“Though Ernest Hemingway’s mother did it,” said Jorrie.
“Excuse me? Did what?”
“Put Ernie in a dress.”
“Right.”
The twins often revert to a previous point in their ongoing conversation, though they know better than to do that if anyone else is around. It’s annoying; not to them, they can pick up each other’s dropped stitches, but it can make other people feel excluded. Or else – nowadays – it can make other people feel they are missing a cog or two.
“And then he blew his head off,” said Tin. “Which I personally have no intention of doing.”
“Better not,” said Jorrie. “It would make such a mess. Brain salad all over the walls. Leap off a bridge, if the urge comes over you.”
“Thanks a bundle,” says Tin. “I’ll keep that suggestion in mind.”
“Any time.”
That’s how they go on: like a ’30s wisecrackers’ movie. The Marxes. Hepburn and Tracy. Nick and Nora Charles, minus the chain-drinking of martinis, which Jorrie and Tin can’t handle any more. They skate over the surfaces, chilled and thin and shiny; they avoid the depths. It wears Tin out a bit, their doubles act. Possibly Jorrie feels the same, but they both understand that they have to keep up their ends.
Tin turned into a pansy anyway, which the twins purport to regard as a hilarious booby trap sprung on their mother, even though she was dead by the time he stopped concealing his pansyhood. The role betrayal should have gone the other way round – Jorrie having been the child gender-crosser as far as the sailor outfits went – but she could never make the jump to lesbianism because she didn’t like other women much.
Why would she, considering their mother? Not only was Mother Maeve dumb as a sack of hammers, but as time went by and her grief over their exploded father failed to abate, she’d morphed into a binge drinker who’d robbed the twins’ piggy banks for booze money. She also brought home oafs and thugs, for the purpose – said Tin, when describing these episodes at dinner parties, much later – “for the purpose of sexual congress.” Too funny! When the twins would hear the front door opening, they’d skin out the back. Or they’d hide in the cellar, then creep upstairs once things went quiet to spy on the congressional goings-on; or they’d eavesdrop if the bedroom door was closed.
What had they felt about all that when they were children? They can’t really recall, since they’ve papered over the too-frequently-repeated primal scene with so many layers of harebrained and possibly mythological narration that the original simple outlines have been obscured. (Did the dog really run outside with a large black brassiere in its mouth and bury it in the backyard? Did they even have a dog? Did Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx? Did Jason make off with the Golden Fleece? It’s the same sort of question.)
For Tin, the anecdotal family humour has long ceased to be amusing. Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick. And it meant that their life was free of the oafs and thugs by the time they went to university. Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Two of the oafs had the nerve to come to the funeral, which may explain Jorrie’s fixation on funerals. She still feels she shouldn’t have let those assholes get away with it: turning up at the grave side, pretending to be sad, telling the twins what a fine and kind-hearted woman their mother had been, what a good friend. “Friend, like shit! All they wanted was an easy lay!” she’d raged. She ought to have called them on it; she ought to have made a scene. Punched them in the nose.
Tin’s view is that maybe these men really were sad. Is it so out of the question that they could actually have loved Mother Maeve, in one or two or even three senses of the word? Amor, voluptas, caritas. But he’s kept that view to himself: to express it would be too irritating to Jorrie, especially if he includes the Latin. Jorrie has scant patience with anything Latin. It’s a part of his life she’s never been able to grasp. Why waste your life on a bunch of fusty, forgotten scribblers in a dead language? He was so smart, he was so talented, he could have been … (A long list of things he could have been would follow, none of them in any way possible.)
So best not to hit that button.
“Oafs and thugs” was a phrase they’d lifted from their eighth-grade principal who’d harangued the whole school about the dangers of turning into oafs and thugs, especially if you threw snowballs with rocks in them or wrote swear words on the blackboard. “Oafs vs. Thugs” became, briefly, a schoolyard game invented by Tin in his popular, pre-pansy period. It was something like Capture the Flag and was played only on the boys’ side of the playground. Girls could not be oafs and thugs, said Tin: only boys, which made Jorrie resentful.
