The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  Still, there was this small part of me that fantasized about finding Taylor and having her show up at our surprise birthday party. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Or maybe not.

  Rose says that when she’s writing, she tries to imagine that she’s other people. When I imagine that I’m Taylor, I think I’d be split right in two. Half feeling so happy to meet my birth mother, and half wishing I hadn’t, not because she’s conjoined but because she’s dying.

  Anyway, Rose says it’s ironic that I talk so much about the odds of this and that. Like I talked about the odds of publishing her book being slim, and the odds of finding Taylor even slimmer. She said the odds of twin girls not completely dividing is about the slimmest you can get, but here we are.

  La Tranche

  The summer we turned fourteen, Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash took me to the zoo. It might sound strange, given my situation as a craniopagus twin, to say they took me, but the trip was mine. I’d gotten straight As in eighth grade. (Ruby had done poorly in school and was not putting forth her best effort.) The trip to the Detroit Zoo was a reward for me, just as the weekday ban on television was a restriction for Ruby.

  We didn’t (and don’t) travel often. My sister’s car sickness has made everyone think twice. Uncle Stash often worked weekends, and we had homework and summer school, and Aunt Lovey had her volunteering. Plus, there was the question of our comfort and safety in the backseat of the car, with the tangle of seat belts and the mountain of pillows Ruby sits on to level us out. We’re high-maintenance travelers (though we do take the bus and the even roomier train with fair success), so our trips have been few but memorable.

  I had always wanted to go to the Detroit Zoo. When I was a little girl, one of my favorite books in the Leaford Library was A-nimal-Z. The photographs in the book—the lion cub sniffing daisies, the wise silver wolf gazing beyond the horizon, the winsome bear licking her paw—had captivated me. I’d noted under many of the pictures a line that said “Courtesy of the Detroit Zoo,” and I had begged Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey to take me there. Detroit wasn’t far away. We’d crossed the border on several occasions to go to Hamtramck (a suburb of Detroit), which is where Aunt Lovey’s favorite sister, Poppy, lived, but the trip to the zoo had been put off. Then it was made my reward for excellence in the eighth grade, even though I hadn’t looked at A-nimal-Z in years and had long since outgrown my interest in the wolf or the bear.

  Ruby tolerated two children’s Dramamine tablets and slept the full two-hour drive there. It wasn’t really a two-hour drive, but Uncle Stash liked to take the long way, hugging the winding river road near Chatham, where the homes were huge and the lawns tended, and there were no cars on blocks in driveways or woodpiles in view of the front porch. Then we’d cross the little bridge over the river and pick up Number Two on our way to the border city. Along the way Aunt Lovey would point out the sites of historical significance because, as Ruby said, in Aunt Lovey’s world a person was not allowed to breathe for more than thirty seconds without learning something new or being reminded of a thing we already knew.

  These are the kinds of things Aunt Lovey taught us back then, when we were children in the car: the Neutral Indians who lived in the county hundreds of years ago called the Thames River “Eskinippsi,” which translates to “deer’s antlers,” because of the way the river curves and loops and winds around and comes back again. Later, the French explorers called the wide, winding river “La Tranche,” “the trench,” because its banks were so steep and its magnificent trees—willow, chestnut, walnut, and birch—so lofty and dense that it gave the French explorers the sense they were sailing through a deep trench. La Tranche. (That would be a great last name for a character—Monsieur LaTranche!) The land was swamp, strewn with meadows of bergamot and thickets of trees, a refuge for deer and raccoon, a distraction for rare migratory birds. Most of the land where Ruby and I grew up was cleared by the earliest French settlers from Quebec and Detroit.

  There’s a parcel of land on the road past the store where we would stop for Popsicles. We’d lick our treats (I got a space pop—Ruby always went for the cornet) while Aunt Lovey told us about the Oneida woman called Sally Ainse who fought for her right to keep 150 acres of land near the river and became one of the first settlers of the county. She had been a trader on the lakes. “A woman,” Aunt Lovey would say, wagging her head in mock disbelief. “And a Native woman to boot.”

