Sometimes Elphie and Nessa scream in laughter together. Sometimes they just scream.
So they are improbable sisters. But are any two girls likely to be more consistent than they are? Even identical twins, underneath their matching gendered miens, often take stances in opposition to each other. And no one in the missionary camp has a benchmark to make a comparison about sibling sisters. Melena Thropp is an only child; Cattery Spunge had a stepsister and a pet goat, and neither of them made much of an impression on her. Frexispar Togue Thropp, the Godly, is the seventh son of a seventh son, but brotherliness isn’t the issue here. Anyhow, comparisons are futile. As the ditty goes, Girls are monster humans and boys are human monsters. And for Boozy, she is so Dust on the Soup that she can’t seem to remember if she has sisters or not. Kinship relationships among Quadlings being less crisply delineated than they are among Munchkinlanders.
They hate each other with affection, Nessa and Elphie; they tolerate each other with impatience; they love each other with scorn. When they play cards, Elphie manages both hands, and won’t allow herself to cheat. If Nanny or Boozy are busy, Elphie feeds Nessa with a spoon sometimes. (Sometimes.) It will occur to those who come after these famous girls that while they shared a mother, their fathers were probably not the same man. So their differences might have an origin in lineage. But it’s more than that: it’s always more than that.
You plant two sunflower seeds in a pot of rich soil. You water them with the same can, at the same time, with the same portions. You rotate the pot daily so they get equal access to the sunlight. Yet on some early, pertinent day, perhaps there is a cloud across the sky, and the plant on the left doesn’t get quite the strength of light that the one on the right does. Or there is a worm in the soil in one quadrant of the pot who eats through more of these roots here than those ones there. Who can say.
Sisters are not flowers. And parents can never, from the first day, give the same water and light and soil to one girl that they gave to her sister. Sisters grow, if they grow together at all, in adjacent sorrow.
So sometimes Nessa screams and Elphie screams, just because. They have no words for their spontaneous outbursts. It is a mutual sort of melismatic yodel, saying, more or less, we’re fucked. They look at each other and shake their heads, scarcely believing the untoward luck of having been born adjacent—to that!—and like this!
But the screaming can turn into screaming with laughter a moment later. This is called spiritual health, and no one has ever known where it comes from, or why.