Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Read online

  “An Indian word.”

  “I think so. I can’t remember who told me that,” I said.

  “I remember when that kid died,” he said. “Christian Prince. What a name. I read everything about it. I cried. My wife thought I had some kind of weird Freudian identity thing.”

  “You mean you thought you killed him?”

  “What a funny mind you have,” said Gordon. “She thought he represented the child I never had.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you’re the victim. When I read about a crime, I’m the perpetrator.”

  “It was terrible,” he said again and put down the stack of clippings. Then he returned to his desk in the other room. When I heard him on the phone, I closed the door between us; reading and sorting, I quickly forgot about him. I was interested and curious as I looked through these stacks of paper—not needing to pretend to be interested and curious, as I often did, while concealing mild frustration or amusement toward a client. My pile of clippings about death—local death—grew. I made a few more piles. This archive also had an urban renewal motif. The unknown scissoring hands had often saved pieces about the unexpected effects, good and bad, of change. There were stories of neighborhoods fragmented by a superhighway, sustained by repair of a bridge, or changed by the placement of a bus route. I had a public transportation stack and an arts stack, but that one rapidly began to seem condescending; everything was about the making of art by people who might have been expected not to be capable of it. I remembered our play with a rush of confusion: I’d stolen the headline, in a way; Gordon Skeetling would surely scorn this unsophisticated venture; I would surely scorn it; I ought to be scorning it, and withdrawing from it. I had no business participating in art by the barely capable.

  The door opened. “More coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then I won’t make another pot.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Did I show you the headline about the woman with two heads?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “You didn’t throw it away?” he said.

  “You said I could throw away whatever I wanted to.”

  “But I said I’d yell if you did.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  He seemed to want something, and I wondered if he hoped I’d tell him more about Ellen and my theft of her possessions. I made up my mind not to take anything else. He stood in the doorway, so I edged past him and asked the way to the bathroom. When I returned, he’d gone back to his desk, but when I sat down, he again came and stood in the doorway. “Call me before coming in next time, all right?” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “I like to know whether I’ll be alone,” he said apologetically. “I do different work.”

  Gordon Skeetling seemed to bestow permission with every gesture, but now he was refusing it. “What kind of work?” I said.

  “I’m writing.”

  “A paper for a journal?”

  “An op-ed piece. The Times has run a few I’ve done, over the years.”

  “What about?”

  “If I wanted company to hear about it, maybe I could write it with company around,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, but then he told me.

  “I’m arguing in favor of decreased funding for foster care.”

  “But that’s a terrible idea!” I said.

  “The state is a bad parent,” he said. “Do you know how many foster kids end up in the prison system?”

  We argued for an hour. Neither of us got anything done. By the end his hair was in his eyes and his shirt was hanging out because he waved his arms so much. I didn’t convince him. “You look as if I’ve been beating you up,” I said at last, gathering my things. When I left, the afternoon was yellow. I drove home and took Arthur on a walk to the river, along a trail through woods near the base of East Rock. The trees hadn’t leafed out yet, so I could see a distance in all directions. The forest had a roominess I’d miss when the leaves came. The air was light green and anticipatory. I began the walk angry with Gordon, but as I walked my anger was replaced by that awareness, again, of permission. He could cry over a murder by poor children and then argue for decreased help to their younger brothers, and his very refusal to see a connection—though I’d pointed it out—exhilarated me, it was so unapologetically outrageous. I also liked the willingness to take me on in combat, to take me seriously enough to fight, to tell me what I wasn’t allowed to do. “Arthur,” I said, as if I had something to tell him. “Arthur, Arthur.”

  Pekko and I had dinner one night in April at Basement Thai with Charlotte and Philip LoPresti. I arrived alone in my Jetta, straight from a client, and parked a block away. Approaching the restaurant in the cool twilight, I glanced through a window and saw Pekko and my friends already seated together. Pekko leaned forward over the table with his hands extended—as for clapping—but held steady, as if he was saying, “This big.” When I sat down, Charlotte was talking earnestly about a misunderstanding with her younger daughter, Olivia, her pale blue eyes holding Pekko hard, then refocusing on me, as they all smiled to be caught talking so intently so soon.

