The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  4.

  MABEL AND LILY S MOTHER HAD LEFT in the spring, a few days after Easter. They had gone to church that Easter morning. Their mother had turned religious in the few months after their father’s death and had pilfered the shop for all its sacred relics: the plastic dashboard virgins, the votive candles, the strings of rosary beads, the pictures of angels, the lives of the saints. Mabel’s grandmother had robbed many abandoned country churches over the years, prying shiny crosses from pulpits with the flat of a screwdriver or stealing panes of stained glass to put up for sale. Mabel had been with her at some of these churches and had wandered the graveyards, fearful her grandmother would come out with a shovel and start turning up dirt to get at a ribbon in wiry hair and to pluck a brooch from a rotting chest.

  On the way back from Easter service, just as they passed the ANTIQUES 1 MI. sign, a sandhill crane lifted its gangly body from the weeds of the ditch and unfolded into something enormous. For a moment, Mabel heard nothing, not the engine of the car, not the wheels, nothing but the flap of the heavy wings, like the sound of a sheet in the wind on the laundry line. Mabel’s mother tried to swerve away from the crane, but swerved into it, and its talons scratched the glass of the windshield. Mabel heard it hit the roof and roll across, and when her mother slammed on the brakes, Lily fell forward. Everyone was fine, though Lily had a few scratches from the sharp-edged dash. When they stepped from the car, they found only feathers and blood, but no bird on the ground or in the sky.

  Mabel, imagining the crane broken and near death somewhere in the dried yellow weeds of the ditch, began to search for it. She picked up a stalk of milkweed and poked at the ditch, hoping to rustle the bird out. Before Mabel could find any sign of anything, Lily burst into tears. A drop of blood had fallen from the scratch of her brow into her eye, and her mother scooped her up into her arms and put her back in the car.

  “We’ll come back to look for the bird,” her mother told Mabel, but Mabel knew they wouldn’t. Once they were back to the house, her mother would collapse into bed and would sleep until Tuesday. Mabel took one last jab at the ditch, then set the milkweed stalk at the edge of the road where she could easily pick it up again when she returned to her search. As they drove away, Mabel looked out the back window, wondering what could be done for an injured bird. Mabel would need bandages, she thought, and a bowl for the crane to drink from. She would prepare a nest of blankets and down pillows in the back of the old Buick up on blocks in the pasture.

  When they got the inconsolable Lily up to the bedroom, Mabel’s concerns switched to her sister. Mabel’s mother undressed Lily and dabbed the scratches on her cheeks and hands with a pale silver ointment. Lily’s gentle sobs dropped her into sleep. When their mother left the room, Mabel stripped naked in sympathy and ran her finger along the scratches on Lily’s skin, picking up some of the ointment on her fingertip. She dabbed the ointment onto a days-old scratch of her own.

  Mabel smelled Lily’s sleeping breath—peppermint from the leaves she liked to chew. She whispered in Lily’s ear. “Tara’s dead,” she whispered, “Jenny’s dead . . . Sally’s dead . . . Brenda’s dead,” a soft litany of Lily’s friends and cousins, all still living and healthy. Mabel hoped to stir up nightmares in Lily’s sleep. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Lily would wake crying, and Mabel would hold her sister in her arms and stroke her hair.

  Mabel blew Lily’s fine hair from her face, and she kissed her cheek, then her shoulder, then her naked hip.

  Lily whimpered in her sleep, and twitched. Mabel ran her fingers along Lily’s stomach, touched at her knob-like belly button. Lily wore a rusty spoon twisted around her wrist like a bracelet, and Mabel ran her finger along its bend.

  Bored with her own nakedness, Mabel went to the closet for a robe. The light from the shop downstairs seeped up between the floorboards, and she touched her toe to the light as she crossed the room. She put on a tattered robe her mother had passed down to her, though it was much too big. She pressed her ear to the wall and she listened for the religious songs turned languid in her mother’s deep singing voice that broke and gave the songs an unintended intimacy—as if Jesus were someone her mother had known, someone she’d touched. But the house was silent.

