Excerpts

An Excerpt from The Sisters Sweet

Start reading Elizabeth Weiss’s debut novel about two estranged twin sisters who once shared the spotlight—and a secret—on a vaudeville stage.

Elizabeth Weiss’s novel The Sisters Sweet will transport readers back in time to the early 20th century where the Szász family is doing everything they can to survive. Two twin sisters—Harriet and Josephine—pose as conjoined twins in a vaudeville act conceived of by their ambitious parents, who were once themselves theatrical stars. But after Josie exposes the family’s fraud and runs away to Hollywood, Harriet must learn to live out of the spotlight—and her sister’s shadow. As Josie’s star rises in California, the Szászes fall on hard times. Striving to keep her struggling family afloat, Harriet molds herself into the perfect daughter. She also tentatively forms her first relationships outside her family and begins to imagine a life for herself beyond the role of dutiful daughter that she has played for so long. Finally, Harriet must decide whether to honor her mother, her father, or the self she’s only beginning to get to know. Full of long-simmering tensions, buried secrets, questionable saviors, and broken promises, this is a story about how much we are beholden to others and what we owe ourselves.

PROLOGUE

A young woman is pacing up and down the front steps of my house, her briefcase bouncing against her knees. She’s muttering to herself, steeling her resolve to ring the bell, I think, as I watch her through my study window. I’ve been staring at the blank page in my typewriter for an hour. I’m not exactly sorry to abandon it.

When I open the front door, she scrambles up the steps, pushing her sunglasses back into the nest of her pale hair.

“Harriet Szász?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“You’re Josephine Wilder’s sister? Her twin?” She blinks at me expectantly.
“Who are you exactly?”
“I’m Linda Delaney? I’m working on a story? For Vanity Fair? Well, it’s on spec. But in light of your sister’s passing. I took the train up from the city.” And then she shakes her head gravely, as if she’s just remembered she’s supposed to. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What are you talking about?”
She goes ashen.
“Then you don’t—oh, but I assumed you—well, look.” She scoops the newspaper off the welcome mat and shakes it open to the obituary page. There she is: my sister Josephine. Smiling out of a headshot from the forties, when we were in our thirties. My eyes glide over the words, my mind struggling to absorb their meaning: star of Hollywood’s golden age, dead. A heart attack in her Malibu home. I skim down to the list of survivors. My name does not appear.

“I’ve seen all of her movies,” she says. “Everything she was ever in, really. Her talk show, both seasons. And that episode of What’s My Line? She was my college thesis. I got the tapes.”

Me too, I want to say. I’ve seen it all too. But the words are trapped in my throat. Is it grief I feel? Maybe after all this time it won’t be. Maybe I long ago forfeited my right to grief.

When I look up from the paper, she is studying me, her forehead tense. Her cream-colored silk blouse, fussed into a bow at the collar, looks brand-new, her blazer looks borrowed from some older woman’s closet—special clothes chosen for an important day. If she’d said she was writing an article for the school paper I would have believed her.

“How did you even find me?” I ask. “How are you here?”

“Oh, I called up your publisher and got your address.” She beams, as if she expects a merit badge for resourcefulness. “I read one of your books, you know.”

“You did?” I feel an old, sheepish pleasure. She nods brightly.

“For my thesis. I thought it might be relevant. Of course it wasn’t, but I’m not sorry I read it. I liked it!”

Of course, of course: my life, my work, just a footnote in some coed’s thesis. As far as Miss Delaney is concerned, I’m the family dud, the tragically abandoned second fiddle, a nobody stunned by her sister’s magnificence. But as soon as I allow myself that bitter thought, the grief I worried I had no right to feel floods my chest, threatens to spill out my throat in a cry. Josie! But it’s always been this way! The desire to be known, to mark my own clear edge, is tethered to the desire to keep her close.

For a wild instant, I think I can make Linda Delaney understand. This girl who wants to make sense of the person I once knew better than anyone in the world, the person who once knew me. Maybe the story I need to tell isn’t exactly the story Miss Delaney expects to hear, but I can make her hear it. My life may not have demanded notice the way Josie’s did, but it was never a footnote. I was never a footnote. I grab her arm.

“Would you like to come in?”

In the study, she makes a beeline for the photo on the bookshelf: Josie and me in the harness, eleven, or maybe twelve, dressed in ruffles, with Little Bo Peep bonnets and a shepherdess’s crook resting against my shoulder.

“Incredible,” she says. Her fingers are smudging the glass. “No one talks about the Siamese Sweets. I read six obituaries this morning, and none of them even mentioned you. Everyone’s just forgotten your part of the story, which is crazy, because—I mean, what a story! To have performed with Josephine Wilder, and then to have lost her.”

My part of the story: to have performed with Josie, and then to have lost her. That’s all she can imagine.

“What I want is to paint the complete picture,” she’s saying. “She’s always been flattened out, hasn’t she? Into whatever they needed her to be. Ingenue, vixen, mother.”

“Trailblazer,” I say. “Ball buster. Grand dame.”

“Exactly.” Now she’s growing excited. “Wife. Ex-wife. Camp queen.” She holds up the photograph. “Do you have anything else like this?”

