Sylvie: Short Story Read online

  Sylvie

  Barbara Gowdy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Sylvie

  About the Author

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Sylvie

  Although Sylvie draws a blank about what happened to her before her first day of school, her absolute recollection of certain moments after that day is a documented medical marvel. She doesn’t just remember verbatim conversations, she remembers how the air smelled and if there was a breeze. She remembers that while her mother waited for her father to answer, a train whistled far off and there were mice scratching in the walls. If there were three dead flies on the windowsill and she noticed them ten years ago, she notices them again in her memory. “It’s like dreaming when you know it’s a dream,” she tells the fat lady, Merry Mary. “You’ve got two lives going on at once.”

  “As if,” Merry Mary points out, “you don’t anyways.”

  Merry Mary is referring to the fact that Sylvie’s Siamese twin sister, Sue, is attached to her. Sue is nothing but a pair of legs, though. Perfect little legs with feet, knees, thighs, hips and a belly, the belly growing out of Sylvie’s own belly, just under her navel, and the feet hanging to a few inches below her own knees and facing away from her body, that is to say, facing in the same direction as her own feet. She has no more will over these little legs than she does over her ears, but she feels them, the cramps they occasionally get, the twitches, anything touching them. Off and on during the day she holds them by the feet and bends and stretches them, a habit drilled into her by her mother, who said that otherwise they would rot and fall off.

  The school nurse eventually told Sylvie that this wasn’t true. “No such luck,” was how the nurse put it, in spite of which she encouraged exercises to control the cramps. She also set Sylvie straight regarding her mother’s conviction that if she hadn’t been constipated throughout the pregnancy, there would have been enough room inside her for two babies to grow.

  “Malarkey,” the nurse said.

  “I thought so,” Sylvie murmured. But she went right on suffering survivor guilt.

  Sylvie never had reason to believe that her mother was upset about having a daughter with an extra pair of legs. The reason her mother sighed over everyone else’s good luck and made sarcastic remarks about their supposed problems was that she had a daughter who was nothing but legs. She knit blue-and-white or red-and-white striped stockings for Sue (Sylvie had to wear plain white) and bought her new shoes (Sylvie’s were secondhand, from the church bazaar). As if Sylvie weren’t there, as if she weren’t the one who felt what Sue felt, her mother squeezed Sue by her feet and massaged her calves and said, “How’s my baby? What kind of day did my sweet baby have?” By Sue’s round knees her mother said you could tell that she would have taken after her side of the family, the Scottish, blond, plump side.

  “These,” her mother said, knocking on Sylvie’s own bony knees, “are Portuguese.”

  Her mother’s obvious favouritism hurt Sylvie, but at the same time she felt sorry for her sister, and she appreciated her own good fortune in having an entire body, plus, at her sister’s expense, a second pair of legs, which, even if they didn’t work, no one else had. Given her mother’s behaviour, the last thing Sylvie suspected was that the legs were alarming. There was nobody to tell her. She was an only child, and her father, who worked long shifts in a light-bulb factory and was hardly ever at home, didn’t speak fluent enough English to say much. They lived at the end of a deeply rutted dirt road on a piece of poor land where German shepherds ran loose. Maybe Sylvie went to town a few times before starting school, she doesn’t remember. A year could go by without a visitor.

  The school inspector must have visited. They had no phone, so people had to come by in person to tell them anything. Her mother subsequently referred to the inspector as That Man, and when he died, a year later, she said that if they thought she was going to wax That Man’s coffin they had another think coming.

  Two days a week her mother cleaned at the funeral parlour for twenty dollars a month plus the wilted flower arrangements. On Sylvie’s first day of school the red ribbons holding her pigtails were cut from a Rest-in-Peace sash, as was the white trim that at the last moment her mother sewed along the hem of her skirt to make sure her little legs didn’t show.

