The Mirror Sisters

  Mother was right about our schoolwork, however. In the beginning, neither of us achieved much less than a ninety-eight on any test in any subject. I often heard Mrs. Elliot compliment Mother on how well she had done with us in our homeschooling. Mother gloated about it to Daddy. If he wanted to express opposition to anything she had decided for us, that diminished even more now. Look at how successful her planning had been.

  Before our first year of private-school attendance ended, we went to three birthday parties for girls Haylee did like because they were in awe of her. Two of them, Melanie Rosen and Toby Sue Daniels, became what she declared were “our best friends,” even though they weren’t really that close to me. The truth was, I didn’t like either of them very much. They were always complaining about other students, making fun of other girls, and eager and willing to do anything Haylee told them to do. Because we were doing so well in all our subjects, she offered to help them, which actually meant that I would be doing most of the tutoring. In exchange, they gave Haylee things our mother would never want us to have, from candy to magazines and, eventually, when we were in sixth grade, cigarettes. Haylee smoked only at their houses and tried to get me to do it, too. Melanie and Toby Sue showed her how to get rid of the smell, but Mother finally did detect it on our clothes.

  I’ll never forget that day, because it was the first time I saw Mother fall for one of Haylee’s serious lies. She sat us in the great room as usual and began her cross-examination just like the lawyer she had once set out to be.

  “Let me see your hands,” she began, and inspected our fingers. Melanie and Toby Sue had shown Haylee how to scrub off any traces of nicotine, and I hadn’t given in and smoked a cigarette that afternoon. Mother squinted suspiciously when she saw nothing. She leaned in closer so she could smell our breath, but Haylee had gargled with mouthwash before we left Melanie’s house.

  Mother still looked skeptical and suspicious. “Which one of your friends gave you cigarettes?” she asked me. Although she wouldn’t ever tell us so, she must have believed that I would be more truthful.

  But before I could answer, Haylee spoke up. “It wasn’t a friend, Mother. It was Melanie’s father.”

  “What? He gave you cigarettes?”

  “No. He was the one smoking. He likes to do magic tricks,” she continued. Mr. Rosen did like to perform for us. He worked in a bank and, according to Melanie, hated his boring job. He had always wanted to be an entertainer. He was very funny sometimes. I liked him much more than I liked Melanie.

  “So?” Mother asked.

  “Well, he was smoking when he performed in Melanie’s room for us,” Haylee continued. “The windows were open, so we didn’t notice it that much. He always has a cigarette dangling from his lips, right, Kaylee?”

  That part was true, so I nodded, expecting Mother to start shouting at us for lying. She didn’t, and Haylee continued her fabrication with more confidence than I had ever seen her have.

  “The teachers have a room for those who want to smoke,” she said, “and when you walk by, you can smell it in the hallway. Our clothes could smell from that, too, I bet.”

  “Really? That should be stopped,” Mother said.

  A really clever liar gets someone distracted from the main questions as soon as she can, I thought. At this moment, Haylee looked like she had taken lessons in how to deceive. She was doing so much of it at school as it was.

  “It’s just like you say, Mother, very dirty,” she said, nodding and grimacing. “I can see how yellow it makes their teeth. It’s ugh.”

  “Good,” Mother said. “Next time Mr. Rosen comes near you with a cigarette in his mouth, I want you to tell him how upset I was about the stench on your clothes. If he wants to get lung cancer, fine, but I won’t let you go to Melanie’s house if it happens again.”

  “Oh, we’ll tell him, won’t we, Kaylee?” she said.

  There was a part of me that wanted to end the lying, to tell Mother that Haylee—and I, because the three of them were demanding that I do it—smoked cigarettes from time to time, but I was now more afraid of Haylee’s anger than Mother’s at my snitching on my sister.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. My girls are still perfect,” Mother said, smiling. I couldn’t believe we were getting away with it. Mother was still cautious, however. “I want you to have friends, but remember, real friends don’t force their friends to do bad things.”

