The Girls Read online

  White-haired Mrs. Merkel sat alone on an orange vinyl chair where she could watch people coming and going from both the front doors and the Emergency entrance. She was clutching Larry’s picture (shorn white hair, slit gray eyes, fretful brows), dreaming of his little blue bike spinning without a rider in the vortex of the storm. In the dark, there were soft steps and whispers. Down the hall, dancing circles from a flashlight.

  At 11:33 p.m. the Stones, a family of Mennonites from the Eleventh Concession, staggered through the Emergency doors into the dark hospital. Fifteen of them, with injuries from mild to severe, had spent hours digging out from the rubble of their collapsed cellar. Their horses were lost, so they’d stumbled the five muddy miles from farm to hospital. Two of the men, though bleeding and limping badly, carried a third, who appeared to be dead. Six small children, bits of wood clinging to their hot wool caps, floated behind the others. Aunt Lovey was relieved to see that the children seemed mostly unharmed, until the little girl in the center fell to the ground and stopped breathing. Dr. Ruttle Sr. dropped to his knees to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

  Most of the volunteers had already been sent home, and with them had gone the extra lanterns and flashlights. In the dark there were cries for light, and water, and light, and bandages, and light, and saline, and light and light and light. The man who’d been carried in dead had been revived by the commotion and, on seeing the fallen child, began to wail. There was so much noise in the Emergency Room, with trying to revive the little girl and administering care to the rest of the family, that no one could hear our mother moaning, or maybe yowling, some sort of deep, throaty, animal sound. No one except Mrs. Merkel, who, steeped as she was in worry, prepared as she was to grieve, followed the river of cries from Room One, groping through the blackness until she found our mother, on her knees, leaning over a chair with her forehead flat on the windowsill. (Aunt Lovey thinks she was trying to climb out the window to retrieve her cigarette.) The candles that had been in the room were dead on the ground outside. (Presumably she was trying to cast light on the grass to see if she could find that smoke.) Whatever brought our mother to the window, she’d been overcome by searing pain from her longest, strongest contraction yet, and before she could right herself, let alone make it back to the bed, another wave of pain had come, and then another and another.

  Even in the pitch black it was obvious to Mrs. Merkel, who unintentionally set her hands on the woman’s pulsing stomach, that this was the pregnant woman she’d seen before. “Help me,” our mother begged. “Please, God, help me.”

  Mrs. Merkel shouted down the hall, “Nurse! Doctor! There’s a woman having a baby! It’s coming! The baby’s coming! Please! Please!”

  But no one came. Mrs. Merkel (who only had the one child) knew nothing of midwifery but had the presence of mind to offer some comforting words, find the sink in the dark, and soap up fast. There was a sound from our mother, a spine-chilling scream, as if she’d just had her arms amputated in a horrible sneak attack. And then another scream, the legs gone now too. Mrs. Merkel started out of the room, but circled and returned.

  With her sleeves pulled up to her elbows, Mrs. Merkel reached down to feel the slick hair moon that was my (our) head between our mother’s legs. “Good Lord,” Mrs. Merkel whispered. “Good Lord in heaven.” Of course, being conjoined, our head was nearly twice the size of a normal baby’s head. Our mother grunted and pushed.

  From anus. To clitoris. Her tissue tore.

  One would assume that the birthing mother would be screaming, but she was not. “Oh my God,” Mrs. Merkel whispered. “The head’s out.” She could hear the faucet dripping in the corner. Her hand on our bloody scalps, unable to see the two-faced twin that we were, Mrs. Merkel drew a deep, thrilled breath.

  Suddenly Aunt Lovey was in the doorway with a kerosene lamp. The flickering lamp lit the scene at the window just enough for the nurse to see that an enormous head had emerged from young Elizabeth Taylor and that it had two distinct faces. Pinched faces not quite side by side, sharing a crop of thick dark hair. Aunt Lovey cocked her head and drew closer, not shocked or repulsed but utterly entranced.

  Cathy Merkel screamed.

  Within seconds, Doctors Jr. and Sr., followed by a passel of female nurses, appeared, all clutching some source of emergency light—a candle, a kerosene lamp, a flashlight, shining their lights upon the thing, the thing that was us.

