourselves into his chest so hard that if he'd not possessed his uncanny sturdiness surely we'd have knocked him to the ground. But as it was he held us and smiled upon us with red teeth. He murmured things, I forgot to mention the snakes, my apologies, Roo, my apologies, Rose, they're harmless, overgrown garter snakes, a by-product of the experimental strawberry plants, don't worry, they're everywhere, you'll get used to them, all the while holding the half-moon knife in his left hand. I backed out of his embrace a few seconds before Roo; he touched her hair. When I turned and looked back at the strawberry field, I saw that it was alive with snakes. The whole field undulated with green bodies slithering among red strawberries.

We returned to the strawberry field, our stomachs taut with cold water from the stream. We picked strawberries, filled pails. I attributed my stomachache to the snakes that kept sliding by; only much later would I attribute it to the sight of the thin man stroking my sister's hair extensions. Late in the day, when almost all the pails were full, Roo reached out to touch a snake as it passed. She looked at me, grinned and giggled. My nausea swelled and overflowed. I vomited red water onto a strawberry plant.

*   *   *

My sister and
the thin man put me to bed in the bunkhouse. They brought porridge. It was creamy and honeyed, but there was an aftertaste of salt that dried out my mouth and my gut.

*   *   *

My sister didn't
sleep with me that night or the next because I was ill; and then, on the third night, when I was better, she still didn't sleep with me. She climbed up the ladder to the bunk above me.

“Roo. What are you doing.”

“Going to sleep.”

“I'm better now.”

“Good.”

“Come down!” Ever obedient, she came down. “Sleep here!”

“The mattress is so narrow.”

“We always sleep in the same bed.”

Roo shrugged and gestured at the abandoned bunkroom, the thirty-nine empty beds, as though to say,
We've only slept together all these years because there was no alternative
, before mounting the ladder once more.

*   *   *

Eventually our hair
extensions grew out. The curls began to slide off our dull brownish hair, and soon became so loose we could remove them with the merest tug. These sheddings of synthetic hair got mixed up and mired in the muck of the barnyard, glimmering auburn amid chicken shit.

The thin man said to us, “You have nice hair.” We gazed with some longing at our lost curls, sinking in the mud. “I mean the hair on your heads,” he said. There were no mirrors on the farm, but I could see Roo's soft straight brown hair fluttering above her eyebrows and feathering at the base of her neck, so I knew my hair was doing the same. The thin man did not compliment us except that once. It was strange to go so long without compliments from men. It was kind of nice and then sometimes not.

In the hut where he slept and where we all ate, the thin man brought out cards after the dinner porridge—playing cards, like those we'd seen a million times at the place, but now we got to handle them and examine them up close. The colorful, regal characters. There were games he taught us, and dried beans for betting. Yet, oddly, I tired long before Roo did—we always used to yawn at the same time, Roo and I—and though I tried hard to fight it so Roo wouldn't be left alone with the thin man, still I'd retire to the bunkhouse early. At night the wind blew tremendously. It kept me up. Then I'd climb the ladder to Roo's bunk but sometimes she wasn't there. I'd pretend she was, putting the pillow just so to imitate the shape of her and clinging to it. I'd get so crazy and scared, like I was a tiny crumb of nothing cowering in the roaring universe. In the morning I'd wake to find Roo in my bunk and me in hers.

“Did you hear that wind?” I said.

“I love it so much,” my sister said.

At times I had feelings toward Roo that were unfamiliar to me, and for which I knew no good words, but they were not pleasant.

The thin man played banjo, peculiar songs from faraway, and one night when he pulled the banjo out after dinner, Roo sang along and knew every word of every song.

The thin man taught Roo how to make the daily porridge, which was served at noontime with honey and at nighttime with cheese. Also we ate things grown on the farm. Strawberries, of course, and vegetables from the garden. Soon Roo's porridge surpassed the porridge of the thin man.

*   *   *

One day I
looked over at my sister and looked down at myself and realized our appearances had begun to diverge. Roo was plumper now, her breasts larger than mine, her skin a deeper shade of tan. Her hair was light brown and now that my hair was long enough to pull over my shoulder I could see it was several shades darker.

“What color are my eyes?” I said to Roo. Hers were brown flecked with yellow. It was wonderful to have them gazing so thoughtfully into mine.

“Gray,” she replied after a moment.

Dismayed, I insisted that we ask the thin man. We stood before him in the barnyard, our eyes wide open.

“Both of you have hazel eyes,” he said, and I was filled with giddy relief, “but yours are more gray,” he said to me, “while hers are brown like honey.”

There were other things, too. Her fingernails grew faster than mine. Freckles appeared on her forehead but not on mine. We noticed a difference in our heights—I perhaps an inch taller—that had been lost on us before. We'd always been so interchangeable that Mrs. Penelope had often just referred to us as R.

