Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  So I was not completely surprised that Mother stepped aside for the burly officials of King Rama, though they had come to kill her children.

  “This is the poorest house we’ve ever seen,” said the man beside Mother. Through a hole in the ceiling, sunlight reflected off his polished head. Outside, despite the sunshine, the sound of rain enveloped our houseboat.

  As imperturbable as these guards strove to appear, they could not keep themselves from gawking at us, the connected twins who were compelled to lie face-to-face. Chang kept his head lolled heavily to one side, and we were still panting because of the knife cut.

  Turning to the window, I was startled to find that it wasn’t raining at all. Instead, on the lip of the shore, bare-chested drummers were rolling a soothing beat out into the Mekong.

  Mother braved back tears. Using one hand to support herself on our tree-butt table, she asked the men if they could just wait until Father returned. With a little mercy, she said, our family could be together for Chang-Eng’s last moments.

  “We must take it to the King immediately,” said one of the sentries, eyeing our bleeding bond with distaste and worry; he could not return to the King with unbonded children. He said, “His Majesty desires a look at the double-monster before killing him. Them.”

  I felt certain I would die that morning, and if Mother had cut the bond, perhaps I would have died alone. Or perhaps by some miracle, separation would not have killed us, and I could have lived on that way—separate. Now I knew that, whether it would be today or some far-off tomorrow, I would be condemned to die attached to my brother.

  Mother now grabbed her chest and cried. “No!” And she wept and she wept. I thought this would be the end of her. Death by weeping. She kissed our hands tearfully, one after the others.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Yates Sisters

  December 1842

  North Carolina

  The very day Chang and I first met Sarah and Adelaide Yates of North Carolina, as they stood blushing on the porch of their mother’s inn, Wilkesboro had begun construction on a new church, one that might be called splendid for a small town. It was going to be the tallest building for fifteen miles and would boast four stately white Doric columns and a tetra-style portico that would make an impression on any traveler passing through. Plans were being discussed to import real stained-glass windows—from Virginia, if need be. This new and grand house of worship was the brainchild of Wilkesboro’s Parson Hodge and Mayor Dungsworth, and the platform on which the latter had gotten elected weeks before. But on the day Chang and I first rode into town, it was nothing more than an ambitious pile of wood across the street from the Yates Inn.

  The town itself was mostly without trees, except for the pathetic row of bare Carolina poplars in the town square, their leafless state blamed on some poor topsoil that the former mayor, Brett Martin, had imported—foolishly, and most unpopularly—from the North. At least that was the rumor; the disgraced politician claimed the dirt had been purchased cheaply from neighboring Mount Airy. Regardless—though Mr. Martin’s father’s father had been born in Wilkesboro when the village hadn’t yet had a name listed in the Post Office annals—he’d been known ever since the topsoil disgrace as “that Yankee mayor Brett Martin.”

  Despite years of performing before festival crowds, Chang and I were overcome by bashfulness that day when first we stood before the Yates family, milling about their innyard with a throng of strangers at our back and these two blond daughters some twenty feet in front of us. These girls worked to dim the caressing light in their eyes, but it shone against their will in those shy smiles.

  Conscious of the crowd, the large innkeeper fixed her eye on us and cleared her throat. “Now, boys, you say you came here for a room?” Her big legs were bobbing. I thought she was blushing as much as her daughters were, though maybe her skin was just mottled with red blotches.

  I glanced at the sisters quickly, but did not answer or move.

  “Well,” the innkeeper said with the vivacity of most truly large people. “You’all look like someone hit you with a stob.” Mrs. Yates had a manner I’d encountered in hippodrome promoters—heartfelt-sounding but not especially human. “Why don’t you come inside and enjoy our inn?” She tapped her fingers on the base of her chair. “Don’t be squirrelly, now, Chinamen.”

  My brother was apprehensive, too. But the Yateses’ rickety front door was open; we had only to walk through it.

  Someone in the crowd at our back muttered, “Ain’t nowhere else in Wilkesboro for the Chinamen to stay, anyhow.”