I’m beginning to worry I’ve made a mistake, inviting her in, but I open the big oak trunk opposite the desk. She kneels on the floor beside it and starts pawing through the archive: clippings and photos, ticket stubs, handbills. I sit next to her on a stool. It’s been years since I looked at any of it. Josie, a smudge of ink on a yellowing piece of newsprint, cuts a ribbon outside a new home for wounded soldiers. Josie, in pearls, hawks Lustre-Creme shampoo. A bill promotes our appearance at a county fair: “The Siamese Sweets! Born joined together!” Paper flakes beneath my fingertips. The scent of old fibers, of dust and wood and the soft hint of mildew, seems like the scent of memory itself.

“What’s this?” she asks, handing me a typewritten manuscript tied with a ribbon. The paper is thin, yellowing. I read:

Maude Foster emerges into the steam and hustle of the platform at Grand Central Station, clinging to her suitcase and staring, with great purpose, some yards ahead, the surest way, she has learned, to keep busybodies from asking why she is traveling alone.

It takes me a moment to recognize the words as my own. I wrote them twenty-five years ago, right after Mama died. Absurd to think of oneself as an orphan at fifty-three, but that was how I felt. My parents were gone. The truth of what had passed between us was fixed. All I had left were their stories. For a week, I holed up in my apartment, writing what I knew, or what I thought I knew, or what I dared to imagine. There should be a word for what I am now: orphaned in all directions. Sister-orphaned. And once again, the urge arises: to tell the story, to make it stick.

“Just something I wrote once,” I say, at last. “A long time ago.”

“Another book?”

“Not another book.”

If she hears the coolness in my answer she makes no sign. With an absent smile, she pulls a tape recorder and microphone out of her briefcase and sets them up on the desk. I sit across from her, still clutching my parents’ stories. I’ll need them if I’m going to make her understand. If I’m going to properly tell my own.

I settle into the comfortable groove of my chair. The recorder starts to whir. She leans forward, legs crossed, notebook propped on one knee.

“Now,” she says. “Where should we begin?”

 PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

A rainy morning, late spring of 1918. Josie and I, five years old, sat together at the table in the little, muggy kitchen, pressing craters into our porridge with the backs of our spoons and watching them ooze shut again. Mama, who had warned us twice already not to play with our food, was stirring something in a pot, her hair wrapped in a red flannel cloth, a cigarette clamped between her teeth, her forehead mottled and glistening, when the door swung open and Daddy swept in, waving a pale garment high above his head. I dragged my spoon through my porridge and sighed just loudly enough for Josie to hear. Another costume.

For as long as I could remember, Daddy had been trying to convince Mama to get us into show business—the family business, he called it, when we scrambled up onto his knees and begged him for a story, and instead of a fairy tale he told us about his grandfather, the dancer, or his grandmother, who had been in a traveling show, or his parents’ puppet theater, or, best of all, the stories we wanted most but knew better than to ask for, stories that would only come when Daddy was in the mood to offer them, which depended on Mama being in the mood to give him tacit permission: stories about their glory days, when Mama was a star of the Follies, and Daddy built the sets on which she performed. (We knew Mama had had an accident, that it was the reason she used a cane, that it had ended her career and inaugurated the poverty into which we had been born, though that didn’t figure into Daddy’s lore, and I couldn’t have said how I learned any of it; the accident was a foundational fact of our lives, part of the history that belonged neither to memory nor to telling. The history that simply was.) When Daddy described relieving Mama of an unwieldy freight of roses as she came offstage, she pretended to scoff. When he told us about how she’d come on as Lady Godiva in a flesh-colored body stocking, her long yellow wig arranged to reinforce the illusion of her nudity, and three young men had actually fainted from excitement, she swatted the back of his head and said, “Oh really.” But Josie and I knew it was okay to smile. If Mama had really been angry, she would have gone silent, or retreated into one of the long baths she took to escape the rest of us. Instead, she lingered. She fussed at a potted fern. She sat and mended a blouse, only pretending not to listen.

But whenever Daddy turned the conversation to Josie and me—when he said let’s just teach them a number, see what they can do—Mama’s eyes would go cold. Absolutely not, she’d say. Over my dead body. Until one morning Mama and Josie and I heard a ruckus outside and went to the window. There was Daddy on the sidewalk beside an upright piano, a crowd at his back.

I don’t know what finally persuaded Mama: the sight of our father, sunburned and panting, arm draped over the piano as if it were a prize rhino he’d just shot down; the four men who emerged from the crowd to carry the piano up to the third floor, who laughed as they wiped the sweat from their faces, who insisted on kissing Mama’s hand and then toasting her fine specimen of a husband, who’d just moved that piano ten blocks, all by himself; his blistered feet and bloodied ankles, which she cleaned and bandaged. But the next morning, she took Josie and me to a shop on Twenty-Third Street and bought us tap shoes on credit. That afternoon, she sat down at the piano and taught us our first song. Just like that, we were an act: The Magnificent Singing Szász Twins.

