.3.

“Are you there? Are you asleep?” My mother’s voice. “Sorry to call so early.”

“Disaster,” Mark said, shaking me. Grieving Gloria, he calls her. And sometimes Gorgeous Gloria. Gawjis, he says, the way she does.

“What time is it?” I stood over the machine watching the tape turn, listening to my mother stall. It was seven o’clock Saturday morning. I’d been wanting to talk to her, which is unusual.

“Mom?”

“Aunt Anita died last night,” she said. I yanked Mark’s T-shirt from under Chico and tried to pull it over my head and the phone receiver. I got a flash of Anita’s doughy arms. The pincurls she kept in all day. She had just begun to have that old woman smell.

“Ma, I’m sorry,” I said. Anita is her oldest sister.

I covered the receiver and mouthed the news to Mark.

“The wake is Monday and the funeral right away Tuesday,” she continued. “I have to arrange everything today. Of course it’s all left up to me.” Mark pulled me against his chest and rubbed my neck and shoulders. “You and Mark can spend Monday night out here. So you won’t have the trip.”

Out here is Brooklyn.

“It’s okay, Mom. It’s a quick cab ride.” I can get to Flatbush by subway in under an hour, but I rarely visit except for Christmas and Easter.

I’d miss class. My session on Tuesday. And I’d been planning to go to Yvonne’s.

“The girls’ll be here. But Carla says she won’t come to the wake.”

Though they’re thirty-three, my mother still refers to my twin sisters as “the girls.” At least she stopped calling them “the twins.”

“Well, you know how upset she gets.”

“It’s her aunt.”

My mother has an idea of how things should be and she spends her time arranging the way other people will be made to see how she’s right. But I went home without Mark. The deaths of older aunts is the kind of thing we’re both allowed to skip.

Deep in Brooklyn I always feel like I’m starting to disappear. The way you almost forget you have a life when you visit your parents. The place you were born. The voice you changed. Most of what I remember from the neighborhood is gone. Key Food. Stride Rite. The Granada theater. I went out of my way to walk past Holy Cross, my old grammar school. Several West Indian workmen were ripping out the convent. I guess all the old nuns are dead, but I kept expecting Sister Dominica, my third-grade nun, to rush out of the wrecked shell, shrieking and pulling my hair. “Theresa Spera,” she said once, in her thick, Irish brogue, “you’re the Devil’s own child.” It was Halloween. Everyone in our school had to dress up as their name saint, which was confusing as there are two St. Theresas—the visionary mystic and the humble drudge. I wore a long brown robe, belted with one of my mother’s curtain tassels. I held rosary beads and was supposed to carry a broom to symbolize St. Theresa cleaning out her Interior Castle. Spiritual Housecleaning, Sister Dominica called it. In this way, she said, I could be like both St. Theresas. The thing was, I didn’t want to carry the kitchen broom all the way from home, so I just stuck some Ajax and a sponge in my schoolbag and used that. When Sister Dominica saw the Ajax, she started pulling my hair saying that stuff about being the Devil’s own child. She said I needed to do some very serious Spiritual Houseclean-ing. I ended up having to carry this big dirty pushbroom the janitor let us use. It was a terrible place that school, and yet I feel kind of nostalgic for it. For believing in things. In some kind of order.

I was almost glad to be home. It was the first time I needed to see my mother in years. To talk to her. I followed her around all day trying to lead into it, but the shifting arrivals and departures of relatives at the funeral parlor made it impossible to talk. I called Eric from a pay phone by the bathrooms to arrange a phone session for later that night.

“So, you’re wearing lipstick,” my mother said, when we were finally back at the house.

We were sitting in the living room which she has recently redecorated into what Mark calls postmodern pandemonium. A piece out of every period. Eighteenth-century lavabos and colonial pewter mugs, sky-blue ceramic ducks deployed around an imitation fireplace bricked up with Con-Tact paper. She works for a small interior decoration store on Flatbush Avenue. I imagine her erecting setting after setting in which nothing will ever happen.

