Drew Price was the only one with fast enough hands to ever dare reach across to the fruit bowl and rip grapes from the vine to throw them one by one—when Mrs. Dinnerman wasn’t looking—into various corners of the kitchen. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice them, but when she did, she would bend over and we would sigh with gratitude for that lovely Russian ass—round and high and firm. Again, thankfully, deliciously, nothing like our own mothers. And nothing, for that matter, like our female counterparts.

  To be fair, we went to the Dinnermans’ not just for the view, but also for the stories. Of all the mothers, Mrs. Dinnerman was the least tight-mouthed, the most unrestrained. She would talk about anyone, everyone. There were no boundaries. It was as if she didn’t register that we were there, as if we’d caught her in the middle of a monologue that had started before we arrived and would continue once we’d left. Either that, or she didn’t care that we were children. There was no distinction between us and our mothers or our fathers. There was only the fact that we weren’t Russian, weren’t her own, and because of that we didn’t matter. Loyalty didn’t exist for her in our language. Everything was public domain. Whatever the reason, we didn’t care. We liked going and listening—to her stories, to her gossip, to her strange and terrifying way of speaking.

  At the time it never made sense to us—Trey Stephens’ insistence that he didn’t find Mrs. Dinnerman sexy—but looking back on it, we begin to understand. Women—adult women—would never hold him captive in the same way a girl—teenaged, yes, but a girl all the same—could preoccupy his mind.

  We thought he was being tough, coy, all those nights we stayed up late in his basement, sitting with our backs against the wall, our knees splayed in various directions, talking about Minka’s mother.

  “Nope, boys, she doesn’t do it for me,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” said Chuck Goodhue, his arms crossed over his chest, his hands sunk deep into his armpits. “Minka’s mom does it for everyone.” Funny that it would be Minka Dinnerman, not her mother, who would one day threaten the integrity of Chuck Goodhue’s marriage.

  “Seriously,” said Stu Zblowski, whose parents had recently given him a yellow Lab that he’d naturally named Stu. “I’d consider naming my dog after her if she’d show me even one boob.”

  “Not for me,” Trey said. “She’s an oldie. That face. Makes me sick to think about looking at that face while I screw.”

  “Bullshit,” again Chuck Goodhue.

  Trey’s final comeback: “Give me a girl in uniform any day.”

  Thirty years later those words, for those of us who remembered them, made us shiver.

  After Nora disappeared, Mrs. Dinnerman’s role in our lives changed slightly. We still visited her kitchen, still threw grapes onto her linoleum floors, still admired the perfect roundness of her foreign rear end. But we visited now to hear her version of Nora’s fate. While the other mothers discouraged our fascination, Mrs. Dinnerman sought it out.

  “I have a gossip, boyz.” She waited for Minka to take her book bag upstairs; she never had gossips for Minka. “Do you want to hear my gossip?” Before we could answer: “Nora is not deed, boyz. The facts is no, Nora is not deed.”

  “Then where is she?” Paul Epstein often carried the conversation. Mrs. Dinnerman appealed to him, sure, but she didn’t make him dizzy the way she made the rest of us. After all, he was already in love with Sissy by that time, already completely preoccupied with another female.

  “Feh. And why would I know where she is? No, I do not know where she is, bet I know that when I go missing from my family house at sixteen, I do not go missing as deed. I go missing as alive and—” she pinched her lips together with her fingers, a gesture so sexy that its effect required most of us to cross our legs in a show of attempted decency “—as a wolunteer.”

  It was during these afternoons with Mrs. Dinnerman—Minka and her friends, sometimes even Sissy, upstairs, safely out of earshot—that we learned about Mrs. Lindell, famously absent from our lives, famously absent and undeniably dead.

  “She was kraseevaya, you know, beautiful.”