Right away, Daddy started making costumes. He sewed skirts of rose tulle. He bent slim wires into the shape of butterfly wings and wrapped them in green net. He constructed denim overalls and red cotton work shirts for us to wear during choreographed trots on broomstick ponies. He dressed Josie in an ivory wedding gown and me in a shiny black tuxedo and a top hat fashioned from a scrap of black silk and some rolled-up pasteboard. Whenever he came home with another bolt of fabric Mama would scowl. She’d ask him if he’d married and murdered an heiress she didn’t know about. Sometimes he brushed her aside, sometimes he risked a fight by snapping back that the fabric had been a gift from a friend—they still had friends in the theater. But by the time he sat down at the sewing machine and fed a cotton cuff or a pleated panel of butter yellow organza under the needle, he would be grinning.

As the months wore on without a callback, let alone a job, no one blamed me, not out loud. But I could see as clearly as anyone that Josie’s voice was effortlessly sweet and true, while I had to try and try again to match the pitches Mama played on the piano. I knew that when Josie danced, her whole body seemed to float, as if carried by invisible strings, while I got stuck in the sludge of my own thoughts, trying to remember where my feet were to go next, how to hold my hands, how to keep my balance.

A year had passed, and all we had to show for our efforts was a trunk full of useless costumes. That morning, in the kitchen, I was certain nothing would come of Daddy’s latest creation, whatever it was, save a quarrel, a fact that struck in my belly with a hot, awful thud. A few nights earlier, I’d listened through the wall as Mama had begged Daddy to ask his friend Bert for some work. By then, from the glimpses I got of the lives of the other children who lived in our building and on our block, I had gleaned that normal fathers worked every day, while my father worked only occasionally. It was Mama who took in mending and laundry, Mama who sold paper fans out of a cart in Union Square, each fan printed with the name and biography of a star, while Josie and I played nearby, tethered to the cart with a length of clothesline. I knew that Josie was like Mama—it was something people always said—but in a way I couldn’t explain I sensed that I was like her too, that we worried with the same heat, while Josie and Daddy seemed hardly to worry at all.

I sighed again, a little louder this time, but Josie’s eyes were fixed on Daddy, her spoon gripped tightly in her fist. Daddy draped the costume over his arm, delicately, as if he were handling a fine French frock, though this garment, a corset-like contraption with open sides, was obviously improvised. Buckles lined both edges of the back panel, matched on the front by short belts. It took me a moment to recognize that the garment was double wide: its two neck holes were separated by a strip of canvas.

Mama tapped a little ash from her cigarette into a tin can on the narrow counter and looked at him, as if to say, “Well?”

In a single, swift motion, he stepped toward the table and lifted our bowls.

“Stand up, girls,” he called.
The bowls crashed into the sink.
“Up up up.”
We stood. He pushed my shoulder into Josie’s and lowered the harness over our heads, then threaded the buckles with the belts and pulled them tight, crunching our inside arms together. Josie’s eyes didn’t fall from Daddy’s face, not for a second. After he’d yoked us in, he wrapped one hand around our waists—our waist—and lifted.

The enamel tabletop was clammy against the bottoms of my feet. Daddy turned to Mama, raised his fist against his lips, and blew as if it were a trumpet: Ta-ta-ta!

“I present to you, Josephine and Harriet Szász, the Siamese Twins who will also dance and sing!”

The lid rattled softly on the pot. The shadows of raindrops twitched along the foggy window. The harness crushed my arm so tightly against my ribs that I could feel my heartbeat in my armpit. I worried Josie could feel it too, that it was communicating to her the fact of my fear. All year, she had been alert to my fear. In hallways before auditions she would sometimes pinch me from wrist to elbow, to distract me, she said, but she couldn’t do that now, any more than Mama could lean over and whisper in my ear, “Big girls don’t cry, Harriet.”

Daddy’s explanation came tumbling out: he’d been to the library, he said, and history proved his case. Chang and Eng. The Two-Headed Nightingale. The Chalkhurst Sisters. Twins were a dime a dozen, Daddy said. We were pretty girls, maybe we could carry a tune, but that didn’t make us special.

A long groove formed between Mama’s eyebrows. She kneaded her bad hip with her fist, as she often did when she was thinking something through. Josie was smiling wildly, theatrically. I felt the stirring of a powerful desire to perform, and I knew that it had been Josie’s desire first, that she had passed it to me. As far back as I could remember, we’d been able to do that—pass things back and forth, thoughts and feelings and dreams. Sometimes—when Mama wasn’t listening—instead of telling us stories about our forebears, Daddy would tell us stories about ourselves as babies, which dipped into a period of family history I knew we were not supposed to discuss, but which I loved nevertheless for the proof they offered of our twinnedness: how in the cradle, Josie and I had babbled in a language of our own invention; how our teeth had come in at the same time, all in the same order.

He flicked his wrist at Mama, his cheeks starting to pink. Her silence always flustered him. Of silence, Mama was a virtuoso, every variety of discontent expressed in a quiet of its own key. If rehearsal went poorly or if dinner burned, she stamped around the kitchen, cleaning roughly, her silence an interior stir that drew in any part of herself on which our blame or disappointment might otherwise hitch. If one of us hurt her feelings she signaled her unforgivingness—and she had a great capacity for unforgivingness—with a silence like a block of ice: still and cold and slow to thaw. Even at the best of times there was something brisk and stiff in Mama, as if happiness were palatable only as long as no one suspected you might be feeling it.