It was she who came up with the idea of calling Mother Maeve’s on-again, off-again gentleman callers – “or you could say, in-again, out-again,” Tin would quip later – the Oafs and Thugs. That ruined the game for Tin; no doubt it contributed to his pansyhood, he decided later. “Don’t blame me,” said Jorrie. “I didn’t invite them home.”
“Darling, I’m not blaming you, I’m thanking you,” Tin said. “I’m deeply grateful.” Which, by that time – after he’d sorted out a few things – he really was.
Their mother wasn’t drunk all the time. Her binges took place only on weekends: she had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military widow’s pension being so minuscule. And she did love the twins in her own way.
“At least she wasn’t too violent,” Jorrie would say. “Though she got carried away.”
“Everyone spanked their kids then. Everyone got carried away.” Indeed it was a point of honour to compare your slice of corporal punishment with those of other children, and to exaggerate. Slippers, belts, rulers, hairbrushes, ping-pong paddles: those were the parental weapons of choice. It made the young twins sad that they didn’t have a father to administer such beatings, only ineffectual Mother Maeve, whom they could reduce to tears by pretending to be mortally injured, whom they could tease with relative impunity, from whom they could run away. There were two of them and only one of her, so they ganged up.
“I suppose we were heartless,” Jorrie would say.
“We were disobedient. We talked back. We were out of control. But adorable, you have to grant that.”
“We were brats. Heartless little brats. We showed no mercy,” Jorrie sometimes adds. Is it regret, or bragging?
On the cusp of adolescence, Jorrie had a painful experience with one of the oafs – a sneak attack from which Tin failed to defend her, being asleep at the time. That has weighed on him. It must have messed up her life in regards to men, though most likely her life would have been messed up anyway. She deals with this incident now by making fun of it – “I was ravished by a troll!” – but she hasn’t always managed that. She was downright sullen on the subject of rape in the early ’70s when so many women were going on the rampage, but she seems to have got over that by now.
Molesting isn’t everything, in Tin’s view. He himself never got molested by the oafs, but his relationships with men were just as scrambled, and if anything more so. Jorrie said he had a problem with love: he conceptualizes it too much. He said Jorrie didn’t conceptualize it enough. That was back when love was still a topic of conversation for them.
“We should put all of our lovers in a blender,” Jorrie said once. “Mix them up, average them out.” Tin said she had a brutalist way of putting things.
The truth is, thinks Tin, that the twins never loved anyone except each other. Or they didn’t love anyone unconditionally. Their other loves had many conditions.
“Look who just croaked,” says Jorrie now. “Big Dick Metaphor!”
“That nickname could apply to a lot of men,” says Tin. “Though I assume you mean someone in particular. I can see your ears twitching, so he must be important to you.”
“Three guesses,” says Jorrie. “Hint: He was at the Riverboat a lot, that summer when I was doing their bookkeeping, volunteer, part-time.”
“Because you wanted to hang out with the bohemians,” said Tin. “I do have a vague recollection. So who? Blind Sonny Terry?”
“Don’t be silly,” says Jorrie. “He was decrepit even then.”
“I give up. I never went there much, it was too fetid for me. Those folksingers made a fetish of not bathing.”
“That’s untrue,” says Jorrie. “Not all of them. I know it for a fact. No fair giving up!”
“Who ever said I was fair? Not you.”
“You should be able to read my mind.”
“Oh, a challenge. All right: Gavin Putnam. That self-styled poet you were so nuts about.”
“You knew all along!”
Tin sighs. “He was so derivative, him and his poetry both. Sentimental trash. Quite gruesomely putrid.”
“The early ones were very good,” says Jorrie defensively. “The sonnets, except they weren’t sonnets. The Dark Lady ones.”
Tin has slipped up, he’s been maladroit. How could he have forgotten that some of Gavin Putnam’s early poems had been about Jorrie? Or so she’d claimed. She’d been thrilled by that. “I’m a Muse,” she’d announced when the Dark Lady suite first appeared in print, or in what passed for print among the poets: a stapled-together mimeo magazine they put out themselves and sold to one another for a dollar. The Dirt, they’d called it, in a bid for grittiness.