  “This community here,” Aunt Lovey told us of the little village near the lake where we once drove to see a stock-car race, “was settled by fugitive slaves from the southern United States.” The fact that some of the ancestors of those original settlers were still farming the land where their forebears had found freedom made Aunt Lovey shake her head all over again. “It just goes to show you,” she’d say. Then, even though she’d told me a million times, she’d remind me, “As a point of interest, Rose, Fergie Jenkins’s mother’s people came to Chatham by way of the Underground Railroad.”

  I would sincerely, and unfailingly, respond, “Cool.”

  (Ferguson “Fergie” Jenkins was a phenomenal baseball player, a right-handed pitcher who threw fireballs and has a record of more than three thousand strikeouts. More than three thousand strikeouts! Anyone who knows baseball already knows that statistic, but you still want to let out a long, low whistle. Fergie pitched for the Phillies, the Rangers, the BoSox, and, best of all, the Chicago Cubs. Fergie Jenkins is the only Canadian in the Baseball Hall of Fame. How’s that for a distinction? Fergie Jenkins is astonishing, and he is one of us. He lived and breathed this country air and trod these fields and walked these streets. And he was born just a ways from our old orange farmhouse. That just inspires the hell out of me.)

  The roads we drove cut through lush acres of corn and beans, and gravel pits and scrap yards. We passed small red foxes chasing mice in meadows. Gaggles of geese skimming grass. One night, driving down a country road, catching a deer in our brights, Uncle Stash told the story of the forty-year-old father, a packer at Vanderhagen’s, a German fellow everyone called Whitey because of his snowy white hair. (Two years before, Whitey had chopped his left index finger off at the knuckle in an accident that was not work-related, but that’s of no consequence to this particular story.) Whitey had been driving down a country road in the pouring rain when a large male deer leaped from the ditch and skidded onto the wet gravel. Whitey caught the deer’s spindly legs on the bumper of his old Ford truck, unintentionally hoisting the beast up and rolling him onto the hood. The creature came crashing through the windshield, and Whitey saw a blur of fur and blood and antlers and glass. Then nothing. When Whitey came to, five or ten minutes after the collision, the rain had all but stopped. He felt a small deep gash on his forehead and was surprised to find that he was otherwise unhurt. He turned to look beside him where the deer had landed, ass-first in the passenger seat, front hooves on the dash like he was waiting at the drive-through, head back because it was taking too long. Whitey was about to laugh about the deer and how it had landed in his car looking so human and pissed off, but he suddenly remembered that he had not been driving alone. On closer examination, Whitey saw that his passenger, a petite young woman, remained strapped in her seat beneath the massive deer and was quite clearly dead. He tried to pull the dead animal off the dead woman, but the deer would not budge. Uncle Stash said that the moral of the story was, “Never drive in rain with mistress.”

  “What’s ‘mistress’?” Ruby asked.

  Aunt Lovey had turned full circle to look at Ruby and me in the backseat. “A mistress is a woman who sleeps with a married man. A woman who has sexual relations with a married man.” Her policy was, If you’re old enough to ask the question you’re old enough to be told the truth.

  “What about a man who has sexual relations with a married woman?” I recall asking. “What’s he called?”

  Aunt Lovey had cleared her throat. “Depends. If he’s married too, he’s called an adulterer.”

  Uncle Stash pointed to hi
s left at the restored Victorian house where the Doctors Ruttle had lived for generations. “Richie’s building a new garage.”

  We passed orchards and ranches, and farmhouses like ours with orange brick edges worn by the wind. Those farmhouses seemed exotic from inside the car, just as the sky seemed bluer, and the sun larger, and the wind stronger, and the rain appeared not so much dismissed by the sky as drawn to the earth.

  Uncle Stash had the opposite of lead foot, which would be what? Feather foot? He drove slowly, and he liked to stop at the historical markers on the side of the road, making Ruby or me read them out loud, twice if we stumbled a lot or if he was especially interested. Ruby learned the words on the marker about the famous Indian chief Tecumseh word for word. (She had this fantasy that we could be related to Tecumseh, but that’s just because he was famous and she would love to have been famous, though not for being conjoined. Tecumseh was an Indian prophet who took sides with the British in the war against the Americans in 1812. He helped capture Detroit, but he was killed in Chatham in the great Battle of the Thames. There’s a plaque in the park that Ruby used to like to grieve at, pretending he was our great-great-great-grandfather. Ruby could tell you more about Tecumseh.)

