The House of Rumor.

1. Lexi and Amy, Age 34

It starts with polite knocking. As always, the neighbors stay quiet. I lie perfectly still, listening. It goes on for an hour and forty-seven minutes, and by the end it’s pounding. I keep the bedroom clock six minutes fast, so in actual fact the sobbing begins at precisely 2:43 a.m.

I chew at a thumbnail. Since I quit smoking, all the chewing has made the surface of this one nail go wavy. I chew and chew, sometimes running my tongue over the wavy nail surface, until finally I get up and tiptoe to the door, pressing chest and ear against it. My twin sister cries on the other side. I can tell that she’s leaning against the door, facing the opposite wall. I hold my breath.

The clock ticks—

The clock ticks—minutes leak from it.

When I open the door Lexi stops crying and slips inside. I haven’t seen her in a few months. She wears a big Russian officer’s jacket and her mouth is red at the corners. She twists a ring around and around her finger. She looks pretty in her down-at-heels way, and my back teeth begin to ache.

“Hi, Amy,” she says, almost shy.

I say, “Take off your coat.”

She says, “No.”

“My house my rules.”

She takes off her coat and I look at her arms. When I look up she’s staring into my eyes. I feel a little pulse of guilt, which makes me angry.

“Is this about money?” I flare. And then I say, “I mean, no. Sit down.”

Lexi sits.

It’s fucking late, but I pour us each a glass of juice with a little splash of vodka in it. I do this to preempt being asked for a regular-sized amount of vodka, which would almost certainly happen if I gave her just juice. Lexi and I spend a moment not looking at each other. I sit there grappling with resentment. In four and a half hours, I have to start getting ready for work. I can see the work-a-day bullshit ahead of me: I’ll adjust my collar in a storefront window on the way to the office and pause before the building to rotate my stockings. I might forget to change out of my comfortable shoes. Fatigue always drives home how low-status my office job is, how ghoulish my boss’s laughter is, how anyone could do the work I do—how much older I look since I started.

But there are those pleasures, too. The slant of the morning light through my kitchen window in the morning, the gurgle of the coffee percolator; the starched crispness of my light-grey office shirt against my skin; the minutes of idle pleasure talking to Emma, the receptionist whose youth and hope have the power to buoy me.

Two ice cubes melt to nothing in my drink. I begin, “Lexi, I’m…” but I can’t finish the sentence. I’m scared to ask her how she is. Misery leaks and seeps from her, and when I’m with her I feel it too.

“Do you remember the house of rumor?” she says quietly.

“I… yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

I don’t know how to respond. This reference to our private childhood language could mean she misses me on the one hand. Or, conversely, she could be referring to our father, who called us, collectively, “the house of rumor” after a small passage from Ovid he especially liked. She could be talking about him. These are possibilities with opposite emotional valences, and I’m adrift between them.

Lexi stands and walks to my stereo. I’m distressed that I’ve lost the ability to interpret her psychic pain, even as I feel it acutely. She holds her drink tight. Once again, I’m struck by how graceful her hands are, slim, perfectly tapered, the nails not cheapened by polish or excessive length. One nail has dirt or grime beneath it and the nail is so pretty the dirt looks intentional. I look at my own hands. My nail polish has peeled off the side that I chew, and I somehow forgot to paint any of the nails on the other hand. Everything but my hands reflects my new leaf, including what I’m wearing, which is created in the factory for no other purpose than to be slept in. This distillation of function is new in my life, and I find it immensely satisfying. Clothes to sleep in, clothes to work in, clothes to run in, clothes to go on a date in every other month.

Lexi is skinny and punk rock. I haven’t heard of the band on her T-shirt. For my own sake, I look at and fret about the lines around her mouth and eyes. Are they worse than mine? Her short haircut partially reveals the thumb-sized scar behind her ear. Each time I see it I get a rusty taste on my tongue, as though my mouth were filling with blood.

Lexi picks out a record at random and stares at the cover, then replaces it. Then she picks out another. The record corner shakes in her hand. There is a graphic of a fat pink baby on the cover. The font looks as though it has been squeezed from a toothpaste tube.

“Didn’t you give me this?” she asks.

“Yes. You should take it. Take it.”

“I listened to it every day.”

“I know.”

“I don’t need money,” she says. “Well I do. But I’m not asking.” Tears form in her eyes, but she doesn’t let them drop. “I just… where do I go?” she says softly.

“OK,” I say. I think, Please don’t leave.

“I guess I’ll leave,” she says, but she doesn’t move.

We continue to stand in the same position until it feels like we’re cast members in a play, waiting for curtain. In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the House of Rumor as an unpeopled place full of murmuring, whispering, tall tales wandering, lies mingling together with truth. Now Lexi and I are just people, no words, secret language vanished. I’m reminded of a photograph our father took a long time ago. He squared us off with the sun behind us, so that we looked like one of those bi-stable images of vases that are also faces in profile.

The clock ticks like a leaking faucet. There’s no other sound in the building.