The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read online

  Jordan drove up just as all the old clocks for sale on the wall began their fractured chiming. “Anybody got the time?” Jordan said, smirking and stepping in. The shop’s light glinted on the key he wore on a shoestring around his neck. Mabel and Lily first met Jordan a year or so before when he’d come out to sell some torn-up Louis L’Amours. Mabel bought everything he brought out over the months. She paid much too much for the metal ribs of an old barrel and the red tailfin of a wrecked ’57 Chevy. Jordan’s teeth were already yellow and broken from too much nicotine and sugar, so he had a shy, tight-lipped smile Mabel and Lily both fell for.

  He leaned over the back of the sofa and Mabel touched at the key swinging from the end of its string. “What’s that key to, anyway?” Mabel said.

  “Some lock somewhere,” Jordan said, shrugging. “But I got this deal I’ve got to strike up with you. Think you’ll buy this?” He held out a silver egg-shaped container, and he twisted off its top to show her the green stains inside. He said, “In this, you’d cure your betel nuts in lime.”

  “I don’t know,” Mabel said, suddenly tired of contemplating the price of junk.

  Jordan set the betel-nut thing next to Mabel on the sofa, and he shouted out for Lily. He took a swig from a little bottle of Vicks Formula 44 he carried in his pants pocket. “Oh, Lily,” he sung out.

  He loved Lily very much, Mabel knew, but Lily was devoted to no one in her life. She was only moved by the attention of strangers, particularly strange men in their late twenties, men who maybe had a divorce already, or at least some well-earned disillusion. Lily worked nights at the steak-house and days at the counter of a bakery in Bonnevilla. The bakery was across the street from a Texaco station and down the street from the police station and the library. Mechanics and cops and mustached librarians in tweed would come in to buy stale pastries at half price and to tease her about the coffee as black and nasty as bilgewater.

  It did seem to Mabel, as she watched Lily come down the stairs, that Lily wore their father’s suicide almost seductively. Maybe the men sitting alone in the bakery, leaning in toward her as she poured her awful coffee, would smell her perfume, a perfume as uncomplicated, as unoriginal as White Shoulders, and remember some other’s throat, some other’s wrist. They’d notice her looking vaguely wrecked—her lipstick smeared a little or an earring gone or a button gone from her blouse—and these men would love her for a sadness they hadn’t caused.

  Lily walked slowly down the stairs having put on a pair of white pumps too long in the toe and too high in the heel. Her dress was unzipped again, and she turned her back to Jordan without a hello. “Do me up, hon,” she said, and Jordan obliged, moving in close behind her, putting his lips to the skin of her shoulder as he zipped her dress. He noticed an insect on her neck, and he blew it away before kissing her there. The insect landed on the back of Mabel’s hand. It was a strange black ant with wine-colored wings that looked like ornate paper-cuttings. Mabel suspected these odd bugs, these winged ants and white bees she’d been noticing lately, were a result of the new genetically altered crops farmers were resorting to.

  Lily winked at Mabel as Jordan kissed her, and she stretched her neck for more of Jordan’s affection. “I’m sorry we fought, Mabel,” Lily said, nearly whispering. “You’re welcome to hate me for the rest of the night, just don’t hate me forever.” Mabel often daydreamed of hating Lily forever. She wished she could sustain her anger the way Lily did, the way Lily might spend days not speaking because of some slight, shut up in her room with old Vogues and a handkerchief wrapped around her hot head as if she were convalescing. Lily had convinced herself that her pain was original, unique, unlike the pain endured by anyone anywhere in the history of time. Over the years, Mabel had tried to teach her otherwise by collecting short articles depicting worse tragedies from the back pages of the newspaper. She’d leave these clippings on Lily’s pillow, stories like the one about the girl who pushed her twin down an old well or the one about a woman who slowly poisoned her sister by stirring iron filings into her nightly cup of chamomile.

  Lily unrolled the short sleeve of Jordan’s shirt to get at the pack there. “This is candy,” Lily said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m trying to quit smoking. But look here,” and he took one of the bubble gum cigarettes from the pack and held it to his lips. He blew into it and a dusting of fine, powdery sugar made a cloud. “Just like smoke,” he said.

