The Girls Read online

  Ruby sniffed into the plaid handkerchief she kept, as old ladies do, tucked up in her sleeve. I opened a small red book with no pictures and read a story that haunts me, like music. The story of Minnie and Marie. Minnie and Marie were born joined at the chest (that would be a thorapagus conjoinment) in Wales in 1959. The combined weight of the girls at birth was only seven pounds. By the time they were eighteen months old, they’d spent more time in the hospital than out. Minnie and Marie were physically beautiful babies with porcelain complexions and thick black curls, and they laughed more than they cried. The babies embraced and kissed each other often, but they also fought viciously and sometimes had to be restrained by the nurses. They were slow developing language skills but communicated easily with each other. For some reason, they each called the other “Marie,” which they pronounced “Me.” Their adoring nurses and doctors called both babies “Me” too. Minnie and Marie were normal in all aspects except that they shared one heart, which began to fail as they neared their second birthday.

  Specialists were brought in on the case, thoracic and vascular and cardiac surgeons, all of whom proposed sacrificing the sicklier baby, Marie, and giving the shared heart to the stronger twin, Minnie. Their mother, panicked by the ticking clock and the doctors’ insistence that both girls would die if something wasn’t done, agreed to the surgery. She kissed baby Marie good-bye forever while she prayed that the shared heart would work in baby Minnie. The heart did work in Minnie, better than the doctors had dared hope. When little Minnie opened her eyes a few days following the surgery, the roomful of doctors and nurses erupted with applause. The baby clapped too, then reached out to embrace her sister, frightened and confused to find her twin gone. Minnie searched the room for the face of Marie. “Me?” she whispered. The doctors and nurses fell silent. The baby looked around again. “Me?” she begged. “Me?” Then she looked down and, suddenly, seemed to understand that her sister had been amputated from her chest. “Hurts,” she whimpered, touching the white bandages. She found the eyes of her mother, who by this time was awash in tears. “Me,” Minnie said once more, then closed her eyes and died too.

  AUNT LOVEY TOLD me way back then to write my story fearlessly, a little how it is, a little how I wish it could be, not just as a conjoined twin but as a human being and a woman, and all these years later, that’s what I’m going to do. “Write,” she said, “as if you’ll never be read. That way you’ll be sure to tell the truth.” But I do want to be read. I want to share this true story of my life—with you.

  Mother’s Nature

  A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born. According to eyewitness accounts, after hovering over twenty acres of seed corn near Jeanette’s Creek, the fury suddenly drove to the earth, plucked four-year-old Larry Merkel and his blue bike from his gravel driveway, and, cutting a swath through the seed corn and sugar beets, stole south toward the lake with its trophy. The tornado never reached the lake but veered sharply at Cadot’s Corners as if just having remembered the way. There were sightings in three more townships, then nothing. The Merkel boy was lost, but his blue bike was found on the roof of a house three concessions over, more or less intact.

  The little bike, with its slightly bent front frame, once sat behind a rope in the Leaford Museum, flanked to the left by a display of antique farming implements and to the right by a congregation of monarch butterflies straight-pinned to cork. The museum was across the road from our farmhouse on Rural Route One, so Ruby and I were frequent visitors. We knew the exhibits well, and Ruby even became a valuable contributor. In addition to the butterflies, there were cases of musket shot from the War of 1812, and a tobacco pouch said to have belonged to the great Chief Tecumseh. What began as a small display of Neutral Indian artifacts grew, as each year my sister searched for and found dozens more objects in the fields around our home. Across from the Indian exhibit in the Leaford Museum were two larger-than-life photographs of my sister and me, taken when we were three and a half years old.

