by Lori Lansens
My headaches have been getting worse. My vision is occasionally blurred, and I’ve had some weakness in my legs. There’s a bizarre hallucination episode that I haven’t told anyone about yet, but for a dying person I’m feeling surprisingly okay.
The aneurysm is inoperable. We’ve had three opinions on this matter. I have no wish to discuss the details, except to say that I’ve found some poetry in the medical language: saccular, fusiform, communicating artery, subarachnoid hemorrhage, pulsatile tinnitus ipsilateral, neoplasmic, granuloma, proteinaceous.
I am fearful that I’ll lose control of my body. I’m terrified that I’ll lose control of my mind. And through all of it I’m horrified to have to take Ruby with me when I go. And vexed and perplexed by her calm.
I’ve been struggling with the structure of this book. Originally I wanted to move onward from birth in the telling of my life story (our life story—maybe Ruby’s right) and not mention my death until the end, or not at all, as if, like most people, I hadn’t expected it and couldn’t have known it was near. But the song of my past has been so altered—not the sequence of notes, exactly, but the pitch—that I find I can’t go on writing about my past without sharing my present with you. Along with my fears. And my regrets. And my delight that you’ve cared to read this far.
I can’t say exactly why I’ve chosen to write about the particular things I’m writing about. There are doubtless better stories from my life that I’m missing, events and escapades I’m not wise enough to know were important. If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.
MY BIZARRE HALLUCINATION occurred last week when Ruby and I were at Nonna’s, next door. (I’ve never had a hallucination before, but, like a first orgasm, you know when it’s the real deal.) I’ve been tiring more easily lately and I’ve lost a little weight. I’m often dizzy and I’m uncomfortable just standing still. Ruby has lost weight too but feels heavier than she ever has before.
I was leaning against the sofa watching Nonna watching Coronation Street, wondering how our dear Italian gramma could possibly understand what the characters were saying in their thick British accents, when I felt the heat of Nick Todino’s body. I moved my eyes (by this time you know I can’t swivel my head) too quickly, and the room began to spin. I felt blood rushing through my veins, a prickle in my brain. I was suddenly gripped by panic, reckoning that the aneurysm had erupted. The hot feeling spread through my head and made my lips wet and quivery. My hands and feet burned like spice does on the tongue.
My fear was such that I could not speak, though I wanted desperately to call out for Ruby. Not to warn her, though. I’ll confess that my instinct at that moment was purely selfish. I wanted to tell Ruby I was going, so I didn’t have to die alone.
I closed my eyes briefly, listening to my heart, somewhat shocked by its continued beating. I recalled that Dr. Singh had said that when my thing bursts, I will lose consciousness instantly, and I realized that I wasn’t dying after all. I opened my eyes, surprised to see something moving in my periphery. And even more surprised to find that it was Ruby, coming down the hall. The hallucination was more brief than I could ever describe it; a flash frame from a daydream. I can’t remember the details of what she was wearing or the expression on her face, only that she was there without me and that it seemed perfectly natural. I felt myself slip away again. Quickly. Like a jump in the lake. Or from sleep to awake. Then, at the end of my nose I saw the dark curly hairs on Nick’s strong forearm and I realized that I’d fainted, and fallen, and that he’d caught us. (Nick has offered to drive us to Toronto to see Dr. Singh again. He’s already driven us twice and says it’s no big deal. He hates Toronto, so it is quite a big deal. He complains about the people and the traffic and the eight bucks an hour for hospital parking, even though Ruby and I pay for it! He remained sober the entire day last time and sat with us in the waiting room instead of his car. He read fashion magazines because there was nothing else. I found that sort of charming. On the way home we talked about the Pistons. He likes basketball better than hockey. He’s in his fifties.)