  Sitting on the floor, Mabel ate supermarket blackberries one-by-one from a bowl on the nightstand. The berries were hard and sour, but Mabel decided she liked them that way. It seemed grown-up to like the taste of things that tasted bad. She remembered sitting on her father’s lap, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and she’d closed her mouth around the awful smoke. She’d stolen sips from her father’s beer and thought it tasted of moldy bread.

  Mabel was not Mabel’s real name; she’d chosen it after her father killed himself. Many nights her father had come home and had winked and said to her mother, “What’s cooking, Mabel,” though her mother’s name wasn’t Mabel, and she never cooked at night. He’d call her Mabel at other times, like when he thought the girls were in bed and no one else could see him or hear him, standing in a towel in the hallway after an evening bath. He’d call her mother Mabel and he’d put his hand in her blouse and he’d kiss her neck and whisper in her hair, his breath the smell of the anise seeds and baking powder he used to brush his teeth, the way he’d brushed his teeth in his Catholic boy’s school. Though Lily and their mother never complained about calling Mabel by her new name, they did at times seem startled by the sound of it, would jump as if they heard Mabel’s father’s deep morning cough again on the other side of the bedroom wall.

  Mabel’s father had been an insomniac, and Mabel had sat up with him many nights as he fretted and drank Alka-Seltzer for his nervous stomach. Sometimes they’d play rummy; sometimes he’d just talk to her, telling her about what he thought his life would be like someday. He thought he might like to take some courses and become a stage technician. He had played Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire in high school, and people had told him how much they’d liked him in the part. But it was ridiculous to think of becoming an actor, he knew. So he’d hang lights for local presentations and plays, paint sets, and even sew costumes. Sometimes his eyes were red and wet, and he rubbed at them and sniffled, and Mabel never knew if he was crying or just sleepy. If Mabel would start to drift off, her father would make a pot of coffee and give her a cup with lots of milk and tablespoons of sugar. He’d go on about some other things, like how his parents always loved his brother more and how he’d done some drugs in school and how he’d wanted Mabel’s mother to have an abortion, but was now so glad that she hadn’t, because he loved Mabel so much and couldn’t imagine how things would be without her. But he did imagine things without her, again and again, as he described a life he’d have if he didn’t have responsibilities.

  Mabel picked up Lily’s glasses from the nightstand and put them on, and everything in the room stepped forward and large into her sight. The black wardrobe, its doors gaping open, threatened the room like a cornered beast. The glasses gave Mabel a headache and she took them off and the room fell back again, everything, again, what it was supposed to be. Mabel wondered if Lily needed these glasses in order to notice the world at all. Mabel thought of her grandmother’s friend, a blind woman in black-lensed, octagonal spectacles. “I’m very blind,” the woman said just the day before, “but I know there have been changes in the atmosphere. In the mornings, I sense a difference in the light of my room.” Maybe that was all the impression life made on Lily, Mabel thought, an impression as slight as the shifting of shadow and color.

  Mabel’s mother carried in a tray with two plates of pancakes. Lily loved pancakes, even for her dinner and supper. Her mother set the tray on a trunk and hesitantly touched Lily’s shoulder. “Lily?” she whispered, then cringed. “Lily?” Sometimes Lily slapped or kicked the person waking her. “Lily?” she whispered, even more softly. Her mother looked to Mabel. “Should I leave her sleep?” she said, and Mabel said, “Yes.”

  “What?” her mother said, as if she hadn’t expected a voice,
as if she’d only been asking the room or a ghost in the room. She then left the plates on an old piano bench long since separated from its piano, and she skulked away. Mabel was very hungry and ate both pancakes before Lily woke.

  Lily sat up in bed. “What flew up out of the ditch?” she said, in a choked, waking voice.

  “It was a crane,” Mabel told Lily.

  “It was something worse than a crane,” Lily said, pulling at a sheet and covering her naked body up to her chin. Mabel thought Lily might be right; all the cranes had passed through weeks before, before it had even turned spring. Hundreds had died with ice in their feathers. Mabel had seen it on the news—a man lifting a frozen crane from a frozen tree, then tossing the carcass atop other carcasses in the back of a pickup truck. It broke Mabel’s heart even more to think of her crane in the ditch, having survived the ice only to get hit on her family’s Sunday morning drive.