  Probably what we wanted to say was, “No, Mrs. Dinnerman, you’re the beauty. We love you.” But probably what we said was nothing. Probably we waited, sitting on her awful, tall stools, positioning and repositioning our feet, crossing and re-crossing our legs, for her to say something else.

  “The mothers, your mothers, boyz, they were nice to her like they are nice to me.” The sibilance in her speech was mesmerizing, snakelike and sharp. Russian, so very, very Russian. How strange and wonderful to be with a woman who understood her beauty and was not embarrassed by it. How very un-American. “Yes, I see you turning red, Chuck Gootyue. You know of what I am talking about.” She wagged her finger in our directions. “They were nice to her only as of much as patreeabny, you know, as much as they must be.”

  Drew Price threw a grape on the floor. We listened to it bounce.

  “When she is round,” she made the shape of a baby in front of her, “they like her wery well because she no longer has her shape, you know. Because when she is not round,” again the gesture in front of her own belly, “she has a wonderful shape.”

  She spotted the grape where it lay against the base of Danny Hatchet’s stool. She picked it up, blew on it, and popped it in her mouth. Then she dusted off her hands and looked at us. “Bet den she die. Baby number two is too much baby for her. Out you go, boyz. Baby Minka and her papa must eat.”

  6

  It’s possible that, in Arizona, Nora Lindell’s hair turned a burnt yellow. Her skin became a caramel color she’d never seen before. She aged quickly. She waited tables. She worked hard. She rented a trailer.

  Nights, she sat in a folding chair set up on the dirt patch outside her home. She looked up at the sky and thought things like, “Tonight the sky is Arizona.” Some nights, she might even have thought of us. She wondered which of us had graduated, which hadn’t. She wondered who’d gotten into what schools. She thought about Trey Stephens, maybe, and whether he’d taken another girl to prom after all. Of course she thought of her father, her sister, but we didn’t worry about that.

  Most nights, she leaned back, closed her eyes, tried to imagine the things inside her. She could call them babies, because that’s what they were. She could even call them daughters, because that’s also what they were. Still, it seemed most right to leave them as heartbeats for now, nothing else struck true in Nora’s brain. And, after all, heartbeats was how she saw them sitting there under that gaudy Arizona sky, her eyelids shut tight, her head turned upward, her eyes turned inward, southward, to look squarely at the things that were sharing that folding chair, sharing her body. What she saw was two heartbeats, red and bloody and tiny, tiny. Two little heartbeats perfectly and eerily syncopated. One heartbeat and then another.

  What she saw clear as day were those two little heartbeat babies, and they each had exactly one arm and one hand, locked together at the fingers. Imagine something monstrous. Little red chimeras joined at the palm, floating there, not one thought in the world of anything other than themselves. Beastly organisms, selfish for existing in the first place. Sisters, she might have called them, and so defined them by each other and not by her. Because, more than anything, what Nora was sure of was that though they lived in her body, though she alone housed them while they grew, those babies didn’t belong to her. They couldn’t. She was still a child herself, after all. Still freckled and pig-tailed and awkward.

  We liked to imagine that she’d picked Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the warmth. Maybe she’d thought it was possible to live in it, in the canyon. But she never admitted that to anyone, not once she got there and saw how wrong her fantasy had been. The walls of Jack Boyd’s bedroom were decorated with postcards of the Southwest. Postcards his father had sent while traveling with his fourth wife. We imagined Nora just beyond the postcards’ borders. Always out of reach. These were the details of Arizona she now lived among. Open spaces; wood carvings and chalk drawings; gaping holes in the earth; grotesque protrusions upward out of the rock; and turquoise. Turquoise especially. The turquoise was everywhere, and if anyone asked, she would have told them she’d gotten that right at least. The water was turquoise, the sky was turquoise, the jewelry was turquoise. And the people were so used to it they didn’t even see it. The color was so common it was imperceptible. This was exactly what she wanted—to be in a place so unlike the one where she’d been born. Scorched earth, turquoise sky. Extremes.

