The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (4 page)

When it ended, Lily tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edward Shapiro’s windows were dark, and she wondered where he had gone. Through the wall, she heard Mabel blow her nose and start typing again. A copy of
Glamour
lay on the night table, and Lily picked it up. She turned the pages and stared at the clothes she couldn’t afford and then stopped to read a headline: “What Does a Man Want in a Woman?” It was a survey. Lily threw aside the magazine and began to recite her lines in a whisper. “So is Lysander.” She closed her eyes. “I would but my father look’d with my eyes.” She paused. “I do but entreat your grace to pardon me. /I do not know by what power I am made bold.” A breeze blew in through her open window, and the fresh air aggravated her restlessness. I could walk over to Rick’s and have a beer, she thought. She remembered Hank, felt troubled, and then after putting her hand down inside her jeans, she held her genitals for comfort and, still dressed, fell asleep.

Once in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought she heard voices singing far away. Then she fell asleep again. At nine o’clock, she heard the church bells from Saint John’s and opened her eyes. Lily had been dreaming, and the Sunday bells had mixed themselves into the dream, which she had forgotten except that it hadn’t been pleasant, because the repeated clang bothered her. She could almost hear the congregation’s murmuring, that hollow, haunted tone people use to speak to the unseen, interrupted only by the occasional cough or a baby’s cry. As she pulled herself out of the muddy dream, she saw Pastor Carlsen’s face with its permanently sincere expression—an indistinct blend of pity and remorse. His face had always irritated her, not because she thought it was hypocritical, but because she knew it was real.

*   *   *

Lily never consciously decided to take the route that passed the Bodler place, but she found herself pedaling her bicycle in that direction and dreaming of the car she could buy with the money she had in the bank if she didn’t have to use it for college. Her father’s medical bills had eaten up the savings put aside for Lily’s education, and when Vince offered her a job at the Ideal Cafe and the room upstairs, she took it without complaint. Lily had told herself she needed time to think anyway. She needed to plan. Hank had a plan for himself and for her, but whenever she thought about the imaginary house in Minneapolis and the imaginary children and Hank Farmer forever, a part of her balked. So far she had managed to save $3,476.32 from her job, and that money promised her a life after Webster. Watching Edward Shapiro paint had launched new fantasies about New York, a place she had seen only on postcards and in the movies. Before he had moved into the Stuart Hotel, she had dreamed mostly of Hollywood and California, but watching the man in the window had turned her eastward, and now she imagined herself walking in crowded streets beneath towering buildings on her way to an audition, a script tucked under her arm. Lily pedaled harder with the wind in her face and looked out at the cornfields, the stalks still short but growing taller in the wide, flat fields. The sky had cleared since yesterday, and the sun was hot on her face. When she came to the end of the driveway that led to the Bodlers’, she stopped, climbed off her bicycle and looked at the ruined farmstead turned junkyard.

The Bodler place was such a spectacular eyesore, it was almost gorgeous, a sight that made people whistle in disbelief if it didn’t stun them to silence. A mountain range of refuse had formed in the front yard, great heaps of junk so high they hid the house, garage and fallen barn behind them. These multicolored towers that included parts of bicycles and cars, old appliances, wires, pipes, lumber and innumerable moldering somethings never failed to impress Lily. She remembered searching for toys in the piles when she came here with her father as a child. She remembered feeling both exhilarated and uncomfortable as she dug in the mounds of junk. That was before she had heard the Helen Bodler story, and yet she had known that the old farm with its two dirty men was a place apart. She had never been inside the house. Her father used to go in to speak to Frank, but he had always asked her to wait on the step, as though he didn’t want her to see what was inside. Once, after her father had left her in the yard, she had walked around to the side of the house and pressed her face to a windowpane. She had seen hazy piles of objects and furniture, and then out of nowhere she had seen a face—an enormous, only vaguely human face, its great mouth hanging open, its tongue flickering like a snake’s, and Lily had run gasping from the window. She did not tell her father about it. She did not tell anyone about it, and only years later did she assume that she had mistaken Dick Bodler for a monster.

