Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read online

  Then we acted out a scene in which the mother of the two-headed baby tries nursing both heads simultaneously, one on each breast. Denise was the mother this time, and she arranged the doll on her chest. “My kids had only one head, and still I could nurse and keep private,” she said serenely. As friends and family members, we circled her, offering imaginary cushions and other props, as well as advice.

  “Just nurse one head! Maybe the other will drop off!” I said. Nobody noticed what I considered my funniest lines, but I hoped that Katya’s tape recorder was picking them up. We had played back some of what we’d done. Parts sounded more like scuffles and panting than speech, but Katya insisted she had plenty to transcribe. She also took notes. When she wasn’t pacing, she sprawled with her back against a wall, a big drawing pad in her lap, a felt-tipped marker in her hand. She said she wrote faster if the writing was big.

  “May I ask a question?” Jonah said in measured tones. The current parents had flopped onto their mats after trying a scene we all hated, in which the father (Chantal, that night) tried to persuade the mother (me) to go to bed with him, and she said, “Yeah, and get a three-headed baby?” while as a baby-sitter, Denise tried walking with the two-headed doll. Wiping sweat and patting our hair, we nodded and looked at Jonah, who had not participated so far. “What is the meaning?” he said.

  Somebody explained the headline. We were working up to a wedding, we said. “We’re searching for the story,” Katya offered, easing herself to the floor. “There will be a process of decision making later.”

  “Is it about prejudice?” Jonah persisted. “I think it’s about prejudice.”

  “You mean race?” said Muriel. “I’m tired of talking about race.”

  “Her race, or maybe her handicap?” Jonah said. “I’m just asking.”

  Chantal said, “No, no, nothing like that. I think it’s about not being able to make up your mind. Some days I feel like I have two heads.”

  To my astonishment, I was suddenly angry; I felt the kind of anger that burns the veins in your arms. I almost said, “But I brought the headline!” as if that made me the boss. I knew the two-headed woman had nothing to do with indecision, and I thought she had nothing to do with prejudice either. I was surprised to be angry, because I didn’t know I cared about the play at all. All I could say was “That’s too simple, don’t you see?” They looked at me. They did not see. “We’re talking about having two heads. Don’t you see how interesting that is? Having two heads is—having two heads. It’s not like anything.” To myself, I sounded childish and obvious, and everyone looked at me with careful politeness.

  “Then why do it?” Jonah said. “Nobody really has two heads. It’s about being anyone who’s looked down on. We need reminders about that.”

  “I guess I think it’s something like that, too,” Katya said.

  “No,” I said from my mat, pressing my hands into my thighs. “I have no interest in that.”

  “You don’t think it’s important that people are prejudiced?” Denise said.

  “Of course it’s important.” I couldn’t explain further because I didn’t know what I meant. All I could think of was Pekko saying that Gordon saw things as they were. I wanted to look at that two-headed person, at the two-headedness of her. “Comparing her to anything,” I said, struggling to control my voice, “is disrespectful. She’s not like anything.”

  Gordon had changed our appointment so he wouldn’t be late, but he was late. I thought of Ellen as I again stood waiting on steps, but this time I had no key, and the day was colder, though it was later in the spring. At last I saw him coming quickly toward me down the other side of Temple Street, past the gray stones of the back of St. Mary’s Church. He was not just hurrying but running, the bottom of his jacket flapping. He crossed with a glance at the traffic and stopped, puffing, at the foot of the stairs I stood on. “It’s worth it, because I have more time than I thought. I can stay a little.”

  I didn’t need him to stay. I had learned enough to get started, which probably meant sitting and reading at random. But once we were inside I began to talk about how I usually worked. I was unsure of myself, uncomfortable because I’d expected him to leave, and so I found myself talking about Ellen, the client who made me feel unsure and uncomfortable. “I’ve got a client now who doesn’t want to keep anything she has,” I said. “She just thinks she ought to. I can’t deal with conscience.”

  “Conscience isn’t the usual reason for clutter?” His pointed eyebrows moved up and down, and he stroked the doorjamb.

