The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  After Nick left, I thought Rose would want to write, but she didn’t even open her computer. Instead, she wanted to talk. She was asking me questions about how I see my life—like, Is my life a series of little dramas, stories within a story, or does it feel more continuous, like something long with a suspenseful plot? I’ve never thought about my life in any particular way. I definitely don’t think of my life as a bunch of little stories. Or suspenseful, though I guess it is. Guess everyone’s is, really. I’m just living. I don’t dwell on my past. I don’t worry about my future. I’m just trying to be at peace from one moment to the next. That’s the way I live my life and that’s the way I think about my life. I stayed awake all night figuring that out.

  I’m trying to be supportive about Rose’s writing, but I’m still thinking about the odds of anyone ever reading this thing. Maybe Roz would want to read it. Nick. Not Nonna. Even if Nonna were still Nonna, she wouldn’t want to read Rose’s life. She watched us grow up. She knows all the good parts, believe me. Nonna liked romance books. I wonder who Fiodor was? She’s been asking for Fiodor. Fiodor. Nick said he thinks it was a boy from her village in Italy. Before her family moved and she married Nick’s father. (Rose acts like it’s such a tragedy that Nonna is calling for Fiodor. She’s imagined this whole romance for Nonna. Why does Fiodor have to be a lost love? Fiodor could be the kid who killed her goat. Or the boy she told us about who could suck spaghetti up his nose.)

  Nick was telling Rose how he read about these monks who have a tradition of making beautiful mosaic art with poured colored sand. When it’s finished, they let the wind blow the sand mosaic away. When I said what a waste of time, Nick said that art isn’t a product. It’s an experience. Which sounds like something he read. Nick does metal craft in Nonna’s garage. He makes sculptures and hangs them all over the place. I think he probably learned how to do this in jail, but I’m not about to ask. Not like he could, because they wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but he doesn’t even try to sell them.

  Nick is currently reading the great philosophers, which makes me roll my eyes. He says the philosophers all say the same thing—work hard and do right but don’t worry about outcomes. He said we have no control over what happens. Which I guess makes some kind of sense. He’s full of quotations, if you know what I mean. You can see why Nick and Rosie are friends.

  Still, it was very cool that Nick made us the stool, which is definitely making our life easier. We thought we were going to have to quit at the library because Rose is having so many headaches and not sleeping, but now with the stool the pressure’s off her back a little. The kids would be so disappointed if we weren’t there for story time. They can be little buggers, but I do like children a lot.

  Mr. Merkel came into the library yesterday to check on his notice for help on the bulletin board. He couldn’t believe that no one had pulled off one of the little tags with his telephone number. There are a lot of people in Baldoon County who are unemployed, but farmwork is hard and not too many want to be farmhands, especially in the winter, when there’s not much to do and what you do you do in the cold.

  Rose is still writing the story about what happened in Slovakia. She has been writing that story for three or four weeks. It seems to be driving her crazy. She is writing so slow now I don’t know if she’s managing a page a day.

  Basically, the trip to Slovakia was pretty freaky. There were some good things, but, really, we all should have listened to Aunt Lovey and not gone. Uncle Stash would have enjoyed the trip much more on his own. Maybe he would have found what he was looking for instead of spending the whole time defending Rose and me. Why spend four weeks writing about a bunch of misunderstandings and bad feelings? There are so many more good and happy things in our lives.

  Rose said she doesn’t feel like she’s done a good job describing how scared to death we were in Grozovo when that lunatic took us to see the woman with her twins. And about what happened after, when we thought the old ladies were going to drown us in the pond. She asked me if Jerzy was really as sexy as she remembered him. He was. Sexy and creepy at the same time. Kind of like Nick.

  Rose is also worried she hasn’t done a good enough job describing Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. She said when she’s done writing about the Slovak trip, she’s going back to the very beginning of the book to find a better way to introduce our parents. She asked me how I’d describe Aunt Lovey. Not what she looked like but who she was. And right away I thought of something that happened just after our family moved into the little house in Leaford. Rose and I came home from a visit to the library one day to find Aunt Lovey in the backyard with a can of blue latex and a roller, painting the mattress from our bed. She was sweating like crazy, with one hand on her aching back, rolling this awful blue paint over the pee and blood and puke stains on our old mattress. Rose and I started laughing when we saw her, though the truth is I was a little worried because I was thinking, maybe she was getting Alzheimer’s like Nonna next door. We asked her what she was doing, and she said that our new mattress had come from Sears that day and the old one had to go to the curb, and she couldn’t put our mattress at the curb for all of Leaford to see with pee and puke and drool stains. To me, that just says it all about Aunt Lovey.

