She put down the mirror and kneeled in front of me. She touched my bangs, almost tenderly. “The hair’s easy. Just brush your bangs to the side while you’re blow-drying in the morning, then spray, spray, spray.”
“How will I remember all this on my own?”
“I thought of that already,” she said. “I’ll write out instructions for you tomorrow.” She told me there was an envelope that had everything I would need to know, from directions to the club and the names of her co-workers to the description of the woman who had been following her to lists of what she usually bought at the grocery.
“You’re being very organized about this.”
“I love a good scheme,” Sylvia said. “I would have been a great criminal mastermind.”
“What about when I’m at your job? What if I forget someone’s name or make a dumb mistake?”
“People are used to me making dumb mistakes,” Sylvia said. “That’s the last thing that would make anyone think you’re not me.”
At two in the morning, the electricity came back on. We blew out the candles and turned on the lights. The apartment was a mess: wax drippings, newspaper pinned beneath the stool in the kitchen, brushes and compacts and tubes on the counter, boarded windows. Sylvia said we would worry about cleaning in the morning. She put on cotton pajamas with martini glasses printed on them and tossed me a pair with flamingos. I had brought a T-shirt and sweatpants to sleep in, but didn’t protest; her pajamas were soft and smelled like perfume.
She asked if I wanted to sleep with her, like we sometimes did when we were young, when our parents were shouting at each other and we were afraid. I said okay. In her room, she cleared away a mound of clothes and yanked out a trundle bed.
“This is where I would make my boyfriends sleep when I was mad at them,” she said.
We got into our beds. Sylvia turned off the light. It was hot in the bedroom. I pushed the sheets down to my waist. I could still hear tree branches slapping the building and a terrible, tearing wind.
“When the weather’s nice, I have drinks on the balcony,” Sylvia said. “There’s vodka in the freezer. You can do that, too, if you want.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
We were quiet for a while. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t even think about sleep. There was an electricity in my body unlike anything I had felt in a long time.
“I jumped off that balcony once,” Sylvia said. “About a year ago. I landed in the bushes. I broke two fingers. I got a concussion. I had to spend the night in the hospital.”
I rolled toward her. On the wall, I saw the shadow of her raised arm. “Why didn’t someone from the hospital call me?”
“I told them I didn’t have any family,” she said.
“I would have helped.”
“I couldn’t be sure, seeing as you told me to disappear the last time we talked.”
She was referring to the time she phoned to say she was in love with Mark, and that she was going to tell him so, and that she thought there was a chance he was in love with her, too. I’d told her she was a sickness and I was cutting her out. After the call, I asked Mark if he was having an affair with Sylvia. He said “no” then and he said “no” later, in the office of our marriage counselor. But still I just had this feeling. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe I wanted someone to blame. I was willing to entertain those possibilities. What I didn’t understand was why I couldn’t do anything more than stand around in pain.
“You told me to stay away,” she said. “So I did.”
A week after the balcony, Sylvia tried to hang herself in the bathroom, but the shower rod broke. She said that she didn’t even go to the hospital that time. All she had to show for her efforts was a ring of bruises around her neck.
“I have the worst luck sometimes,” she said.
“Some people would say you were lucky.”
Neither of us said anything more, though something about my sister’s breathing told me she wanted to keep talking.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she finally said.
I’d heard that line before, always when I was doing whatever it was that Sylvia wanted.
“It’s good that you called. Thanks for the trip to beauty school.”
“Maybe you’ll like my life so much, you won’t want to give it back.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
2.
My first day as Sylvia began at dusk. From the balcony, I watched my sister slip into a taxi. All afternoon we had been looking for the woman’s car, but the coast seemed clear. After Sylvia confirmed the airport was open and her rendezvous was on, a hushed phone call taken in her bedroom, we went over everything in the envelope, spreading lists of names and work schedules and addresses across the kitchen counter. She had even gotten a fake lip ring for me. It was shaped like a comma and came in a plastic baggie. She picked out an outfit for my shift at the Bortaga, a black minidress and red heels, and did my hair and makeup once more. When it was time for her to leave, we stood in the apartment doorway. I wished her luck. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. And then she was gone.
After her taxi had disappeared down the street, I went into the bathroom and stood at the mirror. My face was bruised with makeup. My bangs drooped over my eye. I wedged the lip ring on. The metal felt strange inside my mouth. I couldn’t stop running my tongue over the thin silver curve. I studied the photo of Sylvia leaning against a palm tree that hung on the bathroom wall and wondered who had taken it. This man she was meeting? I stared at her toothless smile, her narrowed eyes, and tried out the same expression in the mirror.
In the kitchen, I poured a vodka on the rocks. I stood on the balcony and watched the sun drop. There was sand on the concrete floor. The air was wet and heavy. I saw palm trees that were nothing but brown stalks and sagging power lines. Everywhere there was paper and glass and spears of wood, like the aftermath of a riot. Sylvia’s building made it through the storm without any damage, but others in her neighborhood, we’d heard on the news, had broken windows and leaks. I heard a rumbling and saw a street-cleaning machine inching down Sixth Street. I finished the drink. The sun was halfway below the horizon, a watery orange orb. It seemed much bigger than the sun in Washington, the heat radiating across the tops of buildings and into me.
* * *
I woke the next morning feeling groggy, as though I’d been asleep for days. I rose and showered, using Sylvia’s gardenia-scented soap and her pink pumice stone. Afterward, I put on a silk bathrobe and poked around in the medicine cabinet: a nail file, red polish, an eyelash curler, makeup sponges, pills. The bottle was labeled “lorazepam,” the same thing, incidentally, a psychiatrist had once given me for nerves. I would take one and be immune to anything my husband said, any argument. I opened the bottle and found all kinds: tiny blue ones, round orange ones, rectangular pink ones. I pushed them around with my index finger and took the one that looked the most familiar. I closed the medicine cabinet and watched in the mirror as the oblong pill bled white onto the pink of my tongue.
I wrapped my hair in a towel, took the bottle of polish from the cabinet, and painted my toenails on the balcony. The streets were a little cleaner. It was hotter than before. The sky looked like a wet canvas someone had smudged with their fingers. I couldn’t remember the last time I had so many open days in front of me. Sylvia worked only three nights a week at the Bortaga. Her next shift was tomorrow. Today was training.
Later I moved a hairdryer over my toes until the polish hardened. I found some jeans, low-rises with holes in the knees, and a purple tank top in the bedroom. I studied myself in Sylvia’s full-length mirror. My stomach wasn’t as flat and my arms were paler. I taped the beauty instructions she’d left, complete with a diagram of a face drawn in blue pen, to the bathroom mirror and did my hair and makeup. I wedged the lip ring on and looked myself over. The eyeliner was too thick, the lipstick a little heavy, but not bad. A decent imitation Sylvia.