The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  I was content to be going to Aunt Poppy’s to have the baby. We’d been to Hamtramck before for Tremblay family reunions, and I’d liked the way Aunt Poppy talked to Ruby and me separately, and the way she had gently grasped my shoulder when she leaned down to ask, “Are we having fun yet?” We would perch ourselves by a picnic table (me standing, Ruby balancing on her clubfeet so she didn’t have to cling to me like an infant) and smile at the children shoved our way by pitying parents whose faces said, “There but for the grace of God go we.”

  Aunt Poppy was Aunt Lovey’s favorite sister because they had both married Eastern European men against their French father’s wishes and they’d both gone in for nursing. Aunt Poppy lived in a modest but sparkling new ranch-style house with an aboveground swimming pool in a neighborhood outlined by clean white curbs and putting-green lawns. She liked to tell stories too, especially stories about their mother, whom they referred to as “Mother,” or even “Verbeena,” but never as “Mom” or “Mama.” Aunt Poppy was not judgmental, but it was clear she thought I was doing the right thing giving up my baby.

  Aunt Poppy’s two daughters were grown and had children of their own. They lived a few miles on either side of Aunt Poppy in neighborhoods just like the one where they’d grown up, with husbands who worked at the Ford Plant alongside their aging fathers. The girls visited the house on several occasions in the time we were there, but never brought their husbands or kids. I understood that they didn’t want to have to explain to their offspring how their conjoined teenage cousin, who was (thank God) no blood relation, had gotten herself in a family way.

  Aunt Poppy’s younger daughter, Diane, was beautiful, but Gail, the older girl, was homely, with a hawkish nose and jutting chin and hair that, like mine, tended to frizz. I thought we should have been friends, with all we had in common. But she and her sister stood apart from Ruby and me and looked at us too intently or not at all.

  Aunt Poppy’s husband, Uncle Yanno, was a frowning man with a floret of white hair at the top of his head and cheeks burned scarlet by his welding torch. He wore expensive fleece tracksuits and buffed his body on the rowing machine he kept on one side of the two-car garage. His biceps were poured concrete. He had no accent. Whatsoever.

  When Uncle Yanno thought no one was looking, and even when he knew we were, he tickled the crack of Aunt Poppy’s ass with his middle finger. She’d smack him hard, but she kind of seemed to like it, so I didn’t understand when, one day, I overheard Aunt Poppy sobbing to Aunt Lovey about Uncle Yanno’s much younger mistress.

  Ruby and I slept in the back bedroom. Or, rather, Ruby slept. I shivered beside her, beneath two comforters, wondering why the forced air resisted the double grates in the room, though Uncle Yanno had checked it out twice. (It was the first and only time in our lives that I was the cold one.)

  I ached from missing Uncle Stash. He crossed the border without incident (he claims) and came to see us at Aunt Poppy’s three times a week, which I’d pouted about because I felt it was not often enough. Hurt and hormonally challenged, I’d suggested that if Ruby were the pregnant one, Uncle Stash would come every day. Aunt Lovey had sent me to my room for that. (Ingratitude was a grave sin in our world.) It was unbearably humiliating to be pregnant and sent to my room. Ruby, who had found my comment cruel and insensitive because she could not bear children at all, enjoyed my punishment, even if it meant her confinement too.

  Our ground-floor room looked directly into the window of the adjoining garage. Ruby and I spied on Uncle Yanno on his rowing machine, tittering when he turned and caught us admiring him. We didn’t talk with Uncle Yanno much but were conspirators in the game of look and hide. Livid with Aunt Lovey for sending me to my room, and annoyed with Ruby for perceiving her pain greater than mine, I looked out the window into the garage.

  Uncle Yanno was there, as I’d hoped. He was dressed in his track pants and T-shirt, not sitting on his rowing machine but leaning against the garage’s metal door, arms crossed. Ruby must have caught something move in her periphery. She shifted so that she could see Uncle Yanno too, and just as she did, Uncle Stash stepped into view. Maybe he had been there all along. Suddenly, without provocation (because Uncle Yanno did not move or speak), Uncle Stash rushed at the younger and fitter man, shoving him rudely. Uncle Yanno let himself be bounced against his own garage door and did not fight back, which was curious. Ruby and I both knew Uncle Yanno could have killed Uncle Stash if he wanted to.

