Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [39]
The two of them are drinking the yogourt-and-skim-milk-and-blueberry smoothies they’ve just made in the blender. She can see the melting package of frozen blueberries, and the puddle of blue milk lying like pale ink on the counter.
“So, you’ll do me a favour, for once you’ll put it in the dishwasher,” she can’t help saying to them.
They turn their identical eyes towards her, lambent eyes like those of forest cats, and smile their identical heartless heart-crushing smiles, showing their slightly feral faun’s teeth, blue at the moment, and shaking their moussey, fluffed-out manes; and she catches her breath, as she does almost every time she sees them, because they are so huge and so gorgeous and she still can’t quite understand how she managed to give birth to them. One such creature would have been unlikely enough, but two!
They laugh. “It’s the Big Mom!” one of them shouts, the one on the right. “The Big Mommy! Let’s give her a hug!”
They leap down from their stools and grab hold of her and squeeze. Her feet lift from the ground, and she rises perilously into the air.
“Put me down!” she shrieks. They know she doesn’t like this, they know she’s afraid they’ll drop her. They’ll drop her and she’ll break. Sometimes they have no sense of that; they think she’s unbreakable. Roz the Rock. Then they remember.
“Let’s put her on a stool,” they say. They carry her over and deposit her, and climb back onto their own stools, like circus animals who have done their trick.
“Mom, you look like a pumpkin in that,” says one. It’s Erin. Roz has always been able to tell them apart, or so she claims. Two guesses and she’s right every time. Mitch used to have trouble. But then, he only ever saw them for about fifteen minutes a day.
“Pumpkin, that’s me,” says Roz, with heavy jocularity. “Fat, orange, big friendly grin, hollow in the centre and glows in the dark.” She needs her coffee, right now! She pulls open the freezer door, sticks the frozen blueberry package back in there, finds the bag of magic beans, and fumbles around in one of the roll-out drawers for the electric grinder. Having everything stowed away in drawers wasn’t such a hot idea, she can never find anything any more. Especially not the pot lids. The uncluttered look, said that fool of a designer. They always intimidate her.
“Aww,” says the other one. Paula. Errie and Pollie, they call each other, or Er and La, or, when they’re speaking collectively, Erla. It’s creepy when they do that. Erla’s going out tonight. That means both of them. “Aww. You rotten twin! You hurt the Mommy’s feelings! You are just rotten, rotten to the core!” This last is an imitation of Roz imitating her own mother, who used to say that. Roz feels a sudden need for her, for her harsh, embattled, once-scorned, long-dead mother. She’s tired of being a mother, she wants to be a child for a change. She missed out on that. It looks like way more fun.
The twins laugh delightedly. “Selfish rotten cesspool,” one says to the other.
“Unshaved armpit!”
“Festering tampon!”
“Used panty liner!” They can go on this way for hours, thinking up worse and worse insults for each other, laughing so hard they roll on the floor and kick their feet in the air with delight at their own outrageous humour. What puzzles her is how