by Lori Lansens
I know what people mean when they say they feel weighed down by guilt. I feel like that now. Heavy. When Rose lifts me she struggles and grunts like when she’s doing free weights in physio. I think it used to be easier for her.
A long time ago we were examined by this famous brain doctor called Dr. Mau at this hospital in Philadelphia. I think Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were investigating the possibility of having us separated, but I don’t really know that for sure. One of the interns there that day asked something about me and called me the parasitic twin, and Dr. Mau was furious because that was not the correct term and the intern was obviously an idiot. There have been instances of parasitic twins, like this boy called Laloo, who had a pair of legs sticking out of his stomach, but that was not the case with Rose and me, as I am a whole person with a brain, and not just some appendage that only exists courtesy of my sibling.
I think we should make an appointment with Randy Togood, whom we went to Leaford Public School and Leaford Collegiate with, and who is a lawyer with an office near the library. We need to make a will. We’re not the Rockefellers, but there’ll be some money from the sale of the farm and the house on Chippewa. Nonna is in her eighties and she’d only leave it to her son, Nick, who is fifty-five and a pig, so forget that, but we have to leave it to someone. And, also, we should talk about what we want done with our remains.
Rose and I always talked openly about death when it wasn’t just a few months away. It never mattered before that we could not agree on our remains. I want to be cremated. I like the thought of becoming smoke and floating in the air, returning on a raindrop or something. Rose thinks we should donate our bodies to science. She likes the idea of hanging in glass at the Mütter Museum, which is a thought that actually makes me sick to my stomach.
So we made some headway with the birthday plans, but Rose keeps putting me off when I want to talk about our arrangements. She keeps saying, When I’m done with the book, when I’m done with the book. When I reminded Rose that we could die tomorrow, she said we could not die tomorrow (and why would I want to curse us like that anyway?) because she still has hundreds of pages to write and hasn’t even written the story of how Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey met yet.
I’ll just say that the story of how Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey met is one of my favorite stories, but I don’t get why it’s in Rose’s autobiography. She said the story of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash is a parallel to the story of her and me. And that our story doesn’t even exist without theirs. And that I would know that stories about different people can exist together if I ever picked up a book that was about something other than Neutrals on the Thames.
If the book is torturing her so much, she should let it go. She said when the book is done, so is she. That kind of drama-queen stuff is really, really, really annoying. Also, how am I supposed to feel about that? When her book is done, so am I? And what about my contribution to all of this?
Rose says that leaving something artistic behind, like a story or a painting or a sculpture, is the closest thing you can get to immortality. I like to draw, but I don’t see how a few lines on a page are going to make me feel better about dying. Still, you often hear about writers who have strangers begging them to write the story of their life (or at least to help them get published), so there must be something to it. Aunt Lovey used to say that everyone has a story to tell and that even ordinary people have wild things happen. Maybe she was right.
I wish Aunt Lovey was here. I miss her and Uncle Stash so much.
I am not enjoying the things I used to, like scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese or wearing my salmon-colored cashmere that Rose bought me last Christmas. When I ask myself what I’m living for, the answer is my sister. But Rose is so far away.
Yesterday I asked Rose if she ever felt bad about Mrs. Merkel. She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about. Bad about what with Mrs. Merkel? I reminded her how Larry Merkel’s bike used to be in the Leaford Museum beside the huge pictures of us. I reminded her of the poem about Larry Merkel that she wrote for composition class and how Mrs. Merkel read it when it fell out of Rose’s book bag when we went over to deliver the eggs.
After Mrs. Merkel read the poem, she looked at Rose like she’d stolen something. Then she folded the paper and put it in the pocket of her apron and said, This is mine.
Rose is one to stick up for herself, but she didn’t know what to say, so I said, Well, it’s Rose’s poem, really, because Rose wrote it.
Mrs. Merkel stared at Rose, and she said really slow, as if Rose was an occupational student, she said, This is not yours. It is not yours.