  Her mother took her to school the first day, in the horse cart. Sometimes they owned a truck, but not that year. When the schoolhouse came into sight down the road, her mother said, “You keep Sue under your skirt. Don’t show her to anybody. Don’t exercise her until you’re back home.”

  Sylvie was standing in the cart to see over her mother’s shoulder. “Are they playing tag?” she asked rapturously as the children stopped playing and cried, “Here she is!” and “It’s her!” and ran out onto the road.

  “Sit down,” her mother said.

  The cart creaked and clacked up to the school. With a pang Sylvie noticed that all of the girls’ skirts were shorter than hers and that none of the girls had pigtails. Her mother drove about twenty yards past the children before stopping. “Go right inside,” she said. Her eyes were on a boy who was off by himself, smoking a cigarette.

  Sylvie picked up her lunch pail and climbed out. When she reached the children they parted to make a path. The look on some of the children’s faces made her instinctively shield the front of herself with her lunch pail, and yet she wasn’t connecting her little legs to those looks. Her mother’s warning to keep Sue under her skirt, she had taken to mean: don’t be immodest, don’t show off.

  She was now at the schoolhouse steps. Holding the lunch pail pressed against her little legs, she turned and waved to her mother. Her mother snapped the reins, a sound Sylvie heard in her left ear, while in her right ear she heard a voice pitched like her own—her first experience of another little girl speaking to her.

  “Can we see them?” the girl asked.

  “See what?” Sylvie said.

  “Your legs.”

  “My mother said I’m not allowed to.”

  “Is that where they are?” a second girl asked, pointing at where Sylvie held the lunch pail. This girl had mean eyes and long teeth.

  “I’m supposed to go right inside,” Sylvie murmured, and she started to walk around the children.

  Somebody tried to lift her skirt. When she swung around to see who, a hand darted in front of her, under her lunch pail, and smacked one of her little legs on the knee. “I felt them!” the mean-eyed girl screamed. A boy yanked Sylvie’s hair. She let go of her lunch pail, and immediately the front of her skirt was under attack. “Don’t!” she cried. Somebody pushed her, and she fell to the ground. Her skirt was pulled above her knees. Her arms were pinned, a hand clamped over her mouth. The hand smelled like tobacco. The children who could see gasped and fell silent. “I’m going to bring up,” a girl whispered, and Sylvie thought that it was because of her underpants showing, hers and Sue’s, but then a boy touched her little leg on the shin, a quick testing pressure with the ends of his fingers, and Sylvie got the picture—her little legs were white slugs when you turn over a rock.

  When everyone had taken a look, some of the older girls helped her up. They swiped dirt from her skirt, careful to avoid the front of her. They examined the cut on her arm. It didn’t need a bandage, they agreed. A girl who wore glasses picked up Sylvie’s lunch pail and praised the strawberries painted on it. “Don’t cry,” she said. “They just looked like normal legs to me.”

  “It’s your own fault,” the mean-eyed girl rasped in her ear. “You should have showed us when we asked nicely.”

  That was the best advice Sylvie ever got. From th
en on, if anyone asked to see her legs, nicely or not, she hiked up her skirt. Kids brought their older brothers and sisters and their parents to the school yard to see her. One boy brought a blind aunt who, after gripping each of Sue’s thighs, said, “Just as I thought. Fake. Plantation rubber.”

  It didn’t take long for Sylvie’s parents to find out what was going on. Sylvie’s compliance was the thing that her mother couldn’t get over. She called Sylvie a dirty dish rag. She said that a steady diet of scratches and pokes in the eye would have soon taught the children a lesson.

  “But if I don’t show them, they’ll scratch and poke me,” Sylvie said.

  “Then that is your lot!” her mother shouted. “That is your cross to bear! Think of what Sue has borne! Think of what I have borne!”

  At this point her father appeared from another room. “Why not she stay here?” he said.

  “What?” Her mother looked startled by this rare intervention.

  “You give her the lessons,” he said.

  “What?” her mother said louder.

