Lila: A Novel (27 page)

The sister said, “Then let’s go, Edith. The sun will be up.”

But Missy just stood there, looking at the credenza. Lila said, “Something of yours in there?” The lower edge of the door hung an inch or so below the bottom shelf. She could just pull at it and pop the door open, it was so dry and shabby. She knew this from all the times she’d tried to polish it. So she did, and it opened, and she said, “Take what’s yours.” She saw Missy pause over the sad little odds and ends and then take at least half of them, even Doll’s knife. “Well,” she said, “that ain’t yours, that knife. I don’t know about the rest.”

The sister said, “She don’t want any of it. Put it back. You don’t want nothing from this damn place, Edith, not one thing.”

Lila said, “Where you going?”

“None of your business,” the sister said. “A long way from here, that’s for sure.” So Missy left without whatever it was that had kept her lingering, and Lila had Doll’s knife in her hand again, the shape and weight of it so familiar she felt as if it had always been there. Mrs. would yell when she saw what had happened to that cabinet. The little tongue of the lock had pulled right through the wood, splintering it. But Lila just stood there thinking, I never will see that baby. I’ve been almost feeling it in my arms, singing to it, and I’ll never even see it. How could I have been so sure Missy would have it here, that she never would tell anybody where to find her damn sister? I never even believed she had a sister. Why did I think I knew how things would happen? It was because time was about to bring her back to the old life, where it seemed as though she could do what was asked of her. She had a dream sometimes that she was running along a road and there was Doll ahead of her, waiting for her, and she just ran into her arms, and she thought, It’s over now, I’m not lost anymore, and the dream had all the sweetness of a mild day in summer. If you could smell in dreams, it would be the smell of hay on the softest breeze and sunlight warming the fields. She thought that was going to be waiting for her, that life, and she never even stopped to wonder about herself for thinking that way. I been crazy for a long time, she said.

The morning Missy left, Lila found a suitcase in a closet and put a few things in it, a hairbrush and a towel and a nightgown, slipped the knife into her stocking, and left the house. She walked until the sun came up, and until there were people in the street. There was just no end to the city. So she went into a hotel and asked if they could use a cleaning woman. And then the years passed. She didn’t mind so much. It was just work. No need to smile at people you’ll never see again. The other women would tell her to ease up a little. You start doing that, they going to start expecting it. Lila heard them talking about her, and they meant for her to hear. She don’t have another job to go to when she done here. She don’t have no children to look after. Nobody going to be hanging on her skirts, fussing for their supper.

But there’s no pleasure in work if you don’t break a sweat. Out in the fields you feel any little breeze. You know it’s coming, you hear it in the trees, you almost can’t wait for it, and then there it is, like a cold drink of water. Well, when she finished with her rooms Lila went to help another of the women finish hers. She didn’t think of it as helping, it was just a way to pass the time. She’d hear them talking about their mothers and their children, so she kept to herself as much as she could. One woman gave her a jar of cream for her hands, and Lila couldn’t even say thanks. She thought about doing it, but then pretty soon it was so long ago she gave it to her that it would probably seem strange to mention it. There was a time when I just quit talking, she said to the child. I’d go a day, a week, and never say a word, except to myself. To Doll sometimes. I’m probably talking to myself right now. No, you’re there, I feel you there.

She had a room on the third story of a rooming house with a window that looked out on the street, and in the evening she would watch people pass by. She noticed when babies started walking, when an old man began to use a cane. At first there was a sway-back mule that pulled a wagon of odds and ends along the street, standing patiently while the junk man lowered the tailgate every block or so to let people see what he had to sell. At the end of the second winter they were gone. Somebody opened a sandwich shop. Now and then a new car came down the street. There were always papers blowing along the pavement, men talking and smoking by the streetlight. There were drunks, at night mostly. Sometimes she’d hear laughing or shouting or singing until morning, and she didn’t mind it. Just people doing what they do.

