The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  Soon the car stopped in front of a boxy, whitewashed, four-story building, and the Darlensky family was delivered to a mildew-scented basement apartment where a somber welcoming party awaited. Stash knew a few of the people, distant relations from Grozovo who’d immigrated before them, and those people he didn’t know looked, and sounded, enough like relatives to fool him. Stash glanced around the smoky room, where everyone wore black because, somewhere, someone they had loved was dead. He’d been hoping to see some more North American people, like the boys in the car and the blond girl from the train station, and not this gathering of taciturn crows. The food was a disappointment too, homey recipes from Grozovo: halushki and palacsinta and rice sausage, cabbage and more cabbage, when all he wanted was lemonade and another Walnut Wally.

  A group of young Slovak men corralled Stash near the kitchen. They were contemptuous, like they resented having to break him in. The most arrogant of the boys, the one who’d been there longest and the son of the Slovak uncle, said with his excellent North American accent, “You wanna shot, Stash?”

  Of course Stash didn’t know what a “shot” was, gun or otherwise, and was surprised when one of the boys pressed a glass of clear fluid (three or even four ounces’ worth) into his hand. He knew right away what it was. “Slivovitz?” It smelled like truck fuel. The boys nodded, waiting. Stash held the glass up, aware he was being tested. “Nostrovia,” he said, throwing the fluid into the back of his throat. When he finished, he restrained himself from holding both ears (something he later did to make Ruby and me laugh whenever he drank liquor. Just like he also said “whiskey” instead of “achoo” every time he sneezed).

  The arrogant cousin stepped up again, overpronouncing, “Here we don’t say ‘Nostrovia.’ Here we say ‘Down the hatch.’” The other boys laughed, and Stash, who did not understand the English words, could only assume that he was being ridiculed.

  Woozy from the booze, young Stash lowered himself to a chair. He felt a lump at his back and reached around to find a baseball stuck between the cushions. Stash knew a little about the sport, though he’d never seen it played (in Grozovo they didn’t play anything but soccer). He’d never held such a ball in his grip. The arrogant cousin happened to notice that Stash had the baseball. “That’s my ball, chief,” he said.

  Suddenly afraid that his cousin would suggest he try a throw, or worse, a catch, Stash bolted from the chair, stumbling through the crowd, still clutching the baseball, moving from one cramped room to another, dizzy and not sure what he was looking for. He found his mother, arguing with a group of women over which of their husbands should go to the shop to buy more butter. (The women made their own sour cream and buttermilk, and some slaughtered chickens in the backyard, but a modern Slovak woman living in Windsor in the forties did not churn her own butter.) Stash volunteered, and his mother, informed by the other women that the shop was only a short distance down the road (and that the girl they were thinking of for Stash was working the counter that very afternoon), agreed to let him go.

  On the street, alone, Stash began to further feel the effects of the double (triple?) shot of slivovitz. The sun was baking the top of his black head, and he wished he’d remembered to bring his hat. He wondered if he should find a place to sit down or turn around altogether. He was sober enough to understand that he had to walk toward the Detroit River, on the same road as the apartment building, cross two streets, and look for the shop on his left. But he was not sober enough, or perhaps he’d never be sober enough, to want to meet the girl these good Slovak strangers had decided he should marry. He remembered he still had the baseball in his hand only when it dropped to the dusty pavement and began to roll down a hill toward another street altogether.

  Stash considered letting the ball go, then thought of how his arrogant cousin would mock him (and worse, in English) for his carelessness. Baseballs must be very costly. Maybe the cousin would expect compensation. His mother would be furious. This was no way to begin his new North American life. Stash ran after the baseball, which picked up speed as it rolled down the hill.

  Dizzy from tracking the thing with his eyes, Stash nearly crashed headfirst to the pavement with each step. Finally he was on top of the ball and could pluck it from the ground. In leaning down, he stumbled, but recovered artfully. Feeling proud of his athleticism, enjoying the feel of the ball in his hand, young Stash was not paying attention when he stepped out from between two parked cars and was hit by a speeding bicycle.