  She picked up waiting tables easily. She was good at it. The manager had said, “Have you waited tables before?” And Nora had shaken her head.

  “Then why should I hire you?”

  “I’m a blank slate,” Nora said. “Teach me and I’ll do exactly what you say.”

  “I like that,” the woman had said. A woman just like you’d expect in a place like this. Tan, wrinkled, two parts chain smoker, one part beauty queen. She was soft somewhere deep down. She was a mother—of her own children, of course; but maybe also of Nora. Someone to guide her, show her how to live.

  “You can start tomorrow,” the woman had said.

  “You should know I’m pregnant.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  But probably there was nothing friendly between the manager and Nora. Nothing unfriendly, either, but also nothing motherly as Nora might have hoped that first day. The cooks, though, would have been different. They would have taken to Nora immediately, and she almost immediately to them. At first they might have made her nervous, made her blush at the things they said and the way they said them. But soon the banter became something to go to work for, something to help pass the time.

  They would have liked that she was pregnant, asking daily about the baby. When the bump grew, they might have asked to touch it. Of course she would let them.

  “Babies,” she had to remind them more than once. To the Mexican cook, she said bambinos. Dos.

  “A baby having babies,” he liked to say.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, already so much older and calmer than she should be. Already a woman, too much a woman. Seventeen, but also not seventeen. Our age, and yet a decade advanced.

  She fell for the Mexican. The old man. She fell for the words he taught her, for the baby blanket he’d asked his sister to knit for him as a gift for Nora. She fell for his arthritis and his dark skin and the way he asked first about the babies and then about her. She fell, perhaps, too, for his food, for the cow tongue and the goat belly he brought her for lunch. But mostly, mostly she fell for the absence of sex.

  He touched her cheek. She liked this. He held her hand. She liked this too. But even after she began spending nights with him, they did not have sex. Clothed in pajamas, they faced the window of his rancher and held each other. She in front, he in back. He held on to the babies and she held on to him.

  A month before she gave birth, he asked her to marry him. For the first time, she was nervous.

  “Why?” she said. “Why marry me?”

  “For the girls,” he said. “For all three of you. Let me give you what I have.” His sister had died. He’d been made head cook. His house was empty.

  “What will change?” she said.

  “Nothing will change. Crying babies, constant noises. We will not change.” He overarticulated when he spoke. “I will give you your own bedroom.” He looked down when he said this and blushed, because he did not like to talk about sex either and did not like the implication of her question.

  She laughed then, laughed at him and with him. She put his hands on either side of her face and made his fingers pinch the skin. “Silly old man,” she said. “Inheriting three silly young girls. I will marry you.”

  She left the restaurant and they moved her few belongings to the rancher. She insisted that the folding chair come with her, the one she’d first sat in under the Arizona sky.

  “It is crap,” he said, offended that she didn’t think he could offer her better.

  “My crap, though,” she said.

  “Americans and their crap,” he said.

  She set the folding chair up outside, in back by the swimming pool so that people driving by couldn’t see it. She’d grown up with swimming pools, but she didn’t tell him about that. She didn’t want him to know he wasn’t giving her something special. We’d all grown up with swimming pools. And we’d grown up with Nora Lindell. And sometimes, but only sometimes, she thought about this. When the babies kicked, especially, she thought about Trey Stephens and the way he ran his hands up and down her legs. Maybe she wished they were kicking him. She thought about Sissy only when the Mexican wasn’t around. It was almost impossible to imagine her pale, fragile sister when there was someone so old and dark in the same room. It was almost impossible in fact to imagine another life, a different life, when he was there. And, after all, that’s what she had married him for.

  Fourteen years after Nora Lindell went missing, Jack Boyd claimed he saw her again, this time in the Phoenix airport. (This was five years after Sissy Lindell had confirmed to Danny Hatchet that there was definitely no family in Arizona; five years after she allegedly crawled into the backseat of his Nissan.) Jack said Nora looked older, just as he did. She had twins, he said, girls, maybe thirteen years old. This time he didn’t talk to her.

