You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
The housing development where Ruth and Margie lived was built on swampland. Up the block from their house, a patch of swamp still remained, and this where the two little girls liked to play, searching for Indian arrowheads in the wet soil, pretending to be swallowed up in quicksand, rescuing each other from the shallow waters of the creek.
Ruth and Margie loved the swamp. They loved its muddy smell; they loved its muddy, messy look. Being there was like being in the middle of nowhere.
After the swamp was paved over to make way for another housing development, the only place left for the girls to play in this stripped-down corner of the South Shore of Long Island was the schoolyard behind their house.
The father of the family needed an hour or two to nurse himself back to life with a couple of martinis, a book and a nap after his long day of work in the city was done, so the Lessers did not sit down to dinner until eight o’clock in the evening. Ruth and Margie liked to spend that in-between time, the interval between homework and dinner, going to the schoolyard to play.
With all the other children in the neighborhood gathered around their kitchen tables eating, Ruth and Margie had the playground all to themselves. Being there alone at twilight time felt wonderful, and slightly dangerous, too. The changing colors of the setting sun made everything seem magical, and with no one around to watch them they could be as fearless in their play as they cared to be.
On the seesaw, they would send each other flying into the air, boomeranging back down, like a couple of rubber balls. On the swings, reaching high into the sky, they would make crash landings onto the ground below, sometimes swinging hard enough and high enough to jettison themselves up and over the top bar.
The girls were identical twins, with dark brown eyes and dark brown hair. Margie, the older of the two by three minutes, was sturdier and stronger than Ruth, who had spent the first three months of her life in an incubator. People would sometimes speculate whether beginning life in this strange fashion was why she had such an unearthly way about her, seeming almost as though she belonged to some undiscovered planet, orbiting a distant star.
When the girls were nine, Ruth came down with a fever so high the doctor told her mother to wrap her up in wet sheets and tuck socks filled with ice cubes under her arms. After the illness, Ruth started behaving in ways that troubled Margie.
The first time Margie noticed the change in her sister, they were dancing around the living room, pretending to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Suddenly, Ruth stopped dancing. For several seconds, she stood in frozen silence, her eyes vacant, like the eyes of a blind person, fixed on no set point. When Margie asked her what was wrong, Ruth said that she was dead.
“Ruthie!” Margie cried out.
“I’m dead,” Ruth repeated.
“Ruthie! What are you talking about?” Margie asked.
“I died. I’m dead.”
“You’re scaring me, Ruthie. Please don’t say that. Tell me you don’t mean it. Please say you don’t mean it.”
Ruth looked at Margie with a cold blank stare that reminded her of how the people in the movie Invaders from Mars looked after the Martians stuck them in the neck with a gigantic needle. The movie had given the girls nightmares for months. It made them worry that their mother and father were not really their mother and father and in the middle of the night they would sneak upstairs to inspect their parents’ necks to see if they had any of the telltale signs of the little red marks the Martians left when they took over the souls of humans.
The twins’ parents had an active social life. Their weekends were filled with cocktail parties, bridge games and trips to the city for dinner in restaurants, followed by Broadway shows. Nights the Lessers were out, Joanne, a teenager from the neighborhood, would look after the twins.
One evening when she was babysitting for the girls, Joanne scolded Ruthie for not helping her sister. Margie had been doing the dishes while Ruthie sat at the kitchen table reading a book. It was a familiar scene: whenever there was any work to be done around the house, Margie, never Ruthie, was the one to do it. This was something that had always bothered Joanne, but knowing how sensitive Ruthie was, she had never dared say anything about it before. Why she decided to open her big, fat mouth about it now, she couldn’t say.
Ruth responded to Joanne’s reprimand by punching her in the stomach and running up the stairs in tears.
Joanne sat down at the table, her head in her hands. Margie sat down beside her and put her head in her hands, too. They sat there for several seconds in a bewildering silence.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Joanne looked at Margie sadly and said that she wished she had kept her stupid mouth shut.
“You’re not going to tell on her, are you?” Margie could not restrain herself from asking. The possibility seemed unlikely, but she had to make sure, just in case.
