The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2 page)

“You’d know just as well as I would,” Lily said, pushing aside a collection of scarves to see into a full-length mirror. “Considering you and him have been so chummy lately.”

“What do you mean?” Mabel asked.

“You talk to him a lot when I’m not around. I mean, when he comes here, and I’m not here, I know you two talk to each other.”

“What are you trying to say, Lily?” Mabel asked, coaxing. She felt a blush hot in her cheeks and throat, anticipating a scuffle. She didn’t like arguing. Dispute and confrontation made her throat swell shut and her eyes run. But she felt so much closer to Lily when Lily was provoked. Mabel and Lily were just orphans, really, like
Orphans of the Storm
. In the shop was a box of glass slides for projecting on the screen of movie theaters. Though Mabel had seen only a few of the silent movies featured on these coming-attractions slides, she’d often cast the pictures onto the wall with a flashlight, imagining the stories behind the strange titles:
The Sibyl’s Handmaiden; Chinatown Wastrels; The Yellow Piano; The Phantom Limbs of Captain Moore
. The satellite dish in the backyard piped in some old-movie channels that Mabel watched religiously. She most longed to see all the movies of the Gish sisters. She loved the pictures of them holding
hands or of them both sweetly gazing upon a common object, their peaked cheeks pressed together, their rouged, puckered lips tiny like black pansies. Why must Lily be so distant? Mabel wondered. Why couldn’t we be sisters famous for our devotion?

As Lily spoke, she tied up her curls in a ponytail with a souvenir scarf of the Niagara Falls depicting honeymooners going over in barrels. “What am I
trying
to say?” Lily said. “Well, Mabel, I’m trying to say that when I’m not here, you and Jordan talk. That’s what I’m
trying
to say, and I think that’s pretty much exactly what I fucking said. What I said is what I’m trying to say. The fucking end. I think a better question would be, What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“You know exactly what I’m trying to say,” Mabel said, though not sure herself. She pinched the pliers onto the head of the zipper and gently closed Lily’s dress, careful not to catch Lily’s soft pink skin in the ragged teeth.

“I don’t have the first mother-fucking clue what you’re trying to say to me,” Lily said. Before Mabel could speak again, Lily continued. “Is what you’re trying to say to me that I’m accusing you of trying to steal Jordan away?”

“Yes,” Mabel said, looking at Lily’s reflection in the mirror. “Yes. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Why can’t you ever just say what’s in your head? What are you so afraid’s going to happen?”

“Look,” Lily said, “you may feel guilty . . . you may have a guilty conscience about the time you spend alone with Jordan,
or the feelings you may have for Jordan, but that’s your own thing. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

There are photographs of us, Mabel thought, evidence of two sorrowful and frightened sisters, and there are notes we wrote to each other.
Complete and utter orphans
, she thought. “Why don’t you ever talk to me about things?” Mabel said softly, fussing with the back of Lily’s dress, smoothing out a wrinkle. She was so worn out by her own complaint. Lily’s absence was an old absence.

“I talk to you,” Lily said, walking to the stairs. Her voice built as she went up to her room. “I talk to you all the time. Don’t you ever listen?” This was Lily’s way of turning everything around, Mabel knew, her way of trying to come across as the one sorely misunderstood.

Mabel thought of a retort, and she ran over to stand at the bottom of the stairs. “Who are you trying to convince, Lily?” she called up. “There’s no one here but us.” Think of us old, she would have said if Lily hadn’t slammed the door. Think of you in your wheelchair and me with a rat on a platter, me all Bette Davis late-career screech.

Mabel picked up a dusty perfume bottle and pinched at the bulb of the atomizer, misting her throat with a fragrance that somehow suggested flappers and Gatsby. The thing was, Mabel hadn’t spoken much to Jordan lately or to Lily. She’d been spending most of her hours driving up and down the gravel roads across the state looking for abandoned farmhouses to pillage. Mabel had been running the secondhand
store on her own since the day her grandmother packed one shallow suitcase and booked a flight to Orlando, Florida, only a few months before. Her grandmother’s sister lived there in a condo in a retirement complex near a beach, along a street called Seashell Circle. “Now that Lily’s out of school,” her grandmother announced the night of Lily’s graduation in June, “you girls can look after yourselves.” Though Mabel and Lily were sad to see her go, they were mostly shocked to see her emerge from her room at all, let alone smiling and wearing a brand-new red dress. She also wore a Raquel Welch wig she’d ordered from an ad in a tabloid sometime before but never removed from its box. It was as if the undertaker had crept in with brush and makeup palette to make her grandmother look exactly as she had looked in life. For a long time, Mabel’s grandmother had been nothing more than a squeak of the floorboards and a thin stick of light beneath her shut bedroom door.

So Mabel took to the roads and salvaged anything she could from the old places, finding something to steal from even the emptiest of ruins—steam-heat radiators, cement gargoyles, the drawer pulls off built-in wardrobes, antique keys left in old locks. As the banks foreclosed on the area farms, rich people from town, the bankers and lawyers, bought the land for their dream houses and a few horses and maybe a Zen garden of fountains and imported rock. These people liked to fill their new luxury homes with artifacts of old farmhouses. They haunted the junk shop for doors of
ornate woodwork or squares of stamped tin or ball-and-claw foot tubs.

Mabel loved her solitary drives across the counties, though all she had was a beaten-down Jimmy that frequently clunked to a complete stop on a back road. Deep in the country there wasn’t a junction every mile, and the highways, though marked on a map, were often nothing more than weed-choked paths of broken pavement that dead-ended no place special. In the daytime, Mabel didn’t mind the search for help. She’d jump a fence and cross a feedlot to drink from the pipe of a windmill. She’d watch the hawks circle then land in the trees planted for windbreaks at the edges of the fields. She’d eventually scare up a farmer who’d probably make fun of her lack of mechanical know-how, but the mocking was usually playful and flirty and Mabel enjoyed it. The fact was, Mabel had taken a few courses in mechanics from a community college, but she liked getting lost and needing help. She liked kicking up new people from a landscape so forsaken.

With Lily in her bedroom, Mabel returned to the fainting sofa. “Eat me,” Mabel mumbled, to Lily maybe or to no one in particular. “Bite me.”
You’re much too easygoing
, Mabel remembered her mother telling her, back when Mabel’s father was still alive.
People will stomp all over you, if you’re not careful
. What kind of a thing was that to tell an eight-year-old girl, Mabel now wondered. “Kiss my rosy red,” she said. She picked up a fedora from a hat stand, spanked off its dust,
and put it on. Size 7
. She felt a static electricity working out from the brim of the hat, lifting strands of hair from her skin. She used to think that snap of shock was her father having become some short-wired ghost, giving her a little smooch. Sometimes Mabel saw her father’s reflection in the corners of glass or caught scent of the clove gum he constantly chewed, and she knew he remained watchful and curious about the ways of her life. Mabel wasn’t at all religious, but it only made sense that her father kept near. His blood was still inside of her, after all.

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
.