“Yeah,” I said. I waited to see if she liked it. I still wasn’t sure of the color. “A friend of mine wears this color. Yvonne.” I liked saying her name in my mother’s house.

An arc of straight pins stuck out of her mouth like some kind of medieval torture implement. She was raising the hem of her funeral skirt, filling me in on the details of Anita’s death. Once my sisters arrived I knew I’d hear it again.

“I just can’t figure it out,” she said through the pins, picking up a thread of an earlier conversation. Talk in our family has always been like this. Long arcs that cross but rarely connect. She’d been alluding to some mystery ever since I arrived but she hadn’t elaborated. I guess she was waiting for the right setting. She picked the pins from her mouth one by one and stuck them in a tomato-shaped pincushion.

A scratchy recording of Renata Tebaldi singing “Un bel di’ vedremo” blasted from the kitchen. Madame Butterfly, my father’s favorite opera. I must have heard it hundreds of times while I was growing up. Last Christmas I bought him the Maria Callas version but I don’t think he’s ever played it. I think he thinks it would be disloyal. My father’s voice blended with Tebaldi’s. My mother smiled and shook her head. “Your father,” she said, and I could see how much she loved him. That familiar kind of love. Married love.

“Ma, what about Aunt Anita.”

The gist of it was that Anita died holding an envelope of old photographs. No one knows who the man is, squinting and grinning out of a series of blurry landscapes.

“It’s a mystery,” my mother said. She broke the thread with her teeth. “This one looks like Coney Island.” She handed me the snapshots.

They were mostly black and white. And sticky. The one I liked best was torn and had bits of what looked like chocolate stuck to the corner: an angular-faced man with a slight sneer and sex in his eyes. An unusual choice for any of the sisters, especially Anita. The kind you couldn’t hold on to for too long. Definitely an improvement on my Uncle Tony who died last year.

Anita was a sweet, placid woman. Unevolved you might say—like a giant amoeba, vague and shapeless in her flowered housedress. It struck me how there can be this big mystery at the center of the most ordinary life.

Renata Tebaldi hit that high, heartbreaking note at the end of the aria—that terrible mixture of hope and hopelessness. My father hit it with her.

“Ma, do you think Daddy ever had an affair?”

She laughed. She turned to the sewing drawer and replaced the pincushion, shoving the drawer in and out to jam it closed. While her back was turned I took one of the photographs.

“Your father?”

I have to admit the idea of my father having an affair is ludicrous at best. The most passion I’ve ever seen my father display was when I was eight and he caught me playing his Madame Butterfly record, shifting the speed up to make Carlo Bergonzi sound like a woman, and slowing it down to make Renata Tebaldi sound like a man. It was the only time he ever hit me.

The aria ended. My father lifted the needle and set it down and it began all over again.

“Ma,” I said, “I wanted . . .”

The phone rang.

“Could you get that, honey. I don’t feel like talking. I don’t think I can tell the story one more time.”

I picked up the phone. Aunt Mary, I mouthed to my mother. She motioned to me to hand her the receiver.

“Mary,” she said, in the woeful voice she uses on sad occasions. “Another sad day.”

It was the first time I’d slept at my mother’s since I moved out. I was in the guest room, which was crammed with knickknacks and stenciled wallpaper and furnished with odd pieces from the bedroom I’d shared with my sisters in our old apartment. The streetlight threw a knife shape across the “antiqued” bureau. The top two drawers had been mine. When I was twelve my mother had gone through those drawers and discovered my diary. I forgot what she found in there, but I remember being dragged into the kitchen by my ponytail, then not allowed out after school for two weeks.

My mother was like that. There wasn’t a drawer she wouldn’t open. A place she couldn’t reach. “I can read you like a book,” she used to say. Now I know that all mothers say things like that. Thing is, I believed her. “People who live in glass houses,” she’d say, eyeing me suspiciously, and I’d feel as transparent as one of her Jell-O molds—the gray, wrinkling grapes and miniature marshmallows bloating under the tough skin.

