The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  Mabel nestled up in the dish, and she looked off to a neighboring farm, to Mrs. Maroon planting tulips in the sorghum field. Mrs. Maroon and her husband had decided it wasn’t worth the work of planting and harvesting a crop this summer, so she was extending her flower beds; she’d bought six hundred tulip bulbs and a special device for the end of her battery-powered drill that allowed her to dig holes quickly and easily. Mabel worried that Mrs. Maroon had gone a bit wacko from the struggles of the farm, but what a divine madness, she thought. Uncontrolled tulip planting.

  Soon, Mabel promised herself, she would actually be glad Lily and Jordan had left, and she wouldn’t care if they didn’t come back for weeks. She wouldn’t sit around and wait for them, and she certainly wouldn’t follow them. She would change her life instead. In the help-wanted section of the paper had been an ad for an assistant at the grain elevator for the longer hours of harvest. Mabel had always liked all the nighttime activity of the cold autumn weeks. As a girl, she had frequently sat up at her bedroom window watching the lights of the combines across neighboring fields, listening to the comforting roar of the engines and the rattle of trucks passing on the road after dark.

  Mabel lay her head back and considered herself in other incarnations. She thought she might like to do something selfless for a time, like a woman she knew named Betty who looked after things in the Alzheimer’s ward of the hospital. Mabel frequently brought Betty whatever Beanies she picked up cheap at flea markets, and they had lunch in the nurse’s station, watching the old folks in the lobby through the tall glass windows.

  Mabel would miss the shop and her life among the junk. She closed her eyes and pictured the paint-by-numbers and framed hook-a-rugs on the wall and the junk jewelry locked up in its glass case.

  Business had improved a bit at the secondhand store after a recent discovery; an antique dealer bought a ratty blanket that had been draped across the top of the upright piano for years. Mabel got eleven bucks for it, which she had thought a great sale considering the blanket was threadbare and riddled with burns. A few weeks later, the local newspaper carried a story trumpeting the dealer’s selling of the blanket, an Indian relic of ceremonial purpose, for $50,000. People trickled in then, investigating all the dustiest tchotchkes, scrutinizing every costume jewel and wineglass and cardboard print in gilded plaster frame.

  Mabel took advantage of the new interest in the shop by scratching French-sounding names into the paint at the bottom of cheap vases; on the title page of an old copy of The Sun Also Rises she wrote FRANCIS—THANKS FOR THE GREAT TIME IN GREAT NECK.—ERNIE; on every porcelain thing marked with “Japan” on the bottom, Mabel stamped “Occupied” above it and quadrupled the price. She even practiced an elaborate trick she learned from an underground antiquing newsletter: she mixed baby powder and automobile paint, then coated an old rocker or an old trunk with the mixture. She’d light the piece and let it burn a minute, to give it the look of something centuries old.

  Nobody fell for the more obvious forgeries, but many altered items were sold; people would approach Mabel, fretting over particular pieces of junk, biting their lips, afraid of questioning authenticity and calling attention to the possible great worth. So she never felt guilty about her deceptions because the buyers had come with their own deceptive schemes—a husband and wife would stand whispering over something like the mock authentication papers of a Tiffany lamp knockoff, then decide to quietly pay the low asking price. They all hoped to get their own pictures in the paper praising brilliant thefts, their ability to recognize the rich histories of things broken or torn.

  Suddenly Mabel’s hands felt lighter, unencumbered, and she realized she was no longer wearing the ring Jordan had slipped onto her finger in The Red Opera House. Where did I take it off? she wondered, and she worried that the ring was lost. If Lily happened to call, Mabel would say, “Tell Jordan I can’t find the ring he gave me.”

  Mabel slid from the satellite dish as Mrs. Cecil, who’d once been the town’s undertaker, drove in to the driveway, pulling up next to Starkweather’s Packard. Mabel felt embarrassed by the red words on the side of the house. She didn’t want to sell the shop; she just wanted to punish Lily and Jordan, wanted to worry them when they returned on the highway, with a bright red sign that announced they’d ruined everything. “Do you still have the extreme unction box?” Mrs. Cecil called to Mabel as she stepped from her car.

  “The what?” Mabel said.

