The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  The Merkels’ cash crops were seed corn and soybeans, and winter wheat when we were young. Telling Aunt Lovey we were going to pick lilies from the ditch, Ruby and I would take the handle from the stable broom and head for the wheat field. There, we’d flatten the stems of the wheat and sit down inside our crop circles, awaiting an alien encounter. One time Cathy Merkel walked by with her big black dog—a Bouvier she called Cyrus. The dog barked like crazy, so we knew that she knew we were there, but she never said a word.

  Aunt Lovey’s father, and his father, and his, had grown everything from peanuts and peppermint to sugar beets and tobacco. Of the crops Sherman Merkel grew, I loved the corn the best. Mr. Merkel grew sweet corn in a small plot out back of the barn, just enough for our two families to share. We harvested the fat ears in the first few weeks of August, or a little before, or a little after (farming isn’t an exact science), then boiled them for thirteen minutes and slathered them in butter, never margarine. Aunt Lovey cut the kernels off for Ruby, and to this day she won’t eat it any other way.

  Most of our fields were planted with seed corn. I loved to watch the corn grow knee-high by the Fourth of July (or a little before, or a little after), then in two weeks’ time it was higher than me, then higher than Mr. Merkel, who was a very tall man. Aunt Lovey used to say the corn looked “gussied up” with her golden tassels and her green plumage. Corn syrup, corn oil, cornmeal, cosmetics, explosives, detergents, peevo (the Slovak word for “beer”)—corn is in all of these. I loved the way the smell of the corn could climb up my nose after a good rain, and the feel of the silk before it dried up and went brown. We used to tear the leaves and make small woven carpets for our dollhouse.

  Sometime in mid-July the corn detasselers, a busload of teenage girls in tube tops, would arrive to work Mr. Merkel’s seed-corn fields. If you were a teenager in Baldoon County, you worked as a corn detasseler, walking the mile-long rows in the blistering sun, pulling the quivering tassels from the female plants so their ears could be fertilized by the adjoining rows of male plants. Our fields were always done by the girl crews. Maybe Sherman Merkel arranged it that way, hoping teenage girls would remind his wife less of Larry. Or maybe it was the tube tops.

  For three weeks or so each summer the detasseling girls, with their bloodred faces and sliced white legs, their short shorts and potty mouths, thrilled and terrified Ruby and me.

  (An aside: My sister and I did not have many friends while we were growing up. Children spoke to us at school and on the bus, but no one ever came to our home, even though Aunt Lovey used to whisper invitations when she thought we couldn’t hear. I consider Roz and Rupert, and Whiffer and Lutie from the library our friends, but we don’t really see them socially. Rupert doesn’t do well veering from routine, and after a couple of disastrous dinners with Roz and him, Ruby and I stopped trying. Whiffer keeps saying he’s gonna take me to a Red Wings game, but I’ll believe it when I see it. There is some alienation, of course, in being so different, but it’s also been fascinating, and a unique opportunity, I think, to have observed our generation without fully participating in it.)

  The best days were when the detasselers hit their lunch break at our end of the mile-long row and we could watch from the window as the girls spread their blankets on the lawn. It encouraged me somewhat to see that the teenagers were as cruel to one another as they ever were to Ruby and me. I mocked and derided the detasseling girls to Ruby, and I did genuinely find them mean, but I would have loved, just one time, to join them.

  (Ruby and I were not allowed near the detasselers. Aunt Lovey found a condom and a marijuana joint after the bus left one day. In fact, we were not allowed near the corn at all after mid-July, which was when it grew so high and dense a child could get lost for days and die from exposure and dehydration. Death by corn.)

  We were encouraged, as long as we were careful, to pick the blueberries that grew wild around the creek, and the apples and peaches from the low branches. An acre of land was reserved for the family’s needs (we referred to the acre as the “family field”), where we also planted rows of snap beans and baby cucumbers and tomatoes and parsnips. What we didn’t eat in season we canned for the winter. We called it “putting up,” as in “Aunt Lovey put up thirty cans of beets today.” Aunt Lovey and Cathy Merkel never put up the same thing. If Aunt Lovey did a relish, Cathy Merkel did a jam. If Aunt Lovey put up the peaches, Cathy Merkel put up the pickles. They passed the jars back and forth, until both their pantries were full and even, carefully complimenting the other on an especially good batch, noticing the extra pinch of this or dash of that. Still, they weren’t friends.

