The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (20 page)

Of a muffin, Mabel realized, picking up the crumb and putting it in her mouth. With a blueberry. Mabel’s stomach rumbled, and her shoulders and back ached from the night on the sofa, but she felt wonderful, accomplished, seeing the scattered shoes and the records on the grass. Soon the house would be empty of its boxes of broken dishes and the rolled carpets in the rafters. She would toss out the tobacco tins full of snapshots of long-dead strangers and the basket of glass
percolator tops collected off old coffee pots. As Mabel walked back into her house, she closed her eyes and subtracted everything from the image in her mind. She slowly and carefully felt her way down the path in the junk, avoiding the corners of shelves and the legs of tables. The house would be a place of potential, her life one of promise.

Mabel followed a scent of coffee and red pepper, and she opened her eyes. Atop the kitchen table were more crumbs of muffin and part of a breakfast burrito still warm from the Texaco microwave. Mabel sat down to drink the coffee dregs from the Styrofoam cup and to eat the last bites of the food. Not until she ate all there was did she wonder who had been in her house.

Looking around the room, she noticed a paper sack she didn’t recognize on the floor next to the stairs; inside was the metal lettering pried from the backs and sides of deluxe cars—
CADILLAC
in gold-plated cursive, and
MERCEDES
and
PORSCHE
. She saw then, on the stairs, a trail of clothes—jeans, T-shirt, boxer shorts with heart shapes. When she got to the fringed moccasins, she knew Jordan was back. He was always buying hand-beaded moccasins; he liked to go out to the reservation to play the illegal slots and to get the government-issue peanut butter for cheap. Mabel picked up his clothes from the steps, along with a bent-up Polaroid photo of Lily and Jordan with a black bottle of Cava beneath a crepe-paper bell. A quickie wedding along the way, and me left uninvited.
How not surprising
, Mabel thought, surprised. Strangers for witnesses and canned wedding hymns. The
bridal bouquet tossed into a pack of rented well-wishers. But Mabel was too glad to have Lily and Jordan back to be at all aloof or punishing. “You’re home,” she said, pressing her cheek against the closed bathroom door. “You’re home.”

“Come in,” Jordan shouted out, “but don’t come near me. I’ve got lice.”

Jordan sat naked in the empty tub, his hair standing on end with a thick shampoo. He’d covered his privates with a
Penthouse
magazine. “I’d give you a little kiss,” he said, “but I’m infested. I’ve got to sit dripping with this shampoo for ten minutes. I’m thinking of going to the filling station next to shower in gasoline. Anything to kill the damn parasites.” He spoke quickly and his tongue sounded like it was too heavy to lift around his words. Mabel wondered if he was hopped up on something. “I hope it’s all right that I came here,” he said. “I stole a bike from in front of the bus station. My dad’s going to be pissed off at me for leaving town, even though he did fire me. So I’m trying to avoid him. Though I could use him to float me a loan. Tell you what . . . if he gives me some money, I’ll take us all out for steaks . . . my treat. I know you love steak.”

“Where’s Lily?” Mabel said, holding out the Polaroid, to let him know that she knew.

“I don’t care,” he said, looking away. “Lily’s dead to me.” Then he said, “Not really. It’s just that she left me behind, in the middle of the night, without a word of good-bye.” Then he added, “In Vegas, on our honeymoon,” he said, his eyes wide with romantic misery. Jordan held up his hand. “You don’t want to hold me,” he said. “You don’t want this lice.”

But Mabel had had no intention of going to him—she was struck cold with worry for Lily. It was easier when she could imagine Lily and Jordan gone off together. Mabel thought of the things of Lily’s she’d kept over the years: a baby tooth, an old barrette with strands of Lily’s hair caught in its clip. When she was little, Mabel had heard such things were useful to investigators looking for lost children. If Lily had ever turned up missing, Mabel could have offered the police a chewed-on pencil and a photocopy of the palm of Lily’s hand.

“Did you see the stuff I brought you back from Vegas?” Jordan said, cheering slightly. “The lettering in the paper sack? I collected that stuff myself. I figured you could sell it in the shop. The kids buy that stuff and wear it as jewelry.”

Mabel noticed Jordan’s skin was splotchy pink and red. She picked up an empty bottle of shampoo from the floor—
SAV-MOR LICE KIT
. “You’re only supposed to use a little bit,” she said, reading the directions.

