“Except most of the time,” he adds, “I feel like I’m undercover.” “So can you believe how weird I’ve gotten and how normal you’ve gotten?” “It’s astounding,” he says, which cracks us both up. Or maybe he’ll do it like this: the forest a blur of green over our heads while we lie on our backs, playing Rochambeau. “Let’s go,” Noah says, and we’re running together into the woods like we used to, and I can see how he’ll draw it later, with the redwoods bowing, the flowers opening like houses for us to enter, the creek following behind us in winding wending color, our feet inches above the ground. That’s the way it is between Jude and me now. I don’t know how this can be but it can: A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it. “See you tonight then if Mom and I don’t kill each other.” She gives a salute and is off. If one cried, the other cried even if we were on different sides of Lost Cove. “It came right through the wall last night.” This was worse when we were younger. “Don’t be sad.” She says it so warmly, it makes the air change color. (Portrait, Self-portrait: Brother and Sister on a Seesaw, Blindfolded) “Me too,” I reply, knowing what she was going to say. “We can watch the Animal Channel tonight. “We still got it, yes we do!” She jumps to her feet. “One two three,” we say at the same time. We exhale together, then inhale together, exhale, inhale, in and out, out and in, until not even the trees remember what happened in the woods yesterday, until Mom’s and Dad’s voices turn from mad to music, until we’re not only one age, but one complete and whole person.Īfter a while, she picks up her fist. I can see her smiling even though I’m looking straight ahead. Maybe we’re too old to still do this, but whatever. When I don’t draw us like this, I draw us as half-people. It’s always: two rocks, two papers, two scissors.
This is why no one hardly notices that Jude does most of the talking for both of us, why we can only play piano with all four of our hands on the keyboard and not at all alone, why we can never do Rochambeau because not once in thirteen years have we chosen differently. Unlike most everyone else on earth, from the very first cells of us, we were together, we came here together. It’s even how we are in the ultrasound photo they took of us inside Mom and how I had us in the picture Fry ripped up yesterday. scoots over so we’re shoulder to shoulder. They welcome in a “new age” in their relationship as they mutually recognize that though their bond has changed, the shifts it has undergone have allowed them to mature and spread their wings without smothering one another. At the end of the novel, when the two reunite emotionally after years of brushing the other off, they try a game of rock-paper-scissors and are delighted to find that they are at last able to play correctly: when Noah picks rock, Jude picks scissors, and so on and so forth. Though Noah and Jude draw solace from one another, they are suffocating each other-and in many ways, the emotional schisms which tear their relationship apart during their early teenage years, painful as they are, actually save the two of them. The game of rock-paper-scissors is a kind of litmus test which signifies and symbolizes where Noah and Jude are in relation to one another, whether they’re too close for comfort or at a distance which allows them, at last, to see the other clearly.
The game, then, functions as a mirror of Noah and Jude’s symbiotic relationship. At the start of the novel, as Noah describes his intensely close relationship with his twin sister Jude, he notes that the two of them have such a strong emotional link that they can’t even play a regular game of rock-paper-scissors-whenever they throw out the symbols, they always pick the same ones, and end up tying.
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