  “Where’s the car?” Lily said, waving her hand in the air, refusing the bubble gum. Jordan took Lily’s wrist, then Mabel’s, and led them out to the front porch. Beneath the lamp that lit the gravel drive sat the two-door Packard faded away to a pale gray. Rust spots like gunshot riddled the side of it. A dishtowel hung in place of the glass of one of the side windows.

  “One of those ninety-nine-dollar paint jobs and she’ll be the prettiest girl on the block,” Jordan said. Mabel imagined riding in the back of the car to the river on a muggy afternoon, wearing a swimsuit with a beach towel wrapped around her waist. Jordan would be in a pair of cutoff jeans and a tropical shirt all unbuttoned, Lily beside him painting her toenails with her foot up and pressed against the dashboard. They’d listen to the old records her father had taped—Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello and The Clash.

  Jordan took a box from the backseat of the car. “This woman in town had meant to open up a Starkweather museum. She put a new engine in the car and everything, so people could go for joy rides in it. But she ran out of money.” He took from the box the other artifacts he’d bought from the woman: a doll Caril Ann had made from twisting up a Kleenex, and a sign Caril had put up on the door of her house where she and Charlie holed up for six days after he killed her family. The sign read: STAY AWAY EVERY BODY IS SICK WITH THE FLU.

  “I’m not buying any of this from you,” Mabel said. “It’s borderline perverted. Not to mention hexed.” But Lily, with reverence, lifted the impossibly fragile Kleenex doll from the box and held it in her palm. She touched a fingertip to its bald head. Lily and Jordan once took a bus to Lincoln to visit Starkweather’s grave at the Wyuka Cemetery and to attempt a seance.

  “None of this stuff is for sale, anyway,” Jordan said. “I robbed that woman blind and this is all going to only appreciate in value.” Jordan opened the doors for Lily and Mabel. Mabel slipped into the backseat and sat back. The vinyl was torn, the cushions lumpy, and she wondered if there might be something grisly sewn into the seat—the silent remains of something unspeakable. Jordan didn’t start the car yet, savoring it, holding the steering wheel, steering a little, fiddling with the radio knob and pushing in the cigarette lighter. The car smelled of must and mice. A broken spring in the seat poked at the back of Mabel’s leg. It seemed to Mabel that, in such a car, one would be inspired by the spirit of renegade youth and not be scared of anything. But the only thing that affected Mabel was the view out the window. The sun was setting at the edge of the desolation, casting its sharp glow across the miles of nothingness to be traveled before reaching a good place.

  Mabel longed for the circle of lights of the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds on the edge of town. The Hamilton County fair had just ended after a long weekend; as a little girl, Mabel had sat on the roof of the porch to watch the lights of the fair spin and flash, the carnival like a ghost city, a mid-western Brigadoon, rising from the mist once a year. On still nights she could hear the smash of the demolition derby or even the bleat of sheep penned and judged. Even years later, walking alongside the booths and tents and trucks of the carnival, the air thick with humidity and the smell of cotton candy and candied apples, Mabel wouldn’t have been surprised to see her father holding Lily up to pick a rubber duck from a tub of running water. On the bottom of the duck would be the number of Lily’s prize, a plastic shark’s tooth on the end of a necklace that Lily would give to her mother to wear. When her parents fussed over Lily, when Lily was small, was when Mabel most felt part of a family, when Lily’s crying and laughing, napping and waking, were of great amus
ement and concern. Mabel would never forget sitting on her mother’s lap in the old apartment one Sunday, both of them rapt and silent watching Lily sleep naked but for a diaper against her sleeping father’s naked chest. Her father lay back on the sofa, Lily in his arms, the funnies spread out on the floor beside them. The Silly Putty they’d been playing with still held the stretched-out image of Dick Tracy’s daughter-in-law Moonbeam. “Aren’t we lucky?” Mabel’s mother whispered in her ear.

