Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 5

  “That’s right, there isn’t!” I said, instead of claiming I wasn’t fascinated.

  We crossed a parking lot and entered Clark’s Pizza—which is Greek despite its name—through the back door. It’s an old-fashioned lunch place with red upholstered booths and a menu including gyros and moussaka. Gordon had a light, tenor voice—the voice of a younger man—and as we sat down in a booth near the windows, I looked around to see if anyone was listening.

  “Prostitutes are just one sort of needy person,” I continued. “They’re usually poor. They may be homeless. They may have AIDS.”

  I ordered a Greek salad, and he asked for spanakopita. I didn’t feel rushed with Gordon Skeetling, so after my outburst I tried to answer his question truthfully. Of course I didn’t know why I’d wanted to do a series about prostitution, only that I did. “I’m not a prostitute,” I began again, in a different tone.

  “Were you ever offered money for sex?” he said. “It never happened to me. I guess I’m not attractive enough.”

  “Twice,” I said and told him the stories I couldn’t get Pekko to listen to—the man outside the bakery, the man outside the dress shop. I remembered another occasion I didn’t mention.

  “Were you tempted?” he said quickly, sounding not as if he was trying to get personal but as if he was such a curious person he couldn’t keep from asking. Then he answered his own question. “Well, you were tempted as I would be—by the chance to learn something. Not by the money or the sex itself.”

  Then he added, “What did you do, when the first man asked you?”

  “I think I pretended I hadn’t heard. I hurried away. I was afraid he might follow me.”

  He nodded, and shrugged off his raincoat, and he was wearing a tan sweater, the way I’d first imagined him. He was narrower than I thought when I saw him in a jacket. He took up room when he spread his arms, and now he stretched one arm along the back of the booth. Behind us, a small child stood up and patted Gordon’s arm vigorously. He ignored her.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “It’s the idea of doing something with a stranger that you’d ordinarily do only with someone you cared about. Or at least knew.”

  “Something about eliminating distance?”

  “No. I think prostitutes and their clients must be lonely. They don’t make a connection.”

  “With me they do,” he said.

  “You patronize whores?”

  “No, but I buy them drinks, or cups of coffee. I don’t want to sleep with them, but I like to talk to them. Like you, but I’ve never gone on the radio.”

  The child in the next booth had been coaxed to sit down, but now she turned and patted Gordon’s arm once more. He glanced at her as if at a woman who tapped his arm in the street. “What you do for a living is perfectly respectable, of course,” he said then. “This poking in attics and cellars. But I wonder— Don’t be insulted.”

  “I’m never insulted.”

  “You go to people’s houses, and they take you to a private room and show you something they don’t show anybody else.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The locked door. It’s true.”

  Our lunches were brought. “Maybe trash is the new genitalia,” said Gordon.

  There was one more interruption by the child, and I asked him if he had kids. “Nieces, nephews,” he said.

  “Me too. You’re married?”

  “Twice,” he said. “Not now. You?” So I told him about marrying Pekko after years of being single.

  “I know Pekko Roberts,” he said. “We were on a board together.”

  He ate spanakopita in silence, concentrating on cutting layers of phyllo dough and spinach and feta cheese, and then told me more about the Small Cities Project. He was a paid researcher; small cities paid him for studies, and in the course of his research, he often found a magazine piece he wanted to write. “The archive is leftovers,” he said. “My thought is, if you show up, read, throw away the trash—well, what’s left will have an emphasis, just because I do, because the people who’ve worked with me do, maybe because you do. Maybe everything you look at will have to do with prostitution. The process could lead to something—another radio series, a paper, a book. I can pay you for a while, but if you hit on something big, you’ll have to find somebody to fund it.”

  I considered mentioning what I’d already come up with, after my single look at his archive—the play about the two-headed woman—but I didn’t.

