The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  Two things. Why do you want to make a grown man cry and embarrass him completely in the children’s section of the Leaford Library? And why can’t you just be normal and say, Thanks, yeah, we’ll let you know if we need anything, Mr. Merkel? You know?

  We gave Mr. Merkel some Kleenex, but he had a hell of a time getting control of his emotions. Rose and I think a lot of his weeping was about losing Larry too. Even though that happened a long time ago.

  The note Mr. Merkel put up on the bulletin board was about looking for a farmhand for the winter. Rosie and I were saying, Whoever they find, we hope it’s someone who’s good company for Mrs. Merkel.

  She must get so lonely. Especially now that she doesn’t keep dogs.

  Rose confided in Whiffer that she’s written quite a few pages for the book, and so have I. Whiffer said he was going to call his cousin to tell his friend’s friend in publishing about Rose writing her story. Rose told him not to, because she doesn’t want anyone to know about it until she’s done. She says it’ll jinx her. She laughs about me, but she is really so superstitious.

  Rose said something to Whiffer about how she’s not sure her story is very good. She said she thought it would be easier to write, and when she reads it back to herself it sounds simple. I knew that she was angling for him to ask to read it, but instead he said, Don’t worry if it’s not well written. It’s the conjoined-twin thing that’s gonna sell it or not.

  When Whiffer said the conjoined-twin thing, Rose just about threw up. I could feel her swallowing and swallowing. Maybe Whiffer’s right. But he didn’t have to say it.

  Nick knows she’s writing this thing, but he’s the only other one. If she gives it to Nick before she gives it to me, I will take that Tatranax.

  Anyway, seeing Mr. Merkel standing there in the library with his eyes bright red and tears running down his face made me remember when he got the ammonia in his lungs one summer when we were little. There was this huge tanker of ammonia that he would take out in the field, and it’s got this long tube thing and you shoot the ammonia into the earth, because it’s good for the corn, but once in a while a farmer might pull the ammonia tube out too soon and get a burning blast of it. You can imagine how that would fry your lungs. And your eyes. And that happened to Mr. Merkel twice in one summer because the ammonia tank he was renting wasn’t working right. When Mr. Merkel was crying in the library, he looked exactly like when he got blasted with ammonia. Aunt Lovey said Mr. Merkel was gonna have cardboard for lungs when he’s an old man because of those ammonia accidents.

  Eventually he got hold of himself, though, and why I would say something as stupid as this, and especially to Mr. Merkel, is beyond me. But this is what I said. I said, This has been a bad year for hurricanes in the southern United States.

  I was just making small talk so Sherman Merkel wouldn’t start crying again. I was just thinking about the news. I started saying something else about the bad weather in the South, and I wasn’t thinking anything of it until Rose pinched me. Hard.

  Mr. Merkel took this long inhale of breath, and I thought, Oh now, here he goes again. And I clocked the tissues so I could pass them back over. But Mr. Merkel didn’t start crying when he let his breath out.

  He just told us to watch the price of tomatoes this winter.

  Prosim

  We touched down in Kosice at dusk, and I found hope in the soft pink sky. Uncle Stash seemed to be breathing more easily, though he was still woozy from travel and hadn’t quite recovered his voice. There was a sense of calm, if not exactly peace, in the airport, in the hush of the square gray halls and the orderliness of the structure itself. There were no people whatsoever who did not appear to be Slovak, except Ruby and me and Aunt Lovey. I squeezed Ruby, but she was busy with her own concerns, having already noticed something I had not. No one was staring. There was no staring. No craning. No peering. Nothing. We walked down a long corridor, past quiet doughy people who would not look and would not stare, but, wearing frowns and looking down, passed by Ruby and me like we weren’t there. It wasn’t just odd or weird, it was frightening. Who would not stare, what kind of people would not even look, at conjoined twins?

  There was no baggage carousel in the airport at Kosice. The baggage handler tossed the luggage onto an old wooden wagon and pulled it along behind us. The wagon’s wheels nearly clipped Uncle Stash’s heels when he stopped abruptly to have a coughing fit. A security guard, on seeing Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey and Ruby and me in our sort-of-matching blue tracksuits, motioned for Team Darlen to follow him to a side door. The man smiled at my sister and me in a genuine way and radio-called for a taxi. “It’s the best taxi I get for you,” he said in English, as he opened the glass door to the cold Slovak night.

