The Orphan Sister

Predictions, Results

 
When I was in graduate school, my friend Lori-Lyn and I went to the Upper West Side for the day. I forget the agenda, though I remember buying stacks of obscure literary magazines (Egg! The Daily Slab! Quiddity! Pickled Herring on a Stick! Forgive me if any of these are actual). We stopped for snacks at Cafe Du Soliel. Fancy, demure, delicieux.

We also went to a palm reader--I believe this is the only time I've been to a palm reader, though I did practice white magic in first grade from a little booklet with my friend Lisa Smith at the back of Brownie Troop 518, and my friend Lisa Bail and I used the Ouija board with conviction, bored summer afternoons, or homework done, skipping chorus rehearsal because the walk was too much to ask when we could ask, instead, about the future. There were long planning sessions for Halloween costumes, and the game of Careers in the long red box. I'm not sure novelist was an option--Lisa became a lawyer. I have had many Lisa friends, very different from each other, and all of them wonderful. But I digress.

The palm reader spoke privately with Lori Lyn for a long time. I believe it was of use to LL, who is mystical and quite magical herself.

I was more of a fascinated skeptic. The palm reader told me I would have twin girls. I don't, and though I will never say never, that particular bit may not make fact in this particular incarnation. She also told me I'd left a career hanging, a passion, and that I was making my way back. About this she was correct. I was in graduate school for writing, something I'd loved as companion and entertainment and frame for the whole wide world since I could remember. My grad school fiction thesis became my first novel.

And though I never had the twin girls, I have thought about them, these matching people. Which is another seed in the garden of The Orphan Spoon. I had to explore what it meant to match, but be different. To belong possibly more than desired. I had to try on the hat of a twin, even if I hadn't carried them in my arms.

triplets, bottom row

The Orphan Spoon

Welcome to the Orphan Sister--soon I will share details about a new novel, but for now, let me offer up posts on topics related to the narrative: twins and triplets, secret lives, dogs and ferrets and boyfriends nicknamed Feet.

This isn't part of the novel, but it is part of the reason I wrote The Orphan Sister.

There is a family story--isn't there always a family story? But there is a family story about triplets, my grandmother's uncles. I imagine they are redheads but I'm not sure that's true. There were many blond and blue-eyed Wolbranskys, and I wish I had pages of photographs, but instead, I have the frame of my grandmother's telling and my own invention. My sister's youngest son, Simon, has red hair and blue eyes and he blazes and shines, and I imagine these three boys were just like that.

Anyway, the story has stuck with me, even if I've changed details in my own personal memory telephone game. They were emigrating from Russia or Poland--whichever country it was according to the border at that time--to escape the pogroms. Either way, they were most certainly unusual in that generation, triplets, long before fertility drugs or even obsessively good prenatal care.

This is how the story goes: they were at a train station. My great great grandmother was clutching her baby boys, and the men were moving the luggage, when a woman darted out of the anonymous stream of passersby. She grabbed one of the triplets and took off. I imagine a whistle of the police; I imagine this great great, this young mother, howling alarm. Someone stole her baby, but she still had two to hold.

The police caught the woman, but she didn't want to let go of the child, game, instead, for a biblical tearing apart.

"It's not fair!" she screamed, collapsing, pressing her body against him, her cabbagy odor of sweat and desire and sadness inspiring the stunned baby to his own wailing. "She has three and I have none! It's not fair! God is not fair!"

That's how the story goes. It's stuck with me like a stone in my pocket, worried and smooth, but it is also a seed of truth for fiction. How fair is it that she has three and she has none? As fair as all of nature, of thieving birds who snatch chicks or eggs, of benevolent labradors nursing kittens. As fair as the bright blaze of red hair as the triplet was returned to his mother's excessively full arms.