Half Life Read online

  Audrey sank down beside me. “So tell me, does Blanche ever…check in?”

  There it was, the question I had been expecting. “No,” I said, too quickly, and frowned. The sofa did intimate things to my behind.

  “Well, I guess she won’t need her own shelf in the fridge,” she said, and won my heart. I moved in the following Monday.

  Though we disagreed on practically everything, Audrey was the only person whose opinion I really cared about. For this I resented her, a feeling that rarely broke out into the open, but kept me in a constant state of vague guilt. Maybe that was why I had let her make the film. At first she had taped me on the sly; at odd moments I would turn around and find her lens trained on me. Though she played it off (“I don’t know if I like this slow-shutter feature, it’s too MTV”), I started avoiding her. Finally she wandered into my room, leaned against the mantel, picked up a pink paper parasol from a fancy drink, broke it, put it down, and begged me to help her finish her project, which was about me, though in such disguised ways that I would hardly recognize myself. “It’s about shadows and reflections,” she said, “and incommensurable love. Like all my films.” When I agreed, she reached around the doorjamb for her camera. She’d left it just outside the door, she was so sure I’d say yes.

  At one point she had me hold up a mirror between our two heads. I looked right and saw myself looking back. That’s when I finally balked. “That’s OK,” she said airily. “I think I nailed it.”

  “Audrey. Please.”

  She crossed her legs under the kitchen table with a clash of boot hardware and fished calmly in a bag of tortilla chips, ignoring the Mooncalf’s steady, avid gaze.

  I flipped to the last blank page in the Manual and squared the film festival flyer against it. “I don’t want to go. I’ll hyperventilate. You know I can’t sit in one room with all those freaks. I hate freaks,” I said without heat, because this was nothing new, neither the enthusiasm on her part nor the lack of it on mine. Audrey was twofer-identified. There are nastier ways of putting it: “twin hag,” “triplet.” Look up “Leila ‘n’ Lila” in the back of the Bay Guardian. That’s Audrey and a tape recorder.

  It was only through Audrey that I knew anything at all about the community. “You’re friends with Jasmin and Irina. And Bill and Empress Tennessee. And Jose-Jose, and Lulu and Ki”—coughing—“ki!”

  “I am friends with them individually,” I said, “if you can call it that. I am capable, under civilized circumstances, of sitting across from two people and overlooking the fact that they are holding hands under the table. It’s not the same thing to join the crowd. Have you seen the glue stick?”

  “Rubber band drawer. Don’t change the subject.” She examined both sides of a tortilla chip before putting it in her mouth with an air of satisfaction. The Mooncalf groaned and threw herself despondently on the linoleum.

  Audrey had great patience. She could sit for hours watching the grain change in a Study in Kinetic Greys. Lately she had been making what she called “transspecies erotica,” piecing together (over a gasp track supplied by “Tiffany Bells,” my phone-sex pseudonym) her own documentary footage, clips from old nature films, and lingering close-ups of ornate, phantasmagorical genitals made of strawberry jam, Vienna sausages, tapioca pudding, and false eyelashes. Smacking his lips showily, Trey had eaten one of these (you can see it intact in Elephant Seal Sluts), and had insisted on describing what became of the eyelashes later.

  Audrey had set aside this series to make the film in question. “My best work,” she said. “A breakthrough.” They were making a big deal out of it at the twofer film festival. She was probably going to win a prize.

  I found the glue stick, thumbed off its gummy skin, and steered it around on the back of the flyer, frowning with concentration. The Mooncalf shuddered in her sleep.

  “I’m not even going to get into the issue of how you think you can spend your whole life pretending not to see someone who’s right next to you—” I opened my mouth to protest. “No, I’m not having that conversation again. All I really want to say is excuse me, but you’re not going to do that to me. I’m here, I’ve made this thing, I’m really proud of it, I want you to see it, you said you would, and I’m not going to let you get out of it. End of story!”

  I draped the sticky sheet on the page and thumped it all over with unnecessary force. The Mooncalf woofed and jumped up, banging her head on the table.