  On April 1, Muriel brought the two-headed doll to rehearsal. She was bigger than a baby, a tan rag doll with something inside to stiffen her a bit. Her arms were slightly bent, and her legs were straight and fat. She wore a yellow nightgown with broad shoulders and two neck openings, and out of each opening rose a head. One had a dark brown face, short, black yarn hair, and black button eyes, while the other’s face was peach-colored. It had short, yellow hair and blue eyes. The doll was startling, and it silenced me; I stopped feeling, at least for now, as if I’d wandered into something beneath me. I was the first to take it from Muriel, and I held it gingerly. Both faces had appliquéd circles of red felt for mouths. They silently screamed. “You sewed each strand of hair, one at a time,” I said.

  “You make loops, then you cut them. It makes that cute baby fuzz.” Muriel’s placid pride did not quite acknowledge the doll’s strangeness. It was numinous, and nobody ever picked it up casually.

  When we began rehearsing, David and Muriel played the baby’s parents, because Katya said it was too soon to decide on roles. As the mother, Muriel stroked the baby and walked with it. Muriel’s body was muscular and efficient, and she walked fast. She always wore jeans. She made dolls, but she looked as if she’d wear a hard hat and drive a bulldozer.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, dear,” said her husband. “I want a divorce.”

  Muriel turned her still, intent face in his direction. “You’re going to leave me alone with TheaDora?”

  “April fool!” said David. “I don’t want a divorce. April fool!”

  “Lover boy,” Muriel said slowly, “I have to tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our baby has two heads. Not April fool. Not April fool.” Muriel was bigger than David, and when she stared at him, he seemed to grow smaller. He’d gone to Yale and was barely out of college. He had told us he worked with computers.

  When David and I left together after the rehearsal, I asked, “What made you say that?”

  “The April fool joke? I felt mean. That doll is so weird.”

  The next time I saw Ellen she had no spare children in her arms, and we tried to make a plan for her kitchen. She still wanted to keep everything, just rearrange it, and I forced myself to agree. She didn’t mention the broken pitcher. Sitting on the floor, we gathered pots and pans and crockery from her many pantries and cabinets and shelves, and then we grouped everything in categories: baking pans in a pile, sugar bowls in one corner, stacks of plates in another. Ellen’s children came home from school, and each watched us briefly before turning away. One was a rather mature-looking girl with long hair, who looked around critically but didn’t speak. The other I took to be a boy—stubby, plump, with a practical look—but she later turned out to be another girl. For the rest of the afternoon I heard footsteps or music, occasionally, from upstairs. The children played sad folk music, not what I’d have expected. Ellen and I had made matters worse, but as we worked she said, “This was a good idea.”

  “What about supper?”

  “We’ll order in.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “Breakfast is easy.”

  At least she didn’t have a dog running around. “Why don’t you have animals?” I said, surprised by that thought. “Where are everybody’s unwanted cats and dogs?”

  “I got rid of them. Three cats and a dog. Justine’s allergic.”

  “What did you do, kill them?”

  “No, I didn’t kill them!” She sat up. She’d been lying on her stomach,
pulling dusty bowls out from a deep shelf, getting dust on her skirt. Ellen wore wide cotton skirts in pale, swirling prints. “I bought cute things for them—leashes, little beds. Then I lined them up outside a supermarket and looked pathetic until people took them.” We stopped working and began discussing animals. Ellen had missed those pets. We had a conversation new friends have, beginning with childhood dogs, but I grew bored with her undifferentiated grief for the pets of her life. I didn’t want to be her friend, but I kept listening, and narrowly missed eating Chinese takeout with her and the children. I promised to come the next day. When she was out of the room for a moment, I dealt with my feelings by pocketing a sugar bowl—a rather nice one, blue ceramic—and later I threw it in the garbage.

  As my mother told Daphne, I am no gardener, but on a windy but sunny Saturday I raked the mucky dead leaves of the previous autumn—leaves we hadn’t bothered with when they fell—into piles. Arthur sniffed the fecund stuff my rake was exposing and sometimes rolled in it. I was cold, but activity warmed me. Inside, the phone rang. Pekko wasn’t home, but the machine would pick up the call. When Arthur barked, I followed him down the alley between houses and found my mother ringing our doorbell. She came into the yard.