“You’ll come up with something—a name.” He turned to us, his gaze pressing, urgent, as if he were willing us to understand something crucial. “Show your mother, girls.”

She nodded. Josie stepped to the left—the opening move from “Coffee and Cream,” a song Mama had written for us. For a split second the harness tugged against my ribs, but then I was moving with Josie, singing with her. At first, my inside arm wanted to stretch, but after a moment her left arm was my left arm, and my right arm belonged as much to her as to me.

“The cat’s got his cradle, the fish has the sea, I’ve got my sister, my sister’s got me.”

We swung to the left, Josie’s hip a hip for both of us, and we swung to the right. Our bare feet pounded the tabletop. I was sure of the choreography as I’d never been at an audition. It was as if the harness had granted me a share of Josie’s muscles, as if the breath beneath my voice were pouring from her lungs as well as my own.

“We go together,” we sang the last line, our voices billowing in the snug kitchen, “like coffee and cream!”

We stood on our inside toes, lifted our outside feet in perfect unison, and then I pushed off and we began to spin. When we came back around to the front, our inside feet crossed. We pointed our outside feet, beaming at Mama and Daddy, and reached high into the air, our outside hands spreading open like starfish, our rib cages knocking our inside arms together as we caught our breath. Daddy clapped and shouted brava. From the apartment below there came a shout, followed by the sound of a broom handle pounding the ceiling. But I couldn’t stop smiling.

Mama studied us, her expression perfectly calm, a shutter against whatever roiled within. After several seconds, she pronounced her verdict:

“Okay, Lenny.”

They sold everything that wasn’t nailed down. Mama bought us tickets to Chicago—“our starting over place,” she called it, brightly, now committed in every outward way to Daddy’s scheme. In Chicago, we’d find a crop of producers and casting agents who didn’t already know us as an ordinary twin act that had failed to get off the ground. We took our first rail journey in the harness; when we disembarked I was too giddy, too charged with excitement, to worry about the fact that I couldn’t feel my inside arm, or about the blood I could feel, seeping into the bottom edge of the harness, where it had rubbed the flesh of my stomach. Josie muttered directions: get ready to turn right, I should take the suitcase and she would hold the railing. People crowded and gawked; Mama hurried us along; Josie beamed.

In our rented room, Mama stuffed a towel in the crack beneath the door and a bit of sponge in the keyhole. Daddy bought daintier buckles for the harness. He reworked its necklines so they couldn’t gape and lined its bottom edge with a strip of velvet. He ripped up our old costumes and repurposed the fabric for new ones: a pink gingham dress with two Peter Pan collars; a satin gown with a wide sash that traversed both our waists; a forest green leotard with double turtlenecks. We rehearsed every day, Mama choreographing on the fly. Daddy watched with his hands pressed together, index fingers tapping his slightly parted lips, face glazed with pleasure. At night, in our narrow cot, I would come right to the edge of sleep only to feel Josie’s finger poking between my shoulder blades, then her warm breath against my neck as she whispered: “Harry. I was just thinking. What if we rode in a limousine?” Or, “Do you think we’ll get into the pictures? Someday?” Or she would hum the song we’d learned that afternoon, and I’d hum back, and then next thing I knew it would be morning.

Three weeks after our arrival in Chicago, we were hired as an opening act for a benefit concert at the Studebaker Theater.

A warm evening early in June 1918. The curtain rises for the first time on the Siamese Sweets. Two-girls-in-one stand at center stage wearing pink gingham, two arms extended, fingers loose but energized (“like you’re holding an egg,” Mama had told us), our smiles wide slices between round, rouged cheeks. For the first time, I hear the hush of an audience, a not-quite silence, electric with anticipation. The footlights heat my chin and, somehow, sharpen the scent of paint and muslin. From the pit comes the plink of the piano.

We were off. One two wink smile shuffle ball change. Every note, every step, every breath unfurled in exquisite synchronization. In the harness, Josie’s body pressed warm and solid against mine. The audience faded to nearly nothing. It was just Josie and me, our harmonies shimmering and clear, the perfect unison of our footwork approaching something like flight. But as soon as we finished there they were, all those watching, listening people, clapping and hollering and stomping their feet. The great wave of sound buoyed us into the wings.

Backstage, Mama fixed our hair, but there was an unusual tenderness in her touch that made me want to lean toward her fingers like a petted cat. Daddy walked a tight, elated loop and kissed the stage manager’s forehead. I could tell he wanted to pick us up but didn’t dare. He was like that sometimes: shy, his affection tinged by woundedness, as if we were a treasure of which he’d been robbed. Josie, panting happily, her cheek a pink blotch in my peripheral vision, raised her free hand toward mine. I pressed my fingers into hers, one by one. It would become our secret sister salute, meaning whatever we needed it to—don’t worry, or I’m sorry. But in that moment it meant only that something important was happening, something I didn’t have a name for. Later I would name it like so: our real lives had begun.

That night, we all stayed up well past midnight, too giddy to sleep. Already, Mama had spoken to a booking agent: we’d have a weeklong engagement at the McVickers Theater, and then four more jobs on the road. The Road! The words rang in my ear like something unreal, the name of a kingdom in a fairy tale. Finally, Mama insisted on pajamas and lights out. Josie’s breath fluttered in my ear, soft and even, but I fought my own exhaustion to listen to Mama and Daddy.

