Zingolgy

Exerpts from Twin Souls, a Novel by Sue Hand

CHAPTER 1

When Laura Winston is alone, she likes to play a game she calls Change the House. She wouldn't play it around her husband, because the house was his before they married, and it might hurt his feelings to think she'd throw all the furniture out and change the decor, starting all over again. If it didn't hurt his feelings, it would make him mad, because Win is a financial consultant, a careful and conservative one, and the idea of taking a roomful, a houseful of perfectly good furnishings and throwing them out would be anathema to him.

Plus it's a very private game. She wouldn't want him to be around. She talks aloud to herself, laughs, gets up and walks, gesticulates. It's like being a girl again, playing house; she is playing house. The furniture was almost all picked out by Win's late wife, Elinor, and so the sofa she sits on now, chintz, with flowers on a red background, and the easy chairs and tables and lamps that flank it are foreign to Laura, and sometimes they seem possessed of a spirit that will do her in somehow. A fresh start--doesn't every second wife want that?

She'd start with the sofa she sits on, drinking her second cup of coffee (Win has already left for work, almost an hour and a half before she has to). Chintz, she thinks, especially flowered chintz, is something Katherine Hepburn should sit on in an old movie: it's not a modern material. She would stand the thing on its end and walk it end over end to the front door and out onto the lawn. The easy chairs are small and mousy, one mustard and one brown, covered in a slightly worn velour that, in certain lights, shows the shapes of their behinds, of Win's and of Elinor's, mostly, since she has been here only three years herself. The chairs are small enough so she could push them out the door, too. And the coffee table, which is oval and made of something characterless like fruit wood and strewn mostly with his boating magazines. And the matching end tables with the matching Chinese lamps on them--those, too.

When she gets it out on the lawn, she'll decide what to do then. Maybe she'll have Donny and Tom, the men who work for her, pick it all up and take it to her shop, ATR (for All Things Reconsidered); how handy that she runs a consignment shop and handles furniture. In the meantime, it will give the neighbors something to think about. She can just see the curtains parting, then falling shut as they try not to be seen. "What is that crazy woman that Win married doing now?" they'll say.

She'll be down to the carpet then, which is champagne-colored and of good quality, wool or a wool blend, but slightly dirty and worn in spots, and anyway she doesn't like carpeting. She'll take a razor cutter and tear it out in strips, which she'll put out with the garbage, two or three rolls at a time, or maybe she'll put it all out at once. She can see it now--because the carpet covers the dining room floor also, and why stop with the living room once she's gotten started?--20 or 30 rolls of carpet extending from their driveway to the boundary line, looking like giant pieces of sushi, all in a row. She'll put an orange garbage sticker on each roll, to make it official, but the Hayes next door won't be happy. They have said scarcely anything to her since she moved in.

"Did you see what's she done?" they'll say. "And the furniture on the lawn? Poor, poor Win."

Now she's gotten to her favorite part. She's down to bare floor, plywood, unfortunately, because the house is a brick and shingle colonial, built in the fifties, not one of the charming old colonials with beautiful oak floors or the antique ones with pine. But she'll cover it with something even better than oak, more unusual, white birch, maybe, or cherry with an ebony inlay, a floor that will look like a work of art in itself. Less is more: she'll have at most a few vivid scatter rugs here and there. And the chintz drapes are out as well--she'll have paper shades in shell pink or pearl gray, something that will let the light in even when pulled down. Or she'll have bare windows, like the early Puritans. They never do anything risqué in their living room, anyway. They read or watch TV, drink their cocktails, and talk.

For furniture she'll buy a lean and simple gray modular sofa she saw in a designer's window once in Boston and, perpendicular to it, around a big glass coffee table, a fainting sofa from another store, a lush S turned on its side, covered in a startling scarlet fabric that looked like wool. On the coffee table, there wouldn't be any magazines, only a single glass vase of sunflowers and maybe a ceramic ashtray. There'd be nothing to do except talk. Maybe they'd lie down on the sofa and make out. If the new beautiful look makes Win hyper-erotic, she'll gladly put up opaque shades.

