by Lori Lansens
Rose and I have always liked visiting museums. Especially the county ones. The history of this area of southwestern Ontario is very interesting because we are so close to America, yet we are not Americans. And so many things have happened between our two countries. Southwestern Ontario was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, where black American slaves found freedom and built whole towns and communities. Plus, there was the Battle of the Thames between the Americans and the British, where the Indians were on the British side. And the great Indian prophet Chief Tecumseh was killed right near the Thames River in Chatham. And the missionary village of Fairfield was burned to the ground by American troops. In the roaring twenties, half the people around here were involved in bootlegging. We did not have a local history class in grade school, but Aunt Lovey knew everything about the local history of Leaford and Chatham and the whole county because the Tremblays were among the earliest settlers and they passed down their family stories, which also ended up being history.
When I was putting together all the sketches I made of the artifacts I’d found over the years and updating my map of the farm, Aunt Lovey wrote out a poem for me—something about how people don’t really die—something about a dead man’s embers. Rose will remember it. I’ll get her to write it down in one of her chapters.
So, anyway, Rose and I both like museums and we both like history, and since we’re part of Baldoon County history, being craniopagus twins born during a fluke tornado, I joked with Rose that if her autobiography does not get published, she should leave it to the Leaford Museum for when it opens back up, and people could read bits of it if they wanted. She got huffy and said, You don’t write a book to have bits read.
I thought bits would be better than nothing. Shows you what I know about writing.
Anyway, we’re too old for Disney World, and Paris is not meant to be, but the Indian museum is a place I enjoy visiting, and it’s a place I’d like to go again. I’d also like to say good-bye to Errol Osler, though I won’t necessarily say it like it’s final. Rose wants to visit the museum too. She’s never been quite as interested in our Native history as I am, but she likes Errol. She says he’s a good character study. What a way to talk about a person!
Before she closed her eyes tonight, Rose said she regretted that she has not done something heroic in her life. Well, it’s not like she can suddenly climb a tree and save a cat, or go to medical school and begin some important cancer research.
But Rose has been my sister.
I think that’s heroic.
A couple of nights ago, Rose set her computer aside but forgot to shut it down. In the morning, before she realized it was still on, I read a line that said something like “I could not have been more loved, but I could have loved more.” I hope all her writing is not that freakin’ boring.
I was saving my new blue blouse for laying out, but I think I’ll wear it to the museum instead.
I made maps and wrote the location of all my finds. I sketched pictures of all the artifacts. I gave the stuff over to the Leaford Museum, but I kept the map and the sketches, and I still have them. I want to give them to Errol Osler.
The best thing I ever found was an intact pipe where the stem looked like a bird body and the bowl looked like a bird head. A crane, I think. Or a heron. I didn’t find the bird effigy pipe in the fields in the spring, like most of my other Indian artifacts. I found it in the fall, when we were just sitting on the bridge to Merkels’, waiting for herons. I saw the bird head poking out of the dry dirt at the top of the bank of the creek. We went down to investigate, and I think even Rose was excited about seeing the pipe because you could tell it was something old and rare. Rose kicked off her shoe, using her toes to move the dirt from the thing without destroying it, and then she curled her toes around it and lifted it up and gave it to me. (Obviously it’s hard for us to bend down, but Rose is really good with her feet and toes, and her balance is amazing, especially since she’s so weighed down. She’s really quite the athlete, but only the people really close to us would get that.)
We cleaned the dirt off the pipe and we went back to sit on the bridge, and Rosie and I played this game of pretending we were Indian sisters from hundreds of years ago. We passed the pipe back and forth, pretending to take puffs of tobacco, though we weren’t sure if the pipe was a leisure pipe for personal use or a peace pipe for rituals.