UNCLE STASH MADE an oversize rocking chair for us when we moved from the farm to the bungalow. The callous winters on the porch have warped the soft pine, but there’s a comforting dip when you rock forward and a little bump when you rock back. The chair seems to whisper, My Girls, My Girls, My Girls, as it dips and bumps. On summer evenings we like to rock until the mosquitoes invade. (They devour me, but they leave Ruby alone. Strange. Also strange is the fact that when Ruby eats asparagus, her pee has no smell of it.) The Chippewa Drive neighbors wave to us rocking on the porch, but they don’t intrude. We say we like it that way, but I think both Ruby and I would like a little intruding. It would be nice to chat with the neighbors sometimes, especially now that Nonna’s so out of it, and Nick (because of, or in spite of, his past) isn’t much of a talker, or maybe he just doesn’t trust us. The rocking chair makes Ruby drowsy. I feel the shift in her breathing and the heaviness of her body as her grip relaxes on my shoulder and she falls away from the world. The weight of wonder. The weight of worry. I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be.
One night last week we rocked and rocked, but Ruby did not fall asleep. The wind coming in from Mitchell’s Bay grew cool. And rising from the rooftops, a black cloud to shroud the remainder of the day. Leaves shivered as lightning tore the sky to the east, and thunder crashed above us. My body vibrated with the violent eruption, in unison with Ruby’s. We didn’t speak of going inside. Neither of us made a move. Or a sound. Were we even breathing? Rain battered the porch’s metal roof and quickly made rapids of the rocks in the garden. We were scared shitless. There was a moment of silence and stillness, then a gust of wind so strong it blew the lid off the garbage at the curb and threw us back in the rocking chair. I had the strangest sense that the tornado was coming, the very tornado that brought us, like he’d just realized it was all a big mistake. Still, we didn’t leave the porch, or move at all, like animals afraid to be seen. The wind shook the curtains of rain as though it suspected we were hiding there. Furious it was, then frustrated, and gone.
The rain stopped and the clouds dispersed, and we watched the sun sink behind the Indian Crescent bungalows. We continued to rock as stars peered through the night, then we carefully left the front porch, inching across the short wet grass to retrieve the lid from our garbage can. In leaning to lift the lid, which I then hoisted up (using my leg like a winch the way I do), I got dizzy again, but not enough to faint or fall (or to have another hallucination), just dizzy enough to lose my place, like when you close a book by accident and have to flip through the pages to find your spot. In my moment of dizziness, I thought of Aunt Lovey and her mother, Verbeena, and the story of the wedding dress. I don’t know why it came to me then. But I thought I should write it out because I know it means something.
The Story of the Wedding Dress
A long time ago, before Aunt Lovey even met Uncle Stash, Aunt Lovey’s mother, Verbeena, was asked to sew a wedding gown for the mayor of Leaford’s daughter. It was a wonderful opportunity for the skilled seamstress since the most important people in Baldoon County were invited to the wedding, and everyone would know who had sewn the bride’s gown. Verbeena decided to ignore the mayor’s daughter’s reputation as a spoiled brat and happily took the job.
Verbeena quickly discovered that the mayor’s daughter was worse than her reputation. Simpleminded and mean and impossible to please. To make matters worse, Verbeena’d made a tactical error in accepting payment early and buying the costly fabric herself out of the lump-sum fee. The bride had chosen snow-white satin, which any woman knows should never hang on any but the trimmest and straightest of forms (which the girl did not have), and with each fitting it seemed that the bride had added another five pounds t
o her hips, which meant a thousand stitches to rip and resew, but there were also the complicated alterations that required additional lengths of fabric. By the time of the wedding, Verbeena was paying richly to make the awful girl’s gown.
Aunt Lovey, just a teenager then, had fondled the satin fabric as her mother cursed its slippery nature and tsked over the bride’s excessive choice of one hundred pearl buttons down the back. The day before the wedding, Verbeena was blushing with pride. The dress was spectacular, and she knew the nasty bride could not help but be thrilled when she came by the farmhouse for her final fitting. But the mayor’s daughter was not thrilled with the dress. She had grown fatter yet (on what is anyone’s guess), and not one of the hundred buttons could be closed on the fitted satin bodice. The bride was furious. She threatened to sue the seamstress in court until Verbeena, sobbing, promised she could fix the dress.
