Haylee looked a little stunned and then quickly regained her composure and said, “Of course not.”
But she looked at me a little differently for the rest of the evening. She was like someone who wasn’t quite sure she knew the person she was with, and there were no two people on earth who supposedly knew each other better.
A week later, what she had hoped wouldn’t happen for a long time did happen. I had my first period.
Although Mother didn’t notice her behavior, Haylee went into a sulk. What really annoyed her was that I didn’t have cramps as bad as hers. What pleased Mother, however, was that I had my period the same day of the week exactly three weeks later and almost at the same time. I knew that whenever we did something simultaneously or something happened to us simultaneously, Mother felt she was right about us.
“That’s not just a coincidence,” she told us at dinner that night. “Now you’re both the same again and you can support and help each other as usual with the new problems and questions that come up.”
Daddy had come home late and looked uncomfortable with all the talk about periods and cramps.
Mother rattled off a list of things she had found worked for herself to relieve the pains, like drinking lots of water to avoid bloating. She said her grandmother used to give herself and her mother cinnamon and ginger. When she got into more detail about blood flow, Daddy cringed.
“Do we have to discuss this at dinner, Keri?”
“See, girls, men are just built weaker,” she declared, smiling.
Haylee smiled, too, but I didn’t.
Daddy looked even more annoyed. “It’s not a matter of being strong or weak. It’s what’s appropriate,” he said, with a sharper tone than usual. “You’d think with how you stress dinner etiquette, you’d be teaching them that.”
Mother despised being criticized in front of us. Her face would blanch and her neck tighten. More than Haylee, I knew how many times she and Daddy had argued about how we were being raised and how Mother’s devotion to us had affected their relationship and their social life. On two occasions I knew of recently, she had decided not to accompany him to a business dinner, citing the need to help us with some aspect of our schoolwork, mainly, it seemed, to bring Haylee up to my level.
“Why does she have to be getting the same grades as Kaylee?” Daddy demanded. “She’s doing as well as, if not better than, I was in school.”
“If either of them falls behind the other in anything for any reason, it will be damaging,” Mother insisted.
As usual, their argument had ended with Daddy just walking out of the room. Silence seemed the best way to stay married, but whether either of them wanted it or not, the static we used to see frequently, static that seemed to have disappeared from our home, had returned. It began to occur more often. Sometimes I expected to hear thunder roll through the house. Mother was even saying “your father,” as if she had nothing to do with him, as if he was no longer also her husband.
Arguments between them had come and gone over the years. I expected them to happen at least once a week, usually because of something she was doing with us. Now their arguments were more about their relationship, the little they were doing together, and the friends Daddy said they were losing. The static those fights created resulted in more silence between them, and soon it felt as if we were all walking on eggshells again.
And this time, it wasn’t going away, even after Daddy left for good.
6
Years later, I would wonder if Mother realized how bad things finally had become between her and Daddy or if she always knew but didn’t care as much as Haylee and I would have expected her to care. It did seem like she either missed clues or deliberately ignored them, all in the name of bringing us up perfectly. Any mother would tell her husband that their children came first, but the sacrifices our mother was willing, even eager, to make were not ones Daddy was willing to make. Gradually, what social life they had thinned out, until their attending parties, meeting people for dinners, and going to shows with friends dwindled to almost never.
The periods during which Daddy would be gone for business trips grew longer. It was clear to me, at least, that he welcomed any opportunity to stay away from the home he had once so loved. In fact, there were weeds showing on the tennis court, and it was easy to see how our property was being neglected, not to the point of being outright shabby but without the loving pride that Daddy had once had in it. Mother didn’t seem to notice or care, either, and if I asked her about something like the unkempt flower beds, she would say, “That’s your father’s responsibility, not mine. I have enough to do with you and what needs to be done inside the house.”
By the time we entered the tenth grade in high school, Daddy had drifted so far from us that he almost forgot our birthday, something Mother pounced on like a panther. He was supposed to return from a business trip the day before but called to say he was being delayed. It was then that we heard Mother reminding him that he would miss our fifteenth birthday. The plan had been for us all to go to the London House, an upscale restaurant outside of Philadelphia that, though built to resemble a pub, was very expensive and far too formal to make anyone who had lived or traveled in England think they were in that kind of neighborhood place. The rich cherry paneling, brass bar, hardwood floors, and chandeliers in the dining room, along with the maitre d’ in a tuxedo, gave it the elegance to justify the high prices. There were some traditional English dishes on the menu, such as shepherd’s pie and, for lunch only, fish and chips, but everything else was gourmet. The chef, in fact, was not English but French.
Mother liked it, but the restaurant wasn’t Haylee’s or my favorite. We thought it was too stuffy. None of our friends had ever gone there with their families, but we knew Mother liked parading us past the upscale crowd, the men dressed in jackets and ties and the women in designer clothes bedecked with expensive-looking jewelry. We’d walk through the dining area to a center table, which for us was like a stage. Still identically dressed and with identical hairstyles, we turned heads and created a pause in conversations. Although Haylee hated sharing it with me, she enjoyed the attention. Normally, Mother soaked in the compliments we received from strangers. But this time, from the moment we left the house without Daddy, I knew she was very agitated.