Another great thing I found was a kit—well at least I call it a kit. There was a flint, and a half-chipped arrowhead, and a round of sandstone, and a large grooved stone ready to be fitted to a handle. And a stone mortar and pestle. Errol Osler said it all must have been wrapped up in a pouch or something. I found the things within a couple inches of each other, which tells me they were together, so that’s why I call it a kit, but of course the leather pouch would have disintegrated long ago. Rose and I tried to figure out what had happened and how the kit got left or lost. Rose wrote a short story about the pouch, imagining that it had belonged to a teenage Indian girl and that she lost it while running away from home to marry a boy from the Delaware tribe at Fairfield. Rose wrote the story as a diary of a runaway, pretending that she was the teenage Indian runaway, which I loved. I thought it was a really good story, and Rose was really proud of it. Aunt Lovey said it was the best thing Rose had ever written. But our English teacher gave her a D and wrote a note in red pen saying Rose was a good writer but that she should stick to things she knows. And then she wrote, It’s not a good idea to cross racial boundaries when you are writing. Especially don’t do it when you are writing in the first-person voice. You could offend and upset many people who have more right to tell a certain story than you do.
Rose has never been one to suffer in silence. She was steaming for most of the afternoon and whispering to me about her story all during science, so we almost got sent out of the room. At the end of the day, we went up to the English teacher’s desk, and Rose challenged the teacher about her D. Rose was so mad she was shaking. The teacher thought Rose was really nervy for challenging the grade. She said things about how, even though Rose is part of a minority culture because of our deformity, she should not be exploiting other people in her writing, and that she should be telling her own stories, not those of someone else. Rose argued that it could not be someone else’s story because the story didn’t exist without her. But the teacher did not change her grade.
Rose is still snoring, but it doesn’t bother me. It makes me love her more. I love that saying My cup runneth over. That’s how I feel about Rose right in this moment. Like I can’t even contain my feelings for her. Funny how that happens, that you just feel this intense love for a person because of the way they’re snoring. Or the way they say your name. Also, my sister is vulnerable when she is asleep, and she does not let herself be that way in life. When she’s sleeping, she feels more like my child than my sister, though I know that sounds extremely weird.
A couple of people have mentioned how well we’re dealing with our situation and how optimistic and strong we seem. They say it to us, but they mean me, and even Rose knows that. Rose has not been herself. How could she be?
I think my beliefs are helping me deal with our current situation. I just know that the end is not the end. Something in me is energy and was not created and can’t be destroyed. That’s a fact. And something in Rose is indestructible too. So I know that I will come here again. And in some way or other, Rose and I will still be attached, like we are now and like we’ve always been.
I wish Rose could believe in something.
Writing
Words leak from my brain. Seep out my ear. Burble from my crooked mouth. Splash on my shirt. Trickle into my keyboard. Pool on my warped parquet floor. At least they’re not gushing from my heart. Or, God forbid, my ass. I catch the words as they fall. My hands smell. And the place is a wreck. From all the spilled words.
It is mid-September, and my sister and I have been greeted by fog each morning for three days straight. The warmed-by-summer eart
h meets the chill of a fresh fall night, and the fog that results from their union is very dense and gray. Uncle Stash used to say it was a “fairy fog,” which is mystical and beyond Mother Nature’s intervention. That is where the fairies live. Not the beautiful winged fairies that advise heroes and rescue princesses, but devilish hoofed ones that cause loss and chaos. At least, that’s how Uncle Stash told it. (Though I always had the feeling that the Leaford fairies were not as cunning or mean as the fairies of his Slovak youth.) Uncle Stash said you can see the fairies in the fog if you look hard enough. And they can bring you luck if you catch one of their eyes before they catch one of yours.
I remember when Uncle Stash first told Ruby and me about the fairy fog, walking us out to our phallic silver bus shelter on a late September day to wait for the yellow bus to take us to school. When he was a small child in Grozovo, he told us, he’d caught the eye of a fairy in the fog early one morning while walking the ducks to the pond. That afternoon he’d found a koruna on the road, which he gave to his mother. That evening he’d found considerably more meat in his soup than did his two older brothers. “It was good day,” Stash said. “My mother was happy. ‘Dobre klopsy,’ she said to me. Good boy.”