  “We’re discussing clarity,” said Philip, a man who looks ascetic, like a graying priest. He did spend a couple of years in a Catholic seminary in his youth, before he changed his mind, became a teacher, and married Charlotte. “We’ve ordered appetizers.”

  Charlotte is a social worker, as I’ve said somewhere, and Philip was my colleague when I taught at the community college. I knew Philip first, then met Charlotte, years before I knew Pekko. They liked Pekko and became increasingly impatient with me when I kept breaking up with him. Once Charlotte accused me of being a less serious person than she had imagined. “I always knew your style was not serious,” she said, her eyes filled with tears, “and I love that. But lately I think it’s more than style.”

  I cried too, though I never cry, and we were shocked into new closeness by her honesty. When I married Pekko, she and Philip were happy and went out of their way to spend time with us.

  “I rented an apartment to Daphne Jenkins,” Pekko said. Clarity, apparently, had something to do with Olivia, the daughter, and something to do with Daphne. I hadn’t known Daphne’s last name, but of course Pekko did. I felt at a disadvantage, as if knowing her last name was equivalent to knowing an intimate fact about her, and he probably knew some of those as well. I was also bothered because he’d made up his mind without discussing it with me, though he never talked about professional decisions. I’d promised my mother to ask him again about Daphne, but I never had. Eating a Thai dumpling, I said, “I don’t trust Daphne.”

  “She’s reliable,” he said, “if you let her know the rules.” Again he made the gesture I’d seen through the window—hands held stiffly, facing each other—and I recognized it this time as the way people signal that they will keep a difficult person within limits. Of course he’d meant Daphne that time, too, but I couldn’t keep from wondering whether he had said earlier that he’d have to set limits for me.

  Charlotte drank some wine and said, “I was just saying that I hadn’t been clear enough with Olivia.” Olivia has always been complicated, and I’ve always liked her. She went to medical school and had recently begun a residency in surgery, in which, Charlotte said, “The final exam is cutting off your mother’s head.” Olivia claimed not to mind being insulted by her professors but was quick to leave sharply worded, offended messages on her parents’ answering machine.

  “What rules did you tell Daphne?” I asked Pekko, interrupting Charlotte.

  “Mostly no extensions on the rent—that’s the problem with friends. I’m not worried she’ll trash the apartment.”

  If Daphne did fail to pay the rent, I thought, Pekko might let her get away with it. I sensed an unusual distraction in him. The very fact that he’d told Charlotte and Philip what he’d done: he was less protected than usual. I didn’t trust Daphne because she penetrated barriers, and that
thought reminded me of Gordon Skeetling.

  “I’m working on a rubbish heap at the Yale Small Cities Project,” I said now to Charlotte. “I had a fight with the director.”

  “I never heard of that project.”

  “One guy in a row house on Temple Street.”

  “Yale has hundreds of tiny kingdoms,” Charlotte said. “Some do evil, some good.”

  “What did you fight about?” said Philip. By now we were eating our main course. I probably had seafood curry.

  “He’s in favor of reducing funding for foster care.”

  “A reactionary?” Charlotte said, the lines around her blue eyes deepening.

  “He says he’s a sensible lefty.”

  “He’s a pile of shit,” Pekko said. “I was on a board with him. He’s one of those people who’s too damned clearheaded. No feelings.”

  “Oh, he definitely has feelings!” I said, remembering Gordon’s reaction to the clipping about the murder. I wanted to see if by chance Charlotte agreed with him about foster care—I wanted to see if I’d been arguing on the wrong side—and she agreed heartily that, as Gordon had said, the state is a bad parent.

  “Maybe it would be better after all . . . ,” I said.

  “If kids were left with abusive parents?”

  “Or their relatives had to take them in, instead of having foster care as an option.” I was arguing Gordon’s position, I saw to my dismay. “Terrible things do happen.”