  When, later that night, I inquired about the nature of the fight between Uncle Stash and Uncle Yanno, Aunt Lovey told me I had enough to worry about. While she was helping Ruby and me bathe that evening (my girth had made washing extremely difficult), she reminded me how lucky I was to have Uncle Yanno’s hospitality in this time of my great need. “It’s not always good guys and bad guys, girls. It takes two to tango,” she said. “You girls should understand that better than anyone.”

  I didn’t understand. Not really. Not then.

  “Well, I think Uncle Yanno’s a bastard,” I said.

  “That so?”

  “That’s so. And I’m a good judge of character.”

  “A good judge?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Here’s a riddle,” Aunt Lovey began. “God says, ‘Judge not.’ So how can any judge be a good judge? Of character or anything else.”

  “Well, Uncle Stash hates him,” I’d countered, loathing how she could so conveniently quote the smartest parts of the Bible.

  “That goes back to the old country,” she said, waving me off.

  “Uncle Yanno knew Uncle Stash in Grozovo?” I asked, shocked that I’d never been told.

  “No,” Aunt Lovey answered. And somehow that sufficed.

  Uncle Stash came less often after that, and he never stayed overnight. Each time he reached Hamtramck I sighed with relief, but his visits, much as we looked forward to them, made us fearful too. At first his weight loss gave us cause to applaud (Dr. Ruttle had been telling him to lose weight since long before his heart attack). But lean became slender and slender became gaunt and gaunt grew emaciated. Without Aunt Lovey, we saw that Uncle Stash wasn’t eating anything at all. His teeth turned orange and his breath went foul. Of course he was smoking his pipe in the house. I think another month would have killed him.

  (An aside: I have often wondered about the effect of Uncle Stash’s job on his psyche. He slaughtered at Vanderhagen’s longer than he should have. He was worried about our medical expenses, Ruby’s and my future. So, for eight hours a day, five days a week, for decades, Uncle Stash was confined to a cold (or, God forbid, hot) antechamber where animal carcasses hung from hooks on a line. Scowling men. Clotted blood. Cigarette smoke. Glinting knives. Golden globules of fat making slippery the floor. My sister and I were not allowed in the slaughter room, but we’d glimpsed Uncle Stash there on occasion, through the smudged windows on the silver doors. He looked larger there, taller than he is, standing behind the massive wooden block wielding his cleaver. Holding the bloody leg of some poor creature, he would, in one quick motion, separate limb from body. Then he’d turn to hack at another joint, and chop at another, until the animal was body parts ready for Styrofoam and shrink-wrap. How awful it must have been for him to have been without his family for all that time we were in Hamtramck, and just the scowling men, and the dead animals, and his pipe to keep him company.)

  Anxious as she was, Aunt Lovey was the only one who seemed certain that Uncle Stash would not die of starvation. “We’re not long now,” she’d say, patting my mound. “Any time, really.”

  I have not had full-blown insomnia since my pregnancy, so, on the rare occasion, like now, that I’m awake all night, too preoccupied or worried to sleep, I remember those nights in Hamtramck, listening to the neighbor’s feet crunching through the snow at quarter past five. His old truck yawning to life, then warming up for five or ten while he made his mug of coffee for the drive. Then Uncle Yanno’s van, not leaving early but returning late. The door crea
king in the dark. Recriminations and denials from the kitchen. Aunt Lovey padding down the hall to dry her sister’s tears. Ruby sleeping peacefully beside me as I looked out the window past the poofy gingham valance, nothing in view but the stars shivering in a cold black sky and a single leafless branch that broke off one night with the sudden weight of winter.

  I couldn’t imagine a life with my baby. I couldn’t think of one without. I consoled myself that my baby and I would have something in common, in that neither of us would ever know our birth mothers. I called my baby Taylor (which I thought worked for a boy or girl).

  So all that long winter month we spent cooped up at Aunt Poppy’s, I thought about this book, this story of my life, which at that point was only half what it is now, and though I never put pen to paper, I thought of writing things down to help me understand my decision. Poetry. I did not know what else to do.

