The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  I have not allowed television. I have not allowed food except crackers and dry Cheerios. We’ve hardly even left the bed. When Ruby asked if she could write in her yellow legal pads, I said no. The scratching of her pen wouldn’t have destroyed me, but my guilt and remorse about missing day after day of my writing, and my anxiety over what those missing days and missing pages would mean to my deadline, would have swallowed me whole. Of course it was only three days, but it’s a question of flow. My flow has been dammed. My sentences have leaked from their chapters and changed from themselves into something unrecognizable and unnavigable. I am in deep shit.

  For most of the time that we lay in the bed, I clung to Ruby with my eyes on the sky, whimpering, as Ruby sang softly. (Ruby’s voice resonates for me because I don’t just hear it, I feel it in our conjoined skulls.) I listened to her singing and looked through the window, the one near our bed, where bees tease pallid roses and the sun surrenders red. The few times we got up (because Ruby forced me to use the bathroom and made me stretch to avoid blood clots), both of us forgot to draw the drapes. We rose with the dawn, a length of day before us, with nothing to do and nothing to see but pain and its confusion, and even that was preferable to the alternative in all but my darkest moments, when I imagined death as a fairy, youthful and winged, on whose back we could cruise the clouds.

  Ruby shook when I mentioned the Tatranax. It started as a tremble that I could feel in her jaw and chin. I tried to catch her in the mirror, but she resisted. The tremble became a shake and she couldn’t talk. Did she shake because she wanted to take the Tatranax too but couldn’t admit it? Is it possible she’s never thought of such a clean, joint departure herself?

  Although our view has been just sky, so many crows still fly by, I could easily imagine I was at the farm, Sherman Merkel calling from the barn, Ruby beside me soft and warm, our lives stretched out before us, instead of shriveling behind.

  I ONCE READ some wise writer’s advice that an author should clean his manuscript of blood and tears, then find the sentence that tickled him most when he wrote it down—the most lyrical line, the cleverest insight, the most potent image, the most profound conclusion—and promptly strike the words out. I feel confident, recalling my chapters, that my work is unburdened by any of those things. I have reached a peak, made an important discovery, and acknowledge that my book is what it is, rare and imperfect.

  I IMAGINE RUBY is more a diarist, and she’s writing about the day-to-day stuff, as though her chapters were to be inserted in a journal chronicling our final days. What a challenge to find the right place for Ruby’s chapters, which she writes at one sitting, never returning, never revising. I imagine she’s writing about the visits to see Dr. Singh in Toronto. My declining health (though I’ve begged her not to). I bet she wrote the full details of the surprise party. Lutie brought a Jell-O salad—that sort of thing.

  When I was very sick, on the third day of our confinement, Ruby said she was going to call for help whether I liked it or not. I just assumed she’d call one of the Doctors Ruttle. But it was Nick Todino she thought to call. The second he saw us, he insisted he drive us up to see Dr. Singh in Toronto. He said, “Forget about Ruttle. We need the specialist.” I liked the way he took charge. I think Ruby was relieved too. My head was pulsing and there were bright green spots flashing in my periphery. I couldn’t think of a good argument why we shouldn’t go with him.

  On the way out to the car, I stumbled and fell against the porch railing. Ruby and I weren’t badly hurt, but I suddenly found myself confessing about the aneurysm (because I didn’t want him to think I was just clumsy). The details burbled out of my mouth like something carbonated and shaken. Nick didn’t seem surprised about the aneurysm. I don’t know how, but I think he already knew.

  Nick owns an old Ford Thunderbird, which he keeps in cherry condition and puts in the garage when it snows. There’s a bench seat in the front of Nick’s car, and when I asked if Ruby and I could sit beside him he said sure, but on the way home.

  It was a long day at the hospital, hours and hours of tests and taps and pricks and probes and waiting and waiting. I was relieved to be outdoors, even if it was a dusty downtown parking lot. (You can’t see the stars in Toronto. That’s reason enough not to live there. You look up. No sparkle. No twinkle. No glitter. You can’t wish so well on overhead jet planes. And if you’re looking for poetic inspiration, nothing rhymes with “helicopter.”) I’d forgotten about asking to sit in the front seat until Nick came around the side to open the door for my sleepy sister and me. With Nick’s help, Ruby and I were secured into the front seat, giggling like kids on a carousel. Nick said Ruby and I could sit in front anytime we wanted, as long as it was at night, when there was less risk someone might see us and cause a tragic accident.