  “I’m hungry,” Lily said, standing from the bed with her sheet still wrapped around her. She hid behind the closet door to change into a sundress with a daisy print. Lily had newly found this modesty, and Mabel was convinced she was only pretending. She just wanted to hurt Mabel, to hide her round, plump body away and leave Mabel alone with her terrible bones and sickly olive skin. The old farmers’ wives and widows frequently descended upon the house to weigh and measure Mabel. Though they never marked down any measurement, they were certain, with each visit, some fraction of a fraction of an inch had dissolved from her body. They examined her in her underwear. One old woman, who wore long skirts and always held a white stone pipe, constantly unlit, in her long fingers, would tap that pipe at the knobs of Mabel’s shoulders and elbows, sending a ringing down through all her bones. But Lily they pinched and adored, admiring of the way she moved indifferently about them all like a rowdy cherub.

  In the few months since their father had died, Lily had wanted to be close to Mabel. They had spoken that winter in a mock sign language, wiggling their fingers in the air and pretending to understand each other. They’d faked silent conversation at breakfast and at dinner, even outside in the cold, their fingers hidden by mittens. But now, with the spring thaw, Lily had changed. I’ll only love you more, she seemed to be saying, if you don’t look at me, if you don’t speak to me, if you don’t touch me, if you don’t know me.

  Mabel followed Lily into the hall, and down to their mother’s room. The door was closed and locked. Lily pressed her lips to the keyhole. “We’re hungry,” she said. Their mother spent much of her time sleeping in her bed. The only reason they’d gone out that Easter morning was because Pastor Lenny had been by a few days before. He’d told their mother that Mabel and Lily desperately needed the guidance of church. He’d spoken so loudly, his voice coming up from so deep in his throat and his chest, it had seemed he’d blow the whole house down with his prayer. If she and Lily were minister’s daughters, Mabel thought, they could steal a wafer and lick it. They could explore all the mysteries of the altar—take a sip from the baptismal font, blow out the everlasting flame and inhale its curl of smoke.

  “Come downstairs,” Mabel said. She felt guilty for eating Lily’s pancake. “I’ll find you something.”

  Downstairs, Lily sat at a table in a corner of the shop, and Mabel went to the kitchen. The kitchen was nothing but a narrow closet lit by one faint bulb. Mabel looked into the refrigerator and found only uncooked ham wrapped in newspaper and a jar of apple rings. “She has to eat something,” Mabel said aloud, plucking the mold from a slice of bread, then opening a can of sardines found in a drawer.

  The table was still set for tea from the day before. In the teapot, tea bags steeped in black water and a horsefly did a dead-man’s float in someone’s half-empty cup. The day before, as usual, Lily had ignored the old women who gathered with their grandmother for bridge and stood on a chair with a key to wind all the clocks on the wall. It was as if Lily knew her clock-winding would drop the women into quiet and hesitance, would turn them reflective, pondering what a young girl winding clocks might mean to their old lives. Above the thick ticking grown noisome in the room, Mrs. Beard said, “Mr. Beard thinks he’s finished his breakfast before I’ve even cooked it. He’s dressed for bed hours before he’s tired. He doesn’t even know a clock anymore.” As she spoke of how she was teaching him time again, her spotted and wrinkled fingers gracefully drew a clock in the air, creating a round face and the long and short hands, casting fragile shadows against the wall. But Mabel was anxious for old age; she admired the old women’s resignation and knowledge. She thought it must be a powerful thing to know for certain that you wouldn’t die young.

  When Mabel brought Lily her sandwich on a plate, Lily said, “Take it away.” She performed a lethargic puppet show for herself with two raggedy puppets that normally hung from nails in the wall. “Fish,” Lily said in the shrill, disgusted voice of the puppet on her left hand, a sailor in a cap. The sailor lay a lazy kiss against the head of the other puppet, a Spanish senorita. Then Lily lowered her hands and let the puppets slip off to the floor.

  “I thought you said you were hungry,” Mabel said. “You have to eat.”

  Lily held her fat fingers in the air, pinching at the imagined lid of a pot, holding its handle, then pantomimed the pouring of tea. She smiled sweetly and mouthed polite conversation to the absent guests. She then expertly peeled a fictional orange.