  “They don’t, Mother,” Haylee said, with more of a confident grin than a smile of relief. “If anything, Melanie Rosen and Toby Sue Daniels do what we tell them, not vice versa. We never forgot what you told us about keeping our standards higher and making them become more like us.”

  She’s talking too much, I thought. Mother’s not stupid. I waited, expecting her to really cross-examine us now, but she surprised me. She rose, smiled at us, and went off to prepare dinner. I didn’t move, half-expecting Mother to return now that she had thought about it a little more.

  Haylee was watching me. “That was close,” she said. “You did well, Kaylee.”

  “I don’t like lying to Mother,” I said.

  “Sometimes she makes us lie.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She’s too strict with us, so it’s her fault if we lie,” she replied. It was another example of how Haylee was going to lay blame for everything at Mother’s feet.

  “That doesn’t give us the right to lie,” I insisted.

  She rolled her eyes. “You know, I have a hard time getting the girls in our class to like you because you act like such a goody-goody, Kaylee,” she said. “All right. From now on, if Melanie and Toby Sue want us to smoke in their rooms or anywhere else, they’ll have to loan us clothes to wear.”

  “It will get into our hair, too, Haylee. Mother will smell it on us.”

  “Then we’ll just shampoo and blow-dry before we come home.”

  “Just to smoke? That’s stupid.”

  “If I do it, you’ll do it,” she ordered. “Or we won’t have any friends at all, ever.”

  “I don’t like your friends.”

  “They’re our friends, Kaylee, don’t you remember?” She lost her smile. “Don’t ruin it for me. Just . . . grow up.” She rose to go to our room and paused in the doorway. “Don’t think I’ll be a baby like you just to please Mother,” she warned.

  “I’m not a baby, Haylee.”

  She smiled again. It was almost as if she knew what was coming next and was preparing me to do things I would not even have thought of doing.

  She couldn’t beat me in a race, and she couldn’t get a better grade in any subject, but she would be in charge of us, or else.

  It was the or else I never saw coming that really put her in charge.

  5

  Haylee would never let me forget that she had her first period almost a month before I did. In her mind, it was like finally beating me in a race. We were just finishing our sixth-grade year at Betsy Ross. Although most of the sixth-graders were eleven and some very close to twelve, we knew that a period could come as early as eight and as late as eighteen and still be considered normal. Our school nurse had told us that. Two other girls in our class, one of them Haylee’s friend Melanie Rosen, had also had their first periods, or what Mother called “the stork’s first visit.” She was still treating us like little girls, and although we were learning a lot about sex from our girlfriends, or I should say Haylee’s friends, Mother had yet to have a real mother-daughter talk with us, a talk that wasn’t scientific and delivered with anatomical illustrations.

  Mother was prepared for our first periods, however. Despite what we were taught to expect, more girls were getting it at earlier ages these days. The nurse told us that there were some theories involving hormones in our foods. It was all scientific gobbledygook and quite boring. It seemed to take the X out of sex. Who wanted to be able to identify fallopian tubes on a chart? What did that have to do with boyfriends and parties and romance? A first period was more than some
historical biological event.

  All of us girls both feared and looked forward to it. It was impossible not to anticipate the pain and discomfort but at the same time look forward to feeling mature, almost escaping from childhood, where you were seen as a little girl, innocent and protected, then stepping into adolescence with all the excitement that awaited us.

  Sometime during the night before Haylee’s happened, she was having cramps. She complained and moaned, refused to eat, and wanted only to curl up in the fetal position. Mother kept asking me how I was, but I had nothing to say, no complaints. She seemed concerned, but more like disappointed, and kept asking me if I was sure.

  “No cramps at all?”

  “Maybe a little,” I said, more to make her happy than anything.

  “Then it’s probably just an upset stomach,” Mother concluded, going by her belief that if something like a period wasn’t happening to us both simultaneously, it wasn’t happening. She gave us each a tablespoon of castor oil.