“No, of course not. Of course, I’m not going to tell on Ruthie. But I don’t think we’re doing her any favor, keeping this to ourselves.”
When the girls’ parents got back home, Joanne said that she was sorry, but she was too busy with schoolwork to babysit for the twins anymore.
Ruth and Margie were just five weeks away from their tenth birthday and Mr. and Mrs. Lesser decided that their daughters had outgrown the need for babysitters. True, Ruth was a little immature, but her older sister (as they would jokingly refer to Margie) had enough maturity for the both of them; they liked to brag to their friends that she could survive on the streets by herself if she had to.
Margie was sorry to lose Joanne, who didn’t care what time they went to sleep or how much ice cream they had for dessert. Once, she let them walk to the shopping center wearing lipstick and eye shadow, dressed up as ballerinas.
For their tenth birthday, the twins’ parents gave Ruth and Margie Barbie dolls. The gift so enraged Ruthie, she told Margie she wanted to run away from home.
“They knew we wanted a record player!” she said, twisting the heads off both dolls and throwing them against the wall.
After packing up a box of saltines and a jar of peanut butter, the girls left the house and headed for the playground (unable to think of anyplace else to go). It was dark outside, but the full moon and the streetlamps cast the playground in a hazy light. The monkey bars were in the process of being renovated. There was a cyclone fence in front of which was posted a sign that said DANGER. KEEP OUT.
Ruth and Margie spent a long time swinging on the swings, singing songs from Bye Bye Birdie and Oklahoma and making crash landings onto the ground below. When they got bored with the swings, they went on the seesaw, where they took turns catapulting each other high up into the air. Then Ruth said she wanted to play on the monkey bars.
“I want to be an acrobatic without the net,” Ruth called out to her sister, as she ran over to the fence. “Real acrobatics don’t use nets.”
“No, Ruthie! No!” Margie shouted. “The fence is too high! It’s much too dangerous!”
“Don’t be such a scaredy cat. Go on. Sing ‘Rutheleena!’” Ruth called out as she proceeded to climb the gigantic fence. Margie scrambled up the fence after her. Ruthie was almost halfway to top when she lost her footing and came tumbling down, taking her sister with her. She landed half on top of Margie and half on the ground.
Ruthie wasn’t moving and her eyes were closed. Margie, too stunned for tears, held Ruthie in her arms and repeated over and over and over again, “Wake up, Ruthie. Wake up. Don’t die. Don’t die. Please. Please don’t die.” Closing her eyes, she looked up into the sky and promised God that if He brought her sister back to life she would always take care of her.
“Wake up, Ruthie, wake up,” she repeated over and over again. Finally, Ruth opened her eyes.
Margie had been in such a panic that it was only after God brought her sister back to life that she experienced a pain in her left leg that sent her howling in agony.
That night in the emergency room, Ruth and Margie lay side by side on separate cots. The doctor told their parents that Margie had broken her leg and would have to wear a cast for two months. As for Ruth, except for a bump on the head and a few scratches, she had come out of the fall uninjured. Apparently, her sister’s body had cushioned her from harm. The temporary loss of consciousness she experienced was from the shock of the fall; she had fainted, that was all.
“She’ll have a little headache for a day or so. Just give her one baby aspirin every six
hours and she’ll be fine,” the doctor said. He was young and handsome. Dressed in his white coat, a stethoscope hanging from his neck, he had reminded the girls of Dr. Kildare.
After a pause, the doctor continued. “She wasn’t hurt, yet she seemed to take the fall much harder than her sister.”
“Ruth is very sensitive,” said the mother.
“She wouldn’t stop crying. She kept on calling for her sister,” the young doctor said with a frown.
“Ruth is very sensitive,” the mother repeated.
“They’re very beautiful, your daughters.”
“I call them my two black roses,” the father said.
“People are always saying they should be models,” the mother added proudly.
“I can see why,” the doctor replied, obligingly.
The mother smiled in response.
“It hurts to break a leg,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen kids much older than your daughter thrashing around so much we had to strap them down. But your daughter, all she cared about was her sister.”
“Yes. She loves her sister very much,” the girls’ mother said.
And together the mother, the father and the doctor looked over to where the two little girls lay beside each other on their respective hospital beds. Margie was reaching her hand out to Ruthie, telling her that there was nothing worry about and that everything was going to be all right.