Rose swallowed hard, then Mrs. Merkel started crying and Cyrus started barking and we left. Rose said she was okay, even though I knew she was shaken up. Then she made me recite the poem with her all the way home so she could remember it and write it down again. (I believe I must have said that poem 150 times, then many times after that, and even now the thing will not leave my head.)
Lawrence
I thought you’d find me over there,
when I was taken by the air,
flung against the earth awake,
where rocks engrave the silver lake.
Mother hear me I am nigh
and long to hear a lullaby.
Sing to me so I can dream
of dragons, knights, and soft ice cream.
Then bury me where I may rest
for here I am no longer guest
but ghost who wanders futilely
looking for my apple tree.
When Rose submitted it to the yearbook, she didn’t sign her own name and she changed the title to something else. Rose and I did not agree on her submitting that poem to the yearbook. I thought, considering how Mrs. Merkel had reacted, she should have kept that poem to herself. She had at least twenty more poems in her scrapbook. She read them all to me at least once. But Rose said “Lawrence” was her best. I remember her saying Mrs. Merkel would never see it published in the yearbook, and, besides, she’d taken Larry’s name from the title.
The day after the yearbooks came out, Larry Merkel’s bike was stolen from the Leaford Museum. Everyone expected Mrs. Merkel to shatter because of it. Rose and I were the only ones who knew she was the thief. And we were the only ones who noticed that the huge rock under the apple tree had been moved and the earth dug up around it. Somehow we knew she’d moved the rock. Alone at night. And we admired her for that. She’d buried the bike under the apple tree. I always wondered if she thought Larry’s spirit was speaking to her through Rose’s poem. I’m not being sarcastic about that. I believe it.
Mrs. Merkel asked Uncle Stash to deliver the eggs from then on and we hardly ever saw her, except from a distance, out with her dog.
I was thinking about who would attend our funeral. Dr. Ruttle and Richie and his family. Nonna and Nick. Roz and Rupert. Whiffer and Lutie. I realized the birthday party guest list would be practically the same for the funeral. The Merkels would come to the funeral but not the birthday party. Crazy Berb Foyle would come. Berb’s like that. Frankie Foyle? Would Frankie come? (Frankie moved to Toronto to be a cop after graduation, but I think he kept in touch with his dad.) Even though I imagine Berb would pass along the news, I doubt Frankie would come. Remember, he didn’t know about Rose’s baby, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing that happened with us, which I’m sure Rose has gone into gory detail about, is a memory he’d sooner forget.
Our Michigan relations would likely just send an arrangement. And a chintzy arrangement, knowing them. We don’t really have any close relations, except Rose’s baby, of course. Taylor is around twelve now. Her name is only Taylor to Rose and me. To the people in her real world, she’s whatever her adoptive parents named her. Hopefully it’s something cute, like Courtney or Alisha.
She’s not all that much younger than Rose was when she gave birth. (Aunt Lovey told Rose to go ahead and name her, though it was almost certain the adoptive parents would not choose to keep the name.) Rose na
med Taylor after our birth mother, which I think hurt Aunt Lovey, but you can understand not wanting to name a baby girl Lovey in this day and age. Aunt Lovey came from a family where girls were named after either flowers or places. Aunt Lovey was named after Livonia, Michigan. Her sisters’ names were Poppy, Salle, Iris, and Daisy. Aunt Lovey’s mother’s name was Verbeena because the grandmother was addicted to Lemon Verbeena tea. (Rose said maybe she smoked it instead of drinking it.)
Aunt Lovey told a million stories about her mother, Verbeena, but in all of the stories she sounds more than just eccentric. She sounds like she was right off her rocker. Like, a long time ago when she was a young mother, Verbeena was trying to cure her second-oldest daughter (which is Aunt Lovey’s sister Poppy) of fingernail biting. Poppy was around eight years old. Verbeena tried bitter herb paste on her fingers, and she even tried electrical tape on her fingernails, but nothing worked. She was going to ask the priest for advice one Sunday, but on their way to the church, Verbeena’s father died. He was laid out in the parlor because that was the custom back then. Verbeena brought Poppy into the parlor to pay her respects to her grandfather, and while Poppy was standing there at the casket, Verbeena suddenly grabbed both the little girl’s hands and stuffed them inside her own dead grandfather’s mouth.
