That was all it took—four hours—for Aunt Lovey to fall in love, the way you do with babies, deeply and without effort. She fed us infant formula and sang a song she made up about two chicken sisters. (When I was sixteen, on the eve of a violent acne eruption, I broke Aunt Lovey’s heart by asking that she never, ever, sing that stupid song again.) Ruby does pretty fair vocal impressions. She sings the song with a little tremolo, just like Aunt Lovey used to. It makes me sad, but I never ask her to stop. (What is it about sadness that can be so fulfilling?) “Two little chicks just sleeping in the sun. First chick peeped and woke the other one. ‘Who are you?’ said the one to the two. ‘Who am I? I’m your sis-ter!’”
Aunt Lovey named my sister “Ruby” because she shone like a gem. And she named me “Rose” to carry on the tradition of her eccentric mother, Verbeena (and hers before her), who named their girls after places or plants. As rain pelted the ambulance roof, Aunt Lovey found herself thinking of Verbeena and of her own childhood in the old orange farmhouse. She thought of Stash and his upbringing in distant Slovakia (once known as Czechoslovakia: the Slovaks separated from the Czechs in 1993). She also thought of the conjoined South Asian twins she’d read about who’d been raised in the basement of an institution for the criminally insane but were found to have genius IQs. What would life be like for Rose and Ruby if Elizabeth Taylor wanted to raise us? I think Aunt Lovey knew, though, even before our mother ran away, that Elizabeth Taylor could not, would not, raise us. (I’m not bitter. I don’t blame her.) Aunt Lovey believed that God had sent my sister and me to her, in answer to a prayer.
The July sky offered a cleansing rain for most of the journey down the flat, gray Highway 401. Aunt Lovey fretted that the ambulance would spin out on the slick black roads. When finally we approached the Emergency bay at the Toronto hospital, she saw that there were dozens of doctors and nurses waiting on the dock and imagined there must have been a terrible accident and a load of injured on the way.
“Pull up!” she’d called to the Leaford ambulance driver. “Pull up, for Pete’s sake! They’ve got accident victims coming in.”
The driver pulled the vehicle forward, and the doctors and nurses, led by a small, rather attractive, middle-aged Asian man, followed. They had not been waiting for accident victims. They’d been waiting for us.
Aunt Lovey was not prepared for the hungry way Dr. Mau (the eminent craniofacial surgeon) and the others set upon her babies, or the way they seemed not to notice or care when they yanked us from her and we began to wail. One of them called us “it.” One of them let out a whoop, like he was at a bucking rodeo roundup (Aunt Lovey’s words, not mine). Aunt Lovey said Dr. Mau reminded her of a large black spider descending upon two little fruit flies.
The press came; television reporters, newspapermen, and, of course, the sleazy tabloid guys. Aunt Lovey, as our self-appointed guardian, kept them all away. She’d been horrified to turn on the news that first night and see the Polaroid snapshot that was taken of Ruby and me shortly after our birth, and she’d been furious with Dr. Ruttle Jr. for releasing the photo to the media. (Newborn babies seem more alien than human to begin with, so you can only imagine what Ruby and I looked like through that awful Polaroid lens. Our Nonna calls newborns “creatura.”) Aunt Lovey was determined that no unauthorized photos would ever find their way to the media again.
Fearing for our emotional development, Aunt Lovey made sure it was she, and not one of the other nurses, who fed us our bottles, gave us our bath, and sang the chicken sister song as she rocked us to sleep each night. Ruby preferred a cuddle against the chest, while I liked to be held higher up on the shoulder. “You had to be Give when you were Take,” she told Ruby. “And visie versie for you, Rosie.”
Doctors from all over the world came to Toronto to confer with Dr. Mau and to examine the rare craniopagus twins. Newspapers around the globe carried the story (accompanied by that awful Polaroid photo) of our miraculous birth and its concurrence with the freak tornado in Baldoon County. For a short time, anyway, we put Leaford on the map. Channel Seven featured daily progress reports on the six and eleven o’clock news. Viewers were rapt, especially because there was fear early on that Ruby was too feeble to survive. A team of twenty surgeons was standing by, prepared to assist Dr. Mau in slicing my sister and me apart in the event she perished, so I might be saved. People prayed for Ruby’s death, thinking it would have been kinder to both of us.
