Twenty-one
Adina
RELIEF. I HAVE NEVER FELT anything like it. It sings through me, replacing my blood with liquid gold. It skips across the strings of my viola during my hours-long practice sessions, at Arjun’s apartment and in my room and at the symphony. It drums next to my heart, pound-pound-pounding a new rhythm. Re-LIEF, re-LIEF, re-LIEF.
This new life begins with figuring out what I have missed out on.
While the carnival is not my usual scene, I am curious about it. My sister will be here, and as vicious as we’ve been to each other, part of me aches to reconcile with her. I cannot fathom the idea of living out the rest of my life, however much of it I have left, with a sister who cannot stand the sight of me. The way I lashed out at her after she was deferred from Johns Hopkins—that cannot happen again. I miss our sleepovers and bus stories. I miss the person who once knew me better than anyone else.
If I am going to have any peace, I need my family to be whole. I am a sister learning to forgive, to forget.
The gym is packed with sweaty teenage bodies, filled with so much noise that I’d think this was a group of little kids, not people who are nearly adults. A guy on the football team or basketball team elbows me as he aims a rubber ball at a stack of cans. He does not apologize. Rubbing my arm, I disappear farther into the crowd.
Tovah’s friend Lindsay is sitting on the gym bleachers, splitting an entire cake with her boyfriend. I hold up my hand in a half wave. “Hey.” They don’t look up. I clear my throat and project: “Hey, have you seen Tovah?”
Lindsay’s face crinkles when she sees me. Of course Tovah would have told her both of our results. Still, it makes me feel exposed.
“I haven’t seen her in hour or so. She disappeared somewhere with Zack.”
“Oh. Well, thanks,” I say.
“Do you—” Lindsay breaks off, as though reconsidering what she’s about to say. “Do you, um, want to hang out with us? We have cake. Troy’s really good at the cake walk.”
With a mouthful of frosting, Troy adds, “I won three cakes.”
It’s a pity invitation. “I’m waiting for a friend,” I lie, and the relief on her face is palpable.
Relief. Relief. Relief.
Why, exactly, did I think this was a good idea? No one goes to a school carnival alone. I am not a school carnival kind of person.
I press through the crowd, my stomach tangled like one of Ima’s never-finished projects. I don’t want a balloon animal. I don’t want to throw a thing at another thing. I don’t want to win any of these meaningless prizes.
I burst into the hall, whipping my head in the direction of laughter and footsteps coming from the art wing. Tovah and Zack are making their way toward the gym. At first I think their faces are bleeding, but as they get closer, I see that they’re actually covered in paint. His arm is around her shoulders, holding her close.
The most jarring thing about this picture, though, is the obvious happiness smeared all over Tovah’s face.
“Adina?” she says in between giggles. She sounds drunk. Drunk on joy, perhaps, drunk on male attention. Her hair’s slicked back with lime paint.
This uninhibited public display of affection is what I cannot have with Arjun, and it makes my stomach twinge with envy.
“Hey, I’m Zack,” he says, because the two of us have never spoken.
“Hi.” Even looking at Zack feels as though I am intruding on something personal, private.
“Can I talk to you?” I ask, indicating that I don’t want Zack as an audience member. He gets the hint and backs up, giving us some space.
“What are you doing here?” Tovah asks when he’s out of earshot, raising an orange-blue eyebrow.
Humiliating myself. “I, um. Thought we could hang out here. At the carnival.”
She blurts out a toneless laugh. “Seriously? And do what, listen to you complain about how lame it is, like at Great Skate? Judge me for even more things you don’t understand? Yeah, no thanks.”
She spins back around and falls into step with Zack again. As they head back into the gym, snippets of their conversation mix with the insipid carnival music: “Everyone’s gonna laugh at us” and “I don’t care; you look adorable.”
The gym doors bang shut, and I am so stunned I stagger backward until I’m against the cold metal of a locker, then let myself collapse to the floor, shaking.
She could at least wait until I’m gone—from this carnival and later, from this earth—to parade her Technicolor life in front of me.
I was wrong. Tovah will bring me zero relief. If she and I grow close again, she will be a constant reminder of everything I am missing out on. It’s because we are twins that it will hurt so much, seeing her experience things that I cannot, knowing I am so close to them but unable to grasp them. I will watch her graduate college and become a surgeon and fix people and get married and maybe have children. I will watch her plan an entire fucking future without worrying about an impending death. I will watch her mull over choice after choice after choice.
Maybe life is better without her.
I’ve never liked my English class. I don’t mind reading, but all our assigned books are written by dead privileged white men. I can’t stomach how my privileged white Hemingway-worshipping teacher, Mr. Bianchi, touts their supposed literary genius.
So I simply stop going. Instead I spend second period in the empty orchestra room, or in the library, or in the abandoned east stairwell. A couple days I even skip first period and sleep late. There’s no need to spend my precious hours reading about the heroic struggles of white males. And sometimes no need to waste brain space with special right triangles or Newton’s Laws of Motion either.