  I loved listening to our Aunt Lovey, or sometimes Uncle Stash, read the handwritten signs describing Leaford’s riches and rarities. Beneath our picture the placard read: “Rose and Ruby Darlen. Born joined at the head on the day of the tornado—July 30, 1974—at St. Jude’s Hospital, Leaford. Rose and Ruby are one of the rarest forms of conjoined twins—craniopagus. They share an essential vein and can never be separated. In spite of their situation, the girls enjoy a normal and productive life here in Leaford. Picture taken by Stash Darlen, the girls’ uncle.” (Aunt Lovey told me they’d originally used the word “predicament” to describe our conjoinment. She’d made them change it to “situation.”) Beneath Larry Merkel’s bent blue bike the placard read: “Child’s bike. Found on Don Charboneau’s roof after the tornado, July 30, 1974. The tornado devastated Baldoon and the surrounding counties, wounding dozens of people and killing two. Property damage was estimated at over $300,000. Ninety-mile-an-hour winds carried this child’s bike almost four miles.” The dead boy (whose body was never found) was not named. And there was no mention of his poor grieving mother.

  St. Jude’s Hospital, the place where we were born, was not equipped for disaster, and the staff didn’t know where to start after the tornado had come and gone and taken Larry Merkel with it. Most of the injured were seasonal workers from the Caribbean, and many of them had been stranded in the field, unwisely seeking shelter in a derelict barn when the wind began to wail. There were eighteen rooms in the squat brown medical building, and by four-thirty in the afternoon, a half an hour after the tornado hit, all the rooms were occupied. Several dozen bruised and bleeding men were crammed into the musty waiting room, a few more spilling out onto the slippery floor in the hall. The less serious cases waited outside, smoking and joking in their island patois, glad for the excuse to be away from the farm. Pale and white-haired Cathy Merkel, mother of little lost Larry, walked among the wounded, searching the halls for her swept-away son, standing shocked and still from time to time, like one of the lengths of birch scattered across the township.

  I should stop here and make it clear that all I know of the details of the tornado, and of our birth, was told to me by Aunt Lovey, who was “Nurse Darlen” to her coworkers at St. Jude’s Hospital and everything to Ruby and me. Aunt Lovey was in attendance when we were born, benignly plump back then, her mop of curls more blond than gray, her freckled face hardly lined. You might have guessed she was forty. She was fifty-two.

  My recollections of Aunt Lovey’s recollections of our birth will differ, of course, the story having been combed by my memory and set by imagination. And my sister’s recollections of Aunt Lovey’s recollections of our birth, or her own memories of any of the things that have happened in our lives, are very different from mine.

  Back to our story: Aunt Lovey said that on the day of the tornado, Dr. Richard Ruttle Jr., on seeing his hospital crowded with injured migrant workers, called his elderly doctor-father, Dr. Richard Ruttle Sr., out of retirement to help. Nurses from several neighboring communities appeared with boxes of supplies, and a few Catholic League ladies brought food: mushroom soup casserole, Kraft slices on white bread, chicken salad with celery chunks, and Cocoa Krispies from the fridge.

  Aunt Lovey was paged on the intercom. There was a call from Uncle Stash, but she couldn’t take the phone. The message had been scribbled by a harried staffer in blotchy blue pen on the back of a Kentucky Fried Chicken napkin. It said simply, “You.” Uncle Stash was in Ohio visiting his elderly mother and had missed the bad weather altogether. He’d heard about the storm and called St. Jude’s, relieved to learn that his wife was unharmed. “Please, just to tell my wife, ‘You,’” he’d said in his thick Slovak accent, then spelled it y-o-u, when the staffer thought she’d misheard. “You.” It’s what Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey said to each other, perfect in its singularity, throughout their whole married life. It meant “I love you,” and other such powerful clichés. You are everything to me. I’ve been so worried
about you. I’d die if anything happened to you. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you. You have made my life. Uncle Stash also called Aunt Lovey “moja mila,” which means “my darling” in Slovak. Aunt Lovey would laugh and say, “I’m everyone’s darlin’, Darlen.” She said you had to have a sense of humor about names when you were born with the name “Lovonia Tremblay,” then married to become “Lovey Darlen.” Being a craniopagus twin, I understood what she meant about needing a sense of humor.

  After tucking the napkin with its precious blue code into the cleavage of her damp brassiere, Aunt Lovey took a moment to wonder at the chaos around her. She’d scratched her blond head, feeling ridiculous for the gesture, thinking that Leaford hadn’t seen a tornado in more than forty years, and never one as vicious as this. When the public alarm siren behind the water tower in the park by the Thames River sounded off, Aunt Lovey just assumed (though she knew, of course, that our country was not at war) that Leaford was being bombed. She’d been shocked by news of the tornado and perversely disappointed not to have felt the lash of the killer storm more directly.

