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  By the time I got back to New York, I already had a letter. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the catalogs and junk waiting for me in my little mailbox. I tore it open immediately, thinking, So we’re really doing this. And that’s exactly what the letter said:

  We’re Really Doing This!! No backing out!! xoxo —Sid My guess was that she had penned it Christmas Eve night after I’d passed out on the couch, since it was written in a faded purple Magic Marker on a torn-out page of notebook paper, both items easily found in Mom and Dad’s basement. Sid’s loopy and childlike writing always made me feel tender toward her. Soft and wide and squishy, it evoked Mylar balloons, cookie cakes, and boy-band crushes. Dumb girl handwriting. It’s okay; I can say this because Sid is not dumb. She was a National Merit Scholar and has never in her life been on the losing team in a game of Trivial Pursuit. She does possess a certain innocence that no amount of intelligence or hard knocks will erode; that is what I see when I look at her bubbly scrawl. That’s all it took to catapult me from lukewarm to enthusiastic about our experiment in communication. I wanted to run inside and write to her that, yes, I was on board. We were really doing this. But I knew it would be hours before I could grab a second alone. Instead, I wrangled the twins up the stairs to our second-floor walk-up while Leo returned the rental car to the lot around the corner. Our mountain of luggage sat inside the foyer of our building. Leo would take the car seats to our basement storage locker and bring the luggage up after he returned the car. Our neighborhood and building were relatively safe, but leaving all of this loot in the hallway was still a risk and just one of the many inconveniences we suffered for the privilege of living in Manhattan’s West Village. When I found out I was having twins, one of my first instincts was to panic about whether we’d have to move from our beloved apartment. Leo thought yes. I convinced him that we could stay. “Much larger families live in much smaller spaces in other parts of the world,” I remember saying, feeling smugly proud of my worldly outlook—picturing families of seven on the African plain huddled in a grass hut and how we’d be more like them than a family of four living in a McMansion in, say, suburban Houston. Or how every story I can remember reading in this Immigrant Women’s literature course in college seemed to mention there being only one bed for the entire family. We weren’t like ordinary Americans, needing their ridiculously large houses, raping the earth with fertilized lawns and central air. No, we would take only what we needed. We were New Yorkers, I told him; we could handle this. How evolved, how drunk on my own superior lifestyle I felt. I regret it at least four or five times a day. Say, for example, when I’m coming home with the boys and the dinner and the dry cleaning, and Quinn has a stage-five meltdown on the front stoop because I again refused to patronize the Mister Softee ice cream truck that followed us home from the park like a fucking stalker. (I’m sorry, but that Mister Softee driver has caused more family strife than a Vegas bachelor party.) And then I forget I’d promised Joey that he’d be the one to stick the magnetic key fob into the sensor on the outside door, and his meltdown begins. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the general angst of the moment to be escalated by one of the boys pooping in their pants or falling down and beginning to bleed. In these situations, I think about how I’ve made my life so much more difficult than it needs to be. I surmise that I’d be a happier, calmer, and better-groomed person if I lived in one of those suburban McMansions where the boys had space to run around and I had a kitchen with room for more than two days’ worth of food and the counter space and appliances required to prepare it. Add to that the publicness of it all. Can no moment of childhood ugliness happen in private? Why is it that some meticulously dressed gay man who lives in my building—one of the same guys I used to chat with about politics and restaurants while doing laundry or sorting recycling—seems to appear at the most shameful mommy moments, wincing past me, no doubt silently congratulating himself on the bullet he dodged by not having easy access to an ovary, and making me feel like a pox on our perfect neighborhood. Don’t you remember? I’m one of you! I want to yell. Or, I almost didn’t have kids! I didn’t know it was going to be so hard! But there’s no “almost” about twin three-year-old boys, no blending in or quick and quiet entries. My only chance at getting them into the building smoothly is if one of Mrs. Tannenbaum’s white pugs—the friendly one, hopefully—is hanging around the first-floor hallway. If the boys made enough noise, Mrs. T. would appear with a small dog biscuit and break it in two for them to give to Mitzi. “Thank you,” I’d say to her as if she’d just fortified me for the long journey ahead. It’s one flight—eighteen steps with a landing halfway—and we’re home. It’s not unusual for it to take fifteen minutes. The apartment itself is lovely. The perfect place if you are childless, or maybe if you have anything