  The Siamese Twin Reference Manual—the Manual, for short—contained my clippings and reading notes on matters twofer. Among them were a few genuine rarities from before the Boom that had cost Tiffany a good many fictitious caresses:

  The sheet music to “Me Too HO-HO! HA-HA!” (Woods-Tobias-Sherman) endorsed by San Antonio’s Siamese Twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton, both in ringlets:

  Mary had a lamb and this little lamb followed her around

  But that’s nothing new I follow someone too

  Since I found her I hang around her like no one did before

  I’ve followed her for miles and miles but I’d go a million more

  ’Cause I don’t care I don’t mind

  Anywhere that she goes you’ll find

  Ho Ho! Ha Ha! ME TOO

  A cabinet card depicting Millie-Christine, the Two-Headed Nightingale, wearing a single, gigantic frock reminiscent of a bed skirt, with an associated clipping (in French—translation Audrey’s): “All we know at present is that nine months before their birth, on a hot summer night, their sleepy father dozed off in the middle of a conversation he was having with his wife, woke up two minutes later, and not remembering at just what point he had stopped, he began the phrase all over again.”

  An interview with Harold Estep, aka Buddy Sawyer, on breaking off his engagement to Daisy Hilton, one of the San Antonio twins: “I am not even what you would really call gregarious.”

  A vintage postcard bearing the image of the virtuous Biddenden maids, Elisa and Mary Chulkhurst, who were born joined at the hips in 1100, and died saying, “As we came together we will also go together.”

  The Mexican film poster for Sisters, under the name of Siamesas Diabolicas (“Lo Que El Diablo Une El Hombre No Debe Seperar”), on which a blood-splattered wench with a bad hairdo, attached at the rump to her better-coiffed twin, with whom she shares a single, complicated swimsuit, raises a dripping dagger. The bloodied knife appears thrice more on the poster, along with a skull and a mysterious hooded figure with glowing eyes.

  This last item, being both nasty and stupid, was one of my most treasured possessions. To a casual eye the Manual might appear as doting as a dotard’s detailed notes on diet, “A.M. ate blueberries,” and the size and hue, “blue,” of his BMs. To me, it was a devotional of self-loathing. I’d leaf through it and feel strict and unmitigated, somehow righted. This was not, in those days and particularly that desperately self-affirming city, something I could express to just anyone. Certainly not Audrey. I could not possibly be the only twofer at odds with myself, but whatever differences the others had seemed to be easily washed away by a double shot of whiskey, or eagerly processed in interminable tête-à-têtes. The others thought they were normal; at the very least, they aspired to normalcy; when all else failed, they made a pretense of normalcy. They believed it was their obligation to represent in the best possible light the entirety of twoferdom in their individual or rather dual two ferness, presenting to the world the happy face(s) of (what was the latest sick-making phrase?) “twinfulness.” Self-hatred, a permissible condition among singletons, was not allowed among the twice-blessed.

  But hate, like love, is very hard to squash. It’s knocking in the coffin and embarrassing the mourners. It’s sprouting hair, hawking loogies, chewing with its mouth open, farting, grinning. It’s life: untoward, unseemly. But way cooler than easeful death, that sap. Who decorously taps his toe behind “Nora, you have self-esteem issues,” and “Nora, so much rage,” and “Nora, affirm to Blanche that you love yourselfs.” “Yourselfs!” Languag
e itself refutes certain propositions.

  I closed the Manual and stood up, leaning my forehead against the kitchen window. Blanche’s forehead too, perforce. Our breath made two symmetrical ghosts that floated over the familiar, no-longer-dizzying view: the tawny hunch of whatchamacallit hill over on the left, with the smoke from the hospital angled black behind it, Bernal Hill down on the right, the terraced descent of rooftops down to the Castro and the Mission below that, flattening and spreading, and the bay beyond with an oversized freighter posing on it. Farther still, beyond Emeryville’s cooling towers, Berkeley and Oakland leaned back against the hills, from which a few windows threw back the sun: needles of light, piercing the distance and the haze.

