The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  Lily took a pack of cigarettes from her purse and offered Jordan a Virginia Slim. Jordan shook his head and bit the tip off another Pixy Stix. He poured the powder into his mouth. “No dirty cheroot shall ever perch atop this lip again,” Jordan said.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying half the time,” Lily said, but she put her cigarettes away. It was too hot to smoke. Everyone was quitting.

  “I’ll still love you when you’ve got a hole in your throat,” Jordan said. “And when your lungs are black, you’ll still be just as pretty to me.” He’d quit smoking only a few days before and already become quite pious about it.

  Jordan drove west of town, toward the tufts of smoke blacker than the night sky and rising high above the tall corn in the fields. A long row of cars was parked facing the burning house, and some boys got drunk in a ditch. Lily and Jordan parked and sat on the hood of the Packard. The car’s new black paint reflected the movement of the fire. Jordan plucked an ash from Lily’s cheek.

  Once upon a time, a woman named Mrs. Bixby lived in this house, and she invited Lily and Mabel to pick the wild plums from the trees in the back. The girls tied dishtowels around their heads and wore aprons, and they stepped over what seemed a whole city of lazy dogs lying in the dirt. Mrs. Bixby’s house had been very old even then, its white walls already marked black by a past fire. The plums had too many seeds for the tastes of Lily and Mabel, so they left their apronfuls of pickings with Mrs. Bixby, who cooked the plums and preserved them, then presented the jars of jam to the girls late in the summer. Lily remembered walking home with the jars still cold from Mrs. Bixby’s fridge, and she had rolled the glass along her hot neck and chest.

  The heat of the burning house made Lily’s neck tingle, and she reached back to push her hair up. Her glasses slid down in the sweat of her nose. Lily saw a little deeper into Mrs. Bixby’s past then: a buffalo-head nickel in a penny loafer; a ring weighing down the front pocket of a man’s shirt. Lily had a hint of psychic ability and she’d been trying to hone it, reading books on the reading of tarot and tea leaves. She kept a small book on palmistry in her purse and had been skimming it during the slow hours at work.

  When Lily turned away from the burning house, all she saw was the pitch black of unlit roads and fields. She often felt claustrophobic in the country, pressed-in by the emptiness. On moonless, starless nights, when you couldn’t see far, it seemed you could reach out and press your hand flat against the dark.

  When Lily was little, she’d always worried about how she would direct fire trucks to her grandmother’s house in the country. Their only address was Rural Route One, and Lily had always anticipated a fire from the furnace beneath the floor of the shop. Lily and Mabel had felt drawn to drop things through the grating in the middle of the front room. They pretended someone kept a girl prisoner in the bowels of the house, and they squatted down at the grating and dropped in sticks of gum and notes that said things like “someone will save you soon.” Lily’s other grandparents, her father’s parents, lived at 4214 California Street in Omaha. If 4214 California were to start on fire, neighbors would arrive with buckets and hoses. The firemen would find their way easily; 4-2-1-4 in silver hung above the porch.

  Jordan played a tune on his guitar, a tune Lily recognized after a minute. It was from a record, a Phoebe Snow, Lily’s father used to play.

  Jordan stopped singing suddenly and put the guitar aside. “The strings are too hot,” he said. He called for one of the boys in the ditch to toss up some ice. The boy flung across the hood of the car a handful of cubes from his Styrofoam cooler. Lily picked up a cube and tossed it from hand to hand. Jordan leaned over to kiss Lily on the cheek. She jumped, shocked from the cold of his lips. She kissed his lips, running her tongue along the ice in his mouth.

  Lily leaned back against the front window of the car, taking a few milagros from her pocket: the tiny flat body, head to foot, of a girl in a skirt; a round stomach with a belly button at its center. She put the stomach milagro in her mouth and tasted it for words unspoken in her mother’s letter. This last letter with the details of the nuns’ kindnesses and the beautiful vineyard seemed as phony to Lily as her father’s suicide note. Her mother had always before written of the squalor of her life, of mean lovers and no money and American tourists shot down in front of saloons and bookie joints. What had changed Lily’s mother? Why, all of a sudden, was she so willing to admit to some happiness? Lily would have to remember to write that question down.

