It’s amazing my teeth didn’t break off. If they had, I guess, I’d have eaten them also. As it was, I kept eating those frozen cookies until my sister came down to the kitchen. Then I tried to shove the bag back into the freezer, but my mother was already there in the doorway.

  She stood there in her yellow wool suit with mother-of-pearl buttons, and her white gloves that only just came past her wrist bones, and she was shaking with fury.

  At that point, I couldn’t spit out the last bite. But I also couldn’t swallow it. The bite was far too big, and solidly frozen, so I could only stand there by the freezer, holding an egg-sized rock in my gullet.

  “What are you eating?” my mother said.

  I couldn’t answer.

  By then my mother was shaking with rage. She was so small and so angry. I had attacked her; I’d stolen her secret hoard. I’d violated what space she’d preserved on this planet, and her whole face was a furious bird’s beak.

  “What are you eating?” she said again, and still I didn’t answer. It was as if I had one of her eggs in my mouth. Then she took a few steps closer and faced me.

  “You liar,” she said. “You little snake.”

  Both of us, I think, were frightened by the scale of the thing. It was so much bigger than we were. It was a conflict on a scale we couldn’t manage.

  Some people eat, and some don’t. That was the main problem. In Ireland, for instance, during the famine, as we were often told when we were children, mothers were expected to starve while their children ate. They were expected to give of their bodies, to rise above the necessity of their hunger, and there I was, in the nice house my mother provided, wearing the nice clothes that she bought me, unabashedly and selfishly eating, and before either one of us had quite comprehended the problem, my mother had already taken my jaw in her hand and pried open my mouth so I’d spit out the cookie.

  Then we stood side by side, looking down at that mess, the regurgitated food in her palm.

  And only then did my mother become human again, not some vengeful mythical angel.

  Then she was nothing more than a small woman, or perhaps a large bird, hunched and inconsolable beside her snake of a daughter.

  AFTER THAT, MY MOTHER WENT OUT FOR A DRIVE.

  I stayed in the kitchen with my twin sister. And it was then that I realized that while my mother and I had been enacting our own personal drama, my sister had gone to the table. She was staring at the newspaper, and her whole body was trembling.

  She hadn’t touched the cereal she’d poured for herself. That morning she went to school without eating.

  My sister could submit herself to a cause. She had the willpower I lacked, and a crueler sense of aesthetics.

  AFTER THAT MORNING, SHE ATE LESS AND LESS.

  She also started the project she continued from that day forward, collecting photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  She arranged them in the book our mother bought her, along with factoids about the lingering effects of the blasts. She had a clear eye for how such images should be arranged, an understanding of design that I lacked. Once, for instance, in our junior year at St. Stephen’s, in the unit of home economics when we were learning how to decorate our bomb shelters in a style befitting our aspirations, we were sitting under our desks, and I was embroidering a needlepoint. I only half-listened while the teacher droned on about beautifying a room with no windows, about adding a feminine touch to an underground bunker. Mostly, however, I focused on anticipating the needlepoint my sister was making, in the hopes that maybe I could outdo her.

  Her work was always more perfect than mine. She had predictably impeccable taste. By contrast, my style was exuberant and confused. I couldn’t ever resist the inclination to add. So when the teacher stopped talking and we’d come out from under our desks and shared the samplers we’d sewn in our shelters, mine was sloppy and fat, a bloody mess of embroidery threads.

  Then my sister revealed the sampler she’d made. All of us stared. The teacher turned pale. Because, of course, her sampler was perfect. It was entirely empty. A pure white circle of cloth, bound in a wood frame.

  Which, needless to say, was much better than mine, untouched as it was, and still spotless.

  ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY THAT IN THE RESTAURANT KATHY HAD CHOSEN in Princeton, while she flared her nostrils and my sister starved, I sawed my dolphin fins in the air and cut through the bloody steak I’d been given.

  Meanwhile, Kathy’s respectable boyfriend was saying that friends of his from the force had come home with stories of being compelled—for lack of meaningful targets, since even the smallest villages had already been completely destroyed—to drop their bombs into rivers, or on footbridges, or into little copses of trees.