  Annoyed by being left out of Lily’s silent party, Mabel began to noisily clear the table, stacking cups and saucers onto a tray. Bent at the back, she carried the tray to the kitchen. She happened to look out the window and saw people in the old Riordan house on the hill. One wall of the abandoned house had fallen away with the weight of the last heavy snow, and all its insides were exposed. There was nothing to see but the bare wood of walls and floors, the squares where doors and windows had been. But only a few days before, as Mabel had walked up the hill, examining in the palm of her hand the husk of a locust, she happened to glance up just as the sun shifted. The house filled, for only a second, with a sharp light, and shadows of things not there fell and moved.

  Mabel took the opera glasses from the windowsill and looked at the people in the Riordan house. They tiptoed over the floor like walking across an icy pond. They bent, picked things up, put things in their pockets. Mabel hated that they found things to take; she’d been through the house several times and had found only the chipped enamel of a piano key. One woman even climbed the stairs to the second floor, something Mabel had been much too afraid to do. The woman appeared weightless and undisturbed walking across the weak wood planks of the floor that was barely there.

  Suddenly, Mabel worried that these women were birdwatchers, part of one of the many groups that passed through looking for cranes and herons and prairie chickens. She put the opera glasses in the pocket of her robe and headed for the front door, determined to go find her wounded crane before these women did. She wanted to be the one to care for it, to nurse it back into flight.

  A fire engine, as it wailed past, shook the road next to the shop, and the rows of empty perfume bottles and atomizers jingled against each other. At the kitchen window, Mabel saw the smoke rising from a neighboring field. In the last week, farmers had been burning the old stalks from their fields before plowing, and sometimes the wind, with a mean-spirited twist, would shift directions and send the flame somewhere unintended. Mabel already missed winter, missed breaking the brittle stumps of cornstalks beneath her heavy winter boots. In winter, when the wind blew and the snow on the plains broke like dust, she couldn’t tell where the ground ended and the sky began. But on quiet, windless days, Mabel could nearly hear the smoke leaving the chimney.

  As Mabel looked for her coat at the front of the shop, Lily stood, grinning, in front of the wall of clocks. “What?” Mabel said. Lily looked Mabel directly in the eyes for the first time in weeks. She held something in her mouth. “What do you have?” Mabel said. Lily kept silent, then slowly pointed to the Swiss clock that hadn’t worked for years. On
the tiny wheel beneath the face, the tiny woodsman still stood, his ax still lifted, but the little girl with braids was gone.

  Mabel had always wanted to steal the little girl from the clock, to hide it in a chamois bag. Lily tugged on the sleeve of Mabel’s robe, the little wooden girl on her stuck-out tongue. Mabel wanted to rip the tongue clean from Lily’s head.

  “Why did you take that?” Mabel said, but she already knew the answer. Lily broke the clock because Mabel wouldn’t. How had Lily even known Mabel wanted the little girl? It seemed it should have been nothing but inconsequential to everyone else. But Lily, with her hateful instinct, knew. Lily took her tongue, and the girl, back into her mouth.

  Mabel made a fist, lifted it to her shoulder, and punched Lily. She only barely hit Lily’s ear, but it startled Lily, and she fell, hitting her head against the table before dropping to the floor. Lily’s glasses were knocked from her face, and Mabel noticed a new scratch beneath her eye that slowly reddened with blood. But Lily didn’t cry; she sat with her mouth open, nodding her head quickly like a clucking chicken. When she brought her hands up to press at her own throat, Mabel realized she was choking on the wooden girl. Mabel was too frightened to scream, though she wanted to, and she spun around in a circle, looking all along the walls of the shop for some suggestion of what to do. Lily opened her mouth wide to Mabel, as if expecting her to reach in.

  Mabel found her voice and shouted up the stairs for her mother, uncertain that she would even respond. But her mother did come running from her room, her door slamming into the wall as she threw it open. She hurried down the stairs and, needing no explanation, she put her hands beneath Lily’s arms and lifted her to her feet, then put her hands above Lily’s stomach and squeezed her as if she was a bagpipe. The little wooden girl popped from Lily’s mouth and flew away to be lost in the clutter of the shop.