The Mirror Sisters Read online

  “Balanced,” he repeated, shaking his head. “So when will they be ready?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said. There was that judge’s gavel coming down again, case closed.

  Daddy left the topic for another day, which was pushed further and further into the future. Haylee and I were disappointed that Daddy didn’t try harder for us. We were hoping he would win this argument. But he never won any.

  Yet I never believed that Daddy was not as interested in our upbringing and care as Mother was. She convinced him that she had made the greater personal sacrifice once we were born. She had decided not to pursue her legal career and often reminded him of that. She said that if there had been only one of us, she would have eventually hired a nanny and continued with her education and her part-time work as a paralegal.

  “I would have agreed to that anyway,” Daddy said, “twins or no twins.”

  Mother would have nothing to do with such a thought.

  We’d often sit on the floor listening to them discuss us as if we weren’t right there. Or at least I did; Haylee was bored with their arguments about us.

  “I thought by now you understood, Mason. Identical twins are a true phenomenon,” Mother declared. “They require very special care and nurturing, especially ours, because they are extra special. Besides, it was a blessing to have two of the same. It’s a double joy, and if God is going to be so good to me, I have to live up to the gift and be doubly attentive and twice as unselfish.”

  How could Daddy argue with that, even though he was still trying to get her to be less intense about how we were to be raised? “I understand, but we all have to be a little selfish in order to survive, to keep our marriage healthy, don’t we, Keri?”

  My ears perked up at the word selfish. It was a word Mother treated as profanity. Neither Haylee nor I could ever be selfish. We were to always think of each other first. Why was it all right for Daddy to say they should be selfish?

  “Of course, we should think of each other, but the children and their needs come first. Don’t you believe that?” Mother tossed back at him.

  “Yeah, sure,” Daddy said.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you do,” she said.

  He threw up his hands in surrender and retreated to his little corner of peace and quiet, as he did most of the time. I was disappointed because I still didn’t understand what he meant by selfish and wished they had argued more. How could it ever be good to be selfish? I wondered for the first time if Daddy really was happy we’d been born.

  There was no doubt that Mother did more for us and sacrificed more. She was far from selfish. When she had given up college and her intention of becoming a lawyer for a while, if not for good, she had dismissed the housekeeper and taken on the housework herself. She relented while she was nursing us and permitted a maid, Mrs. Jakes, to come in once a week. She was a woman in her early sixties who had lost her husband and whose own children lived far away. At least, that was what we were told. I remember she had curly white hair and bright cerulean eyes that looked too young for her face and made her smile soft and warmer than those of most women her age. She was fascinated with us, but Mother had her doing mostly housework and very little with us.

  Once we were able to do most things for ourselves, Mother let Mrs. Jakes go. In my heart, I thought it was really because she wasn’t treating us with equal attention enough to satisfy Mother. She favored me more, talking mostly to me. Haylee didn’t like her, maybe for that reason. When Haylee complained about Mrs. Jakes, Mother looked at me to see if I would object. I didn’t, because in a weird way, even then I understood that Mother would blame me for letting someone favor one of us more. I even felt a little guilty about it. For that reason more than any other, she didn’t want to bring anyone else into our home to do housework.

  Even though we could take care of our basic needs, Mother still could have used the help. We lived in Ridgeway, a very upscale community outside of Philadelphia, and had a large, two-story house with a double gable. It had complex rooflines, and the siding was a mix of oiled cedar board and clapboards painted gray-green, which Mother thought played well with the natural surroundings. On the first floor, we had what Mother called the great room, along with the kitchen, its dining nook, and our dining room. The walls had rustic-grade butternut paneling and walnut floors with classic painted trim. There were soaring fir ceilings in the great room, and we had a screened porch. The great room had a large stone fireplace. Everyone who came to our house loved it for its warmth and complimented Mother on her decorating skills. Between the house and us, she didn’t have time for much else, which I eventually realized was why Daddy complained. He felt neglected.

  More and more, he pointed out how little they were doing with their friends and how many events they had missed. She found fault with every babysitter she hired, even Mrs. Ramsey, who was a retired schoolteacher, and sweet old Hattie Carter, a sixty-four-year-old grandmother herself who could whistle “London Bridge Is Falling Down” or “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Mother was suspicious of everyone they hired and everyone who came into contact with us. When she came home after going out, the first thing she would do was come to our room and question us about the sitter, seeking a reason to classify her as inappropriate, especially for us.

  “We haven’t gone to a movie in months,” Daddy told her, “much less enjoyed a quiet dinner together.”

  “We’ll do all that when they’re older,” Mother told him. “It’s difficult to get the proper kind of babysitter.”

  “Other people don’t have so much trouble with babysitters, Keri.”

  “We’re not other people. Other people don’t have what we have!” she exclaimed, her eyes looking as if they would pop.

  The dwindling of their social activities was another battlefield from which Daddy retreated. That was probably why he devoted more time to his work and our property. He had continued to develop it years after he and Mother had bought it, but about two years after we were born, he stopped. The property was nearly five acres, and he once had plans to build a lake.