It is my first small rebellion in what is sure to be a long list of rebellions.
I drag a box cutter over my index finger as I’m opening a new shipment of sheet music at work. It is an accident. I think.
My manager, Oscar, glances over my shoulder. “Adina, you okay? I’ll get the first aid kit.” He returns with a small white box, from which he produces a Band-Aid. “No more sharp objects for you.”
“It slipped.” Did it? Suddenly I’m not sure. I am never clumsy. I’ve never even nicked my legs while shaving.
Red beads spill out of the slit in my skin. I stare at my finger, wondering what my relief will feel like. Maybe it will hurt, this small cut multiplied by one thousand. Maybe it will feel like nothing. I likely have several years or more to ponder how I’ll do it. Whatever method I choose, it’s better than what awaits my mother. I need to control it. I cannot simply succumb to genetics or the universe or God or whatever is out there. Nothing poetic like that.
Next year I’ll have to help pay for school, and for my plane tickets if—when—I hear back about auditions, so I’ve taken extra shifts at Muse and Music. I have spent the rest of my time perfecting the pieces I’ll play. My calluses get married and have babies with nearby calluses. A turtleneck sweaterdress hides the pink viola hickey on my neck. An audition will make all this worth it. Conservatory and life in a new city are the only steps for me if I want to go professional. It has always been my goal, but now it has become a requirement.
Oscar banishes me to the cash register, and since it’s a slow afternoon, I spend it refreshing my e-mail. Hattie Woo from youth symphony was already rejected from Juilliard, so sad, and Meena Liebeskind is starting to consider music programs at state schools.
“Excuse me,” someone says, and I glance up from the register. The man looks vaguely familiar. “I’m sure what’s on your phone is really important, but I need to return something.”
I shove my phone underneath the register. “I’m sorry about that. What can I help you with?”
He holds up a viola case and hands me a receipt. “I think you sold this to us. It was for our daughter, but she lost interest pretty quickly. Said it was boring.”
Foolish girl. Guess she wasn’t as much of a natural as her parents thought. “Since it’s been more than thirty days, we can only buy it back on consignment.”
“She barely played it. Is that the best you can do?”
“I’m afraid so,” I say, a ribbon of irrational satisfaction threatening to pull my mouth into an unprofessional smile. He cannot simply demand what he wants and expect me to give it to him. Everyone wants to think they are an exception. He grumbles while I take out the consignment forms for him to sign.
After my shift, I message Arjun. On my way over. Can’t wait to see you. Then I text Ima that I am doing homework at a friend’s house, though I skipped another few classes this week and, to be honest, am not entirely sure what my homework is. Lying to my parents has become easy, perhaps because they want so desperately to believe I am not lonely. My positive result has made me a social butterfly.
What I have realized is this: The relationships I’ve had were not about love. They weren’t even relationships. Whatever they were, they were about need, about want. A pretty girl like you should have a boyfriend, Tamar Mizrahi said. As though there is something about being pretty that makes you deserving of love. If there is, I haven’t gotten there yet. To love.
That is what I need from Arjun: a declaration, a commitment.
He doesn’t text back right away, but that’s okay. Sometimes it takes him a while to reply, but he has two dozen students to keep track of, and maybe he’s getting his apartment ready for me tonight, planning something special. After all, I did something special: I bought him a set of viola strings with my employee discount. The good kind, the kind he probably wouldn’t splurge on for himself.
It is a mystery to me when lust turns to love, when sex turns into a relationship. If a relationship means playing duets and cooking together and teaching each other words in other languages, then maybe that is exactly what Arjun and I have. Maybe love is what comes next.
Arjun could love me, I’m sure of it, and that night I make sure of it twice.
At Ima’s retirement party, Tovah and I sit in her classroom chairs made for ten-year-old bodies. It is probably the last time I will sit in a chair like this.
Next to me, Tovah grinds her teeth.
“Can you stop?” I ask. “Do you have any idea how annoying that is?”
“No. I can’t.”
Some of Ima’s former students are here. “Mrs. S was the best teacher I’ve ever had,” says a twentysomething guy speaking in front of the room. “I hated math, but she wouldn’t give up until I got my multiplication tables right. And now . . . I’m getting a PhD in math!” He holds up his hands and wiggles his fingers. “I don’t count on my fingers anymore, Mrs. S!”
Finally, Ima gets up to make a speech. Her aide, Jackie, who’s already taken over her classroom, gives her shoulder a pat. Ima grips the edge of the podium, but when her body shakes, she sinks back down in her chair.
“This is a little . . . difficult . . . for me to do,” she says. The bandage is off, thank God, but she still doesn’t look like herself. She staggers and slurs her speech and needs Aba’s help getting dressed in the morning. “I love teaching. I didn’t have a big family growing up, and teaching is like having a huge family. I’m going to miss this so much, but I need this time to spend with my family. My husband . . . Mark . . . and my two talented, intelligent, beautiful girls.”
