Thirty-four
Tovah
I USED TO THINK BEING a twin meant I’d never be the center of attention. For a long time, I didn’t mind sharing the spotlight with my sister—but secretly, I wanted to be her.
Back when our bodies started changing, she was so confident with her new shape. I hid my curves in sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Adina knew how to handle it. Knew how to own not being a straight line. Knew what to wear and how to style her hair and how to walk without staring at the ground.
She has always known exactly what she wants.
The day after the party, I lie in bed until morning turns into afternoon, until afternoon becomes evening. Adina crawls into her room sometime in the midafternoon, and I sag with relief that she made it home okay.
There isn’t enough room in my head for all the new knowledge that’s been crammed inside. Death with dignity. I’d heard of it, but I assumed it was only for the elderly, exhausted by the agony of a terminal disease. Not people like my sister.
I can’t stop the visions in my head: harshly lit rooms and metal tables and cold blue skin. A dark-haired cadaver sliced open from sternum to her last rib, ready to be examined and analyzed. A girl taking a razor blade to her wrists. A car smashing into a tree. Red. Too much of it.
On my nightstand next to me, my phone lights up with a message from Zack.
Heard you and Adina fought at the party. You okay? Here if you need to talk.
I turn the phone over. My relationship is the least of my worries right now.
Adina wasn’t wrong that I wanted to leave her behind. I had school and I had goals and if I didn’t try my hardest to get where I wanted to be, I was going to collapse with the weight of Ima’s diagnosis. I had to be selfish.
Death with dignity. It’s something many Jewish scholars agree should be condemned, but I guess that’s another item on the list of things that no longer matter to her.
If Adina . . . committed suicide . . . would I still be a twin?
Would I still be a sister?
I used to think I could separate myself enough from death that the darkest parts of a career as a surgeon wouldn’t faze me. I’m years and years away from that still, but death has taken on new meaning. Now I’m terrified of it too.
For days Adina and I don’t talk. I should tell my parents—I know I should—but I need to talk to her first. I’m still letting it all sink in, doing my own research. Death with dignity is reserved for people with six months to live, but Adina has a long time before she hits that stage. Doesn’t she?
On Passover, Adina and I are forced to interact.
“I guess this is our last seder all together for a while,” Aba says once we start eating.
“Unless I have a break that coincides with Passover,” Adina says.
Will you be alive then? My stomach twists until I’m no longer hungry.
“Why would this be our last seder together?” Ima says. “What’s happening? Where are the girls going?”
“Adi is going to conservatory in Baltimore,” Aba says. “Remember?”
Ima’s head bobs up and down quickly. “Oh. Yes,” she says, but she doesn’t sound convinced. “And Tov is going to Johns Hopkins! My talented girls. I can’t believe it. Wait until I tell my mother. She’ll be so proud of her granddaughters.” She looks to my father. “Do you have her phone number?”
“Simcha,” he says in a quiet voice. “Your mother—”
“—is on vacation!” I say quickly. I don’t want to break Ima’s heart. I can’t fathom forgetting your own mother has died. “She, uh, doesn’t have reception where she is.”
“Right,” Aba says.
“Oh,” Ima says, her smile drooping for a moment. “Well, we’ll just have to phone her when she gets back!”
My eyes meet Adina’s, whose shoulders slump in relief. Part of me opens up and understands: she never wants to become this version of our mother. And I have no idea how to feel about that.
Ima’s memory lapses are beginning to scare me. She must know I’m avoiding her, because one night when I’m coming back from a late run, she calls me into the living room. A blanket is draped across her legs. She finally finished knitting it a couple weeks ago. It’s chocolate and caramel with some patches of bright blue, and it took her months because she’s been moving so slowly lately.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, sliding a biography of an old Hollywood movie star onto the coffee table.
I head into the kitchen. “Do you want some tea?” When Adina and I used to get sick, Ima made tea with a scoop of honey and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Sweet-and-spicy tea, she called it.