But she doubts he'll see it this way. She imagines him coming in and seeing his and Elinor's things--all that history--gone and yelling bloody murder and sinking to the floor. He does have atrial fibrillation. She'll have to call him at the office and warn him about what she's done, which will take away the element of surprise. But Win hates surprises. He still hasn't gotten over the surprise of Elinor's cerebral hemorrhage four years ago, even though apparently she was a big drinker, and drinkers apparently--he learned this after the fact--can have their blood break down on them.

"Don't you like surprises?" she sometimes asks him.

"No," he always answers. He, at least, is utterly consistent.

She'll paint the walls white--again, to let the light in. Why mustard yellow? What were he and Elinor thinking? Mustard is almost as depressing as brown or black.

She tries to imagine Win sitting in her new room--if he doesn't make her take everything back--trying to find a comfortable position on the modular sofa. "How can you sit on a sofa without arms?" he'd say. She can see him fidgeting, readjusting throw pillows, finally tossing them on the floor in disgust.

She'd replace the pictures on the walls, too, almost all of them, with her twin sister Lydia's paintings, if she could find ones polite enough for Hovington. The first thing she'd take down would be the big Degas print over the fireplace, the centerpiece of the wall opposite the sofa. It's the one you run into everywhere that shows the ballerinas taking a bow in the footlights, their heavily made up young faces green and ghoulish. The picture is eerie, and the gold frame, with its fat, soft-ice-cream curlicues of gilt, looks as if it belongs in Versailles.

To the left hang two pictures of wood nymphs, also likely picked out by Elinor; Win would never have chosen them. They are from some earlier era of French painting, Boucher or Fragonard; she's gone up to them with glasses on but has seen no attribution. At least the Degas is relieved by touches of lurid color. But the nymph prints are entirely somber: they recline, portly odalisques, under tall canopies of dark trees, with dark leaves underneath, swatches of gray silk thrown over their swollen bodies, and only the white shirts of the hunters--who will probably shoot them or at least rape them--and the silver tips of their arrows shine out from the general desolation. The frames, though, are simple wood touched with gold in a faux antique finish. Hovington matrons love that kind of frame and will snap the pictures up if she sells them in her shop, whether they like the nymphs or not.

To the right of the Degas hangs the print that Win would make a fuss over. She wonders if his father might have bought it or his mother; they were boaters like himself. It shows a schooner in a storm. The ship is large and magnificent, a great bird with its wings spread, but it's plunging and pitching in a turbid, greenish-black sea. A lone ray of sun descending from a cloud-filled sky touches the sails and decks with spooky light. Men small as ants scurry up and down the masts trying to haul sail or whatever the term is; Win would know it. But whatever they're doing, things don't look good. The waves are enormous ahead, rearing like dragons, roiling with whitecaps. The ray of sun is the last those poor men will see for all eternity. Win loves it. Sometimes he walks over and looks at it up close, still, after all these years. "Boy, they're going to have to hustle!" he says, turning around and grinning. Her interpretation is that the boat is going to sink like a stone or be reduced to kindling whether they hustle or not.

The picture rubs her face in the very worst aspect of boating, even now, in November, when she wouldn't have to think about boats. The sailors in town love to talk about the most adverse conditions they have been out in, the worst turns of wind and tide, the storms that came out of nowhere, the unfamiliar harbors, treacherous with rocks. She's never heard them talk about beautiful sunsets or seals disporting themselves in the waves, things she has seen, herself, from Win's boat. No, they go on and on, especially at parties--when, she has always thought, conversation is supposed to be general and pleasant--about brushes with death and the worst trips they can think of, and these stories, whenever they are told and retold, are always well-received, with the particulars of wind velocity and sail angle and water and keel depth argued and refined upon, until teller and hearers alike are finally satisfied.

Sometimes if it's someone else's house, Laura sneaks off to the powder room and sits on the toilet seat reading House & Garden and Yankee until she thinks they must have moved on to another topic. If they haven't, or they flip back to sailing, she wanders upstairs--this is more risky--and goes into a bathroom there, canvassing the medicine cabinet or studying the contents of shampoo bottles lined up along the tub. She hasn't gone into a master bedroom yet and riffled through bedside drawers, but this, too, may happen in time.

