Rita had stopped playing with Elodie through this and was now looking at Maude with her mouth open. Gloria on the other hand was mulling this over. “I don’t think I want the spandex and bright colors, but I could totally do a tank and those jegging things.”
“Depends on the colors, though,” Maude pointed out, putting her finger to her lower lip.
“Obviously,” Gloria agreed, her mind stuck on the potential new look.
There was another silence, but this time two of the people in the room were lost in thought and not feeling the horror/awkwardness that the other two people were feeling at the mental image that had hit us at the description given by my grandmother.
“Do you…” Rita started, her eyes flicking between her sister and Maude’s hair, “do you do your own hair?”
Patting the side of her bouffant, Maude grinned at her proudly. “Of course, great ain’t it? If you’ve got an hour this week, I’ll do yours for you. The higher the hair, the closer to heaven and all that.”
Seeing that Rita didn’t want to be rude but also had no intentions of her hair reaching heaven before she did, I cut in. “I’m amazed at how much y’all are getting along given that you don’t normally. Which one of you was born first?”
It was a desperate grab to save poor Rita, but it was also a stupid grab because it brought up the tensions that we’d been trying to bury after their tales of dislike for each other. Stupid, stupid me.
“Oh, we’ve always been close,” Rita replied, waving her arm in the air dismissively. “Gloria’s fifteen months older than me, so I’m the baby of the family.”
This information confused the hell out of me because I wasn’t a mathematical genius, but fifteen months would be a hell of a long time to wait for the second twin to be born, right? It’s not like their mother popped one out and then lay there waiting for the other one to come out for fifteen months.
I was busy thinking this, but it was my grandmother who said it out loud. “Wait, so your mom had to stay pregnant for fifteen months after Gloria came out? Didn’t they say they’d do a caesarean or anything? I know things have changed from the days when I was born, but still, I would have assumed they’d be worried about you and your mom enough to not make her wait that long.”
The two women looked at each other and then back at Maude. “Um, she wasn’t in labor for fifteen months with me,” Rita said slowly. “She got pregnant with me after Gloria was born.”
Maude’s head jerked slightly, and she looked quickly between the two of them. “So how in the ever loving hell are y’all twins?”
Both women burst out laughing, finding this hilarious for some reason. I was relieved that I hadn’t been the one to ask the question, but at the same time I was struggling to figure out the answer to it, too.
“We’re not twins,” Gloria chuckled, waving it off like it was a ridiculous notion. “My twin’s in Jamaica still.”
Now that blew my mind and broke my silence. “How do y’all look identical if you’re not twins? I’ve seen it with Jarrod and his brothers because those guys look like quads…”
“I don’t think they look that alike really,” Gloria mused. “They’ve got similar features, but everything else is different.”
“Are you high?” Maude screeched, slamming her cup down on the table and making us all jump. “Those boys look so alike that I got them to show me their driving licenses to make sure they weren’t talking shit.”
“Shih!” Elodie yelled as she held both fists up in the air, making all of us flinch.
Uncle Leo was going to kill Maude for teaching his daughter to say a cuss word as one of her first words. There was no way that was going in the baby book I’d started for her after she was born either. I had no intention of sitting with her first boyfriend in seventeen years’ time (and he’d better be her first boyfriend, and one who had no interest in doing anything else because holding hands was racy enough), showing him her achievements as a baby. When we got to the page about first words, there’d be a list of them including the word shit at fourteen months old.
Shooting a glare at Maude who was now inspecting her shoes, I crouched down in front of my niece and stroked the back of my finger down her face, getting a goofy grin in return. “We don’t say that word, ‘Lodie. It’s a mean word that only big people say, not pretty little babies.”
Apparently at that age, those words meant nothing because Elodie just shrugged and repeated it. “Shih!”
Glaring over at my grandmother, I snapped, “You’re in so much trouble with Leo. And how am I going to put this in the baby book?”