  The Merkels never once had an evening at our house, and we were never invited to theirs. Mr. Merkel was like Uncle Stash—when the day was done, he liked to flip on the tube and watch sports. And Mrs. Merkel spent her free time walking the country roads with her dogs. (Mrs. Merkel has had three dogs since we’ve known her. Funny how you can measure time by pets that were not even your own. Her dog until we went to grade school was a shih tzu she called Cutie Pie, or sometimes just Pie. Pie had a problem with his anal gland and used to drag his scratchy bum all over Mrs. Merkel’s kitchen floor. Her next dog was Cyrus. And the last, because Mrs. Merkel hasn’t kept dogs for a few years, was that barking mutt Scruffy.)

  Aunt Lovey sighed one night, after we’d seen Mrs. Merkel walking with Cyrus the Bouvier along the dark country roads, “She needs to bury that child. That poor woman needs to bury that poor child.”

  ON THE FARM, in our first-floor bedroom with the queen-size bed and the entwined-hearts comforter and the shelf for Ruby’s stuffed animals and the rack for my baseball cards and library books, my sister and I were sheltered in the essence of normal. We were not hidden, but unseen. The orange farmhouse was our castle, our kingdom the fields around, and the shallow creek that bisected our property the sea we crossed to find adventure.

  Aunt Lovey had been right about the country. Ruby and I watched kittens being born under the porch out back and meteor showers in the blackest sky. We trod the rock-hard furrows in spring, searching for Indian arrowheads churned up by Sherman Merkel’s tractor. We learned the names of trees and plants. (Ruby could tell you the names of dozens of edible plants that grow wild near the creek on our farm where the Neutral Indians foraged. Aunt Lovey showed us where to find the bitter cress, the Solomon’s seal, and the sorrel, which were all eaten raw, but some of the wilder weeds would be boiled for teas and broths.) We ate sun-hot apples and wormy peaches, and we strung necklaces from Indian corn.

  Each year on our birthday Ruby and I remembered Larry Merkel. Under the apple tree near the driveway, the place from which he’d disappeared, we’d say a prayer (though we were not officially baptized and were never really clear on our status with God) for his lost soul. We’d been told that Larry Merkel was dead, but in our imaginations he was very much alive. When Ruby and I were young he was our secret friend, a wild boy who didn’t wash and couldn’t talk, who lived deep in the bush at the edge of the property, not hidden, but unseen, like Ruby and me.

  When it got cold we made a shelter of twigs for our wild friend, with a corn-husk roof and a bed of scratchy horse blankets from the barn. We brought tumblers of milk and raisin cookies that we knew he ate in the night because they were always gone by morning, the milk spilled and lapped clean from the ground. We left books with interesting pictures and poems (drawn with symbols) under a damp old pillow. I secretly hoped he liked me better than Ruby.

  In later years, as my sister and I were becoming pubescent girls, who, in spite of being attached at the head, were normal, Larry Merkel became our boyfriend. Sometimes he was mine; sometimes he was Ruby’s. Once in a while, when we couldn’t agree on whose turn it was, we’d make him our protective older brother.

  Once a week when the weather was fine, my sister and I went to the Merkels’ place on the other side of the creek to deliver the eggs (feeding the chickens and packing the eggs was Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash’s sin
gle concession to farming). Even though Mrs. Merkel wasn’t very friendly or kind, we loved her, because she loved Larry. There wasn’t much to the walk (we could be seen by either house the entire way there and back), but it was still exciting to cross the rickety bridge over the creek and find Sherman Merkel aiming his shotgun at the crows. Once, we sat on the bridge for a full hour and watched a fat green tobacco worm stuck on its back. Ruby wanted to put him right. I believed in nature. Or I was cruel. One summer we made a race out of the trip with the eggs, pretending that Cathy Merkel would die if we didn’t get there in time.

