Twins (3 page)

Madrigal, however, did not notice. The twin who should have instantly comprehended the situation was simply enjoying herself. Laughing away, having a good old time.

And at night, in the dorm, Madrigal on a lumpy guest cot — she refused offers of bunks — Madrigal entertained them with stories of high school. Of handsome wonderful Jon Pear, and their exciting wild dates. Of Jon Pear’s romantic escapades and his crazy insane ideas.

It didn’t even sound like home to Mary Lee. Mother and Father, who all but fingerprinted the kids their little girls played with, letting Madrigal go out at any hour of the day or night with this wild-acting Jon Pear? There seemed to be no curfews, no rules, no supervision.

Supervision. She remembered that word. Mother had claimed to keep Madrigal at home for “supervision.”

“Wow, you get to do
anything
, don’t you?” said Bianca enviously. She brushed Madrigal’s gorgeous fall of black hair, playing with it and fixing it, as if this were an incredible treat, as if Mary Lee, with the same hair, had not been around all year.

Sunday was the final day of a too long and too lonely visit. Mary Lee said to her sister, “I’m not going to ski today. You go on with Bianca and Mindy. I’m going to work on my report.”

They were fixing each other’s hair as they often had, a perfect reflection of the other without mirrors. Mary Lee stared at her lovely self; and at the self who was actually somebody else. Those hazel green eyes, so clear and true — so deep and unreadable. That rich olive skin, like a curtain between them. The long black lashes, finer than any mascara, dropping like a fringe to separate their lives. Each girl had caught her heavy black hair back twice, high on top of the head, and again low at the neck.

Who are you?
thought Mary Lee.
I don’t even know you!

“Of course you’re going to ski,” said Madrigal. “That’s what’s across the street. A ski slope. So you ski. Don’t be such a baby, MreeLee.”

“I’m not as coordinated as you are,” said Mary Lee.

Her sister poked her. “We are identical in leg muscles, too,” said Madrigal. “Now we’re going to ski. There are people out there I intend to impress. Two of us are more impressive than one of us.”

Who is out there for you to impress? thought Mary Lee. You own them all already.

It would happen, though. They would go out there, the two of them, and only one of them — Madrigal — would impress somebody.

Madrigal’s ski outfit was stunning.

Jacket and pants looked as if they had begun life as a taffeta Christmas ball gown: darkly striking crimson and green, plaid with black velvet trim and black boots. Madrigal was no oddity, but a trendsetter. Every other girl on the slopes was now out of date.

Including Madrigal’s twin.

For Mary Lee wore the same neon solids everyone else had that winter: Hers was turquoise. The color, which had seemed so splendid, which would hold its own against the lemon-yellow and hot-orange and lime-green of other skiers, was now pathetically out of style.

She was ashamed of her turquoise. She felt obvious. She felt loud and lacking in taste.

In fact, Mary Lee felt like an imposter. As if she and her sister had not started life as equally divided halves; as if Madrigal had drawn nine tenths of the personality, and Mary Lee the slight remaining fraction.

They could both wear their hair in the same black cloud of excitement, paint their lips the same dark rose, throw back their heads to laugh the same laugh … but even identical, Madrigal was more.

Despair overtook Mary Lee. She prayed that Madrigal was not reading her mind right now. What if Madrigal knew Mary Lee was eaten with jealousy over her own twin?

She thought to herself: Okay, this is my fault, this loneliness at school. It was a decision I stupidly made, not to try my hardest, not to be my best. But how can I start over? How do I make friends where I shrugged them off before?

Madrigal did not waver in her affection. Even now, during the mild argument that was the closest they had ever come to fighting, Madrigal tilted forward to touch her twin’s cheek with her lips.

“Okay, okay,” said Mary Lee reluctantly, breaking down, “we’ll ski. But you’d better break your leg in the same place I break mine, Madrigal.”

Madrigal laughed. “I have too much at stake to allow for hospital time.”

She meant Jon Pear.

Mary Lee’s cheeks grew hot. Unwanted jealousy whipped like an approaching blizzard through the snow of her heart.

Perhaps that was the great difference that people saw or suspected. Perhaps having a boy in your life lifted your spirits so high that everyone else wanted to hang onto the edge of your soaring heart. Take a free ride to love.