  A strangled cry floated down the hall from Trey’s room. “I did follow the MLA guidelines, except in that one teensy-weensy footnote!”

  I stepped back. The twin ghosts faded and disappeared. On the neighbor’s roof a cat was peeing in the shade of a spinning vent, staring grandly out over the city.

  “Oh, all right,” I said, “I’ll go.” I had known all along that I would.

  THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL

  6th Annual Twofer Pride Film Festival

  Have we got some treats in store for you—including the award-winning twofer lesbian kickboxing romantic comedy, One Two Punch! It’s a great double-date flick, and binary heartthrob Nicki ‘n’ Kicki will be in the house to meet their fans. We hear they can sign autographs with both hands! Twinkies and Twinings teas will be served on opening night. Local fave Audrey DeMoss will also be in the house for the premiere of her thought-provoking new short, Seeing Double, and will answer questions after the showing. We’ve also lined up plenty of those older movies you love to hate and hate to love, including Freaks, Sisters, Twins, Despair, Dead Ringers, The Dark Mirror, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Prince and the Pauper, The Double Life of Veronique, A Zed and Two Noughts, Twin Falls Idaho, The City of Lost Children, The Bride with White Hair, Twelfth Night, A Comedy of Errors, How to Get a Head in Advertising, On the Double, The Corsican Brothers, Basket Case, Blood Link, Dark Seed II, and Chained for Life. For kids we’ve got The Parent Trap, The Parent Trap II, The Parent Trap III, and The Parent Trap Hawaiian Honeymoon! Finally, in the you asked for it, you got it category: last year’s audience hit, the camp insta-classic recently resurrected from MGM’s vaults, The King, The King and I, or Anna and the Siamese Kings. For fans who missed the Evelyn North mini-festival last February, here’s a second chance to see the mysterious actress in her last big film. Twofer avant le deluge? You decide.

  So come on down. You’ll think you’re seeing double!

  CELL DIVISION

  I wasn’t always bitter. Go back to the blob. The blob was not bitter. In the beginning, we were in perfect agreement. We went halves on everything: one cell for me, one for you, fair and square. Matters soon got more complicated, but we just kept on following the golden rule, splitting everything right down the middle. We didn’t plan ahead, just went by feel, following rules that became clearer as we went along. I say “we,” but I don’t think I noticed there was a we at this early stage, or even an I. Maybe that was the trouble. If only I hadn’t been so lax about the I, letting it go until I’d taken care of other things that seemed more important at the time! But how was I supposed to know? I spent a lot of time on knees. A whole day on a birthmark! I thought I had time to putter around, playing Cat’s Cradle and Patience, practicing badinage and Balinese dancing, and sipping slowly through my belly button. There was so much to take care of, I was burgeoning in all directions, like a very gradual explosion, and by the time I noticed I had company, it was too late to do anything about it.

  After that, we were neck and neck. We kept sneaking looks at each other, cribbing ideas. We were copycats. Copykittens.

  We’ve all seen the photographs, in Time, Life, Science News, of the tiny hunchbacks with their split ends. Anonymous, but sometimes I think I recognize the sullen shrug of the shoulders, the trigger fingers twitching, and the guilty duck of the head away from the flash.

  Mama took her time telling Max. But if it hadn’t been for the unlikelihood of their union bearing fruit, Max would have guessed for sure, because by now Mama was playing the expectant mother to the hilt: now capricious, pouting and weeping and “glancing up prettily through lashes still damp from recent showers” (as she would describe it to herself), now radiating a sublime calm. She affected flowing robes before there was any need to loosen her belt. Her friends told her she looked like a Botticelli (she corrected them according to her mood: No, a Mantegna! a Fra Angelico!) and ran to the store for items she craved or affected to crave, pickled baby onions, salted almonds, smoked oysters, so that she really did grow bigger, but then it suited her, as everyone agreed. She collected vases. “I’m very interested in swollen shapes, gourds, interiors,” she said with a knit brow and a distant look, and then shook herself with a laugh and turned to her guest, who might bring her some faux Ming next time, or at least a droll bit of majolica.