As Ruby and I held our breath, he’d stood very still and stared hard at the yard where the mist seemed thickest. “There! There!” he said. “I caught the little bugger! He looked right at me!”
Ruby sobbed, terrified that this demon fairy might come rushing out of the fog to steal us away. But Uncle Stash petted my sister’s silly head and stopped her tears and told her the fairies were not allowed to harm children, which I could see he didn’t believe. He asked Ruby to give him her hand and pressed something into her palm that I didn’t see. “Wow,” Ruby breathed. “Can I keep it?”
I begged Ruby to tell me what Uncle Stash had given her, but she wouldn’t, and to this day I do not know what it was. That afternoon Ruby got a C+ on her spelling test instead of her usual D-. And on the way home, Frankie Foyle opened the bus’s back window when Ruby said she felt vomity.
That night after school we’d told Aunt Lovey about Uncle Stash seeing the fairy in the fog when he was a boy, and the koruna, and the meat, and his happy mother. I could tell by her expression that Aunt Lovey had never heard the story before. We wanted to explain how Uncle Stash had caught the fairy looking back at him in the fog that morning and transferred his good luck to Ruby, but Aunt Lovey had stopped listening. She was gazing down the long hall, where Uncle Stash was resting on the sofa in the den.
Aunt Lovey squeezed my shoulder, and Ruby’s arm, and padded down the hall and hovered above Uncle Stash’s still face. Ruby and I watched as Aunt Lovey kissed him, deeply. I saw her mouth the word “You.” And he said it too. Then Aunt Lovey kicked the door closed with her foot and we did not see them again until dinner, an absence about which Ruby and I chose not to wonder.
No doubt Ruby has written about the stool Nick Todino made for us. We have nicknamed the thing Stooly Too. Or Two. I’m not sure—it was Ruby’s idea. I didn’t even know how to thank Nick for what he did. For what he’s done. He says that doing things for Ruby and me is like therapy, which I find oddly unflattering. When Nick first came to live with Nonna, shortly after Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash passed away, Ruby and I hated him. He never did much around the house (still doesn’t do much by way of general maintenance), and there was the drinking. Then, one day, Ruby and I went over for a visit and were surprised by the sound of lively music pouring out the windows, and even more surprised by the trill of Nonna’s laughter. We peered in the window and saw Nick dancing Nonna around the living room, with Italian folk music blaring on the stereo. When they answered the door, they were both sweating. Nonna looked a decade younger. Nick smelled of yeast. Nonna was just starting to get confused back then. She’d been shocked to see us on her doorstep. Her laughter stopped. And so did the music—like a cue.
Nick brought us into the house, explaining in his smoky voice, “It’s Rose and Ruby, Mama. It’s okay,” he said. “You remember, Mama. You knew them since they were babies.”
“It’s not a monster?” Nonna whispered in Italian. The Italian word “orco” sounded nothing like the English word for “monster,” but I knew what she was saying.
Nick shook his head. “Sometimes when you crack an egg there’s a double yolk, right, Mama? You’ve seen the double yolk? And sometimes the cherry grows together—not on two stems, but the flesh of two, together.” He laced his fingers to demonstrate. “It’s like that. Special.”
I liked the way Nick described our situation, but Ruby continued to be suspicious of him. I imagine Stooly has changed all that, though. She just about slobbered all over him for making it. I don’t think it has occurred to Ruby that the stool was for me too.
Nick. Nick. Nick. What would we do without Nick? Nick, who pronounces the K in his name so hard it sounds like a separate syllable. Ni-KA. Nick’s been such a help, driving us here and there and bringing us this and that. He has been clean and sober for twenty-nine days. Maybe his sponsor lives in Windsor. He’s been going there a lot. It’s either his sponsor or a woman. Or a sponsor who’s a woman. Just about every Saturday he gets all dressed up (which means cowboy boots and a tweedy sports jacket) and heads out in his Thunderbird. He goes to his other meetings in the basement of Holy Cross Church around the corner from Chippewa Drive, but he does not wear his cowboy boots. Ruby and I think it’s funny that Nick is so mysterious about his Saturday night adventures.