other than twin boys who are between the ages of zero and three. It’s technically a one-bedroom with a study, which was our combination closet and office until we turned it into the boys’ room. The whole place is eight hundred square feet—about the size of the back porch in the house I grew up in. During my pregnancy, I nested like some kind of crazed Martha Stewart protégée, intent on delivering on the promises made in my hard-fought campaign to keep the apartment. Determined to be right about how easy and wonderful life in our little apartment would be, I transformed our abode into the ultimate small but cleverly designed family home. It was even featured on ApartmentTherapy.com as “Cassie & Leo’s Dreamy Oasis.” Our dovel gray walls and white Eames rocker, the chandelier and half-sized travel cribs we painted the same midnight blue, handsomely awaited the arrival of their tenants, who were markedly less impressed than the dozens of ApartmentTherapy readers, who commented on our brilliant storage solutions and sophisticated color palette. There are some upsides to living in our tiny apartment, including needing only twenty minutes and five or six baby wipes to clean it. But when I see my boys slithering off our supertall bed, running four steps to the sofa, jumping on that, then repeating the loop over and over, I can’t help but think of a pair of puppies forced to live in a small pen. Leo grew up with a bunch of brothers, but I only had my sister. My earliest memories of playing include coloring and dressing up dolls, and I guess I pictured the boys doing slightly more masculine versions of that. I did not foresee constant wrestling or the compulsion to run and jump and knock things over that is programmed into their DNA. When I was pregnant, the market was booming and we could have sold our place for a nice profit. Now we’d have to take a loss to sell it, so I didn’t feel like it was worth it to admit to Leo I was wrong about staying, to let on how frustrating I found my day-to-day life and that I held the apartment responsible. Still, I loved our street. Someone once told me that Morton Street is the most photographed street in New York. I have no idea if that’s true, but at certain times of day, it is breathtaking. In a city of straight lines and rectangles, Morton is one of the few with a bend, which allows the street to reveal itself slowly. With its low trees and stately town houses, it’s quintessential West Village. Also, it’s magically quiet. The crowds of Sex and the City tourists that can ruin Charles or Perry streets on a Saturday morning seem worlds away, though they are only a few blocks over. It seemed unfair—impossible, even—that these two things I loved so much—my kids and my apartment—didn’t go together at all. I wanted to sit them all down and say, “Can’t you all just try to get along, for my sake?” Upstairs, I stuck Sid’s letter into a book under my bed and helped the boys negotiate the bathroom. I didn’t need to open my refrigerator to know that we had nothing to eat. Still, I was poking through its contents in search of the source of an awful stench when Leo returned from his second trip up the stairs with our luggage. “Blech. This has got to go,” I said, plunking the loosely wrapped morsel of soft stinky cheese into the trash and tying it up. “Fair enough,” he said, grabbing the trash from me. “Hudson?” “Yeah, let’s go. I’m starved,” I said, and began herding the boys back out the door. The Hud
son Diner wasn’t known for its food, but it was right around the corner and never crowded, so we could usually get a big booth by the window. There was something about that place that had a calming effect on the boys. Maybe it was the smell of gravy, the dim orange fluorescent lighting, the geriatric crowd, or the giant pile of individually wrapped saltine crackers the humorless waitress always plunked in front of them as soon as we arrived, but this was the only restaurant where we could eat an entire meal and not have to apologize to a half-dozen different people on the way out. While the boys munched on saltines, I took out a pack of baby wipes and asked Joey if I could give his car a wash. He never went anywhere without clutching a little matchbox car. Sometimes I worried that his left hand would be permanently deformed into a little claw, and at night while he slept I’d pry his sweet little fingers away from the silver vehicle and massage his palm. With the car scrubbed, I reached across the table and wiped the boys’ hands clean one by one while Leo set up a windy sugar packet racetrack on the table. I cleaned my phone with a new wipe and then scrolled through Christmas pictures. “Hey, Joey, nice camera work,” I said when I got to the million shots he’d snapped at Joe and Margie’s. “Oh, bud, I love this one!” It was a shot of Sid and me sitting on the sofa, my head resting on her shoulder and both of us beaming in the completely unguarded way you do when a child asks you to smile. I posted it to Facebook and captioned it, “Good to be home but missing this gorgeous gal already.” It was such a nice shot that I cropped it and brightened it and made it my profile picture. By the time the food arrived, I’d accumulated forty-some likes and nearly as many comments from old friends who hadn’t seen Sid in many years—virtually or