It was three o’clock. It occurred to me that my being away gave Mark and Yvonne a chance to spend the night. I dialed Yvonne. I knew her number by heart.

Most people, even if they have machines, jump to answer their phone if it rings at 3:00 A.M.

“Hello?” She sounded alarmed. “Hello?” I wanted her to say Mark? or Fuck off, or something emphatic. She just said hello again and then hung up. I dialed again but she didn’t pick up.

I dialed Mark.

“Terry? Jesus. What time is it?”

“Three.”

“Are you okay?”

I couldn’t talk.

“Honey, what’s the matter? You fight with your mother?”

“I want to come home,” I said. I tried to quiet down but I was breathing hard.

“Treas, calm down. Tell me what happened.”

The ruffled comforter stuck to my legs. I kicked it off.

“My mother found these photographs,” I said. I started to tell him the whole story.

“Honey, hang on a second, okay?” I knew he was going for a glass of water. Mark always wakes up with a dry mouth. “Now talk to me,” he said when he came back.

“They were pictures of this guy nobody knows,” I said. “He looks a little like you.” I wrapped the cord around my foot. “Do you really love me?”

“Terry, you know I love you.”

“Remember you used to call me like this in the morning?”

“Honey, call a car service and come home,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Lie down,” he said. “Are you lying down?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Pull down the blankets.”

“They’re down,” I said.

“Okay. Now imagine I’m lying on top of you.”

I’m still amazed at how easily he turns me on.

“Can you feel me?”

“No.”

“Well, then I guess I have to get a little rough,” he said and waited. “Now, I’ll ask you again. Can you feel me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re licking my neck,” I said. “Your hands are on my ass.”

“One hand,” he said. “The other is inside you. Can you feel me? Tree?”

I flashed on Yvonne. I felt guilty. Like I was having an affair with my own husband.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You feel pretty wet.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good,” he said.

“I wish you were here.”

“Treas, do you really want me to come?”

“No,” I said. “Just make me come.”

He whispered and talked me into it while I rubbed my finger inside myself and softly over my clit. His voice still had some sleep in it. I could imagine his hands, his long fingers, the callus inside the left knuckle. I could feel his weight on top of me. By 3:45 I was calm and ready to sleep.

My sisters were at the kitchen table when I woke up. They’d come in late the night before. Both of them worked double waitress shifts and couldn’t get off. Actually, Carla had lied. She’s always hated wakes. The dead body lying there as though it were just sleeping. I kissed them both.

“Hey stranger,” Carla said. “How’s your gorgeous husband?”

She pronounced it the way my mother does. Gawjis. Sometimes it hits me that if I hadn’t worked so hard to change my voice I would sound just like them.

“Gorgeous,” I said. I looked for some regular coffee. It was useless. My mother only uses instant. I’d have to get take-out on the way to the funeral parlor.

Carla lit a cigarette.

“Isn’t it a little early,” I asked. I fanned away the smoke. I stopped smoking six years ago when I read an article in the Times that associated smoking with the undereducated.

Carla inhaled deeply and continued flipping through the News.

“Bad dreams?” Lisa asked.

We have five sets of twins in our family. In no pair do both have the same disposition. Lisa and Carla look almost exactly alike, but as flip and distant as Carla is, Lisa is gentle, loving. You can hear the difference in her voice. Lisa rubbed my shoulder. “I heard you moaning when I went by the guest room.”

“Must be the ghosts of our childhood coming up,” I said.

“Christ,” Carla said, “with the crowd that’ll be here later, there won’t be room for all those ghosts.”

“See Gloria yet?” I asked.

Carla raised her eyebrows. Each of us has taken acting classes at one time or another and we’ve all capitalized on our mother. Carla has her down the best. She struck a pose.

“As usual,” she whined in Gloria’s unmistakable voice, “everything’s been left up to me.”