  Very quickly the thrill of the front seat wore off, and Ruby fell asleep as she always does in the car. I felt my stomach lurch, the way it always does, with the guilty pleasure of being without her.

  I was sure that I hadn’t brought up the subject of Ryan Todino with Nick, but maybe I had. I’ve been surprising myself with my candor. It could be the aneurysm affecting pressure, causing an imbalance, stimulating personality changes. Or it could be my personality as a narrator fusing with my personality as a person. I have always been a bit of a loner, which may sound surprising because I’m never alone, but where Ruby has been troubled by our exclusion from the normal, I haven’t minded so much. I think Nick’s like me in that way.

  As Nick was speeding down the stretch of dark road, I had a flash of Ruby when we were little, sobbing because Aunt Lovey had promised a trip on the highway. “This isn’t the highway,” Ruby cried. “This is the low way.” Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash laughed when they understood what she meant, and that made her cry even harder. And then I had a flash of Ruby at about five years old, at the Jaycee Fair in Chatham. We’d gone on a child’s ride (the race cars, I think), which, inexplicably, did not make Ruby queasy but did me. A crowd had gathered to watch us. I remember friendly faces for the most part, somewhat pitying, friendly faces, at least until we got off the ride and Ruby shouted, “That made my vagina tingle!”

  Nick was talking about Ryan, and I was thinking of Ruby and her tingly vagina, when, as happens in daydreams, the image of my sister became that of my daughter, Taylor, and I was remembering moments with Ruby as though I’d lived them with my daughter. Then I thought of Ruby telling me her suspicions that the stories we were told about our mother weren’t true, and that whoever she is, she’s probably still alive. (Good God, she could live in Leaford for all we know! Or Chatham! Or Dresden!) I don’t know if it was the aneurysm or the tension or the combination of the two, but I was suddenly very confused, and afraid, and somewhat panicked because I didn’t know what was true. Ruby was asleep, so I blubbered and snorted and blew my nose and told Nick about my mother, and sex with Frankie Foyle, and giving birth to Taylor, and being afraid to die.

  For a long time we just rode the dark, then Nick said, “I been in jail.”

  “I know.”

  “You know what for?”

  I didn’t know what Nick had gone to jail for. “Yes,” I lied.

  “You know I’m an asshole.”

  “Yes.”

  “You gotta tell people, Rose.”

  “That you’re an asshole?”

  He laughed, then said, “That you’re dying.”

  Premonitions & Portents

  Aunt Lovey was against the trip to Slovakia. She said she had a bad feeling, a premonition, but, as Uncle Stash pointed out, she’d been wrong before. (She’d had a bad feeling he was going to crash the Duster on a visit to Ohio one time and he did not, and she’d had a terrible nightmare where he hacked off his left hand at Vanderhagen’s, but that never happened either. The things that did happen—his heart attack, the accident—those things she never saw coming.) In the end she was simply outvoted.

  We set a departure date for late November after successfully arguing that missi
ng a couple of weeks of our last year of school would be less difficult than trying to travel during the busy Christmas holidays. As we cleared dishes from the long pine table in the kitchen, Aunt Lovey was being an uncharacteristically poor sport.

  “You’d think we were going to Paris, France, the way you girls are carrying on,” she said. “You do realize there are no televisions in Grozovo. No Motown radio. And we’ll have to go catheter on the plane.”

  (An aside: The flight promised a few horrors, as we would be badly cramped and, more disturbingly, catheterized for the longest leg of the journey because our particular anatomy does not configure with the teeny airplane bathrooms. We’d endured discomfort before. And we knew precisely what to expect regarding our fellow passengers. The staring. The questions. The staring. Still, this was the trip of a lifetime, and once the challenging air travel was complete, it was just a simple bus ride up the mountains to Grozovo and the welcoming arms of Uncle Stash’s Slovak kin.)