Wearing a crisp white nurse’s uniform even though she was not officially on duty, Aunt Lovey sat next to our hospital crib, reading books or calmly looping wool from the pink yarn in the basket at her side. Doctors came and went with foreign germs and disregard. Aunt Lovey read, and looped, and prayed to God that Elizabeth Taylor would not return to claim us. When the children’s welfare people had given her temporary guardianship of Ruby and me, Aunt Lovey hated the way they thanked her for taking on such a “tragic case.” She held us when she could and promised us the moon. “I’m your Aunt Lovey,” she whispered, nuzzling our soft cheeks, “and you are my family.”
Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had never been separated for longer than a few days before, and these separations, when Uncle Stash went to see his elderly mother in Ohio, were rare—not even yearly (only when Mother Darlensky called to say she was dying, then didn’t). As much as Uncle Stash missed Aunt Lovey, he was delighting in his solitude. The World Series was on Channel Two. His beloved Tigers (if you lived in Leaford you were a Detroit Tigers fan) hadn’t made the play-offs, but the Los Angeles Dodgers were playing the Oakland A’s (the A’s were Uncle Stash’s second-favorite team) in Game Five in Oakland. (The Athletics were not a team in the seventies; they were a dynasty, winning three consecutive World Series!) Not only could Uncle Stash watch his baseball in peace but he could smoke his forbidden pipe in the house and eat supper in his underwear in front of the TV.
(An aside: In some strange way I can celebrate the unlikelihood of Ruby and me through the game of baseball. Maybe that’s why I love it. The controlled chaos. The trillions of possibilities. And millions of improbabilities. The home run. The pop fly. The double play. The shocking outcomes. Not to mention the simple thrill of watching a mere mortal launch that little white ball into the stands. Uncle Stash would clap his hands, shouting, “Vack dat ball, Kirk Gibson! Vack dat ball, Gibby!”)
(Another aside: I didn’t know that Uncle Stash had a thick Slovak accent until Ruby and I were in fourth grade attending a parent-teacher meeting about Ruby’s inability to focus. Mrs. Hern, whom Ruby disliked but I adored, seemed not to understand a single word Uncle Stash was saying. Aunt Lovey said Uncle Stash’s ear didn’t hear his own accent. At his workplace, except for the sound of the saws, there was quiet. The other butchers didn’t have much to say—which is just as well with all the bad tempers and sharp knives. We lived in the country, where the nearest neighbors were across the field and over the creek. Before that, Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had lived in a little bungalow beside Nonna, an old woman whose Italian accent was as thick as Uncle Stash’s Slovak one. Uncle Stash didn’t hear his accent, so he assumed people who couldn’t understand him were either stupid or deliberately trying to irritate him. “Picovina,” he would mutter under his breath—the Slovak word for “Bullshit.”)
(Ruby hated—still hates—baseball. Ruby hates all sports, preferring just about any mindless garbage on the television: Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie reruns from the 1960s or one of her endless movies taped from TV, neatly labeled and stacked in a room, like Aunt Lovey with her books. Our conflicting taste in entertainment causes conflict between us during the hockey play-offs, and the basketball play-offs, and the Olympics, and especially the World Series.)
All that to say that Uncle Stash was enjoying being alone, smoking his pipe in the living room, watching Game Five in his underwear, and he had not been paying enough attention to Aunt Lovey’s voice on the phone or her face when he was visiting the hospital on the weekends. He didn’t suspect that his wife was falli
ng in love with the conjoined twin girls. Her phone call about guardianship came from the proverbial left field.
“I have to tink about it, Lovey.”
“What do you have to think about?”
“Lovey . . .” His tone was a warning. She was already being unreasonable. He watched the tobacco smolder in his pipe.
“Have you got the baseball on, Stash?”
“It’s Game Five.”
“Well, for the love of Pete, turn it down.”
“Rollie Fingers is at pitching.”
“You say, on the mound, or is the pitcher, or just is pitching, Stash—you know that.” Aunt Lovey had been correcting her husband’s English for nearly thirty years, but he never seemed to mind. “Please turn it down, Stash. This is important.”