“Tea sounds nice.” When I return with two mugs, she says, “Todah.” We blow on the tea. Sip in silence for a while. “How was your run?”
“Fine.” I pull my knees up tight against my chest.
“We don’t do this very much. Talk, the two of us.”
“I know.” My fault. “I’m sorry.”
“You and Adi have so much going on. I understand that. But if you’re not too tired, and I can’t sleep . . . tell me what’s going on with you, Tovah’le,” she says, and it sounds like begging. “Something about school, or about your friends, or your boyfriend . . . You’re going to have to help me with his name.”
“Zack,” I say quietly. “Zack.”
“Right, Zack.”
There’s no Adina around. This is just my mother and me.
“Actually,” I start. “I’m not fine.” Suddenly I want to confide in a mother who’s been a mystery to me for so many years, but I’m not sure where to start. It’s not just losing Johns Hopkins that’s thrown me completely off course. But I don’t want to—can’t—admit what’s been on the edge of my mind for weeks. That I don’t know who I am without a definitive path toward med school and residency and operating rooms.
That I don’t know if that’s the right path for me anymore.
What comes out is this: “I don’t want to make the wrong choice.”
“About college?”
My jaw is tight and I don’t know how many more words about this I can spare, so I nod. Pressure builds behind my eyes. No, I don’t want to do this here. Not in front of her when she has so many other troubles to deal with.
“I don’t know what to do once I get to college, wherever I end up going, and if I’m supposed to take bio classes for premed, and I’m . . . freaking out.” Finally saying this out loud feels good. “Everything’s different now, and I’m really freaking out.”
“Come here.” She wraps me in the blanket like a burrito. I’ve forgotten how comforting it is to be taken care of. If I’m too old for this, I don’t care.
My lungs fill, and I suck in big breaths. They come fast, like I’m starving for air. She kneads my back, whispering “hakol yihyeh beseder” over and over until I start to believe her and my breathing returns to normal.
“You think about the future so much,” she says softly.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Not necessarily, but . . . I think sometimes you live more in the future than in the now. You’re so young. You should be thinking about the now.”
Right. My own mother’s now is so grim I can’t imagine how she could think about the future. As always, I’m acting so selfish.
“How are you feeling?” I ask gently.
“I’m all right. Some days are worse than others. I am struggling to remember more things than I used to, and this new medication is supposed to be helping with the hallucinations. It’s an adjustment, though. Not teaching. I have . . . a lot of time on my hands.”
She has good days and bad, and so far it seems this is a good one. She’s not the stammering, confused Ima she was a few nights ago, the one who forgot I wasn’t actually going to Johns Hopkins.
Tonight I can almost remember who she used to be.
“I like all your knitting projects, though,” I say, and she smiles sadly. “Can you tell me about savtah?” It feels weird to call her “savtah” when I never had a chance to use the word. It makes me think of the evil-eye bracelet, currently buried in a dresser drawer.
“My ima.” She waits a while before continuing, like she’s digging around in her memory. “She used to let me stay home from school every year on my birthday. She didn’t think you should have to spend your birthday in school. We’d go to the market, and we’d get something to eat, or we’d go to a park, or we’d buy a new outfit.” A sigh. “But I don’t remember much of anything else. I wish I did. I barely remember her going through this. She progressed so quickly, and the doctors weren’t able to determine what it was. They wouldn’t have known if it was genetic or not, if it was something I would inherit too. That you girls were at risk for it.”
“Is that why you left? Because she got sick?”
She shakes her head. “That was a long time before I left. I was eight years old when she died. My father . . . he changed after she passed. He had always had some trouble with alcohol, and her death made that even worse. He wasn’t abusive, not physically. Emotionally, perhaps. He yelled and swore constantly, came home late or sometimes not at all. I couldn’t stand to be in my own house.”
“Ima.” My heart twists. “I’m so sorry.”
“You can understand why I wanted to do my service and then get out of there.”
