“Angie!” I lock her in a bear hug.
“Hey, that’s too tight, let me go.”
“No.”
“Mare…”
“Not until you tell me you miss me.”
“Ma, get her off of me, please.”
“Let your sister alone. You’re too old for that. Too old.” My mother swats me in the arm with the spoon.
“Too old to hug my own twin? Since when?”
She hits me again.
“Ouch! What is this,Mommy Dearest?” I let Angie go.
“Yeah, grow up,” she says, with a short laugh. Her eyes look large and luminous under a short haircut-our childhood pixie resurrected. She’s dressed in jeans and a Penn sweatshirt just like mine, having left her Halloween costume back at the convent. We’re twins again, but for the hair and the fact that Angie looks rested and serene, with a solid spiritual core.
“Look at her, Ma, she looks so good!” I say. “Angie, you look great!”
“Stop, you.” Angie can’t take a compliment, never could.
“Turn around. Let me see.”
She does a obligatory swish-turn in her jeans.
“You wearing underwear?”
She laughs gaily. For a split second, it’s a snap shot of the twin I grew up with. I catch glimpses of the old Angie only now and then. The rest of the time, she’s a twin I hardly know.
“Basta, Maria!Basta! ” chides my mother happily.
“So you’re out of uniform. I can’t believe it.”
“I changed at a Hojo’s after I left.” She sets her purse on the floor.
“Why?”
“No special reason. Tired of you making all those habit jokes, I guess.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“Well I love the sweatshirt. You look like yourself again.”
“Like I didn’t know you’d say that,” Angie says.
“Look at this hair!” My mother runs an arthritic hand through Angie’s hair. “So soft. Just like a baby’s.”
Angie smiles, and I wonder why she’s so accepting of my mother’s touch and not my own.
“Look at this hair, Matty!” my mother shouts delightedly. “Just like a baby’s!”
My father smiles. “You got your baby back, Mama.”
Angie positively glows in my mother’s arms. “I can’t get over how good you look, Ange. I think I’m in love,” I say.
“Will you stop already?” She wiggles away from my mother, still smiling.
“Plus I’m not used to you looking so much better than me. You look like theafter picture and I look like thebefore.”
“That’s because you work too hard.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did you make a partner yet?”
“No, they decide in two months. I’m going crazy. I hate life.” I wish I could tell her about the partnership rumors and the strange car, but we won’t have any time alone unless I waylay her.
“And it’s a hit! Out to right field! Might be deep enough…It is!” screams the Phillies announcer, Richie Ashburn, but my father’s too excited at seeing Angie again to look at the television. My parents miss Angie, even though they’re proud of her decision. They’re proud of both their twins, the one who serves God, and the other who serves Mammon.
We troop into the kitchen to talk and drink percolated coffee from chipped cups. That’s all we’ll do today, as Richie Ashburn calls a high-decibel double-header to an empty living room. I start the ball rolling over the first cup, whining about my caseload, but my father quickly takes over the conversation. He can’t hear when others talk, so his only choice is to filibuster. None of us minds this much, least of all my mother, who footnotes his narrative of their courtship.
My father takes a breather after lunch and my mother holds forth about the new butcher, who doesn’t trim off enough fat. She tells a few stories of her own, mostly about our childhood, and I realize how badly she needs to talk to someone who can hear her. Angie must know this too, for she doesn’t look bored, and, truth to tell, I’m not either. But we both draw the line after dinner, when she launches into the story of a maiden aunt’s gallbladder operation. Angie seizes the opportunity to head for the bathroom and I follow her upstairs, hoping to get her alone. I reach the bathroom door just as she’s about to close it.
“Ange, wait. It’s me.” I stick my foot in the door.
“What are you doing?” Angie looks at me through the crack.
“I want to talk to you.”
“Move your foot. I’ll be right out.”
“What am I, the Boston Strangler? Let me in.”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Number one or number two?”
“Mary, we’re not kids anymore.”
“Right. Number one or number two?”
She shakes her head. “Number one.”
“Okay. So number one, you can let me in.”
“It can’t wait two minutes?”
“I don’t want Mom to hear. Will you open the goddamn door?”
So she does, and I take a precarious seat on the curved edge of the tub, an old claw-and-ball-foot. Angie stands above me with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she says.
“You can pee if you have to.”
“I can wait. Why don’t you tell me what you have to say.”
A little ember of anger starts to glow inside my chest. “What’s the big deal, Angie? We took baths together until we were ten years old. Now you won’t let me in the bathroom?”
She closes the lid on the toilet seat and sits down on it with a quiet sigh. The old Angie would have snapped back, would have given as good as she got, but that Angie went into the convent and never came out. “Is something the matter?” she asks patiently.
By now my teeth are on edge. “No.”
“Look, Mary, let’s not fight. What’s the matter?”
I look down at the tiny white octagons that make up the tile floor. The grout between them is pure as sugar. My father, a tile setter until he popped a disc in his back, regrouts the bathroom every year. The porcelain gleams like something you’d find at Trump Tower. My father does beautiful work.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Angie says.
I smile. We used to be able to read each other’s minds; I guess Angie can still read mine. “What was it Pop always said?”
“‘It’s not a job, it’s acraft.’”
“Right.” I look up, and her face has softened. I take a deep breath. “I don’t know where to start, Ange. So much is going on. At work. At home. I feel tense all the time.”
“What’s happening?”
“It’s the last couple of weeks until they decide who’s partner. I heard they’re only picking two of us. Everything I do is under the microscope. Plus I’ve been getting these phony phone calls. And last night I could swear a car was watching me from across the street.”
She frowns. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“But why would anybody be watching you? You’re not involved in any trouble, are you? I mean, in the work you
