“Try harder!” he yelled.
She tried harder. But as he grew, they were so different. Lincoln was serious, steadfast, methodical, and liked things to be a certain way and a certain way only. Having a prominent feminist as a mother had made him neither wildly political himself nor a misogynist. Once, when he was a teenager and some reporter had asked him if he was a feminist, he’d said, “Well, obviously,” offended at the question. But that was the extent of it. He was conventional, reserved, yet their love was mutual, established, sometimes distracted, and never in doubt.
She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last. Lincoln’s increasing lack of neediness was hard for Faith sometimes, but it was also something of a relief to think that he was all right on his own. In this way, they were actually alike.
“Now tell me what’s going on with you,” she said to him.
“Another time. Go have your massage, Mom.”
She watched the phone go dark, then held it in her hand for a few more seconds. It was the closest she could get, these days, to holding Lincoln himself.
Faith pushed through the glass door of the massage place and entered the anteroom where young Chinese women sat on a sofa, waiting for their appointments and walkins. One of the women stood and nodded, and Faith nodded back. “You want thirty, sixty, or ninety minute?” the woman asked, and Faith said, “Sixty.” Then with no further comment she was led down a long unlit hall; from inside the curtained cubicles came the sounds of flesh being battered by hands.
The masseuse, whose name was Sue, started on her through the towel, working along the spine and shoulders and neck, oh the neck, all of which were desperate for attention. The long strokes down the length of the back, punctuated by occasional sharp pokes, dropped Faith stupefied into a hole, as if the face cradle were a tunnel and she was going down inside it, to the place where everything waited that had come before.
* * *
? ? ?
They were twins, having shared a uterus, and then, later on, a bedroom. That bedroom, on West Eighth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, wasn’t much bigger than the uterus had been, relative to their growing bodies, and so a red gingham curtain hung from a rod dividing the two halves, providing what passed for privacy in that household. At night, though, lying in their separate curtained compartments, neither of them really wanted privacy. They just wanted to talk. They were born six minutes apart in the winter of 1943, wartime, Faith first and then Philip, and their differences were obvious to everyone. She was the student, the serious one, beautiful but remote; he was more popular and sunny and accessible. She worked harder, and he slid by on slapdash charm and athletics.
At night, through the curtain, Faith and Philip asked each other advice about dating. “Well, the first thing I would say is don’t date Owen Lansky,” Philip said. “He will definitely want to go all the way.”
She was touched by his protectiveness, and he was proved right about Owen Lansky, who was extremely pushy and had a head of oiled hair that, if you were locked in an embrace with him, would leave your face shining wet.
They often talked so late into the night that their mother sometimes appeared in the doorway in her robe and said, “You two! Go to bed!”
“We’re just talking, Mom,” said Philip. “We have a lot to say.”
“What do I need to do to get you to sleep?” she asked. “Do I have to hit you over the head with a frying pan?”
“Save your frying pan for breakfast,” Faith said. “Good night, Mom!” As soon as their mother left, Faith and Philip returned to their fevered and intimate conversation.
It wasn’t just brother and sister who were close. The entire Frank family made up a kind of four-person team. They had boisterous dinners, and they played charades; all four of them were crack players. When guests came over for the evening, they were asked, “Do you want to play charades?” and if the answer was no, they were rarely invited back.
Throughout the twins’ childhood, their overworked housewife mother, Sylvia, and tolerant, easily amused tailor father, Martin, were encouraging to both of them. They were made to feel as if what they did, the path they were on, their whole way of being in the world, was good enough. Their childhood was happy, and the transition into adulthood was meant to be happy too. But one night their parents said they needed to have a “family discussion.”
“Let’s all sit in the living room,” said Martin. Sylvia sat beside him. It was unusual to see her just sitting there, not fussing around or pulling something out of the oven.
Philip pointed to Faith. “She did it, not me. It was all her. I had nothing to do with it.” Faith rolled her eyes.
“Here’s the situation,” said Martin. “You know you’re not the only ones in this house who stay up late talking. We do too. And one conversation we’ve been having late at night is about your education. We’re both so proud of you. But as your parents, we worry.”
“What are you getting at?” Faith asked. She had a sense, almost immediately, that this was about her.
“Every day there are terrible stories in the newspaper,” said Sylvia.
“We used to live in a safe country,” said Martin. “But just last week in the paper I read about a man who hurt a girl on a college campus. She was walking back to her dormitory late at night. We don’t want you to find yourself in a situation like that, Faith. I don’t think we could bear it.”
“I’ll walk places with friends at college,” said Faith. “Twos and threes, I promise.”
“It’s not just that,” said Sylvia. Then she looked at Martin, both of them unbearably uneasy.
“Sex,” Martin finally said, looking down. “There’s that to think about, honey.”
Oh, don’t worry, Faith thought. I’ll definitely do that in twos.
“There will be pressures on you,” said her father. “You’ve been very sheltered up until now, and I’m afraid you don’t know what college men might want and expect.”
For more than a year, Faith had been quietly thinking about going away to college to study a subject like sociology or political science or anthropology. She had mentioned college once in a while, and neither of her parents had given her a sense that they wouldn’t let her leave home and go away to school. Though they had been surprisingly vague about the subject, she had somehow trusted that when the time came, it would all work out.
“Please don’t do this to me,” she said. For she wanted exactly what her parents feared. She saw herself studying, but then putting down the book to embrace a man who would embrace her back. “I’m a good student,” she tried, her voice catching.
“Yes you are, and we want to protect you. We want you to live at home,” said her father. “There are excellent schools in the city.”
“What about Philip?” Faith asked.
“Philip will go away to school,” her father said easily. Faith glanced at her brother, who looked away. “It will be good for him. Look,” he went on, “you’re different people, and you need different things.”
Faith stood up, as if somehow towering over her sitting parents would help her cause. “I don’t want to live at home,” she said. She turned to her brother. “Tell them you agree with me,” she said to him.
“I don’t know, Faith,” he said. “I think I should just stay out of it.”