  It was a full minute before someone thought to remove the screaming Mrs. Merkel from the room.

  The Doctors Ruttle quickly agreed not to try to move the patient from her all fours, acknowledging that hands and knees was, in fact, a fine posture to birth what appeared to be the first case of conjoined twins in Leaford and, possibly, the whole country. Dr. Ruttle Sr. at her left flank, Dr. Ruttle Jr. at her right, using two pairs of obstetric forceps, wrenched us from our mother’s body, our internment with her ended, ours with each other about to begin.

  Our entry into the world was greeted not with gasps but with the quiet reverence of professionals. Someone scooped us up and carried us, uncovered, to the examination table. We were slippery with creamy vernix, blotchy, purple, trembling. The doctors and nurses moved as one to watch us wriggle on the crinkling paper blanket. How long must they have stared before someone spoke?

  Our combined weight at birth was ten pounds seven ounces. I was the longer one, my legs perfectly formed, my torso somewhat shorter than normal, making my arms appear somewhat longer. My sister’s legs hung limply from her hips, two clubfeet annexed by her shortened femur bones. Ruby’s upper body was normal, but very petite. I can imagine what the silent staff at St. Jude’s Hospital saw as they looked down upon us: our heads welded together, my crooked face looking this way, and Ruby’s pretty one looking that.

  I’ve heard a number of versions of what happened next, but I’m sticking with Aunt Lovey’s. There was a hushed round of “Oh my Gods” and “Lord in heavens” and “Holy mackerels.” Then Aunt Lovey whispered, “The little one looks like the big one’s doll.” Dr. Ruttle Jr., never taking his eyes from us, called for a camera, then told Aunt Lovey to get on the phone with the Children’s Hospital in Toronto. Before Aunt Lovey could turn to go, an instrument cart crashed near the door. People did not instantly spin to look, as they would in normal circumstances. And when they did turn, one by one, with their lamps and candles and flashlights, they were not shocked (after what they’d just seen, nothing would ever seem shocking again) to see Dr. Ruttle Sr. sprawled on the linoleum, a scalpel resting comically on his forehead, dead of a heart attack at age seventy-eight.

  I abruptly stopped crying and led the room in a moment of silence. Heads twisted and swiveled, wondering at the extraordinary birth, conceding the timely death. Dr. Ruttle Jr. moved to his father’s side. He did not attempt resuscitation. His father was already gone. He returned a rogue white hair to its dignified place on the old doctor’s head, then set the instrument cart back on its feet. Quietly, calmly, he retrieved the bag of saline, the forceps, the clamps, and the other things strewn about the floor, straightening and revising the exact position of the scalpels twice while he considered that his beloved father had died on what had likely been the best day of his life. My newborn cries recommenced.

  Finally, Dr. Ruttle Jr. turned his attention back to the craniopagus twins as Aunt Lovey and the other two men in the room (the custodian and one of the Mennonite men who’d been drawn by all the commotion) hoisted the elderly doctor’s body onto a gurney and ferried him away.

  Our mother, exhausted by her labor and likely reassured by the sound of my mewling (Ruby was still mute), did not make inquiries. She did not confirm, “Twins?” She did not question, “Boys or girls?” She did not even ask for a smoke. She allowed the attending nurses to roll her toward the bed, where Aunt Lovey helped to deliver the afterbirth. But there was a hemorrhage with this second delivery and enough blood to severely deplete the poor young girl, if not quite enough to require a transfusion.

 
Within two hours of our arrival, Ruby and I were on our way to the Children’s Hospital in Toronto, in the back of an ambulance with head nurse Lovey Darlen. Our mother, Elizabeth Taylor, lay silent and staring but conscious for a full week following our birth. She would not divulge her real name (Mary-Ann Taylor) or eat, but she did manage to obtain some cigarettes. Aunt Lovey was in Toronto with us, and the rest of the staff, feeling sorry for the wretched new mother, didn’t have the heart to enforce Aunt Lovey’s no-smoking rule. On the morning of the tenth day, our mother accidentally or intentionally started a fire in Room One. Before the smoke was cleared, someone reported having seen her wobble toward the beat-up yellow Mustang parked in the tow zone. She was not seen again.

