The stocky, sandy-haired girl hung in the doorway. “I'll stay out here,” she said. “I thought we could go home together though."
“Darling, how nice of you. But I'll be a bit longer, I'm afraid."
“That's all right. How are you feeling, Nancy?"
“Wonderful, dear. Especially now that your doctor has taken a picture that'll show him what's inside this bump of mine."
“Well, I'll be out here,” the other girl said and turned back into the waiting room. She passed a woman in white who came in, shut the door, and handed the doctor a large, brown envelope.
He turned to Nancy. “I'll look at this and be back right away."
“Dr. Myers is on the phone,” the nurse told him as they started out. “Wants to know about tonight. Can he come here and drive over with you?"
“How soon can he get here?"
“About half an hour, he says."
“Tell him that will be fine, Miss Snyder."
The door closed behind them. Nancy sat still for perhaps two minutes. Then she jerked, as if at a twinge of pain. She looked at her ankle. Bending over, she clasped her hand around her good ankle and squeezed experimentally. She shuddered.
The door banged open. Dr. Ballard hurried in and immediately began to reexamine the swelling, swiftly exploring each detail of its outlines with gentle fingers, at the same time firing questions.
“Are you absolutely sure, Miss Sawyer, that you hadn't noticed anything of this swelling before last night? Perhaps just some slight change in shape or feeling, or a tendency to favor that ankle, or just a disinclination to look at it? Cast your mind back."
Nancy hesitated uneasily, but when she spoke it was with certainty. “No, I'm absolutely sure."
He shook his head. “Very well. And now, Miss Sawyer, that twin of yours. Was she identical?"
Nancy looked at him. “Why are you interested in that? Doctor, what does the X-ray show?"
“I have a very good reason, which I'll explain to you later. I'll go into the details about the X-ray then, too. You can set your mind at rest on one point, though, if it's been worrying you. This swelling is in no sense malignant."
“Thank goodness, Doctor."
“But now about the twin."
“You really want to know?"
“I do."
Nancy's manner and voice showed some signs of agitation. “Why, yes,” she said, “we were identical. People were always mistaking us for each other. We looked exactly alike, but underneath...” Her voice trailed off. There was a change hard to define. Abruptly she continued, “Dr. Ballard, I'd like to tell you about her, tell you things I've hardly told anyone else. You know, it was she I was dreaming about last night. In fact, I thought it was she who had grabbed me in my nightmare. What's the matter, Dr. Ballard?"
It did seem that Dr. Ballard had changed color, though it was hard to tell in the failing light. What he said, a little jerkily, was: “Nothing, Miss Sawyer. Please go ahead.” He leaned forward a little, resting his elbows on the desk, and watched her.
“You know, Dr. Ballard,” she began slowly, “most people think that twins are very affectionate. They think stories of twins hating each other are invented by writers looking for morbid plots.
“But in my case the morbid plot happened to be the simple truth. Beth tyrannized me, hated me, and ... wasn't above expressing her hate in a physical way.” She took a deep breath.
“It started when we were little girls. As far back as I can remember, I was always the slave and she was the mistress. And if I didn't carry out her orders faithfully, and sometimes if I did, there was always a slap or a pinch. Not a little-girl pinch. Beth had peculiarly strong fingers. I was very afraid of them.
“There's something terrible, Dr. Ballard, about the way one human being can intimidate another, crush their will power, reduce to mush their ability to fight back. You'd think the victim could escape so easily —look, there are people all around, teachers and friends to confide in, your father and mother—but it's as if you were bound by invisible chains, your mouth shut by an invisible gag. And it grows and grows, like the horrors of a concentration camp. A whole inner world of pain and fright. And yet on the surface —why, there seems to be nothing at all.
“For of course no one else had the faintest idea what was going on between us. Everyone thought we loved each other very much. Beth especially was always being praised for her ‘sunny gaiety.’ I was supposed to be a little ‘subdued.’ Oh, how she used to fuss and coo over me when there were people around. Though even then there would be pinches on the sly—hard ones I never winced at. And more than that, for..."
Nancy broke off. “But I really don't think I should be wasting your time with all these childhood gripes, Dr. Ballard. Especially since I know you have an engagement for this evening."
“That's just an informal dinner with a few old cronies. I have lots of time. Go right ahead. I'm interested.
Nancy paused, frowning a little. “The funny thing is,” she continued, “I never understood why Beth hated me. It was as if she were intensely jealous. She was the successful one, the one who won the prizes and played the leads in the school shows and got the nicest presents and all the boys. But somehow each success made her worse. I've sometimes thought, Dr. Ballard, that only cruel people can be successful, that success is really a reward for cruelty ... to someone."
Dr. Ballard knit his brows, might have nodded.
“The only thing I ever read that helped explain it to me,” she went on, “was something in psychoanalysis. The idea that each of us has an equal dose of love and hate, and that it's our business to balance them off, to act in such a way that both have expression and yet so that the hate is always under the control of the love.
“But perhaps when the two people are very close together, as it is with twins, the balancing works out differently. Perhaps all the softness and love begins to gather in the one person and all the hardness and hate in the other. And then the hate takes the lead, because it's an emotion of violence and power and action—a concentrated emotion, not misty like love. And it keeps on and on, getting worse all the time, until it's so strong you feel it will never stop, not even with death.
“For it did keep on, Dr. Ballard, and it did get worse.” Nancy looked at him closely. “Oh, I know that what I've been telling you isn't supposed to be so unusual among children. ‘Little barbarians,’ people say, quite confident that they'll outgrow it. Quite convinced that wrist-twisting and pinching are things that will automatically stop when children begin to grow up."
Nancy smiled thinly at him. “Well, they don't stop, Dr. Ballard. You know, it's very hard for most people to associate actual cruelty with an adolescent girl, maybe because of the way girls have been glorified in
advertising. Yet I could write you a pretty chapter on just that topic. Of course a lot of it that happened in my case was what you'd call mental cruelty. I was shy and Beth had a hundred ways of embarrassing me. And if a boy became interested in me, she'd always take him away."
“I'd hardly have thought she'd have been able to,” remarked Dr. Ballard.
“You think I'm good-looking? But I'm only good-looking in an odd way, and in any case it never seemed to count then. It's true, though, that twice there were boys who wouldn't respond to her invitations. Then both times she played a trick that only she could, because we were identical twins. She would pretend to be me—she could always imitate my manner and voice, even my reactions, precisely, though I couldn't possibly have imitated her—and then she would ... do something that would make the boy drop me cold."