Part 3: Nadine's Consensual Home Invasion
by Swati Sudarsan
Michel O’Hara, Home: Portland, digital photograph, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.
Part 3: Nadine's Consensual
Home Invasion
Swati Sudarsan | June 2024 | Issue 34
When Nadine and the Other Nadine arrived at Athena’s, Nadine led them in through the back door.
“This is okay?” asked the Other Nadine.
Nadine nodded. Athena always insisted that she come in through the back. “There’s something nostalgic about consensual home invasion,” she would say, her eyes pulsing. “It reminds me of an eighteenth-century romance. Or neighborliness in the countryside. Or an episode of Friends.”
Inside the house, the dull morning air sharpened with the scent of butter burning and toast toasting. Athena’s home was littered with armchairs, armories, cabinets, and garish displays of crockery. For a woman of science, she was particularly flamboyant when it came to archaic symbols of domestication. Which reminded Nadine — Athena expected everyone under her roof to adhere to a particular code of conduct. “It’s the basis of self-dignity” Athena said about her rules, which made Nadine wonder what the difference was between that and self-righteousness. In any case, Athena was far more likely to be helpful if her dignity was stoked.
“Listen up,” Nadine hissed, almost snapping her fingers at the Other Nadine. “Athena’s going to come in here at any minute, and we need her to like you. So you’re going to have to eat everything she makes us. She’s not much of a cook, but just think of it as edible calories. She loves knowing you feel provided for. Also, don’t make faces if it’s too salty. Also, don’t put your elbows on the table. Also, don’t speak unless spoken to. She’ll loosen up when she’s had enough wine.”
“What is she, a witch?”
“No, she’s British.”
The Other Nadine wrinkled her nose.
“Okay, now sit down. But not on the velvet divan. That’s a vanity piece.”
The Other Nadine draped herself over a linen ottoman, her limbs splaying over its edges like an oversized toy, and Nadine sank into a wooden adirondack chair that pulled her butt and body back, like someone preparing to blast off into space. Her feet hung loosely above the ground, swaying at the whims of the breeze coming in through the window. She was about to alert Athena to their presence, when a loud wail pierced its way from the kitchen. It resounded into the crockery, wrapping around itself, amplifying, until it made the house shake. Both Nadines startled at the same time, their wide eyes snagging on each other. They looked to each other for confirmation — of danger? Then the light scent of Earl Grey floated through the door from the kitchen, and together, they came to understand it had just been the chirrupy whistle of a kettle. They simultaneously relaxed back into their seats.
Athena appeared in the doorframe. In one arm she held a silver tray, strewn with assorted pastries, savories, and sweets, and in the other was a French press, so fresh it hadn’t even been pressed down yet. She stepped into the room, her figure looming over the two Nadines. She looked from one to the other, then back, blinking unsteadily. She hovered in her spot, items tightening into her grip, still as a zebra being hunted. Then she blinked, once, re-emerging slowly back into her human form.
Her lips thinned, then wilted into a small frown.
“Nadine, you didn’t tell me we would be having company. I would have made more quiche — ”
“I can explain,” Nadine interrupted, anxious to mitigate, but she was cut off by the Other Nadine, who interjected with, “— I’m her sister, the rude one with social issues she never mentions! I came to town unexpectedly!”
Athena’s mouth gaped, dimming the chaos of the encounter. Nadine’s body turned hot with sheepish fervor. How silly of her. How could she expect Athena to accept The Other Nadine — her existence, the concept of her, the implications of her arrival — as readily as she had? Athena was cerebral. Methodical. Analytical. Also, single. She would never take something outrageous at face value, which is why she was perpetually letting go of potential partners only after second and third dates. She needed to know the mechanisms of every mystery. To understand the inner workings of everything she did not agree with. Even outside of Athena’s dating life, there were times this mindset felt overly rigid to Nadine — how it unraveled the fabric of life’s mystery and magic, undid the wonder of synchronicity, removed the gifts of coincidence — but now, she came to a new understanding. It was protective.
So what would happen when Athena realized they weren’t pulling a prank. That they truly needed her help. Would she be upset? Angry? Frightened? Or would she be flattered that they had come to her in their time of need? The only way to know was to be up front, but Athena beat her to it.
“Nadine. Kitchen. Now.”
Nadine uncorked the chilled red wine she had brought and poured them each a glass. Athena took a long chug before turning to Nadine.
“What’s going on? You never told me you have a sister?”
It came out accusatory, and Nadine’s immediate impulse was to defend herself. Then she noticed that Athena’s eyes were quivering, and she had her second revelation of the morning.
Athena was hurt.
“Athena— ”
“I thought we shared everything with each other. I offered you comfort, invited you over. This is how I find out your secret?”
“She’s not my sister, Athena. She’s a stranger.”
Athena's eyes flickered, disbelieving.
