Excerpt: The Living Will

As a girl I often fell asleep imagining what it would be like to have a twin sister; someone living under the same roof who had the same taste in fashion, music and friends. We could share clothes and records, host joint sleepover parties and help one another study for the SATs. It wasn’t until after my marriage that I was disabused of this fantasy and learned to be grateful for Robbie and Abby and our mutually assured alienation.
Christopher, Kathleen, Daniel and Gregory Hagen were born in a span of seven years, but Suzanne could just as well given birth to quadruplets. This family had no black sheep, no jock, no artist, no brain. They shared an equal interest in sports, advanced placement courses and politics. It didn’t help that Chris, Dan and Greg resembled one another so strongly, older teachers at their high school frequently mistook them for one another. Kathleen at least had her gender to distinguish her, but even that was compromised when Daniel brought home Jessica, a native New Yorker whom Dan met in his first week of law school. Her voice, her looks even her mannerisms were eerily similar to Kathleen’s. I’m sure everyone thought as much, but the only person who ever voiced the observation was Jessica’s maid of honor at the tail-end of her bachelorette party, to which I had been press-ganged into attending.
“I mean, they’re a great couple, but like… it’s just freaky. She could at least color her hair or something so that he doesn’t have to look at his own sister when they’re, you know, doing it,” she said, swallowing her fourth fuzzy navel.
“That would defeat the point,” I replied, stone-cold sober.
The maid of honor went on to break her arm falling off the back of a barstool and Kathleen had to stand-in as matron of honor, making for some odd wedding photos with the two doppelgangers standing side by side.
Dan’s marriage created a whole new dimension to the Hagen family superiority struggle. Kathleen now had to fight on two fronts, against her brothers, and her new sister-in-law. But there was nobody was better suited for such a challenge. Kath woke up every morning raring to rip the balls off the day, and that was before her first cup of coffee. Like all Hagens, she played soccer in the fall but when spring came, and the boys played baseball, Kathleen took up lacrosse, which was where she excelled. The playing fields of Lexington High were frequently littered with her opponents. Once-pretty girls who were now be scarred for life with the imprint of Kath’s power hurl across their foreheads. After college, with no more lacrosse team, she was forced to channel all her excess energy and aggression into her career, and later into her two children.
The scary thing about Jessica was that she manifested the same degree of power as Kathleen, without the lacrosse stick, the Wall Street job or the two perfectly coiffed toddlers. Jessica competed with Kathleen without even trying. It was never clear exactly what she did with her time or if she earned any money and she made no apologies for it. She wore her entitlement like a custom-made jacket. It was never clear to me if she was doing it intentionally or if that was her natural state. Whatever it was, Kathleen fed off it and that same instinct that drove her destroy the other girls on the lacross field only grew stonger as Jessica entrenched herself deeper into the Hagen family. Kathleen gravitated towards her at all the family functions. There was even talk of them organizing a house-share in the Hamptons some summer, which gratefully for the local law enforcement, never materialized.
Things were no less interesting among the boys. The year I met Greg, Dan had already graduated from college, so my future husband had a bit of breathing room. I doubt our relationship would have bloomed had there been another Hagen in the wings waiting to take a spot at Dartmouth. Greg was a different person outside the influence of his family. He was curious, asked questions, sought other’s opinions and was generally open to new ideas. Around his siblings he dug in his heels and had a self-conscious motive for his every action and remark. The fact that they had all attended the same college made it even easier to sort and rank their accomplishments.
Jim and Suzanne didn’t ecourage this kind of conformism among their children, nor did they seek to dissauade it and send them on their own path of individuality. I think their mother found it cute that her brood turned out so identical. She joked that she and Jim should have a rubber stamp made “Payable to Dartmouth University.” But it wasn’t in their nature to interfere with their children. They came from the emotional hands-off school of parenting. The Hagen kids didn’t require much by way of discipline or enrichment. They would wake up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning and play games with each other like “mock trial,” or “brain surgery,” while other kids on the block were splayed on the couch watching cartoons and eating Coco Puffs straight from the box. Of course, they weren’t perfect. Greg admitted his father used to to have to strong-arm them into doing any chores. While he could have easily afforded a gardener, he liked the sight of his four able-bodied children raking the leaves and shoveling the driveway. It would set a good example for the younger kids in the neighborhood, he thought. The kids however always had some distate for manual and thought it unjust that they should be forced to work on principle when there were other more interesting things they could be doing, and less cultivated, ambitious people willing to be paid for the dirty work.
No one shirked their duties at the funeral though, nor did they jockey among themselves for special recognition or superiority over one another. Their mother’s burial was the one non-competitive event of their lives. I suppose the shock of it humbled their egos and left them briefly with no bearings. Had Suzanne gone to intensive care and survived a few days, I can’t say they would have behaved the same way. Perhaps there would have been a power struggle at the hospital as they vied for the doctors’ attention and asserted their own opinions on palliative care. But Suzanne’s death came very swiftly and by the time we got the call, there was no hospital to go to.