Twins (2 page)

Through the blinding loneliness, she saw that Mother and Father had been right: She was crippled by her twinness.

When Madrigal and Mary Lee sashayed into a room, action and speech ceased. People were fascinated. Twins are unusual. Identical twins are striking. Beautiful identical twins are an Event.

Mary Lee was just another pretty black-haired girl on a campus stocked with pretty girls. No longer an Event, she let herself become the reverse. A Non-Event.

At dinner, for which seats were assigned, companionship was enforced at a full table. But for breakfast and lunch, girls came when they were hungry, or awake. Some tables were empty while others were jammed. Mary Lee ached to join a packed table, yet sat at an empty one, yearning for the twin back home, for the life back home, the friends and school and parents and good things.

Whatever good there was at boarding school, Mary Lee ignored.

Within days she was branded: the sort of loser who sat alone; who had no friends and never would. Mindy and Bianca dutifully continued to be nice, and quietly asked the dorm mother if Mary Lee could be transferred to another room.

Mary Lee observed the dorm friendships. How lovely they were! How much Mary Lee wanted one for herself. If she had not had a twin, perhaps she would have possessed such a thing with Scarlett. Or Van. But the chance had gone by, she had been too absorbed by Madrigal to consider it, or to act upon it, and now Scarlett and Van and all that was home and good and safe were lost to her.

Among their other terrible orders when they enforced Separation, Mother and Father had ordered Mary Lee to tell nobody that she was an identical twin. “Am I supposed to hide it like some scandalous past?” she wept.

“No,” said Father, “you’re supposed to forget it, like some crippling past.”

Forget that you were an identical twin? How could she?

In boarding school there was little history. It was as if they had all dumped something behind. They had all abandoned a twin or a parent or a past. They lived in the present, and Mary Lee’s present did not include a twin. People didn’t ask for background, and they quit asking Mary Lee anything.

When she thought of home — which was constantly — she thought mostly of questions she should have asked Mother and Father. There had to be more to this than they had explained. Why, if there had been too much togetherness, didn’t they just make Mary Lee take different courses at school? Sign up for different sports? Get involved with different activities? Why couldn’t she have gone to one of the private day schools in town — why pick a school nearly two thousand miles away?

Now and then Bianca and Mindy yelled at her, and told her to make an effort, and said if she was lonely it was her own fault.

My own fault, she thought. It must be all my fault, and none of Madrigal’s fault, or Mother and Father wouldn’t have done it this way. But what did I do?

She struggled to communicate with Madrigal by letter. The twins had certainly never written to each other before. In fact, they often skipped speaking. There was no need. They knew each other’s thoughts and plans without speech.

One thousand nine hundred and twelve miles proved something terrible. Something Mary Lee would have been happier not knowing.

Dear Madrigal
… wrote Mary Lee twice a week. What to say next?
It’s terrible here; I miss you so; I want to come home!

She couldn’t write that. The whole point was that Mary Lee and Madrigal had passed the point of normalcy and must be separated to be whole. And what was this whining, but proof?

So Mary Lee wrote lies.
I am on the field hockey team
, she wrote, although she was not.

My roommates Mindy and Bianca are wonderful
, she wrote. That much was true. It was Mary Lee who was not proving to be a wonderful roommate.

My English teacher
,
Mrs. Spinney
,
thinks my writing is brilliant
, she wrote, although Mrs. Spinney had given her C-minus on her last two papers.

Madrigal’s letters were also full of lies.

She did not write nearly as often as Mary Lee.
I am having a great year
.
What a good idea this was! What wonderful times I’m having
.

No doubt Mother and Father supervised the writing of such paragraphs. She pictured them, ripping up the letter in which Madrigal wept and sobbed and confessed how awful it was without her twin, and dictating those hateful sentences:
I am having a great year
.
What a good idea this was! What wonderful times I’m having
.

Sometimes she remembered another sentence. Madrigal, Mother had said, will stay home under our supervision.

The twins had always behaved perfectly. When had they ever needed supervision?

Certainly boarding school was supervised. Mary Lee got used to it, as people get used to any form of torture. With cruel slowness, Christmas holidays inched closer.