Mary Lee no longer knew what love was. Her twin had discarded her, her parents had shipped her away. If you could not trust the love of your family, could you trust the love of some unknown boy, or of anyone?

The mountain on which they skied rose beyond the playing fields. Girls supposedly came to the school for the famous academics, but as far as Mary Lee could tell, they came for the nearby boys and the winter sports. The two schools shared an indoor skating rink, so figure skating and ice hockey could be practiced year round. Each ski team could be at the top of the mountain within minutes of the end of classes.

So while there were several hundred girls that Mary Lee had failed to impress, there were also several hundred boys. Could Madrigal have her eyes on one of them? Why would somebody as deeply in love with a boy as Madrigal said she was with Jon Pear look at anyone else?

What was Jon Pear like? What if she met a boy as wonderful as Jon Pear? For he must be wonderful, or Madrigal would not adore him so.

“Do you and Jon Pear talk about me?” she said, wanting to be a necessary part of her sister’s conversation with Jon Pear.

Madrigal turned away from the twin who looked exactly like her to look in the mirror instead. When she spoke, her generous lips played with the single word and lingered upon it. “No.”

Madrigal smiled into the mirror and the mirror, of course, smiled back, equally satisfied. Madrigal’s lips moved, and Mary Lee read them:
Mirror
,
Mirror
,
On the Wall
,
Who Is the Fairest of Them All?

Mary Lee was chilled. The mirror cannot answer that question, she thought. We are equally fair.

Another word from Mother’s lecture flickered in Mary Lee’s memory like a reminder on the calendar:
unhealthy
.

“But Jon Pear must wonder what it’s like,” said Mary Lee quickly. “Everybody wants to know what it’s like to be identical twins.”

“I’m sure he does,” said Madrigal, giving her twin a hard look, “but he has the good manners not to refer to it.”

Mary Lee was cut to the bone.

“I don’t think he actually believes that I could have an identical twin,” said Madrigal, laughing now. She seemed to flirt with her reflection. “He’s in love with me. He says, ‘
Two of Madrigal? Impossible
.’” Madrigal went on ahead, dancing out the dormitory door in her dashing glittering ski suit. She was greeted with cries of ecstasy and friendship from girls who had never bothered with Mary Lee.

“Oh, Madrigal! This is such fun!”

“How neat to be an identical twin!”

“Tell us all about it. What’s it really like?”

They did not ask Mary Lee what it was like.

Mary Lee became part of the masses, blending in with ordinary skiers, while Madrigal was fascinating and special and An Identical Twin.

The boarding school’s bus carried the skiers and their equipment the single mile to the lifts. Everybody got out, carefully maneuvering long skis and poles and making put-your-eye-out jokes.

Madrigal scampered ahead of Mary Lee. Way ahead. Deep in a throng of new, but close, friends. Laughing and teasing and thoroughly enjoying herself.

Mary Lee pulled out an old ugly knit cap and stuffed her heavy hair beneath it. The cap was not a good match for the turquoise ski suit; it was royal blue: together the colors snarled. Mary Lee became plain. An inconvenient blue splat.

She struggled even to trudge in her sister’s wake, her abandoned heart no longer pumping as it should.

Halfway to the lifts, Madrigal paused. Around her, the crowd had expanded as if it were being multiplied by some geometric factor; as if some magic algebra class were using the creatures on this slope for their problematic equations, moving and multiplying what had once been human beings.

Fear clogged Mary Lee’s arteries and thoughts.

Mary Lee
, came a pulsing wordless communication.
Come
.

Madrigal was calling. The lovely unspoken words had returned.

Madrigal just figured out how lonely and lost I am without her. So we’re back. Twins again, touching without speech again!

Madrigal entered the immense lodge, and Mary Lee flew in the building, too, broken heart mending as she ran.

“
I knew you’d come
.” They said it together, inflections on the same syllables, lips equally lingering on the
m
.

Madrigal huffed out a breath of relief. “I was afraid we’d lost it, MreeLee.”

“Me, too,” said Mary Lee, her eyes filling.

The twins embraced. The joy was almost too much to bear.

Madrigal pushed Mary Lee into a girls’ room. “I feel so bad because you have on that old rag of a ski suit and I’ve got such a beauty. Listen, MreeLee.”

