The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  “You’re drawing from my life, damn it,” she said, “and you’ll listen.”

  Mabel won every point, and then Mabel and Tex and Stanley and Dolores were packed up, crated and shipped.

  “Maybe someone will buy them when you show the paintings in September,” Lily said as she sat with Ed and his suitcases in the empty room.

  “I hope so,” he said. “People are buying all kinds of shit in New York these days. I might get lucky.”

  “Some rich person will hang Mabel or Tex on their wall, and they won’t even know who they are. They’ll say, I like that old lady or that naked cowboy, and they’ll tell their friends they bought ‘a Shapiro.’”

  “And their friends will wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Who’s that?’”

  “It’s just funny, that’s all.” Lily looked at him. She hadn’t told Ed that she might be pregnant. She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t want to say anything until she was.

  Ed rubbed his face and lit his last cigar in Webster. “I know that you haven’t promised me anything, but I’ve decided to be patient.”

  Lily looked at him and smiled.

  “I’m going to call you every day.”

  She kissed him. And then he was gone.

  * * *

  About a week later, Mabel and Lily were lying beside each other in bed when Mabel sat up and said in a low voice. “Are you going to move to New York, Lily?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” Lily sat up and hugged her knees in the dark.

  “I think you should leave here,” Mabel said. “You shouldn’t stay in Webster. I’ve come to like this town, and it’s fine for an old lady who’s coming to an end.” Mabel grinned as if this were a good joke. “But you’ve got too much for this place, and after a while it will beat you down. And New York…” Mabel shook her head. “New York is the best city in the world and the worst city.”

  “You want me to go,” Lily said.

  “Yes.” Mabel paused. “But I want you to go for yourself.”

  “Not for Ed.”

  “Not for Ed,” Mabel repeated.

  Through the window Lily could see the bricks of the Stuart Hotel. “I can’t live with him,” she said. “I can’t live with anybody.” She smiled when she realized what she had said. “Except you, I guess. I’m in love with Ed, but there’s a lot I don’t understand about him…”

  “I was married to Evan for fifteen years, and I never knew him completely. I’ve been thinking about him ever since he died all those years ago, and I still can’t explain him. But I adored him.”

  “Didn’t you ever fight?”

  “Of course we fought. I was a hellcat in those days—an impossible woman.”

  “If I go to New York, you’ll lose your roommate.”

  Mabel turned her head away from Lily and looked at the wall. From outside in the street she heard the bus for Des Moines stop in front of the Stuart Hotel and then the hydraulic whoosh of the bus door as it opened to let in a passenger. Looking at the back of Mabel’s head, Lily heard the woman say, “I think about her every day, about my Anna. If she’s still alive, she’s much older than you. She could be a grandmother. I could be a great-grandmother. Isn’t that something?”

  And suddenly Lily felt Mabel’s child as someone very real, as a person who was living now or had lived, and in the same moment, she wondered if Anna wasn’t turning her into a ghost, if she hadn’t become in some funny way a substitute for the baby Mabel had lost.

  Mabel turned her face toward Lily, and her voice cracked as she spoke. “I’d never ask you to stay here, you know, to hold my hand at the Dilly Home when I’m hooked up to some goddamned breathing machine. It’s not my style.”

  Lily looked at the woman’s face and touched her cheek. “I know,” she said. “But sometimes people do things because they want to—things like holding a person’s hand.” Lily lay back on the pillow. “Now,” she said, “read to me.”

  And Mabel did.

  * * *

  The first Saturday in August, Lily rode her bicycle to the graveyard after work. It was a hot, dry day and the grass had begun to scorch yellow-brown from too much sun. When she arrived at the cemetery, she didn’t know where to look for Martin’s grave, except to walk beyond the old graves toward the new. “He probably doesn’t have a stone yet. I won’t know which is his. Old Mrs. Knutsen was buried last week. She’ll have flowers, and Martin won’t, probably.” Lily muttered these observations as she walked past one marker after another toward the treeless place at the edge of the cemetery that looked over the wide farmland flats of corn and alfalfa. There were three nameless graves, and Lily stopped beside one that had new sod over the earth and guessed it was Martin’s. It occurred to her that it was expensive to die, expensive for your relatives. She wondered if the sod came with the deal or if you paid extra. She stood on the new grass, put her feet squarely on it and tried to feel something important like an ending. But the truth was she didn’t feel anything. There was a hot wind, and in it the smell of a distant fire mixed with dry alfalfa and car exhaust. The wind blew onto her face as she stared at the line of the horizon.