  The front door was open; we had only to walk through it, and that is what we did.

  Not a word was spoken as the two sisters ushered us through a little corridor to our room. Shyly, they walked ahead, and with my left arm over Chang’s shoulder, we followed down the little hallway, shyly. I was five seven, Chang five six.

  The Yates girls were not traditionally pretty. They had unsettled complexions and long faces that fell right into their necks. But they were American women, modestly broad (they were broad, no other word for it), and they walked with quick steps that bore their large figures with a dignified lightness.

  We reached the doorway of a lean-to room with flyspecked walls and chipped white paint on the ceiling. The four of us stood very close, looking at one another. “I hope you find it passable, sirs, it’s the only choosing in town,” the taller one said. “My name is Adelaide.” This was the first American woman ever to speak to us so gently.

  Chang said: “Is no need to call us ‘sirs.’ ” He wore a smile I had not seen from him before, like a turtle’s. And he was sweating on the back of his neck.

  Was this flirtation? The shorter of the two girls—Adelaide’s sister—was staring at Adelaide with the same look of disbelief I assumed was on my face. For a while we all stood in the doorway of the small bedroom, submitting to the respectful silence, creatures from distant corners of the same world. The Yateses’ floor had been worn smooth by naked feet—even now, the sisters were barefoot, with stubby toes.

  “All right, then,” Adelaide said. “How should we call you, then?”

  My brother beamed but could not think of anything to say. He just let his whole face stumble into a smile. He probably did not realize he was fidgeting his ankles against mine.

  Finally my brother said, “Call us any way that please you, ma’am.”

  Had Chang gone insane? It is fine to enjoy a chance grin from an American woman on a porch, but to engage in flirtatious conversation with her would always remain taboo for yellow-skinned conjoined twins such as us. I could not be a part of Chang’s coquetry, I could not even bear to watch. I noticed just how scuffed my black shoes were.

  “All right, then,” said Adelaide. “Siamese twin.” She sniggered, and I smelled from her direction the musk of a woman’s perspiration mixed with a fine layer of dust, a subtle and lovely odor.

  “I see our reputation has preceded us, miss,” I managed, “but we are the Siamese twins.”

  How lovely it would be to shake her hand in greeting, I said to myself, to perceive that softness in a woman’s skin that I’ve read is worth crying for.

  But that is impossible, I told myself. Chang is a fool and disappointment will shatter him.

  Then, all at once, as jittery as a boxer before his first punch, my brother propelled us. Without consulting me, he bent to the dusty floor and, stirred by the chaos his heart no doubt was, he began to go into a handstand near the doorway. I had no choice but to follow, amazed that anything of mine at that moment—my clumsy hands, my tense shoulders—worked well enough to support half of us. We stood on our palms in front of the girls, who looked at the conjoined twins before them as incredulously as if we had turned into a horse.

  “We are the Twins,” my brother said, huffing slightly enough that the girls may not have noted the strain. “Most famous in the wide world.”

  We stood upside down for a minute, then two, my throat thick with embarrassmen
t, until I heard approaching footsteps. A pair of man’s feet came to stand beside the sisters’. I don’t know how long my brother would have let us linger there like inverted idiots, so I moved us from the handstand, and we jumped to our feet.

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” I said, and Chang smiled a greeting. The man’s face was pale and agitated.

  “All right, girls,” the man said in a severe paternal voice, “you have shown Mr. Chang-Eng to its room.”

  The sisters turned as if to leave, but the man hustled all four of us into the bedroom, then followed us in and closed the door.

  Mr. Yates wore homespun gray woolen and had graying, curly hair. His head was wide at its top, but narrowed sharply as it made its way downward, so—by his chin if not earlier—Mr. Yates’s face was skinnier than expected. His mouth was tiny.

  After a few moments his gaze became unnerving. The man shook our hands in his cold and damp grip. “Hello, hello.” He walked to the bed and sat down solemnly. The four of us—Sarah, Adelaide, and we conjoined—stood waiting for the fifth finally to speak, but Mr. Yates sat on the mattress resting his chin on two fists, nipping his lower lip between his teeth.

