“She could not. She’s all the time crying and talking to herself and doing stupid stuff.”
“Well, she has to talk to herself,” Nela objected. “There’s nobody else there for her to talk to.”
“A boy wouldn’t,” said Bertran stoutly. “A boy wouldn’t talk to himself like that. He’d do something!”
“Oh, pooh,” said Nela. “What would you do?”
“I’d smash that caterpillar for one thing.”
“Boys are always smashing something,” sneered Nela.
Bertran subsided with a glower.
“I’ll read something for you tomorrow night,” his mother promised. “You pick it out.”
“Read the turtle,” he demanded when the time came. “Not the Ninja one, the other one!”
Marla wondered why the turtle was more a boy’s story than Alice had been, but Nela was making no objection so she burrowed for the raggedy old book. It was behind the fairytale tapes, on the bottom shelf, much creased and worn and stained with jam or something worse. It was called The Turtle Who Wanted to Fly.
“‘Once there was a turtle,’” she read, telling of the turtle who swam in the pond and dwelt in the mud, who ate green things and wormy things and listened to the splash of water and the humming wings of the dragonflies, who saw the swallows dipping the silver surface of the water.
“‘Came autumn, a time of gray thorn and gray leaf and gray mist rising,’” she read. “‘Turtle saw the glimmer of the swallows in the evening mist and wondered at them, for he could not see them clearly, darting as they did, their silver bellies and sapphire backs making bright arcs and darting dances along the ripples. “Oh, I want to see them,” cried the turtle. “See them close and feel their feathers and the whisper of their wings, for I believe if I could see them closely, I could learn to fly….”
““‘To see them closely, you must go to the secret sanctuary of the birds,” said the bullfrog, whose eyes were so constructed that he could see only the movement of the birds, not the birds themselves. “My grandfather told me of the place high on the windy mountains.”
“‘ So turtle went, by long ways and sad ways and hard ways always, gray tree and gray stone and gray wind blowing, until he came to the secret sanctuary of the birds.’”
“And there he saw the birds, as he had longed to do. And there he was made a certain offer that he could not accept.”
“I don’t like that story,” cried Nela, tears on her cheeks, anger in her eyes.
“I do,” said Bertran, wiping his eyes on his forearm. “It’s real, that story. Things are like that, they are.”
“Only a fairy tale,” said his mother, shocked at the depth of his feeling. “Berty, it’s only a story!”
“Real,” he insisted. “The way he feels.”
“You know,” said Marla in a slightly confused and worried voice, “if you practice, very soon you’ll read well enough to read to yourselves. Then you can each read what you like.”
She wiped Nela’s tears and found herself longing for the person who had once wiped her own tears, her older sister Sizzy. It had always been Sizzy who had read to Marla when she was a child, always Sizzy who comforted her when things went wrong. Sizzy had left home long ago. Sizzy would be in her forties by now. Marla hadn’t heard from her in over two years and didn’t even know for certain she was still alive, but at that moment, wiping Nela’s tears away, powerless to help whatever was really wrong, Marla wanted Sizzy very badly.
When the twins were six, they went to first grade at Holy Redeemer parochial school. The nun in charge—the school actually had a nun in charge, and some teaching nuns as well, despite the diminishing number of religious nationwide—made a halfhearted attempt to refuse them admittance on the grounds they didn’t live in the parish. There were other nonparish children in the school, however, and Marla had a few choice words to say about the Pope’s stand on birth control and the sanctity of life, ending with the question: Would Sister have preferred that the twins had been aborted?
Sister, shamefaced, said no, and forgive me, and we’ll work it out somehow. The perennial rest-room question came up yet again, and was solved simply by letting the twins use the private toilet off the teachers’ lounge, which was, presumably, unisex anyhow. Marla bought a duplicate of the small stool the children used at home, one they could move from one side of the toilet to the other, as necessity demanded, so both could sit while one was eliminating.
There was some teasing from the other kids to begin with, though old Sister Jean Luc soon put a stop to that. The twins sat at the back of the room, so the other students couldn’t stare, occupying two chairs set side by side behind a small table brought in from the library where it had formerly held the big dictionary. Everyone tried very hard to be understanding and civilized, and the twins did not feel at all handicapped at any intellectual level.
Sports were something else again. The only exercise they were able to engage in was walking, which they managed in the manner of a three-legged race; Bertran, wearing his elevator shoes, his inside arm about Nela’s shoulders, Nela’s inside arm thrust into the front of her jacket, their outside arms swinging freely. The only problem with walking any distance was that neither of them enjoyed it very much. Their single heart had to work quite hard just to keep them both going; putting extra strain upon it fatigued them both to exhaustion.
Anything that required hitting a moving ball was out. Anything involving hitting a stationary ball was out, since neither of them could get their arms into a good position for whacking anything. Sister Jean Luc found them crying in the teachers’ lounge one afternoon after a particularly trying attempt at kickball.
“Why?” demanded Bertran,