  It is my opinion that our mother lost her mind when she delivered us. I think any normal woman would come unhinged giving birth to conjoined babies, and our mother was still just a girl, and an unmarried girl, in 1974, in southern Ontario. Ruby thinks it wasn’t giving birth to us that drove our mother away but having her twin girls taken from her with so little regard. Ruby has deified our mother somewhat. I don’t have the same illusions.

  Nature’s Mother

  Larry Merkel was the first casualty of the tornado. Missing, presumed dead. Leaford also blamed Dr. Ruttle Sr.’s death on the storm. It was said that stress from the tornado caused his massive heart attack. The third death, the one that is not counted in any official records, might be blamed on the tornado a little too. Perhaps if our mother hadn’t been caught in the storm, maybe if she’d delivered us in another town, her married lover waiting anxiously in the hall, the event would have materialized for her in a different way. Maybe she would have kept us. At least it’s possible.

  Contrary to some Web site information, our mother did not jump out the window when she saw that Ruby and I were joined at the head. (The room was on the first floor, after all.) She died alone in Toronto, in her dusty fourth-floor walk-up, of sepsis, eight weeks postpartum. Aunt Lovey said our mother must have been mentally deficient to have suffered the infection without seeking treatment. Uncle Stash said you didn’t have to be crazy to do something stupid, just young.

  We spoke of our dead mother often when we were children, less as we grew older. Aunt Lovey tolerated our adulation for the woman who’d abandoned us, but only because she was dead. She encouraged Ruby to draw pictures of her (Ruby is quite the talented artist) with diamond tiaras and angel wings, wearing white robes and riding on clouds. I wrote poems and short stories about our mother, keeping the unflattering portraits to myself. When we grew bored with drawing and writing, one of us (usually Ruby) would say, “Let’s play that game,” and the other knew it meant the game where we called our mother Liz and intentionally mixed her up with the real Elizabeth Taylor. It was the game where Ruby pretended we lived in Hollywood and people found us more interesting than freakish.

  When we were twelve years old and pestering Aunt Lovey with questions about our birth mother, Uncle Stash had the idea to hire a private investigator. It was an incredibly exciting week for Ruby and me as, each day, Uncle Stash brought another tidbit of information home to the orange brick farmhouse on Rural Route One. Our mother’s name, as I said, was Mary-Ann, not Elizabeth. She lived in Toronto but had friends in Windsor. She’d once had a part-time job in a secondhand bookstore, where she was well liked by the staff. A coworker told the investigator that she was a voracious reader and was saving money to go to college (I loved knowing that). She had been very interested in all things Native (Ruby loved knowing that), and she had belonged to a church youth group (which my sister and I could never picture).

  Just before our fourteenth birthday, Uncle Stash took a day off from his job as butcher at Vanderhagen’s Meat (where the other men called him Stan) so he and Aunt Lovey could drive us to Toronto for a doctor’s appointment for Ruby’s gastrointestinal problems—and to learn a little more about our birth mother. In Toronto we parked the old red Duster in front of the apartment building where our mother had lived on Sherbourne Street, across from a park and near a hospital. We sat in front of the unremarkable brick building (Uncle Stash bought a fat Saturday newspaper to read) for a full hour before Ruby finally said we could go. Where I’d found my attention drifting toward the beautiful, dangerous young people in the park, my sister had never taken her eyes from the red-brick building, imagining that each stranger going in or out had been our mother’s trusted confidant and had some important story to tell. Ruby had sulked when Uncle Stash said we could not approach the strangers for questioning, and then she refused to eat the picnic lunch (honey ham sandwiches and date squares) that Aunt Lovey had packed that morning. “Don’t be cute, Ruby. You are going to eat,” Aunt Lovey had promised.

  After lunch in the hot car (because Aunt Lovey would not expose my sister and me to those beautiful, dangerous young people in the park), we drove to Mount Pleasant Cemetery to put pink carnations (Ruby’s favorite) on our mother’s grave. The gravestone, which we’d found on the map given to Uncle Stash by the private investigator, was pink granite with specks of scarlet and amber. The stone read: MARY-ANN TAYLOR. BELOVED DAUGHTER. BORN, JANUARY 10, 1956. DIED, SEPTEMBER 21, 1974. My sister and I found comfort in seeing the grave, just as Aunt Lovey had told Uncle Stash we would when I overheard them arguing about it one night.

