The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  “I feel fine,” Lily said, though she felt sick from the press of the desert heat. She longed for her own bed and for Mabel’s worthless stomach-flu remedies.

  Women in braids and housedresses cluttered the sidewalks with souvenirs for sale—ceramic lizards painted in tropical colors, tall bottles of clear vanilla, faceless rag dolls with MEXICO sewn into their skirts. Shopkeeps dragged out piles of blankets that looked scratchy. Terra-cotta suns hung alongside hanging pots spilling out clay fish. The shops sold crescent moons made of frosted glass and chess sets made of rock. Skeleton brides and grooms hung slack jawed from puppet strings.

  Lily saw an old movie poster she wanted to buy for Mabel—UN GATO SOBRE EL TEJADO CALIENTE, with an illustration of Elizabeth Taylor in a baby-blue slip sitting on an iron bed. ESTA ES MAGGIE LA GATA. But when she asked Ana, who had firm hold of her arm, to slow down, Ana couldn’t hear her weak voice above the racket of the street. Ana only smiled and said, “Just let me know if you want to stop for anything.”

  Lily touched Ana’s stomach without her seeming to notice. She became determined to coax Ana back to Nebraska with her, where they would all raise the little one together. Lily would be saving Ana, and possibly the child, from abuse, in a way that Lily’s mother seemed unable to do. Ana had to come with her. There were no other meaningful conclusions.

  They walked up to a man who carried a row of counterfeit Gucci handbags on a broomstick at his shoulder. “Medical prescriptions?” the man whispered in Lily’s ear, his breath smelling sweetly of clove. “Xanax, Valium?” Ana stepped in to negotiate for a new purse. Mabel would love Nogales, Lily thought—all the bartering, all the cheap goods she could make a fortune off back home in the shop.

  Ana, with two handbags on her arm, led Lily to a window in a bright blue wall. She bought them both fish tacos from the walk-up café then led them to a bench in an open space. As they ate the tacos, they watched children practice drums in a schoolyard.

  “Are you having a boy or girl, do you think?” Lily said.

  “A boy,” Ana said. “And don’t I know it. The little squirt’s been hell on wheels.” She gave her stomach an annoyed finger thump.

  “You’ll be glad to let him out.”

  “I guess so,” Ana said. “But I kind of like him right where he is, truth be known.”

  “Where’d you get that bruise?” Lily said, feeling a little bold.

  “Bruise?” Ana said. She said it like she didn’t know what Lily was talking about, but she’d reached right up to the purple spot near her throat. “Oh, this bruise,” she said, after a second. “Danny and me, we get to wrestling around. Just horsing around and making out. Just him being cute, and I bruise easily.” Ana pressed lightly on the bruise, seeming pleased with it, maybe picturing the romantic rough-and-tumble she described.

  It pissed Lily off that Ana, who clearly had some fierce bones in her body, would fall patsy to some guy. “If I was pregnant,” Lily said, “I’d protect my baby with my life.”

  Ana had been leaning in toward Lily, and now she leaned away. “Is that so,” Ana muttered, looking off, shutting down. She buttoned her blouse up more, hiding her bruise away.

  “Leave the bastard,” Lily said, wanting to be the tough stepsister, in town only a minute, who suggested things no one else would. Now Lily wished she’d brought Jordan along, for everyone to envy her her gentle husband. “My sister and me, we have a house, a shop. Come to Nebraska with me.”

  Ana only shrugged. “Fiona’s right about you.”

  “What do you mean? What is she right about?”

  “Nothing,” Ana said, keeping it secret. Lily actually relaxed, happy that her mother had formed an opinion of her and had confided it to her closest friend.

  “I can give you my address,” Lily said. “And you could come anytime. You should do something. Get a gun or something at least.”

  “Are you crazy?” Ana said. She took out her paper fan again but kept the breeze to herself. Lily leaned over a bit for some of the cooler air. “I’m surprised you’d suggest a gun,” Ana said, not looking at Lily. “Your father’s suicide and all.”

  “My mom told you about that?”

  Ana shut the fan and dropped it into her lap. She looked at Lily. “She told me things she didn’t even tell you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lily said.

  Ana busied herself with her new purse, concentrating on adjusting the strap. Her hands shook as she fumbled with a tiny buckle. What she said then, she said so softly Lily couldn’t hear her. Lily asked Ana to say it again. Ana said, loud enough, but without looking at Lily, “He shot himself in front of her. Your father shot himself right in front of your mother.”

  “Oh, God,” Lily said, losing her breath a second. She’d never had to picture any of it before; no one had ever breathed a word of such violence. In Lily’s childish imaginings, the bullet had slipped from the gun down her father’s throat like a fatal dose. Lily had never heard who found him or how they’d found him. Now all the parts of the room, long since forgotten, the rust-stained wallpaper, the houseflies thick in summer, a dusty seashell, and a jar of wheat pennies all surrounded her father in his evening chair. How closely had her mother stood, and how closely had she seen? Come back, had he said, or I swear I’ll do it?

  “She lied to you,” Lily said. “My father would never do that to her.”

