The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  “What words can we put, Rose?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the writer. You write something, okay?”

  “Something funny?”

  “Yes, something funny. Because it’s funny, the picture.”

  I sat looking at that silly photograph for an hour and came up with “Happy Birthday, Birdbrain. You really ruffle my feathers.” Aunt Lovey pretended to be amused when she opened the card and, after forcing a laugh, fled the room. Uncle Stash blamed me because I should have known she’d have preferred something more personal and romantic. I think I knew she wouldn’t like the card, but I was angry about losing my childhood home. I felt bereft and needed someone to blame.

  Aunt Lovey was the only one of us who didn’t have a chance to miss the farm. She made frequent trips down that rutty road to check the attic for bats, or the traps for mice, or the cellar for raccoons. She was really going to the farm to see Scruffy—and we all knew it. Once, when Uncle Stash tagged along on one of her errands, he came home describing to Ruby and me the way Scruffy had bounded out of the field when the Mercury turned into the driveway and how the dog had lunged at Aunt Lovey, his muddy paws smearing her just-cleaned coat, and how she hadn’t scolded him or even seemed to care. Mrs. Merkel never appeared during any of Scruffy’s visits, but she must have known Aunt Lovey was with him, gamboling somewhere beyond the corn.

  If it was just the physical farm I longed for, I could have asked to go with Aunt Lovey to rendezvous with the dog. Ruby would have endured the car ride if she thought it was important to me. But whatever it was I had lost in leaving the old orange farmhouse, I couldn’t find in returning. I’d seen that with Uncle Stash and Slovakia.

  Ruby and I watched Halloween from behind the living-room window that first year on Chippewa Drive, children pulling their mothers past our tidy little house, frightened by classmates’ stories about “The Girls,” all grown up now but still freaky, who’d recently moved onto their street. Aunt Lovey made some excuse about the porch light not being bright enough, but I knew it’d be some time before we were accepted here as neighbors. Uncle Stash, without residue of patience since his slip in the pee, turned the lights off altogether, so no one had to wonder why the children weren’t coming to the door. Ruby got sick on all the leftover Snickers.

  I was trying to overcome my disappointment about not going to university by writing short stories. I was working on a book of connected stories adapted from Aunt Lovey’s tales about her eccentric mother. I called it, simply, Verbeena, and was going to present it as a gift to Aunt Lovey for her birthday, but I was having trouble with the structure, and the blending of fact with fiction, and sensed I was imitating Aunt Lovey’s voice instead of writing with my own. I destroyed whole pages in tantrums of self-doubt. I tried not to blame my sister for my restlessness.

  Aunt Lovey knew I was frustrated, so she copied a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation, found an old frame, and hung it near where I keep my computer. I was too resentful to thank her. It’s still on the wall, reminding, “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

  Living in the bungalow on Chippewa Drive naturally made me think of Frankie Foyle, and though his basement room was gone and Aunt Lovey had scrubbed the place clean of the renters, I found myself looking for artifacts, the way Ruby searched the fields. A chewed-on-the-end ballpoint pen that had fallen in the furnace grate. An evil-smelling clothespin of a style Aunt Lovey didn’t use. A sliver of soap stuck behind the vanity in the bathroom. I wanted to hold something of Frankie Foyle’s and feel the vibration that Ruby talks about. I wanted to hold something with weight, so I could prove to myself that my daughter was real.

  I was thinking last night, when I couldn’t sleep, how to describe my feelings about my decision to give up Taylor. While even today, in this moment, I know I did the right thing, there’s a hole when I glance to my left and sorrow for what I’ve lost. I wonder if it was the same for our birth mother and if she ever drowned, as I do, in self-pity and doubt. I’ve told Ruby I want to see Taylor, and I do, part of me does, but the other part (wiser part? selfless part? mother part?) recognizes that in mending my hole, one would surely appear in my daughter’s life, if one isn’t there already. (How cruel to leave her twice in a lifetime.)

  In those first few years after she was born, I never imagined having contact with Taylor. I just wanted to look at her. If I could have seen her through a window, or caught a glimpse of her profile in a photograph, I would have been satisfied. I thought of Taylor often in that first year we lived at the bungalow. Her memory startled me when I turned the little corners of the narrow halls. That’s when I started to write, every day, like a serious writer, and found some comfort in trying to make poetry of my most human condition.