I wasn’t feeling well the day Nick brought Stooly over last week. I wanted to kill Ruby for pushing me about trying the thing out. I thought I would puke if I stood up. I didn’t want to puke in front of Nick. It may be normal for Ruby, but I don’t puke in front of anyone. After Nick left, I had a missing-time episode. At least I think that’s what it was. Ruby didn’t say anything about rectal probes or little green men, so I’m guessing it was a seizure of some kind. I considered calling Dr. Singh, but he would most certainly say we most certainly need to see him, though there is most certainly nothing he can do. It’s happened to me before—losing time—but not for such a long period. (I’ve been able to convince myself I had been daydreaming and got lost.) But this time I sensed a change in the air, and the sun had moved completely from one window to another.
I shouted, “Shit!” because I was scared and confused. Ruby was watching me in the mirror. Ruby misunderstood. She rambled on and on about how Aunt Lovey would have wanted me to try the stool and how it wasn’t like giving up or giving in. I didn’t want to tell her that it wasn’t the stool. It was because I was nauseous. I’ve always been the well one and do not like feeling so damn vulnerable.
So I dragged my laptop from the coffee table and started to write because, even though the writing is killing me, it focuses and cleanses me too. I’d begun to write the story of our trip to Slovakia, but that story has become several stories, entwined and connected. And I want to write the next part in one big breath.
WE’RE GOING TO the Indian museum in London soon. Nick is bringing us, of course. And we’ll be able to stay as long as Ruby wants, since we’re bringing our cool new stool.
Sweet surrender.
This book isn’t a book anymore. It’s alive. It calls to me when I’m asleep. It chides me to be truthful.
So here it is.
I think I’m falling in love with Nick Todino.
It’s Ruby here.
It’s the first week of fall, but it feels more like summer. We had no jackets, and only short sleeves, from morning on.
Sherman Merkel came into the library today. I was finishing up reading circle and the kids were rammy, and Rose and I both had headaches. In comes Sherman Merkel wearing clean clothes, which was the first weird thing because we’re used to seeing him in his farmer pants. He went straight for the bulletin board. The bulletin board is the reason most people without kids come to the kids’ section, because the bulletin board is near the washrooms, which are behind the junior mysteries
shelves.
Mr. Merkel tacked a notice on the bulletin board, then, on his way out, he stopped to say hello. Only not hello, really. He just dipped his chin and said, Girls, which is all he ever really says. Girls. Girls. Girls. Girls.
I’ve always liked Mr. Merkel, even though he’s usually too shy for conversations. And, even today, I can’t help how I love Mrs. Merkel. Even though she obviously doesn’t love us in return.
Rosie and I have the strangest relationship with Mrs. Merkel. It’s like we completely understand how she feels and don’t take any of it personally. She doesn’t even know it, but with Aunt Lovey passed away and Nonna not really Nonna anymore, Mrs. Merkel’s the only mother figure we have left.
Anyway, after Mr. Merkel said Girls, he stood there for a long time and we could see he had tears in his eyes. We never saw Mr. Merkel with tears in his eyes before, and I felt pretty sure he was about to tell us that his wife had left him, because I always half expected that.
Instead, he said to us, If there’s anything me and the missus can do, you girls just let us know. I realized he must have heard about the aneurysm, but I still didn’t connect that his sad face was about us.
I hate when Rose talks the way she writes. She can sound so pretentious. And that’s what happened with Mr. Merkel today. She said something like, We’ve always thought well of you and Mrs. Merkel, and we’re richer for having been your neighbors. I swear to God I felt carsick.
Then the poor guy burst into tears. Uncontrollable tears. He was sobbing right there in the children’s section, and all these kids who’d been running around stopped, and some of them started to cry. Then Mr. Merkel got the hiccups, only it sounded like retching. And I just thought I was in hell.