  When her friends tried to take her to the doctor, she put them off. You might have thought she had been faking it all along, and didn’t want her belly debunked. Maybe she thought she was faking it. But more probably she was scared. Would motherhood wreck everything? She liked stepping out with Max, feeling the boys watching, teasing them with a little twist of the ankle that twirled her spike heel on the sidewalk. She liked their closet, suits on the left, dresses on the right. She liked her little local fame. If she thought of Papa, it was as a part of another world. That strange, raw landscape, the gargantuan sky, the rare streetlights held up by cones of laboring insects.

  “Don’t you think you should tell Max already? Will someone take the cigarette away from that crazy bitch? You shouldn’t be smoking, pet; what are you thinking?”

  Mama lit candles, put on a white robe with long sleeves like wings, and sat on Max’s lap. Max’s face took on a noticeably strained expression, and Mama moved to the arm of the chair. She let her hair fall around Max’s face. “I have a surprise for you,” she murmured into the warm space between them. With many shy pauses and little looks, she told her secret, then sat back with her eyes cast down and her hands folded in her lap.

  Max jumped up, and Mama’s feet banged to the floor. Mama dropped her Madonna attitudes, ran to the bathroom, and shut herself in. Behind her, she heard the front door slam.

  “If only I had consulted the I Ching first!” Mama lamented over Chinese takeout. The reading she had belatedly drawn gave a clear warning. It was Po, or Splitting Apart: “There is a large fruit still uneaten. The superior man receives a carriage. The house of the inferior man is split apart.” So did the fortune cookie she was about to open: “It is better to have a hen tomorrow, than and egg today.”

  And egg, it really said that. She didn’t know how right that was.

  Max didn’t come back for two days. Then she knocked on the door, though she had a key, as a sign to Mama that she was a stranger now. “I’m taking you to the doctor,” she said. “And that’s going to be our last date.” Mama’s welcoming smile fell away. On the way to the doctor, she slumped against the passenger door. She walked in wearing the print of the lock in her cheek, like a dimple.

  Funny, it wasn’t Mama but Max who fainted at the sight of us mugging there on the screen. At first they could only see one head. Then we turned to face the audience. How they gawped, and nobody paid much attention to poor Max there on the floor, except a stout but handsome nurse who propped up Max’s head on her monumental bosom. Max opened her eyes, then closed them again.

  Max drove Mama home, parked in their usual spot, escorted her up the stairs to their apartment, and held the door for her. Mama said, walking in, “Don’t think I didn’t see you making up to that nurse.” Then she burst into tears. She stopped and rocked backward, toward a touch that didn’t come. Max was at the top of the stairs, was down the stairs, was at the corner, was turning, was gone.

  That night, Mama came
to a decision. Later, she would explain it like this, with a brittle laugh: A baby needs a father, even if it’s only a man.

  The next day, Mama stole Max’s Volvo and went west. She took an outdated map of Tennessee (a state she had always believed to be out west, because of its savage spelling), a suitcase full of feather boas and side-slit skirts, her red snakeskin pumps with bows at the ankles, and a pith helmet she’d worn in a play. Later, these pitiably useless items proved useful after all, as props for the Time Camera. A photo survives in which Mama is wearing all of them at once, smiling a sweet and, I think, genuinely happy smile. Only the map is missing, having soared out the car window toward a herd of mildly surprised llamas, somewhere near Omaha.

  SEEING DOUBLE

  A FILM BY AUDREY DEMOSS

  Blurred white letters trembled on a black screen.

  “Focus!” the audience cried.

  “Philistines,” muttered Audrey.

  “Hello! Heard of Maya Deren, dumb-ass?” Trey shrieked, a bit hysterically.

  The black slowly faded to grey, then white, until the letters disappeared and the screen appeared blank. Slowly, a few grey cusps and scallops appeared. They darkened. Then they suddenly resolved into the shadowed curves and folds of a three-dimensional body, and the screen ceased to be a piece of fabric and became a place.

  “Believe lies and never come home early,” murmured Audrey into her popcorn.