  “Like before.” He shrugged.

  “What did I tell you?” her mother shouted at him. “What did That Man say? Truancy is against the law! Against the law! Do you want us all hauled off to the slammer?”

  At dismissal the next afternoon her mother showed up and laid into Sylvie’s teacher, Miss Moote, for not being on the ball. From then on, Miss Moote kept Sylvie inside at recess and waited with her outside the front doors until her mother arrived in the cart. Tuesdays and Fridays, the days her mother cleaned the funeral parlour, her father was supposed to come for her, but more often than not he got tied up at the factory, and finally Miss Moote would walk around the school and say timidly that all the children were long gone, she was sure it was all right for Sylvie to walk home.

  It was never all right. Boys ambushed her and poked and tickled her little legs to see them kick. One day the boy who chain-smoked stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs, her little ones and then her own, and she had to race home to wash out the blood that dripped onto her underpants.

  She lay them in the warming oven to dry, but Sue’s pair, a higher-quality cotton than her own, were still damp when she heard her mother opening the front door. She had to put them on anyway (she and Sue owned only one pair each) and just hope that her mother wouldn’t notice.

  Not only did her mother not notice, she had a gift from the funeral parlour. After stroking and massaging Sue and asking about her day, she stood up, reached in her coat pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

  “Found it beside Mr. Arnett on the slab,” she said, unwrapping the napkin to reveal a dead praying mantis. “Right beside his ear, like it was praying for his old skinflint soul and then keeled over from the formaldehyde. Don’t ask me how it got in there, though.”

  As Sylvie carefully picked the insect up, the boy’s finger stabbing her and Sue became the darkness before the dawn, the terrible trial that had earned her this otherwise unaccountable blessing. The blessing wasn’t just that Sylvie had never seen a real praying mantis, it was that her mother had been trying for months to find a buyer for the microscope. Her father, claiming to have got the microscope cheap at a fire sale, gave it to Sylvie on her birthday. Ten dollars, her father finally confessed, and for a day Sylvie’s mother muttered and raged that amount, and then she posted For Sale notices on telephone poles in town. But there were no takers, and meanwhile Sylvie used the microscope to study insects.

  With the praying mantis, she began a collection. First she studied the insect from every possible angle, then, after flattening it with a rock or by rolling a pencil over it, she cleaned it off with vinegar and water. When it was dry she ironed it between pieces of wax paper and glued it into a scrapbook.

  She filled three scrapbooks in three years. In her fourth scrapbook she branched out to include larvae and worms. By then she was identifying her catches with the help of a library book, and making labels from letters cut out of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. On the facing page she would write down some aspect of what she had read or observed. “To defend itself the catocala hides its colourful wings with dull wings that blend in with the surroundings.” “A black line under its back wings is the only difference between the Basilarchia butterfly and the monarch butterfly.”

  A few weeks after her fourteenth birthday she gave this activity up. One day she didn’t have the heart to flatten another insect. Also she hardly ever discovered anything she didn’t already have, and this frustrated her, especially as she knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of different insect species right on her land alone.

  The exciting feeling of the hunt didn’t end, though. In fact, because of her memory spells, it came back to her at least once a week, as vividly as the real thing. Other moments came back as well (she had no control over what entered her mind at these times) but usually in her memory she was stalking or preserving one of her insects.

  The spells had started a year before, and always when she was nervous or upset. Her mother would be yelling at her, and Sylvie would hear every word her mother said, and she’d see her mother there, banging a pot down, but why she squinted was from late-afternoon sun glancing off the barn roof, and why she felt an urge to lift her hand was that her hand was lifting, to pluck an aphid from the rose trellis. She heard her mother in the kitchen and heard her mother two years ago, calling from the barn door.

  Even without her spells Sylvie had an excellent memory. She memorized her textbooks and got perfect grades and achievement pins. During spare periods and physical education classes (from which she was excused) she studied in the library or in an empty classroom. Since everyone who wanted to had seen her legs at least once, she was left alone.