“I’m serious. She showed up at my door when I got home from the wine shop. I didn’t know what to do.” Athena remained silent, so Nadine added, “I haven’t even told Dev.”
At the mention of Dev, Athena’s face mulled, then darkened. “What’s he going to say?”
“He’s not going to know.”
Athena’s eyes unfurled, dancing in resplendence. “We’re going to get rid of her?”
“What? No!”
Nadine was surprised by the strength of her refusal, given only twenty minutes ago, she herself had wanted to drop off the Other Nadine at some gas station.
“No, I just need your help, Athena. I don’t know if she’s…safe.”
Athena’s lashes summoned thickly over her dilated pupils. She appeared reticent, but a beat later, they opened wide again. “She trusts you, right?”
Nadine was surprised by the question. She didn’t know the answer.
“I have an idea, Nadine. I’m going to pour dimethoxyethane on this dish rag here, I think I’ve still got some in my office. Meanwhile, you’re going to bring her some quiche. That’ll distract her enough for me to grab her, and — I just did this with a mouse the other day — we’ll have about thirty minutes before she comes to —”
“— she’s not a lab specimen, ” Nadine interrupted, but Athena barreled forward.
“We’ll have to be quick, but we can open her up and see what’s inside!”
Nadine was aghast. “Athena, we can’t dissect her!”
Athena, woman of science, normally so stoic she could be made of porcelain, twitched. Her cheeks flushed and her teeth gnashed in a way that made Nadine uneasy. In her eyes — a dormant grandiosity, awakened like the Kraken.
“Just a little cut, Nadine. Please. Do you not understand how extraordinary this is? We could become famous if she’s some type of alien —”
Nadine felt suddenly resolutely protective of Other Nadine. “No Athena. She’s human.”
A silence fell between them like a brick, growing heavier, until a third voice broke through.
“What the hell?”
Other Nadine was at the door.
+
The three of them stood in a circle in the kitchen, facing each other. Athena’s nostrils flared, and she hunched like a cat accordioned into itself, ready to pounce. Other Nadine stood with her legs wide, hands on her hips, receded into the counter, with an almost imperceptible tremble in her fingers. Nadine stood in the middle. She was suddenly very invested in looking at the thin surface of the wine, waiting for the tension to crack.
She wondered how this next conversation would go. Would it be a demure peacekeeping discussion, like a United Nations roundtable? Or would harsh words be thrown around, like couple’s therapy with Dr. Phil?
It turned out to be like an episode of Judge Judy.
“HUMAN?” Other Nadine screeched. “You were trying to decide if I was human?”
“We’re so sorry —” Nadine began, but Athena sprang in.
“Wait, wait, wait.”
Both Nadines looked at her.
“If we’re going to argue, I’d like to know…what’s your name?”
Nadine’s cheeks flushed with the heat of the wine. How had she never asked Other Nadine for her name?
“Nadine!”
“Okay, Nadine. We are so sorry for questioning your humanity. We believe you, Nadine. You can understand why we were a little cautious, right?” Athena said, tilting her head in that Athena way. She spoke emphatically, full of sensibility and reason, but with an undertone of self-pity. Athena had learned this manner of speaking while working in the sciences. It was the tone that got her lab bounteous funding from eager donors.
“Maybe you can tell us why you’re here, and we can tell you what we want out of this?” Athena said, crossing her arms.
Nadine looked at Other Nadine pleadingly. She needed her to understand that she was not a part of this interrogation. Their eyes met briefly.
“Maybe we can come to a mutual understanding?” Athena added.
“I don’t want anything from you,” said Other Nadine, agitated. “But if it would help you to trust me, I can tell you how I got here. Do you want my story?”
At this offer, Nadine forgot her embarrassment. She and Athena looked at each other excitedly.
They loved gossip.
Before Other Nadine began her tale, the three of them decided to get comfortable. They sat down in the living room, and Athena insisted they eat. The Nadines bit into the quiche and crumpets, and didn’t make any faces at the burnt saltiness. All three of them passed around more wine, poured themselves tea, used the bathroom, and when their bodily needs were met, the Other Nadine began.
“The first thing to know about me is that I’m a widow.”
Athena gasped, and Nadine tried to imagine what it would feel like to be widowed. She pictured an empty room, a fresh breeze, vast swathes of time, a profound sense of freedom, attunement to the joy of a burning candle….she turned away from the thought.
“Well, he passed away — oh don’t look so sad, two more months and we would have been divorced — so when he died, I inherited all his estates. Like millions of dollars of estates.”
Nadine and Athena’s jaws dropped.
“So, then I had all this money, but it was tied up in real estate. Did you know working in real estate is basically like selling your soul? Anyway, I knew I would have to take care of the houses eventually, for a living, but I had some money saved up to keep me floating by for a bit longer. I figured, who knew how long until I was this free again. I should really make use of this time. And for the first time, I was forced to think beyond consumerism, money, and status. My husband had always given me every thing I wanted, because he loved to know he was the one providing things. It made me, in a sense, owe him. So with him dead, I could finally think about what I cared about.