otherwise. I had to put my phone away when Joey spilled his water, and I spent the rest of dinner preoccupied by the logistics of getting letters from here to Singapore. How long would it take? What kind of stamps would I need? Oh crap, would I have to go to the post office? That in itself could be a deal breaker. That night, after the boys were in bed, I got out the stepladder and rifled through the tiny cupboard above the refrigerator. Behind a ziplock bag containing our tax returns from the last five years, I found the dust-coated shoe box of old postcards, thank-you notes, and the set of yellowing monogrammed stationery Mom gave me when I graduated college. Leo turned on the TV and lay on the floor groaning about his back being sore from sitting in the car all day. As the IT director for a chain of gyms, he spends his days crisscrossing Manhattan on his bike to fix one computer issue or another at the gym’s eight different locations, so sitting for long periods was unusual for him. I halfheartedly offered a back rub and surveyed the dozen or so dull pencils and freebie pens jammed into the jar on the desk in the foyer. The pencil jar was like a microcosm of my wardrobe, I thought: overstuffed with uninspiring items, most of them with no shot of being chosen. Selfishly relieved that Leo responded, “That’s all right,” to my offer, I settled in on the sofa, using a fat September Vogue as my lap desk, a clicker pen from a Realtor in Pennsylvania in hand, and froze. I couldn’t think of how to begin. I’d withdrawn only a single sheet of stationery and an envelope from the box, so I had to get this right if I didn’t want to get out the stepladder again. But even without the logistical concerns, I just didn’t know what to say. If asked, I would definitely have described Sid and me as close, but that moment of paralysis brought home the reality that many years had passed since we’d exchanged real intimacies. She was right, I thought, with a wave of sadness: I did know more about those people on Facebook than I did about her. I promised myself that that was going to change this year. My letter had to be a good kickoff. I didn’t want to set the tone for a year of vague updates and pleasantries. I wanted this thing to be real and meaningful. But first, an important thing to know about Sid: She was nineteen and single when she had River. I’ll tell you the story because having an unplanned baby at that age really changes a person. It was the summer of 1994, and I had just graduated from high school. Sid was home from her first year at Ohio University, where I was to join her in the fall. She had declared a perfectly Sid-like double major in biology and poetry and thrown herself wholeheartedly into the pervasive counterculture in Athens, Ohio: that of the latter-day hippie. In mid-June, Gretchen Steele and I tagged along with Sid and her boyfriend, Kenny Fisher, to a Grateful Dead show at Buckeye Lake in Columbus. Gretchen and I were not Dead fans—we listened to 311 and Sublime and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it sounded like a fun way to spend a summer weekend, and I’d do anything to hang out with Sid. To people in Sid’s old crowd, you just have to say Buckeye Lake ’94, and they know that it was pouring rain and that the band did a whole set of rain songs and an unending jam that made me wish I had split that tab of LSD with Sid, so I didn’t have to stand there swaying like a moron for twenty minutes while everyone around me went into some kind of reverential trance. At some point during the nine-hour preshow party in the fields around the stage, Sid and Kenny disappeared into his tent and accidentally made a baby. Kenny sold marijuana and nitrous oxide balloons out of the back of his van. This makes him sound like a real loser, but forget everything you may have heard about drug dealers or single guys with conversion vans. Kenny was kind and funny and smart—at least that’s how he seemed to my seventeen-year-old self. He was huge—six foot four and muscular except for his soft beer belly. He wore loose-fitting tank tops and board shorts, and had an animal skull tattooed on his tanned biceps. With his wraparound reflective sunglasses, fanny pack (essentially a drug dealer’s briefcase), and New Balance running shoes, he affected a sort of trend-resistant, devil-may-care attitude. Again, he sounds awful on paper, but in the alternate universe of the jam-band circuit, he was definitely the “cool guy.” Something about his scratchy deep voice, bright blue eyes, sunburned face, dazzling smile, and infectious laugh drew people to him. Sid and Kenny were kind of this power couple in that whole world. Gorgeous and uninhibited, their non-dreadlocked hair and pleasant smell set them apart from many of their peers. Have I mentioned yet that Sid is a beauty? I know that’s what everyone wants to know: what we look like. We look a lot alike—thin, average height, honey-colored hair, olive skin, dark eyes, big bright smiles—except she is strikingly beautiful in the way of movie stars and wealthy socialites and I am just barely above average in the way of plain girls everywhere. Our mom is part Native American and our dad is half Greek, so we looked vaguely exotic among the blondes and redheads of our childhood. And while our features are mostly the