haunted children. When our mother wasn't there,
those two sets of eyes pleaded mutely with Chris and
me to do something, anything, to make the misery go
away.
Momma took a week off from the secretarial
school so she could be with her twins as much as possible. I hated it that the grandmother felt it so necessary to trail after her every time she showed up. Always putting her nose in where it didn't belong, and her advice, when we didn't want her advice. Already she'd told us we didn't exist, and had no right to be alive on God's earth, save for those saintly and pure-- like herself. Did she come merely to distress us more, and take from us the comfort of having our mother to
ourselves?
The whisper of her menacing gray dresses, the
sound of her voice, the tread of her heavy feet, the
sight of her huge pale hands, soft and puffy, flashing
with diamond rings, and spotted brown with dying
pigment . . . oh, yes, just to see her was to loathe her. Then there was our mother, rushing to us often,
doing what she could to help the twins back to health.
Shadows were under her eyes, too, as she gave the
twins aspirins and water, and later on orange juice,
and hot chicken soup.
One morning Momma rushed in carrying a big
thermos of orange juice she had just squeezed. "It's
better than the frozen or canned kind," she explained,
"full of vitamins C and A, and that's good for colds."
Next she listed what she wanted Chris and me to do,
saying that Chris and I were to give orange juice often. We stored the thermos on the attic steps--as
good as any refrigerator in the wintertime.
One glance at the thermometer from Carrie's lips,
and a frenzied panic blew away all of Momma's cool.
"Oh, God!" she cried out in distress. "One hundred
three-point-six. I have to take them to a doctor, a
hospital!"
I was before the heavy dresser holding to it lightly
with one hand and exercising my legs, as I did each