  “Prosim,” the young security guard said. “Prosim.” (We would discover that the Slovaks say prosim, which translated means “if you please,” about a thousand times a day, for the oddest reasons, in the strangest ways.)

  The Slovak sky looked stained, blacker in the middle and lighter around the edges. I don’t remember any stars. But there must have been stars. The bulb buzzing above the door where we stood was bright and made our skin green. Or we were green, from illness and fatigue.

  We waited. And waited, and we were still waiting, long after the passengers from on board our flight had climbed into taxis at the official taxi stand at the front of the building. The handsome guard made small talk with Aunt Lovey in his practiced English. He smiled our way several more times with his ice-blue eyes. He even winked at Ruby. He reminded me of a tennis player (but without a tan), with his broad shoulders and whittled waist and strong forearms. I was watching him, making notes for an elaborate romantic fantasy, when he suddenly poked Ruby’s shoulder and asked, “It can talk? Yes?”

  Before Aunt Lovey could educate the blue-eyed guard, a long black taxi arrived and an old uniformed driver stepped out. The driver nodded to the security guard and bent to collect the luggage, but he was stopped by the sight of Ruby and me. He stood stock-still, the heavy suitcases stretching his long thin arms.

  He stared. Briefly, but he stared. And I felt better.

  The taxi was old, a late-seventies model, judging from its appearance. It looked something like an old Cadillac. That kind of wheelbase. That serious sleek. Ruby and I eased ourselves into the back as our parents climbed into the front, to share the bench seat with the driver. The cab was clean and smelled of dusty roses from the pink air freshener hanging on the rearview mirror. As he pulled away from the airport the old man pressed a button on the car’s radio and Madonna started singing “Material Girl.” Hovno.

  We followed the winding road, barren fields to the left and right. I tried to find the Tatras Mountain range in the darkening sky but couldn’t. Uncle Stash began to cough violently. I could not believe, when it was over and he moved his hands from his face, that he was not covered in blood. Aunt Lovey checked Uncle Stash’s temperature with her palm. She counted the beats of his heart. To reassure all of us, she said, “I’m sure it’s not your ticker, hon. It’s just a lousy virus. You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”

  Aunt Lovey asked the driver to slow down. “Please,” she said. “It’s so hard on the girls when you hit the bumps.”

  The elderly driver pulled up under a canopy near the front doors to the Hotel Kosice. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash slid out of the front and helped Ruby and me climb out from the back. The bamboo planters lining the path to the hotel grew clusters of twigs and cigarette butts. The air was cold and smelled like bacon. Leaford seemed not just a world away but years and decades and whole lifetimes away. I thought of how Sherman Merkel would be finishing up with the squash. Cathy Merkel’d be putting it up while we were gone. (I like it with butter and pepper, but squash makes Ruby bilious.) I was suddenly very homesick.

  We could see through the large glass doors that the hotel lobby was nearly deserted. Exhausted, Ruby and I waited at the elevators with Uncle Stash while Aunt Lovey went to check in. I wis
hed I was not so tired. I wished Uncle Stash was not so sick. I’d imagined him in these first few moments back in his homeland, his cheeks wet from the flood of memories, telling us stories about this strange world and the boy he was when he lived here. But Uncle Stash had no voice to tell stories.

  Aunt Lovey appeared after a short time, jangling a set of keys, one that opened the hotel room door, another for the room’s only closet, and one for the top dresser, where she’d been advised by the staff to keep our passports and cash. “This is where the diplomats and visiting hockey teams stay,” she enthused as we climbed into the elevator.