“I know,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ve probably OD’d on the stuff. But I could still fucking feel them crawling on me, after two whole treatments.” He held up his hands and bent and unbent his fingers, wiggling them, making them buggy. “They’re all over my fucking body. I just know I got ’em from sitting next to this one filthy friggin’ Boy Scout on the bus.”

“I’m a little worried,” Mabel said. “You shouldn’t have used so much of this stuff. It’s toxic.” Must his every action tend toward the suicidal? Even the taking of his medicine? How could she care so much about someone so precariously perched in the world? “You’re even talking funny,” she said.

“Oh,” and Jordan’s shoulders shook as he looked down with a silent laugh. “Oh, that.” He looked back up at her and opened his mouth wide. Mabel resisted the urge to reach out and touch the piercing, the tiny silver ball near the tip of his tongue. “When I was sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting for Lily to come back, I read a
Cosmopolitan
magazine that somebody had left laying there on a table. There was this article that recommended getting something pierced as a cure for heartbreak.” He lowered the magazine a bit so she could see the silver hoop piercing his navel, an outie that Mabel had always thought so adorable, so childlike. Then he turned his head around so she could see his left earlobe stuck through with a gold stud and the ring around the top of his ear. “If I knew you a little better,” he said, winking, nodding at the magazine at his crotch, “I’d let you see the one down below.” Then he laughed and said, “I’m just kidding. I’m not so heartbroken as to mutilate that.”

He’d come back to Mabel and, no surprise, Lily had literally filled him full of holes first. “You shouldn’t have done it to your belly button,” Mabel said. “It was cuter before.” She turned toward the door and said, “You better wash this stuff off.”

“You could stay a minute,” Jordan said, smiling and biting his lip, trying to seem cute and boyish. “Help me comb out my nits.” Then he kind of laughed, so she’d know he was just joking about the combing.

If all this had happened on some other day, maybe only days before, Mabel might have taken her sister’s husband
naked and scrubbed to her bed and run her tongue over his, over all the metal pieces in his body, and over the scar on his wrist. She would have let him shut his eyes tight, let him keep his hands to himself, and would have let him think of whomever he wanted to think of.

Mabel did still long to kiss him but only to know what his new tongue felt like. She’d kiss him once, she thought, and keep the kiss as a souvenir. “Can I try it?” she said, tapping her finger at her own tongue, kneeling beside the tub. Jordan smiled and opened his mouth on hers. A
soft tongue breaks the bone
, Mabel remembered her mother, in her religious phase, quoting whenever Mabel and Lily screamed in argument. A
soft tongue
, she thought, kissing Jordan, jimmying the cold metal bump, and she thought of the next line in Proverbs, a question she’d found when looking up her mother’s strange admonitions in her Girl’s First Bible.
Have you found honey
”? was the question. Though the Proverb had gone on to speak of excess and vomit, Mabel had always loved the sound of it:
Have you found honey
? God asks in his gentle interest.

Mabel leaned back and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, feeling a sharp bite of headache from the chemical shampoo. She wouldn’t be his agonizing guilt, his little cruelty. He’d have to find some other way to hurt Lily.

Mabel said to Jordan, “Some people shave their heads to get rid of lice.”

Jordan looked toward the ceiling, squinting, probably seeing himself with all his hair gone and looking tough and angry. “Would you shave my head for me, Mabel?” When she nodded,
he pulled the plastic curtain closed and turned on the shower to rinse off the shampoo.

Mabel got the blue case from under the sink and took out the electric clippers. She was anxious to see the true shape of Jordan’s head, and she hoped the transformation was shocking. When Jordan finished rinsing off, he reached from around the curtain to grab a towel to wrap around his waist, and he sat on the edge of the tub, his back to Mabel. “There’s a whole industry of porno about shaving,” Jordan said, chuckling. Mabel didn’t think she was a fetishist, but she did like the ritual of this afternoon haircut, the almost sacred act of specific order—the steam in the room and the buzzing of the clippers, the hair falling away in wet curls, the cold smell of the menthol burning her nose. After cutting the hair down to the stubs with the electric scissors, she followed the curve of Jordan’s skull with her daisy-wheel leg shaver, and she fully understood the meaning of the Roseleafs’ monthly haircuts and foreign movies. It was like making your own religion, building your own church in your own rooms.

