The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  I know that even if a surgical separation had been possible, the truth of being an individual would be somewhat less dazzling. I suppose I would move to Toronto, though I’d likely never afford an apartment near the lake. I would try to get a job as a writer, any kind of writer, even in advertising. I would like to have my face cosmetically corrected. I could conceivably lead a normal life. Just to be clear—my fantasy is not so much the product of burning desire but a distraction from reality.

  I was thinking of when Ruby and I were children, sleeping under the entwined-hearts quilt in the old orange farmhouse on Rural Route One. I was thinking of the soft bed beneath the open window. The lowing of livestock. The stinking sweet air. The mice in the corner under our chair. The crows in the field. The kittens wet born. And the world beyond the whispering corn.

  In sleep, my sister and I found a common breath. In dreams, we knew the moon.

  I’VE DECIDED TO proceed by telling this autobiographical story more or less chronologically. (That is a more difficult decision, and more complicated task, than you might imagine.)

  Holy Ghosts

  Holy Cross Church, at the intersection of Chippewa Drive and Tecumseh Road, was the first Catholic church in Leaford, built by the French settlers. The aisle measures ninety feet from door to altar. The honey oak floors and darker oak pews were carved from the trees cleared to make space for the small church cemetery on the sunny west side. There are six spires, two cupolas, gold-leaf frames, and enough precious icons that the doors need to be locked before and after Mass. One hundred fifty years ago Aunt Lovey’s ancestors drove a horse and buggy to worship at Holy Cross. Men prayed to be led from temptation. Women prayed for better men.

  Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had both been raised Catholic, and they dutifully, eagerly, made the pilgrimage to Holy Cross each Sunday to hear Father Pardo invoke the Holy Ghost in his slurry old-man voice. It was widely known that Pardo took sacramental wine for breakfast and had a nip on nights he couldn’t sleep, but he was agreeable enough and not often noticeably drunk. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had been pillars of Holy Cross for years before Father Pardo was transferred (or banished) to Leaford. Aunt Lovey was president of the Women’s League, organizing day trips to nursing homes and craft shows. Uncle Stash passed the collection plate and knew how to linger without appearing to beg. They would share a glance when Father Pardo stumbled up the steps or when he snickered or snorted at some inappropriate moment, but Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash would not desert their church.

  After Mass one day, when Ruby and I were nearing our first birthday, Aunt Lovey cornered Father Pardo at the rusty gate by the lilac bushes and asked, as she had been asking repeatedly for weeks, about a date for our baptism. It was a detail Aunt Lovey had overlooked during those intense early months of parenthood—one that suddenly consumed her after Ruby had mysteriously stopped breathing one night and my frightened cries had awoken Uncle Stash.

  (Some people think that Ruby and I are cursed to live conjoined. But think of how blessed we are to be so connected that we can and did and do cry out, “There’s something wrong! Help!” Imagine if a husband knew the instant his wife stopped loving him and could bring the marriage back to life before it was too late. If a mother could see the second her child took the wrong path and call while he was still close enough to hear “Come back! You’re going the wrong way!” Ruby and I endure because of our connectedness. Maybe we all do. How can that be a curse?)

  The old priest hesitated, frowning at having to state the obvious. “It’s not for me to judge. But some of the older parishioners, a few of the older parishioners think that she”—he cast a glare at Ruby and me wriggling in the oversize pram nearby—“is . . .” He pulled Aunt Lovey farther from the crowd, and from us, into the quiet of the gated church garden. “It might be better if we wait until after her surgery,” he said, patting her arm. “I’m sure things will go well.”

  Aunt Lovey informed Father Pardo that there would be no surgery, could be no surgery, no matter what he thought or what rumors he’d heard. She’d been proud of her restraint. “Let’s talk again when you’re sober, Father,” she’d said. “I’m sure you’ll see that my girls are perfect the way they are. God made them, after all.”

  Under the influence of several rather large goblets of wine, Father Pardo told Aunt Lovey, regrettably, “God makes bowel movements too, but I wouldn’t baptize one.”

  Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash considered firing off letters to the cardinal and the pope, but their faith in the Church was too completely destroyed. Not so their faith in God. Ruby and I were taught about God as we were growing up, using the basic constructs of Christianity—Love one another, Do unto others, Don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife—though we never again set foot in a church. Uncle Stash would always add to our lessons in faith that we should question authority and follow our own instincts, and that even the Bible is mostly fiction. Aunt Lovey would wag her finger and say, “Don’t believe God’s some old man with a beard. God could be a woman. Or Chinese.” It was all very confusing. Still is.

  Ruby and I would perch on the side of the bed, where our entwined-hearts quilt had been neatly folded back, to say our nighttime prayers. (It was Aunt Lovey’s job to put us to bed. Uncle Stash was old-fashioned that way. Ruby and I kissed his whiskery chin as he lounged on the La-Z-Boy, then we joined Aunt Lovey in our room after we’d brushed our teeth.) I don’t know how many prayers God heard, but Aunt Lovey heard every one—except one—until the day she died. And in all that time, and the thousands of prayers, she never suggested an edit or a correction beyond “More gratefulness. Fewer requests.”

  (An aside: If Aunt Lovey hated self-pity, she hated ingratitude worse. One summer day when we were children, Ruby complained about being bored: “I’m bored. It’s so boring here. There’s nothing to do.” Aunt Lovey reminded Ruby of her many blessings, but Ruby kept it up. “It’s boring, boring, boring on the farm.” Aunt Lovey didn’t respond directly but disappeared down the cobwebbed stairs and hauled the camping cooler up out of the basement. She filled the cooler with Popsicles and Oreos and instructed Ruby and me to get in the car. Ruby thought we were going to the lake for a picnic and was delighted that lunch would be her two favorite foods. Even when we turned away from the lake instead of toward it, Ruby was hopeful, thinking that Aunt Lovey had planned a picnic at the conservation area instead of the lake. But we sped past the gates to the conservation area and drove on farther, and when we finally stopped it was near a stinky ditch beside a field of high corn. Aunt Lovey got out of the car. She went around to the back and took the cooler from the trunk. Then she passed by our door without stopping to let us out. Ruby and I watched as she gazed out over the cornfield. She brought her hand to her mouth and whistled shrilly, using two fingers. That woman could whistle! Ruby wanted to get out of the car. She knocked on the passenger window, calling, “Let us out, Aunt Lovey! Let us out!” But Aunt Lovey shook her head. My sister and I watched as one, then two, then four, then ten, then more Mennonite children than I could count emerged from the shadowy rows of corn, with sunburned faces and shining eyes, smiling shyly at Aunt Lovey, moving toward the cooler, not like animals, not like the children at school would have acted over a cooler full of treats, but slowly, each child taking one Popsicle and one cookie, before disappearing back into the corn. At the end, when the children were gone, Aunt Lovey had one Popsicle left, which she broke in half for Ruby and me. It was banana-flavored, not Ruby’s favorite, but she didn’t dare complain.)

  Every other night I went first with my prayers. “God bless Ruby. And Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. And Nonna. And Mr. Merkel. And Mrs. Merkel. And Larry. And our birth mother. God, please make Ruby not have to have a colostomy bag. Ever. Please make peace in the world. Please help me find my green-and-yellow speller.” (We’d been cut down to three postscripts one night after Ruby asked God to please give the poppies more sun in the backyard and make the strawberries ripen faster, then launched into a litany of reques
ts regarding the well-being of the remainder of the family farm, the seed-corn crop, the weather, and finally concluded with hope for someone to dust the displays at the Leaford Museum.) After Aunt Lovey died, Ruby and I stopped praying out loud, and somewhere along the line I stopped praying altogether. I wonder if it was then that I stopped believing in God. If only I’d been connected to Him the way I am to my sister, God might have called out to me that I’d gone too far away.

  Maybe He did. Maybe I just heard Him.

  I was thinking of those childhood prayers, Aunt Lovey’s soft cheek, Ruby’s quick road to slumber. In those dark, quiet moments when only I was awake, my prayers private and real, crickets courting in the weeds under our window, the smell of fish coming from the river not awful like it can be but glorious, I’d notice things: how Ruby smelled different because she was on a certain medication, or how smooth her hair felt when it fell between us, or how lovely the weight of her hand resting on my collarbone. It would occur to me how deeply I loved my sister, and how profoundly I was loved by her. I think I found something of God in that. And in the way Aunt Lovey kissed me. And in the sound of Uncle Stash’s voice when he said, “My girls.”