Matt. My father’s name is Matt, not Mark.
The speech ends and kids’ parents start distributing slices of the WE LOVE YOU, MRS. S cake. Ima gets the first piece, which she promptly chokes on. Aba thumps on her back, and her mouth drops open to reveal a chewed-up yellow mass that gets all over her chin and blouse.
I push out my chair, the legs squealing across the linoleum, and race for the door. My boot hitches on the threshold, and I stumble into the hall, righting myself before I fall. Panic flares through me. Clumsy again? I vow to be even more careful. It was stupid of me not to pay attention to where I was going.
Self-portraits cover the bulletin board outside the classroom. Distorted eyeballs and noses and wacky hair and skin colored green and blue. My mother’s distorted too, though not yet quite as alien as these drawings. She will continue to become less and less familiar to me. I dig for good memories: when she chattered at five times her normal speed and volume with Tamar and her other Israeli friends or sang songs in Hebrew to herself as she cooked shakshuka or showed me my first movie with Gregory Peck, whom she admitted was her first crush.
I want that old Ima back so desperately that even the calloused pads of my fingers ache. One day she won’t even know who I am. She spent eighteen hours in labor before Tovah and I decided we were ready for the world. Tovah first, and then an emergency C-section for me, since I was a miniature contortionist. She has the scars to prove it. How can someone forget all that?
Part of me, a dreadful part, hopes Ima isn’t lucid enough when I start to show symptoms. She might be in a home then, eating meals through a tube. Someone—Aba? Tovah?—will tell her what I’ve done and she will be too far gone to react.
How were your students? I used to ask my mother. What will I ask her now?
Kids . . .
Even if I get married someday, if I have time for it, I will never have kids of my own. I couldn’t pass on my fifty–fifty chance to someone else. I’ve never allowed myself to ponder whether I want them. Sometimes I think I could be a good parent to a musical child. But more likely, I would be a terrible, selfish mother, too absorbed in my own life to be responsible for another human being.
Still, I would have been grateful for the chance to consider it.
None of that matters now, I remind myself. There is no room for doubt in my beautiful new life.
My phone lights up with an e-mail, and the words on the screen change everything. They make me forget about babies and the impossibility of my stomach growing big.
I have an audition at the Manhattan School of Music in March.
Inside my chest, a tiny orchestra bursts to life with “Spring,” the sunniest of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I read the e-mail over and over, making sure it’s true. The orchestra plays louder and louder and louder and yes, I want to shout. Yes.
When I glide back into the classroom, I watch the threshold to make sure I don’t trip. But my sunny mood storms over when I nearly run into Tovah, who is being fawned over by our old fourth-grade teacher.
“Such a remarkable future,” Mrs. Augustine says. “I always knew you were headed for something big.”
I am headed for something big too, I want to interrupt to say.
“You couldn’t have known back then,” Tovah says, blushing.
“I can always tell which students are going to be successful.” As though she can take some credit for Tovah’s achievements. “You were always so serious about your schoolwork. So focused. You’ll be an excellent surgeon.”
Tovah turns an even deeper red. “Thank you.”
Perhaps no matter how happy I am, Tovah will always be happier.
The two of them hug, and Tovah spies me watching her. She stares hard at me, like she wants to say something acidic, but stays silent. I don’t say anything either. Instead I get a piece of cake, find a lone tiny chair in the back of the classroom, and welcome the darkness in my mind. The darkness and I are close these days.
Tovah tried, with her promise of forgiveness back in Canada, but she will never understand. We may be twins, but some things cannot be shared. We can share some percentage of our DNA. We can share hair color and body types and an affinity for stupid movies. But this is mine alone.
Our results weren’t fair. It’s a childish thought, sure, but it’s how I feel. I widened the rift between us when I deleted her applications, but she is the one who never got over it. She is the one who wanted to leave our family, who pushed me away, who forced me to learn about a bleak future I wish had remained a mystery.
And yet: she is the happy one. Lately she has been smiling more, acquiring experiences she previously shied away from. Living, while half the Siegels are dying.
I cannot enjoy the rest of my life with this sister in it. I am convinced of that now.
I finish my cake. I want another piece, but the kids have left only crumbs. They’re on a sugar high that makes them race, tumble, dance around the classroom. Ima watches them with a slightly distant, glazed look in her eyes. Tovah is grinning at her phone.
My relief turns to rage. Time to amend my plan. Instead of letting my sister back in, I will cut her out and make her suffer, steal as much of her happiness for myself as I can.
Truly, I am doing her a favor. I am doing all of them a favor. My death will be less of a tragedy for Tovah if during my life I am full of spite. My cruelty will be at its core a selfless act, and my parents will pity me too much to punish me. I am a girl without consequences. A girl untethered.
Vengeance. That is what sings through me now.