When she finished, Jordan was smiling even before he looked in the mirror. Mabel had been startled when he’d turned around, and she looked forward to the getting used to it—that slow process of studying someone until they were newly familiar. Jordan touched his head only hesitantly, like he was afraid to feel the shape of the bone. “I think I like it,” he said. “I think it makes me look a little crazy.” His smile fell then, and he looked sad again.

Mabel slipped from the bathroom without Jordan even
noticing—he was so intent on his reflection. Mabel went to Lily’s room and lay back on the bed, and she thought of her father, not a religious man, reading to her and Lily, not from the Bible, but from a slim book called
The Blue Book of Fairy Tales
. Mabel would lean against his arm to see the illustrations of characters who looked wan and wanting even after their lives were bettered.

Mabel thought of Rose-Red and Snow-White often in the forest alone gathering red berries. No
mishap ever overtook them
, her father read. The first day Lily was gone, Mabel had cleaned and straightened Lily’s bedroom, and now Mabel decided to put it back the way it was. When Lily came back, she’d be comfortable, knowing her room was left untouched. Mabel took the clothes she’d washed and hung and she tossed them back on the floor. She rehung a sheer nightie that had been left hanging in the window at the end of the curtain rod. She unmade the bed, and she knocked over the stack of magazines next to the nightstand. She moved around the perfume bottles atop the vanity, taking out the stoppers, knocking a few over. She picked up the newspaper clipping she’d left on Lily’s pillow, and she crumpled it up and shoved it in her pocket. A small plane had gone down off the coast of Virginia, the clipping reported. A mother of one of the crash victims said that her daughter had been booked for an earlier flight, but had been late. “She’s always running late,” the mother was quoted as saying.

LILY DROVE MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR
hours nearly nonstop, existing mostly on liters of Jolt cola. The few minutes she slept sitting up at a rest stop had been long enough to dream of her father and her mother in a dry desert garden. Her mother tore the husk from a tomatillo and held the little green apple-like thing to her father’s teeth black with gun powder. Her father dipped her mother in a tango, the blood keeping his hair matted atop his half a head, and he whispered
My little piece-of-shit cunt
in her ear, and she giggled at the sweet nothing.

On the road, Lily played the radio, hooking onto a station and staying with it until she could only hear a few words here and there spoken or sung amid the static. As each station dissolved, she hesitantly moved on to another, when there was another, and got to know the other towns somewhere up ahead or around. She learned the jingles of businesses she
would never patronize and the names of the streets on which they could be found, and she’d devise little lives for herself—the three-dollar breakfast steak at Kitty’s Knife and Fork before 6, then off to her free guava juice with every kiwi-acid facial at the Electric Beach Tan & Spa, then shopping for dresses and deep-discount electronics at the Sun on the Lake Mall. She could follow it all with two-dollar dirty-martini-doubles at Flim’s, where she would mention this ad and get a free cigar.

LILY STOPPED
at the Motel Modern, only a few hours from home, and stayed for two days. She imagined herself an elegant ruin, a newly divorced woman going by her maiden name and staying at the motel for as long as she could afford.
FORWARD ALL MY MAIL TO: LILY ROLLOW, C/O THE MODERN
. Cocktails drunk alone at a little table in a safari-theme lounge. Dresses pressed by housekeeping and left hung on the doorknob.

Lily went into town and bought white pajamas and a portable typewriter at a swap meet. She wanted to write her mother a letter; she had no idea what she’d say, but she’d say it in the efficient alphabet of a machine, making her words appear carefully thought out. But when she typed out a test line,
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country
, the letters floated and fell from the line, looking like a clown act.

Lily stayed in her pajamas all day. She’d close up the curtains
tight to block out all sun, and drape her scarf over the tiny lampshade to cast the walls with a pink glow. Lily practiced her palmistry for Omaha. She could spend her weekends in the Old Market, she figured, reading palms and tarot for cheap on the sidewalks in front of the galleries and cafés and antique shops open late. She didn’t know much about the technical aspects of palm reading, but she didn’t think she really needed to be very good to work the Market—for years a caricaturist had attracted long lines of people who would pose, laughing, anticipating, then step away not recognizing anything about themselves in the scrawls on the page. A carriage driver made a fortune in tips trotting lovers down the rough brick street, around corners of urban decay, the smoke-like steam from the stacks of the Campbell’s soup factory obscuring the sky. Lily could make a nice living off the sorority girls alone.