  And meanwhile the roommate had finished his beer. And he smiled at me every so often, and seemed to be having an excellent evening, unaware that our story had taken such a violent turn, me having cut all ties with Kathy, finishing my second bourbon, heading out into the darkness with or without him.

  From that point on I ignored all Kathy’s efforts to intervene on my behalf. By the time she insisted that it was time to head back to the room we’d reserved in the boardinghouse for nice girls visiting Princeton, I was already somewhat drunkenly making my way back to that roommate’s dorm room, my laughter fat and obscene in the darkness, his hands creeping over my dolphiny body. Then I was under him on the bed, with my fat fins flopping each which way, and then I realized my stockings had torn, and for a moment I felt trapped and frightened.

  Then I slipped out of my body. From somewhere above, I watched my reckless body in bed. My hair was a mess. My clothes were a mess. Even my breasts were a gross, exposed mess, and there was the roommate’s hand inserting itself into my mouth, and I was sucking it like that kind of girl, the kind of girl my mother never imagined her girls would become, and by then, watching myself, even high up on the ceiling, I could have cried, though of course, as I knew well, it wasn’t that roommate’s fault in the slightest.

  He was only playing the part I gave him to play, just as I was playing the part I’d given myself, the role I had to play to appropriately balance the others.

  And then, of course, pinned there in that roommate’s bedroom, I thought of my sister.

  I thought of her lying at home in our childhood bedroom, looking through the pages of her hideous book.

  I thought to myself that she had been steadily retreating from life since the day she decided to eat less. And ever since the same day, I’d been forced to charge into life with an abandon that just wasn’t healthy. I’d lived as if there were a thread between me and my sister, as if I’d gone to retrieve her from the underworld, and tied one end of the rope around her dwindling waist, and the other end around my own, and now I was running uphill, charging into the land of the living.

  And it hadn’t been exactly easy for me. Maybe living in the reckless fat way that I lived was easier than starving myself like my sister. But still, it hadn’t been easy, exerting all the effort to live for us both, and now here I was, trapped in this bed, and I looked over my shoulder and realized she wasn’t with me.

  She wasn’t at the end of the line. There I was, alone in my distress, utterly alone in that bed with my pearl necklace still on and my gross breasts slopped all over my body, and I was suddenly angry.

  Then I started sweating. I wanted to sit up, but I couldn’t. His weight was pressing down on my body, weighing me down, with his hand shoved in my mouth like I was some fat naked catfish, violently pulled out of hiding, and I thought: Enough. Enough. I’ve had enough of this lonely role that I’m playing.

  Then I gagged out the hand and heaved myself up from the bed. I covered my chest with my arm and told him I was going out to the sofa.

  He asked me if I was OK. Then he apologized if he’d done anything wrong. Then offered to let me sleep on the bed.

  Nevertheless, however, I was insistent, so once I’d rooted around for my sweater, and buttoned my skirt over my stockings, I went out to the sofa, and in the morning, when I woke up, Stan was banging around making coffee.

  He was wearing a plaid shirt buttoned up to his neck. He looked fresh faced and happy, the image of a wholesome American boyfriend.

  “Good morning,” he said, and he smiled, and handed me a cup of freshly made coffee.

  WE SEEMED, SOMEWHAT UNBELIEVABLY, TO HAVE EXPERIENCED TWO disparate evenings. I’d been prepared to feel ashamed of myself for having acted like one kind of girl and then suddenly flipping into another, but Stan beamed down upon me as though we were both starting out fresh as new people.

  Later, I learned that Stan had a remarkable ability to forget that which was at all inconvenient. In that moment, however, I wondered if he was amnesiac, or crazy. Somewhat unnerved, I took the cup of coffee he’d made. He stood smiling above me, as though he’d come out of his bedroom and been surprised and not one bit displeased to find me sprawled on the couch, washed up overnight like an overweight mermaid.

