"AGNES AND IRIS"
by Ben Bush

The tenants avoided Iris and Agnes, the identical twin managers of the West Park Apartments. They didn’t avoid them for the usual reasons. They didn’t avoid them because they were behind on rent or because they had painted the kitchen a very dark shade of green. Although of course some of them had done these things, too.

Instead they avoided Iris and Agnes because it was impossible to tell the two apart. There were rumors that Iris was taller or that Agnes had a mole on her neck. But these claims were never substantiated. The tenants lived in fear of calling one of their landladies by the wrong name. One of the twins became angry if she was called by the wrong name. Most people thought it was Iris who hated to be confused with her sister. But even if the name of the easily angered twin could be confirmed it wouldn’t do much to help. There was still no way to tell the sister with the temper from the one without. The man in 506 had once called Iris “Agnes” and she had erupted into a fury. When he moved out a month later, it was rumored that he had received only half of his deposit back.

Iris had never enjoyed looking like her sister. She didn’t like having identical blue eyes or the way their noses had the same rounded shape. People thought it was adorable that they both had dimples when they smiled so Iris stopped smiling. She didn’t like how their hair had begun graying at almost the same instant or that they were both getting crow’s feet wrinkles around their eyes.

The sisters had always lived in the West Park apartments. The building was owned by their father. They had spent their youth on the West Park tennis court, wearing adorable matching culatte twin sets. The loose fabric had sloshed against her knees as Iris charged to return one of her sister’s deft backhand shots. Iris couldn’t stand losing a match to her sister. The only thing she hated more than that was when they tied. She had a vicious temper. She would scream and protest. It was the same temper that the man in 506 had witnessed when he happened to call her by her sister’s name.

They began to inherit the responsibilities of apartment management when their father threw his back out and could no longer operate the sprinkler system or test the pH balance of the swimming pool. When their father drifted into early retirement they took over the apartment complex.

Their father had moved out of West Park but now he was losing more than his mobility. He had been one of the few people capable of telling his daughters apart. It was upsetting for Iris when he was no longer capable of that astonishing feat of keen observation. “Why are you crying Agnes?” her father asked.

This difficult blow was cushioned by the fact that it had been accompanied by the loss of other mental faculties. He was easily confused by the television news. Tragedies were replayed first in the morning then at noon and again at six and on into the night. Each time he saw the footage he believed it was happening again. If a plane crashed in the morning by 11 o’clock he was convinced that a whole fleet of planes had fallen from the sky.

Last week there had been an earthquake not far away. Almost no one died and a few buildings were shaken. The local news was rerunning the footage for a solid week with updates and human-interest stories relating to the quake. Each time he saw the footage he would call his daughters in a panic.

“Hello, West Park Condominiums. This is Iris speaking.”

“Agnes, I just saw on the news about the earthquake. You’ve got to get out.”

“Dad, I’m Iris. This is Iris.”

“It’s not safe, Agnes. You’ve got to go.”

“I’m Iris, Dad.”

“Are the tenants all right, Agnes?”

“It’s for you,” she would say gladly handing off the responsibility for their terrified father to her sister.

* * * * *

There were two tiny plastic troughs on the office desk. One full of business cards marked “Iris Overmaier, Property Manager West Park Apartments.” The other full of business cards marked “Agnes Overmaier, Property Manager West Park Apartments.” Or that’s how it was supposed to be. But the prospective renters had gotten the cards all shuffled up. Iris had the cards in her lap and was re-sorting them.

There were only two chairs: Agnes sat in the comfortable chair where potential renters sat while looking over the contract, Iris sat in the slightly less comfortable chair behind the desk staring out the window at the swimming pool. The office was hot but outside was much worse.

The heat made Iris irritable but also prevented her from being able to concentrate enough to be angry at anything in specific. She stared accusingly at the palm tree that loomed over the swimming pool.

Finished with her task, Iris set the cards back on the desk. The little troughs lived next to an amber colored cut glass ashtray filled with hard candies. Agnes was pawing through these. They were mostly peppermints and she wanted cinnamon. “Is that guy coming today to steam the 506 carpets?” Iris asked.

The truth was that it was nothing personal with the renter from 506. He probably didn’t even deserve half of his deposit back. Earlier, Iris drove his drapes to the dry cleaners. Even from inside a ziploc bag whatever he had done to them was stinking up the car. The state division of highways had closed down the freeway off ramp by the cleaners. Taking the more tedious surface streets was almost unbearable with the heat cooking the bag of drapes.

Iris hadn’t taken that route in years and she noticed a tattoo shop in between a bakery and a hardware store. It was on a tiny island of commercial activity in a residential neighborhood.

Agnes had finally located a cinnamon candy. Both candies were circles of swirling red and white sugar. Cinnamon was identified by a pink blotch in the center. The heat and humidity had sealed Agnes’s candy in its wrapper. She thought she had thoroughly peeled it but there were still flecks of clear plastic imbedded in the candy. “No, I think he’s coming tomorrow. Have you picked up the curtains from the cleaners yet?”

Iris had always wanted to look different from her sister; she wanted to be immediately recognized instead of scrutinized to see which one she was. Iris wasn’t the sort of person usually given to such ostentatious displays but to serve its purpose the tattoo would have to be somewhere visible—he face, her neck, her hands.

While Agnes talked about property values Iris started to sketch symbols on her hand with a ballpoint pen. “Yeah, you’re right,” Iris said, “I should probably go pick up those drapes.”

* * * * *

Iris returned to the apartment entirely padded in white gauze with the freshly laundered drapes tucked under one arm. Was their father right? Agnes thought. Had one of the earthquakes finally clobbered her sister? She had been gone for eight hours. “Where have you been?”

Agnes couldn’t see but under the gauze Iris was smiling. She knew she was finally different from the woman who stood nervously before her. Her body had been inked with the purest expression of herself: herself: her body. Iris was covered in a portrait of Iris. A life-size portrait would have been hard to notice, instead a slightly smaller Iris had been drawn on top of her. There was gauze over her eyelids where 9/10th scale eyes had been drawn; she had to peak out from underneath the bandages. When she had started to think about where on her body to get the tattoo it had given her an appreciation of her body.

Iris reached into her purse with a mitteny white hand and pulled out a tube of antibiotic ointment. “Agnes, I need you to remove my bandages and apply this cream. I’m going to need you to do this every twelve hours.”

The cotton Agnes pulled off was stained with a dark dried maroon tinted with a diluted inky blackness. As she unwrapped her sister she saw the 9/10th scale eyes inked onto her eyelids and 9/10th scale wrinkles tucked inside the wrinkles under the eyes. There was a 9/10th-scale nose in the center of her nose. As Agnes saw more of the portrait her concern turned to joy. She gasped and raised her hand to her mouth and smiled. Agnes looked at Iris’s tattoo and saw a slightly smaller version of herself. “Oh, Iris that is just the sweetest thing! I am so honored that my own sister would choose to have a portrait of me tattooed onto her skin! You’re the greatest! The absolute greatest! It’s like we’ll be together all the time.”

---

Ben Bush lives in Oakland, California where he is sporadically employed. He once took a trip to Canada because the drinking age is 19. His article on global warming accompanied by pornographic illustration isavailable in the December issue of sitandspinmagazine, an interview with foreign policy expert Chalmers Johnson is available at clamormagazine as Communique #47.

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