  “The old box that used to hang on my wall,” Mrs. Cecil said. Ever since retiring from the funeral business a year or so before, Mrs. Cecil had been selling Mabel her antiques one by one, only to return a few days later to buy each one back. Mrs. Cecil was a beautifully preserved old woman, the shriveled, spotted skin of her hands the only sign of her great age. She was stately in her pearls and cameos and silver buckles. Her white hair was smoothly upswept, with the palest tint of blue.

  Mrs. Cecil had prepared Mabel’s father for a closed-casket ceremony, but Mabel had never felt uncomfortable around her. Mrs. Cecil had long been a friend of Mabel’s grandmother, and once when she visited years before, Mabel and Lily described to her the funerals they wanted. “Ringlets,” Lily had said, circling her fingers all around her head. “And the green velvet dress that doesn’t fit me anymore that I wore two Christmases ago.” Mabel had wanted to be buried in a rabbit fur coat she’d seen in a JC Penney catalog.

  “‘This junk shop for sale’?” Mrs. Cecil read aloud.

  “Not really,” Mabel said, but looking up, she was no longer embarrassed. She decided she liked the crooked letters marking the house. The words might lend her life some mystery, Mabel thought. Everyone who drove by would wonder and worry about all that was going on within the walls. Lily had never liked people to know about the sad details of her life and had told many lies growing up, often claiming her parents were missionaries far away teaching heathens about medicine and God. Mabel, however, had basked in sympathy, speaking often of her father’s death and had even invented a sickness for her mother that required her to take the healing waters and vitamin-rich sun of a little town in Mexico. Mabel had at times claimed the sickness to be hereditary, and she had once given her best friend Cindy a list of wishes she was to mail to the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the event of Mabel’s decline (to swim in the ocean with dolphins; to ice skate in Rockefeller Center, New York City). Though Mabel hadn’t told such a lie in years, she sometimes felt this make-believe illness making her sleepy, causing her bones to ache and her teeth to itch.

  Mabel followed Mrs. Cecil into the shop and up to a box hung on the wall. It was a shadow box with statuettes of Mary and the crucified Lord, and beneath the figures was a small, hinged reproduction of the Last Supper. “Behind here,” Mrs. Cecil said, undoing a hook with her crooked fingers and lowering the picture, “is the Communion plate and a bottle of oil for anointment. I don’t even know why I sold it; it’s a nice old piece. How much?”

  “You can just have it back, Mrs. Cecil.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” she said, taking her checkbook from her handbag and checking the price marked on the side of the box. Mrs. Cecil spilled some coins from her purse, and Mabel bent to pick them up. “Excuse me, sweets, I’m shaky as a leaf.” It must be nerve-racking, Mabel thought, to live among the families of those you’d dressed and undressed and cleaned and powdered and sewn up for burial. She was probably frequently haunted by the ghosts of the living, confronted by the widows from past funerals. People could easily come to think her funeral home—its walls painted always the same pale blue, its rugs the same weave, its slipcovers the same flowered print—a monument to all their old grief.

  Mrs. Cecil wrote a check, then lifted the extreme unction box from the wall. She carried it in her arms to the front door, stopped a moment, then stepped out. She then stepped back in. “When did you say Lily would be back?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Mabel said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  Mrs. Cecil looked around the house, av
oiding Mabel’s eyes. The many rings on all her fingers tapped against the box in her arms. “When I drove up just now and saw what you’d painted on the side of the house, I knew I had to finally talk to you girls. To tell you before you move away.” She swallowed, and she licked her dry lips. “To tell you about what I took.” She put the box down and walked slowly to Mabel.

  As Mrs. Cecil took something from her purse, something wrapped in a handkerchief, Mabel longed for her to reveal something stark and awful. Skin from Mabel’s father’s skinned-up elbow, the lobe of his ear, the corner of his mouth. This time she’d believe absolutely, not like with the suicide note. This time she wouldn’t doubt for a second, she promised herself. “I’ve had this in my purse every time I was here,” Mrs. Cecil said. “But I could never bring myself to give it back.” Mrs. Cecil held out her open hand and lifted away the edges of the handkerchief. She held, not something horrible, but a small plastic panther. The toy’s purple paint had chipped from months of play. Mabel recognized it at the touch.