Win, fortunately, is more gentle and less aggressive than most of the other skippers. When she goes out with him in rough weather, and she gets queasy, he asks her if she'd like to head in. But the look on his face, such profound yet patient disappointment--no acting class could have taught him such a look--makes her heart sink, makes her tell him sometimes that she's fine when she isn't. She used to get seasick, and she tried those seasickness bracelets, not just one but one on each wrist; she tried Bonine, which made her so sleepy she had to lie down on the cockpit cushions in a swoon; she tried eating crackers and sipping ginger ale. Nothing worked. Fortunately she rarely gets seasick anymore, but she is nonetheless a fearful and reluctant sailor. She's tried reading or doing a crossword puzzle to get her mind off her fears--when the boat heels way over, she is convinced they'll capsize, and she sees herself trapped in the cabin, an instant coffin. Reading just makes her queasy. Nothing works.

Nor can she chat with him to pass the time, because on the boat he is all business, hand on tiller, eyes doing a perpetual sweep of the horizon, even in calm weather, because you never know, he likes to say, what may come up. (Which is precisely what she's afraid of.) They don't engage in the jolly banter or the making out that she thinks other couples do--she knows they do--she's seen them. Not just the young ones, either: sometimes older couples sweep past them in their majestic yachts, the man with one hand resting lightly on the big wheel, the other over his wife's shoulder; then, like a king and queen, their white teeth bared in unnaturally tanned faces, they wave gayly to Win and Laura. She eats her heart out at their coziness, the sex it implies, while Win eats his out that they blow past him so easily--the Paradise is on the old side and not that big, only 32 feet, though it seems like a behemoth to Laura. Some of those other boats are 42, even 50 feet long.

Sometimes, when she clings to the gunwales as the boat heels way over or bangs down gut-wrenchingly hard on wave after wave, Win tries the scientific approach. He talks about ballast displacement ratios and the like, math that proves the boat won't capsize, no matter how far it tips. He'll state these facts, smiling calmly, while the spray flies in her face, drenching her, and the boat lies practically on its side. Engineering fails to console at a time like that.

"You know, I think I need to go home," she'll tell him. "I guess I'm just a fair weather sailor." And then he will--she'll give him this--head for home.

Maybe if they lived in the Caribbean, she might like to sail, though she would probably worry about the sharks. Still, with that beautiful water and all that sun, sailing would have to be more fun there than in chilly, gray Massachusetts Bay. If they went to the Caribbean every winter for a couple of months, she might even become a decent sailor. But he doesn't want to go to the Caribbean. Or even if he wanted to, he can't. He has his work, and he's not even close to retiring, though he's 60. He likes things the way they are. Besides, she has the shop: how would she get away for two months herself?

She worries about how much time he must spend thinking about the good old days when Elinor--before the drink took hold of her--was a competent sailor and first mate. Laura can take the tiller for a minute if he has to go to the bathroom or check a chart, but she starts calling for him with increasing urgency if she sees so much as a lobster pot ahead. If he got knocked unconscious by the boom and fell overboard, she wouldn't be able to turn the boat around, let alone fish him out of the water, and if he had a heart attack, she couldn't get them back to shore. She hasn't even mastered the radio. When he does try to teach her how to sail, he uses nautical terms like sailing on or off the wind and beating or sailing on a reach (she's never quite sure where the wind is coming from, anyway), and these terms make her so mad she can't listen. "For God's sake, use English!" she tells him furiously, and then he explains what they mean, but she can't remember the meanings even after the umpteenth time he's used them.

So the opposite wall is now white or off-white, she tells herself, and bare of pictures and flooded with sunlight coming in from the front lawn and the driveway. (In actuality, it's a gray day, but if she's going to imagine beauty, she might as well go all out.) What should she hang up there of her twin sister's art? She thinks mischievously of a series of paintings about suburbia that Lydia was working on when Laura last visited her, almost a year ago now. Most of those, if she hung them, would get Laura badly shunned, far more shunned than she is now, as a second wife ten years younger than her husband. One of these, for example, shows a young wife kneeling in her living room to perform a blow job on her husband while, over the top of her head, he watches TV--he raises a beer can as a football player scores and raises the football. Another one shows the same couple in the same living room; as the husband watches TV from the sofa, the wife, hugely pregnant and naked from the waist down, somberly knits a pink baby sweater. Her plump legs splay open to reveal a fiery red pubic bush. The painting is called "Happily Ever After." Her sister is a free spirit, afraid of nothing when it comes to public opinion.