Verbeena left the fat bride at the door and drove the farm truck to the dry-goods store in Leaford. But when she got there, she found not one scrap of white satin left on the fabric bolt. Verbeena felt dizzy and nearly fainted, but when she looked down she saw a beautiful spool of antique lace, which she bought on credit from the sympathetic shopkeeper. She went home to the farmhouse, sequestering herself in her sewing room with a pair of sharp scissors, the spool of lace, and a pot of mint tea, telling the children to slice ham for their supper and to remind their father to check the pump before bed.
Verbeena was still in her room when the rest of the family went to sleep. Aunt Lovey stopped to say good night, but Verbeena did not respond. When Aunt Lovey woke the following morning, she went to the door of her mother’s sewing room. She listened, then knocked three times. And a louder knock. There was no answer. She opened the door and found her poor mother slumped in her sewing chair with three yards of white satin crumpled on her lap. Aunt Lovey shook her mother awake, aghast to see three huge bloodstains and what looked like a shriveled pink worm on the made-over bodice of the wedding gown. Aunt Lovey followed the blood trail from the dress, up to her mother’s apron, and bosom, then all the way to her cleft chin. Gently urging Verbeena’s lips apart, she found her mother’s badly bitten tongue. Verbeena’d had seizures before, and Aunt Lovey knew she’d survive, even with a chunk out of her tongue. The dress, however, was ruined.
When the bride arrived unexpectedly early the morning of her wedding (there was no phone in the farmhouse back then), Aunt Lovey could not stop her at the door. She found Verbeena clutching the gown, saw the bloodstained satin, and screamed so shrilly she caused Verbeena to seize again. The mayor’s daughter left the house cursing like a sailor. It was said she had to wear a wedding gown borrowed from the obese church organist. (And the gown must have been very ugly too, because there was no picture of the bride in the social pages of the Leaford Mirror and no description whatsoever of the dress.)
Needless to say, Verbeena was never hired to sew anything again, but after taking the bloodstained panels out of the bodice of the gown, she was able to make it over for Aunt Lovey’s wedding to Uncle Stash a few years later. Aunt Lovey would never have had so beautiful and costly a gown, with a hundred pearl buttons down the back, if the mayor’s daughter hadn’t gotten so fat.
RUBY ASKED ME last night what will happen to these chapters, these pages and pages floating in my hard drive, and all Ruby’s scribbles on her legal pad, if we die before the book’s done. I explained that nothing would happen to the chapters because the chapters would never be read. Until it’s completely done, I won’t show this thing to a soul. (Whiffer’s cousin is dating a guy, who’s dating a guy who works in the publishing business in New York City. Whiffer is also a writer and has been complimentary about some of the poems I’ve shown him. He asked if he could use one of my poems called “Patty’s Cake” as the lyrics for a song he’s been working on. Whiffer’s cousin’s friend’s friend read some of Whiffer’s short stories and said he needed to find his voice. Currently, Whiffer’s working on a screenplay. I don’t think Autobiography of a Conjoined Twin is the right title for this book, but I don’t know what else to call it.)
OUR BIRTHDAY IS in three weeks. I know about the surprise party. All the notes passed back and forth—what did Ruby think I’d think? Did she really think I wouldn’t notice? (Of course I’ll act surprised, and she’ll never know I knew.) I can think of many things I’d rather do for our birthday, though. In fact, I hate the idea of a surprise party. I know Ruby just means to be sweet. Ruby never expected to turn thirty, but I have expected to beat the odds. And I don’t just want to make it to my surprise party. I want to live to see Christmas and Easter and spring and summer all over again.
Maybe I’m superstitious. I find that I’m reluctant to talk about what to do with our stuff, and I’ve been especially indisposed to discussing our effects and remains. I fear that once these things have been decided, my body will just quit. I have this strange sense that the thing in my brain has a mind of its own, and I imagine it’s vindictive too. I don’t want to make it angry. I don’t want it to know I have my ducks in a row. I don’t want it to think I’m ready to go.
I’m not.
Remains
I’ve been watching Ruby sort through her things, grouping and piling and discarding and wrapping and labeling. She calls these things her effects, which I find unnecessarily dramatic. (I don’t understand her choices—why in the hell would she leave a bally old pink scarf to Roz? And does Rupert really want her VHS movie collection?) It reminds me of when we moved from the farmhouse to the bungalow on Chippewa Drive the summer after we returned from Slovakia. Uncle Stash had hurt his knee badly and was having trouble getting around. It was clear, watching Uncle Stash hobble on his cane, that we could not endure another winter on the farm. Frankie Foyle and his mother had relocated to Toronto, and suitable tenants had yet to be found for the bungalow. The time was right for a move to Chippewa Drive.