Mary Lee’s heart turned over with love for this twin who outshone her.

“We’ll switch,” said Madrigal. “You be the star here. This is your school. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, trying to leap into your life as well as my own.”

How she loved this sister, who would come through for her in the end. We’re still twins, Mary Lee thought, passionately relieved. “It’s okay,” she said. “You look perfect in it.”

Madrigal giggled. “Then so would you, Miss Identical Twin.”

They undressed with lightning speed, the way they had since they were toddlers. “You be Madrigal, MreeLee,” said her twin, zipping Mary Lee into the gleaming taffeta plaid.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll switch.” Madrigal’s wild smile demanded a return, and Mary Lee gave it, smiling wildly back, though comprehending nothing.

“You join them as Madrigal. You answer when they say Maddy. You be the one they want. You laugh and ski and be silly with them. You have hot chocolate and listen to tapes and dance in the dark as their brand-new extra-special-Event friend.” Madrigal yanked the ugly blue cap down over
her
hair this time. “Then tonight, when they’ve completely confused which of us is which, we’ll tell who’s who. It’ll be hysterical. Everybody will have a good laugh. It’ll help. I promise. It’ll get you started up again, like a stalled motor.”

Madrigal lifted her hands to hold her sister’s, and, of course, her sister’s hands had lifted at the same second to hold hers. In the unfathomable way of identical minds, they had each chosen to wear a silver ring on the third finger of the right hand, to wear clear polish, no watch, and two slim silver bracelets.

Madrigal pushed Mary Lee gently in the small of her back, sending her sister out into the group, shining like a Christmas decoration.

Mary Lee was enveloped in Third Floor girls. Mindy and Bianca and Marilyn cried, “Madrigal! What happened to you? Where’d you go?”

“Come on!”

“Time’s wasting!”

“Snow’s melting!”

So many exclamation points. So much excitement. All because they thought she was somebody else.

W
ITH SO MANY FRIENDS
clustered around her, the new Madrigal was slow to reach the ski lift. Girls bumped companionably against her, and giggled, and offered sticks of gum or candy. Where once they had seemed sharks swarming, chewing at her with cruel appetites, they were now pleasant smiling girls having a good time together.

Is there a lovelier word in the English language, thought Mary Lee, than
friends
?

A shock of disloyalty hit her. Of course there was a lovelier word than
friends
.
Twins
was lovelier; lovelier by far.

She looked to see where the new Mary Lee was, but her twin, since she was alone, and therefore able to wriggle through the crowds, had actually arrived first at the chair lift. In spite of such a crush of people waiting in line, no one stepped up to share the seat with the new Mary Lee.

Alone, swinging on the chair lift, went the turquoise suit and the ugly blue cap. The lift careened forward several feet, jerked to a partial stop, and then jerked on. The head of the girl jerked with it, as if on a stem, not a neck.

Not one other person at the mountain was all by herself.

She felt terribly, desperately, sorry for that girl.

You’re Madrigal right now, Mary Lee reminded herself. Stop worrying about that loser. Tonight she’ll evaporate. You’ll dispose of pitiful Mary Lee. You’ll be popular, identical-twinned Mary Lee.

Mindy pushed the group to the head of the lift line, talking and laughing. Mindy, the roommate who still wanted to eat with her, still trudged to the library with her, still cheerfully yelled her name across the campus. “Madrigal, we have another long weekend in March,” said Mindy. “Won’t you visit then? Or — I know! Would you like to visit me over spring vacation? We’ll be going to the islands, of course. You don’t need a tan, you were born with the perfect tan, but I’m hideous and have to spruce up my skin. You’ll come, won’t you.”

Mindy spoke with the complete assurance of one who knows her invitation is irresistible.

“Honestly, Madrigal,” said Bianca, “you really floored us when we found out there was an identical twin.”

“You’re not like your sister at all,” said Mindy.

“You,” pointed out Bianca, “are interesting.”

Mary Lee killed time by yanking the ribbons out of her hair and letting her black tresses spread in the wind. Far ahead and up the mountain, her twin reversed the hair motion, tucking hers even more completely up under the blue cap. Pretty gleaming ski costumes by the dozen shone around, and the girl they thought was Mary Lee stood out like a mistake.