  Daddy had almost become a professional tennis player. He was a star on his high school and college teams, and he had a beautiful clay court built almost as soon as they bought the house. Sometimes Mother played with him. We sat on the bench and watched. We weren’t quite five yet when Mother bought us tennis outfits and tennis shoes. Neither of us could hold a racket well, but I could hit the ball better than Haylee. Maybe that was why Mother discouraged Daddy from teaching us any fundamentals.

  “They’re not ready,” she said. “They’re too little, and their muscles and bones are just developing. It might even damage them.”

  “You can’t keep saying they’re not ready, Keri. I was hitting a ball at their age,” he said.

  “That was you. The usual rules don’t work with identical twins. Everything has to be special, Mason.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything,” she said, as firmly as usual.

  Daddy smirked at that, but he didn’t spend any more time teaching us about tennis. Mother always had a reason Daddy shouldn’t do something with us. I think that was why he stopped trying after a while.

  When Daddy and Mother played tennis, it didn’t seem to me that either one of them was having fun. Sometimes Daddy let Mother win or kept their scores close. She wasn’t that bad herself and was always quite a competitive person, but it was easy to see how good Daddy was, how gracefully he moved. Mother hated losing to anyone, even to Daddy, and I was sure he knew it. There was no limit to how far he would go to keep the peace. When I was older and looked back, I wished he hadn’t thought peace was more important than we were.

  Mother was a better swimmer than he was. When he was home early enough during the summer and joined us at the pool, she often challenged him to a race, and she always beat him. She looked at us and cried, “See, girls? Men aren’t as superior as they’d lead you to believe.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Daddy said. “I know.
We’re all egotists. Women don’t take selfies and pamper themselves.”

  Mother just smiled, as if Daddy was too ignorant to realize what she had known years ago. Daddy could roll his eyes and throw up his hands, but he never got the better of her, and sometimes his face turned crimson and his jaw tightened in frustration.

  Both Haylee and I were very impressed with Mother—and not just because she was our mother. As far as we were concerned, besides knowing so many things, she was one of the prettiest women in the whole world. We knew she had done some modeling. She had beautiful cloth-covered albums with snapshots and newspaper clippings that she often let us look at. She was nearly five foot eleven, with thick blondish-brown hair that matched the beautiful amber necklaces Dad had bought her on their first anniversary. Haylee and I had slightly darker brown hair, but we both had the same patches of tiny freckles on the crests of our cheekbones. Mother actually counted them and concluded that we each had the same number of freckles. That plus the matching small birthmarks we had just under our left earlobes were pieces of evidence she always used to demonstrate how special we were when she paraded us before her friends.

  “Identical twins don’t always have what they have. As babies, when one cried, the other did; when one was hungry, the other always was. Why, they almost pooped at the exact same moment!” she would exclaim, and her friends would look at us, astonished.

  “You’re so devoted to them,” her friend Melissa Clark told her once.

  Mother pulled us to her, embracing us and smiling at her friends. “Look at them. Why wouldn’t I be devoted to them?”

  She kissed us both before she continued. She always kissed us each twice. If she kissed me first and then Haylee, she would kiss Haylee a second time and then me. The next time she did it, Haylee was first, and the same set of kisses followed. I saw how that amazed her friends.

  “I wish my mother loved me half as much as you love them,” Louise Kerry said.

  “If you were an identical twin, she might have,” Mother replied, and smiled at us. “All the joy is compounded. Just holding hands with the two of them when we walk, getting double hugs and kisses, making me feel like a mother-in-the-middle love sandwich—it’s so special.”

  I looked at her friends’ faces and saw how fascinated they were with Mother and with us. We were riveted to her descriptions of us as infants. Sometimes she told her friends things she had never told us.

  “When the doctor announced that I was having twins, I didn’t believe him,” she said. “They felt to me like one child, not two. I was really surprised, up to the day I gave birth and actually set eyes on the two of them side by side. I remember my doctor saying, ‘You’ve had clones.’ Even he was amazed at how identical they were.”

  “It’s true. I’ve never seen any twins so alike,” Mrs. Letterman said. She was the oldest of Mother’s friends, having retired from being a school business manager. “And I’ve seen at least five or six sets during my years at Cherry Hill.”

  “It’s easily explained. They have the same DNA,” Mother told these friends, nodding at us sitting side by side, dressed in the exact same outfits and shoes. Our hair was brushed the same way and kept the exact same length. “Monozygotic twins develop from a single egg-and-sperm combination that splits a few days after conception. Their DNA originates from the same source. They were a total surprise because no one in either my husband’s family or mine had twins, much less identical twins. I began to learn about twins as soon as I could. I mean, to raise identical twins properly, you have to go deeper than Dr. Spock.”

  “I love the way you know so much about it,” Mrs. Letterman said.

  “They’re my children. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Whenever Mother explained us to someone, the other person was always very impressed. Once Daddy told us, “As soon as you were born, your mother went after the research on identical twins as if she were about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. I really do believe your mother has become a nationally important expert on the subject.” He often said something like that when he was tired of arguing about anything she did with us, but he really didn’t sound proud of her. He sounded more annoyed. I even thought he believed she knew too much, if that was possible.

