The Girls

by Patricia Abbott

Although the girls were not twins, they appeared to be so. Ellis was eleven months older than Acton , and looking back on it years later, William believed Ellis was waiting for Acton to arrive: biding her time.

“An odd little girl,” a blunt neighbor said one day, coming upon William sitting with Ellis in the garden. “You get the feeling she could crawl if she wanted. Stubborn, isn't she?”

“We don't like to push her.”

Ellis stared at the woman from her pink bumpo seat, furrowing her brow. “Shouldn't she have outgrown that infant seat months ago?” the woman asked, frowning back at the baby. “My grandson….”

“She's fond of her chair.”

“You shouldn't give into her whims. You'll pay for it later.”

He was disappointed in the way he'd handled this interchange but also disappointed in the way he'd handled Ellis. She should be out of that chair and doing something more than staring at the neighbors.

Then Acton came along and Ellis sprung to life as if her electricity had finally been switched on. Acton was as quick as Ellis had been slow and they began school the same year. The girls were quite insistent, even at five, about such things.

“We want to start together, Daddy,” Ellis said, smiling at Acton . Their fingers twined immediately.

“We don't want to be alone.”

As they often did, one girl started a sentence and the other finished it, knitting themselves into a tight little web that was almost impossible to penetrate.

Alice died in a skiing accident when the girls were five. Her last words to William were, “Teach them how to swim.”

Given their location at the time, he thought she'd said “ski.” But it was swim, the nurse assured him.

Alice 's words were not as enigmatic as they sounded. Her last summer had been spent in a futile attempt to teach the girls to swim. She'd been a champion diver in her younger years, only missing the Olympic team when her final splash was deemed too big by the judges. There was hardly a day in their all-too-brief marriage when she hadn't swum her designated laps. In fact, the ob-gyn credited her easy deliveries on her superb physical condition.

She would, no doubt, have lived to an advanced age if a novice skier, built like half-back and clumsy and thoughtless, hadn't crashed into her, driving her body into a tree like a stake. He'd no business being on the advanced slope but was too embarrassed to ski on the beginner's trail. “A man of my size….” he started to tell William.

“Exactly,” William said.

The Egan's backyard featured an Olympic-size pool and not knowing how to swim was dangerous and a waste. William sent the girls to the YWCA pool at six, seven, and then again, at eight. They refused to put a toe in the water and stood holding hands at the pool's edge, their toes crinkling white as they gripped the cement, their small pot bellies poking out stubbornly, or so it seemed to him. “Defiant, aren't they?” one instructor after another observed. “They'll have to learn sometime.”

Their matching pink polka dot swimsuits were packed away at the back of their closet (no returns on swimwear); followed by their yellow two-pieces the next year, and their purple speedos the summer after that.

William hired a private swimming instructor when they turned nine. The girls spent most of the hour making fun of the woman's incorrect use of the word “lay.”

“What they need to be taught most a re some manners,” the young woman said, gathering her towel and sunscreen up.

So the denim bikinis of their ninth year joined the other swimsuits and moldered away.

William considered closing the pool down, but frankly, he liked to swim, and it was a good place to escape the tyranny of his daughters, although he never phrased it such. He'd often look up and see their grinning faces at their bedroom window, probably making fun of his middle-aged physique and his graceless technique. Despite her attempts, Alice had never been able to improve his form. They'd often laughed about it, in fact. There was little laughter in the Egan house nowadays.

In his presence, the girls were kind if remote. But once or twice, he'd come upon them critiquing various aspects of his personality, his job, his person. From the outside, it appeared no father had ever been closer to his girls. But inside the house, he was seldom sought out for more than prosaic tasks. If his touch on their shoulder was more than the lightest tap, they shrunk or squirmed away from him.

When they were still in high school, he'd tried to introduce a woman into their household. Leslie Marx was an associate at his office. She was athletic, kind, and highly competent if not brilliant. Those qualities seemed more than enough after ten years without a woman in his life. They dated for several months before he got up the nerve to bring her home. “The girls are amazingly….” he tried to tell her.

Amazingly what? True to the memory of their mother, shy, not fond of company? All of these statements seemed disloyal.

They tittered at Leslie's table manners, her clothes, and her light-hearted conversation. When the evening ended, Leslie took him aside and after hemming and hawing a bit, accused the girls of being witches.

At first, he thought she'd said bitches, and oddly, he was ready to agree. But she corrected him. “Witches, Bill. Do you see how they communicate without speaking? Have you ever seen me eat like that before? I think they made me drop my fork, spill my water, dribble olive oil on my lap. They put a spell on me.”