  He raised his head and lowered it again, burying his face in his hands for a moment. Then he reared up and inhaled a deep gulp of air. “It is an honor to have you two famous people in my inn,” he said. A strange grimace crossed his face, half the distance to a smile, yet still a wince. “We charge one dollar three cents a night, and we’re a good lodge, you’d have to walk many a mile before you’d find the beat of it, and we have very few rules here”—here he eyed his girls—“but I’m sure you’ll be heedful guests, so I won’t waste all your time spelling them quare things out to you. Please, won’t you enjoy our hospitality.”

  In a single motion Mr. Yates stood, crossed the floor, opened the door, and ushered his daughters out of the room. Before exiting himself, Yates turned to us one last time, expressionless.

  He closed the door.

  That evening Chang and I sat side by side on the windowsill of our room in the Yates Inn. I read from the Bible and a collection of Shakespeare—and then I thought about unpacking our flutes and asking Chang to practice with me. Chang looked out at the few stragglers who were waiting around and hoping for a glimpse. My brother and I were not giving voice to the thoughts that flitted through our minds.

  “Eng,” said Chang at length. “What do you think that big woman mean by husbands?” His face was calm and inquisitive, but his anxious breath stung my nostrils. “Well,” he answered himself, “it could only mean one thing!”

  “Are you not forgetting an important detail, Chang?” I poked our band with my forefinger.

  Just then, a knock on our door. Somber as the evening sky, the shorter of the two sisters—not Adelaide—let herself into our room. She looked at us, and we at her, and though hers was not an expression to make one smile, Chang smiled at her. Her long face was set not in a frown, exactly, but not in something more pleasant than that, either. “My name is Sarah,” she said. And, after a while, “It’s dinner now.” Then she turned and walked out.

  Taking that for an invitation, my brother and I crossed the hall to find the Yates family—Mr. and Mrs., the boy Jefferson, and, of course, the two sisters—seated at a little table that took up most of the space of a little dining room, waiting for us.

  Mrs. Yates was smirking. “Won’t you join us?” If unease had been legal tender, Chang and I standing there side by side could have paid for this inn three times over. The lady innkeeper did not stop smiling.

  On the odd occasions Mrs. Yates made the effort to stand, she measured some five feet two inches high, and seven and a half feet in circumference. Her exact weight was never measured—Wilkesboro had no adequate means of determining the number. Years later, reporters from Raleigh contrived a scale by securing four 150-pound anvils to a swinging platform; when Mrs. Yates tiptoed smilingly onto the scale the anvils flew up and landed to shatter one reporter’s feet.

  “I am love to join you,” said Chang. “Yes, thank you,” I added.

  On the table rested a meal of okra, rhubarb, baked sweet potatoes, and turkey with red-eye gravy. The girls kept their eyes pointed downward, at the food. The boy Jefferson stared at our connecting band with a stupid look on his face. Mr. Yates, weary, sat sucking on his teeth. Mrs. Yates beamed. (When she died, undertakers could not get her coffin into the house until the door was widened.)

  “Say hello to the twins, Jefferson,” Mrs. Yates told her son, though she was looking at us as she spoke. The boy’s smooth face was without sideburns, and he kept his blond hair wetted flat. “Hello,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.” His face conveyed about as much emotion as a drunken actor.

  We pushed two chairs close together and sat down on them, which left one place setting at the table unfilled. Mrs. Yates pointed to it and said: “We’re expecting another guest. He’s important, too, and dying to meet you.” She made a little clicking sound with her tongue. “But of course you’all are used to attention.” She started to giggle, and no one else seemed to know what to say.

  A few awkward minutes later, Mayor Dungsworth arrived.

  Unlike the Yateses in their cotton and woolen homespun, the large Mr. Dungsworth attired himself in a cutaway wool coat, white silk socks, and high-waisted loose trousers kept tidy with black foot straps. He stood there, taking in my brother and me. “You must be those famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng?” He continued to eye us. “From Siam?” Mayor Dungsworth had a young face despite a whitish beard. “Sure are a quare sight.”