The brothers’ old green truck wasn’t parked in the driveway today, and there wasn’t a junk picker in sight. Lily listened to the sound of her feet scraping against dirt and pebbles in the driveway and looked up suddenly when she heard a crack above her. A loose piece of canvas from a baby stroller had caught the wind, and she heard it crack again. Otherwise the place was very quiet. Birds chittered, the grass rustled, and she could hear car motors in the distance. When she reached the garage, she paused and looked in through the open doors. The sun cut a sharp rectangle on the earth floor, but beyond that light the interior looked almost black. She could make out a chaos of boxes, old tools and farm equipment, and she inhaled the odor of mildew and cold, damp earth, two smells she liked. Lily had no intention of going inside. The sun and air had made her slow and a little sleepy. But then she saw a suitcase lying on a crate, one corner of it illuminated by sunshine, and she walked toward it. Feeling only vaguely curious, she touched its cracked leather surface, then tugged at its handle. It felt full, and its unexpected weight attracted her. Lily dragged it into the light, hesitated for a second and opened it. The bag was filled not with odds and ends as she had anticipated, but with neatly packed clothes, as if someone had planned a trip, never taken it and then forgotten about the suitcase altogether. The clothes inside had belonged to one woman. They were all the same tiny size, and whoever she was, she hadn’t worn them for a long time. Lily couldn’t date them exactly, but examining a long shapeless dress, she guessed it had been fashionable during the twenties or thirties. Lily seated herself on the dirt floor and pulled out a threadbare camisole with a liver-colored stain. Although she knew it was childish, she pitied the stained garment, pitied it the way she would an unhappy child or whining animal. She folded it, replaced it carefully in the suitcase, and then noticed a fabric pocket under the lid that bulged with something. She slid her hand inside and took out a pair of white shoes. These had held up better than the clothes. Only slightly scuffed, they looked like shoes their owner had saved for church and going to parties. Lily guessed they would fit her. Her mother had always said she had Cinderella feet: size five. Lily pulled off her sneakers, slid one bare foot into a shoe, then the other. The shoes had no tongue, only laces. She tied them quickly and stretched out her legs, examining her feet in the old-fashioned shoes. She liked the curve of their stacked heels and the softness of the leather. They fit snugly. In fact, they pinched, but the tightness around her feet gave her pleasure, a sensation that was almost erotic—tense and warm.

As Lily sat on the dirt floor of the garage, looking at her feet in somebody else’s shoes and pondering that satisfying pressure on her toes, she thought she heard a step outside the garage, then a person breathing. She stopped breathing herself to listen. A car with a broken muffler passed on the road, and she listened as its loud rumbling faded away. Was there someone in the grass outside? Did she hear footsteps again? Lily shook her head. No, she thought. She reached forward to untie the shoes, and when her fingers touched the laces, she was struck by the thought that these were Helen Bodler’s shoes, that she had packed her suitcase all those years ago to run away from her husband. With a shiver of excitement Lily removed the shoes and in that same instant decided to take them. After closing the suitcase and returning it to its original place, she found an old paper bag, dumped the nails out of it and dropped in the shoes. Then she dug in her pockets and came up with two dollar bills, a quarter and a dime. I’ll leave this as payment, she thought.

