1977
The baby doesn’t cry but Sara’s mother cries. Everyone is tired and Sara is tired of playing nicely in the plash of sun on the carpet, the dust motes turning, while her mother feeds the baby and rocks the baby and mumbles into the phone, the swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Sara misses the crook of her mother’s arm and the smell of her, the honey-wood smell that comes from the faceted glass bottle on her dresser. She doesn’t like the milk smell on her mother or the milk-shit smell on her sister.
Visitors wear brave watery smiles, and try to elicit brave watery smiles from Sara’s mother. Something about the baby and the baby’s placidity, Sara gathers, is not quite right. The baby is too quiet, the baby sleeps too much. People are gentle and kind and hand the baby back quickly to her mother, who does not rush to take her.
They bring big gifts for the baby and small gifts for Sara, which is unfair and absurd and makes Sara impatient. Sticker sheets and socks and little books that she is encouraged to read to the baby, which is unfair. Sara can’t read. She has to turn the pages by herself in the plash of sunlight, the dust motes spinning endlessly, because her mother cannot. She just cannot read to her right now.
When Sara’s father comes home, Sara’s mother goes to bed. Then her father holds the baby in the crook of his arm and scrambles Sara’s eggs with one hand. He reads the new books with her and puts the baby on the floor more than Sara’s mother does so he can play with Sara. She appreciates this. He smells sourer than her mother, and his cheek is rough. She doesn’t want to shift allegiances, not really, but what choice does she have?
A chokingly sweet-smelling older woman comes to visit. Sara’s
great-aunt. That sounds very grand. She brings another pink bear for the baby but a big gift for Sara: a Barbie doll and a child’s suitcase filled with clothes. Some of them are the cheap things that came with the doll, plastic netting crinolines and pink pretend silk dresses and white plastic shoes that snap onto her feet. But some were hand-sewn by the
great-aunt herself for some distant child who is grown up now. Real silk, real velvet, real wool, even real fur: scraps from real fabrics used to make real clothes. The stitches are tiny, like an elf would make. Fur-trimmed hooded capes, rickrack edged gowns, little two-piece suits, a tiny bouclé peacoat. Sara sits in her plash of sunlight, turning the little clothes this way and that, dressing and undressing the Barbie. She is a very good girl.
“That scent is roses,” her mother tells her once the
great-aunt has left. The difference between roses and her mother’s honey-wood fascinates her. She sniffs back and forth from the doll’s clothes to her mother’s sleeve, again and again, trying to recapture the bursting surprise of a beautiful thing that has nothing of her mother in it. The next day her father brings her a little bottle of scent for her own self from the drugstore because her mother asked him to. Then she loves her mother again.
1998
You’re not the boss of me, they used to tell each other as children. Saskia and Jenny, Jenny and Saskia. Same size, same face, same stubbornness. Their own father couldn’t reliably tell them apart until they were five. You’re not the boss of me.
“Yes, twins,” their mother would tell strangers who stopped to admire their dark eyes, their curls. Their mother was always smiling tiredly. She wasn’t the boss, either, though she knew them better than their father. Knew them well enough that when she sat on the sofa as the afternoon light drained away, and Jenny would say, “Jenny’s upstairs, Jenny’s hurt,” their mother would sip from her glass without looking at her and say, “That’s very funny. Nice try.”
“Really, I’m Saskia,” Jenny would say.
“I’m resting, okay?” their mother would say. “Try to understand.”
“She didn’t fall for it,” Jenny would tell Saskia upstairs, where she lay on the bed, pretending to be Jenny. Saskia had known she wouldn’t fall for it, but it was easier to let Jenny play her games.
“What do you want to do now?” Jenny would say, jumping up. “I know! Let’s try on her clothes. We can put music on and dress up and pretend to—”
“I want to read.”
“That’s boring. Play with me. You have to play with me or I’ll set your book on fire.”
She would, too, in the bathroom sink, with the barbeque lighter. She had got a spanking last time, but it would not deter her from doing it again. Only Saskia could save her, by giving in. That was her one power. Still: “You’re not the boss of me!”
A lie. Jenny always got what she wanted, always. She could twist Saskia into any trouble she wanted.
Jenny’s eyes sparkled. Saskia was serious.
That was how you told them apart.
Copyright © 2021 by Annabel Lyon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
