The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  Ruby remembers nothing. I recall it all—the black and aquamarine tiles in the reception room at the hospital, the greasy vending machine with mostly Clark bars that we’d begged quarters from Uncle Stash to buy, the smell of ammonia in the screeching elevator. The staring in the waiting room—staring at the others staring at us. A small girl with a ledge of white tumors over both eyes. A baby with a severely cleft palate. A limbless toddler throwing a fit in the hall. St. Francis on the wall, pitying.

  We are accustomed to being examined. My sister always falls asleep. Maybe it’s true Ruby doesn’t remember Philadelphia. Maybe she slept through the whole thing. Ruby, with her frequent digestive and bladder problems, had us to Leaford weekly when we were young to see Dr. Ruttle Jr. (and later, when he retired, his son, whom we call Richie or Rich), but our examination in Philadelphia was different. We endured dozens of X-rays, and needle pricks, and electrodes, and swabs, and other procedures I wasn’t familiar with, and after several hours we were taken to a large operating theater where Dr. Mau and a group of ten other doctors waited.

  The whole operating room must have been chrome, for all the reflections I could see. The reflection of the hot white lights, of Dr. Mau and me and my conjoined sleeping sister. We were lying naked on two large gurneys that had been pushed together. Aunt Lovey was worried because I was perspiring so heavily. I was irritated by Dr. Mau’s poking fingers, and though I was too well raised to protest directly, I was shooting him some evil looks.

  I had no idea who Dr. Mau was, or why Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had brought us to see him, or why they seemed so anxious when he didn’t want to let them into the examination room. Aunt Lovey’s tone had been respectful, but her refusal to be left outside was absolute. I remember that, after an hour or so of Dr. Mau’s picking and prodding and talking to the other doctors in a foreign language, his black eyes had found mine. If he understood that I was glaring at him, he didn’t seem to mind. He’d studied me, smiling warmly as he dragged a large white duck feather back and forth over my sleeping sister’s clubfeet. He was wearing cologne. I had never smelled such a scent, sharp and spicy, before. (Uncle Stash smelled of beef blood and Amphora Red tobacco. Aunt Lovey smelled of lilacs and Palmolive.)

  Watching my eyes, Dr. Mau continued dusting Ruby with his ridiculous white feather and whispered, so as not to wake her, “Rose? Can you feel this?”

  I’d responded with what I thought was politeness, whispering back, “No, Dr. Mau. Can you?”

  I hadn’t meant to be funny or clever, but Dr. Mau had laughed and turned to Aunt Lovey, asking, “Is the parasitic twin clever too?”

  In my memory, Aunt Lovey jerked the doctor off his feet like a rag doll and yanked him out of earshot. I know she more likely tugged at his sleeve or merely urged him over to the door, raising her voice somewhat, too angry to remember her place. I couldn’t turn my head to watch, but I heard the sound of Aunt Lovey hissing like a snake and the obscene word “parasitic, parasitic” whispered by one and then the other, again and again.

  When Dr. Mau returned to the table with his watery dark eyes, he seemed different. Maybe he was contrite after Aunt Lovey’s dressing down. Ruby woke up when the doctor accidentally jabbed her with the sharp end of the feather. She was groggy and seemed to have no idea where she was. Dr. Mau smiled at her, explaining that he was an old friend, an old doctor friend, just making sure she was in good shape. Ruby must have smiled back because he looked past me, at Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, and the other doctors, and said, “This one’s quite pretty.”

  Aunt Lovey did not jerk the doctor off his feet or even urge him out of earshot when he said that. Instead, she and Uncle Stash moved closer to have a look at Ruby themselves, and they smiled too, because it was true.

  Coots

  Smelling of motor oil and buttered turnip, and speaking no English, thirteen-year-old Callula Crezda was enrolled in our fourth-grade class at Leaford Public School. The principal brought her to our room, and Miss May, frowning, found a seat for her in the front. She was two years older than the oldest fourth graders, Ruby and me. She had crossed black eyes and straight black hair and a single large mole on her right cheek. She wore a brown tunic, a white blouse with a coffee stain, and boys’ black rubber boots with a stripe of red at the top. The class of fourth graders (who tolerated Ruby and me because we were locals, and because they’d been threatened to death by their parents) were starving for a target, and they found it in the cross-eyed immigrant. It was clear to everyone, within minutes of her arrival, that Callula Crezda had “the coots.”