  The bike caught Stash on his left side and sent him crashing against a traffic sign standard, on which he smacked his forehead before falling to the concrete. The bicycle’s rider gripped the hand brakes and skidded safely to a stop.

  The bicycle rider was not hurt, but Stash was prostrate on the sidewalk, bleeding from his forehead and mouth. The bicycle rider, a young woman, rushed to his side, lifting his head to her lap, unconcerned that his blood might stain her skirt. Uncle Stash opened his eyes. His pupils dilated.

  He had a nasty gash on his forehead and had bitten his tongue, but he was more drunk than hurt. Stash regarded the young woman on whom his head so comfortably rested—a pretty blonde with a spray of freckles wearing a yellow sweater so snug it made him warm. “You,” he said.

  “Me?” This pretty young girl was Aunt Lovey, riding home from her waitress job at the Bridge Diner.

  “You,” Uncle Stash repeated. He’d mistaken Aunt Lovey for the girl from the train station and thought that the coincidence of meeting her again, in this way, was serendipitous.

  “Are you all right?” Lovey asked.

  Stash took a moment to catch his breath and, looking into young Lovey’s eyes, thinking she was someone she was not, said haltingly, using his best English accent, “I tink God vant bring us together.”

  Lovey, who’d never seen this handsome stranger in her life, was struck by the familiar way he was looking at her. She’d never, ever, heard God used in a pickup line before. She dabbed at the stranger’s mouth with a hankie from her pocket. (She was going to be a nurse and liked the practice with blood.) “You smell like liquor,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Stash understood the English word “liquor.” He nodded. “Slivovitz.”

  Aunt Lovey nodded back. “Same to you.”

  Stash raised himself up. The fall had sobered him a little, and after a moment he felt ready to stand. Aunt Lovey helped him to his feet, appraising him as he rose, thinking him swarthy and cute. She decided that she could overlook his foreignness but knew her father never would.

  “You come from Windsor?” Stash queried politely.

  “I’m from Leaford,” she said. “My father’s a Tremblay. My mom’s a St. John. Verbeena St. John. She grew up on the other side of Chatham. Her father did sugar beets.”

  Stash nodded slowly.

  “I’m staying at my Aunt Lily’s for the summer. It’s there.” She pointed to a modest white clapboard house on the corner.

  Stash realized he still had the baseball in his hand. “I am Slovak,” he said, hoping to explain why his English wasn’t good, and why he was in the middle of the street holding a baseball.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Slovak,” she said, and curtsied to be cute. “I’m Lovonia Tremblay. I was born in Livonia, Michigan. But my father didn’t want to name me Livonia because I’d have been called Livy, and he had an Aunt Olivia whom they called Livy, whom he despised, so they named me Lovonia. Just call me Lovey, though. Everyone calls me Lovey.”

  Stash smiled, impressed by the blond girl’s confidence, just as he’d been at the train station.

  Aunt Lovey returned his smile. “You like baseball? My Uncle Jerry goes over to Detroit to watch the Tigers play all the time. He has autographs from Stubby Overmire and Dizzy Trout and Pinky Higgins and Hoot Evers and Earl Webb and Cy Perkins and Goose Goslin and Charlie Gehringer and Steve Larkin.”

  Stash had understood only the first part. “Uncle Jerry go Detroit?”

  “All the time.” Her curls bounc
ed as she nodded.

  “Uncle Jerry have the boat?” He made a rowing gesture.

  She giggled. “He drives the Dodge, of course. You’re so cute.”

  “He drive the Dodge?”

  “Sure. Across the bridge.”

  “I did not saw no bridge.”

  Lovey giggled again. “You don’t know about the Ambassador Bridge? You really are cute. When did you come to Windsor?”

  “Today.”

  “Today?”

  “Now.” Stash felt himself grinning stupidly.

  “You’re saying this is your first day in Windsor?” She screwed up her face. “And you’re already drunk?!”

  Stash nodded hard, his face mirroring her confusion.

  “Well, anyway, I’m sorry I hit you with my bike. But you should have been looking where you were going. And”—she swung her hips a little—“if you want to come see Uncle Jerry’s Tiger autographs, that there’s the house.” She pointed again at the white clapboard house on the corner.