She tries to imagine Win putting up with having one of those on his living room wall. She doubts she could take looking at it day in and day out herself.

The one suburban painting they have of Lydia's, in their dining room, which is mild and tame compared to the rest, has already caused consternation enough. It shows a grotesquely overweight woman, seen from the back, hanging on the ladder to her swimming pool as if stuck there, her wrinkled black suit riding up her fat cheeks and big drops of water, like tiny transparent Christmas ornaments, shining off her rounded shoulders and her neck. "Are You In or Out?" the title reads, painted across the bottom in black. A festive lunch is laid out before the woman on the patio table, a big salad, a wedge of cake, a drink in a tall glass with an umbrella in it. The composition is deft: there's the long diagonal of the pool's tiled edge and the verticals of the ladder and the chair and table legs playing against the curves of the woman's body and the snakelike squiggles of white paint in the pool's aqua water that are meant to be ripples of light. And the colors are breathtaking, the brilliant turquoise pool, the white of the tiles around it, shot with light, and the deeper, truer blue of the sky in the distance, like a glimpse of heaven.

And yet the eye keeps going back to that bloated woman, hung up on the ladder like a tortoise stuck between two rocks. As a result, maybe, people don't know what to say. "My, but that water's blue!" a woman dinner guest said one night. Another guest said the painting reminded him he'd better clean his pool out, and everyone laughed nervously.

Laura imagines her company sitting down in the living room, trying to avert their eyes from Lydia's bawdier paintings. The silence that would ensue would be like that of a skiing party under an avalanche.

As it is, she worries she's not a good enough hostess. She certainly doesn't entertain enough by town standards. Elinor, she gathers, was the consummate party girl, given to bursts of gaiety and wit, always eager for people to have a good time, and Laura has the feeling, when people come over, that they are still looking around for her, as if she must be lurking somewhere just out of sight. Plus they are all around the same age, and she, Laura, is ten years younger and looks even younger than that, or so she's been told; she has noticed some of the wives eyeing their husbands nervously around her. And she's a stranger, after all. Win's circle of friends have shared car pools and gone to school and yacht club functions for years and cruised to Maine or Newfoundland in pods, like whales, and every so often, a husband does fall in love with someone else's wife. How can the wives know that the passion that struck Win four years ago won't strike their husbands, too?

Lydia's earliest paintings, years and years ago, used to be quite romantic, trees and bushes, dim and fog-covered, along country roads--that sort of thing--and those she could hang safely around here. But when Lydia enters a new phase, she usually paints over or throws out anything that has gone before, so Laura is sure they have all been destroyed.

Lydia warned her about coming out to Hovington to live. But she wouldn't listen.

"You're going to do what?" she cried, when Laura told her that after six months of living cramped in her small city apartment, she and Win were going to move to Hovington.

"We're moving. To Win's house. We've gone there on weekends--it's no big deal."

"It is too a big deal! That house is in the middle of nowhere."

"Lydia, for Christ sake. It's fifty minutes from Boston. The North Shore is hardly the middle of nowhere."

Laura suspects that Lydia has always held the suburbs responsible for their father's desertion of them, the single biggest event of their young and possibly their whole lives. Never mind that he fell out of love with their mother, that he wanted her to be thin and glamorous when she was plump and plain, or witty and sophisticated when she was conventional and more than a little dogmatic. When their mother used to say grace at the dinner table, Laura would sometimes look up and see him staring balefully out the window or, even more disconcertingly, looking straight at her or Lydia and giving them a wink. When they were five, he fell in love with another woman and moved to California. Lydia seems to blame the dissolution of their family on the fact that their handsome, clever father had to come home every night and weekend to a town where there was nothing to do except mow the lawn, man the barbecue, and make occasional trips to the hardware store. Never mind that he and the other woman went not to a city but a suburb; it was California, Lydia says, as if a few eucalyptus and palm trees could make all the difference.