  While standing in front of the pink granite gravestone, I sensed Ruby mouthing our mother’s name, Mary-Ann Mary-Ann Mary-Ann. I felt sorry for my sister, at the same time curious as to why she was mouthing Mary-Ann Mary-Ann and not Mother Mother. Ruby urged me to kneel so we could be closer to the grave. I consented, though it was incredibly uncomfortable squatting on the grass that covered the dirt that covered the coffin that covered the body of Mary-Ann Taylor, and I was embarrassed. There were only a few people nearby in the cemetery (none of them squatting on their loved ones’ plots), and they were all staring at us. Of course, they were staring because we are conjoined, but they were also staring because we were a spectacle.

  After five or ten minutes of Ruby moaning Mary-Ann Mary-Ann, I began to feel really irritated. I didn’t have the same longing for our mother that my sister did, and I felt guilty and confused by my lack of emotion. I asked Ruby if we could go and waited patiently each time she said, “A few more minutes.” Soon Ruby began to weep with abandon, Mary-Ann, Mary-Ann, oh Mary-Ann. A family from several rows over drew closer.

  I can count the number of times I’ve physically dominated my sister—the number of times that I have carried her away against her will—but at this point, with the gawking family closing in and my sister bellowing Mary-Ann, it was all I could think to do. I stood, gathering my sister in my right arm, feeling Ruby shake with shock and protest, and marched us back to the family car. After a moment, Uncle Stash appeared with the keys. His hands were trembling and he wouldn’t look at me. I knew that whatever Uncle Stash was thinking, it went triple for Aunt Lovey.

  On the way to dinner no one spoke, except Ruby, to declare that she would not be eating. My sister hadn’t eaten lunch (in spite of Aunt Lovey’s promise that she would), and she’d be sick if she skipped dinner too. This made me anxious (when Ruby gets sick my life is severely restricted), and I could see it worried Aunt Lovey too. She shared a look with Uncle Stash, after which he suddenly pulled out his notes from the private investigator and announced that we’d be having dinner at Lindy’s Steak House on Yonge Street, “where your mother worked as a waitress!” Ruby clapped her hands—like a three-year-old. Gullible. Vulnerable. I loved her beyond comprehension in that moment, though we were not yet back on speaking terms.

  Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash had a chef’s salad and a T-bone steak. I had a banquet burger, and Ruby had the fish. (She had a psychic feeling that fish had been our mother’s favorite. Groan.) Of course there was staring. Whenever we go out in public there is staring, even in Leaford, where we grew up, and went to school, and hold jobs, and where we’ve been described in the local paper (Ruby and I hate this) as the town’s mascot. (Being called
a mascot is bad enough, but to singularize us—that’s the worst.) We’ve been stared at so much in our lives we find it normal, and only really notice when we haven’t been noticed. (I’ve wondered if beautiful women process staring the same way that Ruby and I do. Oh yes, they’re looking. Of course, they’re looking. Why aren’t they looking?)

  My sister remembers little about that pilgrimage to our mother’s grave. She doesn’t remember the dinner at Lindy’s or the cemetery, or that we stayed in a cramped Lakeshore hotel and saw our first and only cockroach.

  Back to the day of our birth. Since it was not possible for our mother to travel with us to the hospital in Toronto, Aunt Lovey volunteered, or rather begged, to go. With the Emergency Room still attending to the injured Mennonites, St. Jude’s could not spare more than two of its staff, the driver and Aunt Lovey. As the ambulance hit the on-ramp to Highway 401, my sister began to cry, then so did I. Aunt Lovey scooped us out of the incubator and juggled us until she found a comfortable hold. She rocked us until we stopped crying and fell asleep. The weight of wonder, she thought, and then, the weight of worry.

  Alone with my sister and me in the back of the ambulance for the full four-hour drive, Aunt Lovey determined that we were alert, responsive, and, surprisingly, more different than the same. (“From the moment you were born you had such opposite demeanors,” she’d once said, and I later wondered if she’d read that term in a poem and forgotten she’d read it, then claimed it as her own.)