“Are they twins?”
The first time Abby heard that question, she and Elaine were eight years old and they were scrambling onto the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. It was July, and she still remembered how warm the smooth bronze mushroom had felt to her bare legs and how sunbeams glistened on Elaine’s long straight hair as she elbowed her way past Abby to get to the Cheshire Cat first.
“Don’t push your sister,” KiKi called up to them.
“She’s not my sister,” Elaine muttered.
“I’m sorry,” KiKi said, turning to the young woman whose toddler tugged at the Mad Hatter’s jacket. “Did you ask me something?”
“Your daughters,” said the toddler’s mom. “Are they twins?”
The woman hadn’t heard Elaine’s disavowal of sisterhood, but Abby lingered by Alice’s bronze shoe to hear KiKi’s answer.
“They do look alike, don’t they? The blonde one’s mine, but the redhead’s my fiancé’s daughter.”
Abby had cried when Dad first told her. “A stepmother? Like Cinderella?”
“Don’t be silly, Abby,” he’d said. “She’s certainly not going to make you scrub floors or sit in ashes. You’ll love KiKi, and she’s ready to love you. Besides, you already know Elaine from school. A new mother and a new sister. It’ll be fun.”
Fun? She barely knew Elaine. Even though she was only three months younger, Abby’s October birthday had kept her from starting kindergarten till she was almost six, so Elaine was a year ahead of her at the Clymer School for Girls.
“Please,” she begged Aunt Jess, her dad’s older sister and the woman who had cared for her after the mother she could not remember died. She felt her whole world was turning upside down. A stepmother. A stepsister. A new apartment. “Let me stay with you.”
“I wish I could, darling, but your dad wants to make a new home for both of you. Besides, you’re only moving across the park to the East Side, not Easter Island. We’ll still see each other whenever you like.”
Later that evening, though, lying sleepless and miserable, Abby heard Aunt Jess say, “You’d better not let KiKi treat her like a red-headed stepchild.”
Dad laughed. “Hard to promise that, Jess. Abby is a redhead, and she is going to be KiKi’s stepchild.”
“You know what I mean, Daniel. You get so tied up with your work, you sometimes forget you even have a daughter.”
“Which is why it’ll be good for her to have KiKi. She likes being a stay-at-home mother.”
“Except that she didn’t stay home, did she? Where were her daughter and her husband when you two were having your intimate little evenings together?”
“I won’t dignify that with an answer, Jessica, and if you want to keep seeing Abby, I expect you to keep your opinions of KiKi to yourself.”
“Are they twins?” asked the bridal consultant when KiKi arrived at her first appointment with Elaine and Abby. Her divorce was now final, and the late-summer wedding was to be small and intimate, with the two girls as her only attendants.
“They do look like twins, don’t they?” KiKi said, but her indulgent smile was for Elaine, who had immediately zeroed in on a purple organza. Even at eight, Abby could see that the color fought with her own thick curls, which were more carrot than strawberry. “I hope you don’t mind, sweetie? Sisters have to learn to compromise.”
Except that compromise always seemed to require less from Elaine and more from Abby.
KiKi gently explained why Abby and her dad needed to move from their comfortably shabby apartment in the West Eighties to a more modern building on the East Side. “It wouldn’t be fair to you and Dad to move into my tiny apartment, just as it wouldn’t be fair to Elaine and me to move in with you and your aunt. Too many old memories for all of us. Much better to make new memories together, don’t you think?”
But Elaine got her way there, too. That first night in the new apartment, she had drawn an imaginary line down the middle of their bedroom. “The window’s mine,” she said, “and you can’t look out of it.”
Abby could not have cared less. The view of that quiet tree-lined street with its sleek modern apartment buildings was boring, and it only made her more homesick for the scruffy charm of the Upper West Side.
When Aunt Jess discreetly probed, Abby had to admit that KiKi tried to be fair. “But Elaine makes such a big deal out of things, it’s easier just to let her have her way. Most of the time, it really doesn’t matter.”
Then there was the problem of Abby’s hair, which was so thick that she couldn’t yet manage all the tangles herself. KiKi soon lost patience trying to brush it out, and two weeks into the school season that fall, she had Abby’s bright orange curls clipped short at the beauty salon. Aunt Jess had been furious the first time she saw the results, and Dad had scowled.
“Fine,” KiKi had snapped at him. “Let her grow it back, and you brush her hair every morning.”
It was their first fight.
After three years, people no longer asked if they were twins.
By the time Abby was eleven, her hair had begun to mellow into auburn, but it was as thick and curly as ever and still short. Elaine’s was like a shining golden waterfall, and almost long enough to sit on. She was already into a training bra and boys, and she sneered at Abby’s flat chest. No Browning boys had yet tried to touch her there as they tried to touch Elaine, who would giggle and slap their hands. Elaine’s hips were also rounding into womanhood—rounding a bit too much in KiKi’s eyes. She soon banned all sweets from the house.
“If it’s not in the house, none of us will be tempted,” she said, running a rueful finger along her rigorously maintained waistline. She herself had resisted temptation ever since she hit puberty, and it was clearly time for Elaine to learn that lesson, too. She spoke to the dietician at the Clymer School, and they worked out special menus for Elaine’s lunches and snacks. To KiKi’s frustration, her daughter’s extra pounds did not melt away, not even with exercises devised by her own personal trainer.
