Free Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Page B

bundle of costumes in one arm and a bag of popping corn in the other as she stood rigid in the sawdust of the midway and lectured me sternly: “We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say 'Where is Elly and Iphy?' We say 'Where are Elly and Iphy?'”
    If you stood facing the twins, Elly was on your left and Iphy on your right. Elly was right-handed and Iphy was left-handed. But Iphy was the right leg and Elly was the left leg. If you pulled Elly's hair, Iphy yelped too. If you kissed Iphy's cheek, Elly smiled. If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn't sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate. Between them they ate a small fraction more than one norm kid their size.
    Jonathan Tomaini, the greasy-haired music-school graduate who became their piano teacher when they had gone past Lily, claimed that Iphy was all melody and Elly was rhythm exclusively. They were both sopranos.
    Arty speculated that their two brains functioned as right and left lobes of a single brain.
    Elly punished Iphy by eating food that disagreed with them. Iphy would sink into depressed silence, eating nothing. Elly's favorite trick was cheese. Iphy hated constipation like cancer.
    Elly varied the treatment by gorging on chocolate, even though she didn't really like chocolate and it made her chin break out in zits. Pimples were very obvious on her milky skin. Iphy loved chocolate and never ate it for fear of pimples. Elly's eating the stuff never gave Iphy pimples. The punishment was that Iphy had to sleep next to Elly's pimples, had to live within inches of the molten eruptions.
    Iphy felt sorry for everybody who wasn't a twin. Elly despised me.
     
    When Chick came along, both twins adored him. He was such a meek little feather that he worshiped them. Lil and Al were just loved. But Arty was different. He was separate. He fascinated Iphy and he terrified Elly. Elly's harshness flared against anyone who might distract Iphy's attention from her. The rest of us were just fantasy opposition. Arty was dangerous. He flirted with Iphy. He toyed with her.
    Elly hated him. She acted, sometimes, as though Arty could tear Iphy away from her.
     
    The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said “Mutant Mystery” and, in smaller letters, “A Museum of Natures Innovative Art.” We called it “the Chute.” Like everything else in the Fabulon, the Chute grew and changed over the years. But the Chute had started with six clear-glass twenty-gallon jars, and those jars-each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice tape-were always the core.
    The Chute was Crystal Lil's idea, and she supervised it. She visited the Chute every day before the gates opened and polished the jars lovingly with glass cleaner. Later, when Al wanted to put the stuffed animals in, he had to clear it with Crystal Lil. She insisted on the maze at the entrance so that the six jars remained the climax of the walk through.
    The stuffed animals in their lit glass windows were the usual humdrum collection of two-headed calves, six-legged chickens, and the mounted skeleton of a three-tailed cat. The only live exhibit was a trio of featherless hens that Al picked up from the chicken rancher who had bred them to save plucking costs on his fryers. He couldn't sell them because customers were used to the pimply “chicken skin” of birds that had their feathers yanked. They didn't trust the smooth-skinned look. These three were cheerful, baggy-fleshed creatures with floppy combs and wattles. They lived for two years before Lil