The Girls Next Door (Gunn)
The Girls Next Door, by Thom Gunn (1929-2004)
Laughter of sisters, mingling,
separating, but so alike you
sometimes couldn’t tell
which was which,
as in a part-song.
I could hear them from outdoors
over the wall
that separated two gardens,
where the lilac bush on our side
was tattered by the passage
of domestic cats, on their constant
wary patrol through
systems of foliage. And then
late afternoons, the sound
of scales on the piano,
of rudimentary tunes.
Evenings, one of them
would call their cat in,
‘poor wandering one’, a joke
out of Gilbert and Sullivan.
And again
laughter, two voices
like two hands on a piano,
separate but not at variance,
practice in a sunlit room.
Today, many years later,
the younger of the two
tells me about her divorce.
On the phone last week he said
‘I didn’t give you
the house for ever,
you know. You could learn
a trade at night school.’
‘But’ she exclaims to me,
‘I’m forty-nine!’
An hour later, from the next room,
I hear her with one of her sons,
and suddenly her laughter
breaks out, as it used to.
Though she is on her own
— for the other sister
died long ago, in her teens —
it is unchanged, a sweet
high stumble of the voice,
rudimentary tune.