Laura's sure that's why her twin's suburban paintings are the way they are. To her, the suburbs must be the embodiment of all human loneliness and perversion, while Laura thinks their father was a restless person no matter where he'd lived and probably would have left their mother had they lived in midtown Manhattan instead of suburban Connecticut. Plus Lydia is an ardent feminist--she kept her maiden name, Rankin, when she married her ex-husband, whereas Laura changed hers--and she thinks women shouldn't give in too easily to their husbands.

"You'd think we were going to Kansas or something, Lydia. Calm down. It's still Massachusetts. Besides, you've never been there. How can you judge it?"

"I don't need to go there. I can see it in my mind's eye already. It's Prep Town. Topsiders and lime green sweaters with the little alligators on them. Please."

Laura had to laugh. Lydia had Hovington pretty well nailed down. "We're way too crowded here," she said. They were, too. In Laura's apartment Win's clothes were piled on chairs and even on the floor, because the closet was chockfull already, and his toilet articles were mixed with hers over every inch of the sink and the back of the toilet. "It's a whole house out there. With a basement and attic and closets."

"You can't live for your closets."

"It's a beautiful town, Lydia." And it is, a postcard town, with the white church steeples, the firs and the pines and the rhododendrons, the sleek boats tugging at their moorings in the harbor. "You're a painter," she said. "You appreciate beauty."

Lydia snorted. She'd been in an apartment in Chicago for 15 years, and before that, when she was still married, she was in Madison, Wisconsin, in a half of a town house. Her whole life she'd put as much distance as she could between herself and the suburbs. "You're happy where you are," Lydia said. "Why change things?"

That particular remark has come back to haunt Laura since. She and Win were happy, so happy their first few months together, in fact, that she is sometimes stunned by the memory of it. They used to lie on her cramped double bed and stare into each other's eyes for long minutes, stroking each other's faces. One day he spoke to her out of the blue in a southern accent, she doesn't remember why, and she made up a character for him to play, a rich oil man named Earl--she was his girlfriend, Magnolia Blossom--and after that, they would have whole interchanges as Earl and Magnolia, talking about his wells or planning their wedding, where he would wear a string tie and a white suit, and she would have magnolia blossoms in her hair and trail an obscenely long satin train. All a joke, of course. They used to call each other up at work several times a day, they hated being apart so much.

"Of course we're happy!" she said. "But we're stumbling all over each other."

"So buy a bigger apartment."

"It's not that easy. He's not that rich. Besides, he loves his house."

"You told me it was unremarkable. That's what you said. Unremarkable."

"That doesn't keep him from loving it. And he misses his boat, too. Big time."

"Ach!" Lydia said, in disgust. No boater, she. She gets claustrophobia in the cabin and nausea in the cockpit. "Well, why can't he dock it in Boston? It's a seaport, isn't it?"

She decided not to get into how much Win preferred the Hovington harbor, over any in the area, in fact--sheltered, safe, quiet, clean. The perfect harbor. He'd selected Hovington because of the harbor.

"And what are you supposed to do, give up your job now? Sit around manicuring your nails and reading magazines all day long?"

Laura's boss at the time, as Lydia well knew, was a nut case named Mary Gardiner, a walking bundle of neuroses, with PMS so bad that everyone at the museum called her Bloody Mary behind her back. "Frankly, I can't wait to quit that job," Laura said.

"And what are you going to find to do out there? Good jobs aren't easy to come by, even in the city."

"I'll find something, don't worry. Maybe I'll take a rest for a while."

"Great, great."

"And you call working for Mary a good job? You should try working for her. You'd quit in a week."

"No, I wouldn't."

"Yes, you would." Lydia has a history of not sticking with jobs that frustrate her or make her uncomfortable--or with men who do, either. Since her divorce, all those years ago, only one man, Hugh Macmillan, has lasted in her life for more than six months, and he lasted only about a year.

"Well, we're not talking about me."

"I wish we were. I'm getting sick of talking about this, let me tell you."

"But you're the one who's getting married and moving to Our Town."

"Now it's Our Town. Next you'll be calling it Dogpatch."

She tried to explain to Lydia that Win dislikes the city, even hates it. He hates crowds and waiting in line and sweating over a parking place, having to honk or shake his fist (he refuses to give the finger) at someone who wants to take the same one. On weekends now, the last thing he wants to do is go back in there to the ballet or the theater or eat at a good restaurant for a change--or even go to a sports event. Once he's home, he likes to stay home.