  I liked it that, after twenty minutes or so of Uncle Stash’s slow driving, Ruby usually fell asleep in the car and I could think my thoughts quietly and pretend to be alone.

  Before that trip to the zoo, we’d crossed the border on exactly five previous occasions (one trip to the Henry Ford Museum and four visits to Aunt Poppy’s in Hamtramck). I’d decided I much preferred the dark mile-long stretch of tunnel to the buzzing multilane Ambassador Bridge crossing, so in spite of its taking us out of our way, Uncle Stash always took the tunnel.

  Uncle Stash pitched a few quarters into the metal mesh basket and, once the gate was lifted, drove from the hot white light of day into the black tunnel that joined Canada to America under the wide Detroit River. With Ruby asleep beside me, I listened to the purr of our tires on the smooth windless road and watched the pale yellow tiles rush by. At intervals I’d notice a tile was missing or a crack had formed, and thought I could detect the river dripping onto the passing cars. I worried that the weight of the water would collapse the tube altogether and we’d all be drowned.

  (An aside: When I was a child I thought that the tunnel was suspended in the water like a large horizontal straw. I didn’t learn until later that it was dug into the earth seventy-five feet under the mile-wide river. In high school I’d found a book about the tunnel on a field trip to the library, and I gave my oral book report on it that semester. Ruby did her oral on Thirty Years of Barbie and embarrassed herself by bringing her suitcase of Barbies from home as a visual aid. This is when we were sixteen years old. Amazing the things you remember. The tunnel was finished in 1930. President Herbert Hoover turned a key in Washington and bells rang on both sides of the border to mark the opening. The tunnel cost 23 million dollars and was finished a year ahead of schedule. I still look at that library book about the tunnel sometimes. I still look at the book from the Mütter Museum too. From time to time I read Beth’s death scene in Little Women, and I still turn to the final page of The Grapes of Wrath and shiver with the last line about Rosasharn’s mysterious smile. I feel, holding the books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can’t trust my computer, though I couldn’t do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the Leaford Library and all its lovely books?)

  Back to our story: As we emerged from the tunnel, Ruby woke with the sudden bright light, and I held the Tupperware tub so she could puke. Aunt Lovey covered the mess with a tight-fitting lid, prepared to clean it out in the parking lot later with a spray bottle full of bleachy water she’d brought from home. Such was our travel routine.

  The huge border guard who loped out of the booth took our four passports in his big hands. (There had been some indecision on the part of the government as to whether Ruby and I should be issued two passports or one. Aunt Lovey had persuaded them we needed two by mailing a series of photographs that Uncle Stash had taken, some angles from my sister’s side, and some from mine, and a note that read briefly, “Two girls. Two names. Two passports. If you please.”)

  Uncle Stash busied himself with a speck of dust on his dashboard. He would not look the border guard in the eye. Aunt Lovey said it was because Uncle Stash had bad memories of Slovakia. (So do I.)

  Uncle Stash had not been born a Canadian citizen. He had an accent, and glinty eyes, and a bald head, and in his senior years looked like a perfect Russian villain, so the border guards were always suspicious of him. Add to this the fact that, in winter, he wore a black skullcap and that he always, always had a toothpick in his mouth, and you get the picture.

  Uncle Stash had pulled his black cap off when the border guard asked sneeringly, “Where you off to today, chief?”

  “The zoo.”

  “Zazoo?”

  Uncle Stash stretched his lips over his teeth to overenunciate as he repeated, “The zoo.”

  Aunt Lovey was applying coral lipstick, praying into her compact mirror.

  The border guard went on. “You carrying firearms?”

  “No.”

  “Call him sir,” Aunt Lovey whispered.

  “No!” Uncle Stash responded.

  “Beg your pardon, chief?”

  “I was speaking to my wife.”

  “What’s that, chief?”