Nevertheless, as usual, she went on and on about the importance of our birthday, making it sound like a national event. I was embarrassed by how special she made our birthdays appear in front of people, especially strangers. I knew Haylee always enjoyed the attention and sat listening, entranced about her own significance. Despite Mother’s mood concerning Daddy, all was going well until Mother spotted Bryce Krammer and his wife entering the restaurant.
Mr. Krammer was an executive in Daddy’s company. He was part of the group who came over to play tennis sometimes and had been the one to call us the Mirror Sisters. Neither he nor the other men had come to play tennis for some time, which partly explained why the court looked neglected. He and his wife had been to our house for dinner at least a half dozen times through the years, and when Mother was socializing more, she and Daddy had been to theirs. It was the Krammers, in fact, who had turned Mother and Daddy on to the London House restaurant. They saw us immediately and came directly to our table.
“Well, what do we have here?” Mr. Krammer said. He was a tall, thin, dark-haired man with graying hair. Despite being in his fifties, he had what I thought was the sort of impish smile more comfortable on the face of a teenage boy, a modern-day Tom Sawyer. I knew that his amused look at Mother whenever she talked about us annoyed her. She believed there was nothing remotely amusing about the things she was pointing out about us. “Surely these aren’t the little girls I remember. These are two beautiful young ladies.”
His wife stood there smiling at us and then turned to Mother and exchanged greetings. “I just told Bryce the other day that he should speak to Mason about us getting together soon. It’s been so long since we’ve seen the twins, too.
I had no idea they were so grown-up and so beautiful!”
“Today is the girls’ birthday,” Mother declared, ignoring her and directing herself to Mr. Krammer. Mother thought very few women these days deserved her attention and time. The truth was, Daddy had tried to get them together with the Krammers, but Mother always found a reason not to be able to make the date.
“Oh, wow!” Mr. Krammer declared. “How old are we?”
“They’re fifteen,” Mother replied.
Mr. Krammer ignored the subtle criticism. “So it’s not just another dinner. It’s a celebration. Happy birthday, girls.”
“Thank you,” we said, so perfectly in unison that it was comical.
Mr. Krammer looked around. “Mason in the bathroom?” he asked.
Mother hesitated, her forehead folding so deeply that the wrinkles looked more like deep slices. “Don’t you have a possible merger with a company in Texas going on?” she asked.
“That fell through last week,” he said. “Why?”
“Mason isn’t here tonight,” she said, without giving any more details.
I saw the way the Krammers looked at each other. To me, it suggested that they already knew a lot more about Daddy and Mother’s strained relationship than they pretended. Daddy’s absence only confirmed what they believed, but, like most people, they chose to ignore something unpleasant.
“Oh, well, he’s so hard at it most of the time that he makes the rest of us look like pikers,” Mr. Krammer said. He forced a smile, but it was clear he didn’t want to linger another moment. “Once again, happy birthday, girls.”
“Yes, happy birthday. We’ll call,” his wife promised, her words as empty as a deflated balloon. She touched Mother’s hand, and they walked off to their table in the rear, both with hoisted shoulders, looking as if they had just stepped out of a walk-in freezer.
Mother stared ahead, the anger rippling through her face from her forehead down and settling in the tightness of her lips.
Where was Daddy? I wondered. Why did he lie about where he was going, especially when he was reminded about our birthday? Haylee was more interested in what she would eat and wasn’t even looking at Mother, nor did she care one iota about the Krammers and their reaction to Daddy’s absence.
Mother’s face seemed to lose the brightness she could generate when talking about us. Her eyes would surge with an energy that normally captured the interest of most people. In fact, Mother would treat our birthdays the way most people treated New Year’s Eve. She would talk about our future, predicting all the good things that were to come and the achievements we would surely enjoy. Inevitably, she would reminisce about our births and early days, bringing up one anecdote after another to emphasize how alike we were.
When Daddy was with us, he would look at her as if he was just learning about us himself. Because she would so dominate the conversation at our birthday celebrations, it was almost as if he wasn’t there anyway. He always appeared worried about what he would say and what gifts he had gotten for us. Because Mother was so in control of it all, he surely felt unnecessary.
He wasn’t unnecessary to me. I could see how hard he was trying to please Mother. Sometimes it seemed she didn’t want to share us with him. We were all hers. I knew she loved it when someone would comment on how much we looked like her, calling us clones. If Daddy was standing by, I would quickly glance at him and see his eyes lower. He stood beside us, wanting to hold our hands, but Mother was always in between us when the four of us went anywhere. He was more like someone going along for the ride. And when we were older and no one had to hold our hands crossing the street or walking on the sidewalk and going into the mall or a store, he looked even more lost.
