5.

The twins were midway between five and six when Audrey was born, so in theory they were able to help in the ways their father wanted them to help. But the only skill they’d mastered thus far was sprinting through the house in Dukes of Hazzard underwear, spitting water at lampshades.

Toby was eight minutes older than McKenna—a fact Toby kept filed in his mental reserves and brought out as a way of settling certain profound disagreements, such as who would eat the last cookie, who would sit in Daddy’s TV chair when Daddy was working in the basement, who could belch the loudest, who would end up married first and to a more beautiful wife (he always said “wife,” no matter how much McKenna protested), and who would be crowned heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

According to the baby books, McKenna and Toby were physically identical in nearly every visible way for their first four years: Long, narrow feet and hands; tiny rumps; wide ears flat to their heads; fair skin; green eyes; mud-brown hair, cut by Misty into “bowls”; and prominent rib cages and spinal cords.

“Gangly kids,” according to their parents.

“Gangly if skeletons are gangly,” according to their maternal grandmother.

Grandma Pencil possessed authority on the issue of malnour-ishment, having been on a death march in the Philippines when she was a child. If she found herself outside arm’s reach of a food source, she became uncomfortable to the point of itchiness. She would snatch at invisible flies, her wrinkled forehead worming with sweat. Nonsense words like “mag-mag” and “riddle kidder” fled her throat at six per second until Misty raced to her side and inserted a disc of summer sausage into her mouth. Breathing and temperature returned to normal; no more riddle kidders.

To avert such a crisis, Grandma Pencil stocked her purse with peanuts and American cheese. However, fear of robbery prevented her from taking her purse anywhere unless “absolutely necessary,” which meant the post office or bank. The Mapes home, therefore, was Snack Food Central. Bowls were positioned in a dozen strategic locations: Pringles on the buffet; roasted almonds on the bookshelf; Hershey’s Kisses on the end table; Corn Nuts on the telephone stand; sunflower seeds on the kitchen counter beside the toaster. As most people know, Grandma Pencil lived five houses down the street. She visited often.

Perhaps because of this gratuitous access to food, the twins rarely felt hungry. At dinner, they carved frowny faces into their mashed potatoes or flicked chunks of hot dog into Snoodles’s mouth.

Murray and Misty had grown used to the twins’ eating habits: “If they’re skinny, they’re skinny.” All a parent could do was put food on the table—the rest was beyond their control. If the twins were indeed “adults-in-training,” as Misty called them, then they would never, never, learn to be adults unless allowed to make their own decisions, which meant making a few mistakes along the way. Clever sound bites filled Misty’s arsenal, and she lobbed these like grenades at Grandma Pencil as well as at the nosy kindergarten teachers who attributed the twins’ lack of appetite to, among other things, their late and inconsistent bedtimes. “Nothing earned means nothing learned,” was Misty’s reply. And “Boners make geniuses of men.” She meant “mistakes.” This last one might have been a red flag for the nuns, come to think of it.

But Misty’s grenades were tossed with pins unpulled. Neither she nor Murray was a fan of confrontation. Not with each other, not with their kids, not with anyone. They were mellow, pragmatic young adults quick to remind anyone who would listen that they were good listeners. In 1972, while stoned and drying the dishes, twenty-year-old inventor Murray had invented a simile that served him and his twin-pregnant nineteen-year-old wife for the next two decades: parenthood was like bowling. You gave your ball a hearty push in the best way you knew. Then all you could do was wait. You stood anxiously, shouting with glee when your ball toppled ten pins, or shedding a tear as it thudded into the gutter.

Grandma Pencil tried to fatten up the twins. She took them on the No. 7 GRATA bus to the movie theater at North Kent Mall. She bought tubs of buttered popcorn. At dinner, she told them a fairy would visit their bedsides with a train of solid silver if they would eat two whole hot dogs (“Without buns, even!”) and just a “f stful” of macaroni and cheese. She melted lard into their oatmeal, hoping they wouldn’t notice.

And then, when she was especially ornery—when not only were Toby and McKenna hurdling her legs in a mockery of the slaughter of the Native Americans, but their father was also filling the house with a blinding turpentine reek—at times like these, Grandma Pencil pulled out the heavy artillery.

She would cry. Softly at first. A whimpered coo, a morning dove. When the twins didn’t notice, or when their notice consisted only of timid glances in her direction, Grandma’s volume and urgency increased until they approached, heads down, index fingers idly exploring nostrils.

“Are we being too loud?” McKenna would say. Always McKenna.

A long pause.

“That’s not why I’m crying,” Grandma Pencil answered. Sniffle. Sob.

“You hate to see Indians getting chased, don’t you?”

“Anyone with a heart would pity the red man,” she admitted. “But tears won’t help his plight.”

“You want us to put on pants,” Toby would say. “No chance!”

She dabbed her eyes with tissue. “It’s your house. You may do as you please.”

As the twins turned to resume their chase, Grandma would freeze them in their tracks by launching into a detailed account of how she, as a girl, had watched a pretty young woman collapse in exhaustion after walking twenty-seven hours in 104-degree heat without food or water. “And what did this woman get for falling to the ground? A bullet to the nose. Boom. Face explosion. Bits of face on every leaf.”

Grandma then nodded at Toby’s nose-digging finger and described how her own mother had done the same thing, except instead of flicking her goblins away or rubbing them under a chair, “Mummy” had saved them between her toes so that little Pencil could have something, anything, in her belly at the end of the day.

Then came the story of her shoes swamped with pus and blood. And the noises that rang through the darkness, the moans of children dying of thirst, the shrieks of girls being violated. And the cold night winds that made you wish your toes had been chopped off. And the monkeys that laughed from the trees. And the bats that landed on your chest and nibbled at you because you were too weak to shoo them. Then the recurring dream of cutting into your own leg with a knife and fork, and how the dream made you deliriously happy, causing you to wake in a puddle of drool (that you eagerly lapped up, sharing with no one).

At about this time, McKenna would sprint to the kitchen. She would squat beneath the table, sobbing, squeezing her sphincter until coaxed out by Misty with promises that she wouldn’t have to eat Grandma’s leg or anything else she didn’t want to eat.