  There was new carpeting in the hallway of the fifth floor, which smelled strongly of formaldehyde. Ruby was nauseous from it and had to cover her mouth. Aunt Lovey held her breath and tried all three keys before she found the one that worked in the door. She pushed the door open. There were two double beds with torn paisley bedspreads mismatched to too-short floral drapes. In the corner near the window there was a pine desk, where a cluster of cigarette burns tried to hide under a large crystal ashtray but were magnified by it instead. The olive-green carpet was worn to its bones. Aunt Lovey exhaled. She needed to have a good cry—and deserved it. But she was all we had. And she had to keep it together. “Let’s just call it charming,” she said. “Besides, it’s only for one night.”

  Uncle Stash moved to the suitcase, found the envelope with his mother’s ashes, and propped it against the lamp beside the crystal ashtray. It sat there like an overdue bill—like a notice of reminder to us all—“Don’t forget to bury me!” He sat on the bed and closed his eyes. Aunt Lovey moved beside him, gently pulling him down on the bed, at the same time folding her body against his strong warm back. “We all need a good sleep,” she said.

  Ruby and I found our bed and shifted our individual weight, stretching our necks and shoulders and arms, twisting our torsos, until we were comfortably arranged and ready to sleep. I breathed. And listened to the sound of my loved ones breathing around me. I thought of the following day, and the trip into the mountains to meet Uncle Stash’s family. I wondered if we’d see the pond where Uncle Stash used to take the ducks.

  “Aunt Lovey,” Ruby whispered, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Yes, Ruby?”

  “The bed smells.”

  “I know, Ruby. Just close your eyes.”

  “It really reeks.”

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Go to sleep, Ruby.”

  “I can’t.”

  Aunt Lovey sucked in air and said it was time Ruby and I grew up. There were going to be challenges on this trip. One day we were going to have to live on our own. Aunt Lovey said it was time to prove what we were made of.

  Ruby paused. “But it smells like a person’s ass.”

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night. (Aunt Lovey didn’t sleep either. I heard her sniffling behind her hands until dawn, when she rose and went to run the tub. Uncle Stash woke then, and I felt encouraged when he called out, “Lovey,” and his voice had returned, husky but there.)

  The breakfast room was busy and crowded. The hostess found a table for us in the back. She had seen us, Ruby and I were sure. I locked eyes with her. Then Ruby did. But there were no double takes, no shocked intake of breath, no nervous laughter. She led us to the table at the back. We walked past the rows of businessmen. No one stared. (Like what had happened at the airport. Discomfiting and surreal.) Uncle Stash’s short coughing fit drew a few stares, but people avoided glancing at Ruby and me.

  There were no hockey players in the breakfast room at the Hotel Kosice. I would have known. There were dozens of men in dark suits, with round faces and apple cheeks and sunken blue eyes and harp-shaped ears. Some of them may have been diplomats. But definitely not hockey players. Ruby and I were the only twins, conjoined or otherwise, in the place.

  We went to look at the offerings on the buffet table. And we felt the eyes on our backs. I turned sharply, or at least as sharply as I could. And as I swiveled, I caught a fat man staring. Staring. Full on. Openmouthed. The man was horrified to have been caught. Then I realized who Ruby and I were to these Slovaks. We were the fairies from the dense gray fog. And they were afraid of us.

  (Even though Uncle Stash was not much of a believer in things like fairies and witches, he defended his superstitious countrymen, saying, “Of course the Slovaks believe in devils and demons. First the Turks. Then the Magyars. Then the Nazis. And the Communists. Always the Slovaks must struggle to be Slovak. It must be witches. It must be demons. Who wants to blame God?”)

  After breakfast, we started off for the bus station, within walking distance of the Hotel Kosice. Almost right away, Uncle Stash remembered that he’d left his camera bag slung over the back of the chair in the breakfast room. Aunt Lovey hurried back to the restaurant but returned without the camera, just as we’d all known she would. We found the bus station, Aunt Lovey trying to see the brighter side of things, comforting, “It’s just as well, hon. Sometimes you get so preoccupied with capturing a moment you don’t live it.”

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Besides, maybe we can find a disposable camera at the convenience store in Grozovo.”

  “In Grozovo, Lovey, there is no convenience. There is no convenience store.”

  “Oh, how do you know? You haven’t set foot there in fifty years! You think they don’t have their version of 7-Eleven?” She laughed, thinking him naive.

