The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read online

  “Just forget about Lily,” Mabel said, though she knew Jordan could never. He didn’t even hear Mabel say it; he was concentrating on the sight of Lily walking away.

  In the stone at the top of the building before them was written “The Red Opera House 1893,” but the bricks had been painted green for as long as Mabel could remember. Mabel wondered if “red opera” referred to the kinds of productions the theater had staged—bloody conflagrations in all red costume against red backdrops, the actors wailing and moaning their music as they fell to the floor stabbed or shot through.

  Jordan got out and held his hand into the backseat to help Mabel from the car. Though he moved toward the alley, he didn’t take his eyes from Lily’s back. But once off the street, he cheered up, and he nonchalantly pushed open a hinged basement window with the toe of his boot. After crawling in through the basement, Jordan and Mabel walked up into the grocery store. Jordan climbed onto a corner pinball machine to pull a ladder down from a door in the ceiling, and he and Mabel both stepped up into the opera house of the second floor.

  Mabel was anxious to see the walls and the stage of the theater lit by the full moon, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Jordan pushing aside a cobweb to clear Mabel’s path, a web so thick it looked like a nylon stocking. “No one’s spoken a word here for years,” Mabel whispered in Jordan’s ear, thinking of Mary and Dickon and their secret garden. The room was surprisingly cool, and she thought she could hear the drip of a faucet. A painted Ophelia, in a dress with the iridescence of peacock feathers, drowned on the door to the dressing rooms. Lady Godiva with butterflies in her long tresses rode a horse across the ceiling.

  “It’s so beautiful in here,” Mabel said, touching the burned wick of a candle on a chandelier that sat in a heap in the corner. “Why don’t they let anyone up to see it?”

  “The place is falling apart,” Jordan said, “and it would be too expensive to repair. All the boards are rotten through. We could fall through the floor at any given minute. So walk on your tiptoes and keep yourself as light as you can.” Jordan opened the doors to a wardrobe, and the glassy eyes of a fox stole caught a sliver of moonlight and stared back at them.

  “I’m taking Lily to Mexico,” Jordan said. He blurted it, like he’d been waiting and waiting for just the right moment but had given up.

  “The beer tastes like skunk down there,” was all Mabel could think of to say. “You have to put fruit in it to drink it.” For years, Mabel’s mother had discouraged Mabel and Lily from visiting her, painting a portrait of Mexico as a place of banditry and bad water, a place where children lost their arms in factory machines and dead hookers were left to rot in the streets. Even when very young, Mabel had seen through her mother’s efforts to disguise her new home as uninhabitable, but Mabel had also grown comfortable with the idea of her mother as virtually unreachable in her foreign land. It was one thing Mabel had been able to rely upon—her mother in a place that children would not want to be, a place where black widows lay eggs in your ear canal and snakes slept curled-up in your cowboy boots.

  “I read in the newspaper,” Mabel said, “about a pregnant woman in Mexico whose sister drugged her, induced labor, sold the baby, then told her sister the child had died.” Mabel had clipped the article and held onto it, saving it to put on Lily’s pillowcase when she had her next long fit.

  “It’s time Lily saw her mother again,” Jordan said with a shrug, as if saying, Isn’t it obvious? As if saying, Don’t we want the best for Lily?

  Mabel walked away from Jordan and looked out a broken window, down to the familiar street. The streets of the town square were all brick with patches of gray concrete. She could hear the rattle and bump of every car she’d ever ridden in as it crossed the streets, could feel the rough ride in her spine. If Jordan took Lily away, even for just a week, even if they never made it to Mexico, everything would change for all of them.

  Jordan took Mabel’s hand, and he slipped a ring onto her finger. In the set of the ring was an opaque sphere, and Jordan flipped it open on its tiny hinges to show something could be kept inside. “I found it under the stage,” he said. “There’s all kinds of things under there. Maybe it was good luck for the actors to drop things through the loose floorboards or something.” Jordan lit his cigarette lighter, led the way to the base of the stage, and pushed aside a panel. The stage was so low to the floor that Mabel had to lower herself to her stomach to get beneath.