  Then she thought about the shoes and the stone she had marked them with. She thought about Dolores, too, her face in the car when she had driven Lily home, and her heavy thighs on the sheets of her bed. Lily lay down on top of the grave. The sod, after all, was man-size, and she fit inside the rectangle. She lay her cheek on the grass and opened an eye to look out for ants. She saw one on a fat blade of grass. Where there was one, there were more. Lily worked at feeling the dead Martin, because she couldn’t see him in her mind, not dead. Then she dug her hands into the grass and, grabbing hold of some of it, yanked it up by the roots and cast it on either side of her. The hot sun baked the back of her legs and arms and neck. She could smell her own hair as it brushed her nose. When she sat up, she looked down at her thighs and saw that grass had made indentations in her skin and a few blades had stuck to her. She traced a faint red mark and spoke to the ground.

  “Martin,” she said. “I’m still alive.”

  Then Lily heard steps in the grass behind her and turned around. She didn’t move off the grave. She saw that Dick and Frank were walking toward her, and she was glad to see them. In the sunlight she noticed how dirty the two men were all over again. Neither one made any sign that they saw her, but she supposed they did, and she watched as they slumped toward her and stopped.

  Frank looked down at her from under the brim of his hat, his eyes the color of wet sand. “Guess you knew ’bout him all along,” he said.

  Dick stood behind his brother. He was looking at her with an expression Lily couldn’t make sense of—a fixed but bright stare. She looked at Frank. “How do you mean?”

  “That he’d hurt somebody—hurt himself in the end. That’s bad enough.”

  Lily looked down at the grave and shook her head.

  When she looked up, Dick’s eyes were still fastened on her face, and he was nodding vigorously. Frank wasn’t looking at Dick, but he seemed to feel the nods at his shoulder, and he spoke again.

  “Dick wants me to tell you we took care of it.”

  Lily looked from one brother to the other. “Took care of it?”

  Frank nodded. Both men were nodding at the same time. Dick’s eyes didn’t leave her face. “What Marty left behind.”

  Lily crossed her arms on her chest and rubbed the skin above her elbows. “You found it?”

  Frank shook his head. “Nope, Marty came with it that morning. Said to burn it.”

  “And you did?” Lily had an abrupt, vivid fantasy of the doll burning in the trash bin outside the house and Dick watching it.

  Again Frank shook his head. “Dick wouldn’t allow it. Put her in a big long box, lucky we had it, had to fold her up a bit. Then he buried it back of the house. Dick took a shine to it—little slip of a thing, wasn’t she?”

  Lily looked at her feet on the grass. One of her shoelaces had come untied and lay on the bro
wning sod. “He told you about the cave?”

  Frank nodded but just barely—a single motion of his chin. “Knew we couldn’t keep it round the house, not with Marty gone and his last wish bein’ to burn it, but Dick said he wasn’t gonna burn nothing’ that looked like a girl.”

  Lily nodded. She bit her lip.

  “Better to lay it down in peace on the property. Don’t s’pose Marty’d really mind that. An’ this way there’s no talk, Miss Dahl, ’bout you and him”—Frank was mumbling now and his eyes had lost focus—“on account of the likeness.”

  The three of them didn’t speak for several minutes. Dick moved away from his brother and stood over her. He folded his hands in front of him and looked down into Lily’s face like a man who didn’t fully believe what he was seeing. Their silence wasn’t an awkward social pause in which all the parties are at a loss about what to say. It was the intimate silence of a shared secret, and Lily realized that the doll was merely the form the secret had taken at that moment. It wasn’t the secret itself. The secret was somewhere else, always somewhere else, and as Lily said this to herself, she heard her own breathing and heard Dick’s and Frank’s and it made her feel happy.

  Dick was staring at the ground now. Then very slowly, he began to bend, then to squat. Lily couldn’t understand what he was doing. Once he had arrived at a squatting position, he let himself fall heavily forward on his knees, and then he grabbed Lily’s shoelace.