  In her junior year, however, an army base was set up down the road from the school, and cadets began to wait for her, two or three of them a day, outside the school gates. They took pictures of her to send to their families and to carry in their pockets—for good luck, they said, when they were shipped off to fight the war in Europe.

  Sylvie didn’t mind. The truth was, she had a soft spot for the cadets, who brought her chocolates and told her she looked like the movie star Vivien Leigh. They made jokes and teased her, but they did it to her face, there was no hypocritical pretense of sparing her feelings.

  One day a carnival came to town, and not a single person from school had the nerve to tell her about the freak show, but the cadets did, no beating around the bush, straight to the Siamese-twin foetuses in a jar.

  “Like you, except with four arms and another head,” one of the cadets reported. “And dead, naturally. Can’t hold a candle to you, though.”

  Sylvie turned on her heel and made for the Brown farm, where the carnival was set up. She found the side-show tent by following red arrows that said, “This Way for the Thrill of Your Life!” and “Keep Going, Thrill-seekers!” Next to the tent was a big sign that said:

  M.T. BEAN OF NEW YORK CITY PRESENTS

  THE SIDE SHOW OF THE DECADE.

  TALLEST, SMALLEST, THINNEST, FATTEST,

  STRANGEST, RAREST EVER TO WALK

  THE FACE OF THE EARTH!

  Underneath was a painting of a thin man in a tuxedo, a fat lady wearing a crown and sitting on a throne, and a tall lady with huge hands holding out a plate that had a midget standing on it. The foetuses weren’t in the painting.

  “Next show in half an hour,” a boy said. “You can buy your ticket now. Fifty cents.”

  Sylvie didn’t have any money, she hadn’t thought about having to pay admission. “I’ll come back,” she said.

  She was sure that her parents would want to see the foetuses as badly as she did. She was wrong. An odd, dark look came over her father’s face. Her mother called M.T. Bean a vulture.

  “But, Mother,” Sylvie protested. “Siamese twins. Like me and Sue.”

  “Not like you and Sue!” her mother cried, shaking a ladle at her. “Naked! Meat on display! That’s what I saved yo
u from!”

  The next day Sylvie left home. She hadn’t planned to, but when she got to the fairgrounds and found the tents gone, she started walking to New York City. She remembered that Mr. Bean was from New York City. She figured that by heading east and following road signs, she’d eventually get there. In the back of her mind she had a plan to exhibit herself at diners in exchange for free meals and a place to sleep.

  Three hours later she came upon the carnival in a meadow, not set up but with the trailers spread out and people lounging around drinking beer. A piebald Negro wolf-whistled at her.

  “Is Mr. Bean here?” she asked him.

  “Honey, you don’t want to see the Bean man,” he said. “We got two trailers broke down, and the Bean man be a mean man today.”

  “He’ll want to see me,” Sylvie said.

  He sure did. He offered her his chair and a bottle of Coke. He said he knew her mother.

  “My mother’s dead,” Sylvie told him. “So is my father.”

  Mr. Bean narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”

  “Almost eighteen.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “When I was born, it was in the papers.”

  He smiled. “Right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

  He was a fat bald man in an undershirt and suspenders and with an English accent. He had her take off Sue’s shoes and stockings, and then he squeezed each bare leg along its length. “Can you move ‘em?” he asked. “Bowels function?”

  She signed a contract that afternoon. Five years, forty dollars a week, free room and board, a fifty-fifty split on wardrobe and prop expenses. A second big sign would be painted, featuring her alone and calling her The Incredible Girl-Boy. Sue would become Bill, and Sylvie would tell funny stories about the trials and tribulations of being attached to a boy.

  Sylvie and Merry Mary share a trailer. They’ve been sharing one for six years, from Sylvie’s first day, their only stretch apart being when Mary had a fling with Leopard Man, and Sylvie moved in with one of the barker women.