  While I could fill whole days reading or writing, and came to the night feeling tired and accomplished, Ruby felt small in the new house. When Christmas came, Aunt Lovey suspected seasonal depression and said we should sit in the window, like tomatoes she was trying to ripen. Ruby said the season didn’t depress her, but the little tabletop Christmas tree from the grocery store must have. One day she threw it to the floor like a toddler because she’d burned a batch of Christmas cookies. Ruby didn’t sing that year. No “Silent Night.” No “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I think she needed to hate Christmas in the new house. I think she needed to protest the change. But I was writing then and wouldn’t let myself shrink.

  As the year progressed, Ruby became bored with being bored and led the two of us on various excursions around Leaford. We began to discover the primary benefit of living in the city was that we found independence. We grew up, finally, and without the Herculean effort I imagined it would require. We discovered we could get around by ourselves. We could walk to the library. Take a bus to the mall. We felt less unusual being unescorted. Without our parents in attendance, people related to us differently. I noticed myself becoming more personable as the checkout ladies and the staff at the library started talking to Ruby and me individually and even seemed to pick favorites between us, instead of looking to Aunt Lovey or Uncle Stash to translate. Ruby and I began taking on responsibilities for Nonna, going to the drugstore to fill her prescriptions, making out shopping lists for Aunt Lovey to take on Tuesday afternoons. We started to talk about getting jobs.

  We could not help but notice the lives of Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey growing smaller, as Ruby and I pushed our own conjoined lives to the edge. Aunt Lovey stopped volunteering at the hospital and, worn out from waiting on Uncle Stash, started going daily to the farm. She didn’t even pretend anymore that she was there to scare the bats or ensure there weren’t squatters at the long pine table. She’d return to the bungalow, frowning. “I don’t know if that animal is getting any attention at all! Honestly, poor Scruffy just seems starved for affection.”

  “I’m the one starved for affection,” Uncle Stash joked one day and seemed his old self again—just like that. (By spring, a whole year after injuring his knee, he’d found some way to tolerate his disability and had even started taking photographs again, of things other than crows.)

  Aunt Lovey had been waiting for the strawberries to ripen and was keeping vigil daily, maybe hourly. She wanted to get to the berries before Cathy Merkel did. She’d come home reporting, “The top berries are starting to turn. They’re gonna be small and red and sweet this year.”

  Finally, Aunt Lovey returned late one June evening with paw prints on her slacks and a pint of ripe strawberries, which she’d waited until dusk to pick, allowing them to take the day’s sun like a last meal. “Berries are ready,” she said.

  “But tomorrow we’re going shopping in Chatham,” I reminded her.

  “Tomorrow we pick,” she corrected.

  “But we need clothes,” Ruby added. “For the interviews.”

  “There’ll be time to drive to Chatham after we pick the strawberries.”

  We’d picked the berry patch a
t Tremblay Farm as a family for as long as I could remember, and we’d missed strawberry season only once when we were children, when we spent a month in the hospital in Toronto, and Cathy Merkel’d put up the berries that time. We heard the whole rest of the year about how our neighbor hadn’t used enough sugar in her jam. Aunt Lovey was not going to risk such disaster again.

  Ruby couldn’t take a Dramamine and then be in the hot field all afternoon, so my sister braved the car ride on the winding river road back to Rural Route One with the window open and the music on loud as a distraction. We’d been gone only a year, but I realized with some shame, driving on that hot, sunny, late-spring day, that I hadn’t exaggerated Baldoon County in my imagination but had, in fact, understated the blinding green of the grass, and dwarfed the magnificent barns and silos, made modest the maples and pines and sycamore trees, and left unfeted the pastoral fields.

  The country was a spectacle, and I felt like a fool for having undervalued her. But the house, the old orange farmhouse, I had not underestimated. It looked shabbier than I remembered. Decrepit. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I could have been convinced the place was haunted when we pulled up the graveled drive. I remember looking away, not wanting the picture to stay with me. Scruffy must have smelled the Mercury coming because, before we climbed out, he was bounding out of the field to see us, or rather to see Aunt Lovey, who fed him turkey from a bag in her coat pocket. Uncle Stash laughed and took a few photos of Scruffy. Dopey face. Muddy whiskers. Unlike me, Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey didn’t blame the dog for anything.

