Identical

II
11

Cassian,” says Zeus, showing off as usual, by utilizing the name Cass was given at birth. “So pleased you are with us. Did I see your mother? I must say hello.”

Zeus delivers a tight handshake, briefly summoning all his power and charm as he levels his black eyes. Behind him, Hermione, Dita’s mom, thin and simple like a piece of blank paper, passes by without the pretense of a smile. She has little use for Lidia-and Mickey-and thus for Cass.

Zeus is warmer, although he would never stand to see his treasured daughter with a cop, whatever Zeus might be required to say in public these days. But Zeus is a fake. His genial manner can bloom into bouquets of compliments, but the man Cass occasionally sees with a glass of whiskey in his study is insular, calculating and dark.

Dita is fearlessly outspoken about everyone else in her family. Her mother is “a twit,” consumed by appearances, and she calls her bawdy Aunt Teri, who most people think is responsible for Dita’s own outrageous manner, “entertaining.” As for her older brother, Hal, Dita sees him as basically clueless, but loves him nonetheless.

Yet about Zeus, she says very little. Love and loathing. You can almost hear it like the hum of power lines whenever she is around her dad. Dita says her father has told her one thousand times in private that Hal takes after his mother while she is more like him, an observation Dita clearly relishes. But the looks she aims at her father’s back roil with contempt for his unctuousness and grandiosity and limitless ambitions.

In his white suit, Zeus this afternoon more resembles a pit boss in Vegas than a political candidate, leaving aside his stars-and-stripes tie. Pausing to greet other guests, he is nevertheless headed toward Lidia, who is beside Nouna Teri, with her bleached hair, stiff as straw, and her piles of jewelry. Like his brother, Cass is faultlessly attuned to the nuances of his mother’s moods, and even at fifty feet he catches the baleful look with which Lidia registers Zeus’s approach.

Neither Paul nor he fully understands his parents’ grief with the Kronons. Now that Dita’s dad is on TV so often, Cass’s father, Mickey, won’t turn on the set, even to watch the Trappers. It’s mystifying because their elder sister, Helen, insists that before they were born, Zeus was regarded as the family’s savior. In the mid-1950s, Mickey was so totally disabled by a leaking mitral valve that he could not work, and Teri prevailed on her brother to hire Lidia in his office. She remained there for two or three years until she was pregnant with the boys and the invention of the heart-lung machine allowed Mickey to have valve-replacement surgery. With Mickey good as new, Papou Gianis helped their father open a grocery. Paulie and Cass worked there from the time they were five, when they began stocking shelves, and Cass still recalls the day his father, who always held his temper around customers, threw his white grocer’s apron from the cash registers to the dairy case and yelled out that the store would be moving. He was furious about his lease, which was now held by Zeus, who’d bought up most of the commercial property in the old neighborhood.

“OH GOD!”

Across the lawn, despite the music and loud conversations, Cass suddenly makes out a startled yelp that he knows automatically is his brother’s, and he dashes toward the sound. Arriving, he sees his twin laid out on the lawn with Sofie Michalis hovering over him, both of them laughing like children. A hunk of barbecued lamb and some macaroni are on the ground beside Paul’s ear, along with an oval paper plate. Several dozen people, most old neighbors, have circled around his fallen brother. Once it’s clear that Paul is fine, a number turn away and greet Cass, inevitably asking, “Which one are you?” That question always leaves Cass feeling as if a wire has shorted somewhere in his chest.

The deepest secret in Cass Gianis’s life is how infuriated he is that he does not really match his brother. While Lidia was pregnant, she took great heed of the story of Esau and Jacob, and as a result, instructed Dr. Worut before she was etherized for the delivery to tell no one, not even her, which baby had been born first. Presented with the boys afterwards, she named them simply from left to right, Cassian and Paul, for her father and Mickey’s. No one has ever known who is older.

But Lidia’s intent to be rigorously evenhanded was taken by the twins as an instruction to remain the same. They shared a room, friends, books; they could not turn on the TV without deciding beforehand what they would watch. Every year, they fought off the principal’s well-intentioned effort to put them in separate classrooms, even while they mocked the teachers who thought they cheated because their papers ended up so similar. Their life was like an apple, cut into precise halves, until Cass, in high school, began to suspect that Paul preferred it this way, because it worked to his advantage. The differences between them, no matter how trivial they seemed to everyone else, subtly marked Paul as better-more appealing, smarter, more adept.

Paul was always the more competitive one. Running laps with the tennis team to build endurance, Paul would continue after the session. Cass can remember his fury. Because he had no choice. Paul knew when he set off that he was essentially dragging Cass behind him. In tournaments, Cass always had the better head-to-head record with shared opponents, but he refused to play Paul, even in practice, knowing he would lose.

By college, he was slightly furious every time his brother came into the room. It was very confused. Because he loved Paul so intensely, and longed for him at times every day, once he had moved in his own direction.

