Once we were able to do most things for ourselves, Mother let Mrs. Jakes go. In my heart, I thought it was really because she wasn’t treating us with equal attention enough to satisfy Mother. She favored me more, talking mostly to me. Haylee didn’t like her, maybe for that reason. When Haylee complained about Mrs. Jakes, Mother looked at me to see if I would object. I didn’t, because in a weird way, even then I understood that Mother would blame me for letting someone favor one of us more. I even felt a little guilty about it. For that reason more than any other, she didn’t want to bring anyone else into our home to do housework.
Even though we could take care of our basic needs, Mother still could have used the help. We lived in Ridgeway, a very upscale community outside of Philadelphia, and had a large, two-story house with a double gable. It had complex rooflines, and the siding was a mix of oiled cedar board and clapboards painted gray-green, which Mother thought played well with the natural surroundings. On the first floor, we had what Mother called the great room, along with the kitchen, its dining nook, and our dining room. The walls had rustic-grade butternut paneling and walnut floors with classic painted trim. There were soaring fir ceilings in the great room, and we had a screened porch. The great room had a large stone fireplace. Everyone who came to our house loved it for its warmth and complimented Mother on her decorating skills. Between the house and us, she didn’t have time for much else, which I eventually realized was why Daddy complained. He felt neglected.
More and more, he pointed out how little they were doing with their friends and how many events they had missed. She found fault with every babysitter she hired, even Mrs. Ramsey, who was a retired schoolteacher, and sweet old Hattie Carter, a sixty-four-year-old grandmother herself who could whistle “London Bridge Is Falling Down” or “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Mother was suspicious of everyone they hired and everyone who came into contact with us. When she came home after going out, the first thing she would do was come to our room and question us about the sitter, seeking a reason to classify her as inappropriate, especially for us.
“We haven’t gone to a movie in months,” Daddy told her, “much less enjoyed a quiet dinner together.”
“We’ll do all that when they’re older,” Mother told him. “It’s difficult to get the proper kind of babysitter.”
“Other people don’t have so much trouble with babysitters, Keri.”
“We’re not other people. Other people don’t have what we have!” she exclaimed, her eyes looking as if they would pop.
The dwindling of their social activities was another battlefield from which Daddy retreated. That was probably why he devoted more time to his work and our property. He had continued to develop it years after he and Mother had bought it, but about two years after we were born, he stopped. The property was nearly five acres, and he once had plans to build a lake.
Daddy had almost become a professional tennis player. He was a star on his high school and college teams, and he had a beautiful clay court built almost as soon as they bought the house. Sometimes Mother played with him. We sat on the bench and watched. We weren’t quite five yet when Mother bought us tennis outfits and tennis shoes. Neither of us could hold a racket well, but I could hit the ball better than Haylee. Maybe that was why Mother discouraged Daddy from teaching us any fundamentals.
“They’re not ready,” she said. “They’re too little, and their muscles and bones are just developing. It might even damage them.”
“You can’t keep saying they’re not ready, Keri. I was hitting a ball at their age,” he said.
“That was you. The usual rules don’t work with identical twins. Everything has to be special, Mason.”
“Everything?”
“Everything,” she said, as firmly as usual.
Daddy smirked at that, but he didn’t spend any more time teaching us about tennis. Mother always had a reason Daddy shouldn’t do something with us. I think that was why he stopped trying after a while.
When Daddy and Mother played tennis, it didn’t seem to me that either one of them was having fun. Sometimes Daddy let Mother win or kept their scores close. She wasn’t that bad herself and was always quite a competitive person, but it was easy to see how good Daddy was, how gracefully he moved. Mother hated losing to anyone, even to Daddy, and I was sure he knew it. There was no limit to how far he would go to keep the peace. When I was older and looked back, I wished he hadn’t thought peace was more important than we were.
Mother was a better swimmer than he was. When he was home early enough during the summer and joined us at the pool, she often challenged him to a race, and she always beat him. She looked at us and cried, “See, girls? Men aren’t as superior as they’d lead you to believe.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Daddy said. “I know.
We’re all egotists. Women don’t take selfies and pamper themselves.”
Mother just smiled, as if Daddy was too ignorant to realize what she had known years ago. Daddy could roll his eyes and throw up his hands, but he never got the better of her, and sometimes his face turned crimson and his jaw tightened in frustration.
Both Haylee and I were very impressed with Mother—and not just because she was our mother. As far as we were concerned, besides knowing so many things, she was one of the prettiest women in the whole world. We knew she had done some modeling. She had beautiful cloth-covered albums with snapshots and newspaper clippings that she often let us look at. She was nearly five foot eleven, with thick blondish-brown hair that matched the beautiful amber necklaces Dad had bought her on their first anniversary. Haylee and I had slightly darker brown hair, but we both had the same patches of tiny freckles on the crests of our cheekbones. Mother actually counted them and concluded that we each had the same number of freckles. That plus the matching small birthmarks we had just under our left earlobes were pieces of evidence she always used to demonstrate how special we were when she paraded us before her friends.
“Identical twins don’t always have what they have. As babies, when one cried, the other did; when one was hungry, the other always was. Why, they almost pooped at the exact same moment!” she would exclaim, and her friends would look at us, astonished.
“You’re so devoted to them,” her friend Melissa Clark told her once.
Mother pulled us to her, embracing us and smiling at her friends. “Look at them. Why wouldn’t I be devoted to them?”
She kissed us both before she continued. She always kissed us each twice. If she kissed me first and then Haylee, she would kiss Haylee a second time and then me. The next time she did it, Haylee was first, and the same set of kisses followed. I saw how that amazed her friends.
“I wish my mother loved me half as much as you love them,” Louise Kerry said.
“If you were an identical twin, she might have,” Mother replied, and smiled at us. “All the joy is compounded. Just holding hands with the two of them when we walk, getting double hugs and kisses, making me feel like a mother-in-the-middle love sandwich—it’s so special.”
I looked at her friends’ faces and saw how fascinated they were with Mother and with us. We were riveted to her descriptions of us as infants. Sometimes she told her friends things she had never told us.
“When the doctor announced that I was having twins, I didn’t believe him,” she said. “They felt to me like one child, not two. I was really surprised, up to the day I gave birth and actually set eyes on the two of them side by side. I remember my doctor saying, ‘You’ve had clones.’ Even he was amazed at how identical they were.”
“It’s true. I’ve never seen any twins so alike,” Mrs. Letterman said. She was the oldest of Mother’s friends, having retired from being a school business manager. “And I’ve seen at least five or six sets during my years at Cherry Hill.”