  When I joined him at the table that was set up in the kitchen, he told me he’d been accepted to Princeton’s doctoral program in politics. Then he supplied the details of his graduate stipend, and the conditions of family life in faculty housing, as though he were answering questions I’d asked him. He was behaving as though I’d sat down in the kitchen to interview him for the position of husband, and to be honest, sitting there, quietly drinking my coffee on the morning after I realized my sister had abandoned me for her fast, I began to wonder whether I might in fact be interested in having Stan fill that position.

  Politely, keeping my ankles crossed, I listened while he covered the salient points: his service in the air force, his course of study, his family background, the suburb they’d moved to.

  Then he asked me a few questions: what I majored in, if I wanted children, where my family summered, my father’s profession.

  He seemed pleased with the answers, or pleased enough to forget the previous evening, and as I continued sipping my coffee, assisted by Stan’s remarkable ability to forget things, I began to feel like a respectable person.

  I began to imagine the house we might share, the garage, the bedspreads, the little frilled pillows.

  Then I began to enjoy telling Stan about how much I wanted children, about how well I got along with my mother, about how I’d always dreamed of a daughter.

  OBVIOUSLY I WAS MAKING EVERYTHING UP.

  I didn’t think I’d marry Stan. I didn’t love him, and I believed my mother wouldn’t approve of the match. I had already begun to suspect that though Stan did go to Princeton, his family probably wasn’t quite up to snuff: otherwise why would he have been at that table, interviewing for the position of husband.

  So I was making everything up. It was all just a new story I’d decided to tell, one that was less frightening to me than the last one.

  By the end of that cup of coffee, I’d described to him our house in the suburbs, our fictional daughter, our fictional son, the sports he played, and the lunch box she carried.

  I was telling such a good story that Stan seemed truly touched. He was becoming fond of those children. When the hour was up, and it was time for him to go to the library and study, he asked for my address so he could write me a letter.

  A letter! Not even a phone call. As if I were so pure and old-fashioned I could only be reached via post.

  FOR A WHILE, AFTER THAT, STAN WROTE ME LETTERS, AND I RESPONDED in kind.

  At first, it was just a minor part I was playing. The girl who wrote him letters back was only one voice in the novel. In the meantime, even as she spun her quaint yarns, I kept up my other lives, still sometimes eating too much, still writing fat novels in secret, and still sometimes performing regrettable roles on the double dates I went on with Kathy.

  Nevertheless, however, I enjoyed my correspondence with Stan. I enjoyed it so much that every time he suggested a trip up to see me, I elegantly parried his efforts.

  For many months, we just kept writing. In sweet, economized prose, I wrote to him of our summer house, the yard he cut on the weekends, the beach where we played with our children.

  And maybe that pattern could have gone on forever, but that spring my father called to tell me my sister had died overnight.

  Her heart stopped, my father said. I had to come home for the funeral.

  AFTER THAT, I WENT AROUND, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS OF life, no longer holding the thread that attached me to my sister.

  Six or seven months later, I married Stan, and for a while I guess we were happy.

  NOW I NEED TO TAKE A BREAK. I NEED TO CLOSE MY EYES FOR A WHILE.

  Actually, wait. Don’t go. If I stop now I’ll never start up again, and I want to get this all down.

  It is what it is, a whole horrible mess. Believe me, I hate it, too. But now that we’ve started let’s just keep going. I want to tell you what happened after I married Stan, which is how I ever met Robert to start with.

  AS SOON AS STAN AND I WERE ENGAGED, I DROPPED OUT OF ROSEMONT. Then I lived with my parents at home. Stan felt it was proper, and I agreed, so for a few months I lived in my childhood bedroom while my mother and I made plans for the wedding.

  By then, things had changed in my family. My parents were lost. They didn’t comment on Stan’s last name, or ask me about the clubs his parents belonged to. My mother failed to wonder about Stan’s swarthy complexion. She simply accepted that a wedding was coming. Then we went to Saks and found a nice dress, with lace sleeves, and a long line of cloth-covered buttons. At the florist, we chose the white calla lily arrangements. I sat in the store with my hands in my lap and agreed with all of my mother’s decisions.