“Another sad day,” Lisa choked out, but was laughing too hard to continue. She put her arms around me.

Sometimes I think the three of us could have been a lot closer if it hadn’t been for our mother. Infiltrating. Instigating. She has a genius for setting one person against another and her three daughters have given her a large playing area.

Though I’m two years older, people always mistook us for triplets. Until I was ten we wore identical clothes. I think it was my mother’s way of making me feel included. Actually, it was the time of mother-daughter dresses and we have photographs of the four of us dressed in the same orange print skirt and white blouse.

“Don’t feel bad, honey,” my mother said one time, “I’ll be your twin.” She had come into the bedroom after my sisters and I had been fighting. I was crying because whenever we played Patty Duke, Lisa and Carla got to play Patty and Kathy, and I always had to play Richard or Poppo. Everyone said that it made sense that they should play the twins since they were twins, but I didn’t think it was fair. My mother laid on top of me. She held me and kissed me. Her perfume had a dark smell that rubbed off on my arms. “You’re just like me,” she said.

In our family I was special, my mother said, because I was not a twin. I was just myself. Unique. But there are so many sets of twins in our family that I’ve always had the vague suspicion that I’m half of a set. That my twin sister died early in the pregnancy but was carried to term. Stillborn. That I’d lain for months curled around my dead twin.

My mother had this book on twins someone gave her. I don’t think she ever opened it, but one summer I read just about all of it. I read that at least one in eight pregnancies begins as twins, that the only sign of the vanishing twin is a little bleeding. I remember how shocked I was to see something in print that corroborated what I’d felt for so long. That I was only half of something.

I discovered all sorts of freakish facts—that some of us are actually twins walking around in a single body, that one twin had just absorbed the other, just merged in the womb. That was called a chimera. You can tell because there are people who actually have two different blood types. (I checked. I have only one.) The book had captions and illustrations that characterized twin pregnancies as these intense intrauterine battles for space and food. It said that sometimes only the stronger twin survives and is often plagued by lifelong feelings of terrible guilt.

Well, I can definitely relate to that.

The three of us went into the guest room to dress. Carla was still clowning and mimicking our mother. She went into the dresser behind a room divider I made twenty years ago out of balsa wood and rice paper. She came out in an embroidered denim mini-skirt and batiked halter I wore in my brief stint as lead singer in a neighborhood rock-and-roll band. For a minute I could see myself in her—exactly the way I had been. Under the strobe lights. Clutching the mike.

Lisa picked up a hairbrush and hiked up her robe. I put some beads over my black slip, knotted Yvonne’s scarf around my head, and grabbed a perfume bottle. Carla stood on the bed. Without a word the three of us went into “Piece of My Heart,” dancing and bending. Jerking back and forth into our mikes.

I took the lead, just like I used to. “I said come on, come on, come on, come on,” Carla leapt from the bed, “and take it,” the three of us screamed, “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.” We fell into one another laughing.

“What is going on in here?” Our mother stood at the door.

We couldn’t stop laughing.

“What is wrong with you? What in God’s name can you be thinking of?”

“Sorry, Ma,” I said. I pulled Yvonne’s scarf off my head. I was still laughing.

“We’re leaving at nine,” she said and walked out.

We dressed in silence. Every once in a while one of us started to laugh. I stuck Tristan—that’s what I named the man in the photographs—face to my stomach, just above the crotch of my pantyhose. I wore emerald stockings and a black velvet skirt. Death is one of the most exotic things that happens in our family and we’ve always dressed for it.

We’ve been through this a lot. The morning of the funeral the family sits alone with their corpse in the funeral parlor until it’s time to go to church. Then one of the McFeeley brothers (we always go to McFeeley’s) comes over and discreetly closes the coffin lid, a white handkerchief in his hand.

Anita looked scared, all alone in her box. I tried to pray for her but I was thinking about Yvonne, wishing it were Yvonne lying in that box. As soon as I thought that I said a little prayer to counteract it—but I can’t help the way I feel.