  As she bellied her way across the floor, she could hear Jordan crawling in behind her. Her sandal fell off, and she felt Jordan touch the sole of her bare foot. She felt his fingertips stepping as light as spider’s legs across her heel and up along her ankle. She remembered the afternoon that her mother read aloud her father’s unlikely suicide note and how her mother then took Mabel and Lily to the river for a swim. Naked in the cold river water, the three of them hid beneath the trestle as a train crossed. They shivered and held each other. Unable to hear anything other than the passing train, they sent wordless messages, Mabel pressing her palm to her mother’s stomach, Lily putting her cheek to her mother’s breast, her mother running her fingers over the goose bumps of their skin.

  Jordan, his face next to Mabel’s, relit the lighter, and Mabel leaned back from the heat in her face. “You’re filthy,” she said, pressing her thumb against a spot of dirt on his cheek. As the lighter went out, Mabel lay back and thought more about her father’s last words—he would have written them on thin pieces of paper and baked them into fortune cookies. With a puddle jumper, he’d have smoked the words across the clouds. You’ll live happily ever after, he would have promised them all.

  Jordan tried to find Mabel’s lips in the dark, kissing her cheek, then her nose, then her lips. He kissed her only once, then crawled away and back to the front of the stage. With the kiss, Mabel forgave him everything—for liking Lily more and for buying a car to take Lily away. And she forgave him all further destruction; she would forgive him if he ruined Lily and if he ruined her and if he became someone she and Lily could only talk about very carefully.

  3.

  IT WAS MABEL’S BIRTHDAY, AND LILY had slipped a card beneath her bedroom door, inviting her down to her school-bus apartment for cocktails and cake. As the sun set, Lily unplugged the lava lamp from the thick orange extension chord that snaked in through a break in a window of the bus; in its place, she plugged in a string of blinking Christmas lights. The cord, its other end plugged into an outlet in what had once been a hog shed, into what had once powered a low electrical fence that Lily had once tripped over, jolting her knees, was her only source of electricity.

  With the summer so hot, Lily spent only nights on the mattress in the bus, mosquito netting delicately draped above her.

  Lily hadn’t spoken much to Mabel since the evening a few nights before at The Red Opera House, though she knew she was wrong to be angry. It shouldn’t matter that she and Mabel didn’t share every interest. Lily should love that Mabel and Jordan were close and could appreciate together the dirty dark recesses of collapsing rooms and the studied appraisal of the worthless. It was sweet, after all, to see them stumble up from that basement window, happy with the precious junk they’d discovered. Lily used to love the antique shop, but after living there for several years, she had become tired of all the topsy-turvy: the old incomplete sets of encyclopedias in the kitchen cabinets; the dishes and saucers on the bookshelves; the chairs and rugs stuffed into the rafters of the ceiling; stamped tin from ceilings rusting in a pile on the floor.

  Lily longed to be more peaceable, to remain aloof and serene in the face of her frustrations. She longed to be calm and wise and forgiving. People love you more when you’re quiet, Lily imagined, when you can simply accept. When again she saw her mother, Lily would be the sweet, understanding girl that she had never been before, and she and her mother could enjoy an uneventful afternoon of simple questions and simple answers. Aside from some kisses and some hugging when they first saw each other, their reunion wo
uld lack all drama. It would lack all punishment. Lily relaxed, imagining the few hours she would spend drinking tea within the mud walls of her mother’s cool, blue house. Her mother had written of the papery sound of scorpions on the floor, a sound she said would be soothing if it weren’t for the fear of the sting.

  Lily had found a traveling cocktail set on a back shelf of the shop, the worn leather strap of the case having turned as fragile as cardboard. As she assembled the martini glasses, screwing the glass cups into the red metal stems, she decided it would be a perfect evening. Just the night before, as she and Jordan sat naked in the heat of the bus, too hot to touch, Jordan had suggested they go find Lily’s mother, that they drive down to the border town where her mother wrote lovely letters to her daughters.

