The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Hustvedt, Siri

  They sat at a table in the corner, and he told her more stories about his life. After art school he had worked as a plumber’s assistant for a year and learned the inner workings of sinks and toilets, a job he said he never regretted, and then he took the money he earned and moved to Amsterdam, where he read and painted and worked at odd jobs like designing sets for plays and painting a brick wall and ten windows for an art movie he never saw. Lily liked the way he talked to her. He didn’t presume she knew Amsterdam, but he didn’t presume she knew nothing either. She liked the way he ate his lasagna. He seemed to enjoy it without paying great attention to it. She liked his neck above the rim of his white T-shirt and his thick hair and his eyes that didn’t wander. Lily didn’t eat much. She looked down at the red, white and brown dinner and couldn’t bother with it. She didn’t feel hungry, and besides, she felt reluctant to chew in front of Ed. Rolf looked over at them several times, not unkindly, Lily thought, but she knew he’d tell Hank, and even if he didn’t, someone else would. Hank was bound to find out anyway. After Ed had paid the check, she told him she was really nineteen, not twenty-one, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “I didn’t want you to send me away,” she said, “so I added a couple of years.”

  “I see,” he said. Ed breathed loudly through his nose, and then after throwing his napkin on the table, he stood up.

  They met Denise Stickle on the way out the door. Lily introduced her to Ed very quickly, pretending she didn’t see the startled look in the girl’s eyes, and said, “See you at rehearsal.”

  Out on the street, he said, “You don’t like that girl, do you?”

  “Denise?” Lily said. “You can tell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Denise is all right. I’ve known her forever. We both went to Mrs. Lodenmeyer’s dance school when we were kids, and now she’s back from college for the summer and she tried out for Helena and got the part. At least her looks are right for it. She’s one of those girls that always rubbed me the wrong way. You know the type—cheerleader, technical virgin.”

  Ed gave Lily a puzzled look.

  “Does everything but, at least in high school. I don’t see the difference.”

  Ed sighed.

  Lily was silent. She stopped walking and looked up at him.

  He stopped, too, looked down at her and frowned. “You seduced me,” he said. “You started it.”

  “I know,” Lily said. “And I’m proud of it.” The word “seduced” sounded beautiful to her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the air. It smelled good. She opened her eyes and looked up at the half-moon and noticed how perfectly half it was.

  Hours later, when Rick’s and the Corner Bar had closed for the night and the bus for Des Moines had come and gone, Lily and Ed were still talking in his room. She told him about Hermia and about Mabel helping her with the role, and she told him about playing Maria in West Side Story in the high school play and how she had loved singing and dancing onstage. Then Ed asked her for a song. At first Lily said no, but when he insisted, she gave in and ended up singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” And because he looked like he was enjoying it, she didn’t hold back but belted out the words as she strutted across the floor. When the song ended, she winked at him.

  He clapped. “You’ve got a strong, clear voice.” He looked at her. “Marilyn was wearing a pink dress in the movie when she sang that song. I’d love to see you in that dress.”

  “You think I’d look good in pink?”

  He nodded.

  Lily thought about Marilyn. Then she said, “It’s a funny thing about Marilyn. Nobody would be very happy if she were alive, except maybe me. You know how in the tabloids they’re always finding Elvis and JFK alive and living in South America or something? But they never find Marilyn, even though she’s just as famous. Well, they don’t find her, because they wouldn’t want to find her old.” She climbed onto the bed with him. “Your ears are beautiful, did you know that? They stick out a little bit, but they’re really nice.” Lily sat back and studied his hair near his neck. Then she reached out and touched his cheek. She liked talking to him, liked saying whatever popped into her mind, liked the way he looked when he was listening. “Sometimes I wish my parents hadn’t moved,” she said to him. “My Dad got a rare and bad cancer in his leg. They saved the leg, but it’s no good. He was a great carpenter. Everybody knew it.” Lily stared at the wall. “He could’ve died, could’ve lost his leg. They couldn’t really stay, I guess. The winters, you know.” She looked back at Ed and lowered her voice as though she were telling a secret. “So they sold our house outside town and moved to Florida—Tampa. It’s nothing like here. A lot of the old folks I grew up with are dead now—my grandparents, their friends. It’s been one funeral after another these past five years. I guess the place didn’t hold them. My parents, I mean.”

