Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress - Nine Tales

Tin himself would never go to the funeral of someone he dislikes, unless it’s to comfort some needy survivor. The early days of AIDS were hellish; it was like the Black Death: wall-to-wall funerals, widespread numbness and glazed disbelief, survivors’ guilt, a run on handkerchiefs. But for Jorrie, loathing is an incentive. She wants to tap dance on the graves, figuratively speaking; neither of them is up to the actual dancing any more, though he at least was an agile rock ’n’ roller in high school.

Jorrie wasn’t agile, as such; more like enthusiastic. She was rangy, she was coltish, she flung herself around, and her hair slipped out of restraint. But the gang thought it was neat when the two of them took the floor together, on account of their being twins, and he could make Jorrie look like a better dancer than she was: it was his calling from childhood to defend her when possible from her own impetuousness. Also, dancing with her gave him a short respite from whatever belle of the ball he was supposed to be going out with. He had his pick, he played the field. Best that way.

Astonishing to him how popular he’d been with the teenaged lovelies; but not surprising, when he comes to think of it. He’d had a sympathetic manner, and he’d listened to their plaints, and had not tried to disrobe them violently in parked cars, though he’d done the mandatory spate of post-dance necking so they wouldn’t think they had halitosis. When extra favours were offered, including the unhooking of the pointy-titted wired bra and the peeling off of the adhesive panty-girdle, he would considerately decline.

“You’d hate yourself in the morning,” he’d counsel them. And they would have hated themselves, and cried on the telephone, and begged him not to tell; and also they would have feared pregnancy, as kids did in those days before the pill. Or they might even have hoped for it, with a view to trapping him in an early marriage — him, Martin the Magnificent! What a catch!

Nor did he ever tell boastful fibs about his dates, as lesser, pimplier youths were in the habit of doing. When the subject of his previous night’s adventures would come up in the chilly, no-frilly, naked-willie boys’ locker room, he would smile enigmatically, and the others would grin and nudge one another and wallop him on the arm in a brotherly fashion. It helped that he was tall and nimble, and a star at track and field. The high jump was his specialty.

What a rascal.

What a gent.

Jorrie doesn’t want to tap dance on the graves alone because she doesn’t want to do anything alone. If she keeps at it she can nag Tin into attending these doleful bun-fests with her, even though he says he has no desire to be bored out of his occiput by a crowd of faux-gloomy old farts gumming the crustless sandwiches and congratulating themselves on still being alive. He finds Jorrie’s interest in such terminal rites of passage excessive and even morbid, and has told her so.

“I’m only being respectful,” she says, at which Tin snorts. It’s a joke: neither of them has ever made respectfulness a priority except for outward show.

“You just want to gloat,” he replies; and Jorrie snorts in her turn because this is so accurate.

“Do you think we’re brittle?” she’s been known to ask him. Terrific sense of humour is one thing, but brittle is another.

“Of course we’re brittle,” he has answered. “We were born brittle! But seek the bright side: you can’t have much taste unless you’re brittle.” He doesn’t add that Jorrie fails to have much taste anyway; less, as time goes on.

“Maybe we could have been brilliant psychopathic murderers,” she said once, perhaps a decade ago, when they were barely in their sixties. “We could have committed the perfect crime by killing a total stranger at random. Pushed them off a train.”

“Never too late,” Tin replied. “It’s certainly on my bucket list. But I’m waiting till we get cancer. If we’ve got to go, we’ll go in style; take a few with us. De-burden the planet. More toast?”

“Don’t you dare get cancer without me!”

“I won’t. Cross my heart and spit. Unless it’s prostate cancer.”

“Don’t do that,” said Jorrie. “I’d feel left out.”

“If I get prostate cancer,” said Tin, “I pledge to arrange a prostate transplant for you so you can share the experience. I know a lot of guys who wouldn’t mind heaving their prostates out the window about now. They could at least get a good night’s sleep: dispense with the pee parade.”

Jorrie grinned. “Thanks a bundle,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a prostate. One more thing to whine about in the golden years. Think the donor might like to throw in the whole scrotum?”

“That remark,” said Tin, “is lacking in fastidiousness. As you intended. More coffee?”

Because they’re twins they can be who they really are with each other, a thing they haven’t managed very well with anyone else. Even when they’re putting on a front, they fool only outside people: to each other they’re transparent as guppies, they can see each other’s innards. Or that’s their story; though, as Tin is well aware — having once had a lover with an aquarium — even guppies have their opacities.

He gazes fondly at Jorrie as she frowns at the obituaries through her crimson-framed reading glasses; or frowns as much as she is able to, given the Botox. In recent years — in recent decades — Jorrie has developed the slightly pop-eyed expression of someone who’s had too much work done. There are hair issues as well. At least he’s been able to stop her from dyeing it jet black: way too Undead with her present-day skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tan-coloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineral-elements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.

“You’re only as old as you feel,” she says too frequently, while trying to talk Tin into some absurdity — rumba classes, watercolour painting holidays, ruinous fads such as spinning. He cannot picture himself on a stationary bicycle, wearing Spandex tights, whirring away like a sawmill and further destroying his wizened crotch. He cannot picture himself on a bicycle of any sort. Painting was a non-starter: if he were going to do that, why would he want to do it in a group of whinnying amateurs? As for the rumba, you have to be able to swivel your coccyx, a skill he lost around the time he gave up on sex.

“Exactly,” he replies. “I feel two thousand. I am older than the rocks among which I sit.”

“What rocks? I don’t see any rocks. You’re sitting on the sofa!”

“It’s a quotation,” he says. “A paraphrase. Walter Pater.”

“Oh, you and your quotations! Not everyone lives in quotation marks, you know.”

Tin sighs. Jorrie is not a wide reader, preferring historical romances about the Tudors and the Borgias to anything more substantial. “Like the vampire, I have been dead many times,” he cites to himself, though he doesn’t wish to alarm her by saying it out loud: an alarmed Jorrie is always a lot of work. She wouldn’t be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she’d be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn’t like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him.

Meanwhile, she’s firmly bent on turning into someone else herself. She does not come up to her own standards. Her only superstitions have to do with the labels on expensive cosmetics. Jorrie actually believes the deceitful come-hither labels — the plumpings, the firmings, the unwrinklings, the returning of youthful dews, the hints of immortality — despite having been in advertising herself, a vocation guaranteed to take the bloom off ornamental adjectives. There are so many things in life about which she ought to know better but does not, the art of makeup being one of them. He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.