  Their mother had called from time to time when Lily and Mabel were still girls. Her voice buzzed and popped with distant noise and tickled Lily’s ear. Lily always asked, “What have you been doing?” and her mother always said, “Oh, keeping the wolves at bay.” Lily hadn’t known what that meant, but she had liked the idea of her mother keeping wolves. She could imagine her in a bungalow along the coast of Mexico, the walls reflecting waves of blue as she licked an oyster from a shell. Near the window overlooking the bay, dirty wolves wrestled. “Can we come to Mexico?” Lily once asked. “Oh, you wouldn’t like it here,” her mother said. “There are bandits to steal your purse. Black widows build webs above your bed. In the cafés, you can’t even get a glass of ice with your pop.” At the time, Lily longed for this terrible place as her mother described it. There, she and Mabel and their mother could live in fear and disgust, never answering the knocks at their door because, in a foreign land, no one could be trusted.

  Lily put on a dark-blue sleeveless velveteen dress that was too hot for summer but too cool for winter, and she curled the ends of her hair with a disposable butane curling iron she bought at the Everything for a Buck. She and Mabel always dressed up on their birthdays, and they always gave each other gifts. They didn’t allow each other to spend a dime, however; they were to find something appropriate in the shop and wrap it up. Lily cheated a bit this year, having gone through a trunk of her father’s things in one of the spare rooms. She selected for Mabel a Joan Armatrading album with her father’s handwriting on the back of the cover, in the upper corner: BOUGHT OCTOBER 12, 1977, FROM THE LICORICE PIZZA, OMAHA. HAD LUNCH AT THE JOE TESS CAFÉ—FRIED RAINBOW TROUT ON A SLICE OF RYE.

  Lily loved having found the record hidden at the bottom of a box of patched-up work jeans. Growing up, she and Mabel had listened over and over to their father’s favorite music. They would set a portable record player in the window of Mabel’s room and crawl out onto the roof where Lily would smear coconut-scented lotion on Mabel’s freckled back and Mabel would soak Lily’s hair with spray-on Sun-In. Hours later, Lily would crawl back into the house as a strawberry blonde. With lines of sunburn crossing their shoulders and hips, they walked downstairs to stand in front of the window air conditioner, both exhausted from their afternoon naps. Eventually they learned all the words to all the songs of ELO and Rickie Lee Jones and Roxy Music, all performers their classmates had never even heard of. Especially on summer days, whenever their father’s music played, Lily and Mabel adored each other, became Daddy’s precious girls, sun-kissed and sweetly sick from the overplaying of Todd Rundgren songs. They glossed their lips and saw themselves as tragically lost to the world. As Lily would drift off to sleep, she’d hear messages from her father in the songs, in the phrases she’d catch in bits and pieces in her drowsiness. Her father existed now to whisper promises in her ear.

  As each year passed, Lily’s memories of her parents inched a little closer toward the romantically impossible, and Lily had imagined herself a bit more like a character in one of the young-adult paperbacks the girls at school passed around. In these, girls suffered family tragedies or drank too much, or they smoked dope or feared pregnancy. For a few years, Lily had read and reread the battered Summer, Finally, about a sixteen-year-old named Summer having an affair with one of her father’s friends in the summertime. Lily kept the book hidden in her locker, certain passages marked in the margins by an X in fingernail polish, and the very idea of it all made Lily feel happily trashy and perverse. She had even jotted in her notebook the name of a boy who had signed her father’s high school yearbook (“Always stay the same! And shave that silly peach fuzz off your lip!”), Bart Youngblood, a name perfectly and creepily suited for her first-love statutory-rape fantasies. She would fall asleep with thoughts of resting her cheek on Bart’s naked chest.

  Lily unfolded a card table and chairs and set them in the center of her bus’s living room. She’d brought a cake home from the bakery where she worked, and she put it atop the table along with the wrapped Joan Armatrading record, some lilacs tucked into the ribbon’s knot. It was night now, the bus lit only by the Christmas lights and a row of candles on the dashboard. She sat down and plucked a candy rose from beneath Mabel’s name in blue and broke off its petals. She let each petal melt on her tongue as she tried to imagine what her mother would be like. Because her mother was so young when she had her babies, she would still be only thirty-five now. She could still very well be confused and afraid over all that had fallen apart in the past. Though Lily couldn’t yet understand how her mother, how any mother, could have left her girls and never returned, Lily would be generous and patient. For once, Lily would be the mothering soul. Lily’s questions would be gentle. What songs make you think of him? Are there songs that make you think of us?