If he asked either of us a question about school, he had to ask the other. We had set answers for the obvious questions, like how we were doing in some school subject, how we liked attending Betsy Ross, whether we’d made any friends. I could see his displeasure in the recited reactions, but I could also see Mother’s satisfaction. She said “They’re so alike” so many times that Daddy looked as if he wanted to put his hands over his ears and scream.
I read stories about daughters who were “Daddy’s little girls,” but the chances of either Haylee or me ever becoming that were nonexistent. Too often, in fact, he looked at us as if we were strangers. It seemed Mother had made him feel that we were beyond his understanding. Rather than deal with all the psychology she had imposed, he drifted further back and became an observer and not a member of the family.
Now I glanced again at Haylee. I was confident that I missed him at our birthday celebration more than she did. Over the years, it was rare for us to be alone with him, and if we did go somewhere with just him, all of us were subjected to Mother’s vigorous cross-examination about what we had done, where we had gone, and even what we had eaten. No matter how strongly Daddy adhered to her rules for us, there was always something for her to criticize. It was no wonder that he began to do less and less with us alone.
“I’m starving,” Haylee said. She looked at both of us, and I realized she really had no clue about what was happening with Mother and Daddy. And she was the one who thought she was more sophisticated about male-female relationships.
Mother signaled to the waiter. I was sure she had already ordered a special cake for us. For the last two birthdays, she had stopped making two identical cakes and simply had a chocolate line drawn down the middle with Haylee’s name spelled out on one side and mine on the other. She had ordered that for us tonight. It was a big cake, because she had insisted we have fifteen candles on each side. It looked like it was on fire. In fact, someone yelled, “Get the fire department!” And there was lots of laughter.
When it came time for us to blow out the candles, the whole restaurant joined in to sing “Happy Birthday.” Afterward, many of the other customers called out to us as we left. Haylee made sure to give any young man, even if he was with a girlfriend or a wife, a special flirtatious smile. Someone had taught her to lower and raise her eyes when she flirted. Normally, Mother might have noticed, but she was occupied with her own thoughts, dark and red with rage.
It wouldn’t be long before we realized that what Mother had learned from Bryce Krammer was the catalyst for the impending break in our parents’ marriage. So much began to happen between them behind closed doors right after our birthday. Daddy didn’t raise his voice, but I could hear the mumbling, and the tone of it was clearly colored with anger. They hardly looked at each other whenever he was home. Finally, she was on the phone and then visiting with her lawyer. She kept the truth from us as long as she could, and then one night, when Daddy wasn’t home again for dinner, she asked us to go into the great room after dinner and wait for her.
“I have something very important to tell you,” she said.
Haylee’s first worry was naturally that she had done something to upset Mother. I hadn’t really talked with Haylee about the cold war between Mother and Daddy. Every time I suggested that something was happening, she immediately changed the topic, like someone who didn’t want to waste time on something that didn’t have her at the center. She was far too into herself at this point, and other conflicts were developing between us almost daily now, mostly around boys or her girlfriends.
Like anything else that Haylee believed involved competition between us, capturing the interest of many boys in high school was very important to her. Consequently, she wasn’t getting involved with any one boy more than the others. She flitted about as if she was collecting smiles, expressions of romantic interest, and invitations for dates, something Mother was still reluctant to let either of us have and most certainly not one of us without the other. We could attend school parties and parties other girls had, but even then, we had yet to be permitted to stay out until the Cinderella hour. Of all our friends, Haylee’s especially, we had to be home the earliest, which was always before midnight.
Daddy had tried to loosen the strict rules Mother imposed on us, but becau
se she was more often than not the one who drove us places and picked us up, his opinion carried little weight. Telling her that other girls weren’t as restricted did no good. Even reminding her that she was going on dates at our age didn’t change her mind. According to her, other girls, even her, weren’t as “special” as we were. Of course, other girls didn’t live under the same rules. She always stung Daddy with a final comment, like “I’m not surprised you don’t realize it.”
Haylee was smart enough not to complain much more about it than I did. In fact, I had to complain about things that really didn’t matter that much to me, especially how long we could hang out at a friend’s house or where we could go afterward if we went to a movie with friends.
“You’ve got to complain more about not being allowed to go on a date, Kaylee,” she told me. “It’s not that she doesn’t think we’re old enough. She doesn’t think you want to do it as much as I do. You know that’s it, Kaylee. I wish you were more interested in having fun.”
I was, but her ideas for having fun and mine were growing further apart.
“If you don’t start wanting to do the things I want to do, I won’t want to do what you want,” she threatened.
Whenever we were alone, she began to sulk about it. Now that there was real trouble brewing between our parents, I thought she would stop thinking about herself so much. Actually, she was happy that Mother was distracted with her marital problems. She could get away with more. One thing she began doing was hiding an article of clothing in her book bag so that after we were brought to school, she could go into the girls’ room and change. She even brushed her hair differently and began to wear a different shade of lipstick. She restored everything before Mother came to pick us up. Ordinarily, I was sure Mother would learn about it, but she was too distracted or angry about Daddy at this point.