One afternoon Margie caught Ruthie banging her head on the sidewalk. Ruthie refused to listen when she begged her to stop and said that if Margie told on her she would hate her for the rest of her life.
Margie kept Ruth’s secret, but to no avail, since that afternoon Belle Goldstein, their next-door neighbor, called the girls’ mother to report that while pruning her rosebushes that afternoon she had witnessed Ruth banging her head on the cement driveway in front of their house. She gave them the name of a child psychiatrist, a cousin of hers.
It was raining the day Ruth’s parents took her to see Dr. Goldstein. He was a tall man, with the kind of stooped-over posture that tall men occasionally acquire. After exiting his office, the psychiatrist’s eyes cut straight to a little puddle of water that had formed on the floor where the Lessers had left their umbrella, there being nowhere else to put it (they had discussed the matter at considerable length). Calling out to a woman named Lucy, his secretary, his wife or some other kind of servant, to bring a goddamned towel to sop up the goddamned mess, he commanded the Lessers to take their umbrella outside—where it belonged, and after the puddle and the umbrella had been dealt with to his satisfaction, he led Mr. and Mrs. Lesser into his office.
Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Goldstein was back in the doorway of his office. With a crook of his finger, he signaled Ruthie to follow him. He didn’t smile or look her in the eye; he merely beckoned her with his finger. (Margie had been taught that it was rude to point at people, and for the rest of her life, whenever she saw anyone employing that gesture, she would think of Dr. Goldstein and that terrible day.)
When Margie got up to follow Ruthie, the psychiatrist commanded her to stay put. The entire time her sister was in the psychiatrist’s office, Margie kept her ear pressed to the door, but all she could make out was the muffled sound of Ruthie crying.
Then, suddenly, there came a scream that sounded more like the wail of a wounded animal than anything a human being could produce, and the next thing Margie knew the door was swinging open and she was flat on the floor, with Ruthie, in her fierce escape, falling on top of her, just as she had, a year ago when she fell off the tall fence.
On the way home, the girls’ parents had a fight. The father said the psychiatrist was crazy.
“Why should we trust him?” he said. “Top of his class at Harvard Medical School! A brilliant doctor! A genius! Some genius! Look at the fit he had just because we left a goddamn puddle on his goddamn floor?” To which the girls’ mother responded by accusing her husband of getting sidetracked by irrelevancies, as usual.
Next to Ruth, Margie’s sweet and gentle father was the person she loved most in the world, and it hurt her to see him treated this way. She felt sorry for her father, who was really a poet, but had to spend long hours every day at his job in the city.
After Margie finished setting the table, she went upstairs to tell her sister that dinner would be ready soon. Ruthie was in bed. Her face was broken out in the red blotches that always accompanied her tears.
“Please don’t let them make me go there again,” she cried. “I don’t need anyone to talk to but you.”
“I promise, Ruthie,” Margie said, holding her sister in her arms. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”
Later on that night, when Ruth was taking a bath, Margie’s parents told her to come up to their room. Her father was the first to speak. He said that the psychiatrist thought Ruth was very sick and had wanted to put her in a hospital for observation.
“We managed to talk him out of it, but he warned us that we would have to be very vigilant. That Ruthie had to be watched very closely.”
“He’s concerned that Ruthie might try to kill herself,” her mother said. “Now we know this is a very big responsibility for you, Margie.”
“But you’re so grownup. You always have been, even when you were a baby,” her father said.
“The main thing is,” her mother said, “we are counting on you to keep a close and careful watch over your sister.”
Margie’s throat hurt so much it was difficult for her to speak. She nodded her head in agreement.
“We’re counting on you to be our eyes and ears,” her father said.
Margie nodded her head again, and rushing downstairs, she ran into the bathroom to make sure that Ruth hadn’t drowned herself in the tub.
Working on psychologically driven fiction?
FastTrack helps you sharpen scene pressure, manage pacing in memory-based narratives, and strengthen the emotional logic that holds a story together.
Get FastTrack feedback (10 business days)Feedback service — it does not guarantee publication.
By Maxine Rosaler