She went to the movies. Every payday she put aside the money it would cost her to go two times a week, and then she got by on whatever was left after the rent. Those women were right, no children to feed. She could live on just about anything, but for a child you had to find something nourishing. So at least she always had a movie to think about. And when she was sitting there in the dark, sometimes, when it was crowded, with somebody’s arm or knee brushing against hers, she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together. Or they were ghosts all gathered in the dark, watching the world, seeing all the scheming and the murder and having no word to say about it, weeping with the orphans and having nothing to do for them. And then the dancing and the kissing, and all of the ghosts floating there just inches from a huge, beautiful face, to see the joy rise up in it. Like sparrows watching the sun come up, all of them happy at once, no matter that the light had nothing much to do with them. Another day eating bugs, that was what it amounted to. Or maybe they ate the bugs so that they could watch another sunrise. Well, the movie was beautiful, even when it scared her. The music they played before the feature made it seem like something so important was about to happen that she could hardly stay in her chair. She could have watched that lion roar all day. Then the movie. If it wasn’t very good, it was still all there was in her mind for an hour or two, a week or two. She might look like some woman going about her work, sitting by her window, but she’d be remaking a story in her mind. If they decided not to kill the old man but just took off in his car. They could pay him back afterward. She took most of the killing out of the movies, and most of the fighting. She kept the dancing and the weddings. But the best part was always to be sitting there in the dark, seeing what she had never seen anywhere before, and mostly believing it. If she had been a ghost watching Doane and Marcelle, so close she could have seen the change in their eyes when they looked at each other, it would have been there for sure. She imagined a wedding for them, both of them young, Marcelle with her arms full of roses. What to imagine for Doll. That she had never cut that old man. That she’d never held a knife or spat on a whetstone. That she was wearing a new shawl that was really the old one on the day whoever owned it first had bought it. She couldn’t wish that scar away, or how Doll never forgot to hide her face from anyone but Lila. The ghost couldn’t really be part of the dream. Lila would just be there, so close, seeing that tender, ugly face. Just her. Nobody else would even want a dream like that.

That was all the life she had for a long time. Three Christmases passed. She helped put up some garlands in the lobby one night, and a year later, and a year after that. Garlands. Tinsel. Everything has a name. Everybody else knows the name and they think you’re stupid if you don’t know it. Don’t matter. The third Christmas passed, then the dirty part of a winter, then it was spring, and summer, and when she was walking home to her room one afternoon with her hair still tied up in a rag, thinking she might wash up a little and get a hot dog and walk down to the river looking for a breeze, she saw two men unloading some crates from the back of a truck and one of them was Mack. He saw her, too, and laughed, and said something to the other man, who glanced at her and then sort of shook his head the way people do when they don’t want a part in something mean. She thought Mack took a step or two after her, but then she thought she heard him say, Lila, too, when he never knew her real name. How could it be that she had never told him her name? There was ringing in her ears. She almost thought she felt the brush of his fingertips at the side of her neck. The worst part of it all was that she knew better. He only teased her so Missy would be jealous. But she felt the rush of blood into her damn cheeks and even that damn sting in her eyes. And walking on away from him was like walking into a strong wind, or walking upstream in a river, and she hoped and hoped he couldn’t see how hard it was for her, if he happened to be watching. The very worst part was that he would still know even if he wasn’t watching. She thought she heard him laugh. Probably about something else. He’d probably already half forgotten he saw her.