  “Daphne did that for me,” she said, after watching me for a while. “She took a long time, and she charged me by the hour.”

  “It’s a big job,” I said. I leaned the rake on a tree.

  “I’m not complaining,” my mother said. “It’s important to know how to charge. I hope you charge your customers enough.”

  I offered her coffee, and as she explained that she’d come with another question for Pekko, I heard him thumping around inside. Roz isn’t shy about visiting, but she doesn’t want me to think she moved to New Haven to bother me, so she always gives a reason. When we came into the kitchen, he’d discovered the blinking light on the answering machine and was listening to a rapid, friendly message from Gordon Skeetling. “Hi, Daisy, it’s Gordon,” and his 432 number—which always means Yale—spoken in the hasty manner of someone who knows you already have it.

  “Who’s that?” he said. “Hi, Roz.”

  “A client.”

  “Gordon who?”

  “Skeetling. The Small Cities Project. He says he knows you.”

  “You’re working for him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Who is he?” said Roz. “A big shot?”

  “He says Yale barely tolerates him,” I said to Pekko. “He sounds like your sort—inner city and all that.”

  “I don’t like him,” Pekko said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I put my jacket on a chair and took three mugs from the cupboard.

  “I don’t want coffee. He was on the board of the shelter with me.”

  “He said so. He seems nice. He has a room full of papers he wants me to sort out.”

  Pekko walked out of the room, but a minute later, as I was measuring coffee, he returned. “A little too clearheaded,” he said. “Sees things just as they are.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said. “You’re the one who’s always claiming to be a realist.”

  “If I were a realist,” said Pekko, “I wouldn’t rent an apartment to the man I just rented an apartment to.”

  He was standing in the doorway, filling it, but now he turned away again. Roz called after him, “Speaking of apartments, Pekko, I need a good deed.”

  “Yes?” he said, sounding friendlier. “How are you anyway, Roz? What are you up to now?” My mother’s conscientious vigor amuses Pekko, and he also admires it. “We’re friends,” he says, which is also what my mother says, though she’s more detailed about it: she claims they made friends because they went through the war together, meaning Vietnam. They didn’t meet until years later, but she says they thought the same way about it. She marched, wrote letters to editors, and affixed bumper stickers to her car reading SUPPORT OUR BOYS: BRING THEM HOME. Pekko was drafted and spent a year in Vietnam. “Not as bad as some people’s year,” he says, “but bad enough.” Discharged, he returned to New Haven and, while taking courses at Southern Connecticut, began organizing against the war.

  They’re a little superior about it. During the war I was busy marrying Bruce Andalusia, who had a good lottery number and wasn’t drafted. I tried not to think about Vietnam. Now and then, all my life, I’ve imagined myself tossing something over my left shoulder with my right hand, walking on and not seeing where it falls. I tossed the war like a button I pulled off my coat and didn’t keep to sew on again.

  Now my mother said to Pekko, “I promised Daphne I’d ask if you have room for her anywhere.”

  “She getting evicted?”

  “Oh, no,” said Roz, “but her place is expensive.”

  “How old are her kids?” Pekko said.

  “I think nine and seven.”

  “I suppose she’ll pay the rent if it’s me.”

  “Of course,” Roz said. “Thank you.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” Pekko said. He climbed the stairs at his steady pace.

  I’d offered my mother a cup of coffee not to be hospitable but because I wanted one myself. She was too pleased to have had her leaves raked by the remarkable Daphne, and I wanted her to leave so I could call Gordon back. That impulse made me angry with myself, so I drank the coffee too fast and burned my mouth. As I drank, I formed a policy about not making client calls over the weekend.

