this just doesn’t feel like it’s true. I don’t feel like it’s mine. It’s not mine.” His pants are on. He is in the middle of the last sentence and in the middle of pulling his shirt over his head when he leaves the bedroom.
Downstairs I hear the breezy noise of the refrigerator door opening, then the clink of beer bottles before Joel leaves and the house grows dark and empty. Only then do I feel a glimmer of the sweet relief that always comes after a breakup, when I am left blissfully alone. But this time it is only a glimmer, and I am no longer truly alone.
I MAKE my way into the kitchen the next morning with only one thing on my mind: coffee. French roast with three spoonfuls of whole milk. I haven’t had a cup in eight and a half weeks, since I found out I was pregnant. But I need one now, this instant, as soon as possible.
I walk straight to the coffeemaker. When I notice Lila bent over the kitchen table it throws me. I forget that she is staying here. My room-mate is usually a stranger whose name I get off the roommates’ Web site at the Bergen Record. I choose a girl who only needs a place for a few months, someone I won’t have to get to know well. One of those girls moved out right before Lila’s housing fell through. It’s been years since I’ve seen my sister in her pajamas. In our normal routine we used to meet for lunch or a movie; we only saw each other fully awake and out of choice. Running into my sister in my own home at odd hours of the day and night is new and strange.
“Come look at these pictures,” she says. “Gram must have left them the other day. They were in an envelope with our names on it under one of the magnets on the refrigerator. Did you see them there?”
Only when the coffeemaker is warm under my fingertips and the hot liquid is beginning to splash into the empty pot do I join her at the table to see what she is talking about. Lined up in front of the sugar bowl are three photographs of Lila and me as little girls. I was probably seven, Lila five, but we were close to the same size and weight. The three pictures appeared to be taken in the course of one afternoon. We were on a hillside wearing winter coats. There was no snow, only waving grass.
The first picture shows us posed, standing back to back, arms crossed over our chests, our hair whipping past each other’s faces. We were clearly under orders to smile, and had ended up with awkward half-mouthed grimaces. If you looked closely, past the puffiness of our parkas, you could see our elbows digging into each other’s sides. We were each trying to bring the other down either by calling uncle first, or by getting yelled at by Mom for ruining the picture.
The other two photos show us playing. I was running, fists and body clenched, uphill, while Lila ran past me downhill, her arms stretched out like airplane wings, her mouth a wide O. In the third photo we played dead. We lay on our backs, arms and legs splayed, eyes squeezed shut.
“I can’t remember that day,” Lila says. “Do you?”
“No.”
Lila is still bent over at the waist, studying the photographs as if looking for hidden clues. “I can’t stand it when I can’t remember something. What good is a photographic memory if I can’t remember days from my own life?”
Our parents had submitted us to a battery of psychological tests when we were in grade school: IQ, personality tests, aptitude exams, etc. They had never told us the results of the tests, which was good, because Lila and I were fiercely competitive and cruel to each other up until I left for college. We might not have survived the knowledge of who had a greater IQ. The only thing our parents did tell us after the testing had concluded was that I had an aptitude for reading and writing, and that Lila had a photographic memory. Lila and I have both been struggling under the weight of these ordinary gifts ever since. I think we both wondered if they were true, or whether we had forced them to be true simply because of how we labeled ink blots and matched vocabulary words