  “Good God, I hope they have running water,” Aunt Lovey went on.

  She walked toward the hallway and called into the den, “Do they have running water? Stash? I know you can hear me!”

  Uncle Stash didn’t respond.

  Aunt Lovey went on grumbling. “I can’t imagine how those people are going to feel when we just drop out of the sky.” Once again she called into the den. “Isn’t there an embassy? Can you call the embassy and get them to contact Velika or Marek somehow?”

  Uncle Stash walked into the room slowly, frowning, impatient. “You’re making too much. It’s just visit to family.”

  “Visit from family they’ve never met before.”

  “Still family.”

  “What about Rose and Ruby?”

  “It’s okay with the girls.”

  “Grozovo is the backwoods, Stash. You told me that yourself.”

  “Still, they have seen things.”

  “But won’t they be shocked to see us?” Ruby asked.

  “It’s Slovakia. Something is always shocking. Plus, they know my girls are conjoined girls. Every year we send the pictures from school.”

  (It was true. We sent off a row of school pictures, along with the cured meats and wax-coated cheeses, and plush toys for the children, and secondhand clothes in good condition, all taped up in a large cardboard box, each Christmas.)

  “I have this feeling, Stash. I just have this awful feeling.”

  “The plane is not crashing.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I am not having another heart attack.”

  “No, you most certainly are not.”

  “My mother wants to be buried in Grozovo. It’s my duty. And that is all.” He turned on his heels and left the room.

  Aunt Lovey sighed, for Uncle Stash rarely said “and that is all,” but when he did, it was. She set the dishes in the sink and reminded us that, the following day, we were to collect Mother Darlensky’s ashes from the crematorium.

  (An aside: There was so much foreshadowing in the weeks leading up to our departure that, were I an editor and this not a true story, I would scratch “too many portents” in the margins—a magazine editor once did that to a short story I wrote about a little boy lost in a tornado. But I feel I must include portents because, in a true story, it’s not exaggerated foretelling but just the shitty things that happened before the shittiest thing happened.)

  I did not know there was a crematorium in Baldoon County. I assumed it was one of those things you had to travel to London or Toronto for, like the Hudson’s Bay Company or a neurologist. I couldn’t tell you now where the Baldoon County crematorium is, though I’m usually good with directions. I recall a short building, made of red bricks whose mortar was crumbling and repaired in places with something black and tarry. On the way there my head was swimming with travel plans, and on the way back I could not look away from the box that Aunt Lovey set to rattle on the dash.

  The box was rectangular, like a miniature shoe box, and made of a heavy brown corrugated cardboard. (I thought something round and made of glass would have been somehow more appropriate.) It looked like a box you might send figs in. Or something in which to ship engraved invitations. Or a good place to keep instructions and warranties. It did not look like a receptacle for human remains. Aunt Lovey had reached out to take the box from the faceless man at the back door, glowering when she saw he’d left smudgy fingerprints on the lid.

  Back at the farmhouse, Ruby and I watched Aunt Lovey clutching the cardboard box, looking around the huge kitchen for a place to put it. She set it in the middle of the long pine table, like a floral centerpiece, then whispered to herself (or was it to Mother Darlensky?), “No, no, not there, dear.” She picked the box up and held it as though it were something alive. Something that might escape. Finally, Aunt Lovey dragged the step stool to the tall china cabinet at the far end of the long table and stretched to set the cardboard box on top of it, brushing aside the dry fern to make room.

  After a moment, Uncle Stash came in the back door.

  “I put her there, Stash.” Aunt Lovey pointed, but Uncle Stash didn’t look up at the box beside the dry fern. He didn’t seem to care. He was juggling the bicycle pump and the air mattress with the duct-tape repairs that we were taking on our trip, intending to test it for leaks, cursing because the mattress was stiff and unyielding.

  “Oh, Stash,” Aunt Lovey started when she saw the pump. “Not in here. You’re gonna break —”

  Too late.

