Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm

retreated. He loves us both. He has not married. If she catches him in her net, he will never be released again.
    We were awed by our grandfather, who looked like a giant when we were young, visiting on his farm. When we returned home, I thought of him as big enough to hold both of us in the palm of his hand. By the time we were eleven, we had overgrown Grandmother, and I thought of her as doll-like. My sister put words to my thoughts: “He’s a roar and she’s a whisper. A tree and a twig. A willow and a wisp.”
    When they came to our graduation from high school, I was shocked to see that Grandfather was not a giant, but just an ordinary tall man.
    “The enchantment stopped at the farm gate,” my sister said.
    One summer at the farm we watched smoke rise, and we smelled fire throughout the day and into the night when the sky glowed in the east as the fire moved over the dry forests. Grandfather glared at the flickering eastern lights, and he said it would not reach us; it would stop at the lake. When it moved around the lake and drew closer, he said it again: it would not reach us. The rain would come first. And it did. The fire burned Mr. Holt’s cornfield across the lake, but it did not reach us.
    “With his will and his eyes he held the false sunrise at bay,” she whispered that night. “The enchantment is restored.”
    When I recall him now, it is that image: he is facing the fire in the east, his face fierce, fists clenched, and he is a giant again.
    We came this time for his funeral.
    The first time I realized we were not exactly the same was when we were eight or nine. Always before, looking at her had been like gazing into the mirror, but that afternoon, looking at her I saw someone else. Someone strange and foreign. I ran to the bathroom and stared into the mirror; she followed. And there, gazing at us side by side in the glass, I saw again the difference in the reflections.
    She was alien, a dreaminess in her eyes perhaps, an expression I could not copy. “What do you see?” I asked in a whisper.
    “Me. You. Us. Yin and Yang, before and after, hard and soft, opaque and transparent, alike and different.”
    I stopped her. She couldn’t explain what she saw any more than I could. “Good and bad?”
    She shook her head. “Incomplete.”
    I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that was the real difference I discovered that summer. I often didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t know what opaque meant, and when I tried to look it up, I couldn’t find it in the dictionary. Later I wondered who was transparent, who opaque.
    Our mother treated us like dolls, her precious, animated dolls, she often said. She also talked about how difficult it had been to carry two, how difficult labor had been, how she had suffered, but of course none of that was our fault. We must not blame ourselves. She bought identical everything for us. When we turned twelve we stopped wearing our identical clothes. My sister wore pink, I chose blue; she dressed in jeans and a yellow shirt, I wore jeans and a green top. I cut my hair short, hers was still long. That was the only time I could remember being first. Mother said she was very disappointed in us.
    Born thirty minutes before me, my sister was first to cut a tooth, first at potty training, first to talk. Always first. At twelve she declared that when she grew up she would marry Bobby Holt.
    I could do math and science; I understood process, physical objects, the abstractions of algebra. She did poetry and art. She understood the labryinth of her psyche and could translate the impulses and images she found there. I have a dissertation not yet finished; she has published two slim books of poetry. I don’t understand her poetry or the illustrations she did in water color. Neither does she. I asked her once and she said the poem was what it was, what it meant was what it was. I didn’t understand that, either. She hasn’t read my dissertation. It has formulas and