  However, Haylee had trouble sleeping that night, and almost as soon as she got out of bed in the morning, she shouted for Mother, who came running to our room. Haylee was crying now. Mother looked at me. I shook my head. She grimaced, took Haylee’s hand, and led her into the bathroom. Daddy, who was getting ready for work, stepped into our room. I was staring in awe at the red spots on Haylee’s bedsheet.

  “What’s happening?” he asked me. Mother was still with Haylee in the bathroom.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know how to tell Daddy. He had little to do with anything intimate about us, and according to Mother, he’d never even changed a diaper when we were babies. I suspected she never would have permitted him to do it anyway.

  “Keri? What is it?” he called.

  Mother poked her head out and said, “The reason some men give thanks they’ve had sons instead of daughters.”

  “What?”

  “Just go to work, Mason. As usual, I have everything under control when it comes to the girls,” she said, and disappeared back into the bathroom.

  Daddy looked at me, still concerned, and I decided to mouth, “She’s having her first period.”

  He widened his eyes and nodded. Then he flashed a smile and fled, as if having a period was catching and he might be the first man to experience it.

  When Mother came out of the bathroom with Haylee, who looked calmer, she held out a pad for me, even though I hadn’t had a period and wasn’t even having stomach discomfort.

  “She doesn’t need it!” Haylee cried out in protest. She was happy I hadn’t had mine.

  Mother glared at her. “She will, now that you have,” she snapped back.

  Haylee looked away quickly but muttered, “I’m just saying what’s true.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that, Haylee. Wouldn’t it be stupid, embarrassing, for me to ignore that it will surely happen to her very soon, too, and send her along with you to school unprotected? Well?”

  “Yes, Mother. I’m sorry,” Haylee said quickly. She sneaked in an angry look at me even so. Mother then gave me the same instructions I imagined she had given Haylee in the bathroom. All the while, Haylee stood off to the side, her arms folded tightly across her chest, pouting.

  The moment Mother left us, Haylee grabbed my right wrist, almost twisting my arm, and said, “You’d better not lie about it and tell the girls you had your period, Kaylee. You’re still a little girl.”

  “I’m not a little girl.”

  “Of course you are,” she said with glee.

  Haylee finally had something that made her different from me, and she didn’t want to lose it too quickly. Until I had my period, she was going to use hers to prove to her friends that she was more mature than I was, even though nothing else physically about her was any different from me. Both of us had begun to grow pubic hair and develop breasts. Haylee claimed I had less hair and smaller buds. She wanted to count hairs and measure the way Mother had counted our freckles, but I wouldn’t do it. That satisfied her, because she could claim I was afraid to see that she was right.

  She wasn’t, of course, but I did look at her when I could to be sure. Sometimes when I gazed at myself naked and saw Haylee undressed, I felt as if we were being sculpted more intensely and frequently, as if God came to us during the night and made subtle changes with his miraculous fingers that were becoming more and more pronounced. It caused me to become more curious about myself and even a little thrilled with the changes I was seeing. I could almost feel the child in me dwindling, sinking in a pool of toys and picture books.

  Despite Haylee’s claims up to the day of her first period, neither of us seemed to be moving into adolescence faster than the other. What I was seeing in her I was also seeing in myself. Mother measured us regularly to confirm it. Haylee and I were exactly the same height, four feet eleven inches, and we each weighed ninety-two pounds. Haylee was just a few ounces heavier, but Mother didn’t count them. We still had the same shoe size, too, and remarkably, neither of us yet had any of the skin blemishes we saw on other girls occasionally. Unlike our classmates, neither of us had a single cavity. Our dentist, Dr. Baxter, always remarked about how perfectly identical our teeth were and how healthy, too. Mother told him that it shouldn’t surprise him. She was compulsive about our brushing and flossing together and forbade us to chew gum or eat candy.

