I buy my new sister at the hot-dog stand across the bodega for two dollars, a dime, and three pennies, with all the change I could scrounge up. The penny is dented from where Katherine bit the rusted copper at four years old, when we were twins spooled in identical outfits and baby blue eyes. Only two weeks before she left, Katherine got contacts to change hers to a dark brown, and like the shingles of an old-town roof, they burrowed a rufous red color that made everyone take a second look as she passed by. Up close, the woman doesn’t look like Katherine, her jaw too canine and eyes lifted with the mark of eyeliner, built like the lapping of waves that breaks out. She wears spandex and a blue collared shirt that reminds me of how my father would iron his work shirt every night at eight pm, and when she lifts her arms, you can see the pale bit of bare stomach flattening out then curving in, synchronous to her breaths. When I ask her what her name is, she says Selia, with a Z, Zelia. A name that pops and fizzles out in your mouth, like a cigarette dying out.
“What is yours?” she asks, and under the street lamp, I do not know what time it is, only the position of the moon over the mountains, ominous above. I do not give her my real name, but a name Katherine said suited me better and called me in quiet sermons we’d never pay attention to; later, a name she used when she asked me to skip church with her. She said it was the name of my shadow self, the self I was repressing, but I am not as complex as her; I have only one self.
“Sylvia.”
“Sylvia. Like the writer.”
“She stuck her head in an oven.”
“Weird name.”
I did not think I would feel this protectiveness, this surge of ownership for Katherine’s whispered nickname until I realize I have never let anyone else call me Sylvia until now. But I look at Zelia and think, our names now rhyme in a way that does not tell anyone that we met under a street lamp next to a bodega where thirteen-year-olds go to smoke.
When I was seven, I wanted to be a professional chess player, thinking if I could beat my family at the game, I could beat anyone I met. Katherine wanted to work in the circus, and I was always worried when she’d fling herself off the high beams at the park, until one day she broke her nose, and she never went on them again. When Zelia asks me what I do now, I tell her I got a Masters in Economics and work as a Data Scientist at a company near the corner of town. When I ask her what she does, she first offers to show me where she lives.
***
Katherine hit her head on the shallow side of a pool once, three feet deep and a crack the depths of the Grand Canyon penetrating through her skull. She was always the feral child, diving head-first from the edge of the pool. I’d like to think Zelia lives in the same pool when she takes me there. We take her car across the interstate, and she plays The Smiths while eating pho with one hand, and the other a phantom on the wheel. I try not to worry, knowing that Katherine would tug her tweed blazer off and try to hold her pale face close to the moon. I rub my hands against the elbow patches on this worn-out blazer and glance anxiously to the driving wheel; mother says, to account for the discrepancy in our being twins, that I came out first, and the first-borns lead a more mature life. I do not think, sometimes, that we are even from the same womb.
The pool’s chlorine tightens my skin, and whenever I open my mouth underwater, the sultry tang of salt flavors my mouth. I stare down at the monochrome blue, and in the pool, I see Katherine without her fiddled hands and sure, steady smile. The last thing she said to me before she left was, ‘I’m going to live without any restraints,’ and I wish she hadn’t said that. Doesn’t she know the ordeal of losing control is the most fascinating aspect of what they cannot have to controlled people?
Zelia keeps her clothes, wrung out and wrinkled, draped across the picket fence, and sleeps in the pool, only her head ajar from the water. There are only the sand-paper houses lining the streets, one a few mere feet away from where we dip our toes past the frigid water, and street row dips into the Earth, carving itself out of town. She gets her food from the market two blocks down and has to eat it all before nightfall to obscure raccoons and pests from sinking their own teeth into it. If you look into hers, there are fierce, canine fangs within her mouth, on all four corners of her set of teeth.
I ask her, once we’re both in the pool and side by side, only our elbows locking and disjointing from time to time, “Where do you get the money for your food from? And the car?”
“I work as a Lifeguard for a beach no one’s heard of.”
“Maybe I have.” I take out my notebook, ready to write the name down.
She snatches it out of my hands. “No, you haven’t.”
We both sit and placate our new situation, something not so different in how I lived with Katherine. Our new sisterhood, I think, has driven us closer in how this silence feels comfortable, though we decided our situation would live on for strictly three nights before I reimburse her to keep this act.
After a dull moment, she says, “I’m not stupid, you know. I have a degree in electrical
engineering. I just failed.”
“Everyone fails.”
“I put all my money in starting a company that could barely conjure up one customer.”
I do not say anything, but I climb out of the pool and peel off my shirt to wring out the water before putting it back on.
“Do you want to live at my place?”
***
This time we each take our own car, after I watch Zelia pack her livelihood into one worn down duffel bag, tethered in a leather strap. I lead the two of us, and in the cup holders next to my seat pools a ring of coffee. Tomorrow, I think, I am going to skip church. I have not skipped church in fifteen years; the last time was the morning Katherine ran away, and at that time, it was excusable. This is not. Zelia’s car rumbles behind me as we drive, and I listen to it putter last whispers of gas as we stop in front of my apartment.
Her lipstick rings the styrofoam of her pho cup. I carry her single bag, worn and tethered, only to wonder how such eccentricity carries so little; my bags hold room for no other than me, a thousand heavy duties. The city stings where I live right on its border, where I can see the sign welcoming me to the next town only a few feet away. The road is still in a quiet light, as if Saturn's amber rings strapped down the street, and in my house, someone calls me ‘Antonia,’ their sweet nickname for me. Zelia asks how they got Antonia from Slyvia.
Inside the house, no one talks to Zelia, and I apologize to her because I did not think they would be here. There is music pounding through the house, and I grab Zelia’s hand through a slick of sweaty bodies, all debris of adrenaline and alcohol, but she grabs a cup from the side table and intertwines in the mold of people. I watch her from afar, until my brother pushes a whisper in my ear, “She will not bring Katherine back. What are you doing? We have no more room in this house.”
“She is our new sister,” I say, and I pool my fingers in a cup of ramen from the kitchen as Zelia does. “She was living in a pool. Maybe you should stop throwing pointless parties if we have no more room.”
“Don’t forget, we have church tomorrow.”
I think of how contradictory is, to be so devout in a room bleeding with temptation. “No, I have to help Zelia get settled.”
He scowls near my ear, and the next morning, he asks once more. Instead, Zelia and I drive by the lake where the clouds settle below your feet, so you look down at them instead of the other way around. Zelia teaches me how to use the cavern near to makeshift a house, traps to clock out animals, and a method to keep track of time. I realize she’s only lived in makeshift homes.
Katherine would climb out to the farthest limb of the trees every morning. When I asked what she was looking for, she said a way out.
Comments