“Don’t be silly, Abby,” he’d said. “She’s certainly not going to make you scrub floors or sit in ashes. You’ll love KiKi, and she’s ready to love you. Besides, you already know Elaine from school. A new mother and a new sister. It’ll be fun.”
Fun? She barely knew Elaine. Even though she was only three months younger, Abby’s October birthday had kept her from starting kindergarten till she was almost six, so Elaine was a year ahead of her at the Clymer School for Girls.
“Please,” she begged Aunt Jess, her dad’s older sister and the woman who had cared for her after the mother she could not remember died. She felt her whole world was turning upside down. A stepmother. A stepsister. A new apartment. “Let me stay with you.”
“I wish I could, darling, but your dad wants to make a new home for both of you. Besides, you’re only moving across the park to the East Side, not Easter Island. We’ll still see each other whenever you like.”
Later that evening, though, lying sleepless and miserable, Abby heard Aunt Jess say, “You’d better not let KiKi treat her like a redheaded stepchild.”
Dad laughed. “Hard to promise that, Jess. Abby is a redhead, and she is going to be KiKi’s stepchild.”
“You know what I mean, Daniel. You get so tied up with your work, you sometimes forget you even have a daughter.”
“Which is why it’ll be good for her to have KiKi. She likes being a stay-at-home mother.”
“Except that she didn’t stay home, did she? Where were her daughter and her husband when you two were having your intimate little evenings together?”
“I won’t dignify that with an answer, Jessica, and if you want to keep seeing Abby, I expect you to keep your opinions of KiKi to yourself.”
“Are they twins?” asked the bridal consultant when KiKi arrived at her first appointment with Elaine and Abby. Her divorce was now final, and the late-summer wedding was to be small and intimate, with the two girls as her only attendants.
“They do look like twins, don’t they?” KiKi said, but her indulgent smile was for Elaine, who had immediately zeroed in on a purple organza. Even at eight, Abby could see that the color fought with her own thick curls, which were more carrot than strawberry. “I hope you don’t mind, sweetie? Sisters have to learn to compromise.”
Except that compromise always seemed to require less from Elaine and more from Abby.
KiKi gently explained why Abby and her dad needed to move from their comfortably shabby apartment in the West Eighties to a more modern building on the East Side. “It wouldn’t be fair to you and Dad to move into my tiny apartment, just as it wouldn’t be fair to Elaine and me to move in with you and your aunt. Too many old memories for all of us. Much better to make new memories together, don’t you think?”
But Elaine got her way there, too. That first night in the new apartment, she had drawn an imaginary line down the middle of their bedroom. “The window’s mine,” she said, “and you can’t look out of it.”
Abby could not have cared less. The view of that quiet tree-lined street with its sleek modern apartment buildings was boring, and it only made her more homesick for the scruffy charm of the Upper West Side.
When Aunt Jess discreetly probed, Abby had to admit that KiKi tried to be fair. “But Elaine makes such a big deal out of things, it’s easier just to let her have her way. Most of the time, it really doesn’t matter.”
Then there was the problem of Abby’s hair, which was so thick that she couldn’t yet manage all the tangles herself. KiKi soon lost patience trying to brush it out, and two weeks into the school season that fall, she had Abby’s bright orange curls clipped short at the beauty salon. Aunt Jess had been furious the first time she saw the results, and Dad had scowled.
“Fine,” KiKi had snapped at him. “Let her grow it back, and you brush her hair every morning.”
It was their first fight.
After three years, people no longer asked if they were twins.
By the time Abby was eleven, her hair had begun to mellow into auburn, but it was as thick and curly as ever and still short. Elaine’s was like a shining golden waterfall, and almost long enough to sit on. She was already into a training bra and boys, and she sneered at Abby’s flat chest. No Browning boys had yet tried to touch her there as they tried to touch Elaine, who would giggle and slap their hands. Elaine’s hips were also rounding into womanhood—rounding a bit too much in KiKi’s eyes. She soon banned all sweets from the house.