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Conjoined twins’ tales inspire empathy, not fear
By Dr. Melvin H. Schreiber
Contributor
Published November 1, 2009
“The Girls,” by Lori Lansens, Little, Brown & Company, 2005, 343 pages, $13.99
When the author’s son was 3˝ years old, he put his cheek next to hers and said, “I wish we could be glued like this, Mommy.” She got goosebumps and asked him why. He replied, “Because then we would always be together.”
That gives me goose shivers, too, and I am transported to a time many years ago when I felt my grandson’s cheek next to mine and inhaled his boyness.
What is nostalgia for many of us ripened into this stunning novel. Here’s some of the text from page one:
“My sister, Ruby, and I, by mishap or miracle, having intended to divide from a single fertilized egg, remained joined instead, by a spot the size of a bread plate on the side of our twin heads. We’re known to the world medical community as the oldest surviving craniopagus twins, (we are 29 years old) and to millions around the globe, those whose interest in people like us is more than just passing, as conjoined craniopagus twins Rose and Ruby Darlen of Baldoon County. We’ve been called many things: freaks, horrors, monsters, devils, witches, retards, wonders, marvels. To most, we’re a curiosity. In small town Leaford, where we live and work, we’re just ‘the girls’.”
Ruby, the smaller of the two (her feet do not reach the ground) is attached by the left side of her head to the right side of her sister, Rose’s. Ruby is pretty, with a symmetrical, endearing face. Rose’s face is a little twisted. Her right eye slants steeply toward the place her right ear would have been if her sister’s head had not gone there instead. Her nose is longer than Ruby’s, one nostril wider than the other, pulled to the right of her brown slanted eye. They have, of course, never looked each other in the eyes, except in a mirror.
So, we are ready for all manner of grotesqueries, but what we get instead is the girls’ stories, told by each of them separately in separate chapters (and with different styles of print), revealing them to be sensitive, tender, loving sisters, girls for whom “me” and “we” have not such different meanings. They love each other and they love their lives, and the remarkable thing about this novel is that the author conveys their thoughts and feelings in such open and easily assimilated prose that we do not see them as seriously impaired.
They were abandoned shortly after their birth by their unwed mother and raised by Aunt Lovey, a nurse, who does not see them as deformed or even disabled. They live in the country near Toronto, and we learn about country life and country neighbors, including Mrs. Merkel, who lost her only son in the tornado during which the girls were born. Aunt Lovey and her husband, Uncle Stash, take the girls to visit his Eastern European homeland, where they are humiliated but not devastated nor destroyed.
Frankie Foyle takes sexual advantage of Rose, and we live with her through pregnancy, delivery, and the adoption by others of her normal daughter, whose face she declines to see.
The narrative is subtle, vivid, and personal, and the reader feels connected from the start with these two fascinating protagonists who live through difficult circumstances without bitterness, without self pity but with love and tenderness, with forgiveness and, ultimately, good humor. In the end, we are left not so much with a sense of gratitude because we are not they, as with a sense from our own travails and limitations of how similar we are.
Dr. Melvyn H. Schreiber is a physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
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