  By the end of my pregnancy I was bedridden, and so was Ruby by proxy. I’d completely lost my sense of balance, and Ruby’s legs could no longer straddle the balloon that was my waist. We spent that last month watching soap operas, eating cold noodle pudding and pierogies with grated cheese.

  I had seen women give birth on television shows and in the films they showed in health class at school, but I’d never felt a contraction and had no idea when I had one that I was having my baby two weeks ahead of schedule. Aunt Lovey heard me cry out and hurried to the guest room. She and Aunt Poppy stripped the fancy spread from the bed and lay a protector (four plastic checkered tablecloths duct taped together) over the mattress. On top of the plastic they spread a floral print sheet. I was sure I recognized the floral sheet as the one that had been folded in the dog’s bed, but Aunt Poppy denied it. Then, because I was somewhat hysterical, they took the thing away and spread out three beach towels that Aunt Poppy kept for her grandchildren on the narrow-for-us double bed.

  Aunt Lovey had discussed with Ruby and me how difficult giving birth would be, primarily because I was about to surrender control of my body to the instincts of my unborn child and to the pain of labor and delivery. I would writhe. I would jerk. I would grunt. I would push. And so would Ruby. Therefore, because we risked serious injury to our necks and spinal columns, we needed an extra two people (nurse friends of Aunt Poppy whom we’d never met) to assist in the delivery. The nurses would help support us on the pillows, holding us level at the neck and shoulders to reduce our risk of injury, and Aunt Lovey and Aunt Poppy would attend to the birth. (Aunt Poppy had discovered that gently stretching the perineum with her index finger as the baby was crowning could greatly reduce tearing and the need for episiotomy.) Aunt Lovey had positioned one of the full-length mirrors so that Ruby and I could watch the birth.

  The contractions came quickly, blistering pain that began in my lower back and radiated to my groin and thighs and up my spine to the base of my neck. “Back labor,” Aunt Poppy said. “That’s the worst.”

  There wasn’t time for her nurse friends to drive all the way from Oakland County, so Aunt Poppy called upon her daughters, who took their places reluctantly, cringing on either side of the bed. It would be their job to hold my legs apart and to ensure that Ruby’s legs were out of the way. Lying in that bed with my knees up and spread, with five women encircling me, one of them attached to my head, I felt more afraid than I ever had before, and perfectly, utterly, alone.

  “She wants some water, Diane,” Ruby said. “She likes the bendy straw.”

  But I didn’t want it and couldn’t drink it when Diane put the straw to my lips.

  Aunt Lovey had encouraged me, throughout my pregnancy, to read the books she’d brought home from the library (telling the staff she was teaching a class on obstetrics to some student nurses) about pregnancy and childbirth. I’d tried to read the books, randomly picking one or another from the stack, but those books were not written for women having babies. Those books were written for mothers. Of the few details I had read, I recalled a number—thirty-six—a story about a woman who’d had thirty-six hours of labor. The pain was exquisite. Too intense for tears. I could not survive thirty-six hours of such pain. My pain was killing Ruby too, I knew, though she couldn’t feel it directly. She was confused. And helpless.

  “Why isn’t it coming?” Ruby cried to Aunt Lovey. “It’s been nine hours!”

  Aunt Lovey cleared her throat but didn’t respond. She shared a look with Aunt Poppy.

  “It hurts,” I cried.

  Ruby stroked the lobe of my ear and chanted shh shh over and over, like I was a toddler who needed a nap.

  Aunt Lovey pushed Ruby’s comforting hand away from my lobe. Then she leaned down, whispering in my ear, “You’re going to do this, Rose Darlen. You need to concentrate. And you need to focus. Shut everything out. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I cried.

  “You’ve got to.”

  “Why?” I was afraid to do this alone.

  “You have to, Rose. Shut me and Poppy and the cousins and Ruby, even Ruby, out of your mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll be there when it counts, Rose. We’ll be there when it matters, but for now you have to shut us out. You’re not dilating, honey. It’s not good.”

  “I can’t control that,” I whimpered.

  “You can. You have to,” she said, fighting to hold my gaze.

  “I’ll try,” I whispered.

  “Don’t try, Rose. Commit,” Aunt Lovey said.

  “But —”

  “Commit!”

  I breathed through my next contraction.

