Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman (9 page)

“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.

 

O
ne 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.”

“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.”

 

P
ekko 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.