  Callula lived in a tiny rented house beside the railroad tracks with her father, who was huge and savage, and who walked with a limp and did not work, and her mother, a doughy, grinning woman who wore a black babushka. Her mother got a job cleaning vats at the canning factory, and soon after that Callula came to school wearing a black pirate patch to train her lazy eye. I begged Aunt Lovey for a pirate patch, but Ruby said she would not go to school if I wore one.

  My sister and I talked about Callula incessantly. Not between each other (never between each other), but at the supper table with Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey, when they asked us about our day. Ruby did most of the telling. I revised and edited as she went along. There was the story about how a boy dropped his spelling book and it hit Callula’s head. Callula thought he did it on purpose, so she smacked him on the head with her spelling book. There was one incident when a disposable razor fell out of Callula’s purse at recess, and she used it to threaten another girl. Ruby even told about Callula climbing to the top of the monkey bars and letting everyone see her dirty underwear. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash winced and shook their heads upon hearing our Callula Crezda stories. “That poor girl,” Aunt Lovey would say, though she never sounded so piteous about Ruby or me.

  One day, during fall flu season, Callula threw up porridge. The sight of the mess made my delicate sister puke too, and we’d ended up in the nurse’s office at the same time. Callula was sitting at the far end of the room. She was glassy-eyed and silent and didn’t notice when we slipped through the door. As Ruby whimpered behind me, I studied Callula. Her sweater was badly pilled. There was dirt in her raggedy nails. A yellow crust around her nose. Her stockings filthy with ladders and holes.

  “Hi, Callula,” I whispered, knowing she couldn’t hear.

  Ruby pinched me hard. She was terrified of Callula, and of other things I didn’t understand.

  That night, after our brief interlude in the nurse’s office, a derailed freight train slammed into the back of Crezdas’ little rented house by the tracks. At four o’clock in the morning a freight train hauling grain went rumbling past Leaford, its wheels screaming on the wet rails, challenging the thunderstorm overhead. The last car of the train, which was loaded with seed corn, came unhitched and jumped the track, skiing down the embankment and shearing off the back half of the Crezdas’ house, before flipping and rolling and finally coming to rest against the hill at the end of the road.

  By six o’clock that morning all of Leaford, including Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash and Ruby and me, were standing in the pouring rain, staring at the remains of the poor little house. (The London newspaper carried a photograph of the immigrant family huddled together in the front seat of their old car, the scowling Crezda father, the grinning Crezda mother, Callula with her pirate patch, arms crisscrossed over her breast buds under thin cotton pajamas.) Uncle Stash shook his head, looking at the house and the train beyond. “Nothing to do.” He shrugged mournfully. “We go.”

  Aunt Lovey nodded.

  “No one else is leaving,” Ruby complained.

  “This is tragedy, Ruby,” said Uncle Stash. “This is not for entertainment.”

  Aunt Lovey nodded but didn’t make a move.

  I could see Callula at a distance, shivering in the car between her mother and father. She looked waxy and white, not angry so much as defeated. I was confused by my urge to flee.

  Aunt Lovey suggested that Ruby and I go
talk to our classmate. When I asked what we would say, Aunt Lovey seemed surprised. “Just tell the poor girl you’re sorry about what happened to her house.”

  I was afraid Callula Crezda would understand “sorry” as an apology, and thought Aunt Lovey was giving me bad advice. Why would I want Callula Crezda to think I had something to do with the train wreck? “I don’t want to,” I said.

  The interior walls of the Crezdas’ house, the ones that separated the two front bedrooms and living room from the kitchen, laundry, and bathroom at the back, had crumpled after the train crashed, and the contents were laid bare. In the living room, a scratched coffee table between two torn red chairs, a sunken sofa, and, beside it, stacks of books—not like Aunt Lovey’s paperbacks, but large hardcover volumes with rich navy spines and gold-leaf titles. A small mattress on the floor of each bedroom, several garbage bags in the corner for clothes. A few crooked Christian icons on the shocked yellow walls.