Uncle Stash left the phone to lower the volume. Steve Garvey singled to first.
“What if they are not finding the mother?” he asked when he picked up the receiver.
Aunt Lovey had one of her feelings (Aunt Lovey’s big on premonitions) that our mother would not reappear, but didn’t share it with Uncle Stash. “She’ll turn up, but if she doesn’t, I s’ppose we could try to make it permanent.”
“We’re old, Lovonia,” Uncle Stash said, sounding old. He was fifty, exactly two years younger than his wife.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Twins.” He paused. “Joined twins.” Another pause. “I don’t know,” he muttered, badly wanting to put his pipe in his mouth, afraid his wife would recognize the clicking sound of the stem hitting his teeth.
“Stash . . .”
“First I see her, okay?” Uncle Stash drove to Toronto each Saturday to spend a few hours with Aunt Lovey, then drove back the same night (neither would have dreamed of wasting money on a hotel), but he hadn’t been allowed in our room and hadn’t yet set eyes on us.
“Not her, Stash, them. Why?”
“It’s reason to want to see her, Lovey.”
“Reasonable. And not her. Them.” She was exhausted. “Twin girls. Not one girl with two heads. Two girls with two heads that happen to be joined together. Stash?”
“Lovey,” he continued, “I don’t know if it’s the right thing. On Saturday, take me to see her. Take me to see her, Lovey. Then I decide.”
“Well, it’s pretty terrible. I mean, it’s horrible but beautiful. You have to get used to it,” Aunt Lovey told him.
Uncle Stash was silent, watching the baseball. For a moment he forgot he was on the phone. “Stash?”
“I’m watching.”
“Listening. You mean you’re listening. It’s horrible, but they’re beautiful too. There’s nobody else, Stash.”
“The doctor says it’s all right to go from the hospital? Before you say the little one is no good.”
“She’s not the little one, she’s Ruby. And I did not say she was no good. ‘No good’ is not what I said. I said she has a few problems. It’s nothing I can’t handle. Have you forgotten I’m a nurse? Stash?”
He was silent again, his eyes on the muted baseball.
“They need somebody.”
“But Lovey, to be attached . . .”
She could barely speak. “They’re attached to me.”
Stash sighed and absently settled the pipe on his bottom lip.
“You should get the floors done, Stash, just in case those children’s welfare people make a surprise visit. And make sure the sink isn’t piled up with dishes. And for Pete’s sake take that pipe outside!” She knew for certain that her husband was smoking his Amphora Red in the living room—and the toilet too, no doubt.
“Stash?” Aunt Lovey paused, so he’d hear it right. “You.”
Uncle Stash paused too, but it was because he felt powerless, and he’d just missed Joe Rudi’s home run. He hung up the phone, turned up the volume, and pulled the vacuum out of the hall closet.
“Hovno,” he cursed in Slovak. Shit.
Country Mice
Aunt Lovey knew, as everyone knows, that it’s better to raise children in the country than in the city, even if the city in question is only Leaford, population 3,502. The city, no matter how small, is corrupt and unrepentant, while the sun shines brighter in the country, making people more wholesome. When Ruby and I were only five months old, Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash bid a tearful good-bye to their widowed Italian neighbor, Mrs. Todino (Nonna), and their tidy bungalow on Chippewa Drive and moved us into the old orange farmhouse that Aunt Lovey had inherited (as the eldest child and the only one of five sisters still in Leaford) ten years earlier.
The sturdy two-story farmhouse had been built in 1807 by Aunt Lovey’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Rosaire, a carpenter by trade. Although he’d been trained to appreciate such things, there wasn’t time for moldings or cornices, or urging tongues into grooves. In order to plant in the spring, Rosaire had to reclaim his land from the ravenous river. In order to survive the following winter, Rosaire had to find a wife.
He found a wife and had eight live children in as many years. The winter that Rosaire’s ninth child was born, a terrible storm uprooted one of the huge pine trees that shaded the west-facing windows and flung it aside like a rogue hair. Rosaire decided to craft an enormous table from it, one that could fit his entire beloved family at one seating. He and his eldest boys whittled the pine tower into an eight-foot table with turned legs and scalloped edges. The table would barely fit the dimensions of the original kitchen.