  “But mostly not,” Charlotte said with authority. She works with the elderly, but she knows about all parts of the system. She wanted to talk about Olivia, though. Her older daughter, Amy, is easygoing, but cranky Olivia has always been the one who can get her mother’s full attention. That week she’d called late at night, exhausted from long hours at the hospital. At first Charlotte was delighted to hear from her, but she was sleepy, and Olivia got angry when Charlotte insisted on hanging up.

  “I recognize her,” I said ruefully. “That’s what I do to my mother. I need her too much, so I’m mean to her.”

  “I think Roz doesn’t mind, in the last analysis,” Charlotte said. “I don’t.”

  “She moved here, near me, not near my brothers.” The oldest of us has lived in Chicago for a long time, but the brother I think about—my younger older brother, I call him, Stephen—is still in New York, where we all grew up.

  “Correct,” said Charlotte.

  Philip sat back, looking at me. I’ve known him now for twenty-five years, and he looks his age. “You’re still a handful, Daisy,” he said. Maybe he aged worrying about me.

  I’ve probably made mischief all my life so as to hear that loving remonstrance in people’s voices. When Philip’s or Charlotte’s disapproval became real, I was wretched. Now I looked at Philip and felt gratitude—I love his attention—and a resolve not to make further mischief. And then I found myself wanting to check my date book, to see when I’d work at Gordon Skeetling’s office again. We had set up a series of appointments, so I wouldn’t be tempted to come at other times. Maybe I could have another fight with him, a fight that would make his shirt come partway out of his pants once more.

  “He doesn’t want me to come when he doesn’t expect me,” I said to my friends. “Does that make sense?” I told them what he’d said. I liked watching them listen.

  I was just wondering,” Ellen said on the phone. “Did you notice an ugly green print shirt? I can’t find it.”

  “What do you need it for if it’s ugly?”

  “I like thinking about the woman who left it here. She forgot it after she stayed overnight, and when I offered to send it, she said, ‘Keep it.’ It wouldn’t fit me—and it’s ugly—but I thought of her when I saw it, and I want that to happen again.”

  “I’ll help you look,” I said.

  “Oh, never mind, the kids will help,” she said. “I just thought you might have noticed it.”

  So how much truth am I going to tell, and how far back need that truth go? And, maybe more important, to whom am I telling this truth? When I began writing this story, if it’s a story, I had a half-formed idea that I would write it all down, put it away, and someday read it. I was writing for my future self, assuming I’d forget, or forget how it felt if I remembered the events. I wanted to preserve the good parts of what happened and also preserve the bad parts, and I’m still hoping to demonstrate to that future Daisy, Old Daisy, that what I felt was as good as I will claim it was, and as bad.

  So will nobody but me ever read this document? Someone could break in and steal my computer. A floppy disk could fall out of my bag onto the street. Or I could change my mind. I could show what I’ve written to a friend, or even to a stranger.

  More likely, I’m doing something I did before. I wrote and published a magazine article. It began as a hundred-page essay about something that happened to my brother Stephen, but in the telling, because I was telling it, my reactions and feelings were central. I wrote it over and over, for years, and each time it became shorter, and contained less detail about me. There’s no need to say here what it was about. The point is that maybe I’m doing that again, maybe I’m writing another publishable five-page article or, more likely, a couple of thirty-page pieces about New Haven, and maybe this is how I do it. In that case I can be as revealing as I like, risk-free. The final version won’t have the word I in it, or it will, but I will just gracefully personalize a serious subject. “When I myself had the opportunity to participate in community theater . . .”

  Well, if there’s going to be a scrubbing of secrets before anyone reads this, I can write down something I suddenly understood some pages back. I know why I wanted to learn about prostitution. It’s because there was a time that I paid for sex, or almost did. I’d begun an affair with a student twenty years younger than I was—I was in my forties. He cleaned houses for a living. He’d been to prison. He was slight and dark, and he resembled Peter Pan—about to slide into the air on an invisible wire. He would come to my house—talking fast and cleverly and oddly—we’d go to bed, I’d pay him for not cleaning. I went on the radio, talking about prostitutes, to find out if the customers are ever not pathetic. The young man, Dennis Ring, has been dead for years. He was crazy and difficult, and I still miss him.