  The Crezdas—the father, the mother, and Callula in her cotton pajamas—sat silently. The rain stopped. More people came. Gawkers from Raleigh County and Harwich brought lawn chairs and binoculars. Behind the steering wheel in the unmoving car, Mr. Crezda’s eyes grew darker.

  Then the crows came. A black cloud that stole over our heads and descended like a cloak upon the seed corn spilled from the wreckage.

  (Leaford is the crow capital of the world. An army of several thousand sleek black crows makes Baldoon County home, dining splendidly in farmers’ fields, fighting for turf on trash day. Every year someone has some brilliant idea about how to drive the crows away. Mayors in Leaford have been elected on their crow-eradicating platforms. When Ruby and I were fifteen years old, a falconer was hired to scare the birds off. There were so many crows that year, Zimmer’s single-engine crop dusters couldn’t fly safely in or out of the Leaford Airfield. The most seasoned farmers in the crowd had never seen the crows like this, so many at once, maybe a thousand, turbulent and hostile, flying as a collective, swooping too close to the crowds, battling one another in midair.)

  A few of the onlookers opened up their umbrellas as the crows continued to circle and dive. Other people returned to their cars. Still others, determined to stay with the carnage, climbed into the remains of the Crezdas’ house and made themselves at home, with their muddy boots on the mattresses and their fat asses on the torn red chairs, as focus shifted from the derailed train to the black winged beasts.

  I could not have been the only person to watch Callula’s father catapult from his car and lunge toward the bisected house. Of course no one inside understood his screaming, since it was in Yugoslavian, but it was impossible not to know his intention. He hoisted himself up over the foundation and into his half-house and ran at the people, swatting them with his open hand and kicking at them with his boots. Uncle Stash made us leave before we could see any more.

  The next morning, my boots sucking the muck of the unpaved lane, the warm air stinking of pig from Lapiere’s to the south, and with the crows cawing loudly in the cornfield behind the barn, Ruby and I made our way down to the road and to the shelter of our weather shed. (Uncle Stash had fashioned the shed of corrugated aluminum, with a silver domed top and a boat’s portal window. It took him eight full days to construct. All the country kids had such enclosures to shelter them while they waited for the school bus, but most were boxy sheds slapped together with incidental scraps of wood, uninspired, hardly ever even painted. No one in the county had a shed like ours: a spaceship; an alien shuttle; an upturned submarine. Now that I think of it, it was actually rather phallic—which may account for at least some of the laughter from the back of the bus. Oh my God, what must Frankie Foyle have thought, watching Ruby and me emerge from our giant silver penis?)

  As we waited in our silver stalk for the yellow bus that would ferry us to Leaford PS, I thought about asking Callula what it felt like when the train sliced through her house, but wondered if my interest would be misunderstood. The bus was buzzing with talk of the train wreck and Crezdas’ misfortune. I had a twinge of anxiety, fearing that Callula might gain status because of the accident and be too high ranking to consider a friendship with the likes of Ruby and me. We arrived in our classroom to find Callula Crezda’s chair vacant. She had been moved to grade five. I knew it would be worse for her there with the older, bolder children, but I shared Ruby’s relief. “Coots. Coots. Coots. Coots.” They’d chant it whenever the halls were teacher-free. The boys would tease Callula into chasing them into the green field at recess. Someone taught Callula a few English swearwords. “Eat me out!” she’d scream at her tormentors, though she couldn’t have known what it meant.

  Her family moved away from Leaford before high school started. I thought I saw Callula Crezda amid the throng of people at Aunt Lovey’s funeral, but of course it wasn’t her.

  It’s Ruby again.

  Rose hasn’t been eating. I can feel in her hips that she’s getting thinner. Lately I’ve had to fight to get us into the shower. That’s not like Rose.

  All she wants to do is write. Or think about writing, or talk about writing. She says a good day is when she writes eight pages instead of four. She’s says it’s like losing ten pounds, which I can’t relate to because I’ve never had a weight issue. But if I ask Rose what she’s writing, she won’t say. I don’t know what she thinks is going to happen to this book, even if it is published, and like I said before, I am truly doubtful that will happen because who, besides other conjoined twins, is going to want to read it? I hate to think my sister’s wasting her time. Especially now.

