Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (5 page)

“I got the right number,” said a woman. “I recognize your voice. Muriel told me to listen, and I just heard the show. I called her and got your number.” I put my hand over the receiver and called to Pekko, but he'd turned on the TV. The call was the third one that mattered arising from the radio show. The first was Gordon Skeetling, the second Muriel Peck, and the third was the woman on the phone. I was too unsettled and tired to take in her name that night, but I listened when she said she wanted to put on a play.

 

H
er name turned out to be Katya, and she had some sort of theater-related degree and a grant to put together community theater. Ordinary people would make up a play and produce it. “I want you,” she said. “You say what you think, and you don't mumble.” The cast was about to meet for the first time, and Muriel had already agreed to join. I wanted to see Muriel Peck again, and I was sad about an ending and looking for a beginning. So I found myself, a few days later, in a big, drafty room at a downtown parish house (not the one that housed the soup kitchen; much of New Haven's communal life takes place in parish houses) with Muriel, two other women, a man, and Katya, thinking up a play. We sat on mats on the floor, though chairs were piled in a corner, and Muriel brought one for herself, saying, “The floor is for dogs, cats, and babies.” Katya—a big, white woman with glasses and long, light brown hair over her shoulders like a cloak—began with mindless physical exercises. Then we talked briefly about who we were. After that Katya asked us to say the most outrageous, the most unspeakable things we could think of. I was unimpressed, but I joined in. Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, we began with obscenity and profanity, and worked our way backwards to phrases of some interest, remarks that we'd heard or that had been said to us, remarks we could imagine someone making at a tough moment. It was true that one of these statements might conceivably be the basis for a play, or a moment around which a play could be constructed.

“I never loved you, not even the night we robbed the bank!” said the man, who was young and Asian—Korean American, I found out later. This project had self-conscious ethnic diversity, like a photograph in a college view book. Katya and I were the only white people, and I liked that.

“Bank is predictable,” said Katya. “I never loved you, not even the night we robbed the natural foods store!”

“Your ugliness is beautiful,” Muriel said now.

“His ugliness, her ugliness . . . ,” Katya mumbled.

“Buy me a snake, honey,” one of the other two women said. One was black and one was Hispanic.

“Buy me a car, buy me a rake, buy me a gun, buy me a man, buy me a . . .”

I said, “It's a headline.” Everybody turned toward me as I sat cross-legged on my mat. They nodded, as if to say they knew what a headline was. “Two-Headed Woman Weds Two Men,” I said. “Subhead: Doc Says She's Twins.”

They laughed, beginning to be comfortable, this little group, mussed and sweaty from the exercises. I can work up a sense of competition in any situation, and my skepticism about this undertaking disappeared temporarily when they liked my suggestion. There were other ideas, but we came back to Gordon Skeetling's favorite headline. We could imagine a play about the Two-Headed Woman. We could begin to imagine her life.

“At first, she's a baby,” Muriel said. “I can make a two-headed doll.”

“That sounds horrible, a two-headed baby,” said the man.

“You want a two-headed woman,” Muriel said slowly from her lone folding chair, turning her big head in his direction, “you got a former two-headed baby.”

 

W
hen my friends the LoPrestis take a trip, Philip keeps a journal that he later copies and gives to people he knows, recording not private insecurities or arguments with Charlotte but discoveries of painters and architects, praiseworthy restaurants, hotels worth the money. He must like to imagine being asked for advice; so do I. I'm no journal keeper, and I began writing this narrative without knowing why, but as I proceed, the reader I think of wants a guidebook. A voice—maybe Philip's, maybe my brother Stephen's—asks, “What's it
like
to live the way you do?”

“The way I do?”

“Heedlessly. Is it a choice, or is this the best you can do? Is it worth it?”

“Heedlessly? Is that how I live?”

 

T
he client I described to myself as Irritating Ellen, who couldn't reject what nobody wanted, was in her late forties, with too many light brown curls on her shoulders and fluttery arms, accustomed to shrugs and hugs. Though she'd given me a key, trusting me instantly, she seemed able to leave her job at any hour to meet me. Ellen had grown up in a big house, all cupolas and porches, on East Rock Road. When her husband left her, she and her two children returned there to live with her parents. Now one parent had died and the other was in Florida, while Ellen and her kids lived on with their own possessions, her parents', and everybody else's. We had an appointment on a sunny morning in March—around the time of the first meeting about the play—but when I rang the doorbell, I heard no footsteps. It was the first day warm enough that waiting wasn't uncomfortable, and Ellen's old-fashioned street was pretty even in the dull season between snow and buds. Each ample, intricately trimmed house had its own variation: carved balusters, curved front steps, a widow's walk. As I stood there, my mind went not to Ellen's mess but to Gordon Skeetling's, and I tried to think where I'd sit in that side room so he couldn't see me through the wide glass doors. When Ellen still didn't come, I let myself into her crowded foyer and big, crowded, dusty living room, planning what I might do in her absence, noting that in Ellen's house windows were obscured with junk. I was about to find the kitchen and fix myself a cup of coffee when Ellen came toward me. Not every window in this house was blocked, and sun lit her solicitous face. She held something in her arms.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm here.”

I thought she carried a pile of old clothes, but it was a baby.

“You didn't let somebody give you that!” I said. Her children were school age.

“Just for a few hours.” The baby, a tense creature with hard fists and a swirl of light hair, was soon screaming.

“Why didn't you say no?” I said, as if my work with Ellen entitled me to candor. I don't have children, and other people's instigate too many feelings in me: a wish both to protect them and to shake off encroaching protection, and helplessness, and also a frightening wish to hurt. Apparently I am both the one who might be harmed, rescued, or stymied by good intentions and the one who'd do the hurting, the saving, the encroaching. Soon I was carrying this girl around, my arms itchy with conflict while her fingers clutched my hair. Later, I couldn't remember why Ellen suddenly wanted to show me something she had to retrieve, kneeling, from a basket on the floor—or exactly when she handed me the child. “At least she doesn't have two heads,” I said nervously, so then I had to explain.