  “Does it hold you?” he said.

  Lily looked at him. “I never really thought about it. I’ve always been saying I’m going to leave, and I will, too. I don’t want to be here my whole life. But I feel close to this place anyway. It must be in my bones.”

  Ed didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he said, “The series of paintings, the ones you saw. You know what I’m going to call them?”

  “No.”

  “Webster.”

  Lily nodded.

  “You think it’s a bad name?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Lily paused. “I think it’s okay because you’ve got those boxes with the stories in them, and that brings in part of the place. It’s not just pictures of the people.”

  “Even if the stories aren’t all true, like Howard’s.”

  “This place runs on stories that aren’t true. My grandfather used to say, ‘One man’s fool notion is another man’s truth.’”

  “A relativist?” Ed said.

  Lily was puzzled. “No,” she said. “He was a socialist. Thorstein Veblen was his hero.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “Don’t you approve?” Lily said and grinned.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve got an uncle who’s great claim to fame was that he licked envelopes for Emma Goldman.”

  Lily paused. She wondered whether she should ask who that was, but before she could decide, Ed said, “They were all on the same side, Lily. They looked up at the same stars.”

  “Did all this start with your ears?”

  “No,” he said. “With Marilyn Monroe.”

  The man was in the street that night again, watching and waiting. Lily slept through it, but Ed told her the next morning that someone had been outside, pacing back and forth in the alley and muttering to himself.

  The next day the wind shifted. The air turned clear, warm, dry. The new weather sharpened the outlines of every building, every tree and bush and fire hydrant and crack in the sidewalk. Lily thought the edges of every person and object she saw had a clarity that almost hurt and that this hard daylight corresponded to her high, aching happiness with Ed. Before she left work she told Bert what she never would have told Ed, that she was terribly in love with him and could barely stand it. Bert had squeezed Lily’s hand and said, “You’re sure, then? And Hank?” Lily had told Bert the truth—that she didn’t think much about Hank. It was awful, she knew it, but that’s how it was. And Bert had looked at her and said, “Well, heaven wouldn’t be heaven if you remembered your friends in hell.”

  That same afternoon, Lily walked in on an agitated Mabel. Pale and shivering, she greeted Lily with outstretched arms and said, “You’re here! Thank God! You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had. It was a torment, Lily. I haven’t recovered.” Mabel sat down in a soft chair and looked up at Lily. “Sit,” she said.

  Lily sat. “What happened?”

  A flush of red appeared on the old woman’s cheeks very suddenly. She leaned forward in her chair and said, “He was here.” Mabel pointed downward with her finger. “In this building last night.”

  “W
ho?”

  “I don’t know who, but I’m sure it’s the man”—Mabel lowered her voice and motioned with her head toward the window—“who’s been holding vigil outside.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I felt him, Lily. You weren’t home, were you?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “I thought it was you at first, returning from, from your revels.”

  Lily wondered if this was an indirect accusation. There was a quality in Mabel’s tone that made Lily feel responsible for having left the old woman alone all night.

  “I called out your name, but there was no answer.”

  “Maybe Vince was in the hallway, checking on the lights or something. He does that, you know.”

  “Never at that hour. It wasn’t Vince. He always lets me know, and besides, he sounds like a herd of elephants on those stairs. This was someone with stealth. He was in your room.”

  “My room?”

  Mabel nodded. Her face flushed deep red and a vein stood out on her forehead. “He was whispering and muttering to himself. I heard him through the wall, but I couldn’t make out a single word, and you know how every sound passes through these walls. I should have been able to understand something.” Mabel rubbed her arms and looked at the ceiling. “Babble. Don’t look at me like that, Lily.”

  “I’m just trying to understand it.”

  Mabel rubbed her hands and looked at the floor on either side of her. “Every once in a while, not often, I’ve had ‘auditory hallucinations,’ strange term I admit, but that’s what it’s called, and that voice coming from your room was both like it and not like it.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t that?”