The heavy inner door to the house stood open. Lily looked through the screen door and into the kitchen. She could hear flies, a low uneven buzz, and inches inside the dim room she made out long rolls of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, crusted black with insects. The room smelled strongly of mold, and when she looked down at the floor, she thought the cracked linoleum squares were oozing liquid. It’s just wet, she thought, from yesterday’s rain. The house probably leaks like a sieve. A couple of feet inside the dark room, Lily could see a table. To run in, slap down the money on the table and rush back would take seconds. Still, Lily hesitated. She listened. The house was silent. Her eyes had adjusted to the murky room within, and she could see a rifle resting against the wall. I’ll count to fifteen, she said to herself, and then run. This method had never failed, because Lily had never cheated on herself. The numbers changed according to the degree of the challenge, but they always worked. The silent count had been responsible for her eating that worm on a dare when she was eight during recess at Longfellow School, for prompting her over the cliff into the ice water of the quarry in May when she was thirteen, and for her greatest triumph—that night only four years ago when she lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train, and then, only seconds before it hit her, rolled out of the way. Bert had been furious, but the boys had all shaken her hand and beat her on the back. The count helped her face more mundane trials, too: like getting out of bed at four o’clock in the morning to go to work. Lily counted, pushed on the screen door, took a step, heard the noise of a car in the driveway, turned her head and slipped. She fell half in and half out of the door, her left arm flat in a pool of cold slime. Coins rolled across the kitchen floor, and she sat up as fast as she could to look at the driveway. With relief she saw that it wasn’t the twins’ truck, but an old blue Chevy with a bashed fender. The floor had left a yellow film mixed with dirt on her arm and Lily wiped it with the bottom of her T-shirt. Then, holding the bag of shoes behind her, she walked down the steps and paused for a second. She saw a dollar bill float over the grass as it caught the wind. I must have dropped it on the step when I fell, she thought. It blew further away. Lily let it go, and began to invent a story for the person driving the car, in case the person wanted to know why she had been sprawled in the Bodler’s doorway. She would say she was leaving money for a purchase and fell. It was true, of course, but also wasn’t.

The Chevy stopped, and Lily watched an obese woman slowly ease herself out the car door. “Give your brother half of that one, Arnie, or I’ll smack you,” she said to the backseat. The woman’s hair had been bleached to a crisp. Lily stared at her enormous belly and thighs in double knit bermudas. She took three heavy steps and puffed. When Lily passed her, the woman said “Hi,” in a dead voice, and Lily said “Hi” back. She glanced into the car and saw two remarkably similar blond boys sitting in the backseat. One was clearly older, but both tanned faces were streaked with tears, snot and Oreos. Lily moved beyond the car, heard its door creak open and the woman say, “Truce, babies. Come and give Mama a hug.” Lily looked back for a moment to see the boys climb out of the car and fling themselves into the flesh of the now squatting woman. When the woman’s arms closed around them, Lily turned back to the road and started to run toward her bicycle.

*   *   *

Mabel’s room smelled of dust, perfume and the paper of old books. She owned hundreds of them, and they crowded the apartment, bulging from shelves that lined several walls in the living room, bedroom and even the bathroom. Lily breathed in that odor again when Mabel opened the door for her Monday afternoon. Stale and dry, Lily thought, like dead bugs. Mabel was talking, but Lily didn’t listen to her. Mabel’s living room had always made her feel funny. There were two things that didn’t seem to belong in the room. One was a miserable old table that Mabel didn’t dust. The other tables were dusted, but the rickety pine table with those old keys lying on it was never touched. And then there was a bird’s nest that was little more than a pile of refuse. If Mabel had not told her what it was, she never would have known. The rest of Mabel’s furniture was adorned with silk and velvet pillows and woven pieces of cloth. The floor was covered with a beautiful red and blue Oriental rug—the leftovers from her big house on Orchard Street. Lily remembered Mabel saying that she had kept only those objects that had “personal meaning” whether they were valuable or not, and that the apartment was a “storehouse of memory.” Once, Lily had mustered the courage to ask Mabel about the undusted table, and it was then that she had discovered that Mabel could answer a question without answering it. For five, maybe ten minutes, she had prattled on about Cicero and some other guy whose name Lily couldn’t remember, and when she stopped, Lily didn’t know a single thing more than when she’d first asked.

“Lily.” Mabel sang the name.

Lily looked at Mabel.

“You’re lost in thought.”

“Sorry.”

Mabel brushed the sleeve of her black tunic. Expensive, Lily thought. She probably bought it in one of those stores in Minneapolis where they look you up and down before they let you in the door. I wonder where she got her money. Professors don’t make that much.

Mabel poured Lily a cup of tea, her hands trembling as she held the pot in the air. The woman always looked cold. But the room was warm, and Lily had gotten used to Mabel’s tremors and quakes and her constantly moving hands. She wasn’t sick. She was nervous, so tightly strung that Lily half expected to hear the woman’s body hum from the strain. Lily held the translucent teacup and imagined its thin sides breaking in her hand.