But she looked at me a little differently for the rest of the evening. She was like someone who wasn’t quite sure she knew the person she was with, and there were no two people on earth who supposedly knew each other better.
A week later, what she had hoped wouldn’t happen for a long time did happen. I had my first period.
Although Mother didn’t notice her behavior, Haylee went into a sulk. What really annoyed her was that I didn’t have cramps as bad as hers. What pleased Mother, however, was that I had my period the same day of the week exactly three weeks later and almost at the same time. I knew that whenever we did something simultaneously or something happened to us simultaneously, Mother felt she was right about us.
“That’s not just a coincidence,” she told us at dinner that night. “Now you’re both the same again and you can support and help each other as usual with the new problems and questions that come up.”
Daddy had come home late and looked uncomfortable with all the talk about periods and cramps.
Mother rattled off a list of things she had found worked for herself to relieve the pains, like drinking lots of water to avoid bloating. She said her grandmother used to give herself and her mother cinnamon and ginger. When she got into more detail about blood flow, Daddy cringed.
“Do we have to discuss this at dinner, Keri?”
“See, girls, men are just built weaker,” she declared, smiling.
Haylee smiled, too, but I didn’t.
Daddy looked even more annoyed. “It’s not a matter of being strong or weak. It’s what’s appropriate,” he said, with a sharper tone than usual. “You’d think with how you stress dinner etiquette, you’d be teaching them that.”
Mother despised being criticized in front of us. Her face would blanch and her neck tighten. More than Haylee, I knew how many times she and Daddy had argued about how we were being raised and how Mother’s devotion to us had affected their relationship and their social life. On two occasions I knew of recently, she had decided not to accompany him to a business dinner, citing the need to help us with some aspect of our schoolwork, mainly, it seemed, to bring Haylee up to my level.
“Why does she have to be getting the same grades as Kaylee?” Daddy demanded. “She’s doing as well as, if not better than, I was in school.”
“If either of them falls behind the other in anything for any reason, it will be damaging,” Mother insisted.
As usual, their argument had ended with Daddy just walking out of the room. Silence seemed the best way to stay married, but whether either of them wanted it or not, the static we used to see frequently, static that seemed to have disappeared from our home, had returned. It began to occur more often. Sometimes I expected to hear thunder roll through the house. Mother was even saying “your father,” as if she had nothing to do with him, as if he was no longer also her husband.
Arguments between them had come and gone over the years. I expected them to happen at least once a week, usually because of something she was doing with us. Now their arguments were more about their relationship, the little they were doing together, and the friends Daddy said they were losing. The static those fights created resulted in more silence between them, and soon it felt as if we were all walking on eggshells again.
And this time, it wasn’t going away, even after Daddy left for good.
6
Years later, I would wonder if Mother realized how bad things finally had become between her and Daddy or if she always knew but didn’t care as much as Haylee and I would have expected her to care. It did seem like she either missed clues or deliberately ignored them, all in the name of bringing us up perfectly. Any mother would tell her husband that their children came first, but the sacrifices our mother was willing, even eager, to make were not ones Daddy was willing to make. Gradually, what social life they had thinned out, until their attending parties, meeting people for dinners, and going to shows with friends dwindled to almost never.
The periods during which Daddy would be gone for business trips grew longer. It was clear to me, at least, that he welcomed any opportunity to stay away from the home he had once so loved. In fact, there were weeds showing on the tennis court, and it was easy to see how our property was being neglected, not to the point of being outright shabby but without the loving pride that Daddy had once had in it. Mother didn’t seem to notice or care, either, and if I asked her about something like the unkempt flower beds, she would say, “That’s your father’s responsibility, not mine. I have enough to do with you and what needs to be done inside the house.”
By the time we entered the tenth grade in high school, Daddy had drifted so far from us that he almost forgot our birthday, something Mother pounced on like a panther. He was supposed to return from a business trip the day before but called to say he was being delayed. It was then that we heard Mother reminding him that he would miss our fifteenth birthday. The plan had been for us all to go to the London House, an upscale restaurant outside of Philadelphia that, though built to resemble a pub, was very expensive and far too formal to make anyone who had lived or traveled in England think they were in that kind of neighborhood place. The rich cherry paneling, brass bar, hardwood floors, and chandeliers in the dining room, along with the maitre d’ in a tuxedo, gave it the elegance to justify the high prices. There were some traditional English dishes on the menu, such as shepherd’s pie and, for lunch only, fish and chips, but everything else was gourmet. The chef, in fact, was not English but French.
Mother liked it, but the restaurant wasn’t Haylee’s or my favorite. We thought it was too stuffy. None of our friends had ever gone there with their families, but we knew Mother liked parading us past the upscale crowd, the men dressed in jackets and ties and the women in designer clothes bedecked with expensive-looking jewelry. We’d walk through the dining area to a center table, which for us was like a stage. Still identically dressed and with identical hairstyles, we turned heads and created a pause in conversations. Although Haylee hated sharing it with me, she enjoyed the attention. Normally, Mother soaked in the compliments we received from strangers. But this time, from the moment we left the house without Daddy, I knew she was very agitated.
Nevertheless, as usual, she went on and on about the importance of our birthday, making it sound like a national event. I was embarrassed by how special she made our birthdays appear in front of people, especially strangers. I knew Haylee always enjoyed the attention and sat listening, entranced about her own significance. Despite Mother’s mood concerning Daddy, all was going well until Mother spotted Bryce Krammer and his wife entering the restaurant.
Mr. Krammer was an executive in Daddy’s company. He was part of the group who came over to play tennis sometimes and had been the one to call us the Mirror Sisters. Neither he nor the other men had come to play tennis for some time, which partly explained why the court looked neglected. He and his wife had been to our house for dinner at least a half dozen times through the years, and when Mother was socializing more, she and Daddy had been to theirs. It was the Krammers, in fact, who had turned Mother and Daddy on to the London House restaurant. They saw us immediately and came directly to our table.
“Well, what do we have here?” Mr. Krammer said. He was a tall, thin, dark-haired man with graying hair. Despite being in his fifties, he had what I thought was the sort of impish smile more comfortable on the face of a teenage boy, a modern-day Tom Sawyer. I knew that his amused look at Mother whenever she talked about us annoyed her. She believed there was nothing remotely amusing about the things she was pointing out about us. “Surely these aren’t the little girls I remember. These are two beautiful young ladies.”
His wife stood there smiling at us and then turned to Mother and exchanged greetings. “I just told Bryce the other day that he should speak to Mason about us getting together soon. It’s been so long since we’ve seen the twins, too.
I had no idea they were so grown-up and so beautiful!”
“Today is the girls’ birthday,” Mother declared, ignoring her and directing herself to Mr. Krammer. Mother thought very few women these days deserved her attention and time. The truth was, Daddy had tried to get them together with the Krammers, but Mother always found a reason not to be able to make the date.
“Oh, wow!” Mr. Krammer declared. “How old are we?”
“They’re fifteen,” Mother replied.
Mr. Krammer ignored the subtle criticism. “So it’s not just another dinner. It’s a celebration. Happy birthday, girls.”