  “Picture your body, the baby inside. You know what you look like. You understand anatomically how you work. Your cervix isn’t dilating and you need to dilate. Do you understand, Rose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Imagine that your cervix is a flower bud.”

  “A flower bud.”

  “Visualize that bud opening, the petals unfolding. Spreading. Wider and wider and still wider. Visualize your beautiful baby emerging from the center of that perfect, open flower. Can you do that, Rose?”

  “I can.”

  I did. And found myself amazed at what a person can will herself to do. My flower was a rose.

  Ruby watched the baby crown in the full-length mirror. “Oh, Rose,” she breathed. “Rose.”

  I listened to the commentary but couldn’t watch my baby girl’s head emerge with her thatch of auburn hair and her tiny angry face and her long kicking legs and balled-up fists. (That’s how Ruby later described her to me.)

  “A girl,” Ruby sobbed. “Oh, my God.” Aunt Lovey, still quietly in awe of birth, whispered, “She looks exactly like you.” I wanted to scream and cry, until Aunt Poppy gushed, “She’s just a perfect little princess,” and I realized that Aunt Lovey meant that my daughter looked exactly like Ruby.

  There was the sound of a ticking clock, and a kitten, but it wasn’t a kitten, of course, it was my newborn baby’s cry. Aunt Poppy cooed, “Hush, little one. Hush, little one.”

  I hadn’t asked about the adoptive parents. I didn’t want a portrait of them to carry around in my head. And I didn’t look, even when Aunt Lovey said, “Rose, sweetie, it’s your last chance to look,” I didn’t look.

  “Aunt Poppy’s taking the baby now. It’s your last chance. Your last chance, Rosie.”

  “Taylor.” I did not open my eyes.

  “What’s that, Rosie?”

  “I’m naming her Taylor.”

  “Don’t you want to hold her, Rose?”

  “No.”

  “Rose?”

  “No.”

  “You might —”

  “No.”

  “You’ll regret —”

  “No.”

  I started to hum.

  Ruby was utterly silent. I think she was pretending to sleep.

  “All right.” Aunt Lovey was crying. “All right, then.”

  Aunt Poppy and Aunt Lovey left the room. I don’t know what became of the cousins. They certainly didn’t stick a
round. Ruby was exhausted and drifted off to sleep. I waited until I heard the front door close and the car start up and back out of the driveway before I opened my eyes.

  I took in the room as if I’d never seen it before. The flower pictures in white frames on the pale yellow walls. The shelf with the stacking babushka dolls lined up big to small. (I would never see that room again. Uncle Yanno left Aunt Poppy and she moved to an apartment close to her elder daughter. She died the following year of ovarian cancer.)

  Aunt Lovey had given me a pill to stop my breasts from producing milk, but they were still hard and achy. I let my hand wander over my stomach, as I’d done a million times, stroking Taylor through my skin, declaring my love and rejoicing in my sin, shocked and alarmed to find the hump still there—not as large a hump, but a hump all the same—and it suddenly occurred to me there must be a second baby, a twin we’d somehow missed. I screamed for Aunt Lovey. Ruby woke up. I told Ruby about the hump and she began to cry. I knew my sister could not survive childbirth again.

  Aunt Lovey raced into the room to find Ruby sobbing and me talking so fast she couldn’t interpret. Finally she understood my fear that my womb, still big and hard and round and pushing my stomach out, held another baby.

  “There’s no twin, Rose,” Aunt Lovey said sharply. Ruby stopped sobbing. I took a deep breath, for in all things medical I trusted and believed in Aunt Lovey. “It takes a while for the uterus to contract”—she demonstrated by clenching her fist—“from this back to this.”

  I was relieved, but dreamed that night that there really was a second baby. One my sister let me keep.

  FOR THE NEXT few weeks I concentrated heavily on my physical pain because the other was so much worse. I tried to write, or rather rewrite, a poem called “Kiss.” Even after all that had happened, I still wished Frankie Foyle had kissed me.

  When I was walking well enough and able to carry my sister without risking a hemorrhage, Uncle Stash drove to Hamtramck to collect us. He was half the man we’d left in Leaford, wearing suspenders to hold up his too-big trousers. The flesh of his face had melted in those few final weeks. He looked old. And desiccated. I prayed for rain.