“I did theater in college,” Ellen said.

“This may not qualify as theater.”

“Mostly I was a director,” she said. “Sometimes I acted. I wish I had time for it now.”

I might have said she'd have time if she didn't let other people rule her life, but the one-headed baby was making too much noise. I didn't want to prolong the conversation anyway, lest Ellen try to join our cast. If she did, I'd drop out, I thought. If Ellen was even slightly interested in our play, it must be too obliging. The baby's sobs quieted as I held her.

“We can make lists,” I said. “Get paper.” I demonstrated surprising patience with other clients, watching myself in disbelief as their tedium just made me smile like a cartoon Buddha, or a stereotype of a cloistered nun. With Ellen, I was my cranky self.

She went for paper. As I waited, I noted that she or someone else had once woven baskets, or people had taken to giving her baskets. Tall hampers and wicker urns held dusty dried flowers or fabric scraps that would never make a quilt. She might have carried baskets of goodies to her grandmother through the wood: she had that look. When she returned, she stood in the dust motes under her high ceiling, holding paper and pen ready. Even scrap paper in this house had been donated: this was the stationery of an oil company.

I didn't know what to say while holding a baby. When I pretended to sympathize with other clients' acquisitiveness I was not pretending—though I wasn't a gatherer myself—but I couldn't seem to join Ellen in her acquiescence, even temporarily. The baby wouldn't settle into my arms but stiffened and arched. She and Ellen were in cahoots, preferring discomfort. Ellen had reasons I was too bored to refute for refusing to take any single load to Goodwill. “I thought we'd just arrange it more efficiently,” she always said.

“Could I have a cup of coffee?” I asked now.

“Of course!” I followed her into the kitchen, a big room with old-fashioned appliances. I stood where the baby could see over my shoulder, out the window, and she calmed enough that I gingerly sat down. Ellen measured coffee into a coffeemaker that stood on a tiny open space at the corner of a cabinet whose surface was filled with stacks of bowls, vases, and carafes. Glass doors in cupboards revealed shelves crowded with china and glasses.

Ellen served me coffee in a mug in which magenta and blue glaze splashed over speckled gray horizontal ridges, and my mood shifting, I curved my fingers around it to feel the warmth. “Hold the baby well away from the mug,” Ellen said, and I looked at her, startled by authority in her voice. I never yearn for the objects I see when I work. I alternate between wanting my clients to keep their elaborate constructions of junk and wanting to destroy and banish their possessions any way at all, ignoring civic-minded strictures about recycling, toxic waste disposal, and charity, scoffing at the supposed obligation to avoid waste by providing simple good people in simple good places used tires to make sandals of, used paper to turn into new paper. At home, after a day of work, I consider throwing out everything I touch, and Pekko and I don't have a lot of objects. But in Ellen's kitchen, I liked the mug I drank from, and then I desired something else: a fat white pitcher, possibly Italian pottery. It was about the size of the baby, with painted yellow flowers. Next to the sink, it took up counter space. “Let's start by getting rid of that pitcher,” I said.

“My cousin . . . ,” she began. “And I think it's nice.”

“Everything's nice, but let's decimate this collection, for a start. Let's put every tenth object in the garbage can.”

“You said you had ideas,” Ellen said.

“Oh, you hate everything here.”

Ellen stood and stepped backwards, leaning against her sink as if to insert herself between me and everything in the room. She stretched her arms out and put a protective hand on the yellow-and-white pitcher. Then the baby wriggled, and for a second it seemed she'd fall. I started, and she did slip through my grasp, but I caught her with my other hand. In the meantime, Ellen's arms swept toward us, and the pitcher crashed to the floor as my client cried out in grief and anger. Its interior was red clay, with the potter's coils still visible. Ellen took the baby and carried her upstairs, shaking her head when I offered to clean up the shards. “Next week,” she said as she left the room, her coffee untouched. Not “Never.”

 

T
he play began with the pregnancy of the two-headed baby's mother, who didn't yet know about the two heads. The first time we tried making up a scene, I played the father. Feeling helpless, I stood in the middle of an open floor next to the young black woman, Chantal, who stared at me through rimless glasses. She had rolled up a sweater and stuffed it under her shirt. “Are you worried about your wife?” Katya prompted. She kept a tape recorder running.

So the father of the two-headed baby would be a worrier. “Did you sign up for childbirth preparation classes?” I asked my wife, remembering a friend's account of this phenomenon.

“Shut up, I'm cooking!” she said. “Shut up! I'm dancing!” Chantal mimed cooking and dancing. She'd once been in an improvisation troupe. She had a quick way of moving, turning her head swiftly in response to what others said, so her glasses flashed.

“Did you ask the doctor if it's all right to dance around like that?” I said, again after silence.

“Doctor, may I dance? May I eat? May I fool around with men?”

“
Men?
” I said. It was embarrassing. Why was I doing this?

The doctor sat on the floor, cross-legged, giggling. She was Denise, a Hispanic woman of about forty. Now she seemed to realize she had to talk. “None of that stuff. Certainly no sex,” she said as the doctor. “And don't eat.”

“But I'm hungry,” said my wife. “I'm horny.”

The childbirth preparation teacher, who was Muriel Peck, organized two pregnant women and their husbands (everybody including Katya), and made the women lie on the floor and breathe deeply. After a while she stopped and said, “This isn't a play.”

“It doesn't matter,” said Katya from the floor. “We'll settle on a script later.”