Marla would have told them to be patient, it was only for a time. Sister Jean Luc was less comforting though more truthful. She had a strong feeling that if the children could be separated, someone would have done it by now, that encouraging them to think they could be separated was much akin to lying to them.
“God always has a purpose for everything,” she said firmly. “The fact that you were born in this strange way and must live differently means that God needs something from you he cannot get from ordinary people. Of course it is hard. Being a tool in God’s hands is always hard.” Sister Jean Luc considered herself a tool in God’s hands, knew how hard it was, and believed what she was saying. Her words were implacably convincing.
Thereafter, most often at night when they were in bed together, they would remind one another of what Sister Jean Luc had said. When the day had been difficult, they would remind each other that being a screwdriver wasn’t easy, being a hammer wasn’t easy, being a pipe wrench wasn’t easy. The idea wasn’t exactly comforting, but it gave them something to hold on to, something to bolster one another with.
“Being a left-handed jackplane isn’t easy,” Bertran would say, trying for a laugh.
“Being a plumber’s helper isn’t easy,” Nela would respond with a giggle.
Though they shared many of their thoughts and fears, they tended to keep their dreams and longings to themselves. Bertran dreamed water-skiing dreams in which he skimmed across white-topped waves. Nela fantasized being a ballet dancer and not merely a ballet dancer but a premiere danseuse, leaping weightless through waves of applause. They feared to share these visions with one another and had no way to share them with anyone else. They had learned to be wary of one another’s feelings, since the unhappiness of one inevitably became the unhappiness of both. They shared misery through the bloodstream, like oxygen. This did not stop their bickering, which those closest to them eventually came to understand was more a recreation than an expression of real annoyance.
They encountered puberty, as their pediatrician had feared they would. At age fourteen, various indeterminate organs began pumping hormones into their bodies and an endocrinologist was added to the working group of physicians who met from time to time to confer on the matter of the twins.
“There’s no way we’re going to be able to keep her on estrogens without him being on them too,” the hormone expert snorted. “No way we’re going to get him on testosterone without her growing a beard.”
“What are they producing naturally?” one of the surgeons asked.
“A most god-awful mix,” gloomed the endocrinologist. “Like a ragout.”
“They’re both growing pubic hair and breasts, if you can believe that.”
“Feminizing hormones, then.”
“Well, yes. Except they’re both growing hair on their chests and faces too.”
“Don’t forget the libido,” said the pediatrician. “Their mother says they’re definitely sexual.” That hadn’t been what Marla had meant, exactly, though she had mentioned the fact.
“With each other?” asked the geneticist, inexplicably horrified.
“Who else?” sniggered someone, unforgivably.
The twins were, in fact, sensual with one another and had been for some time. Though their carefully constructed organs were not reproductive in nature, they were well equipped with nerve endings. Bertran and Nela, deprived of many other joys, had discovered certain mutual comforts when they were about six. Prohibitions against such activity, which they encountered in religion class and which all seemed to involve sins against reproductive nature, simply did not apply in their case. So Bertran had assured Nela, when they were about twelve. Nela told him she was sure Father or the nuns could think up a reason since they could think up reasons most everything nice was sinful.
“Even though we can’t ever make a baby,” she said. “The doctor told us that.”
“We could pretend to have one,” Bertran suggested tentatively, hearing sorrow in her voice but uncertain whether her grief was related to the matter of babies.
“I suppose we could,” she said doubtfully, wondering why Bertran would suggest such a thing, but thinking perhaps he was sad over not being able to be a father. “What shall we name him.”
“Turtle,” said Bertran, the word coming out with no thought at all. “Call him Turtle. Turtle Korsyzczy.”
“Not Korsyzczy,” she objected. “What happens is, when he grows up a little, he changes his name. He says, ‘Korsyzczy is too much of a mouthful. I want a name that says who I am, not who I’m related to.’”
“Well, who is he then?”
“Well, he’s our turtle, Berty. Gray-wind-rising turtle. Only, let’s pretend he can fly. Call him Turtle Bird.”
Bertran thought about this. “I don’t like Bird,” he said. “It sounds too much like that long ago president’s wife, the one our history teacher said got the billboards down along the highways. Something else with wings, maybe.”
“Butterfly? Angel? Moth?” Nela suggested. “Eagle? Owl? Duck?”
“Dove,” he said suddenly, liking the sound of it. “Turtledove. Like in the Bible, the voice of the turtle, you know.”
Turtledove he became, their child, Turtledove. He, a boy, and never any discussion about that. Nela hadn’t demurred. Their child was a boy by virtue of being a “he,” but he never did anything that could not have been done equally well by a she or an it. The twins made up marvelous stories about him, though they never mentioned Turtledove to anyone else, any more than they mentioned what went on between the two of them. And aside from Marla’s plaint to the pediatrician and the pediatrician’s sneer to his colleagues, no one mentioned their intimate activity to anyone, least of all to the twins’ father.
Lek was, therefore, totally unprepared when he entered the twins’ room without knocking one morning and found them intimately engaged. He had entered silently; they didn’t know he was there. In wordless shock, blank-faced and blind-eyed, he departed as soundlessly, left the house, and went
