I climb the stairs, wondering if the telephone will ring after I get in. I unlock the door and switch on the living room light. I glance at the telephone, but it’s sitting there like a properly inanimate object. I breathe a sigh of relief and drop my briefcase with a thud.
“Honey, I’m home.”
The tabby cat doesn’t even look up from the windowsill. She’s not deaf, she’s indifferent. She wouldn’t care if Godzilla drove a Corvette through the door, she’s waiting for Mike to come home. In winter, the windowpane is dotted with her nose prints. In summer, her gray hairs cling to the screen.
“He’s not coming back,” I tell her. It’s a reminder to both of us since the episode this morning in court.
I kick off my shoes and join her at the window, looking out at the apartments across the street. Most have plants on their windowsills, starved for light in the northern exposure. One has a turquoise Bianchi bike hanging in the window, like an advertisement to break in, and another has an antique rake. Most of my neighbors are home, cooking dinner or listening to music. The window directly across from mine has the shade drawn; it looks dark inside. I wonder if the person who lives there is the one who’s been calling me. It’s hard to imagine, since Mike knew all our neighbors. He was the friendly one.
“Come on, Alice. Let’s close up.” I nudge the cat and she jumps to the living room rug, her hindquarters twitching.
I yank on the string of the knife-edged blinds, which tumble to the windowsill with azzziiip. I pad over to the other window, flat-footed without my heels, and am about to pull down the blinds when I hear the ignition of a car outside the window.
Strange. I didn’t see a driver walk to the car, and it’s not a car I recognize.
I let down the blinds but peek between them at the car. It’s too dark out for me to see the driver.
The car’s headlights blaze to life as it pulls out of its parking space and glides down the street. I don’t know the make of the car; I’m not good at that. It’s big, though, like the boats my father used to drive. An Oldsmobile, maybe. Before they tried to convince us that they’re not the boats our fathers used to drive.
I watch the car disappear, as the telephone rings loudly.
I flinch at the sound. Is it the someone?
I pick up the receiver cautiously. “Hello?”
But the only response is static-a static I hear on many of the calls. It’s him. My heart begins to pound as I put two and two together for the first time.
“Is this a car phone, you bastard? Are you watching my house, you sick-”
The tirade is severed by the dial tone.
“Fuck you!” I shout into the dead receiver.
Alice blinks up at me, in disapproval.
4
“Taste,cara,” says my mother, holding out a wooden spoon with tomato sauce.
“Mmmm.Perfetto.” I’m at my parents’ row house in South Philly the next day, playing hooky because my twin sister’s on parole from the convent. She only gets out once a year under the rules of her cloistered order, and isn’t permitted phone calls or mail. I hate the convent for taking my twin from me. I can’t believe that God, even if he does exist, would want to divide us.
“You all right, Maria?” My mother frowns behind her thick glasses, which make her brown eyes look supernaturally large. She’s half blind from sewing lampshades in the basement of this very house, her childhood home. The kitchen is the only thing that’s changed since then; the furniture and fixtures remain the same, stop-time. We still use the tinny black switchplate like a bulletin board, leaving notes among the dog-eared mass cards, a photo of JFK, and a frond of dried-out palm.
“I’m fine, Ma. I’m fine.” I wouldn’t dream of telling her I think I’m being watched. She’s like a supersensitive instrument, the kind that calibrates air pressure-or lies. She has a jumpy needle, and the news would send it into the red zone.
“Maria? They’re not treating you good at that office?” She scrutinizes me, the wooden spoon resting against her stretch pants like Excalibur in its scabbard.
“I’ve just been busy. It’s almost time for them to decide who makes partner.”
“Dio mio!They’re lucky to have you! Lucky! The nuns said you were a genius! A genius!” A scowl contorts her delicate features. Even at seventy-three, she makes up in the morning and gets her hair done every Saturday at the corner, where they tease it to hide her bald spot.
“Catholic school standards, Ma.”
“I should go up there to that fancy office! I should tell them how lucky they are to have my daughter be their lawyer!” She unsheaths the spoon and waves it recklessly in the air.
“No, Ma. Please.” I touch her forearm to calm her. Her skin feels papery.
“They should burn in hell!” She trembles with agitation. I wrap my arms around her, surprised at her frailty.
“It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
“Whaddaya two doing, the fox-trot?” jokes my father, puffing his cigar as he walks into the kitchen. He looks roly-poly in a thin short-sleeved shirt. It’s almost transparent, made from some obscure synthetic fiber, and he’s got the dago T-shirt on underneath. My father has dressed this way for as long as I can remember. When he’s dressed up, that is.
“Out! Out of the kitchen with that cigar!” my mother shouts-of necessity, because my father never wears his hearing aid.
“Don’t shoot!” He puts up both hands, then returns to the baseball game blaring in the living room.
My mother’s magnified eyes are an inch from my nose. “When is he going to stop with those cigars? When?”
“He’s been smoking cigars for sixty years, Ma. You think he’ll quit soon?”
Suddenly, there’s a commotion at the front door and I hear Angie shouting a greeting to my father. My mother and I hurry into the living room, where Angie is taking off her sweater.
“Hello, beautiful,” she says, with a laugh. She always calls me that. It’s her joke, since we’re identical twins.
“Angie!” I lock her in a bear hug.
“Hey, that’s too tight, let me go.”
“No.”
“Mare…”
“Not until you tell me you miss me.”
“Ma, get her off of me, please.”
“Let your sister alone. You’re too old for that. Too old.” My mother swats me in the arm with the spoon.
“Too old to hug my own twin? Since when?”
She hits me again.
“Ouch! What is this,Mommy Dearest?” I let Angie go.
“Yeah, grow up,” she says, with a short laugh. Her eyes look large and luminous under a short haircut-our childhood pixie resurrected. She’s dressed in jeans and a Penn sweatshirt just like mine, having left her Halloween costume back at the convent. We’re twins again, but for the hair and the fact that Angie looks rested and serene, with a solid spiritual core.
“Look at her, Ma, she looks so good!” I say. “Angie, you look great!”
“Stop, you.” Angie can’t take a compliment, never could.
“Turn around. Let me see.”
She does a obligatory swish-turn in her jeans.
“You wearing underwear?”
She laughs gaily. For a split second, it’s a snap shot of the twin I grew up with. I catch glimpses of the old Angie only now and then. The rest of the time, she’s a twin I hardly know.
“Basta, Maria!Basta! ” chides my mother happily.
“So you’re out of uniform. I can’t believe it.”
“I changed at a Hojo’s after I left.” She sets her purse on the floor.
“Why?”
“No special reason. Tired of you making all those habit jokes, I guess.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“Well I love the sweatshirt. You look like yourself again.”
“Like I didn’t know you’d say that,” Angie says.
“Look at this hair!” My mother runs an arthritic hand through Angie’s hair. “So soft. Just like a baby’s.”
Angie smiles, and I wonder why she’s so accepting of my mother’s touch and not my own.