  Aunt Lovey felt the napkin shift in her brassiere. Then a pregnant patient lurched through the Emergency Room doors. And the electricity went out.

  The sun had yet to dip, so the degree of panic in the room did not increase noticeably. Everyone assumed the lights would be quickly restored, and for the moment they could see well enough. Aunt Lovey instructed a fellow nurse to bring water to an old man with a superficial scalp wound, then hurried to attend to the frightened pregnant woman contracting in the hall.

  The woman, our mother, was eighteen years old, petite and pretty, with long wavy brown hair and a wide, full mouth. On her bottom, she wore a pair of men’s boxer-style underwear swung low under the hill of her belly, and on top, a pink, not-quite-long-enough, smocked maternity dress with no bra. A purple Popsicle had melted down the front of her pink dress and stained her lips and tongue. Her hair was tangled from the wind. Her eyes, smudged with black mascara, were terrified. She was large, as pregnancies go, one of the largest Aunt Lovey had ever seen.

  “Twins?” Aunt Lovey guessed, smelling cigarettes on the young woman’s heaving breath.

  Our young mother suddenly noticed the wounded black men spilling out of the waiting room. A hollow, haunted, white-haired woman (Mrs. Merkel) watched her from the far end of the hall. Our mother bit her cheek, trying not to cry, but she was afraid, and she was in pain, and she was really just a kid herself. Aunt Lovey drew the pregnant girl from the twilight of the hallway into the large closet she used as an office. After fondling the light switch and hoping for a miracle, she asked, “Where you from, hon?”

  Our mother couldn’t answer. She tried to catch her breath as the pain from a contraction chugged up her spine.

  Aunt Lovey already knew that our mother wasn’t from Leaford or anywhere nearby. “I’d say you were from Windsor,” Aunt Lovey said, sizing her up.

  Our mother, having earned a reprieve from the contractions, tore the plastic off a fresh package of cigarettes she’d found in her dirty macramé bag. “I’m having a nic fit,” she explained, then checked the darkening sky. “Aren’t hospitals supposed to have generators?”

  Aunt Lovey pointed to a NO SMOKING sign on the wall, bristling, “We have a generator. Of course we have a generator.”

  Our mother seemed reassured, if annoyed about the smoking. She chewed on a strand of damp hair. “One doctor said twins early on, I guess, but I haven’t really been to see him in a while, so . . .” She descended into a yellow swivel chair. “I parked my car in Reserved. Are they gonna tow?”

  The window was open full and the wind was still fierce, coaxing the papers on Aunt Lovey’s bulletin board to flap out a beat. Our mother kept time with her jangling legs as Aunt Lovey looked into her eyes, thinking they seemed too large, like a borrowed boot or an older sister’s sweater. “What’s your name?” Aunt Lovey asked, as she held our mother’s wrist and counted the beats of her heart.

  “Liiiizzzz,” she answered, so slow and uncertain it had to be a lie.

  “Well then, Liiiizzzz,” Aunt Lovey said, reaching for the blood-pressure cuff, “I’m gonna take a wild one and say this is your first baby? Or likely babies.”

  Our mother nodded glumly.

  Aunt Lovey checked the lights in the corridor. Still nothing. She looked at the sky. There’d be an hour’s more light, at best. There must be a problem with the generator, she thought. We do have a generator.

  “Do you know your due date, dear?” Aunt Lovey asked.

  Our mother shrugged.

  Aunt Lovey gave our mother a clipboard and pen, asking that she fill out her own admittance form, then the nurse wheeled a sleeping leg-wound patient back to triage, so the pregnant girl could labor privately in Room One. When Aunt Lovey later found the clipboard and read it in the light from a candle, she saw that, under “Name,” our mother had written “Elizabeth Taylor.” And under “Address,” she’d put “Hollywood, California.” The rest of the form was obliterated by spiral and box doodles.