“It’s all riding on the illusion,” Mama said. “Your harness. If we’re ever found out—”

“We’ll be ruined.”

In my gut, I felt the sickening bloom of worry, a feeling so familiar it was almost a comfort. But the day’s exertions overtook it. I soon fell asleep.

When Josie and I woke the next morning, Mama sat us on the edge of the cot. Daddy stood in the corner, combing the end of his beard with his fingertips. Looming over us, hands on her hips, Mama announced the new cardinal family rule: Josie and I would never go out unattached.

Two weeks later we left Chicago with work lined up through the fall. Daddy released us from the harness only behind locked doors and drawn curtains. If secure conditions could not be achieved, in the harness we remained, even if we had to sit up all night in the third-class carriage, even if we were just passing through some little place where no one knew us. If we needed to buy shoes, if, on a rare afternoon off, Mama agreed to take Josie and me to the movies, we were yoked up and buttoned into one of our double-wide dresses. The whole time we were out, Mama would hover, making sure no one looked too closely.

Sometimes I cried at night because my left arm, my inside arm, still felt tingly, hours after being unbound, or because my right flank, where the harness held tight to my skin, had flared once again in a bright, bumpy rash that stung at the slightest brush of my nightgown. And I felt a pang when I remembered the games of stickball or hide-and-seek we’d played in New York, or the comfort, in our building, of any of a dozen mothers’ aprons that might be dragged roughly over a teary face after a fall, of a dozen kitchens where I felt entitled to snag molasses cookies or crispy pickles or glasses of cold milk. But in boardinghouse rooms and dressing rooms and green rooms, Josie and I now played the games of pretend I had always preferred. We invented an invisible pet rabbit named Jenny, which we carried around and cradled and stroked, and which Daddy obliged us by kissing good night. We held our hands in front of our bellies as if we were gripping reins and trotted around on imaginary horses. Late into the night we whispered under the covers. After Mama hushed us a second or third time, her voice taking on a dangerous edge, we communicated through a system of hand taps and kicks.

We were in Wabash, Indiana, when we decided that if we didn’t play cat’s cradle before a matinée then the theater would catch fire. In Indianapolis, we agreed that when we entered a new dressing room for the first time we had to go in backward or we’d fall onstage. In Vincennes, Josie decreed that after every curtain, one of us had to say “zing zing” before we said anything else, or the next time we took the stage we’d go mute. From Indiana, we traveled west, back into Illinois. We played churches and Elks clubs and library meeting rooms, and stores with folding chairs set out where that afternoon there might have been a display of potatoes or washing powder. But over the course of that first summer, Daddy filled three sketchbooks with designs for new harnesses and trick props and spectacular sets. And every time we stepped onto whatever platform there was, into whatever light there was, I felt a tugging in my chest, a swell of pride, as if I’d entered Daddy’s grandest drawing. Whatever separation remained between Josie and me melted away. The rapt attention of the audience, the skill and power of my own dancing legs, the way my voice and Josie’s voice slipped into each other and wrapped around each other: it all summed and shimmered, and seemed to prove we were exactly who we said we were. It wasn’t that when we stepped onstage I believed our lie. It was that for the duration of a show, it wasn’t a lie; it was simply a different sort of truth. I was the Siamese Sweets, I was Josephine and Harriet both. Our false body was irreducible, indivisible. The truest fact in the world.

We were in Wisconsin that October, performing a two-week engagement at a proper theater where we shared a proper dressing room with Little Tibby Longfellow, a girl a few years our senior who had begun to make a name for herself on the circuit by delivering comedic monologues as adult personae—washerwomen, fishwives, gold diggers. One afternoon, Daddy finished our makeup and then, instead of staying to watch our act, went straight back to the boardinghouse with a headache. Josie turned and whispered, her breath hot and awful in my ear, that his headache was actually something called a hangover. I didn’t answer, not quite knowing what this word meant but recognizing that it must be something vile.

The three of us—Mama, Josie, and I—were alone in the dressing room, Tibby having gone to perform and her mother having followed to watch, when a stagehand knocked on the door. There was something wrong with one of our sets, some question of whether another would be suitable. They needed a decision right away.

Mama put down her mending with a frown. After a moment’s hesitation, she crouched down and looked beneath the counter, where Josie and I were hunched over our drawing of a castle.

“You stay put,” she said sternly. “No funny business.”
“Yes, Mama,” we said. She followed the stagehand out.
It seemed impossible we could get into any trouble in just a few minutes alone. But not long after Mama left, Tibby returned, flushed from her outing on the stage. Her own mother wasn’t with her. Josie looked up at her, curious, even lifted her hand as if she might wave. I looked down at our drawing, cheeks hot, willing Josie to be good.

A few weeks earlier, a pink-faced old comedian had observed slyly, insinuatingly, that we certainly kept to ourselves. Since then, Mama and Daddy had taken us to a couple of parties, just to make an appearance, and some meals in the restaurants where other troupers gathered. But we were strictly forbidden from speaking to other children. Children had a way of poking at things, Mama said, and asking questions they shouldn’t. How lucky we were, she said, to have each other. Who needed friends when you had a sister?