  Mrs. Merkel never offered us cookies or bread and jam. In the summer, if we looked very thirsty, she gave us cloudy water from the tap. With mud-caked paws and jowly jaws, her big black Cyrus watched us from his post at her side. Aunt Lovey used to call him “the mutt from hell.” But I liked Cyrus. (I hadn’t cared for Cutie Pie, the shih tzu. The butt-dragging was disgusting.) And I was sure that if he liked Ruby and me, Mrs. Merkel would like us too. I used to stare at Cyrus to communicate my sincerity.

  On Saturdays Uncle Stash came with us to the Merkels’, the heavy camera swinging from his neck, threatening to thump Ruby or me if we got too close. He loved to take pictures of the landscape, the people, the details, us, even Mrs. Merkel, though she’d scowl at him afterward and call him by his full name, Stanislaus, which even Aunt Lovey never did.

  Uncle Stash had a way of taking a picture that made photography art. Aunt Lovey put together a photo album for our birthday one year of all his best shots. She arranged the pictures thematically, by season. There were the wonderful landscapes of the farm, and candid snaps of Ruby and me, our life to date. At some point in putting the album together, Aunt Lovey must have realized there was not a single picture of Uncle Stash: he took the pictures, so he was never in them. The final picture in the album was of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, their black-and-white wedding photo. I hated that their picture came last, because it felt like they were saying good-bye.

  On a rainy Tuesday last week, Ruby and I looked through the album together for the first time. (If we can do something alone, we usually do, and so it was with the photo album.) I enjoyed the little journey with my sister, and we both admired anew the way Uncle Stash had captured our farm with his camera, verdant in summer with rich black loam and mile-high corn behind our home—King Grain baseball caps skimming dusty gold tassels; brawny field hands blocking sugar beets; straw hats; black arms; one old man’s eyes so distant he looks dead. Ruby and I, at about three, in our wading pool in the shade, wearing identical swimsuits with a ruffle at the bum. (Ruby’s legs don’t look real. I’m already strong.) The fall photographs: a wall of leaves, stippled scarlet with saffron striations; Ruby and me at night, eating roasted pumpkin seeds on the picnic table near the creek—Merkels’ cottage in the background, lamplight in Mrs. Merkel’s sewing room. Another close-up picture of Aunt Lovey resting her cheek on our heads; it’s cold enough to see our breath. Then the winter shots: one photograph so white there appears to be no separation of earth or sky, just brilliant snow with a sun flare in the corner. Another picture spots the ragged flag on our fence post in the distance and a leafless tree so filled with black crows it looks alive—and sinister.

  Ruby and I have often said, “Imagine if we hadn’t grown up in Leaford but somewhere else.” Or imagine if we’d grown up with someone else. Or imagine if we’d grown up in another time, when people like us were exhibited or killed. How isolating—and strange! Which is not to say that our lives haven’t been, at times, isolated and strange.

  Aunt Lovey would scold Ruby and me, those times we whined that the world was unfair. “You’re lucky to be you,” she’d say, looking from me to my sister. “You girls are remarkable. Most people can’t say that.”

  Writing & Deadlines

  My laptop sits on a pillow at my left. I type quickly with my wrong hand. I sense that I’m naturally a right-handed person, but my right arm belongs to Ruby for all intents and purposes (when I was little I thought the term was “intensive purposes”), so I’m a reluctant lefty. My clumsiness annoys Ruby, who is both responsible and blameless.

  I started to write this book only a short time ago, and already my wrist begs a rest. But I can’t rest because I’m afraid that if I stop writing Leaford will vaporize, and with it all my memories. I thought my story’s path would be a straight one. A simple one. After all, it is the true story of my life, to the point I have already lived it, and for which I know even the most incidental detail. But the story isn’t straight. Or simple. And I see now, as I begin to think of the next chapter, that even the truth can spin out of control. My story. Ruby’s story. The story of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. The story of me, and we, and us, and them. The story of then. And the story of now. How can the story of me exist without all of it?

  Ruby feels alienated and like an outcast and hates this book already, though she hasn’t read a word. My sister doesn’t know how to use a computer (she’s so afraid of technology she won’t let me retire our VCR and buy a DVD player), so I’m not worried she might do something sneaky with my laptop, but it’s killing her not to know what I’m writing. She pretends to fall asleep at night, then tries to peek at my screen in her left periphery, her breath purposeful and wheezy, following none of the true pattern of whistle and pause and sigh and repeat beside which I’ve slumbered for twenty-nine years.