  And then there was Sunday school with Nonna.

  On Sunday mornings, while Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash tended the bungalow they rented out in town, our Nonna (Mrs. Todino) fed us Lune Moons and taught us about God. Nonna’s God was not female or Chinese, and His authority was absolute. He was old and bearded and vengeful, meting out punishment like the judge on People’s Court, sentencing masturbators to arthritis and sending a scourge of termites to the porch of a local man who sold Nonna a vacuum she didn’t want or need. (Nonna refused to take responsibility for being sucked in—so to speak—by the vacuum salesman.)

  “Say again why Jesus came to earth,” I would ask.

  Nonna was impatient. “He come to suffer.”

  “I know, but why again?”

  “To teach the lesson, Rose. He come to save the people.”

  “But what’s the lesson in suffering?”

  “The lesson is to be Christian, Rose. You gonna live the way Jesus live. To be Christian is mean to love everybody.”

  Except, apparently, the vacuum guy.

  “To be Christian is to go to church. You take Christ body. You take Christ blood. Then he gonna be inside. Inside you heart.”

  Ruby was alarmed by the discrepancies between Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey’s lessons and Nonna’s on Chippewa Drive, eventually deciding that because Nonna was Italian, and the pope lived in Rome, she must be deferred to as the expert in all matters of God.

  “Can’t God be in our heart if we don’t go to church?” Ruby asked her once, fretfully. “Can’t God be with us even if the priest don’t make us the baptize?” (Ruby said it the way Nonna did.)

  Nonna shook her head sadly. We’d had numerous discussions on the topic of baptism, which Nonna explained like this: “The priest put the water on you head. It gonna glow like the Holy Spirit for all you life and even when you dead. If you don’t gonna get baptize you don’t gonna glow, then God is don’t gonna see you in heaven.”

  Some Sunday mornings we were stopped at the traffic light on Tecumseh and could catch a glimpse through the double-glass doors of Father Pardo in his purple satin robes squinting from the glare of his marble altar, his bulbous nose gobbling the smaller features of his face. Aunt Lovey would clear her throat when the light turned. “Go, Stash. It’s green, Stash. Honey. Go.”

  I LOST MY first tooth just days before our eighth birthday. (Most things have happened slightly later than normal for Ruby and me.) I had pushed with my tongue till it stung and ripped the ragged edge that still clung to my gums, then spit the tooth out on the floor. I put it under my pillow, delighted to find four quarters in its place the following morning. I was proud of my slippery speech and eager to show Nonna my quarters, and my gap, when she came to our birthday party that Saturday afternoon. Ruby didn’t yet have one loose tooth, and I knew she burned with envy.

  For the party, I had chosen a purple blouse with jeans, and Ruby was wearing a white shirt and a sky-blue skirt over altered black tights—a sort of uniform, which she still wears, even in summer, to conceal her deformed legs and clubfeet. We used clothespins to secure a plastic cloth to the table in the backyard, where we set out lemonade and barbecue chips (plain corn chips for Ruby) in plastic bowls. Uncle Stash had driven into town to collect Nonna, so there was no doorbell to signal her arrival, no warning that she was near, and certainly no portent whatsoever that she was bringing someone with her.

  My sister saw him first. Adrenaline coursed through my body as Ruby’s flight instinct sparked. My sister shifted swiftly so I could turn and I saw him too, alone and small at the end of the hall, resplendent in the amber light from the pantry’s tinted window. There was something odd about him—not in the physical way that Ruby and I are an oddity, but something in his torn little eyes—that said he floated above it all in some universe of his own. At first I thought he might be a ghost, though I’d never seen one before, and in fact don’t believe they exist. Then Nonna appeared behind the boy, shoving two brightly wrapped packages into his arms, swatting him gently on the side of his head, urging, “Say happy birthday to the girls!”

  The boy, Mrs. Todino’s only son’s only son, had been told about us, but seemed quite unprepared for such a face-to-face-to-face. He did not say happy birthday. He did not speak at all but stared at us, openmouthed, appearing to grow smaller instead of larger as Nonna pushed him toward us down the hall. Aunt Lovey seemed as surprised as we were to see the boy. She shared a look with Uncle Stash.