same, Sid’s were put together just right. It’s like she was carefully molded by an artist and I was the knockoff, hastily put together in a sweatshop to look like her. At certain angles and in some pictures, we look nearly identical. But on second glance, you notice that my eyebrows hover where hers lift, my nose hooks where hers dips, my skin blotches where hers glows, and my teeth suffice where hers dazzle. On the upside, I am extremely photogenic. But every time someone tells me this, what I hear is, “You look much better in photos.” Or, “It’s disappointing that you don’t look more like your sister.” It’s probably for the best I’d never tried online dating. If I’m being honest, it’s part of the reason I was such a big Facebooker. As long as I never actually run into any of my ex-boyfriends, they are going to think they really missed out. Being the less attractive sister, and I suppose a tad superficial, I spent a lot of time in my formative years thinking about physical beauty—what constitutes it, what it makes possible, how it influences one’s personality. I’ve determined that the hair-skin-teeth trifecta is the most important of all. If you have that covered, you can have a big nose or a weak chin or small eyes (but not all of those, obviously!) and still be considered beautiful. This is the kind of deep stuff I thought about endlessly between the ages of about fifteen and nineteen. At any rate, despite Sid’s considerable charms, a baby turned out to be Kenny’s deal breaker, and shortly after she declared she was going to have it, Kenny was gone. I probably don’t need to tell you that Sid had never been rejected on any l
evel prior to this point, so this was new territory for her. She went from golden child with the world as her oyster to heartbroken virtually overnight. Seeing Sid in this new light came as a blow to everyone. I was as surprised as anyone when she decided to go through with the pregnancy. I guess those annual baby funerals that our favorite teacher in elementary school held on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade had an effect on her. Looking back, I cannot believe that my liberal-voting parents let us sit through that macabre production. Or that they let me wear that “tiny footprints” pin that I bought from Mrs. H for twelve dollars. Or that I had an eighth-grade teacher who sold dead-baby-themed jewelry to her students. After the initial shock wore off, Mom and Dad did their best to act supportive and positive, but it was hard not to detect their disappointment that Sid’s promising future appeared to be caving in. To be honest, I was devastated at first. What about my plans for us? I selfishly wondered. She was supposed to take me under her wing, to help me make friends, to be my roommate when I moved off campus, to backpack across Europe with me after college. I wanted to scream at my parents: “This is what you get for sending us to twelve years of Catholic school. Some of that stuff stuck!” I went off to college while Sid was in her first trimester, barfing and crying all day. Her pregnancy continued in much the same way; she was basically a puffy and weepy mess for nine months. I came home a few weekends to spend time with her, and nobody in our open-minded family quite knew how to talk about it—or how to interact with a Sid who wasn’t the shining sun around which we all orbited. Eventually, I came to find comfort in Sid’s lot. I’d read too many novels in which the only truly good character, the one who is beloved and respected by everyone, dies. Based on this, at some point during our preteen years, I’d developed an irrational fear that my sister would perish in a car accident or at the hands of a serial killer or of a rare disease or natural disaster. As it was, conversations about her could be downright eulogistic: Kind to everyone. A beautiful person—inside and out. And so humble! I harbored this secret fear for years, and in church, after Communion, I would actually kneel down and pray to God to keep my sister alive. But her pregnancy was a major setback, and one that made her less mythical in my eyes. I stopped worrying so much about her then. As soon as River was born, Mom and Dad and Joe and Margie promptly turned to mush, found their words, and couldn’t stop talking about it, which was now a him. Sid, too, took one look at her new son and knew in her hippie heart that becoming River’s mom at this moment in her life was her destiny. She went at mothering him with her trademark gusto. He had a charmed baby – and toddlerhood with an incredible support system, even if Kenny was never heard from again. Sid went back to school—premed—at the state school a half mile from our parents’ house, where she and River lived until she became a certified nurse-midwife five years later. New York Jan 2 Dear Sid, Happy New Year! I hope you guys had a smooth flight back and the jet lag isn’t too bad. It was great to spend Christmas with you. I’ve been fantasizing about coming to visit you in Singapore. Alas, I don’t think it’s in the budget for us anytime soon. But maybe if I start saving now, we can do Christmas there next year. Hey, you were right about this letter-writing thing. It is going to be fun. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see something from you in my mailbox. What a treat! I want to kick off these letters in the spirit of openness. I want us to really know each other again—like when we were teenagers. I’ve been racking my brain for a fitting way to begin, and the only thing I can think of is a truly embarrassing confession. It’s really stupid, but I want to make a gesture of honesty to nudge us a little closer to the time in our lives when there were no secrets. Right about the time River was born, I got arrested for shoplifting in Athens. It had become a habit of mine. I started with books. Incensed that my Psychology 101 book cost $125, I slipped it into my bag and walked out. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, and found it perversely thrilling. I moved on to the odd shirt or candle, becoming bolder and bolder with each success. A few times, I reached behind counters for sunglasses or jewelry. After about six months, I was caught. As I was leaving the bookstore, a security guard stopped me and asked to check my bag. Well, there were two textbooks, a planner, some pens, and a T-shirt in there. Oh my God, it was so humiliating. There were like a dozen people there who saw what was going on. It hurts me—physically hurts me—to think of it now. I called home from the police station, and Dad drove down and bailed me out. I went to court and had to pay thousands of dollars (borrowed from Mom and Dad) and do community service for a year and join this support group. I still have no idea what I was thinking. I may have been depressed . . . This is going to sound like I’m blaming you, but please know that I’m not: When you got pregnant, it was like you suddenly dropped out of my life. I was so sad. I think the whole klepto thing was some sort of coping technique or distraction or simply a sign that I was going a bit crazy without you. What I should have done was made an effort to maintain our relationship then, instead of escaping into my ridiculous little crime spree, but good choices have never been my forte. Okay, there. I did it. I’m mortified (even Leo doesn’t know about this!) but I wanted to reveal something real and honest and hard to get things rolling. I promise to lighten up from here on out, and try to bring you rainbows and sunshine more often than not. Love, Cassie The next day when I went to mail it, I got to the mailbox and something stopped me. When I send an even vaguely important e-mail, I’ll go back and read it two or three times to make sure I didn’t say anything stupid. Yet here I was about to send this massively personal letter, and I’d never be able to see it again. What if it got lost in the mail? Instead of dropping it in the box, I put it back in my bag. I considered typing it out and saving it, but that seemed silly. Plus, that would tempt me to then send it by e-mail, and the thought sullied the delicious vision I had of the piles of handwritten letters accumulating over the year. I thought about taking a picture of it, but a bunch of photos of partial letters on my phone didn’t appeal. So I walked with the boys to the OfficeMax on Sixth Avenue and bought a scanner. The project, from making the purchase to getting the thing set up, took most of the day and all of my patience. But in the end I had a system to assure every letter Sid and I exchanged would be saved for posterity. That night after bath time—letter scanned, saved, and re-enveloped—I let Quinn come downstairs with me while Joey played with Leo. There was a mailbox right on the corner outside of the Henrietta Hudson, our neighborhood lesbian bar. Its proprietor, Kim, was our downstairs neighbor. We had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn’t complain about the noise from her bar or the patrons we sometimes found canoodling in the building’s foyer, and she wouldn’t complain about the running and stomping and screaming coming from our apartment at what must seem to a bar owner ungodly hours of the morning. I’d heard horror stories about angry downstairs neighbors from my apartment-dwelling friends with kids—heavy carpet; no running or jumping indoors; eviction threats from co-op boards—so Kim was basically the perfect neighbor for us. “Would you like to drop the letter in?” I asked. He held out his hand. “Yes.” I hesitated for a second. Maybe I shouldn’t send it. Maybe I should run upstairs and write a regular letter containing no shocking confessions. Maybe I should rewrite it. If it were an e-mail, I would have surely rewritten it several times. “Mama? Come on,” Quinn said. I brushed the dark hair away from his big brown eyes and kissed him on the forehead before handing him the letter. He pulled the box open and stood on his tiptoes to peek inside. To give him a better view, I hoisted him onto my knee. “Huh?” he said, clearly disappointed that the envelope was just sitting there on a tray—I think he imagined peering down into a pile of letters and packages. I explained how the box works and he slowly pushed the handle shut, pressing the bridge of his nose to the lid so he could watch the letter as long as possible. As soon as he closed the lid, he quickly opened it again and gasped at the empty tray. He looked at me, wide-eyed. “I know, right! That letter is
going to go on a truck to the post office and then on an airplane to the post office in Singapore, and then to Aunt Sid’s house.” Singapore