  We’ve promised each other that we won’t read what the other has written.

  Presuming that my sister is going to include chapters at all (I’ll believe it when I see it), Ruby’s work will be written in longhand and we’ll get Whiffer (our friend from the Leaford Library) or somebody to transcribe her pages. (Ruby thinks I’m infatuated with Whiffer, but Ruby is mistaken.) When and if Ruby writes her chapters, we’ll have a third party insert them where they might best be read. Maybe Dr. Ruttle will help us. I’ve been encouraging Ruby to write something. I gave her some yellow pads. But Ruby is somewhat lazy and would rather object than make amends.

  I’m writing in the evenings. With Ruby asleep and the night still around us, with the stars in the sky, the wind kissed by leaf fires, and a chill from the open window, it’s a good time to conjure. I’m filled with confidence when I begin, but by the end of a writing night I’m left to wonder if other writers feel the way I do—that with each letter, word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, I’m digging a toehold, gripping a rock, a fool on a mountainside, alone and ill-equipped, a disastrous fall more likely than a gloried ascent. Why did I start climbing? Where am I now? Who gives a shit if I reach the summit?

  I’ve given myself a deadline. Although I know it’s unusual to write a book, any book, quickly, I’ve calculated that, writing at my current pace of four pages a day, I could finish what I speculate will be a four-hundred-page book in approximately 113 working days. Adding some time for revising and a day off here and there for exhaustion or illness (or writer’s block—can you get that with an autobiography?), I believe I can complete this story of my life by Christmas, about seven months away. This thought comforts and inspires me.

  Ruby stirs. I know she’s cold, so I use my feet to kick the cover over her hopeless little legs. Ruby’s always cold. Even when we were children, we fought about the quilt. As I grew older, I found I could surrender my own comfort so effortlessly it didn’t qualify as sacrifice. The old patchwork quilt, with the entwined blue and red paisley hearts on a cream background, which covered our bed up until a few years ago, is threadbare from washing now, folded into a tattered square and crammed into the cupboard in the laundry room. I can’t bear to throw it out, knowing how Aunt Lovey suffered to make it, not being as skilled with needle and thread as her own mother had been. She’d designed the quilt for her marriage bed, the hearts representing her and Uncle Stash, joining forever as one. But on the eve of her wedding, Mother Darlensky presented Aunt Lovey with a white, lacy, old-fashioned bedspread, which her mother in Slovakia had made as a wedding gift to her, and Lovey felt obliged to us
e it instead. The day after Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had settled into their little bungalow on Chippewa Drive, the Slovak in-laws (who had been second cousins and should never have married, Aunt Lovey told us confidentially one night) came to inspect. When Mother Darlensky saw that Aunt Lovey had made the bed with the lacy white bedspread, she flew into a rage, telling her son that her daughter-in-law knew the heirloom was too precious to use. Out of spite for the miserable woman, Aunt Lovey made her bed with that god-awful bedspread for a full seven years. When Uncle Stash’s father died, Mother Darlensky moved to Ohio to live with her widowed sister, and Aunt Lovey drove to the Kmart to purchase a comforter with matching curtains that she could have sewn for half the money.

  When Ruby and I were four years old and beginning to master our situation, Aunt Lovey moved us to a “big girl’s bed.” She’d remembered the quilt with the entwined hearts and retrieved it from her cedar chest, realizing the quilt had never been meant for her and Stash but for me and Ruby. If she’d only known about us years ago, she’d say, she would have been spared the pain of thinking she’d never be a mother. After a thousand washings, I swear you can still smell cedar in the fabric of that old quilt.

  There has never been a possibility of my being separated from Ruby. We have known that it could not be, and declared that even if we could, we wouldn’t. Still, I have an elaborate fantasy life in which I am a singular woman. My right arm belongs to me. My right leg is the exact length of my left, and I tote nothing on my hip but a funky leather bag. My features have been surgically corrected and I have my sister’s pretty face. I am mysterious. I live alone in a small but chic apartment in Toronto with a view of the lake. I take long bubble baths with dozens of candles. I am a well-known author and I have a poet boyfriend (actually many boyfriends—not all poets) for whom I dress provocatively. (Oh yes, in this fantasy I also have large, shapely breasts.)