  Three girls came to the next rehearsal: Justine; Daphne’s daughter, Cindy; and a bustling, bossy kid named Morgana and called Mo, a black girl with a head full of barrettes. Of course Katya hadn’t been able to say no to anyone who called. She thought they should watch for a week before two of them began playing the two-headed girl. “The third one can be her friend,” she said. Ellen also watched, sitting in a corner on a folding chair. I was constantly aware of her. I was angry with her because I’d thrown away her shirt, as if her mildness had forced me into wrongdoing.

  But I liked Justine, who laughed quietly, with an adult laugh, at moments I wouldn’t have thought were funny, so we became funnier. We were a series of baby-sitters and day-care workers trying to look after the two-headed baby. Then Jonah was a minister who baptized her TheaDora. He did a parody of a preacher, which seemed strange for a real preacher, but maybe he wasn’t trying to be funny. When Justine laughed, I noticed, Mo kicked her, and she pushed Mo’s shoulder. Then Jonah delivered a sermon. “We must examine our thoughts about this child,” he said. “We must destroy any prejudice in our hearts.”

  Playing the baby’s mother, I said, “Reverend, I am not prejudiced against the baby.”

  “The one who’s prejudiced,” said Chantal, who was playing the father, “is Uncle Fractious.”

  Muriel volunteered to be Uncle Fractious, who said, “The baby is an abomination in the sight of God. She is too much trouble. Let’s sacrifice the whole child or cut off one of her heads!” Muriel stepped forward briskly as she finished, then resumed her vigorous striding, being both Muriel herself in her men’s blue jeans, with her hair sticking out in all directions, and the equally energetic Uncle Fractious.

  There followed a debate by the pare
nts, the doctor, and the director of the managed-care plan—David, nodding rapidly, as was his habit in any role though not when he wasn’t acting. “The parents’ insurance does not cover cutting off extra heads,” he said.

  “I love both heads!” Chantal screamed.

  “How can you leave these parents with this monster?” said Denise, who always seemed to play the doctor, no matter how much we meant to trade roles around.

  “No child is a monster,” said Jonah, who was not in the scene and was seated cross-legged on his mat at the edge of the open area where we worked, his big knees sticking up. It didn’t matter; the managed-care company was adamant.

  Later, Jonah played the minister again, and as the mother I found myself giving him a species of confession, explaining how hard it was to love my husband and our peculiar baby, how my husband was afraid of me now, as if I was a witch. Jonah encouraged me to pray.

  “He’s ashamed to be seen pushing the carriage,” I said.

  “Because of her deformity?”

  “People will think it’s his fault.”

  “TheaDora may be a punishment for all our sins,” the minister said.

  “She’s a sweet baby, Reverend. Both heads laugh. Thea is starting to talk. Dora has three teeth.” Getting into the car after the rehearsal that night, I had a momentary feeling of panic: I’d left my baby behind.

  The following week, when we moved ten years forward in the life of this family, different combinations of the three girls tried playing TheaDora. Muriel had made a red calico dress with two necklines, and we had two girls at a time try it on, quickly discovering that it hung correctly only when the girls were more or less the same height. Justine and Mo, then, became TheaDora, while Cindy, who was smaller, was their friend. We all laughed the first time our wide little girl, with Mo’s confident black face and Justine’s sly fair one sticking out of the great big dress, moved toward us, a dark brown left arm and a light-skinned right arm slapping the air as they tried to balance, while four sneakers stepped on one another. The girls stumbled and fell in a tangle but soon were rehearsing out in the corridor, coached by Ellen, while the rest of us reworked baby scenes. Intertwining their hidden arms and counting softly, they were able to walk. By the following week, Muriel had added a flounce to the dress. Their feet concealed, Mo and Justine became a two-headed girl. I watched Muriel watch them, first critically, then with a look of astonishment and pride. Cindy, who commented on everything while twisting or sucking on strands of thin, brown hair, played with TheaDora, teased her, argued with her. “You’re not my friend. I don’t want a friend with two heads.”