  It’s harder for me to think of just one thing for Uncle Stash. For Uncle Stash, I always think of him being handsome. Even when he was older and his hair was gone. One day Uncle Stash took Rosie and me to the park and he was taking pictures of tree bark or something when someone called out, Hi, Stan. We knew it was a guy from work because all the butchers at Vanderhagen’s called him Stan. Funny thing was, Uncle Stash hid his camera when he turned to see the guy and waited until the man was gone before he started taking pictures of the tree again. I remember on Slovak Nights when we were little, Uncle Stash would talk about when he was a boy in Slovakia. Things like what happened on St. Ondrej’s Day when Uncle Stash and his cousin Velika did this superstitious thing of pouring molten lead into ice-cold water. The lead hardens fast and your future is decided, depending on what shape the lead turns into. The ritual was usually done by the village girls, who could see the face of the man they were going to marry in the shape of the cooled molten lead. Velika wanted to know if she would marry Boris Domenovsky or Evo Puca. Uncle Stash was teasing her, because he knew she hoped the lead would look like Evo. She was slowly pouring the liquid lead from her ladle and was just about done when Uncle Stash accidentally knocked her arm. Two blobs of lead dropped into the water instead of one, which they both knew was a very bad omen. Cousin Velika and Uncle Stash argued over what the two blobs meant, and even whose future, Cousin Velika’s or Uncle Stash’s, was being foretold. The very next day Uncle Stash’s two older brothers were killed when a mine shaft collapsed. Uncle Stash was usually one to laugh at superstition. Rose and Uncle Stash liked to roll their eyes when Aunt Lovey and I talked about extrasensory perception or ghosts or past lives, but then Uncle Stash would tell his story about the blobs of molten lead and you could see he was dead serious. He completely believed in that. Same way he did with the curse on the BoSox.

  Writers and Baseball

  It’s easy for Nick to say it doesn’t matter if my story is ever read. He says, “Just that you wrote it, Rosie, let that be enough.” But I want more. So much more. I want this collection of words to transform themselves into visions of Ruby and me. I want to be remembered like long-ago friends.

  Immortality?

  Oui.

  Conjure me.

  RUBY HAS NO enthusiasm for baseball, no matter that history was just made. Hollywood could not have written a better ending to this baseball season, but Ruby’s hardly noticed. Still, she hasn’t complained about all the baseball nights with Nick. My sister and I have been so accommodating with each other lately. Would that we could have lived every day thinking it might be our last. (She doesn’t object to baseball. I don’t object to poached eggs. How’s that for give-and-take?)

  Our Tigers didn’t have their best season
ever, but they’re a young club and hold tons of promise. I just about lost interest in baseball this year until the American League Championship. I guess I’ve been preoccupied. This World Series has reignited my passion, though. I realize that I have totally believed in the curse on the Boston Red Sox. (Say the two words “Bill Buckner” to any sports fan, and you’ll see by their face that everyone believed in the curse.) So what course of events changed fate? Why was the curse broken? How? We’ll never know.

  Watching the baseball with Nick has made me miss Uncle Stash. He would have loved to be sitting beside Ruby and Nick and me watching the Red Sox take this extraordinary victory. (Actually, Nick wouldn’t have been here. Uncle Stash would not have liked Nick. I don’t think he would have allowed Nick in the house. He wouldn’t have wanted him near Ruby and me.)

  Euphoria. When the Sox won, I felt euphoria. It’s quite a thing to feel euphoria. And quite another to share it. I don’t think a lot of people experience the feeling. The athletes surely do. Especially the victors. And the fans do too. That’s why we buy the merchandise! Euphoria! When the Sox won, I had this quick flash of heaven. And heaven was the den in the old farmhouse, with the orange shag and the big TV, and there is Uncle Stash, dressed in his undershirt, drinking peevos, smoke billowing from his pipe, cheering for Johnny Damon and Big Papi. Euphoria.