  Mabel touched her lips for a second. “No,” she said quietly. “When that happens, it’s someone I’ve known, usually Evan. My husband. And what’s said is clear and short. He died many years ago of a brain hemorrhage.” She turned her head and stared at the keys on the pine table. “One morning, he complained of a headache, and two hours later he was dead.” Mabel took a short breath, pursed her lips and said, “Anyway, it happens that I hear him say, ‘Help me.’” Mabel looked back at Lily. “He never said that in life, but it’s as if I carry the imprint of his voice in my brain and sometimes it comes back to me. Sometimes I hear my mother calling my name.” The woman rubbed her thighs. “I don’t mind.”

  Lily put her hand on her forehead. She didn’t speak.

  Mabel looked straight into Lily’s eyes. She spoke slowly, emphasizing each word. “It wasn’t that last night, you see. But it was almost like that man knew about my experiences, a couple of times I thought he imitated them.”

  “That’s impossible,” Lily said.

  “Yes,” Mabel said. “And yet I felt it like that. Did you notice any change in your room?”

  “I haven’t been home yet.”

  “Let’s look,” Mabel said.

  Lily walked with Mabel into the hallway. She studied the woman’s face and wondered if she was living next to someone who was slightly deranged. Mabel turned the knob slowly and then pushed open the door fast. It slammed against the wall inside.

  There was nothing to see. As far as Lily could tell, her room was exactly as she had left it. With Mabel beside her she felt glad she had pushed the white shoes under her bed.

  Lily turned her palms upward and smiled. “It looks just like it did when I left.”

  Mabel turned to Lily. “You do believe me, don’t you? You don’t think I’m crazy, hearing things, an old, senile woman who can’t distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t?”

  “No,” Lily said slowly. “Ed heard him last night in the street. He even said he was talking.”

  Mabel nodded. Her expression made it clear that she knew exactly where Lily had been last night and had no intention of pretending surprise. She also looked relieved. “I’m a highly rational person, Lily. I know that I give a scattered, high-strung impression, and I don’t deny I’m that way, too, but those very qualities that”—she hesitated—“that may annoy you, allow me to feel what many people don’t. It’s like a scent or a strain of music that emanates from another body, and I pick up on it.” Mabel eyed Lily significantly. “That man who’s been lurking under the awning and in the alley … he gives off something high-pitched, almost a scream.” Mabel hesitated. “I think you should lock your door.”

  “Jesus, Mabel,” Lily said aloud.

  Mabel turned her head from Lily and looked over the bed toward the window.

  Lily eyed Mabel’s thin shoulders under her floating blouse. Who could have been in her room? Lily hoped it had been Hank. He’s stayed here enough to feel like it’s part his, she thought. I’ve still got some of his shirts and underwear in the drawers. I wasn’t too nice to him, either. I didn’t even give him a chance to tell me off. But Hank would have been loud and defiant, not quiet and secretive. Lily thought of Martin, but she didn’t mention him. I might be all wrong, she thought. Sunlight shone through the closed curtains, and Lily stared at Mabel’s narrow pants and gold sandals and changed the subject. “You know, I think you’d like Ed. I already told him about you, and I think the two of you have a lot in common. You’d like to see his paintings, wouldn’t you?”

  Mabel turned around. She seemed to relax by increments, her expression first, then her neck and shoulders. “Yes,” she said, her voice still tense. “I would like that.”

  Lily smiled. “Okay, I’ll talk to him, and we’ll make a date.”

  After Mabel left, Lily walked slowly from one end of her room to the other and looked for signs of an intruder. Hank’s shirts were undisturbed. Lily wasn’t fastidious, however. Any number of objects might have been moved without her noticing, and this thought prompted her to look under the bed for the shoes, although why they seemed more vulnerable than any of the other things, she couldn’t explain. But the shoes were there, lying under the bed, and after she had grabbed them, she walked to the mirror and held them up in front of it. Looking at them, it occurred to her that maybe Helen Bodler had had a lover, after all, and then, as if it followed from the first thought, Lily remembered the name of Mabel’s husband: Evan. He was probably the handsome young man in the photo. She laid the shoes on her table and looked at their reflection in the mirror. I wonder how old he was when he died, she thought. A breeze stirred the curtains and blew them up and into the room. Lily watched them flutter aloft for a couple of seconds before they dropped back to the floor. Then she stuffed the shoes into her canvas bag, ran out her door, down the steps and into the alley, where she jumped on her bicycle and began to pedal down Division Street under a sky so blue and cloudless, it made her want to sing, which she did. By the time she was within a quarter of a mile of the Bodler place, she had sung several show tunes and a couple of her favorite hymns.