  She looked up to the house, to the front room, where Mabel stood behind Jordan, her arms around his shoulders. Mabel looked at their reflection in the glass so that she could knot Jordan’s tie. Lily wasn’t jealous, she reminded herself. There was no jealousy. In only a few days, Lily was certain, Jordan would ask again, as he so often did, if she’d marry him, and this time Lily would say yes. Lily would be engaged when she met her mother again, as well as enrolled in community college. She had signed up only for a watercolor class as of yet, but her mother didn’t have to know that. As far as her mother would be concerned, Lily was poised to make none of the mistakes she had.

  But as Lily looked at Jordan in the window, this boy too inept to know his own way around a necktie, she wondered how long their approaching marriage would last. And when they divorced, where would she go? Would she find herself flung far, like her mother? Lily imagined herself in some place like Atlantic City, lonely and hopeful, feeling her stomach sink every time the seat of the Ferris wheel dipped down toward the ocean.

  Lily’s mother had left Lily’s father many times in the years before he killed himself. Though Lily always missed her father during the days they spent in their grandmother’s house, there in the antique shop, she thrived on her mother’s guilt. Lily’s mother, frightened of ruining the lives of her children, lavished attention on her daughters during those days of separation. She’d let Lily join her in her bubble bath and even allowed her sips of the peach Riunite she drank from a wide-mouthed water goblet. Her mother had looked so pretty, pink and naked, her wet curls clinging to her cheeks. She’d tickle Lily’s ribs with her toes beneath the water.

  One afternoon, their mother spirited Lily and Mabel off to Omaha for shopping in an overpriced downtown department store, then lunch at King Fong’s Café. Mabel and their mother had chow mein, and Lily, put off by the foreign words on the menu, had a hamburger. After eating, their mother broke open a fortune cookie.

  “Good news will be brought to you by mail,” she had read, brushing the cookie crumbs from the rabbit fur of her winter coat’s lapel. Lily could still remember the café, though she’d never been there since. She remembered the long walk up steep stairs and picking at the pearl in the inlay of the wood tabletop. The dark, ornate chandeliers, with their silhouettes of rolling dragons and black orchids, looked too heavy to be held up by the ceiling. Lily remembered the cold, white sky bright in the cross-shaped windows. There’d been so
me stained glass in the panes, reminding Lily of church.

  “It will be a love letter from Daddy,” Mabel told Lily, treating Lily like she was an infant needing consoling and assurance. Lily wanted to sock Mabel in the jaw for it.

  “No,” Lily’s mother said. She started to cry and she pressed a paper napkin to her cheek. “No love letters. He doesn’t love me. Why should he love me? Would you?” Lily never knew what to do when her mother cried, when she asked the questions that made no sense, so she did what she always did, which was to look down and wait for Mabel to do something. Mabel finally reached across the table and gently stroked the rabbit fur. “I wish I wouldn’t cry in front of my children,” her mother said, trying to smile.

  Lily wished she wouldn’t either. No matter how often her mother cried, Lily never got used to it. When her mother would fall apart, and her mother might fall apart in the middle of anything, Lily couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think. Sometimes Lily would start crying too, and sometimes that worked to make her mother stop.

  At that lunch at King Fong’s that day, all three of them sat there distraught, their cosmetics-counter makeovers streaming down their faces, staining the collars of their new blouses. As Lily looked down at her hands and her chewed nails, she saw the price tag still dangling from the cuff.

  Good news actually did arrive by mail a few days later, just as the fortune cookie predicted. They’d entered a raffle at the department store and each of them had won a free set-and-style from the hair salon at the back of the store, and the pink coupons featuring a cartoon lady in ridiculously big curlers came to their grandmother’s house in a pink envelope. By that time, however, they’d moved back into the apartment in town, and they actually stayed with their father through the rest of that winter and most of that summer and never made it back to that department store. It had relieved Lily to watch the coupons over the months fade and curl in the sun on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.