  Lily had changed her mind about wanting a quiet reunion. Mabel was right—their mother probably wanted nothing to do with them. There would have to be fight and drama, at least some. It would be dishonest to be polite. When Lily arrived at the vineyard, she would not avoid the intimate and the painful. Lily and her mother could spend days thrashing it out good until they arrived at satisfying conclusions.

  “If you were to steal Mrs. Bixby’s car,” Lily told Jordan, “I might let you take me away tonight.” The old barn, far back from the burning house, still stood. A few years before, Mrs. Bixby had named Lily a good price for the good-condition 1985 Monte Carlo she never drove anymore.

  “I’m not a thief,” Jordan said, picking up his guitar. He played it, using a sliver of ice as a pick. “No . . . wait a minute.” He made like he was sucking on something, working his jaw around, then pulled from his lips a silver bracelet. The trick made Lily think of the fairy tale about the two sisters; when the good sister spoke, rosebuds and diamonds and strings of pearls fell from her lips, but the bad sister spoke in toads and snakes.

  Jordan put the bracelet around Lily’s ankle. “I stole that from the front counter of Mo-net’s,” he said. Mo-net’s was a woman’s dress shop in town. Lily took her foot from her mule and held her leg up. She pointed her toes and admired the bracelet. Lily saw herself on the private beach of a Mexican hotel, listening to Spanish ballads on a transistor radio, her toenails painted blue. Whenever she pictured herself in Mexico, doing something like bargaining with fishmongers on a dock or saddling up a burro at a tourist trap, Jordan was nowhere nearby.

  Lily said, “I’m not entirely convinced you can even get me to Mexico. First you buy this old car on its last legs . . .” Jordan was a year older than her, but he seemed, sometimes, years younger. The first night they had sex, in her room in the dark, she’d felt almost like she was molesting a boy. She’d sat naked on the bed, waiting as he fell out of his clothes. He held his hands in front of his crotch, embarrassed by the boner that poked at a sad, ratty pair of boxers with a snap-to fly.

  “Seems like you could have faith in a guy,” Jordan said. “Your sister would have let me drive her south in this car.”

  Lily held perfectly still. Jordan wouldn’t hear her voice or the rustle of her clothing. She wished that his cheap, lazy efforts to piss her off had no effect on her. Don’t move, she could hear in her own small voice. Once, years before, out in the pasture with Mabel, a bee, its body entirely an ominous black, landed on Mabel’s collar and stepped lightly over her throat. “Don’t move,” Lily said. “Don’t frighten it,” she said, her eyes wide open. Lily had been both anxious and afraid to see what would happen to Mabel.

  Jordan said nothing more, slid from the hood of the car, and got behind the steering wheel. “If you think,” Lily shouted back over her shoulder, “that I’m going to fly into some fucking jealous rage every time you mention how close you are to my sister . . .”

  “You would just love for me and Mabel to get together,” Jordan interrupted, slamming the car door. “Even just once. Even just once for a short nothing kiss.”

  Lily contemplated, for a moment, life as a girl mass killer, shooting up filling stations from the window of Mrs. Bixby’s Monte Carlo on her way south. She could steal the antique Colt her grandmother had placed in a brown paper sack beneath the cash register. The Mexican headlines would all shout out MUERTA, above a photo of Lily with her trousers tucked into the tops of baton boots, just as the deadly Caril Ann had dressed hers
elf. Lily would compose her shocking diaries on the walls of her jail cell, and, using straightened-out safety pins as knitting needles, she’d sew doll dresses from the thread of her unraveled prison-issue socks. She’d send the dresses back to Nebraska, to her niece, the daughter Mabel and Jordan would have had together by then.

  “If I confessed to a short nothing kiss with your sister,” Jordan went on, leaning slightly out the car’s open window, “you’d shut yourself up and just rage for days. Then everything in that house would be about getting Lily’s forgiveness. But you know what, Lily? I don’t want to kiss Mabel. She’s sweet, but I don’t want to kiss her.”