  Our mother was sweating severely, straddling a chair and smoking a cigarette out the window when Aunt Lovey and Dr. Ruttle Jr. entered her room. Aunt Lovey marched across the checkerboard floor, jerked the cigarette from her hand, and threw it out the window. (The room being on the first floor made the gesture somewhat less effective.) Our mother didn’t, or couldn’t, protest. She let Dr. Ruttle Jr. and Aunt Lovey lift her from the chair and heft her up to the hospital bed, where she lay frightened and craving nicotine.

  Aunt Lovey pulled the curtains back as far as they would go. There was just enough light to see. In twenty minutes they’d need candles and flashlights. “I couldn’t find your admittance form,” Aunt Lovey said, clucking her tongue. “You’ll have to fill out another.”

  Our mother nodded, watching the undulations of her babies beneath her blue hospital gown. Dr. Ruttle Jr. bent to pull the gown up, but it was stuck under her sweaty bottom, and there were some embarrassing maneuvers before Liz Taylor’s stretched-raw skin was finally exposed.

  “What’s your name?” Dr. Ruttle Jr. asked. “Where’s her chart?”

  “Chart’s in the hall,” Aunt Lovey answered. “Her name is . . .” She waited to see if our mother would introduce herself, but she just stared off, stroking the linea negra on her swollen stomach. “Her name is Elizabeth. Elizabeth Taylor, just like the old movie star. Isn’t that cute, Dr. Ruttle?”

  “Yes, Nurse Darlen. That’s cute.” Then, for the first time, the doctor looked directly into his patient’s eyes. He smiled kindly. “Who brought you in, Miz Taylor?”

  Our mother began to cry.

  “The father couldn’t get here because of the tornado,” Aunt Lovey lied.

  “It’s just stupid that you won’t let me smoke,” our mother sobbed.

  Dr. Ruttle Jr. laid his small palms on the huge lump and submitted us to some forceful palpitations. “Twins. They’re both engaged.”

  “Engaged?” Our mother sniffed and blinked.

  “The babies’ heads are down,” Aunt Lovey explained. “It’s good.”

  The doctor snapped on a latex glove, pried apart our mother’s knees, and stabbed between her gooseflesh legs. After a moment he extricated himself and, letting the strain of the day creep onto his face, pinched the bridge of his nose with his lubricated fingers. Quickly realizing his mistake, he reached for a tissue. “Four,” he said.

  “Four?” Our mother looked horrified. “Twins are two.”

  “Centimeters. You’re four centimeters dilated, dear.” Aunt Lovey patted our mother’s shoulder. “First delivery. Twins. It’ll be a while yet.”

  I like to think our mother knew what “dilated” meant. I like to think she was not terrorized by the invasion of Dr. Ruttle’s fingers. I like to think that, before he breezed out of the room, he assured her that he’d delivered hundreds of babies and dozens of twins and all would go well. It’s more likely that our mysterious mother just lay there con
tracting in the darkness, dying for a smoke.

  The electricity was not restored. The generator, if there was one, did not kick in. The streetlights did not come on, nor any other light in the whole town of Leaford. Our mother, young and afraid and sweating beneath her blue gown, labored alone. She asked for some movie magazines but couldn’t read them with only two candles to light the room. Aunt Lovey, or one of the other nurses, stopped by each quarter hour with a sip of some swampy-tasting water, apologizing that there were no ice chips to suck on, assuring her that when it was time to deliver, the nurses would bring in kerosene lamps.

  By ten o’clock that night most of the migrant workers had been treated and sent back to the farm to slumber in their makeshift barracks. A few of the men had been rushed to Chatham by ambulance. Three near-drowning victims, teenage boys whose stolen fishing boat had capsized on the choppy lake, had been collected by their fathers and brought home for a thrashing. And the talk of the hospital (before we arrived anyway) was that Dr. Ruttle Sr., in a feat some called heroic, had removed the shard of wood from a split-rail fence that had impaled a young autoworker with four children. Assisting as his father removed the giant splinter from the poor man’s chest, Dr. Ruttle Jr. would recall a day when he was six years old, double-riding a bike down Rondeau Road, clinging to his father’s back and thinking the man a giant.