  At the fair just the night before, Jordan, even three sheets to the wind, had won Lily one of those square, painted mirrors, by knocking over milk bottles with a wrecked baseball, its stitching in pieces. On the mirror was a retro cartoon of R. Crumb’s bald-headed Keep On Truckin’ high-steppers. But Jordan let Mabel have the mirror when Lily disappeared with a gangly, nothing-to-lose carny who felt her up beneath the bleachers of the rodeo. Lily confessed in the middle of the night, in the middle of the midway noisy with heavy-metal music blaring from the Wild Octopus and the Screaming Mimi, and Jordan forgave her because she was in tears—the carny had stolen her ruby earrings by expertly nibbling on her lobes.

  “There’s a State Highway 666,” Jordan said, the car still and silent, “goes south down Arizona. Can you imagine? Driving Starkweather’s car down Highway 666?”

  The sleeves of Jordan’s shirt were too short for his long arms. Lily traced her finger along the scar across Jordan’s right wrist. “When you did this,” she said to Jordan, “did you leave some kind of note?” Lily and I wonder about so many of the same things, Mabel thought, pleased.

  In all the months Mabel and Lily had known Jordan, they’d not spoken of his most obvious relation to their father. But the similarity wasn’t all that obvious. After all, she thought, their father had succeeded at suicide and Jordan had failed—two very, very different situations.

  Mabel listened closely to Jordan’s hindered breathing, the old-man’s rattle of congestion in his young-man’s chest. He was only a boy, just barely nineteen, yet afflicted with a litany of minor ailments and an addiction to over-the-counter remedies. He licked at those cold-medicine lollipops for kids even when he had no sniffle; he constantly popped Advil, sucking the sweet, candy-like coating off each tablet. As he took another hit off his Primatene Mist, Mabel wondered how Lily could just sit there resisting holding his stuffed-up head to her bosom to smooth down his rooster tail and whisper love and comfort.

  Jordan recited from his suicide note. “Think this not,” he mumbled, “a tragedy of great proportion. Think it only the delicate misstep of someone’s dying life.”

  “Hmmmm,” Lily hummed, her voice a sexy wink. “You’re a poet, sweetie.” But Mabel leaned back disappointed. She’d hoped for a letter violent with accusation and spite. These were not the true words of a young man longing for death, and Mabel knew something of fake suicide notes. Before her mother left for Mexico, she took Mabel and Lily aside. “Girls,” she’d said, for Mabel and Lily were just very small girls then, Mabel only about ten years old, “I have something for you.” She took a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it. Mabel recognized her mother’s stationery—powder blue with gray kittens next to Fiona B. Rollow at the top of the page—and her mother’s handwriting, all petite curlicue and extra flourish. But her mother said, “Your father left this note behind. To whom it may concern,” she read aloud, “Please, no one take responsibility for my pain . . . it is my own fault, my own failing. My daughters, please don’t blame your mother for my death, and don’t blame your mother if she can’t take care of you on her own. It would be much too hard for her, as it would be for anyone. I realize what I am about to do is so unfair. But I dug a hole for myself, and I can’t get out of it. Sincerely, Eddy Rollow.”

  Mabel had wanted to believe those were her father’s words, but it had been impossible. My daughters? as it would be for anyone? I dug a hole? It had depressed Mabel even then that her mother wouldn’t have known better, wouldn’t have known that Mabel and Lily loved their father so much because he was not a man who would write with such formality and stiffness. If Eddy Rollow had left a suicide note, Mabel thought, it would have been in the margins of a favorite book. Or he would have written it on the wall of the kitchenette of the old apartment, his script flowing around the pomegranates and grapes and almonds in the wallpaper’s print. Or, more likely, he would have written his words in the dissolving steam of the bathroom mirror.

  Now the note, which Mabel kept in a fire-safe box, was taking on the qualities of age and of damage from the constant opening and closing. Each time Mabel took the note out to read it again, its folds crumbled and tore a bit more, and more of the words, in pencil, had begun to fade away into the powder blue. Always before, Mabel had hated the letter, this evidence of her mother’s deception, but she’d grown to need it. As its words dissolved and the paper fell apart, as it slowly ceased to exist, it became something true. This lie became an honest portrait of Mabel’s mother and her confusion.