  “I was speaking to my wife.”

  “He was speaking to me, sir.” Aunt Lovey smiled.

  “You bringing any drugs into the United States?”

  “No.” Uncle Stash paused. “Sir.”

  “You bringing any plants or animals?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You bringing —?”

  “I’m bringing my daughters to the zoo. That’s all.”

  At this the border guard closed Uncle Stash’s passport. He opened the next, which was Ruby’s, then he opened the next, which was mine. The head shots for the passports had been cropped, so that only the appropriate face appeared in each box. The brawny man leaned down and stared into the backseat. I saw his confusion. I felt his revulsion. I could tell Ruby thought he was cute.

  The border guard straightened up and looked at the passport photos of me and my sister once more. He didn’t say, “Drive on,” the way the guards usually did. Instead he called one of his coworkers to have a look at the passports. The coworker, a small, thin black man, leaned down to look into the backseat. Ruby and I had already decided that she would smile politely, but I would not. The black man looked startled but did his best to smile back.

  Uncle Stash grinned at the black man, who he knew would understand and appreciate his humor. “You caught me. Only one girl is real. The other is bomb.” The small black man did not laugh. And neither did Aunt Lovey, when we were detained and questioned for a full two hours before we were given a warning about the serious crime of making jokes at the border, then sent on our way to the zoo.

  The sun was hot that day, and I was sick. Waiting for Uncle Stash to finish his interview in the detention room, I’d rubbed my stomach and groaned, wondering if I was catching my sister’s car sickness or, worse, her colitis. The Dramamine Aunt Lovey gave me had done nothing to help. I wanted chocolate from the vending machine, but Aunt Lovey claimed not to have change, and my sister and I were not yet in the habit of carrying our own money.

  We went straight to the monkey cage. We’d seen the orangutans in the TV commercial for the zoo so many times we felt they were pets and expected them to know us too. The older female, the one who appeared to wave at the camera in the sixty-second TV spot, lounged on a log with her back to the glass. She wouldn’t look at Ruby and me, not a glance, not a glimpse. Soon I felt myself wishing the rest of the zoo-goers felt the same lack of interest.

  Next to the orangutan cage, two gibbon monkeys suddenly bounded out fro
m an enclosure, one bouncing off the fence, then leaping at the glass, startling Ruby and me. We watched the young monkeys find a log, where they sat quietly, the little one grooming the larger one and snacking on the fleas. Disenchanted, we were about to leave when the larger one stood, stretched, squatted, and defecated directly beside his brother. Rather than feeling insulted, the smaller monkey began to paw at the poop, picking out whole seeds and, well, eating them. Aunt Lovey found the nature of their coexistence a marvelous thing. Uncle Stash compared it to politics.

  The zoo was packed, and most of the animals were hiding in their little homes or sleeping under cool rock ledges in corners of their enclosures where we could barely see them. I had to wait several times for benches to become available so I could stop to take a rest. I kept shifting Ruby on my hip. Holding her too tight. I was hot and irritated. Aunt Lovey thought it might be heatstroke and scolded my sister and me for not wearing the stitched-together sun hat she’d made to match our outfits (our individual outfits—we never ever dress the same). I glared at anyone who dared stare for too long. Eating a frozen chocolate-covered banana made me feel somewhat better.

  Ruby could not have known that the blood was mine, but I still can’t quite forgive her for the way she screamed when we rose from the pine bench near the gorillas’ cage and she saw the sticky red stain on the slats. “You sat in ketchup! You sat in ketchup!”

  “Oh my,” Aunt Lovey whispered, turning me around. “It’s Aunt Flo, sweetie. It’s your first visit from Aunt Flo.” (The girls at school said “on the rag,” but Aunt Lovey thought “Aunt Flo” sounded more genteel.)

  When Ruby realized it was blood, my blood, from my first period, she fell quiet. Aunt Lovey accompanied us into the washroom, got a Kotex from the machine, dragged us into the large stall, and helped me stick the pad to my underwear. She smoothed my frizzing hair when I started to cry and said, “It’s just hormones, sweetie. Menstruation doesn’t hurt.”