  Uncle Stash was excused from the berry patch when he complained about his knee. He’d brought his camera and six rolls of film, and seemed eager to make up for lost time with his lens. He’d pointed at the barn nearby, and the fledgling crops, and Merkels’ cottage in the distance. “See, Rose, look there at the trees and the frame of the field here. There is geometry. There is poetry.”

  Scruffy stayed with Aunt Lovey throughout the afternoon as we picked the sun-warmed berries for her sweet preserves. (We can’t bend or squat comfortably for long periods, so I sit, with Ruby balancing on her clubfeet. I reach and pull, and pass to Ruby, who holds the container and discards the duds.) I remember being struck by the excess of insects. Had I forgotten about them, or were they so much a part of the fabric of my life that I didn’t see, in my periphery, the way they made the earth come alive? In the space of two berry plants I’d encountered four bees, a beetle, a dozen spiders, a grasshopper, and a thousand tiny ants. (No bud weevils or spider mites, though—that would have been bad.)

  Uncle Stash hobbled around, taking photographs of the beauty and ravages of spring. I hated to look up and find him pointing his camera at the old orange farmhouse. Why did he want to shoot it when it was already dead?

  Aunt Lovey worked tirelessly, bent over, straddling the lush berry plants, one leg on either side, as she’d done all her life, her gnarled fingers plucking the dense red berries at a pace, dumping them into the basket when both fists were full. Scruffy barked at the bugs, or simply watched, and wagged, and waited for affection. Occasionally, tried of watching and wagging, the animal would lunge at Aunt Lovey and lick her face, her nose, and her lips, in a strictly disgusting display. I wondered if Cathy Merkel would be jealous of Scruffy’s devotion to another woman. (Or would the recompense be understood?) The dog’s licking and barking irritated Ruby and me and reminded us why, among other reasons, we didn’t miss the mutt. We worked our way through the berry patch, picking, eating, shouting, “Hush up, Scruffy! Hush up!”

  We never went into the house. Not even to pee. Neither Ruby nor I wanted to go inside to witness the peeling wallpaper or hear the wind whistle through the empty rooms or smell the smell of long-dead mice. (Plus, what if I was wrong about ghosts?) I was eager to get away from the farm altogether and, having picked the strawberry plants clean for the day, begged Aunt Lovey, “Let’s hurry up and go to Chatham.”

  We were heading for the Mercury when Uncle Stash noted something about the color of the sky and said he wanted to stay to snap some twilight photos. (It never occurred to me that he might go over to see Mrs. Merkel. I was sure their attachment had been severed.) Ruby and I needed some professional clothes for our upcoming interviews—drugstore clerk and secretarial assistant among them. (Our intention wasn’t to share a job, but to work part-time at individual ones.) We agreed to come back for Uncle Stash in a few hours.

  Uncle Stash loaded the flats of just-picked strawberries into the front seat instead of the trunk, where some motor oil had spilled days earlier. Before we climbed into the car, Uncle Stash suggested that we invite Nonna over for a barbecue. Steak and ribs. And whitefish for Ruby. Aunt Lovey decided we should stop by the Oakwood to get cheese buns and cannolis, since we were going to Chatham anyway. Scruffy jumped up on Aunt Lovey to lick her face one last time. Ruby and I made fake vomiting sounds, which inexplicably made Aunt Lovey laugh. We were having a good time. It had been a difficult year, but spring had sprung, and the berries were luscious, and we had, each one of us, evolved.

  Aunt Lovey, having helped us with our straps in the backseat, gently moved Scruffy out of the way with the toe of her shoe and settled herself into the front. She managed to shut the door, but Scruffy went around and jumped at the Mercury’s grille, barking as if to say, “Don’t go. Don’t go.” She laughed at his persistence, but Ruby and I were impatient to leave. Even when Aunt Lovey turned on the motor and revved the engine, the dog kept barking and would not move away from the front of the car.