So she left St. Louis. It wasn’t just that one thing. It was her whole life. She had told herself that she went to the movies just to see people living, because she was curious. She’d more or less decided that she had missed out on it herself, so this was the best she could do. And it wasn’t so bad. The women at work would talk about their children who used to be so sweet when they were little, and now they’d rather drink than eat, the boys
and
the girls, and they couldn’t keep their mitts out of their mother’s handbag. She’d be thinking how strange it was in that movie
Dorian Gray
that when the man’s picture turned ugly from all his wickedness, the pants in the picture turned baggy, too. She couldn’t make much sense of it. Half the people in the movie were dressed like Fred Astaire and the other half looked like they’d been sleeping in their clothes their whole lives. When that man goes off into the poor part of the city, he turns evil and ends up looking like he’s been sleeping in
his
clothes. The more he goes there, the worse he is. Warts all over him. Maybe somebody stole his hat and the rest of it. Swapped with him. That could happen. Or somebody saw him there stripped naked and took pity on him, since every inch of that town he lived in was always soaking wet. What was she thinking about? It was the painting that changed. She couldn’t remember if the man died in his good clothes and only the rest of him was ugly. Him lying there and the others clucking their tongues. Too bad he happened to have a knife to kill himself with. Then he was too dead to use it to make them stop staring, and that was a shame. She was wearing Doll’s knife in her garter the day she saw Mack, but she probably wouldn’t have used it even if it hadn’t meant putting herself in reach of him, probably looking into his face. That damn face. Well, her life just rose up on her, and before she even knew quite what was happening she was walking away, struggling to keep from making a fool of herself, her heart beating in her ears. The life she’d decided she would never have was there the whole time, trapped and furious, and in that minute she knew that if a man she ought to hate said one kind word to her, there was no telling what she might do. Come along, Rosie. Give me a little smile, come along. He’d forgotten he ever saw her, and she was up in her room with the window shade pulled down, stuffing everything she had into her suitcase.

She walked over to the bus station to see where she could get to with the money she had. Wherever she went, she’d get there after the stores were closed, and the rooming houses. To get out of the city would take all her money, and then she’d have no place to spend the night and no supper. She went outside to sit on a bench and think about it. A car pulled up to the curb, and the driver, a young woman, called to her to ask her where she was going. Lila said, “Iowa,” and the woman said, “Me, too!” as if she had been hoping to hear that very word. “Get in. I saw you sitting there with your suitcase and I thought, I’d sure appreciate some company. That’s really why I came by here. It’s not on my way.” Lila wasn’t sure what to think about sitting for hours beside someone who might expect her to talk or to give her more money than she had, but the woman said, “It’ll save you the price of a ticket. I’ll be driving all night, and I’d rather not do that alone.” She was a tidy, freckly little woman with her hair in a knot. She was wearing a starchy white blouse she must have spent an hour ironing, it was so perfect. At the movies you could find yourself sitting next to anybody at all, some man with polished shoes and creased pants, some woman with rings on her hands, hugging her purse. They might tip their bags of popcorn toward her, she would hear them breathe and sigh as if they were sharing a pillow with her. Sometimes she could feel them looking at her, but she never looked at their faces or said anything to them. She’d just wait until the show began and they could forget each other. Now she would probably be sitting beside this stranger for hours with no way to stop thinking about her, which meant there was no way she could stop thinking about herself. Still, it would make some things easier.

The woman said, “Where you going?”

Lila thought she might try to get to Tammany, but the woman had never heard of it, so when she asked if it was near Des Moines Lila said yes, thinking that must be where the woman was going herself. It turned out she was going to a town called Macedonia, off somewhere in the cornfields, so she left Lila at a gas station in Indianola, which wasn’t too far from Des Moines. Lila had no reason to be in Des Moines. In fact, she didn’t want to be in any town that was big enough for anybody to know where it was. She had in mind one of those no-name places along a county road. A store and a church and a grain elevator. There must be a thousand of them, all just alike, and farms spreading out beyond them. But that woman had brought her clear from St. Louis, so she was glad for twelve hours of riding in a car. It stalled as often as it slowed down. Going up a hill was a trial every time. The woman said she was glad to have someone to talk to because driving made her sleepy, but then she was too nervous to talk. Every now and then she would say she was scared the car was going to break down, and she sure didn’t want to be sitting there in the middle of nowhere all by herself. This was meant as a kindness to Lila, to make her feel welcome, but it was also true. She leaned into the steering wheel and peered out at the road as if that would help.