  “It’s been in the back of my mind for years,” Mrs. Cecil said, pinching at the beads of her necklace.

  Mabel studied the panther. Her father had ordered a small bag full of plastic jungle animals from an ad in the TV Guide—a bag of panthers and lions and elephants. She and Lily had not cared well for the panther in the few years they’d had it. It had been stepped on and gnawed on and caught in the vacuum cleaner.

  Mrs. Cecil wiped her handkerchief at the sweat of her forehead and neck. “I didn’t think much about it at first,” she said, her voice a high crack. “I have to believe that any funeral director would have done the same. We have to be very particular about how we prepare the caskets for burial. Before the funeral, your mother had wanted to just look at your father in his suit. I advised her against it, even though I had done . . . well, a rather, if I do say so myself, a rather good job of repairing the head . . . as best as it really could be repaired, really. But that’s what she wanted, so I lifted the lid for her to look. Though Lily couldn’t see in, she was standing right there, and I saw her reach up and drop something inside. I didn’t think much about it. I just waited until your mother and Lily stepped back out of the room, and I simply removed it. That plastic panther. I simply removed it and put it in a drawer. Then after the service, and the burial, after all the dirt had been filled in, I realized what I had done. Lily had wanted your father buried with that toy, and I had prevented that from happening. After all these years, Mabel, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Some days it seemed like that panther was alive in the drawer, pacing back and forth.” Mrs. Cecil cleared her throat and picked up the extreme unction box. “I hope Lily can forgive me,” she said.

  “Of course we can,” Mabel mumbled, her mind caught on the image of her father dead in his box, his head patched. Mabel had not seen his dead body, and no one before had ever described it. She and Lily had been in the country as their mother alone selected a suit, hopefully the blue one he loved.

  He’d worn the slick-looking suit backstage at Mabel’s second-grade production of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Mabel was only Hedgehog No. 2 in an old bristly brown costume that smelled of mice, but he brought her a present anyway, a tiny box of candied violets he’d special-ordered from a wedding cake baker. He’d decked Lily out in Mabel’s cast-off green velvet Christmas dress and had strung silk ribbon through her hair. Mabel’s mother stayed at home to nurse another terrible headache.

  “Those headaches kick the hell out of her,” Mabel’s father told Mabel’s pretty teacher as she last-minute stitched the ripped lining of Little Red’s cape. “They’re very decapitating.”

  “Debilitating,” Miss Wyle corrected with a wink, and Mabel’s father blushed and chuckled and stroked his stubbly chin.

  “Yeah, that,” he said, then offered to finish fixing the cape so that she could dash off to look for the lost bottle of wine for Little Red’s basket. The other children, so overwhelmed by the sight of this tall, strange man as he sat in a low, tiny chair, all gathered round to watch him simply sew. “I know that dirty mug,” he said, nodding at a boy who lived down the hall from them in the apartment building. “That face needs to meet the business end of a washcloth.” The kids all yucked it up at that, and Mabel sat on the floor beside her father, her head resting against his leg, so that everyone knew he belonged to her.

  He helped Little Red on with her cape and called her “Suzy-Q” even though her name was Bethany. Then he shook her hand and wished her luck. Mabel could recall nothing about the show itself, but afterward her father invited Miss Wyle out for a cup of coffee. The only place open had been a highway convenience store with a few booths in the back; they all shared a few packages of clearance-shelf carrot cake. The adults had coffee and the girls split a 7-Up. Mabel’s father told Miss Wyle about the day Mabel was born, and she reached across to lift his floppy bangs to see the scar on his forehead. Mabel wished her father would marry Miss Wyle. She loved her mother, but she’d always wanted a stepmother too, like other girls had. Stepmothers, she thought, so desperately want love and respect and a place in the family.

  After Mrs. Cecil left, Mabel realized she’d been gripping the plastic panther tight in her fist, and now it felt hot, felt like it was throbbing in her hand. Touching it was like touching at a vein on Lily’s wrist. The panther had not been Lily’s best toy, but Mabel could understand why she had chosen it for their father. The artist had given the cat a wide, comical grin of fanged teeth. The panther burned in Mabel’s hand like a talisman, and she couldn’t wait to show it to Lily. Lily would fall apart at the sight of this secret offering seemingly exhumed from their father’s grave. For even just a moment, Lily was certain to be a broken little girl again, her father’s death new in her heart.

