The Girls by Lori Lansens
Making the Siamese Twin Life Lush and Plush
Six years ago the Polish brothers (Michael and Mark) brought us the film Twin Falls Idaho, the story of attractive Siamese twins, one dying, who hire a prostitute as a birthday present to themselves.(Or is it only for one of them? When she kisses one, is the other really asleep?) During the film, I wondered what the story might be like from a female POV. Would female Siamese twins hire a gigolo? I don't know whether novelist Lori Lansens has seen the film, but she certainly had the same thought.
Lansens treads this terrain with her Siamese twins, Ruby and Rose. Where the Polish brothers operated with independent heads, Ruby and Rose's connection is more off-putting: Rose actually carries Ruby, compressing Rose's spine. They are melded at the head. It is fitting, then, that when Rose announces that she wants to write her memoirs, Ruby is simply along for the ride. Rose asks Ruby to write chapters and these are sandwiched between Rose's. Ruby's chapters are identified by a more severe typeface and adolescent detachment.
The girls are thirty when the novel begins, working separate jobs in the local library of Leaford, Ontario (population 5302). Flashbacks take us to the point after the girls are abandoned by their mother during a tornado in 1974. They are taken in and reared by a gentle nurse, Aunt Lovey, and her Slavic husband, Uncle Stash. The tenor of Rose's writing implies that the town accepts them, at least until they are teenagers, and then again as adults. Rose also outlines the courtship of Stash and Lovey and a trip to Eastern Europe with the girls.
Lansens is expert at employing the senses in her prose. We see Leaford ("the crow capital of the world") vividly in "seed-corn fields and girls in tube-tops." We notice when the new girl shows up in town because we smell her first: "motor oil and buttered turnip." Lansens also manages to create distinct voices between Rose and Ruby. Ruby is more courageous and it comes as no surprise when she is the one to ask a boy to kiss her, and by doing so, impregnating Rose. Here is where the book differs from Twin Falls Idaho and its mediation on death. The Girls do not ignore their proximity to death but they are also conscious of life-forces.
The cadence in the book can be lilting. The first paragraph chimes like a Dr. Seuss rhyme. Rose says: "I've never used an airport bathroom. Or worn a hat, or been kissed like that…never a private talk…or solo walk." Perhaps these notes will appeal to those who are used to reading to their kids. Luckily, Lansens uses these lilts sparingly.
Rose and Ruby seem to be surrounded by accepting figures: Lovey and Stash, and a town that has grown so used to them that they operate by reverse: they don't see Ruby and Rose at all. The girls are often with their own thoughts. They never seem to feel the sting of rejection from other females, something every girl who has not been a craniopagus twin recognizes. In fact, the town takes out their venom, not on the Girls, but a new girl with a lazy eye. The book could have used more grist like this, borrowing from reality, to penetrate its dreamlike quality. For all its carnival costuming, The Girls is just so damn lovely.
The Girls by Lori Lansens
May 2, 2006
Little, Brown
Hardcover, $23.95
ISBN: 0-316-06903-5
345 pages
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