  “My girls always will be perfect,” she insisted. “Unlike other siblings, they look after each other.”

  She was right about that. During our early school years, Haylee was always watching me and I would watch her to be sure neither of us accepted gum or candy from anyone. When other students, especially boys like Stanley Bender, teased us about it, Haylee was more upset than I was, but while Mother was hovering in the hallways or in our classroom doorway, she didn’t dare disobey. When I was teased, I bragged about our dental health, and eventually, Haylee, seeing how that took the steam out of any ridicule, did the same.

  “It’s like they have one mouth, isn’t it?” Mother had commented when we had our most recent checkup. She was always looking for her view of us to be reinforced.

  Dr. Baxter nodded. “I could never tell you whose teeth I’m working on,” he said. “Not a single tooth is different from the other’s.”

  His dental assistant, Shirley Camp, said similar things, all of which pleased Mother but annoyed Haylee, even though only I could see her displeasure when Mother wasn’t with us or wasn’t looking at us. Haylee so wanted her own eyes, her own mouth, and her own nose and ears.

  “I hate mirrors!” she once exclaimed, reluctantly admitting that when she gazed at herself, it was like looking at me through a window. We never played that game anymore where we pretended to be looking into a mirror when we looked at each other and touched our noses and ears with opposite hands perfectly. Once when I bumped my head and had a tiny bruise, she was as happy as a bee drowning in pollen, even though hardly anyone but her could see it. She dared not mention it in front of Mother. I think she was afraid Mother would have her bump hers in the exact same place. I wondered myself, recalling how she had cut my finger with that same piece of glass years ago.

  I understood why Haylee avoided looking at herself. I supposed it was as if we had a mirror walking beside each of us, but finally, Haylee had something very different about herself to cling to. Getting her first period was like being admitted to a private club that I couldn’t join. It was populated not only by her friend Melanie and the two other girls in our class who had their periods but also by three other girls in the seventh and eighth grades who were friends with Melanie. Now the seven of them had something special in common. They sat together in the cafeteria as if something magical had occurred and so changed them that they were almost a different species from the other girls their age.

  Haylee saw the look on my face when she first sat with them and made no room for me to sit beside her. I stood there dumbly for a moment, holding my tray.

  “Go sit somewhere else, Kaylee. We have m
ore mature things to talk about, things you wouldn’t understand,” she said, dismissing me.

  I couldn’t help the tears that came to my eyes.

  Haylee went on, “I don’t know if you even realize it because you’re still a little girl, but boys look at us differently. We have sex things to discuss now, things you can’t appreciate or might be embarrassed by.”

  “That’s not so,” I said. “Boys can’t tell unless you or someone else tells them or you suffer bad cramps in front of them.”

  Haylee looked at Melanie and shook her head, as if to say, Don’t pay attention to her. She’s a child.

  It felt as if a pot of boiling water was steaming in my chest. “We’re not supposed to say bad things about each other,” I reminded her.

  She shrugged. “It’s not something bad, Kaylee. It’s just a simple truth. You’re still a child.” She turned to Melanie. “She’s very jealous, of course. She’s been wearing the same pad for a week and studies it for a drop every night.”

  They both laughed.

  “I do not!”

  “You’re not wearing a pad without having a period?” Haylee asked.

  I was so shocked that she would talk about what Mother wanted me to do that I couldn’t speak.

  “See?” she told Melanie.

  They laughed again.

  “Mother would be very mad at you for saying that, Haylee.”

  “I don’t think you’ll tell her just to get me in trouble, will you? You know how she hates the idea of one of us trying to get her to love her more. You’ll end up in the pantry with the jars of pickles and jelly.”

  Melanie laughed again, and they walked away before I could think of something nasty to say. The frustration felt like a belt being tightened around my chest until I couldn’t breathe. She was right. I would never tell Mother anything bad about her, even though I felt such a strong urge to do so and have that smug look wiped off her face.