She was shaking as she looked down at her blouse. “And can you imagine me losing two buttons on a blouse in an hour? Or talking about scrapbooking for twenty minutes. I've never made a scrapbook in my life. I don't think I even knew what it was before their thoughts flew into my head.”

William was somewhat frightened at her accusations but saw the girls more clearly than he had in some time. He realized feelings along these lines had long percolated in his head, but he'd suppressed them. Things went missing, got moved around, turned up in odd places in his house every day. Friends scheduled to visit never showed up. People the girls disliked got sick, moved away, went missing. Their dominion over his house and life was complete.

He went into the kitchen and chastised Ellis and Acton for their behavior. “A guest in my house cannot be treated like that.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Ellis said, “we're sorry, but she brought it on herself. Did you ever see such odious manners? And she seems to have no interests other than running around on a tennis court and riding her malodorous horse. And that crafty thing she does. What was it called?”

The girls looked at each other and shrugged.

Acton added, “We think you can do a lot better than Ms. Marx. What would Mother think?”

Although he didn't believe either girl remembered Alice with any accuracy or interest, her name popped up whenever he went nose-to-nose with them. Whenever a reminder of her one-time existence would bring an idea of his to a halt.

“Would Mother want you to pull down that wallpaper? Would Mother approve of your taking up poker? What would Mother say about a beard?”

On some level, they knew their opinions must count for less than hers, and so used their poor dead Mother to have their way. Did they really believe Alice was anything like them? He shuddered at the idea. And then shuddered at his unfatherly feeling.

But witches. Surely not.

Both girls excelled in school. Ellis was especially good at science, studying botany in college and later in graduate school. She found a job in the botanical gardens ten miles away—taking charge of the bromeliads. Acton , a math whiz, was hired as an assistant professor at a nearby college. Her specialty was binomials. William had no idea what either bromeliads or binomials were until he looked them up online. How odd the girls had such fanciful interests. Alice had been a CPA, and he practiced law with a rather humdrum firm. The couple had liked to watch TV, take walks, go to the movies, swim. Ordinary pursuits. Before the girls came along, that was. He'd given up walks and movies after Alice 's death and the girls monopolized the TV set with Lifetime movies and the Discovery Channel.

“Oh, how nice we won't have to leave Dad alone,” Acton said in William's earshot once both had secured their jobs.

“Who would take care of him?” Ellis added.

Poor Dad, he imagined them thinking. Their shared view of him as elderly and somewhat senile began to color his outlook. Were they hurrying him toward death? Was having the house all to themselves their ultimate goal? He didn't stand a chance should this be part of their dreams. Witches or not, they'd have their way. They were inexorably in charge; he was superfluous to the girls' all-consuming relationship, outside the sphere of their confidences and closeness. He was handy to have around to change the tires on their car, pay bills, see to the grounds, and make their dinner.

Over the years, the Egan house grew dusty, musty, and odd. Various collections took shape and were discarded, although never literally. Former interests continued to occupy large portions of the house, garage, garden. Ellis brought home every sick plant the botanical gardens allowed her. She was often able to cure the plants, but found no reason to return them. So here they sat. In fact, her interest in her bromeliads waned once the plants improved. They rested on every table top where water stains blotched the surface. Ellis also collected Archie comic books, Incan pottery, door latches, and candles in unusual (William thought, obscene) shapes.

Acton, the less whimsical one, hunted down nineteenth-century hammers, sixties rock posters, antique violins, and tropical birds. Real ones. They twittered at William from a dozen cages spread throughout the house. One—a blue, green and yellow parrot, called to him dozens of times each day. Sindbad had a lisp (or had spent time in Germany during his long life) and called out, “Villiam, Villiam, Villiam.”

“Sounds like he's saying “villain,” one of the girls noted.

“What evil deeds have you been up to, Dad?” the other said with a laugh.

Another thing that grew over the years was his daughter's girth. Their refusal to take any exercise and their love of eating and lolling about did not work in their favor. They moved through clothing sizes as if each step up was an achievement. When he picked up a stray sweatshirt and saw size 22 he was appalled. Their mother had taken a size four and he was quite normal in weight. What strange seed had planted itself in his wife's uterus all those years ago? Had their trip to the dessert, with all its exotica, in ‘77 netted them this? Had two seeds been sown on that trip, hatching in spring of the two following years?

Finally. William refused to take on any more of the chores. Mountains of dishes sat on the kitchen counters. Bags of trash littered the driveway: neither girl (and he could never think of them as women) could be bothered to take the bags out to the street.