  BY THEN, I HAD BECOME A MORE OBEDIENT DAUGHTER. THERE WAS no longer any need to rebel. My sister was gone, and my father had faded into the background, so it was me and my mother in that story together.

  Sometimes, she drove me downtown to the art museum. We stood in the rooms devoted to Renaissance paintings, surrounded by virgins and Roman soldiers and saints, serpents and lambs, satyrs and sylphs, and dark-eyed Christian martyrs whose breasts were about to be sliced off their torsos.

  For dinner, my mother cooked meals I’d liked as a child—lamb chops and canned petit pois—and in gratitude, I didn’t eat much.

  Afterward, we sat together and cut place cards out of thick ivory paper.

  Sometimes, when we’d finished our work, we’d go up to my childhood bedroom and sort through my sister’s belongings. She’d left so little behind. There were a few of her dresses still hanging up in the closet, but her desk was perfectly clean, and her drawers were perfectly empty. The only artifact I could find was that book she labored over so long: the photographs she’d collected of those bombed cities.

  When I pulled it out of her drawer, I felt as if I were peering into something forbidden and lurid, something kept hidden in the back rooms of disreputable bookstores, a book that girls in the suburbs weren’t meant to discover.

  While my mother hovered behind me, I peeked at one or two of the earliest pictures—streams of people in black and white, processing like orderly ghosts through an utterly demolished city, their arms held out from their sides, their forearms hanging down, trying to avoid friction between their burned limbs.

  Later, there were pictures of patients in the hospitals, the petechiae that showed up to warn them they’d die of radiation poisoning, the thick scars that disfigured their faces, the anxiety in the eyes of those patients who lined up in the waiting room still exhibiting no signs and only waiting for the secret poisoning to make itself known, without knowing when or how it would do so.

  Under the photographs there were captions in her neat print. Under the photographs of those ghosts, she’d written, “Some were vomiting as they walked.” And under the photographs of petechiae, “These were a reliable sign that the patient would die.” Under a photograph of the rubble, a month or so after the bombs dropped, she’d written: “By September, the ruins were covered in green—goosefoot, purslane, daylilies, clothbur, sesame, bluets, panic grass, and feverfew—the underground organs of plants having been stimulated by the bomb, so that all fall they grew verdant and fat over the ashes and the bones of the unclaimed dead in the city.”

  Then I closed the book. I put it back in the drawer. The only other artifact I found from my sister’s life was that sampler she hadn’t embroidered, which was shoved at the back of one of my own desk drawers.

  I must have stolen it.

  There it was again: that blank circle of cloth, framed by bent wood.

  I placed it on her empty bookshelf, and later, I took it with me to Princeton.

  SOMETIMES, DURING THOSE MONTHS, IF I COULDN’T SLEEP BECAUSE I was sad, or because I was nervous about the upcoming wedding, my mother sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair until I felt sleepy.

  I liked them so much, those last months with my mother.

  I hoped they’d never end. As the weekend of the wedding approached, I became increasingly nervous, and the night before the ceremony, I couldn’t sleep.

  Then I went to my parents’ room and woke my mother up, and we lay in my childhood bed until morning.

  BEFORE LUNCHTIME, STAN’S PARENTS ARRIVED, ACTING OVERDRESSED and self-conscious.

  My mother ignored them. Which goes to show how much things were changing. My mother had always been strict about manners, but on the morning of the ceremony, when Stan’s parents arrived, she ignored them completely and focused on helping me fasten my hair with the mother-of-pearl comb that she lent me.

  Around noon, Kathy arrived. In the absence of my sister, I’d appointed her as my maid of honor. She and her exemplary boyfriend had broken up, and she sulked around unhappily while I got dressed, and wasn’t polite to my mother, and only rose from the divan to assist me when I asked if she’d help me button my dress up.

  Then she tried to help badly, and made it seem as if she couldn’t do it.

  Witnessing this, my mother rose from her seat. She gave Kathy a look that sent her shrinking out of the bedroom, and then she easily buttoned that dress. It wasn’t even a struggle at all.

 

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