  “Just yesterday the Iron Curtain is lifted. It’s Grozovo. In the mountains.”

  “We’ll just have to see, Stash. But I think you’ll find Grozovo not the same place you left.”

  “Maybe.” You could tell Uncle Stash was thinking about that. Hard.

  We boarded the bus, to find the seats cramped and uncomfortable. I shifted, gesturing to show Ruby the net of garlic hanging from the rearview mirror. “Werewolf country,” Ruby said with a bad Transylvanian accent.

  The driver, true to custom, did not stare at us directly. Instead, he nodded to Uncle Stash, whom he recognized as a countryman, before he opened his mouth to say “Dobre rano.” The two other people aboard the enormous bus, elderly women, seemed completely uninterested in us at first, but we felt their eyes boring into our skulls as we roared out of town for the highway.

  I recall the bus ride to Grozovo with a certain amount of terror. It was a diesel bus. Evil fumes were seeping from the tank. Or maybe the fumes were coming from the rotten garlic hanging from the rearview mirror or from the driver, who was attempting to light a cigarette while negotiating the sharp turns of graveled roads. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel Aunt Lovey’s tight smile, and I knew she was wishing she was home, making space in her pantry for Mrs. Merkel’s squash.

  An hour into the journey, the bus driver pulled off the road and parked beside a small plywood shack. The shack had been painted mud brown. A Slovak word was crudely scrawled over the door. Only Uncle Stash knew what it meant. Beside the shack was a broken picnic table, under which the ground was strewn with litter. Ruby woke up, groggy and annoyed. “Are we there? Why are we stopping?”

  “We’re stopping for another passenger, Ruby. Shh. Go back to sleep,” Aunt Lovey said.

  I glanced out the window, but no one emerged from the shack. After checking his face in the rearview mirror, the driver stood and turned and called out something to Uncle Stash. You could tell by the way the man was grinning that this was an invitation of some kind. But Uncle Stash did not smile back. In fact, he responded in a way that seemed to leave the driver deeply insulted.

  Aunt Lovey sighed. “What’s that all about, Stash?”

  Uncle Stash shook his head, watching the bus driver disappear into the shed.

  “Is he going to get the other passengers?”

  “There’s no other passengers.”

  “Well, is it a washroom? Tell me, because the girls and I will pee.”

  Uncle Stash shook his head, gazing out at the ridge of spruce
forest.

  “Why are we stopped?” Aunt Lovey turned to see if anyone else on the bus seemed concerned or puzzled by the delay, forgetting that the two elderly ladies had gotten out (fled) at the very first stop. “Stash?”

  “He stops here because he stops here.”

  Aunt Lovey bristled but didn’t query further. We were all tired and nauseous from the diesel fumes and no one really wanted a fight. We waited and waited, thinking our disparate thoughts. Finally, the driver emerged from the brown shed, then, with a sarcastic wave (or was it a brotherly wave? or a conciliatory one?) to Uncle Stash, the man took his seat behind the wheel of the bus and we were on our way again.

  I don’t know what I expected. I thought there might be a main street or a group of buildings or a bus station or anything at all to distinguish the village Uncle Stash had described in his stories on Slovak Night. In the middle of nowhere, at the edge of a cliff, the driver stopped and announced, “Grozovo.”

  Uncle Stash did not move. The driver and he barked back and forth until the driver folded his arms and Uncle Stash threw up his hands. “Come on,” he commanded, launching himself down the aisle. We followed our venerable leader as the bus roared on.

  There was nothing around but mountains and the view of more. The sky was white, but not close and not bright. Even here the air smelled of bacon, but of wet rock too, and pine and spruce. It was very, very cold. Uncle Stash pointed to the hill to our left and shrugged apologetically. “If he goes around long way to village, it takes one hour more.”

  “So?”

  “Already he’s late.”

  “What does that mean?” Aunt Lovey was baffled.

  “We climb hill.”

  “A bus driver can’t just drop people off and tell them to climb a hill!” Aunt Lovey’s laughter verged on hysterical as she looked up at the steep climb.

  Uncle Stash cast his eyes. “He did.”