“Are you all right?” Danna asks.
I nod and then I shrug. I really don’t know.
They say that twins have a strange connection with one another, but while Danna and I have always been close, we’ve never been the twins who wear matching outfits that you see going everywhere in public together.
We’ve lived apart for most of our adult lives, but still, seeing her just walk out like that as if it wasn’t even a big thing. I don’t know, it’s just kind of hitting me in a way that I didn’t expect.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asks.
I don’t know what to tell her. On the one hand, I’m pissed at Danna for the way she’s acting, but on the other hand, that’s my twin sister, and she’s out there waiting for a cab to take her away from me.
“Oh,” Emma scoffs, “so now you’re not going to talk to me, either?”
I understand her frustration, but I simply have nothing to offer her right now.
My parents left, Danna left…give it a few more minutes of me and the inadvertent silent treatment, and I bet I can get Emma to leave, too.
“Fine,” she says. “Whenever you’ve figured out how to fucking talk to me, give me a call. Until then, I don’t even want to see you.”
She walks out of the house.
Yep, I’ve still got it.
There’s nothing left for me to do but just sit here and reflect over how wonderfully tragic our charmed lives really are.
The phone rings and at least I’m with it enough to answer, only it’s the last person in the world I want to talk to.
Rita, if that’s really her name, is breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, and I’m tempted to hang up for a moment, but decide in all of my fool’s glory that I might just be able to make a difference in one area of my life today.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “I’m sure this isn’t something that you’ve just always done. Something happened, right?” I ask. “Something happened that took away your sense of control over your life and now you feel like the only way you can feel safe, the only way you can feel secure, is if you take control over someone else’s life, well I have to tell you, that doesn’t work.”
She’s breathing heavy and I just keep talking.
“I’m sure that on some level you know what’s really going on here,” I tell the woman who may or may not be masturbating on the other end of the phone. “Part of you, I think, is reaching out, but you’re doing it in a way you have to know is only going to lead to a harder rejection. So, why do you do this? Am I the first person you’ve done it to or have there been a lot of us? What’s your endgame here if I don’t decide that the person who’s been disrupting every part of my life more than any other is my one true love? What happens then? Do you really think this is the way to get to me?” I ask. “This is how you’re going to get me to hate you,” I tell her. “I’m not sure that I don’t already.”
Something changes in the way that she’s breathing, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Maybe it’s not your fault, I don’t know. Maybe you’re like the rest of us and just have more in your past than you’d like to talk about with people,” I tell her. “Not to get too personal here, because frankly, you scare the bejesus out of me, but I think I can understand what you’re doing on some level. I don’t see the point in it myself, but really, what you’re doing is that you’re lashing out. Something’s happened in your life that’s made you feel like this is the only way you can get a sense of control. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe you’re just so afraid of actually making a positive connection with someone that you feel the need to torture someone you admire and say that it’s because of love.”
Her breath is uneven now, but she keeps her silence.
“What is your fault,” I tell her, “is what you do with those feelings that you have. You can choose to inflict them upon someone else, trying to push back against whatever it was that made you go off your rocker, but is that really going to make you happy? Maybe you don’t see what you’re doing as wrong. Maybe you really do think that this is the way to express your love or whatever it is that you’re calling it—I can tell you right now that it has nothing to do with love.”
I don’t know why I’m still talking, but it’s all my body knows how to do right now.
“When you take something away from someone else, you are exerting power,” I tell her. “The ability to take something away from someone places you above that person. That person immediately becomes your inferior, because you were able to take from them. I get the temptation. To be able to take away someone’s peace of mind, now, that’s got to be even more tempting for you. Even better, why not make it someone in the public eye? Why not make it someone that everyone knows? That way, you can have power over all of them!” I shout. “Is that it?”
She’s still breathing loudly into the phone, but every now and then, little torn pieces of voice come through.
“Problem is, every single one of them is going
to see themselves so superior to you when they find out what you’ve done,” I tell her. “Every single one of them is going to think that you’re just the leftover of someone else’s nothing. If it’s attention you want, though, you’re going to get plenty of that.”
Rita’s now openly sobbing on the other end of the line, and part of me actually wants to feel sorry for her.
“I know that you’re pissed off and you think that if you can just get control over one thing, your life is going to fall back into place and everything’s going to work out better for you, but you’re just fooling yourself,” I tell her, though I’m talking just as much to myself. “People get whatever they get. You can fight it, but you’re going to go crazy trying, as I think we can both agree is pretty evidently the case here. Whatever happened to you happened to you and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Making other people miserable isn’t going to fix anything, you’re just being that prime mover for someone else’s misery, so really, you’re no better than the situation that put you here. It doesn’t have to be like that, though,” I tell her. “You can decide to grow up and start responding to life rather than running away from it. When bad things happen, and they will, you can decide to deal with it. Or, you can keep making my life and the lives of others a total hell so you can see the story on TV. I don’t know who you are, so it’s not like I can really stop you at the moment.”
I’m hoping for some sort of real change, some sort of response. I’m hoping to hear her say that she’s sorry or to say anything, but she doesn’t.