  In trying to pull apart the stuck plastic of the air mattress, Uncle Stash elbowed the corner of the china cabinet and set it to rocking on its spindly Victorian legs. The corrugated box fell from the top of the cabinet onto Uncle Stash’s head, covering his pate with Mother Darlensky’s ashes.

  I couldn’t tell if Ruby had a giggle or a scream inside her throat, but whatever it was I was relieved that there it stayed. (Uncle Stash, being completely bald by then, was often the target of fouling crows, and he looked that way now.) Ruby and I were paralyzed. Aunt Lovey got the whisk broom and collected what she could of Mother Darlensky’s ashes into the dustpan. She brushed a little ash off his shoulders, and the mound from his crown, and put that in the dustpan too. As to the rest, she said, “You’re too oily, hon. You’ll have to soap the rest off in the shower.”

  Less than one-third of the ashes survived the fall from atop the china cabinet. Practical person that she was, creative when it came to things like packing, Aunt Lovey took the ashes from the dustpan and shook them into a small white envelope, which she sealed not by licking but by dabbing spit on her finger to wet the glue on the flap. Then Aunt Lovey folded the envelope and put it inside one of Uncle Stash’s new white T-shirts.

  “Do we have to declare her?” Aunt Lovey wondered when Uncle Stash was out of the shower and we’d gathered in the den.

  Uncle Stash didn’t understand.

  “Your mother.”

  He still didn’t understand.

  “Should we say we’re traveling with her ashes?”

  “There’s no rule to declare ashes, Lovey.”

  “I imagine there is, Stash. There might even be some charge.”

  Uncle Stash didn’t have to think about it. “Don’t declare. It’s enough trouble we have with the girls.” He grinned as he said this, assuring my sister and me that whatever trouble we were, we were worth it.

  “What if they find the envelope?”

  “It’s only envelope, Lovey.” Uncle Stash plopped into the La-Z-Boy.

  “With your mother’s ashes, honey. What about that?”

  “Don’t say it’s mother’s ashes.”

  “Say it’s what, then? What kind of ashes should we say?”

  “Cigarette.”

  “In an envelope? Plus, it doesn’t look like —”

  “Say it is ashes of animal, then. Family pet.”

  “Dog ashes?”

  “Dog ashes. Fine.”

  “Why would we be traveling with the ashes of our dog? What a
re we gonna do with them? How should I say he died?”

  “Say he asked too many questions and I killed him.”

  Aunt Lovey giggled as Uncle Stash pulled her onto his lap. He held her there, grinning, staring blankly at the wall. She leaned against him, staring at the same spot without even knowing it. When I was younger, I was afraid of these intimate moments between Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash and hated the way they clung to each other like driftwood, forgetting Ruby and me.

  “I remember my cousin Zuza and my cousin Velika, young and beautiful. Just a little older than me,” Uncle Stash sighed. (I loved how Uncle Stash could say things as if he’d never said them before.) “Zuza is the most beautiful girl in Grozovo. Velika is the best dancer. Cousin Marek was only seven. Such a funny boy. Fast runner. My father said if Marek comes to Canada, he might go to Olympics.”

  “I wonder if he ever thinks of that,” I said. “How different his life could have been?”

  “Sometimes he does,” Ruby said, answering for him. And herself.

  “Different,” Uncle Stash said, shrugging. “But better? Only God knows.”

  “Stash, you can’t be saying that Marek’s life in Slovakia, working in the mines, was a better life than one he would have had in Canada!” Aunt Lovey’s voice was strangely pitched.

  “Who knows about a person’s life? Maybe Marek comes to Canada and gets hit by the truck. Or he marries a wife who kills him with a hammer. Who knows?”

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Stash? It’s not too late to cancel,” Aunt Lovey said.

  Uncle Stash sighed again. “There’s an apple tree. On the corner of the lane where I take the ducks when I’m a boy, there’s an apple tree. I climb this tree. I have first kiss under this tree. With Cousin Zuza, but still, first kiss. I eat every year apples from this tree. All the children know this tree, but we never tell our mothers. We don’t want to pick for pies. We want to keep secret. We want to make magic the apple tree. It’s silly. I know. I can’t explain.”