  After the game, after Nick left, something strange and remarkable happened. We were in bed and I’d closed my eyes and was nearly asleep when Ruby said, “Ernie Harwell.” (Ernie Harwell was the broadcast announcer for the Detroit Tigers for forty-two years and he retired just a few years ago. The thing that is strange about Ruby saying the name Ernie Harwell is that I had been trying to remember his name the whole night. I couldn’t ask Nick because I didn’t want him to think I was an idiot for not remembering Ernie Harwell’s name—or worse, worry because he feared my memory lapse was because of my aneurysm—so I didn’t say a word, but it was bothering me all night. I could hear his distinctive voice. I could see his face—even though he was the radio voice, he was still recognizable, but I couldn’t recall his name.) Ruby heard the question in my mind, and either pried Ernie Harwell’s name from some department in my brain that was not available to me or remembered it on her own, which is even more remarkable.

  Ernie Harwell used to start off each Tigers’ season by reciting from “Song of the Turtle.” I remember Uncle Stash would whisper it, along with Ernie Harwell, but instead of saying “the time of the singing of the birds,” Uncle Stash would say “the time of the sinking of birds.” Uncle Stash and I listened to Ernie Harwell describe as many Tigers games on the radio as we watched on TV. Ernie Harwell makes me think of being in the garage with Uncle Stash. Oil. Steel. Cursing in Slovak at North American cars. Ruby complaining because she hates cars and baseball. When Ernie Harwell retired, I mourned for Uncle Stash all over again.

  I remember, one winter, Uncle Stash was driving us to the White Oaks Mall in London, where Pierre Berton was signing autographs. It had started to snow on the way there. I hate driving in the snow. Ruby was doped up on Dramamine and deep asleep. Uncle Stash cursed when a transport started to tailgate our Impala. “Don’t crawl up my arse, you kurva bastard.” (“Kurva” means “whore,” and it was a word Uncle Stash used for drivers of any gender or denomination. There were the kurvas who cut him off, the kurvas who raced him at the stoplights, and the kurvas who crawled up his arse.) “We have to turn around,” he said.

  Uncle Stash turned off at the next intersection and drove through the snow to Thamesville, where we’d wait out the storm before heading back to Leaford. He mistook my silence for despair over not getting a signature on my copy of Pierre Berton’s latest book.

  “My Rosie Girl,” he said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. And nothing could have sounded sweeter, because he said “My Rosie Girl” only when we were alone (when Ruby was asleep—or pretending to be). And when he said it, there was a look in his soft brown eyes that made me think I was his favorite.

  “Don’t be sad about the signature,” he said.

  “I know,” I answered. I wanted to scream at him to watch the road.

  “When I was young man in Windsor,” he began, and much as I loved to hear stories from his past, I was truly afraid of the icy road to Thamesville and of dying young.

  “It’s really coming down,” I said.

  Uncle Stash looked through the snow, which had formed into little bullets that were blasting the windshield. “I put the snow tires last week,” he said. “It’s not gonna be an accident, my Rose. Don’t be afraid.”

  I found myself mesmerized by the snowflakes in the foreground and the red taillights beyond as Uncle Stash told his story, one I’d never heard before, his voice trailing off from time to time as if he’d forgotten he was telling it out loud, to me.

  “The first summer I am in Canada, I go to Detroit with the boys from Mr. Lipsky’s apartment building. There is Joseph, and Miro, and Dusan, and Stevie. Five. We go to Briggs Stadium to see Tigers play Yankees. We go early because it’s day for autographs, and we want to get autograph from Tigers. Anybody will make us happy. Hoot Evers, Eddie Lake, Billy Pierce, Dizzy Trout. We don’t dream to get ten autograph. Just one. So it’s okay we get to Briggs Stadium. We go inside. Is so big. So exciting. We go to where people are waiting to get autograph. The line is very long. We wait in line. We wait in line. We wait in line. In front of us is boy, younger a little. This boy hears us, Miro and me, talking in Slovak. This boy is stupid kokot. ‘Go home, Krauts!’ this boys shouts. ‘You lost the war, you Kraut bastards.’ Stevie or Dusan says we’re Slovak—not German—but now more people are hearing us talk. And two more boys call us Krauts. We’re almost near to getting autograph, so I tell my boys it doesn’t matter. We want to get autograph. We want to watch game. We don’t come to fight. Okay. So we move to the front with our baseballs for the players to sign. But the boy says again that we are Krauts, and Dusan starts yelling at the boys. He’s calling them such names, but in Slovak, so they don’t understand exactly the insult. Then I see. I’m watching the players, and one of them whispers something to the other guy and they go away down the corridor to the dugout. We don’t know why they are going. Doesn’t matter. There’s no autograph.”

