Aunt Ingrid is my mother’s twin sister; they were identical twins, the Lofgren girls from Lemond, Illinois, who looked so much alike that one of them once took a Latin test for the other without their teacher catching on. Later they liked to fool their boyfriends, my mother Anna going to the door when Ingrid’s beau arrived and saying in her sly teasing voice, “I’m all ready if you are.” They believed, as many twins do, that they were joined by a bond closer than mere sisterhood. In later years, Aunt Ingrid, married by then to Uncle Eugene and the mother of four children, would write from Napoleon, Indiana, where she moved, and tell my mother that she had a new perm, and it would turn out to have been on the very day my mother in Maywood gave herself a Toni. Or they would find they had had colds at the same time or bought new spring coats in the same color, or tossed and turned throughout the same restless night. More often than not their letters crossed, and this more than anything else provided proof of their joined natures.

As girls they were each other’s best friend. When they were seventeen they enrolled in the teacher training course at DeKalb, traveling back and forth each day on the Interurban that ran for miles past the town limits, into the rolling countryside and stopped not far from the side road where they lived. One afternoon, arriving at their stop, my mother jumped gaily off the car, followed by Ingrid. But Ingrid was wearing a ring on her finger, a cheap ring of imitation gold, and the ring caught in the mechanism of the door. My mother remembered a strip of brown skin unwinding like a peeling off an apple. There was surprisingly little blood, but considerable confusion and shouting, and someone on the street car said loudly, “The poor girl, she’s going to lose that finger.”

The driver of the Interurban took Aunt Ingrid straight back to the DeKalb hospital where she did indeed lose her finger, the fourth finger on the left, that very night.

It fell to my mother to go home and tell her parents that there had been an accident. But she did not tell them. She could not, she later said; her mother could not have borne it. Instead, she told them that Ingrid had gone to a friend’s house in DeKalb to spend the night, and then she lay awake all night with her teeth chattering, the longest night she was ever to endure. In the morning a doctor from DeKalb drove his Model T into the farmyard, knocked at the kitchen door and informed the astonished parents that their daughter’s finger had been amputated.