“So, I sat there and thought and thought about what I cared about, but my mind kept drawing a blank. I realized, I was so indoctrinated with my late husband’s values, that I had no idea what I cared about. And that basically meant, I had no idea who I was. So I decided, I needed to use this time to figure out what I’m made of.”
Athena’s eye twitched. Nadine knew she was thinking about dissection again.
“But not in a physical sense,” Other Nadine continued. “More in a philosophical sense. For some reason, the first thing I wanted to know was if I could take a punch. I walked around, asking strangers to punch me, and no one wanted to. They said I was too pretty to ruin that way. So I asked, oh, what about another way. That really tripped people up. Eventually, I found someone to do it. And it turned out, I can take a punch.”
Other Nadine’s eyes glinted like a razor.
“Then, I wanted to know, could I live without food for a week? I could. Then, could any random dog find me lovable? Could I survive a sugar-free diet? How about paleo? What about a diet of only gummy fish? And the big “Q” question. Could I raise a child? — Stop making that face! I gave the kid back. His mom liked him more than I did, anyway.”
Nadine had heard enough of this nonsense. “So what brought you here?” she demanded.
Other Nadine’s face sunk into a look of pure mischief. “Well, I wanted to know if I could find someone interesting.”
Nadine wanted to ask, “and did you?”, but Other Nadine was looking at her as if for the first time. The energy between them sizzled, growing raucous and churning. The air between them was feverish, almost sexual. It seemed to swell, growing as if in climax —
“So what next?” Athena cut in. Fresh air rushed back into the room, and with it came an idea. It struck Nadine in the way she imagined Renaissance painters were bestowed with divine inspiration—on a platter, from a muse. It arrived fully formed, white hot, in feral need of devouring. She felt like she was going to die if she kept this feeling to herself, so for once in her life, Nadine spoke her truest, deepest thoughts.
“I have a plan,” she said.
+
After Nadine laid out her plan, the three of them discussed it animatedly, building into the ideas, as if workshopping a bionic supermonster blessed with attachments from each of their areas of expertise. Now, The Nadines drove home, ready to execute the plan.
The divine thought Nadine had sounded trite and plagiarized when she said it out loud. Yet she shared. Like Other Nadine, Nadine wanted to know what she was made of too.
“What will it look like for you?” Athena had asked, both hands on her chin as she gazed at Nadine with deep interest.
Nadine’s desires were simple. She wanted to go out into the world, get fresh air, better her health, and moreover, her skin. She wanted to be done buying creams. And above all, she wanted to find her own questions to answer.
Other Nadine insisted that the key to formulating her own questions was access to unfettered time and being unleashed from domestic obligations.
“Lucky for you, I’m at the end of my line of questions,” Other Nadine said, and offered this: she would stay at home during the day, do Nadine’s job, and tend to Dev, who would never notice the difference between them. This arrangement was also mutually beneficial, as it would allow Other Nadine to prepare for her new life. Selling her soul to real estate. She needed to know — could she maintain an inner life once the demands of the job kicked in? Would she be able to maintain her sense of self, or would she become bitter? What things would fulfill her, keep her from becoming walled off, lonely, and unyielding?
“Trust me, if you can survive Dev, you can survive any old job,” Nadine reassured her.
Athena advised it was important to find check-in points with each other.
“This is powerful,” she said in delight. “What if together, you unlock some new meaning of life?”
Nadine agreed with Athena that she didn’t really understand the point of life sometimes. Was the whole point to survive it? That seemed too depressing to even entertain. What else? Why did life exist? To commandeer it? Unleash it? Invade it? Solve it? How could a life be classified as solvable? Then life would have to be considered a problem.
+
As they drove, strange clouds formed in the sky overhead, conglomerate and lenticular. If they didn’t know any better, they would have thought the clouds were UFOs, or some other grandiose object, heaven-sent to herald a new way of life. Instead, Nadine checked her weather app, which simply suggested a “possibility of light drizzle.”
Nadine was taken aback. Where was the subway poet?
In any case, she did not linger on it for too long. They had a plan to execute, so when they parked the car at Nadine's house, they simply prepared themselves for a light drizzle. They pulled on their raincoats and grabbed umbrellas before heading out, back into Nadine’s home.
+
Swati Sudarsan is an Indian-American writer who grew up in the Midwest. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published in The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, and The Spectacle, amongst others. She was the 2023 recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction, and has also received funding and support from the Tin House Workshop, the Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal, and more. She now lives in Brooklyn with her black cat Toothless.
Michel O’Hara is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her most recent poetry can be found in One Art Poetry, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Blue Route, and The Sucarnochee Review. Her photography has been included in exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Los Angeles Center of Photography, Lightbox Photographic Gallery, The Curated Fridge and PhotoPlace Gallery. Michel is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles.