Page 4 of The Identicals
“Have you called your sister?” he asks. “Or your mother?”
My mother?Harper thinks.Ha!If Harper calls Eleanor to say that Billy has died, her mother will sniff or cough in response. Maybe. There was a time, during the heavy shelling of the divorce, when all Eleanor had wanted was for Billy to drop dead. At her most gracious, she might say,I’m sorry for your loss, darling, but with all that smoking, Billy really had it coming.
Eleanor hadn’t always felt that way, of course. Once upon a time, Eleanor Roxie-Frost and Billy Frost were a dynamic, magnetic couple—Eleanor a prominent fashion designer, Billy the owner of Frost Electrical Contractors, Inc. They lived on Beacon Hill in a house they inherited from Eleanor’s parents, and there they raised identical twin girls. They did things properly: they attended Church of the Advent one Sunday a month as well as on Christmas and Easter, like good Episcopalians. They sent the twins to Winsor, the private all-girls school where both Eleanor and Eleanor’s mother had gone. Billy and Eleanor attended parties at the Park Plaza, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Club. At social events, they were photographed so often that they developed a trademark stance: Eleanor would beam at the camera while Billy snaked an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. They were Boston’s sweethearts; the city adored them.
Ultimately, Harper supposes, it was success that ruined them. Eleanor’s dresses became so popular that she was able to open a three-story eponymous boutique on Newbury Street. For nearly two years, Eleanor was at the building night and day, overseeing renovations and designs. A photograph of Eleanor wearing a pencil skirt, stiletto heels, and a hard hat, giving the camera a working girl’s come-hither look, appeared inWomen’s Wear Daily. That had been the first thing to set Billy off.
“Your mother,” Billy said, holding the photograph up for display over the breakfast table, “is only happy when she’s one hundred percent in control.”
The real issue, the twins soon learned, was that Eleanor hadn’t hired Billy’s company to do the electrical work on her boutique. She refused to do so on principle; she said she felt that working together would ruin their marriage.
“That’s a bunch of baloney,” Billy said. “Your mother is a secret snob. She doesn’t want the fancy photographers capturing a picture of her working-class husband. She has always thought she married beneath her.”
There were loud fights that year, Harper remembers. Billy accused Eleanor of abandoning her family for the store; Eleanor resented what she called Billy’s foot on her throat. Why didn’t he want her to succeed? He’d known from the first night he met her that she’d wanted a career.
Billy decided that the only way to get Eleanor to stay home was for him to go out more. He started spending three and four nights a week at the Eire Pub in Dorchester with a group of men Eleanor characterized as thugs. Billy’s friends were no better than Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill gang, she said.
Au contraire,Billy said, his French accent impeccable even after he’d had six or seven whiskeys, thanks to the many years he’d spent living with Eleanor. These friends of his from Southie were aboveboard. They were encouraging Billy to run for city council.
Over my dead body,Eleanor said.
I should be so lucky,Billy said.
Billy and Eleanor divorced the summer before the twins left for their respective colleges. The twins were seventeen, still minors—and with Tabitha heading to Bennington and Harper to Tulane it would be four years at least until the girls were financially independent. It had been Eleanor’s idea to split the girls—one would be Eleanor’s financial responsibility and live with her during summer vacation, and the other twin would go with Billy. Then, on holidays, the girls would switch parents. What Eleanor could not abide was the thought of split time—both girls with one parent or the other, their possessions traveling between the households in a suitcase. It was unseemly, Eleanor said.
What Harper realizes now is that her mother was terrified of being alone. Eleanor’s parents had died; her sister, Flossie, had moved to Florida. Eleanor had no friends, only business associates.
What Eleanor did not bank on, however, was that both girls wanted to go with Billy. When they finally summoned the courage to announce this, Eleanor laughed dismissively and said, “All girls prefer their fathers. That’s a known fact. I certainly preferred mine. But Billy can’t afford both of you, so I’m afraid one of you is coming with me. I don’t care which one of you it is, because unlike the two of you, I don’t play favorites. I love you both the same. The two of you work it out between yourselves, please. By morning.”
There followed one of the most agonizing nights of Harper’s life—an hours-long session of whispered pleading, debating, and bargaining, then finally an out-and-out fight with her sister. Harper argued that she had always been a smidge closer to Billy—she was the athletic one, and she was the one who liked the Red Sox! Tabitha argued that she had been named for Billy’s mother, whereas Harper had inherited the maiden name of Eleanor’s mother, Vivian Harper Roxie, who was formidable indeed. Therefore, Tabitha said, Harper should go with Eleanor and Tabitha should go with Billy. It had unspooled like that until finally the girls—just short of coming to actual blows—decided to settle the dispute the way they had been settling disputes for seventeen and a half years: by shooting rock, paper, scissors.
It was a solution Billy had taught them. He claimed that any argument in the world could be solved by rock, paper, scissors. No need for fistfights, lawyers, or war, in Billy’s opinion: all you needed was a hand and an understanding of the basic rules—scissors cut paper, rock smashes scissors, paper covers rock.
And then if you don’t like the outcome,Billy would say,you simply ask for the best of three.
In determining who would go with Billy, Tabitha shot rock and Harper shot paper. Harper won.
Tabitha accused her of cheating.
Cheating how?Harper had said.By reading your mind?But she let Tabitha “simply ask” for the best of three. Again, Tabitha shot rock and Harper shot paper. Harper won.
She was going with Billy.
It was fair to say that Harper’s relationship with Tabitha had never been the same after that. For a handful of years, they remained civil, but they were no longer friends. Billy left Boston altogether. He bought a house on Daggett Avenue in Vineyard Haven, while Eleanor stayed in the gracious four-story town house on Pinckney Street. Then, when Eleanor sold her shoe line to Steve Madden—a deal her attorney had advised her to delay until after the divorce—she bought a second home, on Nantucket.
The girls stayed with “their” parent every summer, and, as per Eleanor’s mandate, each traveled to visit the other parent during the holidays. Harper used to imagine their ferries bouncing over each other’s wakes and the contrails of their planes crisscrossing in the sky.
There had been one chance for the twins to reunite, and that was after Tabitha gave birth to her second child—a son, Julian—three months prematurely. Tabitha needed help, and Harper swooped in to save the day… but things had gone catastrophically wrong. Julian died, and Tabitha had seen fit to blame Harper—not only for Julian’s death but also for winning at rock, paper, scissors and for causing every single other misery of her adult years.
You ruin everything,Tabitha had said.Everything is your fault.
That was fourteen years ago, and the twins have barely spoken since.
Harper realizes that Reed is waiting for her to respond. She doesn’t like thinking about her sister or her mother, because this is what happens: it feels like someone has blindfolded and gagged her.
“I texted Tabitha,” Harper says. “She’ll tell my mother, I suppose.”
“Good,” Reed says. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