Poppy just shrugged when Rose and I asked if the story was true, like she didn’t think what her mother did was so terrible. She said she never bit her fingernails again. Aunt Lovey used to say, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as if we didn’t know.
I think Taylor is a cute name for a boy or girl.
We don’t know who Taylor was adopted by, so we don’t know where she lives. We went to stay with Aunt Poppy in Michigan so Rose could have the baby. No one in Leaford except Dr. Ruttle knew about the pregnancy. The adoption was arranged by Poppy’s husband, who was Polish and worked at Ford. As far as we know, there are no records. Which Rose has probably already explained. Over the years Rose has talked about finding her daughter, but the part of her that doesn’t want to must keep winning out. The part of her that knows it would completely flip out a preteen girl to learn that she’s the daughter of one of the oldest surviving craniopagus twins. We talk about Taylor sometimes. Once I said, Wouldn’t it be neat if Taylor grew up to be a writer like you? and Rose shocked me by saying, Maybe she’ll grow up to be a singer like her Aunt Ruby. I like to sing, but I’m not a singer. Still, that was a sweet thing for my sister to say.
I never thought it was right that Rose didn’t tell Frankie Foyle about the baby, but no one gave me a vote. Also, Aunt Lovey was dead set against Frankie’s knowing, and she had the biggest influence of anyone. Rose has regrets, but I think she did the right thing. What kind of life could that little baby have had with us, especially with Rose only a kid herself? Aunt Lovey told us that God had a plan for Taylor, just like he had for us, which was to find the right parents, who were not always the birth parents. Rose knew in her heart that a family with a mother and a father, and brothers and sisters who were not conjoined, would be the best way for Taylor to grow up. I think her sacrifice showed a lot of courage and love. But you don’t get over a loss like that. Maybe there are no losses you really get over. No matter how things play out in the end.
You
Stanislaus Darlensky was twenty-two years old, slender and movie-star handsome with a helmet of curly black hair, when his boat docked in Halifax in the summer of 1946. He, along with his mother and father, boarded a train bound west for Windsor, Ontario. In Windsor, the Darlensky family would have opportunities and a better life, and might begin to escape the unimaginable loss of Stash’s two older brothers, who’d perished in the Grozovo mining disaster just six months earlier. The Darlenskys were to have their own apartment in a building owned by Mr. Lipsky, a family friend from the homeland. There was a job waiting for Stash’s father as a meat cutter at a Slovak butcher shop downtown and an apprenticeship there for Stash too. The daughter of one of the church leaders (and, more important, a store owner), a raven-haired beauty by all accounts, had been tagged as a possible wife. There were many Slovak people in Windsor (that’s why his father had chosen it), and they all wanted to help the Darlenskys.
The journey from Slovakia had been long, with frequent trials, and the ocean crossing hadn’t been the worst of it. The trip from Halifax to Windsor, on a hot train with engine trouble, nearly killed his middle-aged parents. Gray and ill, not having eaten more than some dry black bread for two days, they had arrived at the station, disheartened to find there was no one to greet them. Stash was sent to the counter, since he knew the most English words, to inquire how they might get in touch with the relative, an uncle of his mother’s, who was supposed to collect them.
Stash approached the counter, surprised to see a pretty blonde with a spray of freckles across her nose perspiring behind the wicket. The girl, who was about his age, was wearing a brown skirt and a yellow sweater so snug it made Stash warm. She was reading a book, licking the edge of a long thin straw, which she occasionally dipped into a glass of lemonade. In front of her sat a cookie on a cloth napkin. Young Stash, starving Stash, admittedly had as much interest in the cookie as the girl.
Leaning an elbow on the counter, Stash lifted the left corner of his mouth and narrowed his eyes, a somewhat menacing look, but one the girls in Grozovo had found irresistible. He waited for the pretty girl to look up, but so absorbed was the blonde in the book that she didn’t notice Stash leaning there and was startled when he cleared his throat. She closed her book and looked at him, smiling broadly. “You gotta be Stanislaus.” (She’d even pronounced it correctly.) “Am I right? Am I saying your name right? But he said they call you something else.”