  The lady innkeeper Mrs. Yates raised her eyebrows knowingly. “Twins, this is our mayor, Mayor Dungsworth.”

  The Mayor’s face remained impassive, and as he shook our hands he looked over Chang’s shoulder to catch Mr. Yates’s eye.

  As soon as the Mayor sat, we began to eat—in silence, save for the casual percussion of chewing and slurping.

  The Mayor pushed the food aside for a moment, patted his belly, and looked at Mrs. Yates. “I like your grits,” he said finally, with the hint of arrogance deemed appropriate when a mayor compliments a townswoman. “Ain’t bad at all.” (“Ain’t bad at all” is the phrase that sums up the attitude of people in northwestern North Carolina. They expect little, and are happy to compliment something that matches their meager expectations.)

  Turning to us, Dungsworth said, “Welcome to a North Carolina town.” The Mayor had the alert eyes of a youngish man who had aged quickly; he briefly looked at Mr. Yates, then away. And didn’t I detect the tiniest smirk creeping onto the Mayor’s lips?

  That night, after dinner, as Chang and I were in our room readying for sleep, again a knock surprised us, and again the door was opened before we could answer. It was the sisters, still in the dresses they had been wearing all day. Adelaide, the taller one, smiled; her sister did not. They each held a white pillow.

  “You only had two,” said Adelaide. “Our mother thought you might like another one each.”

  “Thank you,” we said. I steeled our posture until it was rigid as King Rama’s justice.

  The sisters looked around our room. Sarah eyed the modest book I had on the night table as if it had had a gilded binding. “Sir?” she asked. “Do you’all really read Shakespeare?”

  I was so floored by the word “sir” that it took me a moment to answer.

  Sarah said, “I’m sorry—I saw the book . . .” She was embarrassed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I mean, true, I am reading Shakespeare, or a collection of his greatest soliloquies, anyway. And, it’s quite all right, no need to be sorry, is what I mean to say.” On the far side of the window, the clouds were out, the sky gray.

  “You won’t make fun of us too much, will you?” said Sarah, her voice showing real emotion.

  “I, make fun of you?” I was astonished at the thought. Without rouge, Sarah’s skin was snow in sunlight.

  Meanwhile, Chang was now stealing a smile at Adelaide
. And Adelaide was herself holding back a laugh.

  Sarah said, “You won’t be putting on airs?” In all the wildest dreams I had scarcely allowed myself, no woman ever bothered to speak to me in such a way. The desire of a female was to me a thing inconceivable, like the hand of God, a magnificence that would never touch a man such as I.

  “Oh, these Chinamen won’t look down at us, Sarah,” Adelaide said. “They ain’t the trifling type.” This one’s staccato brazenness was lovely, too, but like her sister she seemed so unreal to me that I might as well have been staring at a Siamese palace on Main Street.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, trying to regain my composure. Going too far, I continued in an unintentionally chilly voice: “We would not do such a thing.”

  “Especially,” said Chang, “because I not read that Shakespeare myself.”

  They all laughed, and I recognized that Sarah was standing quite close to me. The perfume from the bosom of a Southern girl’s dress—as invigorating as a cup of coffee to a yellow-skinned peasant virgin such as myself—caused my face to flush. I said in a faltering voice: “Never fear, madam. I will never look down our noses at you.” I must admit I began to revel in the pleasure of speaking well to women.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” asked Adelaide.

  Chang answered: “He say we never look down our noses at anyone”—here, my twin needed to marshal his courage before continuing—“anyone beautiful as you.” And now it was his turn to blush.

  “Sorry,” Adelaide echoed. “What was that?”

  Chang and I turned to one another with raised eyebrows. I was about to repeat my point. And then Adelaide declared, “What did you say? I couldn’t hear,” and she started to giggle. We were being teased.

  “Is it me,” Adelaide said with a laugh, “or, may I ask, do you two don’t talk to each other much?” I felt a delicious and unfamiliar type of embarrassment.