  But who else could question anything she did? We didn’t have our grandparents nearby to help Mother care for us when we were young. Daddy’s parents were living in a Florida development for retired people. Mother’s father died when she was in college, and her mother, our grandmother, Nana Clara Beth, had remarried and lived in Arizona. Her new husband had grandchildren of his own, and we sensed early on that Mother resented how our grandmother doted on her new husband’s grandchildren more than she did on her own. Mother was an only child. She told us that only children were normally spoiled. “But not me. Your nana Clara Beth spoiled no one but herself and criticized my father for doting on me too much. She drove him to an early death,” she said, her eyes like hot coals.

  I actually imagined my grandfather sitting in the rear of a car and my grandmother driving him to a dark place where death waited, smiling with teeth as sharp as razors.

  Daddy had two brothers. The older one, Uncle Jack, went into the military and was stationed in Germany. He had a wife and two children, a boy, Philip, who was now eight, and a girl, Arlene, who was ten. Daddy’s younger brother, Uncle Bret, was a salesman for a drug company, married with three children, all boys, ages five, six, and seven—Tim, Donald, and Jack. They lived in Hawaii, so we saw little of them.

  We didn’t see our paternal grandparents much at all, either. Daddy’s parents refused to do much traveling anymore, and Mother hated going to Florida, especially where they lived. She called it “God’s waiting room, full of bingo games and grandparents with ungrateful children.”

  “Don’t even think about us ever retiring there,” she warned Daddy, but I thought the real reason she disliked going to Florida was that our grandmother Mary was always trying to get Haylee and me to be different from each other. She bought us different things, things Mother confiscated as soon as we returned home and then hid somewhere in the basement or threw out. Haylee claimed she saw Mother literally bury two different watches our grandmother Mary had given us. Mine was blue with a silver band, and Haylee’s was silver with a blue band. I didn’t think Daddy ever knew what she had done with them. When he asked about them, she told him she didn’t know.

  “They’re probably somewhere. The girls weren’t that fond of them,” she said. “They must have misplaced them.”

  He didn’t pursue it. He asked us, but neither of us would ever tell him something bad about Mother. It was better to just say we didn’t know. He looked suspicious, but he didn’t keep asking.

  Daddy was very much into his own work by this time anyway. He had helped start what was becoming an international software company, Capture Software, and shortly after our birth, he was appointed president of the company. Because we were such a full-time job for her, Mother didn’t complain about his long hours, the weekends he had to give up, even the holidays he had to cut short, leaving her alone with us. I always thought she would rather have him busy with his own things than involved with our upbringing. He often apologized for not doing more at home or with us, but he was in the middle of a big expansion with his company by the time we were twelve. He said they were going public and would be on the stock exchange. He wasn’t even home enough on weekends to play tennis very much.

  When I was twelve, I once heard Mother tell him, “Ordinarily, I would accuse you of committing adultery with your devotion to your work, Mason, but I’ll let it go for now because I have so much to do.”

  Yet, in the early days at least, there were times when they were together and we weren’t the subject of their conversation or the focus of all their attention. They seemed to be back to being college sweethearts, at least from the way Mother had described herself and Daddy back then. When Daddy graduated from high school, he was a chamber of commerce award recipient. Mother said t
he big joke about him was that he was destined from birth to be the hero in a movie. Listening to her talk about Daddy or hearing them reminisce about their childhoods and their romance was like listening to one of the fairy tales Mother read to us. Who could foresee that it would all shatter like Humpty Dumpty?

  Speaking about Daddy, she once said, “He made me feel safe wherever I was and whatever I was doing. Neither of you can get married until you both find a man like your father. Promise?”

  Of course, we promised. We were only nine at the time, and neither of us realized that Mother was being literal. She actually expected that we would fall in love at the same time and have a double wedding, and even get pregnant at the same time. On afternoons when the three of us were together in the great room, she drew up all these fantasy scenarios for us, detailing how she would plan our marriage ceremonies and receptions and how she would help set up our nurseries.

  I felt like reciting, “Once upon a time, there were identical twins who found identically perfect husbands and had identical marriages and identical families. They died on the same day at the same time and were buried side by side in the same cemetery.”

  Mother was so good at performing what she saw as perfect stories for us, taking our hands and pretending to walk down the aisle at our wedding. She said she would always throw big birthday parties for us, even when we were mothers ourselves. We’d sit at her feet as she waved her hands like magic wands and drew up the scenes before us. It was as if we were in a movie called The Perfect Twins.

  Normally, Mother exhausted us daily with her attention to every detail of every aspect of our lives. Neither of us could have an inch of space more than the other, whether it was in the car or in the house or even in the yard and the pool. I thought she imagined a yardstick when she told one of us not to crowd “your sister.”

  For years, even though there were other bedrooms we could use, Mother kept Haylee and me in the same room. We slept in the same king-size bed. We had identical dressers for our clothing, and we shared the closet space equally. Just mentioning that some of our classmates had their own rooms was enough to fire up her eyes.