Rosaire died of consumption (that’s what they used to call tuberculosis because of the way the disease consumes you) before the table was finished. Rosaire’s wife and three of his children died of TB the same year as he, and rest in a horizontal plot at the eastern edge of our cornfield, kitty-corner to the rural Leaford Museum, under a row of white gravestones, on a grade from large to small. I used to think they looked like the nesting dolls we brought home from Slovakia. Or stairs to heaven.
Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had never planned to live in the country. (They had been renting the farmhouse and surrounding land to Sherman and Cathy Merkel for nearly a decade.) In spite of the sunshine and the promise of virtue, the nurse and the butcher were not eager to abandon their jobs to become farmers, for whom disaster was expected, if not foreseen: a glut of grasshoppers to chomp the leaves, a dearth of bees to pollinate, potato bugs, army worms, wheat rust, too much rain, not enough rain, frost too early, snow too late, droughts that shriveled the crops and withered the wells. The only sure thing was a flood each spring. Their compromise was to live in the farmhouse, which was vacant anyway, Sherman and Cathy having moved into what we called “the cottage” on the other side of the creek after Larry disappeared, and to let the Merkels continue working the land. Aunt Lovey ignored the fact that the Merkels’ four-year-old son had been swept up by the killer tornado in the driveway where Uncle Stash would be parking the family car. She’d decided that the Tremblay family farmhouse was the only safe place for we Darlen girls to live.
It’s been years since I saw the old house. At that time I noticed it had shifted and lists to the left. Eight pine trees still towered over the vast front lawn. The apple tree near the driveway had ceased to blossom, but the willows wept as always. The maples that gave dappled shade to our wading pool obliterated the sun. The long pine table was still in the kitchen, the soft wood blurred by burns and blemishes, the impression of numbers and letters from a thousand homework pages swirling through the grain, a row of four tiny holes near the scalloped edge where I stabbed it once with my fork.
By the time our little family moved into the old farmhouse, the place was already dilapidated. All manner of bugs and rodents had made themselves at home. There were some problems with the plumbing, and the driveway needed to be regraveled. (Along with Larry Merkel’s body and Cathy Merkel’s soul, the tornado had taken all the paving stones.) Aunt Lovey cleaned the walls and floors with Lysol and ordered the burnt-orange shag carpet for the den. Uncle Stash caught twenty-eight mice in the first week. (He had Aunt Lovey
take a photograph of him with two mice caught in one trap, holding them aloft the way a fisherman would “the big one.”)
Of the three square bedrooms on the second floor, two of them were closed off and unheated in winter to save money. Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash slept in the third room, the smallest, whose window had been bricked in because of the terrible winter drafts, but the only room from which they could hear Ruby and me if we called them in the night. Aunt Lovey attempted to brighten the grim room with daisy wallpaper and hung a pair of coordinated yellow drapes over the bricked-in window. Uncle Stash looked into the cost of a skylight but could never find the money in our tight family budget. The walls crumbled when you brushed against them or looked at them too hard. Bits of plaster and dust fell behind with the mouse shit and the ancient black wires. You could almost feel the joists heaving at night, steady and rhythmic, like breath. There were several loose floorboards in all the rooms and tiny ragged nails on which we all (but Ruby) ripped the soles of our feet, until Aunt Lovey filled every square inch (including the bathroom) with mismatched carpet remnants. There was a broken windowpane in the bathroom that, though plugged with a balled-up pillowcase, still let in flies. Even with all that, no one ever spoke of repairs. Not Aunt Lovey to nag (which is kind of amazing considering she was a nurse, but then, she did contain multitudes), and not Uncle Stash. Not Ruby. Never me. We all must have sensed the same thing—that the soundness of the structure relied on its delicate balance of decay.
There was a big red barn behind the orange brick house that sheltered a few dozen chickens and the tractors and some antique tools, which are probably valuable today. Painted in large white letters on the slats of the barn, letters that made Uncle Stash glower each time he chanced to glance, was the name Tremblay. The word, he told me once, was like a scream. “No Polack son of a bitch is gonna marry a Tremblay!” The name on the barn was just another imperfection we didn’t dare repair.