Dad had been grumpy about the new regime. He liked a dish of ice cream at night, but if Elaine couldn’t have ice cream, neither could anyone else, even though Abby had inherited his metabolism.
“Don’t tell KiKi,” he told Abby when they occasionally sneaked out for a hot fudge sundae at Serendipity.
“I won’t,” Abby promised. She had become good at keeping secrets and had never tattled about the stash of jellybeans hidden in Elaine’s dresser.
“Thank God you inherited my brains, too,” Dad said as a storm raged in the next room between Elaine and KiKi over a poor school report. “I can’t afford two sets of tutors.”
As it was, Abby’s grades were so good that she was chosen to help some of the younger students with their reading skills, but no sooner had she settled into a routine with a new child that fall than one of the teachers pulled her aside. “Make sure that Whitney keeps her wooly cap on and that you two don’t touch heads.”
When Abby lifted puzzled eyes, the teacher whispered, “Head lice. You don’t have to worry as long you’re very careful when you sit together and she reads to you.”
There had been a brief outburst of head lice at Clymer the year before. Hoping to squelch fears before parents started looking at Chapin or Spence, the headmistress arranged for a doctor to give a PowerPoint presentation in the great hall to assure everyone that the nits didn’t springboard from head to head without physical contact, and that there was nothing dirty or shameful about the creatures. “As Clymer parents, I hope you will encourage your daughters to be kind to their afflicted classmates,” the headmistress told them. “Lice are no respecters of privilege or wealth.”
Wealth was something that Clymer parents understood, and privilege was a given. Tuition at that exclusive private girls school was higher than at most universities, so when Elaine started scratching her head a week or so later, KiKi was horrified and Dad was outraged. “Dammit, KiKi! Forty-five thousand a year and that school gives her lice?”
He was not the sort of man who ever dealt with spiders in the bathroom or roaches in the kitchen, and Elaine’s condition completely unnerved him. Despite KiKi’s indignant protests, he immediately sent Abby back to the West Side to stay with her aunt Jess until Elaine had been nit free for a full week.
Abby knew there was no danger of her catching the lice as long as she and Elaine didn’t share hairbrushes or head gear, but she was too happy to argue, especially since Dad came to dinner at least twice a week. It was like old times, and when she hugged him goodbye, he seemed wistful about leaving.
Halloween came and went before he let Abby return to what she still called the new apartment. She had heard all about the tedious two-hour comb-outs with a fine-toothed metal comb, the only way to remove nit eggs from a hair shaft short of picking them off one hair at a time.
“Three hundred dollars a session,” Dad grumbled to Aunt Jess. “And her hair’s so long, it took three sessions.”
“Couldn’t KiKi do the comb-outs?” asked Aunt Jess.
“I didn’t want her touching the damn things. What if she got them?” He shuddered at the very thought.
Yet by Thanksgiving, KiKi discovered more lice in Elaine’s hair, even though Elaine swore she hadn’t worn anyone else’s hat, used another’s brush, or touched heads with anyone when she posed for group pictures with the friends who were now forbidden to invite her for sleepovers.
Dad threatened to sue the salon that had treated the first infestation, and they agreed to do another series of comb-outs for free if Elaine’s hair was cut short. This time, Elaine’s tantrums didn’t work and her long, golden, lice-infested tresses were due to meet the hairdresser’s scissors that very afternoon.
“I’m sure you’re glad to be leaving,” KiKi said sourly as Abby zipped up her backpack while Elaine lay on the other bed, scratching her head and sobbing loudly. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to have Christmas there, too.”
Abby didn’t respond. The constant bickering between the two adults wore on all of them. Tempers were frayed. Dad alternated between disgust and indignation because of those insects in Elaine’s hair, but the bills KiKi ran up on their credit cards didn’t help, either. Abby heard him accuse her of marrying him for his money. KiKi was by turns defensive of Elaine and angered by his attitude.
“Your father’s been totally unreasonable about all this. I know you and Elaine have had your differences, but if you’re not afraid of getting them, why should he act like it’s the plague?”
At the door, Abby paused. “I’m sorry, KiKi,” she said and gave her stepmother one of her infrequent hugs before ringing for the elevator.
“I so wish you were both going to be here for Christmas,” Aunt Jess said as Dad finished putting the lights on her tree.
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” her brother said grimly.
The new apartment was not a happy place these days. Somehow, Elaine’s lice seemed to have migrated to KiKi’s head, and he’d begun sleeping on the couch in his home office for fear of getting them himself.
Nevertheless, because of tears and promises and probably sex, too, Abby thought scornfully, Dad met her at the school as winter break began and told her that the lice were completely gone. They would be spending the holidays on Manhattan’s East Side after all.
Abby nodded and handed him her backpack. “I need to say goodbye to one of the little kids I’ve been tutoring,” she said and hurried back into the building.
Luckily, the lower-school girls were still struggling into their coats and mufflers, and they were glad for her help. In all the happy chatter about Santa Claus and what they were going to get for Christmas, no one noticed as Abby lingered with six-year-old Miranda Randolph, who was due for her second comb-out the very next day and was used to having her hair picked at.
Abby carefully transferred three adult nits and several eggs to the small pill bottle she had started carrying last fall. With a little luck, this Christmas present for Dad would be the final straw in the bundle she had already piled onto the camel’s back.
MARGARET MARON has written thirty novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature. She has served as national president of Sisters in Crime and of Mystery Writers of America, which named her grand master in 2013. In 2008 she received the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Vist her at www.MargaretMaron.com.