Tibby took a step toward us and bent to get a better look. I felt like an animal in a burrow.

“I heard something,” she said, pulling up the front of her dress to wipe her damp face. “I know why you are the way you are.”

Josie crawled us forward, out from under the counter, and pulled us to our feet. If I could have resisted without giving away the falseness of our body I would have. Instead, I clenched my crayon and scowled.

“Why?” Josie asked. Inside the harness, her muscles seemed to tauten, as if she were preparing to run.

Tibby looked over her shoulder at the open door and then back at us.

“Your mother was raped by the devil.”

We were staring at her, tongue-tied, when Mama returned. Tibby gave her a little curtsey and retreated to her side of the dressing room, where she poked at her hair with a comb. Mama looked sharply from Tibby to Josie and me, but we scrambled back beneath the counter. Tibby’s mother turned up not long after that, complaining of her bad stomach. Mama offered her a tight smile before turning back to her mending.

That afternoon, Josie and I danced with a ferocity that won us a standing ovation. I knew that she had been picturing the same thing as me: Tibby’s dumb face on the stage beneath our feet. It was the fact of the insult we understood, not its substance. But we spent the next several days plotting revenge. Josie came up with ways to punish Tibby we didn’t have the means to pull off: replacing her face powder with itching powder, bribing the lighting man to plunge her act into darkness, retrieving the dead rat we had seen in the street near the boardinghouse and leaving it in her bed.

But before we could take any more revenge than glaring across the dressing room, everything changed. We were in our room at the boardinghouse, dressed and ready to go to the theater, when Mama came in, pale. She whispered in Daddy’s ear. Daddy ran his fingers over his pockets until he found his pipe, which he squeezed in his palm but didn’t light.

“You can take that off,” Mama finally said to Josie and me, lightly, as if it weren’t anything to make a fuss about. “You won’t be performing today after all.”

Every theater in town had been ordered closed on account of Spanish flu. We were stuck; there was no work to be had within a hundred miles, and even if she had managed to find something for us, Mama said she didn’t trust the trains. Daddy would go out for supplies, or down to the parlor in the evenings to play cards with the other stranded members of the company. But save for a half hour every afternoon when Mama took Josie and me out for a walk, harnessed and masked, wearing camphor stuffed into the toes of old stockings on strings around our necks, we stayed in our room.

Late one night, I was supposed to be asleep when I heard Mama tell Daddy about a family musical act we’d shared a bill with not a month before; the mother and two of the brothers had died in a single afternoon.

I knew what dead was: dead was a cat I’d seen once in an alley, rigid, with little flies in its eyes. Dead was why a girl we’d known in New York only had a father and a grandmother but no mother. Dead was soldiers in Europe. Dead was, even, the row of pine boxes we’d seen lining a street the day before, two girls skipping from one to the next, chanting, “I had a little bird, its name was Enza, I opened the window, and in flu Enza,” until a woman came out of a house with black bunting over the front door and screamed for them to come inside. But now a terrible fact surged through me: dead could be any of us. Mama or Daddy or Josie could catch the flu and be dead by the end of the day.

I turned from them, toward the heat of Josie’s sleeping body, and pulled the quilt over my head. But the low, grave hum of their voices still reached my ear. I screwed my eyes tightly shut, as if the deep darkness might provide some relief. Instead, an even more horrible understanding crashed over me like a black wave: even if influenza spared us, we’d all die eventually, of something. Everyone died. Mama would die, Daddy would die, Josie and I would die. The fabric of the quilt clung to my face. But I couldn’t push it away, I didn’t dare.

That night, and the next night, and the one after that, instead of sleeping, I found myself listening to Mama and Daddy’s conversation, waiting to hear another name I knew, the story of another death. Usually, all I could make out was a whipping tension, but even that gave me a stomachache. I worried we’d have to stay in that little room forever. That for eternity, I’d have to look at those four walls, those two beds, that brass lamp, the painting on the wall of the boardinghouse itself, which, even before we’d been trapped, had made me feel slightly uneasy. And if someday we did get out, I worried we’d never work again. What if the act failed, as, I remembered now, our first act had? What then? Who would we be? The life we had made as the Siamese Sweets was still new, but already, any alternative seemed like its own sort of death.

I dragged through the days that followed my sleepless nights. Every afternoon, I collapsed into a long, dense nap, from which I woke hot and damp, certain I sensed the beginnings of a fever. I irritated Josie by asking her to feel my forehead, asking if I could feel hers.

But the fever never came. In November, Mama found us a job, and, anxious, masked, we boarded a train for the first time in a month. After that job came another, and another, short stints here and there until January, when, at last, Mama booked us a long engagement, in Moline. We settled into a new boardinghouse room, hanging postcards on the walls and putting bundles of dried flowers in the drawers. In February, we had a new job in Joliet, where Daddy won a ukulele in a card game, and that seemed to mark with certainty the return of our good fortune. We learned to play: Josie made the chords while I strummed.