  Plus, I don’t get it. She’s on her computer for hours at a time and she only writes four pages?

  I have the headache tonight. We joke that we pass it back and forth, but the truth is Rose usually has it and it’s usually a bad one. She told Dr. Singh that, by evening, her head is a cave of pain. A cave of pain. That’s how she really talks. (She can be very embarrassing.) She has taken a leave of absence from work, which, because of our circumstances, may sound weird as I did not take a leave of absence and Rose is obviously still at the library when I’m doing reading circle with the school groups. But her job, which was shelving the books—reaching and leaning and lifting more weight than just me (which is enough)—could strain Rose and cause a premature eruption of the aneurysm.

  Rose still participates in the questions and answers with the kids, thank God.

  When we first started at the library (seven years ago this fall), I read books from the kiddie shelves to the school groups from the surrounding counties. Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and The Cat in the Hat, plus anything that’s won a Caldecott Medal and has a silver seal on the cover. But the kids have read these books a million times with their parents and teachers. Really, they want to know about me and Rosie and what it’s like to be joined at the head. So I got some photocopies blown up of other conjoined twins. Famous ones like Chang and Eng Bunker, who were real Siamese twins. (Just so you know, they were called Siamese twins because they were from Siam. North American twins like Rose and me think it’s so weird to be called Siamese because we are obviously from Leaford and we are obviously not cats!) I have pictures of Millie and Christine McCoy, who were joined at the base of their spines and born into slavery in North Carolina. They were brought to Europe to sing for kings and queens. In their pictures they’re always wearing beautiful costumes. Violet and Daisy Hilton were joined at the lower spine too, and they became even more famous. They were really beautiful, and they were in Hollywood movies and everything. My favorite are the Italian twins Giacomo and Giovanni Tocci, who were born in Turin (like the Shroud of Turin) in the late 1800s. They’re called Deicephalous twins (not sure of that spelling), which basically means they were born with normal upper bodies, but, somewhere around the stomach, they were connected. So they had one stomach and one penis and two legs, but each of the legs belonged to the other and they could never learn how to walk. I don’t know which boy the penis belonged to. Their father wen
t insane when he saw them after birth, but later he toured them for big bucks, which is what happened to Chang and Eng and Millie and Christine and most of the conjoined twins you read about in history. The Tocci brothers were blond and adorable. They were called the Two-Headed Boy, which they must have hated.

  I used to show pictures of Laleh and Ladan Bijani, who were Iranian women and joined at the head like Rose and me. These girls were brilliant and accomplished—one a journalist and the other a lawyer—and every time Rose heard something about them she got an inferiority complex because she didn’t go to university and, more than anything, I think, she would have liked to do that. But a year or so ago, the Bijani twins decided on surgery to separate them, and even though many leading doctors told them it wouldn’t work, they wanted to do it anyway. They both died, so of course I don’t show the children their pictures anymore.

  Yesterday an eight-year-old boy from the Chatham Dutch School asked Rose and me if we pooped at the same time. It’s not the first time we’ve heard that one. We explained to the boy that our heads are joined but that our bodies are not, so we eat different foods at different times and we defecate (Rose likes to teach the kids vocabulary) separately. Then a little girl asked if we pee together. It’s very difficult for children to understand that we don’t share a brain or body, no matter how many different ways we say it. It seems difficult for some adults to understand too. Our boss, an older lady named Roz who’s been at the library for about 130 years, sewed twin dolls joined at the head by Velcro to help illustrate the separateness of our bodies and functions to the children. Roz has a boy with multiple sclerosis. Well, technically he’s not a boy because he’s nearly fifty years old, but she calls him her boy. He can’t talk. He can’t walk. He can’t feed himself or dress himself, and he uses adult diapers. His name is Rupert, and he works at the library too. At least, we say he works there, but really he just hangs out in the staff room because Roz can’t afford home care and because he would die of loneliness if he wasn’t close to his mother, who is his best friend and the only one who understands him. Rupert’s mind is not deteriorating. Roz says he’s smart as a whip. He likes me more than he likes Rose. You can just tell these things.