Jane jacked her elbows onto the table and rammed her fingers through her ice-pale hair. Her wide cheekbones and high forehead appeared glazed under the fluorescents. You and me both, she said. Dear Marilyn, you don’t need to go there nearly every single day. I don’t mean to be mean, but it’s not like they’re going anywhere.
Snick-snick—guilt and guilt. To cover, Marilyn sipped her drink. The over-lit concourse shrilled with laughter and reeked of rancid oil. Suit-clad men and women poured off the down escalator and flooded the concessions, though a few loose-limbed tee-shirted teenagers managed to crest through. So many so bright with hunger. She knuckled her eyes and wedged some soothing darkness in. She pinched her nostrils shut with her thumb and forefinger. A few claustrophobic seconds and she let go.
So? Jane said, launching an impatient, sculling motion with her hands. How come so out of touch?
Marilyn drank some more. Bottomless thirst. Just as, momentarily restored at her parents’ graves today, she’d felt drained and lost once she’d turned onto the road. Very lost.
Don’t think you’re boring me, Jane continued—though already she seemed to be sighting the salad of shop signs in Franglish and Korean and Farsi that marked the bustling booths. Her narrow lips held the faint, aeons-familiar curl. Smile? Sneer? You’re not boring me yet, she added, then offered a regal yawn.
A pang sat Marilyn upright. She liked to believe that if someone slit her open, inside might nest a near-semblance of her friend. Her Jane-twin. As kids on sleepovers at each other’s houses, they’d fit like cut-outs, breathing each other’s exhale. It seemed charged with the chlorophyll scent of frog-spawn that bolted in springtime from the banks of the forbidden creek—the waterway where on soggy fall days after school the terrible-twosome tormented muskrats into sewer pipes like the one in which Jane’s older sister once paid them a dime to initiate them out of their knit tights and underpants so she could examine their girl parts. Years later there were the occasional boyfriends occasionally shared. The shared experience of bullshit jobs better than no jobs. Eventually better jobs and eventually even better-than-bullshit jobs.
Not lost. Not even this past grief-stricken year—not totally lost, thanks to Jane.
Okay, I’m doing him, Marilyn said. But it’s not a big deal or anything.
And just saying it, it—he—wasn’t. She suddenly felt cheated. Ashamed, as if she’d gorged on cotton candy. Double-ashamed. Not spun sugar—a person. She felt as if she’d disappeared him too.
Jane’s face blanked. Who’s him? she said, and bent and rummaged in the tote at her feet. Excellent, she went on in a muffled voice, not waiting for a reply. A diversion. That’s what you want.
In Marilyn’s mind, a familiar shredding eclipse so white it looked black. She glared at her friend. Who wants? she snarled.
Brandishing a giant pair of sunglasses, Jane shoved to her feet. She swooped in with a mock kiss then pushed the glasses onto the top of her head so that she appeared to possess two sets of eyes, the top ones reflecting the glances of passersby waiting to see what she might do next—if they’d been actual twins Jane would have been the bolder first-born. I love you, she said. But you’re scaring me. I worry. Tell me you’ll be fine.
The food-court din seemed to rise and recede and rebound off the marble pillars and granite-faced walls only to return in ever-louder circuits. Three, four stories underground? Marilyn only remembered the harried down and down. She quickly hooked her friend around her flexing waist. Jane had always turned every corner first, like some beautiful thrusting snake. But now Jane shifted out of Marilyn’s grasp just as someone’s shopping bag clunked her side. Hey, she groused after the someone, instead of responding to Jane’s command. That kind of hurt.
Jane sighed. I’d love to stay, she said. But you have no idea the major stuff I have to do.
Marilyn winced. Earache, sick-of-self ache. With her usual patient impatience Jane co-directed a micro-agency that fed personnel to bureaus that serviced terror-ravaged consortiums desperately in need of insect netting to ward off dengue and malaria. Important work. Better than bullshit by a long shot. While Marilyn would only head home to ply her grisly trade reducing digital scans of diseased abdominal tracts to cross-sections, magnifying and shading ventricular septal defects, mining the inner lives of organs framed in tidy Exhibits A through Z like immaterial sarcophagi. Glyphs as substantial—since her parents’ deaths—as scrapings of toast.
Jane pecked a hard one now on Marilyn’s cheek and drew away. Marilyn experienced a sudden moment of double vision. In Jane’s glasses, Marilyn’s curves and hollows, her dark mat of difficult curls. Beneath the glasses, Jane cool and blonde, equally petite but trim-tight. The same and not-same, always. Marilyn an only child, Jane the middle of five, they’d grown up in houses kitty-corner to each other, another inverse proposition.