Sometimes, when I lay awake at night, listening to the soft sounds of the rest of them sleeping, the black wave would come crashing over me. But as winter gave way to spring, as the tense weeks of the fall of 1918 slipped further into memory, the wave came less and less. One afternoon that May, Josie and I picked lilacs from a bush outside our rooming house. After dinner, we begged Mama to let us braid them into her hair. She relented, settling on the floor beside the bed, leaning back on her palms, legs straight forward, skirt smoothed out around her. I maneuvered her thick plait around my little fingers. Beside me, Josie cradled the flowers, trying not to laugh lest she swallow the hairpins poking out from between her lips. Daddy sat across the room, sketching the three of us. In that instant, I could almost believe my fear that any of us would die, that anything about our lives would ever have to change, was just another game of pretend. A nightmare I’d confused for real life.

*

That summer, the summer of 1919, our second on the road, Mama started writing us sketches to perform between songs. Daddy had the idea for a Siamese cartwheel, and Mama worked out how we could do it, training us on whatever stage she could get us into early in the morning, or on days we didn’t perform. We were in Terra Haute when, one morning, just after sunrise, we arrived at a dance school, where Mama had arranged for us to use a studio. She went in search of the studio key, leaving Josie and me waiting in the hall. I had brought a book of fairy tales I’d found some months back, abandoned in a rooming house parlor, and was idly turning the pages when I realized I wasn’t just looking at the pictures: I was reading some of the words.

I slammed the book shut, recognizing danger, though I couldn’t have said what exactly that danger was.

“Hey, I was looking at that,” Josie said. But Mama returned then.

We were staying in a cheap hotel, lucky to have a bathroom en suite. That night, I dragged the book in with me and turned the flimsy lock. I sat on the toilet lid and opened the book over my knees. Sure enough, there were the words, rising up from the black shapes my eyes had been sliding over for months as Mama read aloud.

After that, whenever I could get a moment alone—when Mama retreated into a bath or a nap, and Daddy went out to look for some company or a drink, and Josie settled in a corner for one of her private spells of daydreaming—I would crawl under a bed or into a closet with the book and run my finger under each row of words, whispering them to myself. From Mama’s briefcase, I stole a stubby pencil and a few sheets of paper so I could practice writing the letters, matching what I saw on the pages of that picture book to the alphabet song. All summer, I decoded words in newspaper headlines and on posters and billboards, every new word like a piece of candy in a secret stash. I scrawled letters and crumpled them up before anyone could see I hadn’t just been drawing. That I could read and write stirred in me the same flushed-cheek thrill as being onstage, but better for being private, contained entirely within myself. And at the same time, for the same reason, a source of shame. As if to possess an experience so wholly were somehow deceitful. Greedy.

We were in Kalamazoo one bright, golden morning that fall, sitting at the back of the house, on a bench that had been put there for us special, since the harness made it impossible for us to sit in the seats, waiting for our turn to rehearse, when a suited woman with a clipboard swooped in. The manager of the theater watched with crossed arms as she approached. After a brief argument, the manager made an angry sweep of his hands and walked away, and the woman pointed at Little Tibby Longfellow. We’d been annoyed to discover she was also on the bill in Kalamazoo, and were quietly satisfied when the woman, who had an authoritative, punishing aura about her, ordered Tibby to follow her into the hall.

Mama hurried to join the cluster of mothers whispering in the corner. When she came back she spoke urgently: “If she asks your age keep quiet. Be smart.” But before she could explain what exactly being smart entailed, the woman returned a tear-stained Tibby to her mother and pointed to Josie and me.

When she saw what we were—what we wanted her to think we were—she turned to look at the wall, as if she couldn’t trust herself not to gawk. Josie and I followed her into the hallway and perched together on a folding chair. I tried to keep from slumping too badly over the edge, so the harness wouldn’t dig into my latest rash.

The woman took the chair across from ours and lifted her clipboard, shifting her shoulders and blinking rapidly as she forced herself to look right at us, take us in.

“Age?” she said.

We shrugged, our shoulders rising and falling in perfect unison. The woman peered at us over her glasses and scribbled something on her clipboard. The questions continued: What was the nature of our act? Did we do any juggling, acrobatics, fire work, animal work? We folded our hands together in our lap, and I kept my gaze forward and level, while Josie answered the questions, one after the next. I began to relax. Be smart, Mama had said, and Josie knew just what to do.

“And have you ever been enrolled in school?”

Josie’s inside arm went stiff against mine. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The lady pursed her lips, made another mark on her clipboard. Then she handed me a blank piece of paper and Josie a pencil.

“Write your name—your names—your name, please,” she said.

My secret rose like an itch to the surface of my skin. If the woman had handed the pencil to me instead of Josie, I might have managed something close to H-A-R-R-I-E-T. But Josie clung to it helplessly. My heart pounded in my throat.

The woman made one last mark on her clipboard and ushered us back into the theater.

“Mrs. Sweet?” she said. Mama followed her into the hall.

The next morning Mama woke us early, but instead of readying us for the dance studio, she had us sit on the edge of our lumpy mattress and declared—cheerfully, matter-of-factly, as if it had been her plan all along—that it was time we learned our ABCs. She set a phonebook on my knees and on top of it, a sheet of paper with the alphabet written out in neat rows. She handed me a pencil and before she could say another word, I was copying out the letters, so excited that I forgot I wasn’t supposed to know how yet.

