Cinderella Before and After

Cinderella: Before and After

My mother always said she was going to put her loose photos into an album. When she learned about digitizing photos, she said she would probably do that instead. In the end, she did nothing and the cancer caught up with her. Now she is lying here in a hospital bed, her frail white hand marked by a roadmap of blue veins pointing her to the end of her 78 years on earth. I sit next to her but I don’t reach for her hand. We have never been on those terms and it’s too late now.

I have brought the photos to the hospital and to keep busy I am sorting through them. My mother is asleep or in a coma because her eyes are closed and her expression is blank. Now and then, I talk to her about a photo. The nurse says it’s good for her to hear my voice.  

I come across a baby picture of me. I’m maybe six months old wearing a frilly sun bonnet, one of the ways my mother tried to make me cute. Which I wasn’t. I look at the back of the photo. Mother has scrawled Sarah, but my name is Serena.

I say, “Mother, did you change my name? Did you call me Sarah and then decide you liked Serena better?”

An expression passes over my mother’s face so quickly that I’m not sure what it was. Anger? Maybe just a fleeting pain.

“Or,” I say, “Do I have a long-lost twin?”

Her eyes pop open and she says weakly but clearly. “Stop badgering me, Serena.” She points shakily toward the door, “Go home and take the pictures with you.” Her eyes close and her expression becomes empty again.

Driving back to the dated ranch home I will probably inherit soon; I reflect on the Serena/Sarah mystery. Renaming me doesn’t sound like my mother who is always decisive whether right or wrong. A long-lost twin sounds appealing but beyond unlikely. Besides, if I were a twin, wouldn’t I always have felt something was missing? I think I read that somewhere. Lots of things are missing in my life, children, love, a fulfilling career, but I can’t say I’ve ever longed for a twin.

The next thought of course is to call Uncle Herb. He’s mother’s lawyer not really my uncle but my mother’s complicated real estate investments have created a relationship first with her and now with me. I depend on him to tell me the truth, something I’m never sure of with Ma Mere. That’s what she asked me to call her when she went through her French period a while ago. It was a step up from her Italian period, when she wanted me to call her Madonna.

One of the many nice things about Uncle Herb is that he always takes my calls. Thinking of the bottle of wine awaiting me at home, I did not waste words. “Uncle Herb, was I ever called by a different name?”

“Like what?”

“Sarah.”

There’s a moment of silence that I find a little alarming. Then I hear his familiar chuckle and he says, “As far as I know you’ve always been Serena.”

Might as well get to the end of this. “How about a twin sister named Sarah? Did I ever have one of those?”

This time the silence is longer and frightening.

“Uncle Herb?”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“No fair answering a question with a question. You taught me that.”

“Serena, he says firmly, “I need to know.”

“I found this baby picture. I thought it was me but it says Sarah on the back. It’s definitely Mother’s handwriting, so enlighten me please.” I try to keep my voice light but I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears and my hands feel clammy.

After a hesitation, Herb says, “You know that your family finances were very dire when you were born.”

I sigh loudly, “Yes, I know about my mother’s embarrassment at using food stamps and how she invented thrifty casseroles and kept me in cloth diapers she washed herself. Give Mother one martini and she tells the whole story again, replete with a few tears.”

“It wasn’t funny, Serena. You were about to be evicted and your mother…”

A blinding flash of intuition comes over me. I pull over and park. “I had a twin and mother sold her. That’s it, isn’t it?” Inside my head I was shouting but my voice came out in almost a whisper.

“It was very difficult…”

“…Not for Mother I bet. She probably thought that she had one baby so why would she need a spare? Did you help her do it? How much do babies bring on the open market?”

Herb is quiet for so long that I think he might have hung up on me. You can’t tell with cell phones. You can’t slam them down either, although I’d like to.

Come over to the office, Serena, he finally says. I’ll show you what I have.

It’s past five o’clock when I reach Herb’s office and he is the only one there.

Come on back, he says I’m in the conference room.