Twenty days at home. Twenty days with Madrigal. Twenty days in which Mary Lee would not stand before a mirror, because she would be, and would have, a mirror. Her living twin. Her other self.

No one ever returned home from boarding school as joyfully as Mary Lee.

But it did not happen.

There stood the identical twin. Madrigal, her mirror, her lost fraction, remained lost. Mary Lee could no longer read Madrigal. She was no longer joined in heart and mind with this sister.

Mother and Father had accomplished their wish.

The twins were Separate.

When they were eleven, they had been forced to have separate bedrooms. It had taken them years to learn how to sleep with walls between them. Now the wall between them was invisible, but higher. The twins might as well have been divorced.

…
and Madrigal was glad
.

“But Madrigal,” whispered Mary Lee. She was beyond heartsick. She was seasick, as if they stood on a tossing boat. “You must want me back!”

Her sister sighed. “Of course I do, MreeLee.” MreeLee was Madrigal’s baby nickname for Mary Lee. Madrigal kissed her, but it was a kiss of duty. A kiss because she had to.

“Why?” cried Mary Lee. “What’s happened? I miss you so much! It’s so hard, Madrigal. At school most of the day and night I try to hear you, but I don’t get through! It’s like being
anybody
.”

Madrigal would comfort her now. Because that had been their special pride, their special secret.
We are not like anybody
.
We are us
.

“Life has changed,” said her sister briefly.

Fear rose up like floodwater to drown Mary Lee. “But
we
haven’t changed!”

Her sister’s eyes moved in an expression Mary Lee could not duplicate. Mouth curved with an emotion Mary Lee did not know. Two words came out of her sister’s mouth like spinning tops. “Jon Pear,” said Madrigal. “My boyfriend.
Jon Pear
.”

Mary Lee was stunned.

Boyfriend? What boyfriend?

Had her identical twin mentioned Jon Pear in letters?

No.

Had Mother and Father mentioned that Madrigal had a boyfriend?

No.

Had Mary Lee felt that her sister had a man in her life?

No.

“I’d love to meet him,” she said shyly. How extraordinary, to be shy with her own twin!

Madrigal shook her head firmly. “He knows I have a twin,” she said, “and I imagine people in school have told him we are identical. But I don’t want him to see you. I want him to think only of me. Not a set of me.”

“You don’t want your boyfriend to meet me? I’m half of you!”

Madrigal made a face. “Don’t be so melodramatic, MreeLee.”

“But you’re keeping me offstage! Hidden away, like a family scandal!” Mary Lee found herself fussing with her hair, poking at her buttons, tugging on her earrings. Not once did her twin move with her. The simultaneous broadcast had ceased.

“MreeLee,” said her sister, being patient, putting up with her. “Come on now. Your girls’ school has a companion boys’ school. Boys are stacked ten deep just across the street from you. A thousand of them! Pick one.”

“Of course I want a boyfriend,” said Mary Lee, “but that has nothing to do with us. I want us.”

Madrigal fixed her with a stare for which Mary Lee had no return. “I have a different
us
now, MreeLee,” she said. “You are not to interfere.”

Mary Lee could not think about this Jon Pear, this different
us
. It was too huge and terrible. In only a few days she would be back at boarding school. She had to make Madrigal understand her desperation. “Madrigal, please visit me. Spend a long weekend with me. It would help if you came just for a little while.”

“I’m busy,” said Madrigal. “I have Jon Pear now, MreeLee. You’ve got to adapt. You even share the same ski slope with the boys’ school. You ought to be able to meet someone cute. Trust me on this one. What you need is a boyfriend. Just pick one.”

If she could pick, it would be Van. But she could not pick, for she did not go to the old high school, and would soon be shoved back on a plane and shipped away to boarding school. She could not pick there, either, where her uselessness hung around like negative ions.

Madrigal lost interest in Mary Lee’s problems and left the house, and where she went, Mary Lee did not know, and could not feel; and when she came home, Madrigal did not tell.

“I hope you’re happy,” sobbed Mary Lee to her parents. “We’re no longer identical. We’re no longer a mixture. We’re two instead of one.”

“We aren’t happy,” said Father, “but we are right, Mary Lee.”