Now Cass has been in an extended conversation about the academy with Dean Demos, a sergeant on the Force in Property Crimes, when he sees Dita steaming in his direction.

“Your brother is really a total jag-off,” she says, loud enough for Dean to hear, and adds, as if that weren’t enough, “I just can’t handle your entire fucking family.” She is drunk of course although the real problem, Cass suspects, is that she dropped a ’lude before the picnic so she would be able to get through it.

“Yeah, well,” he says, and instead of getting into it, simply slips his arm around her waist and leads her slowly across the lawn, away from the crowd and toward the river. He understands that her anger flags quickly, and after a minute, she sags against him as they walk.

His family thinks he loves Dita because she is the worst woman in the world for him, as if his passion is for sheer contrariness. But Dita is like no other female he has ever known, potty-mouthed, brilliant, fearless, screamingly funny-and, her secret, profoundly kind. Not fifty people at this picnic realize Dita works her butt off every day as a social worker in the Abuse and Neglect Division of the Kindle County Superior Court. Cass has watched her with those kids, to whom she gives her entire heart.

She is, no question, the most complicated person he knows, with vices everybody sees and strengths she keeps hidden. She is certainly the greatest ever in bed. She has sex-‘fucks’ is the only real word for it-as if she invented the activity. She comes more quickly and more often than any other female he has ever heard of, a quaking, gasping, sweating, moaning heap, who says as soon as she finally has her breath again, “More.”

They do it most often right here, in her bed. It’s a weird turn-on for her to be down the long hall from her parents, bucking and carrying on at volume, albeit with the door locked. She has sneaked him up the stairs on occasion, but most nights, he just climbs to the tiny second-floor balcony outside her window, ascending on the hooks driven into the brick wall to hold the phone wires.

His mother hates Dita, probably because she is as strong-willed as Lidia. But that makes Dita a perfect ally for Cass. Dita will never succumb to convention. She will never say ‘OK, that’s what Paul would do.’ She will demand that he-and they-be different, and that is an assurance he requires, because the tidal pull his brother exerts will last forever.

He wants to marry Dita. That is another secret, because her response, especially initially, is bound to be harsh. ‘Me? Marry a cop?’ Or more likely, ‘Me, fuck just one guy for the rest of my life?’ He cannot imagine how horrible it would be to have her actually laugh in his face. Paulie smolders, but Cass has absorbed all of Lidia’s quick temper. That is the one piece of Dita he still does not know how to contend with, the part that dislikes herself and tries to drive everyone away. The risk of loving Dita is that she will hate him for doing it.

Around six, when it is just about time for the picnic to end, the sky darkens and opens, drowning them all in rain. Dita, predictably, stands out in the downpour until her blouse is soaked through. He finally takes a tablecloth and throws it around her and shepherds her inside. She tries to drag him upstairs, but there are too many people in the house, and he whispers that he will be back later.

Near seven, Paulie, who has hung on with Cass and the members of the picnic committee to clean up, has had enough.

“Let’s get a couple cold ones and sit out by the river.”

“No hokey-pokey while Father Nik is playing pinochle with the men’s club?” Nik would lose his entire salary if the men didn’t take turns throwing hands to him. His parishioners feel obliged to take care of Nik now that Georgia’s mom is gone and the father’s priestly vows require him to remain alone.

“Not tonight, Josephine,” Paulie answers. He actually looks troubled.

“Where’s Lidia?” Behind her back, they have called their mother by her first name since they were in grade school.

“She’s gone. She said Teri was going to drive her home so they could visit.” The boys meander across the lawn.

“What was up with Sofie Michalis?” Cass asks. “Were you guys going two falls out of three?”

Paul explains a bit, but concludes, “Can you believe how good she looks?”

“Uh-oh. Paulie has a crush.” It’s been years in fact since his brother indicated interest in any woman besides Georgia. In college, Paul and she agreed to date other people, but it was halfhearted. He was still on the pay phone in the dorm lobby, pouring in quarters and talking to Georgia at least three times a week. They clung to each other, as to life rafts in the tide of growing up. But that time has been over for a while now. Georgia isn’t dumb. She’ll be good at all the stuff women once were supposed to do, having babies and keeping house, but Jesus, it is 1982, and being with her would be like an endless loop of Father Knows Best. The slim chance that Paul might actually escape her lifts Cass’s heart. In the meantime, his brother crumples up his chin and wheels to look around.

“Jesus, Cass. Cut the crap. Georgia’d be crying for a month.”

Instead Cass whispers the same thing in a singsong several times until his brother slugs him in the shoulder. In reprisal, Paul asks, “Brewski or not? Or are you just going to hide in the bushes until you can climb up the drainpipe?”

This effort to get even is so simpleminded but inevitable that Cass breaks into loud laughter. The night is ripe. After the rain, the air has become cool and clear. There is a slice of moon over the river, and the water rushes below. Cass has a full sense of life’s possibilities and the joy of loving certain people. Paul. And Dita. He loves Dita. He realizes he has decided.

He will ask her to marry him tonight.