  * * *

  The Bodlers’ truck was parked in the driveway. Lily rolled her bicycle into the ditch, climbed the embankment, and at its crest she lay down on her stomach in the tall grass and looked across the field toward the little house, the garage and the mountains of junk. Smoke rose from a rusted metal bin only yards from the garage, black then gray as it caught the wind. She noticed the fender of a second truck and heard voices. The speakers were invisible, and the wind distorted the sound—unintelligible rumblings followed an isolated word or phrase that carried over the field oddly charged and amplified. She heard the word “rope” very clearly, then “burn” or “barn.” A figure emerged from behind the trucks. It was Frank, carrying a large black garbage bag in his arms, and at his heels Lily saw an old cane wheelchair come rolling forward from behind the truck. Dick was pushing someone. At first Lily thought it was a tall girl, but then after two or three seconds she realized it was Martin Petersen. He leapt up out of the chair, said something to Dick, and the two men lifted it into the back of the hidden truck and then began to secure the wheelchair with rope. Martin was standing in the back of the truck, his upper body visible against the sky as he leaned forward to receive th
e bulky black bag from Frank. Lily edged over in the grass to get a better view of them, but she kept her head low. Martin jumped down from the truck. She wished she could hear what they were saying and crawled forward in the grass. The three men were now standing close together. She saw Dick’s head turn to one side. He seemed to be looking over the field directly at her. Lily hugged the ground, and then she realized he couldn’t have seen her because he turned back to Martin. Frank must have been negotiating a price. He held out five fingers of one hand, and with the index finger of the other he touched each finger once. Martin had his back turned to her now, but Lily saw him dig into his pocket. The wind blew her hair into her face and flattened the grass in front of her. Frank talked, but Lily couldn’t hear the words. She heard Martin’s voice—an initial stutter that he quickly overcame—and then he said, “Private business, Frank.” Martin rubbed his face, and the gesture looked like one of Frank’s. He might not know it, she thought, but he’s imitating Frank. They shook hands and Martin clapped Dick on the shoulder. The touch seemed to rouse Dirty Dick from his stupor—his head bobbed up and down in acknowledgment—and he fumbled for Martin’s hand, which he didn’t shake so much as hold for several seconds. The physical contact among the three suggested an intimacy Lily couldn’t understand. Few people touched the Bodlers. Her father had, hadn’t he? Yes, he would shake hands with Frank at the door. Lily put her head down in the grass and closed her eyes. She imagined Pastor Ingebretzen bolting from the house, his black robe flying as Frank chased him into the road with an ax. Then she changed the image. No, the minister wouldn’t have worn vestments, just a black suit with his collar. She remembered old Pastor Ingebretzen. He had been a serious little man who quoted Scripture on every occasion, even to the Sunday school kids who rarely understood a word. He had been prone to pointing for emphasis during sermons, and once he had pointed his short, white finger at her, Lily Dahl. He had singled her out among all the children in the Sunday school class. “Stand in awe and sin not; commune with thy heart upon thy bed, and be still.” Years had passed before Lily figured out that the man must have pointed at random, that he hadn’t looked into her heart and seen smudges of sin, but had merely picked out a young face that looked particularly bored and punished it. At the time, Lily thought Pastor Ingebretzen had read her soul and knew that in her bed at night she suffered not only from guilt, but from awe. She had dreaded God, Satan, the Holy Ghost, and angels equally and had prayed that she be spared the appearance of each and all of them. She had even used the word “spared,” because it sounded biblical. At the sound of Martin’s truck, Lily picked up her head and watched him back out of the driveway. The wheelchair rolled and jumped once under its constraint as the truck left the gravel and turned right onto the highway—away from town and toward the little road he had drawn for her on the map. As she watched the truck grow smaller, she saw in her mind the delicate lines of the web he had drawn beneath his house, the inexplicable box at the Overland’s and the arrow to her grandparents’ house. It was like pointing at nothing, except maybe heaven.