What she brought first were the ABCs, then Run, Tom, Run, then The Easy to Read Book of Far Away Places, and all the way up to books-of-the-month and Shakespeare.
I think that Miss Number Two is, most probably, my sister.
Not that there's ever been anything sisterly-brotherly between us, but I have a hundred clues. The most obvious, that she's always been around, one way or another, in a sneaky way even before she came to me with her books and that Nefertiti tip of her head. I remember a breezy kid not much younger than myself in a tree outside my window, blue jeans, red shirt, sticking out her tongue at me, and I happy that the gesture was one I could return. Now and again I remember a furious voice from some other part of the house screeching for her to "Get down, my God, get down." I remember an eye, brown, lustrous, like a little mouse nose waiting at the crack in the door, sometimes during my bath. I even remember the knob turning and the door opening to make that crack. Later a decision was made, out of a sense of obligation or out of resentment, and she, or someone else, decided and she came to me, I cannot say with happiness. I think I was happier before, and then, with five o'clock drama, everything might have seemed complete to me. No, it wasn't happiness and she knew it.
And yet I count on her for my salvation. If anyone is going to rescue me I know it will have to be bold Miss Number Two and, even though I first approached Mrs. Number One, it is Number Two I had in mind all the time. I was afraid. I was in such a cold sweat of hope that I didn't dare to go to Number Two and I didn't even mention to Number One what I really had in mind.
What a vision I had then ... I still have. I see myself in a bright and revealing costume, all Harlequin colours and diamond shapes. I am in a stall with streamers, festoons and flags, American flags ... no, flags of all nations. I belong to the world. Loud speakers on the roof send out fanfares interspersed with Handel's Fireworks music and I, highlighted with a pinkish spotlight, perform upon my mattress such movements as I can perform (and many of these require the utmost skill and concentration). After the day's work, and I do think I can call it work, I see myself in a close and comfortable association with the rubber man, the fat lady, the human pin cushion and the half-man/half-woman.
Though I have this grand vision in mind, and really even grander than this for I see myself as a champion of champions, though I have this vision, I decided that I would ask only that Mrs. Number One should borrow a camera and should take a dozen pictures of me from various angles and in various poses.
I thought I could not only use these in some way as an advertisement of myself, but also to get some real idea of myself since I had, so far, never seen myself in any way at all. It was from the pictures that I thought I could make my further decisions about my future. It's true that it's hard to be really self-evaluating but I thought I might judge well enough if I detracted a certain percentage for too much self-love and another equal percentage for self-hate. The good thing about photographs would be that any initial shock I might have at my first real view of myself could be gotten over by getting used to the pictures. I felt I might get enlargements made and I would have Number One tack some along the walls and I promised myself I would make no decisions whatsoever for at least two weeks of living with them. Then I hoped to be able to look at myself with a truly cold eye.
She agreed. No arguments. Not a blink or shiver. No ambiguous glances, irresolute phrases or imponderable sighs. "Okay," she said, and yet days passed and nothing happened. Finally I approached her firmly, my eyes as my only weapon though they couldn't even stop her bustling about, swishing away nonexistent spots on the dresser front, picking little black threads off the rug. Yes, even at my five o'clock drama she is all business, that busy business of getting herself 'raped' by me. Maybe she thinks it's part of her job, and yet now she keeps me all on her own as if I am something she dressed up to amuse herself with, nothing but her backroom dildo.
Maybe this sex is my job.
But suppose I was inherited after my mother's death. Did I come with the house? A condition of its ownership? And I wonder if my mother, herself, could have paid for that first time? Or Miss Number Two? Did Mrs. Number One really say not to tell?
Impossible to know whose obligation this drama is, mine or Mrs. Number One's. No use wondering. I'll keep on doing my duty, or she hers, and I don't think that I, at least, will ever be able to find out. (But if I had anything more than just this one thing, then I could. One dactylic protuberance more to pit against the other in some way, one threat, one appeasement, one offering, one retreat, one gesture, one decline, one weapon other than this one, then I could find out who is the willing one and who the slave.) However ...
... at this time I said to her that I believed she had no intention of going through with this photography business at all.
What I lacked, she told me then ... "probably due to your environment ... you can't be expected ... so naïve ... not like the rest of us ... " and so on and on. What I lacked, it all came down to, was Good Taste, capital G, capital T, otherwise I would have known that a picture of myself would be an Oh-so-gross violation of propriety and could certainly serve no good purpose either to others or to me, so, she said, she had decided from the beginning not to do it for my own good (as well as for everyone's) but I had been so forceful, so firm, she hadn't known how to argue with me ... at that time, at least. She was, of course, terribly sorry about the whole thing. But, besides, what would the man who printed the pictures say? Chances were he wouldn't return them. Society sees to such things, she said. There are censors at work, even on photos, whether I knew it or not. (Can I, somehow, be lewd simply existing like this? Do I lie here on my sheets, pornographic everyday? But hasn't everyone got his pornographic parts?) At times like these, grasping at distracting details, I watch her nose point out her line of sight. Look ahead, it tells me, but life surely cannot be as earnest as most noses would have it to be. Yet it is from this eager nose that I got the idea of asking to see my mother. I thought I might have more courage to speak out to someone I didn't know as well.
"Your mother," Number One said, "leads a comfortable life. She has surrounded herself with loveliness." (This I understand now much more than I did then, for it was to me that Mother willed many of her nice things. A handsome Louis XVI table is now against my far wall, above it hangs a print of Madame Vigée-Lebrun and her daughter [all arms], upon it is a small statue of Hermes that used to be a salt and pepper holder.) At this time, however, my room was more simply furnished. The mattress on the floor, the books lined up beside it, each with a little leather pull so I can grab it with my teeth — a slow process, finding one's page — book holder, chest of drawers, eating stand, not a single ornament unless you can call decorative a pinkish little creature Miss Number Two had brought me. She often brings things, all sorts, once a covered glass with three grasshoppers, once a white mouse, once a wounded bird. I suppose for my education, yet they give me great pleasure. This time she had been to the beach and had thought of me and brought back a jar of sea water with a starfish in it. (Even though there is no friendship or love between us, I am well aware that she constantly thinks of me. What must it be like to have me curled up at the back of your mind? Seeing everything as though through my eyes? Thinking that I have not walked upon this sand nor felt the edges of these grasses grate against my ankles? That I have not smelled the dried foam on the rocks? And never will? And so she brings these creatures to give me a realisation that she herself has already. But I have always wondered, does she do it to torment me, as she may have brought the reading and the Book of Far Away Places? Does she do it for the torments of understanding so that I will come at last to really know?) The starfish gave me the most pleasure of all.