  Ryan Todino was tiny for nine, with inchworm bald patches leeching his shorn blond head and eyes that were barely slits with a strange changing color. He wore too-big cutoff shorts and a T-shirt with ironing marks. His lips were flaky, his skin pink.

  “This my grandson, Ryan.” Nonna beamed, patting the boy’s head. “This my Nick’s boy.”

  The boy, close enough that we could smell he’d eaten maple syrup at Nonna’s, stared at us, still and strange and quiet.

  Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey looked confused, for they knew that Nonna’s son, Nick, lived in Windsor and that Nick was estranged from his wife (who’d moved to Ipperwash), and they also knew that Nonna hadn’t seen or heard anything of her grandson since Ryan was two years old. Plus, this boy looked nothing like the curly-haired cherub in the pictures on Mrs. Todino’s TV.

  Nonna repeated, “It’s Ryan. He come from the Ipperwash. It’s Nick’s boy!”

  (In all the years they lived on Chippewa Drive, and all the years they didn’t, Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey never set eyes on Nick Todino. Uncle Stash drove Nonna to the train station several times a year to board the VIA to Windsor to visit him, but he never once made the trip to Leaford, though he worked at Chrysler’s then and most surely had a car of his own.)

  Uncle Stash began to perspire and suggested everyone step outside to catch a breeze. At first there was none to be caught. But then the wheat trembled a little, and a sudden gust tipped the plastic chip bowl onto the table. Ruby and I moved to put it right, unsure whether to return the fallen chips to the bowl or brush them onto the grass. Glancing up, I noticed Ryan Todino staring, maybe not so much staring as studying Ruby and me, looking at the area of our conjoinment not furtively, the way most people do, but boldly and with what seemed like admiration. I felt Ruby shudder.

  Ryan looked at me, then shifted to look at Ruby. “You have different hair,” he said accusingly. His voice was high but croaky. “You’re reddish. And you’re darker and straighter.”

  “So?” Ruby spit, thinking the boy meant to be cruel.

  “The old lady said you were identical twins.”

  Ruby was horrified. “That’s not an old lady; that’s your Nonna.”

  Ryan shrugged. “How can you be identical if your hair’s not identical? Identical is identical.”

  I was secretly pleased he’d noticed. “Why
do you care?”

  “I don’t care.”

  The adults were whispering about Ryan’s estranged parents in maddeningly inaudible tones. (I find scandal irresistible.) Punctuating the conversation, sounding more like a refusal than a name, Nick, Nick, Nick. There was no suggestion of opening our birthday gifts, tossed carelessly on a dirty plastic chair, and no mooning over the birthday cake, which was a layer of chocolate and a layer of white. I ate the chips that had fallen out of the bowl. Ruby simmered with indignation that Ryan Todino, who would not stop staring at our joined heads, was ruining our eighth birthday.

  Ruby tried calling to Aunt Lovey a couple of times, but she waved us off. “Go play for a bit, girls. Show Ryan the bridge over the creek.”

  The rickety bridge over the shallow creek was where my sister and I spent a good part of our childhood. We’d sit for hours, watching the mud fish and tadpoles, Ruby chattering about the girls at school, me a million miles away, skywriting a poem for future consideration. The bridge was our special place. We did not want to bring Ryan Todino to our bridge.

  Ruby and I walked the ledge of the creek, where Aunt Lovey encouraged a small wildflower meadow to grow, and where bloomed the asters and foxglove and purple field thistle and pinweed and goldenrod, and where fluttered the dragonflies and damselflies, and where, if we stayed too long, the chiggers bit us silly. We listened to the frogs croak among cattails. We didn’t stop to turn and look for Ryan until we reached the bridge.

  I noticed Mrs. Merkel in her garden and waved, but she pretended not to see me. My sister and I sat on the side of the bridge, where we could spy on the orange farmhouse and the adults in the distance. Uncle Stash had said he’d call when the hot dogs were ready, but he hadn’t even lit the charcoal in the barbecue yet. In a moment we felt the bridge shake. Ryan settled down behind us, dangling his legs the opposite way, facing Merkels’ cottage.