  8.

  WITH THE PLASTIC PANTHER WARM IN her fist, Mabel felt drawn toward Stitch Farm. Years before, Brandi, the Stitch girl, had inhaled too much airplane glue from a paper bag on the night of her junior prom. She now sat in a wheelchair, unable to move, barely able to speak, but with a newfound gift. All the farmers’ widows had made pilgrimages to the young woman’s weekly sessions, standing in line with buttons in their fists and cufflinks plucked from their husbands’ funeral shirts. Mr. Stitch would take the items and press them into his daughter’s unfeeling hand, and Brandi would choke out a word or two, a message whispered to her by some voice in an afterlife.

  Mabel had always rolled her eyes at Lily, had snapped her gum to show indifference, whenever Lily returned from Stitch Farm dressed in mourning weeds—black blouse, black skirt, her father’s wedding band on a chain around her neck. After every session Lily had plopped shut-mouthed and gloomy into the sofa cushions, drinking store-bought margaritas straight from the bottle. But Mabel wasn’t as skeptical as she claimed to be. Lily simply needed her to be faithless and free of ghosts, needed Mabel to be the sensible one.

  She placed the plastic panther atop the dash of the Jimmy and drove out toward the highway. As a drop of sweat rolled into her eye and burned there, Mabel remembered sitting on the roof of the porch years before as Lily concentrated on a tattered Ouija board. Lily touched the board and asked a question about their dead father’s sadness in life, and the triangle spelled out JOSHUA 10 13. Mabel had pretended to be absorbed in a book but later looked the verse up in her grandmother’s Bible. “So the sun stood still and the moon stopped,” the passage read. That’s exactly what everything felt like, Mabel thought now, wiping away sweat with the back of her hand.

  As Mabel approached the dirt road turnoff, she slowly passed two young men pushing a stalled pickup. An older man followed them, hunch-shouldered and wiping his neck with a hanky. ROSELEAF RANCH was painted in blue on the faded-to-pink truck. In her rearview mirror, Mabel saw that a boy, about fourteen, oversteered at the wheel. She considered stopping and offering her help, but she figured they’d just laugh at her—four men offered help by a girl.

  On the country road, just before the entrance to Stitch Farm
, the blossom of a plastic mum flew across Mabel’s windshield, a few broken petals catching in a wiper. She then noticed all the artificial flowers and silk greenery in the ditch—bouquets stuck into the ground with wires or tied to fence posts. Banners marked TO MOTHER and FOR MY SON fluttered in the wind, loosened from their wreaths. The farmers’ wives no longer decorated the plots at the county graveyard. Instead, they took their flowers here, preferring to believe their loved ones to be not beneath ground but in the light and wind surrounding Stitch Farm.

  Mabel had visited her father’s grave only once, a month or so after his death, to help her grandmother plant a peony bush. On the drive home after, Mabel declared she would never return to the cemetery, as she picked the graveyard’s dirt from beneath her fingernails. She’d hated the tombstone’s bland inscription of LOVING SON, FATHER, AND HUSBAND and its ugly gray rose cut into the granite. Now Mabel wished she’d been more devoted, with some simple tradition or ritual of her own. She could have burned a candle one night a year or left a single rose on winter days.

  The panther in the front pocket of her blouse, Mabel parked and stepped from the car. As she’d left the shop, she’d taken a garish daisy-print umbrella from the wall to keep the sun from burning her scalp. All the old ladies had warned her that if she ever visited Stitch Farm to drink plenty of water and to eat plenty before; people were forever fainting and swooning there in the summer months.

  Mabel opened the umbrella and picked the petals from the windshield wiper, looking out across the farm. The only growth anywhere around was a patch of waist-high wheat, a circling labyrinth cut into the field. TAKE A PEACEFUL WALK AND FIND YOUR CENTER—$5, the sign proclaimed. She watched, amused, as people stumbled, dizzied from the twists of the field.