Stash understood enough English to know that this girl was saying his name, and enough about facial expressions to be confused that she seemed to know him, when, of course, she did not. He nodded oafishly. “Stash. Me. I.”
She saw how he was struggling with the language and spoke more slowly. “Well, your uncle—whose name I will not even attempt to say—has been here and gone and here, and at the moment he is gone again. He asked me to say that he would be back.”
Stash liked this girl’s confidence, and her curves.
She appraised the young foreigner, grinning. “Your uncle said there’d be a couple and a boy. I wouldn’t exactly call you a boy.”
He nodded, though he didn’t understand, and glanced at the cookie on the napkin.
“It’s got nuts. You want it?”
Stash took the proffered cookie and crammed it into his mouth, not wanting to let his mother see he’d taken food from a stranger.
“I like Pecan Sandies, which is what my Gram makes, but Gram’s got the gallstones, so the neighbor lady did the baking this week and she made Wallys, which are fine and dandy if you like walnuts, which I don’t.”
Uncle Stash chewed and swallowed, having no idea what the blond vixen was saying but appreciating her smile and enjoying the quality of her voice. He wanted to hear more, but the swinging oak doors to the train station opened and his parents rushed to greet the miserly old man who hobbled in. “Dobre den. Thanks for coming. It’s so good of you. You’re so kind. We owe you so much,” his parents gushed in Slovak, so grateful Stash wondered if they might drop to their knees and completely humiliate him in front of the blond girl.
The old Slovak man did not smile, but kissed Stash’s mother on both cheeks and patted his father on the back. “That’s your uncle,” the girl said, crinkling her nose. “Guess you better go.” She returned her attention to her book.
In the parking lot, the old Slovak uncle led the shrunken family to a shiny black Ford, which his mother and father quickly, effusively, pronounced the best car they had ever seen. Stash thought the car spectacular too, but didn’t care to add his voice to the flurry of compliments. He climbed into the front passenger seat, hardly minding his mother’s hand swatting the back of his head, hardly hearing her whisper, “Say, ‘Thank you,’ say, ‘Tha
nk you, Uncle.’” Stash prepared to drink in the New World.
The uncle didn’t inquire about their awful trip, which was just as well because Stash didn’t want to relive it through his mother’s canned imagination. He cringed when his mother gestured at the busy city streets and sniped in Slovak, “The women here all paint their faces.”
“What’s that?” his father asked incredulously, pointing at the towering buildings across the wide black river.
“That’s Detroit,” the uncle answered in English. “Tiger baseball.” He took his hands off the steering wheel long enough to make a gesture of holding a baseball bat, then swung and clucked his tongue. “Another home run for Charlie Gehringer!” he said, showing off his North American accent. Then he launched into a sudden, surprising rant, not about Detroit or baseball, as Stash would have liked, but about how his youngest son wanted to abbreviate his Slovak name to something that sounded more English. (Uncle Stash would do the same thing within a few years, changing Darlensky to Darlen, an act for which his mother and father would have disowned him if he hadn’t been their only surviving son.)
As they neared their destination, the Slovak neighborhood in the west end, Stash admired the two- and three-story brick houses with their sloping slate roofs, palaces compared to the squat stone huts they’d left in Grozovo. And there were hundreds of cars too, while in his hometown there had been just a dozen vehicles, and most of them trucks.
The Slovak uncle inched up to a stoplight. In the sleek auto next to them, three young men Stash’s age laughed at some hilarious joke, then sped away, blasting the Ford with a plume of exhaust, fully intoxicating young Stanislaus. On the street, a group of young children were splashing in a spouting fountain, and a throng of beautiful, unescorted women poured out of a buzzing diner. Everywhere there was activity. Everywhere there was laughter. And the stores, so many, with surprising and rich goods spilling onto the streets.