I couldn’t wait to get here and now I find myself hesitating. Do I really want to know? I stand at the door of the conference room.

“Don’t you have attorney-client privilege or something? Can you talk to me without my mother’s permission?”

“She said if you got this far, I was free to tell you. She didn’t think you would so it was kind of a sop to her conscience.”

Herb points to the chair across from him and gestures toward a manila folder on the table. His hand on top of it holds the folder firmly closed.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Absolutely, I say although of course I’m no.

Herb looks out the window behind me, not meeting my eyes, and says, “I may as well start at the beginning. Your mother had no idea she was carrying twins. She didn’t have any tests done and the way the babies were positioned in the uterus, the doctor only detected one heartbeat. You were born first and about three minutes later, the other baby appeared”

“Call her Sarah, I say. It’s her name, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Well, your mother was frantic. They couldn’t afford one baby and now they had two.”

“How did you get involved?”

“It was pure serendipity. My last name being Alderman, I was the first attorney listed in the local phone book. Your mother called. It was a while ago and I didn’t even have a secretary then.”

“It would have been 26 years ago, I interjected. That’s how old I am.”

“In the call your mother asked me if I would answer one question for her.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “How do you sell a baby and make a lot of money?”

“No, Serena, My goodness. You’ve become so brittle. It wasn’t like that.”

What was it like, then?

“We talked a while and she said it would break her heart to do it but she needed to put one baby up for adoption and then kind of hinted that she wanted to be paid. She was crying so hard she could hardly talk.”

“I bet she was. I bet she cried all the way to the bank.”

“That’s it, Serna,” Herb said and thumped his hand down on the folder. “Show your mother some respect, damn it. She’s done her best for you. She’s told me many times that everything she’s done has been for you.”

“Yes,” I said flatly. “She’s told me that too.”

Shaking his head sadly, Herb slides the folder across the table to me. I decide that anything is better than not knowing but I’m confused when I open the folder, I see dozens of clippings from magazines.

“Why do you have pictures of her? That’s Sally Biggs the super model.”

Herb just waits, knowing the light would dawn. When it did, I knew several things simultaneously. She is beautiful. She is my twin. She is untouchable. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I feel a lovely dream shatter. No way that Sally Biggs and I will sit around comparing our experiences, laughing and crying together.

Uncle Herb nods. “Yes, he says. That’s Sarah. When I talked to your mother, I had just completed a real estate transaction for Tom and Elvira Biggs. They were trying desperately for a baby and Elvira cried when she said that one bedroom would be for a baby that they prayed to have. They were thrilled to hear about Sarah and immediately offered to adopt her.”

For some reason, it is important for me to know. “How much did they pay for my twin sister?”

“$25,000.”

“If we’re identical twins, how come she has a beautiful nose and I have this honker?” I touch the nose that dominates my face. An unkind classmate once said it was so big it entered the room before I did.

“I believe she had her nose fixed. The Biggs have a lot of money and they spent thousands on Sally’s career. She was their miracle child and nothing was too much to do for her.”

Funny. Until now I had comforted myself that at least Mother had chosen to keep me and get rid of her. Now, I realized that she was Cinderella and I was the convenient daughter who grocery shopped for Mother and took her to doctor’s appointments and sat by her damn hospital bed. Cinderella Before and After. That’s me and Sally.

“You can take the folder with you,” Herb says, standing up and moving to turn off the light.” I need to get home or your aunt Betty will have my head.”

“We’re not really related, you know,” I say coldly and leave without the hug we usually share and will not share again.

I sit in the car staring at the folder. A plan begins to form. First, I need to hasten Mother’s death, maybe with a pillow over her face as I’ve already fantasized a few times. Then I will sell the house, get my nose fixed, lose 15 pounds, let my hair grow and highlight it. Then, I will approach Sally Biggs and the twinning can begin. I will borrow her clothes, share her fame and fortune. I no longer wish to know Sally. Instead, I will be her.