“Look,” said Surgeon A to Surgeon B, running his trembling hands across his bald head, “granted, we can come out with some reasonable-looking sex organs, male and female. But, we do this, these persons are going to have a hell of a life. Where’re they going to go to the bathroom, for God’s sake. Whose locker room do they use at school?”
The surgeons attempted to reason with the parents, in the presence of their priest.
“He’s a boy,” said Lek stubbornly. “His name is Bertran.”
“A daughter,” insisted Marla, who was angry with Leksy for getting her into this. Also, she knew in her heart she would never have another child and it was this time or never. “My little Nela.”
“We pray God will bless your knowledge and skill,” said Father Jabowsky, who was convinced that whatever the doctors did was irrelevant, that sexual organs could be dispensed with entirely for they would make no conceivable difference in the next world, which was the only one that mattered.
The surgeons, who thought they would probably be sued if they did and would undoubtedly be sued if they didn’t, bowed to the inevitable, called their attorneys, and had five pounds of waivers generated to be signed by both parents, their parents, and all the relatives they could find. The surgeons who had been recruited to do the work itself were professors emeritus at the medical school, reconstructive surgeons called out of retirement on the theory that by the time the babies themselves got old enough to sue, the doctors would be dead. So far, no one had mentioned malpractice out loud, but no one was taking any chances.
The operations, several of them, were performed. Tissue healed, several times. Time went by. On a fine spring day at St. Seraph’s, the twins were christened Bertran and Nela Korsyzczy, children of Mother Church, inheritors of the faith. Bertran wore a little blue velvet suit with a white lace collar. Nela wore a pink satin dress with an embroidered ruffle at the bottom. Marla held them, beaming with determined cheerfulness. Lek stood at one side, little Bertran’s right hand curled around one of his big red fingers. Marla kept her mind on all the pretty little dresses she would get to make when Nela started school. Lek was wondering how old his son would have to be before he could start teaching him baseball. He was also resolutely not looking at the image of the Virgin standing in the little chapel, just behind the baptistry. Recently Lek had the feeling the Virgin had somehow let him down.
Neither Lek nor Marla were being realistic about the situation, but then, it was a peculiar situation to be realistic about. Both fully expected the day would come when the children would be separated—“As techniques improve,” the doctor had said repeatedly in his most emollient voice—and until then (surely not long! Not more than a year or so!) it was merely a matter of prayer and patience.
But no more sex. Lek couldn’t bring himself to do it anymore, at least, not with Marla. Not seeing where it had led before. He blamed himself, keeping after her that way. He’d told her it was his moral duty, but hell, he’d liked it. Every time. He’d lusted after her, and lust was one of the seven deadly sins, and maybe he was responsible for this having happened.
Lek didn’t know about the medication, of course. Marla had never told him. Somehow, she felt it was better not to. Maybe she was responsible for what had happened. She considered telling Lek she couldn’t have any more children, which both she and the doctor thought to be true, because during the cesarean he had spotted certain anomalies that hadn’t shown up on tests, but what if something miraculous happened and she got pregnant again? She couldn’t make sure she wouldn’t, by using birth control, because Lek would find out somehow. Even though the doctor offered to put up pills in a bottle with a different label, like for anemia or something, she’d have to confess it to the priest. And somehow Lek would find out. So, she didn’t, he didn’t, they didn’t.
Which meant, since both of them were normal, with normal appetites, that they became more than a little snappish with each other. Whenever things were difficult, however, throughout all their trials, Lek reminded himself of Marla’s words on their wedding morning, when she had said to him four times was too much. Like a keepsake gem, that remembered moment gained importance as time went by, losing its own content and context to become an abstraction freighted with other, deeper meanings. As other enjoyments failed, it was the memory of how he had felt at that moment, the great gush of pride and wonder and fulfilled manhood, uncorrupted by actual memories, that enabled him to be unfailingly loving to the twins. Marla did not share that memory, but she had other myths that served a similar purpose.
Marla made clothes for both the twins until Bertran got to the age where little boys stopped being babies, and then she bought him jeans and checked shirts and tiny boots. Nela always wore dresses, wee pinafores with blouses and skirts with suspenders, and shorty white socks and black Mary Janes. The flesh between them was always kept decently covered by a dark length of stockinette that wrapped around the join in a kind of sleeve and had Velcro tabs to fasten it securely to itself and to the matching holes in the twins’ clothing.
Lek built a double-width swing in the backyard, and a teeter-totter with a forked end, and a double-width slide. When they got to the right age, Marla tried to enroll them in nursery school, but there weren’t any willing to take the twins except one for exceptional children, all the way over in Peaks Hill. They tried it for a week, but