A strange foggy sorrow seemed to envelope her parents. They hugged her, but distantly. It went way beyond giving her away, they acted as if they had sold her into another world. Made a pact, a deal, and she would never know the terms. “What is happening?” she said brokenly. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“We are doing this
for
you, sweetheart,” said her mother. “You must trust us.”

Trust them? She actually laughed.

Christmas vacation ended.

Mary Lee was once again flying through gray skies with a gray heart.

Jon Pear, she thought. What is he like? And if he loves Madrigal, would he not love me exactly the same? For are we not exactly the same?

I wish, she said to the invisible stars behind the featureless clouds,
I wish for Madrigal’s life
.

“I
’M COMING,” CRIED MADRIGAL
on the telephone. “We’ll go skiing! We’ll have a lovely lovely time. I’ll meet all your friends and gossip and we’ll show off and be
us
.”

“Mother and Father said you could come? Mother and Father said you could telephone?” whispered Mary Lee.

“No. They did not. But I love you, twin of mine, and you need me, and so I have arranged it in spite of them.”

Oh, Madrigal! Mary Lee had given up hoping for a visit. Her heart had grown as cold as the February outdoors, and she had thought that only the arrival of summer vacation could end her loneliness.

She began laughing, planning, hoping. She pirouetted around her dorm. “Mindy, guess what! My identical twin is coming!”

Mindy had long since ceased to try with this annoying personality-free roomie. “Give me a break. You don’t have a twin.”

“I do, I do! You’ll love her.” Mary Lee could not stop laughing. She felt thinner and lighter and giddier.

“You remembered this twin in
February
, ML?” Mindy exchanged skeptical looks with the ceiling. “Right.”

“Right!” laughed Mary Lee.

The next day at meals, she assaulted tables and gatherings that she had ignored long enough that they now ignored her. “I’m an identical twin!” she cried. “And my twin is coming to visit for the three-day weekend!”

The popular girls exchanged long looks.

“It happens at this time of year,” said Marilyn with a shrug. “Too much winter. The useless ones get crazy. They start believing in identical twins.”

Mary Lee flushed.

The popular girls laughed, their mouths gaping. “So, Mary Lee,” said one of Bianca’s buddies, “if your supposed identical twin is
really
identical to you …” — A cruel smile flickered on the pretty round face — “like — who cares?”

“Stop,” said Bianca, obeying the roommate rule. You stick up for your roommate even when she’s a dork. “Leave Mary Lee alone.” (A skill, of course, that everyone was now pretty good at.)

Madrigal arrived.

She stalked onto that campus, and it was hers. She was the Event Mary Lee had longed to be. She overwhelmed the girls in Mary Lee’s dorm and made them her own possessions. By the end of the very first evening, the twins were sitting at the very best table, among the most desirable girls. But it was Madrigal and Madrigal alone to whom they spoke.

Maddy, they said affectionately, come to our room and listen to tapes. Maddy, sit with us. Ski with us tomorrow, Maddy. Have hot chocolate with us, Maddy.

In spite of the identical look that had confused people for seventeen years at home, the girls on Third were able to tell Mary Lee and Madrigal apart. Mary Lee was shocked. Back home, she was always answering to Madrigal and Madrigal answering to Mary Lee. How could Bianca and Mindy and Merrill and Marilyn so easily know which dark skinned dark haired dark eyed beauty was Madrigal?

Madrigal had personality.

Mary Lee, whose school this was, remained wallpaper.

This visit for which Mary Lee had had such high hopes was the most horrible weekend of her life. She was taught a terrible and unwanted truth: It is
not
the surface that matters. For the surfaces of the twins were identical. In five months of living with them, she had displayed nothing to these girls. Twenty-four hours with Madrigal, and they had a best friend.

I am not identical
.
She is better
.
And everybody but me knew all along
.
It’s why I was the one sent to boarding school
—
Mother and Father knew
—
Madrigal is the worthy one
.
I am nothing but an echo
.

She tried to twin-wave this dreadful thought to Madrigal, so Madrigal would sweep her up in hugs and love, understand completely and deeply. She needed Madrigal to deny it and prove the silly theory wrong.