My mother slid in beside me. She has a way of entering a room so quietly everyone takes notice. People have always said I take after her, but no one had ever looked at me the way they looked at her. Even my boyfriends used to fall for her. Once I heard our next-door neighbor say she could make a dead man come. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I did know she could make just about anyone do just about anything. They’d even think it was their own idea.

She smiled at Jimmy McFeeley. An overweight, balding funeral director. My mother can’t look at a man without trying to seduce him. She drove my father nuts—his words—but he was crazy about her. His words again. It’s hard to imagine my father nuts or crazy. When I think of him, he’s hunched over a broken toilet or kneeling beside a bathtub screwing in a copper pipe, singing an aria. My father’s a plumber. We used to joke that he fixed things so they worked and my mother made them look good when they didn’t.

Even as a kid I knew they were mismatched. Most kids can’t picture their parents having sex. I couldn’t stop. Even now I see him rolling, groping, and imprecise. Gloria trying to keep her hair neat and fixing their clothes when they took them off. Her pile. His pile. It’d make it easier in the morning. It’s so awful it’s almost beautiful.

She was whispering to Father Finnegan, tilting her head. A wide smile. Too wide for the occasion. She realizes it, tilts it down, frowns. The wistful, funeral smile. He follows like a pilgrim being led to heaven, his eyes resting just above the line of her V-neck. She really could have been something. An army recruiter or automobile dealer, a politician.

She turned to me and pushed the hair out of my eyes, the way she’s always done. “You look so nice when you get dressed up,” she said. She rearranged Yvonne’s green scarf around my neck. My mother is big on improvement. “Don’t just sit there,” she used to say, “you could be doing your stomach pulls, pushing your teeth in.” Dentists find it hard to believe now, but we closed a half-inch gap in my front teeth. Ten-second press three times a day. I kind of miss it. The gap I mean. The way my tongue rested in there when I was just thinking.

“Ma, do you think we could talk later?”

“Why don’t you stay over tonight,” she said. “Then it won’t be so busy.”

But I knew I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even know what to say. What to ask.

Anita looked so sorry in her box, so alone. Like Yvonne, eating salad in that immaculate apartment and dreaming of Mark. I liked the idea of Anita and Tristan. That there had been someone she’d loved deeply, passionately. That she’d saved things up to tell. Felt his touch when he wasn’t there. Waited for him, lost him, then carried him around inside her all these years. Like St.Theresa and St. Lucy she’d lived for something bigger. Moved toward the light no matter what was in front of her face. All those years with Uncle Tony and she’d been living for something else. For herself. Fifty-eight years of interminable barbecues, christenings, Irish Nights, and she’d been there with Tristan. Tristan by the watercooler, baptism font, Tristan by Sears Automotive at the mall. Touching her, tugging her hair the way he did, his mouth on her. Anywhere she wanted it. He knew. She didn’t have to figure it out for him. She’d lived for something. I felt relieved. I wished I’d met him. That she’d died calling his name. That he’d show up for the funeral. Soon. Before Jimmy McFeeley shut the box. So he could see her creamed and powdered, puffy but still smooth. A fifty-eight-year fierce and faithful receptacle for his love. It gave me some kind of hope. Made me think you could escape anything, you just had to live for something big enough.

Jimmy McFeeley was fumbling with his handkerchief. My mother was flirting with Father Finnegan, and I was thinking about Yvonne. Yvonne in the coffin with Mark, fucking on top of the rosary beads and prayer cards, behind the condolence arrangements and flower stands, before the entire roomful of aunts and uncles and cousins. Yvonne rolling in a flowered housedress, Mark’s mouth on her neck, arm beneath her waist, raising her up onto the red velvet pillow.

“Terry. Theresa.” My mother has a way of whispering that’s like onions hissing on a high flame.

“What?”

“Do you want to go up there one more time?”

I shook my head.

“Are you okay?” Lisa whispered.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not okay.”

Then I remembered I’d forgotten to call Eric for my phone session.