Yet still our voices were identical, with the exact same cadence. Still our collarbones were a perfect match.

*   *   *

I couldn't grow
accustomed to the wind and I couldn't grow accustomed to the thin man. But I grew accustomed to the snakes among the strawberry plants; I scarcely noticed them anymore and when I did it was with a feeling of fondness.

It was easy to forget certain things about our former life. What was the name of the last street we used to cross before entering the park? What was the weekly breakfast served by Mrs. Penelope on Wednesdays? Exactly how long did we have to stay in the freezer before going out to the customers?

Time passed. We ate porridge with herbs. I watched a brown bird reclaim a strand of synthetic hair from the freezing mud. Roo and I dug for carrots and placed hay over the dying strawberry plants, working side by side. A series of eerie notes plucked on a banjo, my sister whispering and singing. In the firelight, the Jack of Hearts winking at me. Voices heard as though from afar, the voice of the thin man and the voice of my sister, the same as my voice, but the words drifted over and around me, the fire warming the unpleasant feelings out of me.

*   *   *

One morning they
were gone. I woke to the wind, and the rooster scratching. The rooster wandered lonesome over the frozen dung of the barnyard. My sister and the thin man were not in any bed. That was my first thought; I anticipated finding them entangled, I began to understand the vague hatreds I'd felt. It was something of a relief not to discover them, his bed empty and tidy—but they were nowhere else either, not in the fields, not down by the river, not in the groves.

That night it seemed near tucked under my pillow, how could I have missed it, a note from she whom I had taught to write. Her handwriting still looked like that of a young child, all capitals; her spelling, abysmal.

R—WE LUV U. HAVE FUN WHAL WE R GONE. KEEP A EYE ON THINGZ. HARVIST SQUSH/FED CHICKS. THANK U THANK U THANK U. WE LUV U—R

I had never in my life been so enraged; I had never in my life been away from Roo. The loneliest minutes in my life must have been the six before she was born; but those were now trumped by these, as I stormed around the barnyard, crushing the intricate architectures of frosted sludge. Looking out over the strawberry fields, I saw the small plants all turned brown for winter, the snakes vanished, every last bit of redness harvested. Unlike the rooster, I could do something about my resentment. That poor rooster, he was left there in the barnyard digging through the cold mud for auburn curls that might or might not emerge.

*   *   *

Back in the
city, no wind blew in the park.

I stood in the middle, right where Roo and I had stood, and looked at the blades of grass and groves of trees. I awaited movement. But the park was still. The sky was gray and quiet, everything bathed in flat city light. The wool skirt weighed on my hips. The starched shirt gripped my throat like a pair of hands.

Mrs. Penelope had greeted me mistrustfully. She was not used to hitchhikers showing up on her doorstep at five in the morning. She wrapped her silken peacock robe tighter around her thin, ladylike frame. “Where's the other one?” she said. Warily, she led me to our old room. Another pair of girls was sleeping in our bed. Mrs. Penelope ordered the elderly maintenance man to bring up a cot. There was no one with whom to share the minor adventures I'd experienced on my journey back to the city, so I let those hours spent traveling slide into gray oblivion.

*   *   *

Our trick for
not crying when we had to go into the freezer no longer worked. I couldn't envision God pinching my tear ducts, and I came out crying. But not the desired kind of tearing up that makes one's eyes incandescent; this was true crying, the kind that makes makeup and men run. I kept getting sent back to Mrs. Penelope's with the early shift of girls, those who were less slender or more awkward or partnerless. Pairs of girls were always better off. And pairs of identical twins—well, obviously. The two girls with whom I now shared our old room were new to it, young and scared, which made them irresistible, and they'd creep in quiet, exhausted, hours after I'd settled into my flimsy cot. They were neither friendly nor unfriendly to me, as impeccably gray as the city itself, and mournfully I observed between them the desperate, joyous intimacy I'd once known.

*   *   *

Mrs. Penelope the
Lady leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen, luxuriously smoking a cigarette, while I ate undercooked scrambled eggs.

“Do I need to say it?” she said, blowing out.

I looked up at her, terrified.

“You ain't no good no more.” It was always a bad sign when Mrs. Penelope slipped into trashy grammar. “Watcha thinkin, hidin in corners all night away from the guys, lettin your makeup run and wearin dirty underwear?”

“When Roo comes back I'll be good again.”

“‘When Roo comes back I'll be good again,'” she parroted. “She ain't comin back.”

“What do you mean?” Hope flooded me. “You know where she is?”

Mrs. Penelope smoked.

“She did all the work fer the both of you.”

My fork clattered to the floor. I stood up noisily, pushing my chair back across the linoleum.

“We worked together as identical twins,” I hissed, “which is how we brought in all that dirty slutty cash for you, Missy.” I couldn't believe I'd called her Missy; that's what she used to call us.