“I'm not soiling my clothes with all that slop,” Acton , in a jogging suit circa 1995, said.

“We'll have to find a housekeeper,” he told them at dinner one night. The girls looked at each other in alarm.

“We don't like strangers in the house,” Acton said.

“She'll break things. Or worse yet, steal them.” Ellis put her napkin to her lips in horror.

Mrs. Danville, an elderly woman who seldom spoke, got their house into order in a matter of weeks though the girls grew more sullen by the day. Neither had come up against a force as unrelenting, organized, and persistent as their new housekeeper. They were taken aback when she bought shelving units and baskets and boxes and hanging racks that housed their projects in an orderly way. She seemed to know as much about their hobbies or collections as they did.

“Internet,” she explained when they forced her to acknowledge her source of information. ‘Look at your little wooden hammers. I have a nice cubby hole for each one.” She even managed to identify an especially rare and elusive mallet. “The comic books will keep better in these special sleeves.”

Still she did not have the depth of skill necessary to evade the girls' handiwork for long. Within two months, the girls found a way to dispense with her.

“Has anyone seen Mrs. D. today,” William asked. He slid his finger across the back of a chair and it came away dusty. “How long has it been since she turned up?” Both girls looked at their feet.

He dialed Mrs. Danville's number, stopped by her apartment, called the agency she worked for. Nothing.

“I guess she found a better position,” Acton said. Ellis nodded.

“She only had to ask for more money,” William said, his voice trailing off. “Or tell me what the problem was.”

The problems stood before him looking pleased.

And so things continued. The part of the house that troubled him most was the pool and terrace surrounding it. When he thought of his poor dead Alice , it was here that he pictured her. His mind filled with images of the two of them frolicking in the blue water. Memories of Alice , poised on the diving board. Of their nightly races. Right now, it was filled with leaves from the dying maple tree. Seeds, debris, discarded candy wrappers, charcoal from a recent barbecue. He made a lame attempt to clean it, but the pool was large and he was growing smaller.

“Can you give me a hand with this?” he asked his daughters who'd taken to sitting outside.

The lounge chairs were grimy, but they'd plopped their sizable backsides down. Dirt from the potted plants had washed onto the flagstone. He was disgusted.

The girls looked up. “Well, of course, Daddy. Just give us a minute to finish our

conversation. Acton was telling me about her tenure application.”

William blanched. His one hope for any future peace and happiness had been that Acton would be denied tenure and the girls would move on. Her teaching evaluations were mediocre at best. Her research had been praised early on, but less so over the last two years. Once tenure was secured, the girls would continue to live in his house, waiting for his death if not making themselves the cause of it. Only the other night, he had the impression an unseen hand pushed at him as he began to descend the stairs. His oatmeal the other morning had tasted odd too. He was the only one to eat it so it would be simple to poison the box. He was coming to the conclusion that it was either him or them. Maybe not now, but soon.

Of course, they did not clean the pool, the terrace, the chairs. An hour later when they left in a hurry, he saw their discarded Big Mac cartons, their Big Gulp cups, the greasy paper from the fries. He followed a trail of dabs of ketchup into the kitchen and discarded the lot of it. Their new penchant for poolside snacks and talks deprived him of the one place he could go to remember Alice . He called a pool man out with the thought of draining it once and for all and had the area cleaned. “Shall I cover the pool?” the man asked when the water and terrace were again pristine.

The day was lovely as it usually was in their part of the country. William looked around, pleased with the return of order. “I think I'll keep it open after all.”

How could he let go of it?

Within a week, the weather and the girls had done their work. He came out to find them sitting in their lounges, their feet in the water. They hadn't put the umbrella down when it rained earlier and there was a sizable gash in it. Once again debris from their atrocious diets littered the terrace.

This time his anger overtook him and he walked over to the pool and pushed them and their chairs into the pool. They'd always done everything together so why not this. Drown. He could imagine them thinking that learning how to swim might have been a good idea. He stood there frozen, watching them struggling to get free of the chairs, struggling to lift their heavy heads out of the water, flailing around. He gave a thought to reaching out a hand and then the thought that they wouldn't reach out to him if the reverse situation were true entered his head.

But after several seconds of the flailing and splashing and screaming, he saw they'd managed to link hands and were kicking their way to the side of the pool. Like some gigantic ogre, some underwater beast, they jerked their way across the water, learning how to swim in some fashion at long last.

Before they reached the pool's side, he'd walked back into the house, out the front door, and out of their lives. He'd kept his promise to Alice — that they would learn how to swim—and now he was free of them. And they of him.

*An earlier version of this story appeared in the Baltimore Review.