The twins were strolling around the lake with their sage, Jimmy. This was a little joke they shared, for he was not their sage. He was the son of their croquet coach from long ago and had been with them now for many years as friend and indispensable companion. 

The twins were Camilla and Candida. Camilla’s name was precept, a concept, coming from a long tradition, Virgil’s warrior girl, beautiful, virginal, agile, strong, and valiant, who fights on the wrong side, performs prodigies of bravery, and though defeated inspires passionate regard in the opposing heroes. Candida, on the other hand, was a parasite, a fungus, was it not? Despite the grave differences their names suggested, they appeared identical and Jimmy could scarcely tell them apart. 

They were passing along a purplish muddied finger of the lake. Leeches lay about in turgid harmony. 

“It must be terrible to want to have pretty ways and not have pretty ways,” Candida mused, regarding the leeches. “You know, they perform an elaborate courtship display before mating. We’ve never witnessed it ourselves. We read about it in a scientific journal.” 

“It would be difficult to descry, I imagine,” Jimmy said. “You’d have to know what you were looking at.” He’d been fond of annelids as a boy. He liked cutting them up to marvel at their bilateral symmetry. But the worms of his boyhood had been more modest. These things were a sizzling chili red and long as baguettes. He discerned jaws. They would brook no cutting up. 

Jimmy carried an insulated backpack that held their traditional picnic lunch⁠—several bottles of white wine and a pan of lemon squares. Their destination was the twins’ old playhouse, which had been relocated here and was of great significance to them. 

With the playhouse in sight they began speaking of their childhood: The school holidays when they traveled from the East to their daddy’s ranch in Wyoming, to the sheep-cropped grasslands of the Powder River Basin. The Thanksgiving they discovered that the cowboys were merely Daddy’s accountants decorated with chaps. The Easter morning they had their first menses simultaneously, riding the Appaloosas Jones and Dow. The evening they were told how immeasurably rich they were because Daddy owned the largest coal-bed methane drilling company in Wyoming, consequently in the nation and the world. 

Jimmy had heard all this before but never tired of their conversations. Their impeccable boarding school drawls always pleased him, as did their upper-class slouches and twitches. 

“We called Daddy Midas,” Camilla said. “Everything he touched turned into some ghastly energy source.” 

“The scarring, the erosion, the desertification and waste of trillions of gallons of water …” Candida said faintly. 

“One can hardly think of it in terms of gallons it was so much water,” Camilla said. “A gallon is what you might take on a walk like this, around a lake.” 

Jimmy had packed no water but he never packed water. 

The twins had long harbored the desire to murder their father and make the modest point that greed and desecration do not always go unpunished. But the old man had died of cardiac arrest reaching for his favorite egg cup in one of his many houses’ elaborate kitchens. His death provided little satisfaction. Their daddy had been a common capitalistic nihilist as had their granddaddy. It was their great-granddaddy that disturbed the twins the most, however. He had been instrumental in the ruination of Kansas on his way to Wyoming, enthusiastically participating in the Slaughter, when all animal life was being extinguished by guns and strychnine. Even the hardened generals touring the vast devastated prairie said they’d never seen such a putrid waste. Just bones and hail striking and skittering off the bones. 

Jimmy stumbled against a root but heard no crack of crystal against the lemon square pan, thank God.

“Remember the Christmas we brought home the recording Songs of the Humpback Whale and played it and played it and played it until Daddy practically went apeshit?” Camilla said. 

The twins wore identical dark skirts, sweater sets, and pearls as well as black high-tops, though Candida’s were a half size larger. 

“Imagine, after eleven months in the womb, to be born to no nest, no lair, no room, but to just the great home shadow of the mother …” Candida shuddered. 

“We had hoped he would have been moved, even if not profoundly moved, by nature’s hidden ecstatic adagio, but were not terribly surprised when he was not. Still, we were pleased by his considerable discomfort and irritation.” 

Jimmy had missed them so when they were away at school. He had become practically catatonic. That was almost fifty years ago now. 

“Clasp in back, dear,” Camilla said, adjusting her sister’s strand of pearls. “How does it manage to work its way around like that?” 

“Remember the little calves?” Candida said. “Remember how their mothers behaved? They behaved most unnaturally. They flung themselves against barbed wire before the births. They did not lick their children clean or hasten to nurse them. They …”

“Those were Daddy’s hobby veal calves,” her sister said. “He trucked them over personally to that chef in Jackson and the man made creamy little medallions of them and served them on big black plates.”

Candida looked pained. “We were forbidden to make pets of them.” 

“But he did let us have the prairie dog. Remember that, Jimmy? The whole colony had been gassed but this little fellow hung on⁠—oh, only for a day or two⁠⁠—but we enjoyed him so. We sang the little song to him that Ratty hears in The Wind in the Willows. ‘Lest the awe should dwell⁠—And turn your frolic to fret⁠—’⁠ ” Camilla warbled, “ ⁠‘You shall look on my power at the helping hour⁠—But then you shall forget!’⁠ ”

“Chapter seven,” Candida said. “⁠ ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.’⁠ ” 

Jimmy shuffled along behind them. They had almost reached their belvedere, the playhouse. He would unlock the massive door wrenched from some sixteenth-century monastery, set the table, pour the wine, serve the squares, and Time⁠—the severe concept of which had always troubled him⁠—would share the banquet as friend and accomplice. 

The playhouse had an antler chandelier, bearskin rugs, and mirrors everywhere rimmed with the teeth of wolves. 

“How we loved this place.” Candida sighed, settling in. “We felt no guilt about the decor at all. Most children realize guilt at the age of two or three but we …” 

“In the third year of life guilt appears,” Jimmy said. 

“But we didn’t come to guilt until we were twenty,” Camilla said. She took a long swallow of wine. “This is an excellent white, Jimmy. Racy.” 

“And we adored it!” Candida said. “So much more intriguing than boys. Guilt just got to looking better and better to us. It became this handsome, loyal, thoughtful companion, rather like a German shepherd.”

“Nothing alarms the moneyed class more than a powerful sense of guilt,” Camilla said.

“Our friends thought we had lost our minds. They were so concerned they attempted to do what was then called an intervention.”

Jimmy gazed at them raptly.