  Uncle Stash shrugged after telling his tale. I was relieved when he didn’t ask me to guess at the moral. (Prepare to be disappointed by your heroes? Never speak Slovak among kokot idiots at a ball game?)

  He returned his focus to the hazardous road. “Aunt Lovey will be worried, we’re taking long time,” he said.

  We watched the road. I felt Ruby purring beside me.

  “Autographs are worth hovno,” Uncle Stash said.

  It wasn’t technically true. Plus, what kind of moral was that? I waited to see if there was more. There was.

  “That day, at the baseball park, still we want to see game, Rose. We find our seats. Is nowhere near us, the boy who calls us Krauts. Is good game. Exciting. And when Miro go to get peevo, because he has already the dark beard and is the oldest to look at, it’s Slovak man serving. He gives to Miro the peevo, free, four times he gives to Miro the peevo FREE, because the boss isn’t looking.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “My Rosie”—Uncle Stash laughed—“sometimes in life we don’t get the autograph. But then . . .”

  He was waiting, so I ventured, “Free beer?”

  “Okay.” He laughed. “Okay.” Uncle Stash plugged his Ray Price tape in and sighed, exhausted and edified.

  RUBY ASKED ME to write this bit of verse from Robert Graves. It has taken me a while to dig it up—so to speak. Ruby says it’s about archaeology. I say it’s about writing. I hate it when we’re both right.

  To bring the dead to life

  Is no great magic.

  Few are wholly dead:

  Blow on a dead man’s embers

  And a live flame will start.

  Human Conditions

  Our first year in the bungalow on Chippewa Dr
ive was difficult, but not as great or grave a challenge as our second year would prove. That first autumn, watching the neighbors in their midsize cars crush the leaves that had fallen quietly through the night, I longed for the pumpkin patch on Rural Route One, the hum of the tractor, the foul smell of the creek that separated the Merkels from us. Uncle Stash grumbled about the city and pined for the farm. (It was just Uncle Stash’s knee, just one hinge on a whole wondrous body, but when it stopped working he transformed from one thing to another. Even his heart attack hadn’t changed him so significantly.) His photographs took on a darker hue. We have stacks of photographs from that first year in the city, when Uncle Stash became even more obsessed with the crows. Black and whites of crows in midflight. Lined up on a hydro wire. Strutting atop a garbage-bag mountain in the park down the street. One crow staring cockeyed at the camera, mocking the photographer. When Uncle Stash wasn’t taking pictures of the birds, he was trying to murder them, limping outdoors, leaning heavily on his cane, firing rocks at the crows with his pitching arm, until he made a fairly decent slingshot out of Aunt Lovey’s old brassiere. He never one time hit a bird. Never once, which made me wonder if he was trying all that hard. The neighbors watched him, silently, shaking their heads. They hated the crows too, but Uncle Stash was savagely incorrect.

  On Chippewa Drive Ruby watched too much TV and became bored, and boring. When the cable went out one day, she was in despair. Aunt Lovey suggested she read a book, but Ruby found Uncle Stash’s photographs on the bookshelf and looked at those instead. Ruby was flipping through a stack of his most recent shots, his “crowtographs” (as my sister and I had begun to refer to his pictures), and found one of a fat crow perched on a post behind Aunt Lovey, looking, comically, as though he was standing on the top of her head. We showed this one to Uncle Stash, who laughed, for the first time since his accident, because he hadn’t noticed the ridiculousness of the framing before. He thought to make a card of it for Aunt Lovey’s birthday.