“What about your grandparents?” Optimism grabs hold of me. They could still be alive, just really, really old, living in a tiny house somewhere in Tel Aviv.
“They passed when I was a teenager.”
“Is your dad—”
“I stopped talking to him after I left the country, but I heard from some friends that he died a few years ago.”
“And you never told us.”
“No. I wouldn’t have wanted you to meet him. After I left . . . There were no good memories there, Tovah’le.” A smile crosses her lips. “Do you remember when you were little, you asked why I took Aba’s last name? Why I didn’t keep my own last name?”
I nod. I thought her maiden name, Shapira, was better than Aba’s because before I could spell I associated Siegel with the bird. And her names sounded so good together: Simcha Shapira. I wouldn’t have changed my name if I had one like that. In fact, I’m certain I’ll never change my name even if I get married.
“That was the one thing that tied me to my family,” she says. “To my father. I needed a new family.”
Growing up, Adina and I only knew Aba’s family, sprinkled all over the Pacific Northwest: an aunt in Portland, an uncle in the Tri-Cities, grandparents in Bellingham. We used to think it was odd that we didn’t have photos of our mom’s parents. We always wanted to know more about them. Our mysterious Israeli side.
Now I know why.
“The bracelets you gave us.” I say it quietly. “You told me they were from savtah. But . . . was it only Adina’s?”
She’s silent for a moment. “Ani miztaeret, Tovah’le. I should not have done that.”
“So you found mine online. You lied to me about it.” I’m more resigned than upset. Ima and Adina have a bond I’ll never understand, but my relationship with Ima doesn’t have to be identical to hers.
“Ani miztaeret,” she apologizes again. “I only had the one, but I wanted you each to have something special. And after the test . . . it seemed like she needed it a bit more. That connection to our family. It’s difficult, sometimes, trying to keep everything equal between the two of you.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Does Adina know the reason you left Israel?”
“No,” Ima says, and that makes me feel like maybe things are more equal than she thinks. Adina has the bracelet, but I have the story. “I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell both of you. But it’s okay. I’m not upset about any of it anymore. I have my family here. I have you and I have Adina, and I have your father, and my friends . . . and it’s okay.” She takes a deep breath. “How did we get off topic? I thought we were talking about you.”
“I don’t know what else to say about me. I’m completely stuck.”
She sips her tea. “You know how many times I changed majors in school. And careers, too. You understand that you don’t have to know now, right this very instant, what you want to do for the rest of your life?”
The rest of my life. That suddenly sounds like a long, long time.
“I mean, yes, but . . .” I’ve always thought I had this one path, but maybe I’m more like my mother than I thought. “I like biology. I like the idea of being of a surgeon. And I had the right test scores and took all the right classes and the right extracurriculars. . . .”
“The right ones,” Ima repeats. “Were they the ones you wanted to take?”
“Some of them.” Not all of them, though. Not student council, not really. And I always thought it would be fun to try an elective like photography or newspaper, but I filled my schedule with APs instead.
“When you get to college, you can take anything you want. It doesn’t have to be biology, or premed, and you can join clubs just because you want to.” She touches my hair, her fingers gently combing the short strands. “I know it seems overwhelming now, but you are going to love college.”
I picture all the torn-up pages of Gray’s Anatomy in a dump somewhere. Adi found her niche so early on; is that why I was so desperate to claim one for myself? I found something I liked, something people told me I was good at, and suddenly it became my thing. I wasn’t the invisible twin anymore.
Surgery and medicine don’t have to be my entire life, though. I have time—time my sister may not have—to test out another path. I can try something new and fail at it a dozen times until I find a passion that fits me as well as viola fits Adina. If I stay at home this year, maybe I could learn more about my stranger-mother, too.
“Have you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain?” Ima asks.
I shake my head, and her face lights up. So I turn it on and we drink our tea and watch a movie together just the two of us, no Adina, for the very first time.