  If Mabel had been in the front seat with Jordan, she would have taken his hand and kissed his scar, then held his hand to her cheek. She and Lily knew none of the details of their father’s suicide, except that it involved a gun. They didn’t know if he’d put it in his mouth or in his ear, didn’t know if it had taken apart his head or had left a simple clean hole. Mabel had even fantasized that he’d merely meant to shoot himself in the foot, to injure himself to get disability. He’d often complained of his job as a foreman at a company that manufactured trailer homes. Mabel had loved how his skin smelled of the sawdust from freshly cut wood, and she’d sit on his lap and nuzzle her nose in his neck as he read from the funnies page at night. He particularly enjoyed Andy Capp, so much so that he even ate a bag of Andy Capp—brand Hot Fries every day from the lunchroom vending machine.

  Mabel touched at the back of Jordan’s neck; his skin was hot, almost feverish, and damp with sweat. “Drive us someplace,” she said, looking toward the little yellow lights of Bonnevilla. Mabel wished Jordan would drive them quickly away, fast enough for them to move ahead in time, for her to look back on the whole of her life and learn something about who she would become. Would she have any babies, and would she be the type of mother to abandon them, or would she be the type of mother to steal them away and vanish without a trace? Actually, she couldn’t see herself with children at all—she imagined something of a monastic life for herself, imagined a life of stomped grapes and kept bees and scratchy robes with belts of rope.

  2.

  STREET LAMPS LIT THE EMPTY SIDE - walks of the town square. The only places still open were the steakhouse and a pool hall that Mabel hadn’t been in since she was four years old. As they passed, Mabel could remember the smell of her dad’s Old Golds doused out in mugs of flat beer. Mabel had felt like a celebrity as she’d spun around on the stool, gathering up the attention of all the barflies and pool players. She once ordered a Shirley Temple because that was what she’d heard a little girl in a beret on TV order in a hotel lounge, but her father had said with a wink, “Nah, give her something stronger, Les. Mix her up a Roy Rogers.”

  As Jordan parked the car in front of The Red Opera House, Mabel said, “What would I have been doing in the pool hall at four years old? And where were you, Lily?”

  “Mom needed a break from having a rowdy four-year-old all day long,” Lily said. “And I would have been practically a baby, so he couldn’t have taken me to the bar.” She added, “I would’ve been just about a year old,” pleased with her youth. “It would have been so inappropriate.”

  “One foot in the womb,” Jordan said, pinching Lily’s baby-fat cheek.

  Mabel’s father quit drinking shortly after that night he treated her to a Roy Rogers. Mabel reached over and combed her fingers through Lily’s ponytail, pitying her because she never got to have a mocktail with their daddy.

  “I found a way to break into The Red Opera House,” Jordan said, looking into the rearview at Mabel. Mabel had longed for years to get inside. She’d heard of
the curtain hand-painted with birds by a Dutch artist and of ruby-eyed dragonflies in the stained-glass chandeliers. “There are murals on the wall of people in masks,” Jordan said, telling her about how he’d found his way inside only a few nights before.

  Lily threw open the car door, got out, and kicked off her too-big shoes. She carried one shoe in each hand as she stormed down the sidewalk, away from the opera house. “Lily!” Jordan called. “Lily! Where are you going? What are you mad about?” But Mabel knew this was another of Lily’s fits—Lily didn’t like Mabel and Jordan’s shared interest in junk and old buildings. Mabel knew that Lily was headed toward the end of the block lit up by Jordan’s father’s barbershop; it was after hours, but Mr. Swain often spent evenings in his barber chair avoiding Mrs. Swain at home. Mrs. Swain, when stewed, which was often, became a comic-strip domestic situation, her brittle bleached hair up in rollers, her housecoat hanging open over a flimsy slip, a rolling pin a weapon in her hand. So Mr. Swain kept a VCR at the barbershop, along with his collection of old Suzanne Pleshette movies and the complete episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. He’d watch the tapes on his black-and-white portable, drinking Windsor and smoking Swisher Sweets. Both Lily and Mabel had terrible crushes on Mr. Swain; he, like their own parents, had been only a teenager when he’d fathered Jordan, so he was an extravagantly young older man with thick yellow hair and a flat stomach. He cut hair in his Levis and tight, white T-shirt and wore a plastic comb tucked behind his ear. Lily claimed to Mabel that he once unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down a bit for her to see a horned red devil with “The Devil Made Me Do It!” tattooed at his lower abdomen.