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Caroline was shelling peas at the kitchen table. I smiled at my sister benevolently.
“Mercy, Wheeze, you stink like a crab shanty.”
I gritted my teeth, but the smile was still framing them. “Two dollars,” I said to my mother at the stove, “two dollars and forty-five cents.”
She beamed at me and reached over the propane stove for the pickle crock, where we kept the money. “My,” she said, “that was a good morning. By the time you wash up, we’ll be ready to eat.”
I liked the way she did that. She never suggested that I was dirty or that I stank. Just—“By the time you wash up—” She was a real lady, my mother.
While we were eating, she asked me to go to Kellam’s afterward to get some cream and butter. I knew what that meant. It meant that I had made enough money that she could splurge and make she-crab soup for supper. She wasn’t an islander, but she could make the best she-crab soup on Rass. My grandmother always complained that no good Methodist would ever put spirits into food. But my mother was undaunted. Our soup always had a spoonful or two of her carefully hoarded sherry ladled into it. My grandmother complained, but she never left any in the bowl.
I was sitting there, basking in the day, thinking how pleased my father would be to come home from crabbing and smell his favorite soup, bathing my sister and grandmother in kindly feelings that neither deserved, when Caroline said, “I haven’t got anything to do but practice this summer, so I’ve decided to write a book about my life. Once you’re known,” she explained carefully as though some of us were dim-witted, “once you’re famous, information like that is very valuable. If I don’t get it down now, I may forget.” She said all this in that voice of hers that made me feel slightly nauseated, the one she used when she came home from spending all Saturday going to the mainland for her music lessons, where she’d been told for the billionth time how gifted she was.
I excused myself from the table. The last thing I needed to hear that day was the story of my sister’s life, in which I, her twin, was allowed a very minor role.
2
If my father had not gone to France in 1918 and collected a hip full of German shrapnel, Caroline and I would never have been born. As it was, he did go to war, and when he returned, his childhood sweetheart had married someone else. He worked on other men’s boats as strenuously as his slowly healing body would let him, eking out a meager living for himself and his widowed mother. It was almost ten years before he was strong enough to buy a boat of his own and go after crabs and oysters like a true Rass waterman.
One fall, before he had regained his full strength, a young woman came to teach in the island school (three classrooms plus a gymnasium of sorts), and, somehow, though I was never able to understand it fully, the elegant little schoolmistress fell in love with my large, red-faced, game-legged father, and they were married.
What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.
When my mother and grandmother told the story of our births, it was mostly of how Caroline had refused to breathe. How the midwife smacked and prayed and cajoled the tiny chest to move. How the cry of joy went up at the first weak wail—“no louder than a kitten’s mew.”
“But where was I?” I once asked. “When everyone was working over Caroline, where was I?”
A cloud passed across my mother’s eyes, and I knew that she could not remember. “In the basket,” she said. “Grandma bathed you and dressed you and put you in the basket.”
“Did you, Grandma?”
“How should I know?” she snapped. “It was a long time ago.”
I felt cold all over, as though I was the newborn infant a second time, cast aside and forgotten.
Ten days after our birth, despite the winter wind and a threat of being iced in, my mother took Caroline on the ferry to the hospital in Crisfield. My father had no money for doctors and hospitals, but my mother was determined. Caroline was so tiny, so fragile, she must be given every chance of life. My mother’s father was alive in those days. He may have paid the bill. I’ve never known. What I do know is that my mother went eight or ten times each day to the hospital to nurse Caroline, believing that the milk of a loving mother would supply a healing power that even doctors could not.
But what of me? “Who took care of me while you were gone?” The story always left the other twin, the stronger twin, washed and dressed and lying in a basket. Clean and cold and motherless.
Again the vague look and smile. “Your father was here and your grandmother.”
“Was I a good baby, Grandma?”
“No worse than most, I reckon.”
“What did I do, Grandma? Tell me about when I was a baby.”
“How can I remember? It’s been a long time.”
My mother, seeing my distress, said, “You were a good baby, Louise. You never gave us a minute’s worry.” She meant it to comfort me, but it only distressed me further. Shouldn’t I have been at least a minute’s worry? Wasn’t it all the months of worry that had made Caroline’s life so dear to them all?
When Caroline and I were two months old, my mother brought her back to the island. By then I had grown fat on tinned milk formula. Caroline continued at my mother’s breast for another twelve months. There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in mouth, the pudgy hand covering most of my face.
The next winter we both had whooping cough. My mother thinks that I was sick enough to have a croup tent set up. But everyone remembers that Captain Billy got the ferry out at 2:00 A.M. to rush Caroline and my mother to the hospital.
We went that way through all the old childhood diseases except for chicken pox. We both had a heavy case of that, but only I still sport the scars. That mark on the bridge of my nose is a chicken pox scar. It was more noticeable when I was thirteen than it is now. Once my father referred to me teasingly as “Old Scarface” and looked perfectly bewildered when I burst into tears.
I suppose my father was used to treating me with a certain roughness, not quite as he would have treated a son, but certainly differently from the way he treated Caroline. My father, like nearly every man on our island, was a waterman. This meant that six days a week, long before dawn he was in his boat. From November to March, he was tonging for oysters, and from late April into the fall, he was crabbing. There are few jobs in this world more physically demanding than the work of those men who choose to follow the water. For one slightly lame man alone on a boat, the work was more than doubled. He needed a son and I would have given anything to be that son, but on Rass in those days, men’s work and women’s work were sharply divided, and a waterman’s boat was not the place for a girl.