  “No, avarice,” I said. I was trying to sound provocative; I had no idea what the usual reason for clutter is, but I wished I hadn’t mentioned Ellen.

  He said, “You’re thinking I’m the greedy kind, or you wouldn’t talk about her.”

  “No, no.”

  “So what’s she like?” Gordon Skeetling said, resting against his raised arm. He was wearing not the tan sweater today but a similar blue one. He smiled and encouraged me to make a funny story out of Ellen, but New Haven is too small. He’d recognize her—he’d turn out to be her next-door neighbor. “Why does she do this?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. Then, “I took something from her.”

  “You stole it?”

  “It was worthless.”

  “To you. What did you do with it?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “Hmm.”

  I could tell he was more curious than troubled, that he didn’t care whether Ellen was deprived of her possession or I turned out to be a thief. Have I described his face? Bony planes, lots of forehead. The expressive black eyebrows moved one at a time, and the gray, straight hair flopped when he gestured. A face ready to listen attentively, and then laugh. Now he was getting ready to laugh not at Ellen but at me. At least I’d deflected his attention from her. Usually someone who looks about to laugh doesn’t bestow permission here and there, as Gordon Skeetling did, but his wasn’t mocking or condescending laughter. What amused him was apparently the oddness of human behavior. He seemed to exist, just then, in order to hear me, and so he satisfied a longing I’ve always had: to explain, as if something would be accomplished forever if someone would only listen until I was done. . . .

  “What did you take?” His voice rose zestfully with the question.

  “A sugar bowl.”

  “Sugar bowl? Hmm, a sugar bowl!” Was a sugar bowl a symbol of something? The womb?

  But he didn’t keep on listening. He looked at his watch and gathered some papers, telling me to leave the key in the mailbox. “Take your time and don’t steal anything. No, if you want to, take whatever you like.”

  “I usually steal cars.”

  “Then you’re stuck, because I’m taking mine with me. But speaking of conscience, remind me to tell you about my dream. Oh, I’ll tell you now and be late. I had a German shepherd—a lovely dog—and she grew old and died. This was a dog with a conscience. If she did something she thought she shouldn’t have, she’d incarcerate herself in the bathtub, because she hated baths. So one day, after she died, I dreamed about a minister—a pastor, he was called in the dream—in Germany who was so conscientious, he threw himself out of his own church. Excommunicated himself. When I woke up, I remembered that pastor means “shepherd.” He was a German shepherd. Isn’t that good? Don’t I have great dreams?”

  Now he hurried away, and I missed this friendly man, who I thought probably resembled his dog. He’d have a functioning conscience, not one that operated like Ellen’s, without meaning, or that failed to operate, like mine. His would keep him from doing harm, and I wanted to stop stealing sugar bowls if only to please him.

  In the archive I began by dusting, and then I read. I read or skimmed a stack of articles copied from magazines or torn out: an old account of an election in Albany, a recent story about the New Haven homeless shelter. I could see no unifying principle or subject. It made no sense to group them by city, except that New Haven came up often. I was interested, b
ecause around here it’s a little hard not to focus on big, bold New York, which is only seventy-five miles away.

  I could already see that some stories could easily be discarded. I grouped the rest by subject: poverty, public transportation, crime. At the corner of the table I gathered those that piqued my interest the most. They were invariably about New Haven, I noticed. Then I noticed that they were almost all about a death, not the predictable death of an old person with a cluttered house but the shocking death of a young man or woman who hadn’t had time to accumulate much—the violent death of some young person, a violent death in New Haven.

  When I notice a selfish or unselfish act I’ve committed, I can’t seem to help balancing it. Half the time, that is, I fail morally. After being friendly to Ellen about dead pets, I took a sugar bowl. I took a sugar bowl, so I told Gordon. I told Gordon, so I complained about Ellen on the phone to my friend Charlotte. “I guess in your field there’s no such thing as confidentiality,” Charlotte said. As I add to this narrative, I’m sometimes ashamed of one detail or another, but more often I’m pleased to describe what I did, how I am, as if being an identifiable sort of person matters more than being one sort or another. Accounts like this are supposed to record a change: this is how I became different. But I didn’t change. What could I be except myself?

