Chapter 20 1990
Kelp, Samphire, Gecko, Lime Rickey. Oh, Pistachio, Picnic.
Killarney. Frosted Emerald. Pickle. Susan knows it has to be green, but has never really considered the sheer range, how each one might make the room feel.
Even now, as the light shifts over the various patches of paint on the stripped walls of the bedroom that will belong to her children, she cannot tell which shade she prefers.
The wall looks like America from above. Like a journey to another life.
“What if you did four different colors?” Sadie suggests. “Or stripes?”
An autumn breeze catches the opened window, and both sisters turn toward it.
To Susan, the view still feels surreal. The old house, the new town.
Her body, transforming daily, her appetite for spice.
Twice a week, Al drives to Fortune Palace to pick up noodles drenched in chili oil, plastic jugs of hot-and-sour soup.
He takes such joy in caring for her and it fills her with gratitude, an almost-peace about being here.
But life still feels like it’s happening somewhere else.
“You could always just leave it like this,” Sadie says. “You know, let them gravitate toward whichever green they prefer. Get in touch with their inner greens. Maybe you could just let them crawl around the house and decide which room they want. You’ve got enough space.”
Sadie won’t stop bringing it up, the size of the house, the well-to-do area.
It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fixer-upper.
That they have to start thinking now—somehow—about school districts, planning permissions.
Or at least Al thinks they have to think about these things.
They belong to a category that Susan has never considered before and still has not fully engaged with.
All she can focus on is making the house her own: filling it with her music, making a phenomenal mess in the kitchen, taking up space in all the ways Hollywood hotels did not allow.
“Do you remember when Mom painted the whole house red after Dad left?” Sadie asks.
Of course she remembers. The story is so stale with retelling it doesn’t matter anymore whether or not it happened the way they tell it; what matters is the cadence and the stiff character assessments that it produces.
It was like being inside an intestine. Someone said it once and nothing had been funnier.
But the more it was repeated, the sadder it sounded.
And then we had to wallpaper over everything…
But Mom always used to say… Susan allows the conversation to traverse the dry, familiar riverbeds, to review the same, unchanged people.
Their mother’s cirrhosis (worsening), their father’s absence (continued, unsurprising).
Sometimes now with her sister, she feels their relationship is no more than a residue.
As though they are only pantomiming how they used to be with each other before some invisible line was crossed. It’s the loneliest feeling.
“It could be worse,” Sadie says. “You could be waiting tables and living with your mom.”
“Oh stop,” Susie says. “You could do anything you wanted, if you worked for it.”
“Well, I can’t dance.”
“Oh, Sadie.”
Sadie has been frustrated for two years, ever since her knee injury.
She’s been putting weight on as well, but that’s not something Susan can bring up lightly.
It’s strange, the unspeakable sense of their universes pulling apart.
It won’t be that way with the twins, she thinks.
Underground rivers will run between them, currents carrying them in the same direction.
They are beginning together, and together they will encounter the world.
“Look,” Susan says. “You just need to get creative. Limitations are key to innovation.”
“I wasn’t looking for advice.”
Susan rolls her eyes at her sister, chokes back the words attitude is altitude. She really does believe in it, making your own luck. Sadie reaches out and peels a small roll of green paint out of Susan’s hair.
“It’s more that I feel like I’m supposed to want more than what I have. Like I’m weird because I don’t have, like, a dream, like you.”
“You’re not weird,” Susan murmurs, pulling her sister close. “Okay, you are weird, but only in ways that I know about.”
“Oh shit,” Sadie says, pulling back, giggling, holding up green hands. “Shit.”
Two green handprints wave from the back of Susan’s white T-shirt. A moan turns into a laugh, the playful struggle for revenge.
“What’s going on up there?”
Sadie looks at her sister, giggles calming to sighs. “I should go.”
“You don’t want Chinese?”
“It’s fine.”
The kitchen air is thick with barbecue ribs and juicy dumplings. Susan watches her sister and husband exchange curt pleasantries. It’s a shame they don’t get along. But you can’t make people like each other. You can’t will them to be anyone other than who they are.
“Hello, beautiful,” Al says. His face is tired contentment. He has been working late hours, taken on new lectures. He holds two square hands against her lower back underneath Sadie’s prints and she can feel the weight that she has been carrying release into the warmth of him.
“God, that feels good.”
As he decants the hot-and-sour soup from plastic jugs into bowls, he tells her about his day, the papers he has to mark this evening and—
“Oh.” Her chair is wet, maybe with soup, maybe with urine, maybe she is pissing, No, they need to go, right now, there’s no more time!
Her body, cut open and numb, flooding with the soft, gorgeous smell of the tiny body alive on her breastbone, her daughter’s pinched, perfect face, her lips, her nose, everything that she has yet to be.
They breathe together, her impossible fingers clutching at Susan’s dressing gown.
The new word mom, applied to herself. A soft, insipid word—not enough, not remotely, to capture the conquering flood of everything between herself and this little person.
Al, in the corner, is holding her son. One of each. Susan looks at him for an endless moment, and he gazes back, his face soft with gratitude.
Twelfth Night? he had suggested in the early hours.
Confusion and a happy ending? She hasn’t seen the play, but in the end it felt like nothing, giving him this—she knows the tumult and theatrics of these children are hers.
Everything she thought she knew about the earth is upended.
Each breath, each heartbeat is its own reason.
Each clench of little fingers, each twitch of the mouth.
She doesn’t want to miss a second of this life.
“Hi,” she says as the little eyes flutter open, green and unfocused, looking at but not seeing her face. The bare, damp top of Viola’s head rolls back as she opens her mouth and screams.