We were in the middle of a heat wave that August. The old windowsills in the orange farmhouse could not have withstood the weight of an air conditioner even if we’d had the resources to buy one. Between my overactive sweat glands and Ruby’s colitis, we were miserable. Aunt Lovey’d come into the room (knocking first because she respected our privacy), handed us a box, and told us that we could not take everything with us to the compact little bungalow and that we had to be ruthless. She’d opened our closet. “Purge.”
When Ruby and I complained that we couldn’t possibly find a whole boxful of things to throw out, Aunt Lovey laughed and said, “Oh no, my funny girls, the box is for the things you want to take. I have five more boxes for the things you have to throw out.”
Ruby and I labored that deadly hot afternoon over what to keep and what to chuck, arguing viciously about the value of this, the importance of that. Even when our quarrel became loud and physical (we pinched each other), Aunt Lovey did not intervene. As she knew we would, we grew weary from fighting and tired of our task. Our treasures became so burdensome that, in the end, we didn’t even fill the box we’d labeled “things to take.” My composition books. Ruby’s maps and sketches of her artifact finds on the farm. Ruby and I noted that Aunt Lovey was not in the least ruthless with her own possessions. She didn’t at any time consider her enormous collection of books to be dispensable. She packed them up lovingly, dusting each frayed jacket, promising herself to read each one again, though she never would—not one.
There were all kinds of benefits to living in town. From Chippewa Drive, Ruby and I could walk to the library and to downtown Leaford, and the city bus would take us anywhere else we could possibly want to go (though it would take some time before Ruby and I could fully appreciate our new independence). Our first day in town, Aunt Lovey walked us over to Brekkie Break, which was the unofficial head office for Leaford Transit. She introduced us to the drivers drinking coffee at the counter. (That wasn’t embarrassing.) Then she bought us a day pass, gave us a Leaford route map, and said, “Be back by five-thirty or I will never let you out of my sight ag
ain.” Ruby had been too excited to get motion sickness that day as we rode every route on the map, barely making it back to the bungalow for our curfew.
On Chippewa Drive we were steps away from Mrs. Todino, in case of emergencies (hers or ours). Flood or fire, we could be reached in time.
Before we moved, as much for himself as for me, Uncle Stash took a sledgehammer to the unfinished walls that had framed Frankie Foyle’s basement room. On nights when I can’t sleep, I lie in my bed, Ruby purring beside me, thinking of what happened that afternoon in the basement room. The smell of skunk weed begins to seep through the floorboards, and I taste sweet booze on the roof of my mouth. I close my eyes and watch Frankie Foyle shiver and shudder and arch like a cat—Do all men do that?—wondering what a relief such a release might be. I think of the moment Frankie abruptly stopped kissing my sister, and I thought he might kiss me. And when he didn’t, how Ruby had quietly tugged the lobe of my ear, saying in the gesture that she loved me and that everything was going to be all right.
Many times in the years since Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash passed away, I’ve considered that Ruby and I should sell the bungalow and get an apartment in the building next door to the library. I’ve been troubled by too many memories and that phantom smell of skunk. (I think of Taylor, the product of my brief union with Frankie, and wonder where she is now and what she’s like. In spite of Ruby’s insistence that it would be selfish and cruel, I want to meet my daughter before I die. Yet even as I write those words, I’m not sure it’s right to even try to find her. How’s that for confusion? I had an e-mail from Cousin Gail in Hamtramck today saying she doesn’t know anything and can’t help me, but I’m not sure I believe her.) There wouldn’t be much sense in leaving the bungalow now, with so precious little time left. And what if Taylor came looking for me here? What if, by some miracle, she discovered her parentage and wanted to see me? What if she missed me by a day or an hour? You read about things like that happening. You read about things like that all the time. (Not in fiction books, though, where such coincidences would be sloppy writing.)