Free Sylvie: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy

Sylvie
    A lthough 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 sheencouraged 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 totown 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