  What I don’t like is rest. Only when I have a cold do I understand the wish to snuggle and stop striving. “I like to think of finding a place to rest here,” Ellen said, fluttering her hand at the confusion in her living room, where extra dining room chairs in many styles were lined up along one wall, one behind another as in a train. On them, as it happened, her children were playing train, but they stopped to listen, tilting their heads: wary Justine, who gave me the same shrewd look that had caught my attention before, and the younger one, with short, blond hair, the one I kept forgetting wasn’t a boy, who’d pull his or her shirt up when thinking, baring the belly.

  “A nest,” said Ellen. I dislike the word nest unless a bird is involved, and I loathe nestle. Ellen said, “I keep imagining that if I moved things just a little, I could hide properly. Wouldn’t you love a curtained bed with red velvet hangings?”

  “Dust,” I said. “You’d get entangled with the curtains and wouldn’t be able to escape if there was a fire.”

  “Or if your lover refused to perform,” said Ellen, now laughing at herself. Justine looked alert. She’d been asked to join our cast. I’d given Ellen’s phone number to Katya without permission. Ellen was grateful. She approved of me too heartily. She wanted some connection with the play, because I was in it.

  The kitchen, a week after the day we’d emptied the cabinets, was subtly altered. Ellen and the children had not cleaned up but had transformed the mess into an intricate domestic installation, half nostalgic, half critical of the trammels of household, something you might almost see in the Whitney Biennial. They’d washed everything, then arranged the objects in neater groups: platters, teapots (red, blue, patterned), bowls (handmade pottery, old china with pink flowers, Danish stoneware). Silverware, separated by function and pattern, was spread on a blanket under the table. The children fussed importantly, lending Ellen more direction as they explained that after meals they replaced the dishes on the floor. They tried to use different plates and bowls at each meal now. Walking from doorway to sink was tricky, and the smaller child—Celeste, she was a girl called Celeste—hopped, as if to suggest that the aisle wasn’t wide enough for two feet, though it was.

  Ellen didn’t want help putting the kitchen back to rights. “The girls and I will do it,” she said. I knew they couldn’t. They couldn’t keep everything, yet everything seemed to be cherished. Ellen was transforming herself into my other sort of client, making her own the objects that had been thrust upon her. I said, “You’re appalling,” which Ellen took with one of her accepting shrugs. The children disappeared, and Ellen led me to a spare bedroom. The closet was crammed with clothing.

  “I suppose you want to do the same thing here?” I said.

  “Let’s just see,” said Ellen.

  She wasn’t a real gatherer, not one of my glinty-eyed, irrational but avid accumulators. Her stories were always of imposition, even about her own clothes. “My wedding gown. I never liked it. My mother chose it.”

  “And now you’re planning to force it on your daughters?”

  “Celeste might like it. Justine will marry in a black leotard.”

  We piled clothes halfheartedly on the bed and in a heap on the rug. She’d brought a garbage bag, but it remained empty. Ellen had the profound stubbornness of passivity. As before, when she was out of the room I took something, at greater risk this time. I rolled a green print cotton shirt tightly, then stuffed it into my jacket pocket. And as before, shortly after I left her house, I passed a trash basket on a corner, stopped the car, got out, and threw the shirt away.

  I am good half the time. From Ellen’s house I went to my mother’s, thinking she’d be alone and maybe lonely. Roz and I visited each other uninvited, but while she justified or explained her visits, I acted as if mine were treats. It was a hot spring day, one of those early summer days before the leaves have come out, which make me dread sweating for the next half year but please some people. Instead of moping at home, my mother might be striding briskly through the park, swinging her arms and smiling under her white curls, being the sort of older woman who heartens younger ones. Roz, however, was neither out walking nor home alone but drinking iced tea with Daphne in her little kitchen. Both were in shorts—a picture of midsummer, though clouds were gathering, and we’d be back to April the next day. Daphne said, “Hi, Daisy,” her mouth barely opening.