  Lily got in the car next to Jordan and took out her cigarettes. “Poor Mabel,” she said, sounding snide, but she meant it some. Lily had found a photo of Mabel and Jordan—Mabel in blue jeans and a tropical-flowered bikini top and Jordan shirtless in a pair of chinos cut off at the knees. The photo was tucked into a small tin box kept in Mabel’s underwear drawer. One boring day, Lily had jimmied the box open with the tine of a fork. The photo had been the only thing inside, as if it depicted something secret, though it was Lily who had taken the picture on an old wooden bridge over the Platte. But Lily had spent the rest of that day examining the photo: Jordan’s arm around Mabel’s waist, his hand resting on her hip; Mabel leaning in toward Jordan, the skin of her shoulder touching the skin of his chest. Lily would look at the photo, look away, then look again. It was Jordan’s thumb hooked in Mabel’s belt loop that caught Lily’s eye each time.

  Jordan held out his hand for a Virginia Slim, his mouth already full of nicotine gum. Lily lit one for him, and he smoked as he chewed. Jordan’s cheeks were red from the heat, and his hair stuck straight up.

  MRS. BIXBY lived in a nursing home and was unlikely to ever notice the car missing from her farm. Though Lily could see nothing in the dark barn, she stepped slowly, ducking the rusted scythes and plowshares she imagined leaning out from the walls. She felt a twitching in the soles of her feet, certain she was about to step on a nail. Jordan, sniffling and coughing, practically wept from allergies, and he tied a bandanna, bandit-like, around his nose and mouth in order to breathe the thick air. They discovered the car parked at the back of the barn and covered by a few patchwork quilts.

  Jordan pushed open the back door, and the barn was then noisy with the creaking of the frogs from a nearby irrigation pond. Lily knocked away the quilts and got behind the wheel of the Monte Carlo. Not only were the keys in the ignition, but there was a spare set sitting on the dash. Hidden keys and locked doors, and any fear of thieves, were considered impractical by old people in the country. After a few turns of the ignition and some pumping on the gas pedal, the car finally started, and Jordan followed Lily in the Packard, driving to the antique shop.

  Inside, at the bottom of the stairs, Lily put her hand to Jordan’s chest. Jordan said, “I want to go up and say good-bye to Mabel.”

  “No,” Lily said, and she picked up a heart-shaped box from a shelf and gave it to him. “Eat this candy and wait for me.”

  “It’s probably a hundred years old,” Jordan said, sitting down to try a piece.

  Passing through the hallway, Lily looked in on Mabel sleeping still dressed with her lamp still lit. Jordan made an ungodly racket down below, the cash register clanging its bells with his hammer blows as he attempted to bust the thing open and burglarize the shop. The lamplight shone on a pair of scissors in Mabel’s hand. “Mabel,” Lily said, walking to the side of the bed. “Mabel,” she said, though she knew nothing would disturb her short of screaming in her ear or beating her awake with her fists. Lily knew what such deep sleep was like. Like narcoleptics, both Lily and Mabel could drop off in the middle of anything into a swift, undisturbable nap. Time and again, their grandmother had had to carry one or the other of them in from the empty field or the ditch or the back of the car. Mabel was the worst to watch sleep. Her eyes were closed only partway.

  Lily picked up the newspaper from the floor and saw that Mabel, before dozing off, had been clipping an article from its back pages. Two very young girls had been left, by their father, to suffocate in a hot car in Georgia. One of the girls had ripped all the hair from her head as she died.

  Lily had never heard of anything so ghastly. For years, Lily had tried to ignore the grisly news clippings Mabel had left on her pillow, not wanting to give Mabel the satisfaction of upsetting her. But this story, at this moment, seemed the worst of them all. “Mabel,” Lily half shouted. “Mabel.” She pushed at Mabel’s shoulder. How could Mabel, a girl with a life so disrupted, sleep so soundly? Lily wanted to slap the hell out of her, to scream at her for putting this image in her head—this dead little girl with fistfuls of her own torn-out hair.

  Lily lifted the scissors from Mabel’s loose grip and took up a handful of Mabel’s hair. She wouldn’t cut off quite that much, she decided, and she let some of the hair fall from her hand. She then released some more, then more, until all she held were a few strands. Mabel’s hair was so fine, so thin, and as soft as a ribbon. Lily set the scissors on the nightstand. She ran her fingers along Mabel’s long neck and along the jut of her collarbone. She ran her fingers across her shoulder and down her arm to the very small bones of her wrist. Mabel seemed so slight, so fragile; she could so easily become nothing. Lily could see Mabel, a ten-year-old, concocting their mother’s sloe gin and Coke after a terrible fight between their parents. Their mother had packed up Mabel and Lily and taken off to the secondhand shop for a week, refusing their father’s phone calls, not consenting to a visit. Each time they made the drink, Lily and Mabel consulted the wrinkled and water-spotted pages of a bartender’s manual they’d found on a bookshelf in the shop. They were nervous, and they whispered to each other, careful to measure everything correctly, as if the key to their mother’s contentment lay in the drink’s perfect rendering. When their mother finally called their father to offer forgiveness, it had seemed to Lily that the very worst was absolutely over.

