Free Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison Page B

to accumulate much—the violent death of some young person, a violent death in New Haven.
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    W hen I notice a selfish or unselfish act I’ve committed, I can’t seem to help balancing it. Half the time, that is, I fail morally. After being friendly to Ellen about dead pets, I took a sugar bowl. I took a sugar bowl, so I told Gordon. I told Gordon, so I complained about Ellen on the phone to my friend Charlotte. “I guess in your field there’s no such thing as confidentiality,” Charlotte said. As I add to this narrative, I’m sometimes ashamed of one detail or another, but more often I’m pleased to describe what I did, how I am, as if being an identifiable sort of person matters more than being one sort or another. Accounts like this are supposed to record a change: this is how I became different. But I didn’t change. What could I be except myself?
    What I don’t like is rest. Only when I have a cold do I understand the wish to snuggle and stop striving. “I like to think of finding a place to rest here,” Ellen said, fluttering her hand at the confusion in her living room, where extra dining room chairs in many styles were lined up along one wall, one behind another as in a train. On them, as it happened, her children were playing train, but they stopped to listen, tilting their heads: wary Justine, who gave me the same shrewd look that had caught my attention before, and the younger one, with short, blond hair, the one I kept forgetting wasn’t a boy, who’d pull his or her shirt up when thinking, baring the belly.
    â€œA nest,” said Ellen. I dislike the word nest unless a bird is involved, and I loathe nestle. Ellen said, “I keep imagining that if I moved things just a little, I could hide properly. Wouldn’t you love a curtained bed with red velvet hangings?”
    â€œDust,” I said. “You’d get entangled with the curtains and wouldn’t be able to escape if there was a fire.”
    â€œOr if your lover refused to perform,” said Ellen, now laughing at herself. Justine looked alert. She’d been asked to join our cast. I’d given Ellen’s phone number to Katya without permission. Ellen was grateful. She approved of me too heartily. She wanted some connection with the play, because I was in it.
    The kitchen, a week after the day we’d emptied the cabinets, was subtly altered. Ellen and the children had not cleaned up but had transformed the mess into an intricate domestic installation, half nostalgic, half critical of the trammels of household, something you might almost see in the Whitney Biennial. They’d washed everything, then arranged the objects in neater groups: platters, teapots (red, blue, patterned), bowls (handmade pottery, old china with pink flowers, Danish stoneware). Silverware, separated by function and pattern, was spread on a blanket under the table. The children fussed importantly, lending Ellen more direction as they explained that after meals they replaced the dishes on the floor. They tried to use different plates and bowls at each meal now. Walking from doorway to sink was tricky, and the smaller child—Celeste, she was a girl called Celeste—hopped, as if to suggest that the aisle wasn’t wide enough for two feet, though it was.
    Ellen didn’t want help putting the kitchen back to rights. “The girls and I will do it,” she said. I knew they couldn’t. They couldn’t keep everything, yet everything seemed to be cherished. Ellen was transforming herself into my other sort of client, making her own the objects that had been thrust upon her. I said, “You’re appalling,” which Ellen took with one of her accepting shrugs. The children disappeared, and Ellen led me to a spare bedroom. The closet was crammed with clothing.
    â€œI suppose you want to do the same thing here?” I said.
    â€œLet’s just see,” said Ellen.
    She