“Why, Harriet!” Mama said. I braced myself for trouble. But she was smiling at me the way she smiled at Josie when she made a joke or mastered a new song. Pleasure swirled in my chest.

Josie grabbed the pencil with her right hand, the hand she always grabbed with when we weren’t in the harness. Mama swatted her fingers gently.

“No, no,” she said, and moved the pencil to Josie’s left hand—her outside hand.

Josie frowned but accepted the phonebook and the paper from me. Tongue pressed between her teeth, eyebrows knitted together, she tried to fill in a row of letters below mine. But no letters emerged, just tangled lines, some thickly scrawled, some trailing off in a barely visible thread. She pressed harder, and the pencil slid the paper off the phonebook. Again, Mama said no. She said let me show you, begin at the beginning, and reached to guide Josie’s hand, but Josie yanked her own hand away. She looked at Mama, and then she turned to me, her eyes burning with anger, and snapped the pencil in two.

We didn’t perform for a few days—we were waiting for the Gerry lady to clear out of town, Mama explained, to find some other hard-working Americans to harass. But every morning, she sat us down for a reading lesson. Josie snapped another pencil, tore the page with its printed alphabet into confetti. When we were finally able to return to the theater, Mama seemed more relieved than any of us.

On our first day back, during our first matinée, in the middle of our first sketch, a wooden pear fell from a rickety stock set tree, right onto my head. I was startled: there was a lag, a tiny one, during which I felt myself blinking stupidly into the dark house. But I had recovered and was about to say my next line when Josie scooped up the pear.

“Say, why don’t you lay off my sister!” she said and mimed a punitive bite.

The audience’s laughter was electric, quickly out of control. She tossed the pear over her shoulder with a wink, and there was another wave of it. People clapped and whistled. For the first time since New York, stage fright crimped my belly. I started my next line but couldn’t get it out over the sound of the crowd. Inside the harness, Josie pressed her elbow into mine; I waited until the laughter trailed to a trickle, as we’d been trained, and then, finally, I got out the line, and on we went. We made it to the end of the act without another mishap, but the whole time, I felt peculiar. Cold. Separate from Josie as I had never before felt onstage.

As we took our bows, Josie gave an extra wink and wave and there was a rush of fresh applause and a shrill whistle. Just for her. It was impossible: there was no her on the stage, there was only us, a single being. But as we hurried off I understood: Josie was the star. When we were onstage together and I felt so free, so warm, so alive, so gifted, it wasn’t because of some mutual effort, some equal exchange. I was basking in Josie’s light.

Backstage, Daddy shook his head and laughed, as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to slap Josie or give her a dollar. But Mama grabbed her shoulder and dragged us both down the hall toward the dressing rooms. As soon as we were alone, she crouched down and whispered fiercely in Josie’s face.

“What were you thinking? What business do you have, improvising? Showboating? Don’t think I didn’t know that was exactly what you were doing.” As she went on I looked down at the floor, as if by refusing to watch the scolding I might make it end. My chest was heaving, my muscles jelly, my undershirt clinging to my sweaty skin. Mama promised her a spanking when we got back to our room. Josie didn’t even flinch.

I was certain then that she had done it on purpose. Because I could read, and she couldn’t. It had been a message, a warning. Look, sister, she had said. Never forget how things stand.

A few weeks later, Mama attempted another reading lesson, but Josie hummed “Yankee Doodle Dandy” until she threw up her hands. She tried again a few months after that, and a few months after that, and then periodically over the next few years, the lessons usually following a visit from a Gerry agent, or a warning that one was at hand. But Josie refused to listen. She refused to learn.

We outgrew harnesses as quickly as Daddy could stitch them. Our dolls, Susan and Emily, evolved from babies into dancers, whose pink painted mouths we filled with words of the women we eavesdropped on backstage and at parties, words we didn’t quite understand but knew better than to say loud enough for Mama to hear—pessary and blotto and cramps. I moved from storybooks and headlines to newspapers and whatever reading material I found discarded on trains and in hotel lobbies, forgotten in backstage nooks: novels and popular histories and magazines and seed catalogs and collections of speeches and volume “M” of an encyclopedia. Still, every time Mama tried to teach her how to read, Josie sighed, she broke pencils, she ripped paper, she split strands of her hair and tore out the hems of her clothes, calmly, as if she was only asserting her right to be left alone, until, at last, Mama closed her eyes and said, “All right. That’s enough. We’ll try another time.” A dancer who had run away from home offered us whatever we wanted from a stack of her old books. I took eleven, of which Mama gave me permission to keep three: I chose Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, and, for self-improvement, an old exercise book that I worked through, over and over, until the front cover tore from the spine. Josie laughed as if the dancer had offered us her old underthings.

Onstage, I made occasional mistakes: garbled a lyric, missed a note, forgot a line. Josie rescued me when she needed to but never again drew attention to herself as she had in Kalamazoo. Still, I didn’t forget what she’d shown me that afternoon, didn’t lose track of the distinction she’d drawn. When fans approached us after a show, or when we came off a train and found a crowd waiting for a glimpse of the medical and theatrical miracle, I signed the autographs. Josie mugged and chatted, absorbing their admiration.

Excerpted from The Sisters Sweet by Elizabeth Weiss. Copyright © 2021 by The Dial Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.