  Lily wanted to cradle the little girls she remembered, to comb down the fine hair on their soft heads. Mabel opened her eyes. “What is it?” she said.

  “Why didn’t Grandpa and Grandma Rollow take us in?” was all Lily would say. Though her grandparents’ backyard at 4214 California was surrounded by a brick wall, Lily could sit in the cleft of a tree and hear the tiniest sounds of other lives lived: the clattering of silverware as a family ate their breakfast at the table; the squeak of a trampoline.

  “What? When?”

  “Before,” Lily said. “Didn’t they want us? Why didn’t they fight to have us . . . like some people fight over children?”

  Mabel yawned and rolled her eyes like the answer was ridiculously simple. “How could they?” she said. “Their son had just killed himself. And don’t you remember how we looked? We were pathetic. Your lips were all chapped all the time, and you kept biting the dry skin off them, and then they’d bleed. And I was so skinny and wasn’t eating anything. How would you have liked it? Looking at us like that every day?”

  Lily sat on the edge of the bed. “There should have been more done for us,” she said.

  Mabel sat up in bed and gently pushed Lily’s hair back behind her ear. She ran her thumb across Lily’s cheek, like wiping away tears. Come to Mexico with us, Lily was tempted to say at the touch. But Lily had to simply leave, without one single word. Lily would wait for Mabel to go back to sleep so that Mabel would wake in the morning and find Lily gone. She loved Mabel, but someone had to be left behind. Lily looked at the words she’d written on her hand—Lily needed to be alone with her mother and her list of difficult questions.

  LILY HAD BEEN SAVING for months to rent an apartment, dropping her tips into a tin she kept beneath her bed. She took the money, and they headed down the interstate. Jordan drove twenty miles without speaking as Lily lay her head against the headrest and watched out the side window. She felt comforted by the squares of light in the distance, the lit-up, yellow windows of farmhouses. But
just a few hours from home, and a few hours from the Colorado/Nebraska border, after Lily had slept for miles, a tire of Mrs. Bixby’s car blew on an exit ramp.

  “Good thing we slowed down,” Jordan said, as they sat cockeyed in the Monte Carlo. He’d pulled off the interstate to get gas. “If that thing’d popped when we were going eighty, we might have rolled to Mexico.”

  It was only after Jordan made this point that Lily panicked. The whole accident had been gentle, forgiving, as if a congregation of angels had slowed the car. Angels or maybe her father—reckless in life, but now watchful.

  “I’m not getting out,” Lily said as Jordan attempted to change the tire. Outside, it might as well be raining knives. All the newspaper clippings that Mabel had left on Lily’s pillow over the years, all the stories of last slipups, retold themselves: a smart man choking on a fish bone, a boy intending to just flatten a penny on a railroad track, a little girl who trusted her father in a river.

  7.

  WITH A CAN OF RED SPRAY PAINT, Mabel leaned out an upstairs window and wrote the words THIS JUNK SHOP FOR SALE on the side of the house. She ran downstairs and into the front yard to check her work. Though crooked, the words would be fairly visible to the passing cars of 1-80 a mile or so away. She kicked off her sneakers and sprayed them red then leaned back to sit in the scoop of the large satellite dish. A speck of a spider made Mabel’s ankle itch. “Don’t you know who I am?” she said to the spider as she reached down to crush it with her thumb. All the last week, she’d been running into cobwebs and plucking them from her skin and her hair. She’d catch glimpses of the webs, a shimmer of color out the corner of her eye, only too late. Though she was angry at Lily for leaving without telling her (all Mabel had found was a note Jordan had left next to the cash register—a doodle of a twirling-mustached man in poncho and sombrero beneath the words Off to Mexico and above Don’t tread on me), Mabel had been pacing the house, from worry mostly. Lily had always had higher expectations for things; she was bound to be terribly disappointed in their mother.