Photograph: George Marks/Getty
When Ethel and I were girls, our parents always dressed us in matching clothes and gave us matching toys. For our birthday one year–we must’ve been seven or eight–my Grandmother Adeline gave Ethel a yellow ribbon and me a pink one. It was the first time that I could remember being given something that was a little bit different than Ethel’s and I was delighted.
I cherished the pink ribbon, wore it everyday, a reminder that I was my own person, no matter that even our parents couldn’t tell Ethel and me apart at first glance. I fell asleep one night with the ribbon wrapped around my hand and woke up with it cut into tiny pieces, scattered over the blanket covering me.
I wish now I’d only known how much Ethel wanted the pink ribbon. I would have given her mine, no matter that I loved it. I’d rather that than have such unspoken pain between us. See, neither of us ever talked of the obvious fact that I was my grandmother’s beloved. Grandmother Adeline lavished attention and praise on me while treating Ethel as if she were a coiled viper.
When we were older, Ethel’s tactics for making me miserable took on new depth and creativity. Once when we were in junior high, I came down with the flu the night before an American History test. “I wish I was sick,” Ethel said, “so I wouldn’t have to take that stupid test.” I’d been studying for days; Ethel never studied for anything. When the teacher passed back the tests a few days later, she didn’t give one to Ethel, but placed one on my desk, marked with a bold letter C. “Not your usual work,” she murmured and I flushed hot with shame and rage.
Once, in desperation, I snuck to the beauty parlor and had my hair bobbed to my chin. Longer hair was in style and I didn’t think Ethel would dare follow suit. But by the weekend, her hair again looked just like mine. Within a month, almost all the girls in our class had chin-length hair. After that I gave up trying to look like my own person.
I sat there across from Nancy, remembering those long ago times. I almost told her about Sterling’s bouts of forgetfulness, but for some reason, I stopped myself. “You know,” I admitted, “it’s terrible to say, but the real reason I can’t leave my husband is that my sister would snatch him right up. She’s my twin sister, too. It sounds so shameful, but it’s the truth. I can’t stand the thought of it–how humiliating for all of us, even if they don’t have the sense to know better.
My twin sister doesn’t have fibromyalgia. She gloats about it, says it’s because she eats organic vegetables and goes to yoga, twists her body into pretzel shapes. Says I’m sick from all the chemicals I’ve been ingesting all these years. But she’s the one who’s toxic, I tell you. Been that way our whole lives.”
I’ve had a waking nightmare that’s been coming and going, ever since I saw Ethel and Sterling leaning into each other at the hospital. In the nightmare I am canceled out, gone, as if I’d never existed. And in my place, Ethel’s face basks in the morning light coming through my kitchen window, my morning light. It is my face in the window, only surrounded by hair still tinted a believable shade of auburn.
When Sterling loses his car keys, as he seems to do more and more often these days, she will move from the window to look for them in a seeming act of goodwill. She will cook his dinner, clean up after him, remind him not to go out without the lunch she’s packed him. She will do these things for him because they fit into her plan, the plan she’s always had to become me, though I have always been the one she secretly hated.
I see her throwing out the rail I have along my bed, the special seat in my shower, as if I have become young again, no longer stiff and slowed down and in need of things specially made for the ailing. At night, Sterling will wrench her into impossible, ruthless positions like he’s been doing to me ever since his doctor prescribed those awful pills, but instead of being pained and humiliated as I am, she will make delighted grunting noises.
That was my greatest fear, engendered by all the times Ethel played off being me. It wasn’t just that one time, that one History test, you see. It was every chance she got to humiliate me. Once, when we were in high school, she pretended to be me and told my first boyfriend she hated his sweaty palms. Sometimes throughout the years when she knew I was home sick, she’d show up at my garden club meetings, saying she was me and act purposefully uncouth and rude to my friends. The last time it happened was over twenty years ago, but I still feel the sting as if it was last week.
So that it was a relief when my movements became stiff and I let my hair gray. A relief in a way because it made it impossible for Ethel to masquerade as me, the risk of being found out if she tried it certain. That Thursday in Dan’s Hamburgers, I wanted to explain all of it to Nancy, who looked at me with the kindness and wisdom of one who spends her workweek helping the unhelpable.
I told Nancy that things weren’t as they were supposed to be. There I was having lunch with a social worker, something that should’ve made me feel humiliated and ashamed. And yet I was feeling freer than I’d felt in months. “You do look happy all of a sudden,” Nancy said. She was so round and plump and smiling, like the fairy godmother in Cinderella. “What is it?” she asked. “A minute ago you seemed so scared.”
“I was just thinking I can’t remember the last time I ate food like this,” I said, gesturing at my cheeseburger and fries. “I always want too, but I’m always so worried I’ll end up making a mess.”
“Bippety boppety boo.” Nancy said, or maybe I only imagined it.
The next morning, though Sterling criticized the breakfast I’d cooked him, there was fairy dust in the air as I washed the dishes, and I had more energy than I’d had in months. I swept the whole house, then hung the small hallway rug over the front porch railing and beat it with a broom. As it aired out in the sun, I started doing laundry. I went through the pockets of Sterling’s pants and there was the pill bottle full of the medicine that made Sterling able to do such terrible things to me in the night.
I examined the pills carefully, noting their size and shape, their color, before putting them back in the pocket of his pants, which I then re-hung over the chair where I’d found them.
To be continued….