  Instead of being annoyed with the annoying dog, Aunt Lovey just smiled, unbuckled her seat belt, and maneuvered out of the Mercury, striding back to Uncle Stash, who hobbled to meet her halfway. Ruby and I shifted so we could take turns watching them in the rearview mirror. They were laughing. Could have been about anything. They were laughing hard, a hand on the other’s shoulder, like good friends of the same sex. Scruffy started barking ferociously, which seemed to make them laugh even harder. Aunt Lovey kissed Uncle Stash on the mouth and gave him the bag of turkey from her pocket. Weak and fickle, and just a dog after all, Scruffy chose to stay with the food.

  Aunt Lovey was still laughing when she climbed back into the car, and still laughing when she started driving down Rural Route One. Watching the rearview mirror, she described the scene to Ruby and me. “Uncle Stash is waving. Scruffy just jumped to get the turkey. Ouch! That was his groin! Oh dear. He’s all right. Maybe not. Yes, he’s fine.” She sighed, still watching. “He’s such a ham.”

  Her voice was soft and far away. In the reflection of the rearview mirror, I saw the eyes of a young woman, fair and freckled, stunning in her white satin gown with a hundred pearl buttons down the back, floating down the ninety-foot aisle of Holy Cross Church to marry her handsome Slovak. I don’t believe I ever loved my Aunt Lovey more than in that moment. And I don’t think I’m making that up.

  Aunt Lovey looked away from Uncle Stash and returned her eyes to the road, where two fat black crows were picking at some carrion. Instinct possessed Aunt Lovey to swerve. She hit a rut in the road and lost control of the car. The Mercury flew in the air and came down hard, nose-first in the deepest part of the drainage ditch. Ruby and I were strapped into the backseat with the harness Uncle Stash had custom-made and bolted to the frame. We were in the air. Then we were not. It happened so fast. Ruby and I never spoke a word to each other in the moments after the crash. Or in the hours and days after the accident. We didn’t speak any words at all, not for a very long time. And to this day we have never spoken about the accident, the details of what did or did not happen. I tell myself that Ruby’s eyes were squeezed shut and that she didn’t watch Aunt Lovey slam against the windshield and snap at the neck, then clang against the steering wheel like a ringer on a bell. It was all over in a matter of seconds, the way accidents are. Aunt Lovey was perfectly still. And so was I. And so was Ruby.

  The strawberries, which had been stacked in baskets on the seat beside Aunt Lovey,
were tipped over, strewn about the dash. Their fragrance mingled with the smell of fuel and the mustiness of the ditch. At first, the air was so still and quiet I thought I might have gone deaf. But the crickets and cicadas, whose day we’d rudely interrupted, resumed their communication. And bees began to buzz. And I saw, in my periphery, a muskrat sniff the window of the Mercury, lured there by the berries, then frightened off by Ruby and me.

  I was struck by how fast Uncle Stash made it to the car on his bad leg. And impressed that he didn’t have his cane when he opened the door. Uncle Stash didn’t brush away the strawberries or mention them at all, though he must have seen them and smelled them when he climbed into the front seat. He looked into the backseat at Ruby and me, and then beside him at Aunt Lovey.

  I don’t know if I spoke or if Ruby did, but one of us said, “We’re okay.”

  He could barely catch his breath. “Girls. Good. Girls.

  “But you,” he whispered, laying his palm gently on Aunt Lovey’s back, “you are not okay, my love. Are you? Are you?”

  Uncle Stash stroked Aunt Lovey’s back as a worried father would a sick child. “My Lovey. Oh, my Lovey.” He pulled Aunt Lovey’s head from the dash.

  I wonder now if he was torturing himself, or fortifying himself, or assuring himself, by forcing a look at her mangled face. A crash lasting only seconds, not even at highway speed, yet her nose was horribly broken, her cheek shattered, blood at the cave of her nostril. Something clear dripping from her ear.

  Uncle Stash made a sound. An indescribable sound. Not a cry, smaller than a cry, barely audible, but a sound that held such horror and such grief I wanted to cover my ear in case it came again. The sound did come again. And again. And I realized it was me.