  My mother drank only a few sips of coffee but lingered, talking about my brothers. The oldest of us, Carl, is gay and lives with a man and two adopted children. Stephen is still married to his first wife, and they have a daughter. Sometimes I am sure Roz is about to blame me for being childless, but the truth is that Roz doesn’t want me to be more conventional than I am. She wants to prove that she’s as unconventional as I, and she wants me to delight her with stories. That day she probably hoped for confidences and intimate talk. When I was single, I often told her about my men. She didn’t disapprove, nor did she grow wistful as I aged out of my fertile years, but prided herself on her appreciation of another way.

  Married, though, I’d gone into our bedroom, so to speak, and closed the door. I thought my mother disapproved not of any way of life but of people who don’t know how to get what they want. Possibly, these days, my silence made her think I was unhappy, but I didn’t want to talk about Pekko. Now she said, “After she finished raking, she came inside and I gave her a glass of water. Then we talked for an hour. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the clock. I never do that with anybody but you. She’s a lonely person. She hasn’t time for boyfriends, just taking care of those kids. All of a sudden she looked at her watch and skedaddled—time for school to let out. She’s so skinny she looks twenty, but she’s past forty. Would you have guessed that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How well does she know Pekko?” she asked.

  “How should I know?” Finally my mother left, and I called Gordon right away. He needed to change our next appointment. And he wanted to know if I minded that he wouldn’t be in the office while I worked. He’d just let me in and leave. I said I’d be fine.

  Katya was tall and wide, given to exaggerated gestures and mild bullying (“Use your body, Daisy! This isn’t radio!”) but maddeningly wary of deciding anything definitely. While the rest of us—except for Muriel—sat on the floor, Katya would pace, looming hugely when she came near. She’d expostulate—and then say, “But what do you guys think?”

  I found I looked forward to rehearsals, though after each one I promised myself I’d quit. Then I’d decide to stay in but keep silent as much as possible. Yet I always went, and talked a lot, both in character and out of it. As I’d begin to move around the area we called the stage—with exaggerated gestures and speed—I’d feel a familiar, anxious pleasure in my throat and at last I identified it as the sensation I’d get, in my single years, when I was about to sleep with a man I scarcely knew.

  Denise always had an opinion about what we
were doing, and she was always wrong. She wanted the play to be innocuous, so it wouldn’t upset anybody. Invariably I disagreed, and then everyone would offer a view, and we’d be back where we started. We were now a group of six actors, not counting Katya. She’d found another man, a rotund black storefront preacher with a glorious, deep voice. His name was Jonah. “I was swallowed . . . by a whale!” he said the first night. He had been a drug addict many years ago, he told us, so he was not shocked by swearing. We mustn’t become shy, just because there was a reverend in the room.

  We were not shy, and we weren’t a coherent group of rational adults. David, the computer kid, had a habit of scooting his mat around the floor while people talked, like an eight-year-old. Chantal was tall and sharp-looking, with her quick glances and glittery glasses. She was bright but illogical. At least she no longer rushed around as much. Denise, the little Puerto Rican lady, used to hug her knees as we sat there, as if she was so anxious not to be in the way that she’d decided not to let herself stand up. When she talked about the play, she urged blandness, but her acting wasn’t bland. Something was freed in her, and she often startled me. Muriel retained her dignity and always seemed grown-up, but even Muriel had a fault: she could be boring. Sometimes I had to remind myself that she’d been a prostitute, to make her seem slightly exotic. She looked exotic, and I couldn’t keep up with her long stride as we walked to our cars after the rehearsals, but she was as likely to talk about her special red-and-green Christmas plates as anything else.

  That night we decided, after some debate, that we needed a couple of kids to play the two-headed little girl if we were indeed presenting a sort of biography. I was opposed, but when I lost the argument I didn’t lose my usual desire for control. Somebody said she knew a cute ten-year-old, and I thought of Ellen’s not-cute Justine, with her cool, intelligent look. I didn’t want Ellen involved in the play, but I often can’t help trying to seem more competent than anybody else, so while the others shrugged, I scribbled her phone number on a bit of paper and handed it to Katya.