But Lydia wouldn't have it. She said, "What kind of a person hates cities? There must be something wrong with him!"

Laura was shaky with anger. She didn't call Lydia back for a week, and then she told her that Hovington was off the table as a topic. She pulled all the rank that she could as the older sister, by eleven minutes.

Lydia has abided by the contract pretty well. She can't resist the occasional glancing wisecrack, though. When she visited last summer, for example, she asked if everyone in the town was blond, but she tries to keep her touch light. "Are you having a good time?" she usually asks Laura, or, "Made any new friends?"

Not really and No are the answers. Laura worries that Lydia will be lured onto the topic of her marriage, which hasn't been going the way she wants it to, either, though it hasn't been going badly. Certainly it can't be said to be going badly. She just wishes Win wouldn't look so serious most of the time. She wishes, too, that he would talk like Earl again once in a while. He never talks like Earl anymore, nor she like Magnolia Blossom. She doesn't want to tell Lydia for some reason that things aren't going well, maybe because she doesn't want to hear herself say it.

She moves to the window, pushing aside one of the thick curtains to get a look at the street. The day is discouraging, lugubrious, in fact, the yard and driveway monochrome under a heavy sky. Nothing is happening out there, not so much as a dog being walked or a squirrel running up a tree. Tall pines block the Smiths' house across the street almost entirely from view, and the Hays' house next door also, but she's not missing much: the Hayes, retired, rarely come outside, and the Smiths leave early in the morning, Mrs. with the daughter in the SUV and Mr. with the son in the Jag, and they don't come back till late. There's a basketball hoop at the top of the drive, but she never sees or hears the young--and blond--Smith kids playing there, not even on a summer evening. She doesn't know where they go: scheduled activities, she supposes, so that eventually they will grow up just like their parents and purchase expensive houses they hardly ever spend time in. Just above and beyond the trees, she can see two of their upstairs windows, blind and unfriendly, reflecting the cold gray light of morning back to her with utter blankness, like the eyes, behind glasses, of a banker who isn't going to give you a loan but hasn't told you yet. (Gordon. Smith is a banker.)

She lets the curtain drop, moves out to the hall to get a last look at herself and get her hat and coat. She looks a bit haggard, she thinks, pulling her cheeks this way and that in the dim hall light, but settles on only a fresh coat of lipstick, no eye makeup, no blush-on today. Tamara, her young assistant at the store, who wears enough makeup for any three people, has caused her to scale down her own makeup quite a bit. She wonders whether Tamara will be wearing the whitish foundation today or the purple lipstick or both.

Another day, another dollar, as their father used to say, grimacing in mock horror--or maybe it was real horror--heading off to his advertising job. "Only a dollar?" Lydia asked him once, and he roared with delight. His clever daughter. Lydia was always the wisecracking one.

Just before she drives out of the driveway, she casts a glance back on her lawn, covered with a smattering of leaves that fell since the lawn service came. For a minute, she imagines her living room furniture there, as if she really had pushed it out the front door and then arranged it in a perfect grouping, the way it is inside. She wonders if anyone would see it. The houses are far enough from each other and their house far enough from the street that it's possible that no one, not even the mailman, would notice it. If it weren't December, she could lie on the sofa dressed in a bathing suit and high heels--like someone her sister might put in a painting--and it's possible that she might lounge there all day without attracting attention. She wonders if Win would see her as he came up the drive; of course, it won't be light when he gets home, but even if it were, he might not. He tends to focus on only one thing at a time, so probably he'd be wielding the garage door opener as he rounded the bend. "Yoo-hoo!" she imagines calling out. "Yoo-hoo! I'm out here!" Waving a cigarette holder like Marlene Dietrich, hoping he might catch sight of her through a front window once he went inside--provided he wasn't on the phone already with the police because of the missing furniture.

And if he did see her, what would he do? Would he laugh to see how outlandish she looked in high heels and bathing suit and maybe a feather boa? Or would he be furious and order her to put the furniture back in right now? Or would he, sighing, get the car out again to take her to the mental institution? She doesn't know. That's the scary part. After three and a half years, she has no idea what he would do.