  “This one?” He pointed too, just to be sure.

  She climbed up on her bike and headed for the house, turning once to make sure the handsome foreigner was watching, then again to call out, “If you come, don’t say you’re a Polack right off!”

  Stash watched until Lovonia Tremblay had gone into the house, then hid behind the parked cars and vomited. Feeling better for relieving himself of the slivovitz, he set off to find the Slovak store, where he’d buy a cake of butter and tell the dark-haired girl behind the counter that he’d just met his future wife and her name was Lovey Tremblay.

  Stash rose early the next day and ate a breakfast of cold palacsinta and blackberry jam. Then, with his parents arguing loudly in the bedroom, he opened the creaking door. He was closing the door when something hit his foot. The baseball from yesterday, which he’d completely forgotten about, rolled out after him. He picked the ball up, comforted by the feel of the stitching on his palm, and headed out to find the little white house on the corner and the pretty blond North American girl he believed God had sent to him.

  That week, that first summer Stash was in North America, he found two of his best and most enduring loves, Lovonia Tremblay and baseball. Uncle Jerry would take him to Briggs Stadium when it became apparent he was serious in his intentions toward Lovey and appeared from the outset to be such a devoted Tigers fan, listening intently to all the older man’s Tiger tales. He referred to Stash, affectionately, as “the Polack,” and just laughed when his niece tried to explain, as Stash had explained to her, that Poland and Czechoslovakia were completely separate countries with entirely different languages and customs. It would be several months before Uncle Jerry discovered how little English Stash really understood. It would also be several months before Stash would, having learned enough English words, and thinking she’d be amused, tell Lovey how he had mixed her up that first day in town with the girl from the train station. By that time they were already in love. By that time Aunt Lovey had moved back to Leaford, and Uncle Stash drove the family car from Windsor for dates on Saturday nights. By that time, Aunt Lovey’s father had sealed the young lovers’ fate by slamming his hand on the long pine table in the orange brick farmhouse and forbidding his daughter to marry that “no-good Polack.”

  I REMEMBER, WHEN I was young, asking Aunt Lovey how she could know the story of how she and Uncle Stash met, when she wasn’t a witness to 90 percent of it. “Well, Stash told me most of it,” she said. “And I filled some of it in, because I know him so well, and the rest, well . . .” She seemed to have uncovered this truth in the moment—“I guess I made it up.”

  It’s Ruby.

  I woke up last night to find Uncle Stash standing at the foot of my bed. He said everything was going to be fine, and he pulled the cover up over my legs. I knew it wasn’t a dream because he was gone so fast my heart nearly stopped. And I had been cold, but then the blanket was on my legs and I couldn’t have done that myself. I had that feeling of warm rain from Aunt Lovey’s watering can as I drifted back to sleep.

  Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash haunt me. I know they haunt Rose too. She just uses different words to say she feels haunted. She’ll talk about feeling sad all day, thinking about one of them or both of them. Or she’ll play Uncle Stash’s Ray Price tape over and over again. Or she’ll say, Let’s have a Slovak Night and make palacsinta. She’ll write a sentimental poem about Aunt Lovey. Or a funny one about Uncle Stash.

  Rose has written a lot of poems about grief. If she’s writing a grief poem on a rainy day—watch out. I remember in one poem she called the drizzle dreary, and she got mad when I laughed about the dreary drizzle. Rose has never been good with criticism.

  Lately, Rose’s been frustrated by her writing. I don’t understand why. She says she feels lost, like she’s in a city she knows really well, trying to get to the street she’s lived on all her life, but she keeps taking wrong paths and ending up back where she started. I don’t understand that. She’s writing the story of her life. How could she not know which way to go?

  I don’t feel frustrated from writing. Guess I just don’t take it that seriously. I should write more often, though. It is a good way to make sense of the day.

  So here’s our typical day, leaving out the private stuff. We get to work by about ten-thirty. It’s taking us slightly longer to get ready in the mornings. We take our various meds with juice. We eat something with fiber and get a taxi to work. Or Nick from next door drives us. I must admit he can be quite generous that way.