  “Oh, Mr. Bodler,” Lily said. “I can do that.” She bent down and reached for her shoe, but Dick batted her hand away and began to tie the lace very slowly. He made a good, tight bow and looked up at her before he righted himself.

  “Thank you,” Lily said.

  Once he was on his feet, Dick took Lily’s hand. She could feel the calluses on his palm and the oiliness of his skin. He pulled her away from Martin’s grave and walked back through the stones with her as Frank followed them. Dick dragged his feet but moved with stiff determination, his fingers tightly around her own.

  He took Lily to his mother’s grave. The headstone was small and gray-white. It looked older than it should have and was stained green by moss near the bottom, but there were trees in this part of the graveyard, and the shade cooled Lily as she stared at the inscription: “Helen Bodler, born December 6, 1899, died June 21, 1932. Beloved mother of Ethan, Frank and Richard Bodler.” Ethan Bodler was buried beside his mother—born January 5, 1926, died February 11, 1926. Looking at the grave, Lily squeezed Dick’s hand. She turned to read Dick’s face. He had continued to hold her hand and was sweating into her palm, his grip so slippery she felt her fingers might slide out of his at any moment. Dick opened his mouth and laughed his noiseless laugh and moved his feet ever so slightly on the ground. Frank didn’t interfere with him this time. Then he stopped and the three of them walked to the road together. When she pointed to her bicycle, Dick released her hand.

  Lily didn’t refuse their offer of a ride. She climbed into the cab beside Dick as Frank drove slowly into town and asked that they drop her in front of the Arts Guild. Dick leaned on Lily rather heavily, and the weight of his shoulder was uncomfortable. Why feeling him so close to her should have made her think that Dick had seen his mother killed many years ago, she didn’t know. But Lily did think it. He might not remember, she thought, but I think he was there.

  After Lily had hauled her bicycle from the back of the truck, and just before he started the motor, Frank looked out the window and spoke to her. Lily saw and heard him speak but didn’t understand what he was saying until moments later, as though her brain lagged behind her ears. When the truck was pulling away and she saw only Frank’s elbow sticking out the window, she realized he had said, “Dick wants ya to visit.”

  Auditions in the Arts Guild had already started. Lily heard a piano from the stage beyond the vestibule doors, but she saw no other rivals for the role of Eliza Doolittle. Mrs. Carter squinted at Lily. “Any later and you’d have missed the whole thing,” she said.

  She explained to Mrs. Carter that she’d be right back, raced down the stairs and into the little room at the end of the hallway. She dropped her jeans and sat down on the toilet. While she listened to the rush of urine, she noticed a spot of blood on her underpants. So, Lily thought, there it is, and then she felt tears warm the corners of her eyes. She drew out a long piece of toilet paper. She folded it, placed it on her underpants and hiked up her jeans. As she walked down the hallway, the coarse paper scratched the inside of her thighs, and Lily stopped, hastily sticking her hand into her pants to adjust the wad. She found herself outside the closed door to the costume room. Only weeks ago, Martin had been sitting in there on the floor scribbling down her measurements, quoting the play, asking her to go home with him. Lily imagined the inside of the room now, and saw Cobweb’s costume hanging from a wardrobe rack labeled “DREAM.”

  Then from somewhere above her, she heard a woman calling her name in a high voice just like the one her mother had used to call her up from the creek for dinner. “Lil—y! Lily Dahl!”

  “I’m here!” she called. “I’m coming.”

  The street Lily imagined in her mind as she leapt up the stairs was real, and the fog was real, too. She was singing loudly on a London corner in filthy clothes with a basket of flowers in her arms. I can be her, she thought suddenly. Then Lily straightened her back, lifted her chin and walked quickly through the double doors toward the stage.

  ALSO BY SIRI HUSTVEDT

  Reading to You (poetry)

  The Blindfold

  Yonder (essays)

  What I Loved

  THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL. Copyright © 1996 by Siri Hustvedt. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Henry Holt and Company under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.

  Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763

  Fax: 212-677-7456

  E-mail: trademarketing@stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hustvedt, Siri.

  The enchantment of Lily Dahl : a novel / Siri Hustvedt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42339-X

  I. Title.

  PS3558.U813E53 1996

  813'.54—dc20

  96-16514

  CIP

  First published in the United Stated by Henry Holt and Company

  eISBN 9781466848016

  First eBook edition: May 2013