  The iced tea was from a mix, so with the disapproval daughters feel they may express toward their mothers’ choices, I filled a glass with tap water and stood leaning on the sink—the interloper—while the two women sat at the table. I could hear a wind starting outside, but in the kitchen it was close.

  “Daphne has a nine-year-old daughter,” my mother said significantly, after they’d talked for a few minutes about people from the soup kitchen. I’d described the rehearsals to Roz and mentioned the quest for little girls to play the two-headed kid. “I’ve been telling her about your play. Maybe Daphne’s daughter could be in it.”

  “Katya is pretty much set,” I said. “I gave her the name of a child.”

  “But you need two children,” my mother persisted. To Daphne she added, “She’d play a girl with two heads.”

  “Like, two of them inside a big dress?”

  “Something like that,” I said reluctantly.

  “Oh, Cindy would love that. Does the girl die? She’d love playing a corpse.”

  “No, she doesn’t die,” I said. “Most of the play is about when she grows up.”

  “So it’s a small part? That’s okay, I’ll explain it to her.”

  I pointed out that by now Katya had probably found many little girls. Nonetheless, I was talked into giving her number to Daphne, and before I left I also promised to remind Pekko that Daphne needed an apartment.

  And I heard the details of the plan to install kitchen cabinets. Daphne described the carpentry for women course she’d taken. “It was supposed to be job training, but guess what.” She had a two-dimensional look—a flat face with a small nose, small breasts, no belly, no backside. Her face, with thin, shoulder-length brown hair around it, was expressionless at rest, then quickly cheerful or combative, then expressionless again. She was well-defended. I doubted that she could laugh easily, and to test her I told a joke Charlotte had told me the night before, about a cocker spaniel who rides a motorcycle and won’t wear a helmet—or condoms either, it develops. I like dog jokes, and my mother stared, then laughed. Daphne glanced at her, as if for permission. Then she banged her empty glass on the table, laughing and laughing. She was somebody else, as if she’d stepped through a transforming curtain, and I knew why I had a suspicion about her and Pekko in the past.

  �
�Tell Pekko I still like roller coasters,” she called as I left. She and my mother remained at the table, sucking half-melted ice cubes, while I let myself out. As far as I know, Pekko dislikes roller coasters. I didn’t reply.

  One afternoon I had an unexpected cancellation, so I went to Gordon Skeetling’s office without an appointment. He let me in, surprised but apparently pleased. He led me inside, then crossed to the coffeepot and gestured, one eyebrow raised. He stepped into sunlight near the window, and his thick, gray hair seemed to lift slightly from his head, as individual strands became visible in the spring light. I wanted coffee and nodded. He paused, slightly puzzled, as if he hadn’t expected me to understand, then smiled in appreciation of his own peculiarities.

  “Last time I was here,” I said, “I kept noticing clippings about violent death.”

  “I don’t remember collecting stories of violent death,” he said.

  “I’ll show you.”

  He followed me into the side room, and I handed him the pile I’d made. He sat down on a tall stool, leaning forward to establish his feet far apart on the floor. I was facing his crotch, and as sometimes happens, I imagined him undressed, how his penis and balls might rest on the edge of the stool, how a hand might hold them. I sat down with my back toward him and reached for a folder, so as to fill my hand with something else.

  “This is terrible,” he said at last. “This murder on Hillhouse Avenue. I remember it.” His voice sounded tense with grief.

  “It happened a while ago,” I said. A Yale student had been killed in the middle of the night by New Haven kids. The case had made national headlines. According to rumor, Yale’s enrollment had suffered afterward. “Do you know why Hillhouse Avenue intersects with Sachem Street?” I said, again changing the subject, this time because Gordon’s burst of feeling made me uncomfortable. “It’s named for James Hillhouse, a nineteenth-century treasurer at Yale. He was called Chief, and that’s what Sachem means.”