  So, anyway, we go to work, we read to the kids, clean outdated notices off the bulletin board, that sort of thing, take a long break for lunch, usually resting on the big love seat in the staff room. Then we do more work, which sounds boring but it can really be a fun job. Then we go home. I like to cook, and Rose will eat just about anything except eggs. I draw the line at making two different meals. If Rose doesn’t want what I’m making, she can make herself a peanut-butter sandwich. Tonight neither of us was very hungry, so we just made toast. Well, bagels, actually. And a bagel got stuck in the toaster and it burned like crazy. The First Alert went off, and Rose pulled the cord that releases the batteries, but one of them fell on her head, which stunned me, and must have really hurt her. Rose pulled the toaster cord out of the outlet and grabbed a knife and started stabbing the bagel that was stuck in the toaster. Pretty soon her knife started dragging up bits of wire and coil, and I knew we were never gonna use that toaster again. Rose realized she had ruined the toaster, so she threw the thing right through the screen door.

  We were mad at each other because of the smell and the mess, and the huge hole in the screen door. We went to the living room, and Rose was reading and I was thinking about how mad I was that she ruined our toaster. Then we heard this scratching sound, so we got up to see if we had a mouse in the kitchen. Suddenly a pot crashed. Rose and I were like, Holy shit! We went to the kitchen and opened the swinging door, and another pot crashed, and we looked on the stove and who’s sitting there on the front burner but a squirrel. When the poor squirrel saw us, he started darting here and there, looking for the window, but all the mirrors confused him and he was just going crazy. Eventually he ended up in the cereal cupboard, and he’s racing in circles and Raisin Bran is flying everywhere. Then, finally, he finds the hole in the screen door where Rose threw the toaster, which is how the squirrel got into the kitchen in the first place. Rose and I caught each other’s expressions in the mirrors and burst out laughing. And we were laughing and laughing and we couldn’t even catch our breath. After a while we stopped laughing and looked around at the mess. Then we just about cried. It took us two and a half hours to clean the kitchen. I blame Rosie’s bad temper. Not the squirrel.

  That wasn’t a typical end to our day. But it was the end of this one. I’m sure Rose will write about it. Better than I just did.

  It is a little more than two months since we got the diagnosis. Rose’s headaches have been getting worse, but whatever pain reliever Dr. S
ingh put her on, it’s not bothering me, and she’s in slightly better spirits. Overall, our health is the same.

  Rose asked me last night my opinion about contacting Aunt Poppy’s daughters, Diane and Gail, and getting them to help us find Taylor, since they both still live in Michigan and we know the adoption was arranged there. We haven’t stayed in touch with Aunt Lovey’s family. Or really it’s that they haven’t stayed in touch with us. After the funeral, her sisters came back to the farmhouse for egg-salad sandwiches and left with a few mementos, taking the things with no regard for Rose and me. We wrote and phoned a few times after that, but they didn’t return our calls. They pitied us but they never loved us, with the exception of Aunt Poppy maybe, but she died years ago, of ovarian cancer, which took her fast.

  I don’t think any of the relations in Michigan could help us find Taylor, and the truth is that, at this point, I don’t think we should try. It’s not that I don’t understand how Rose feels. Of course she’d like to meet her daughter before she dies, but she must realize it’s not the best thing for Taylor, or whatever her name really is. Rose even wondered about telling Frankie Foyle, who’s a cop in Toronto with a wife and family, that he has a young daughter living somewhere in Michigan. Now she thinks he should know? Another case of What’s the point? She thinks he could find her because he’s on the police force. But I don’t think he’d want to go down that road. I probably wouldn’t if I were him. That’s just being honest.

  Of course I will do my best to try to talk her out of it, but if Rose really wants to try to find Taylor, I can’t stop her. I do think it would be cruel, though. What would Rose say? Hi. I’m your mother. Rose Darlen. You might know me from the Internet. This woman attached to my head is your Aunt Ruby. We could die any day, so don’t bother getting us tickets for your graduation. We just wanted to say Hi.