  He stopped at an airport pay phone, and the only person he could think to call was his mother.

  “It’s not her,” Mrs. Boyd said.

  “I’m watching her right now,” he said. “It’s Nora clear as day.”

  “That girl is dead,” said Mrs. Boyd. “She died years ago and everyone knows it.”

  “There are three of them. One my age and two girls who look just like Sissy. Just like Nora and Sissy.” He couldn’t help laughing. “Goddamn twins.”

  Mrs. Boyd didn’t believe it of course, but she couldn’t help making the usual round of phone calls. Eighteen years of phone-tree etiquette had engrained it in her. She picked up the phone and started with the second mother on her list—Mrs. Hatchet, after all, was dead.

  “Twins,” she said to Mrs. Epstein. “Can you imagine?”

  Our mothers tried, but we were the ones who really could imagine it. We were the ones who could picture those twins as if they were ours. We gave them the best of Nora. We gave them her hair—red, just as Jack Boyd had described. We gave them her poreless skin and her overabundance of freckles. We kept them slim, just as Nora and Sissy had been. Here and there, though, we added or subtracted a few inches. Paul Epstein kept them short, rounded their noses to look more like his mother’s than like Nora’s or Sissy’s. Winston Rutherford would have given them well-defined chins. “The chin is a sign of character,” he said to Maggie Frasier when he finally married her. He pointed to his own chin. “You can’t fake that.” He would have said this to Nora Lindell if she’d ever given him the chance. Drew Price, still not convinced Mr. Price wasn’t his real father, no doubt had the twins closing in on six feet tall.

  Jack Boyd didn’t have the luxury of fantasy since, he insisted, he’d seen them for himself. But perhaps the real reason he couldn’t imagine them as his own was because he could see too much of the man he suspected was the real father. Something he didn’t admit for years, something he probably should have kept to himself, was that those two little red-haired girls had the undeniable and aggressive look of Trey Stephens. A savageness and confidence that, among us, only the public schooler had ever displayed. Those girls belonged to Trey, Jack Boyd finally confessed, some time after Epstein v. Stephens came to an end.

  Jack was crying when he told us. We were drunk. Our wives were in the kitchen. Our daughters were huddled together in bedrooms on second and third stories. We were allowed, this once, to smoke our cigars inside in the basement. Jack put his hand on Paul Epstein’s back. “Maybe if he’d known about his own girls, he wouldn’t have touched yours,” he said. We looked in other directions, trying hard to pretend we didn’t know what he was talking about; trying hard to believe those twins weren’t real, that Nora wasn’t real anymore, that none of it was real—not even Paul’s pain, and especially not the things that had happened to his daughter.

  Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we’d already lost Minka Dinnerman and Mr. Lindell as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.

  7

  They did have sex once—Nora and the Mexican. Of course they did. It would have been impossible not to, unrealistic even. How it happened was simple, expected. He got drunk. It wasn’t sexy. She’d been expecting it, and perhaps this more than anything demanded that it happen.

  They’d been married two years, a little longer than the babies had been alive. She’d lost the weight and then a little more. She talked about waiting tables again but the Mexican said no. They didn’t need the money.

  She spent mornings in the backyard, cultivating what few herbs were able to grow—mint mostly, a eucalyptus tree, some other juicy thick-leafed plants. Afternoons she spent in the pool with the girls. They were naturals in the water, just as she’d been. Just as Sissy had been. Evenings she spent in the kitchen, the windows open, the babies on a towel on the linoleum floor. She wore very little these days—a dress the weight of a slip, underwear, flip-flops. The breasts she’d grown while nursing had dried up, had shrunk smaller than the ones she’d arrived with in Arizona. She preferred it this way. It made her feel like the genderless thing that she’d wished all along she could be.

 

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