  “She couldn’t have been lying to me,” Ana said. “Not the way she told it. And Fiona doesn’t lie.”

  “But Fiona always lies,” Lily said. “All she does is lie.” Lily noticed new things about Ana then, like a patch of broken blood vessels on her neck and a fresh scar at the corner of her eye. The piercing of her ear was torn clear through the lobe.

  Ana stood and tossed her taco wrapper into a trash can, then walked toward another street of merchants. Lily still felt dazed from thoughts of her father’s sad act of cruelty. She was still back in that room with her father’s work boots kicked off by the door, the laces still in knots.

  Lily didn’t follow Ana. She stood from the bench and slipped into a dark, corner shop silent but for the water running in the fountains for sale. The air in the room was cool and damp, nearly misty. Lily walked past a collection of porcelain sink basins on the floor, the insides painted with flowers and fish and cherubs. After stopping at a wall of tile-framed mirrors, she noticed the dirt in the creases of her face. She took a pack of Kleenex from her purse, licked a tissue, cleaned up a little. Her father, one night, wiped hard at the corn dust, at the red chaff and dirt on her face and neck, enraged at her for playing in the bin. “Children suffocate,” he said.

  It had been a poker night on somebody’s farm, and the grown-ups listened to the old Redd Foxx records the children weren’t allowed to hear. Shooed out into the dark for a game of “Ghostie, Ghostie, Come Out Tonight,” a boy led the five or so children to the mostly empty corn bin, and he opened the door and removed some of the top panels that kept the corn in. They all stripped and dropped naked into the chest-high pile of shelled kernels. A bird, caught at the top, fluttered its wings against the dark bin walls towering above them. The children, barely lit by a touch of moonlight, walked around like zombies, silent and slow in the thick corn dust. Lily had held her hands close to her chest and burrowed, loving the silkiness of the corn against her skin as it parted and engulfed her.

  Lily saw, in the mirror, a girl sitting on the floor of the shop. The girl, her tray of maracas beside her, ate pieces of candied fruit from a paper napkin unfolded in her lap. She offered Lily a piece of sugary mango. As Lily sat on a bench to eat it, she thought of her father that night holding her tight as he scrubbed the chaff away with a dry towel. “I’m not mad,” he’d said, very mad, picturing his babies not breathing.

  In the corner of the shop, a tall screen painted with red parrots hid a desk. Lily could see a woman’s sandaled foot and a curl of adding-machine tape inching down the side of the desk. “Hello?” Lily said, and the woman peeked around
.

  “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Where could I find a ride?” Lily asked. “I need to go to Saint Adelaide’s,” then she added, “to see the nuns,” then, “I’ve left my husband.” When the woman still seemed unmoved, Lily lied just a little more. “And I’m pregnant.”

  The woman then nodded slowly and disappeared again behind the screen. She shouted something in Spanish, her words echoing up a stairwell. She stepped out with her keys. “When my son comes down to watch the shop,” the woman said, “I’ll drive you up there myself.”

  “Thank you,” Lily said, touched by the woman’s gullibility. At Saint Adelaide’s, she’d get into the Monte Carlo and vanish from the desert. She just ran away? her mother might ask Ana, puzzled by her mysterious daughter. Lily took from her purse the Kleenex with the peach pit from the piece of fruit her mother had left her for breakfast. She’d leave the pit on the dash of her mother’s car. Though Lily did feel sympathy for her mother, and what her mother had had to see, nothing had really changed; her mother had still left them in a house full of junk. None of this was very complicated, Lily promised herself.

  15.

  WHEN MABEL WOKE, STILL ON THE SOFA on the lawn in front of the house, she found that someone had covered her with a thin bathrobe. The robe was patterned with stars and crescent moons and had been food for moths for years as it hung on a coat hook. Mabel’s eye caught on a bicycle dropped near the porch, a wheel slowly spinning to a stop. She noticed a crumb of something on the porch step.

  Of a muffin, Mabel realized, picking up the crumb and putting it in her mouth. With a blueberry. Mabel’s stomach rumbled, and her shoulders and back ached from the night on the sofa, but she felt wonderful, accomplished, seeing the scattered shoes and the records on the grass. Soon the house would be empty of its boxes of broken dishes and the rolled carpets in the rafters. She would toss out the tobacco tins full of snapshots of long-dead strangers and the basket of glass percolator tops collected off old coffee pots. As Mabel walked back into her house, she closed her eyes and subtracted everything from the image in her mind. She slowly and carefully felt her way down the path in the junk, avoiding the corners of shelves and the legs of tables. The house would be a place of potential, her life one of promise.

  Mabel followed a scent of coffee and red pepper, and she opened her eyes. Atop the kitchen table were more crumbs of muffin and part of a breakfast burrito still warm from the Texaco microwave. Mabel sat down to drink the coffee dregs from the Styrofoam cup and to eat the last bites of the food. Not until she ate all there was did she wonder who had been in her house.

  Looking around the room, she noticed a paper sack she didn’t recognize on the floor next to the stairs; inside was the metal lettering pried from the backs and sides of deluxe cars—CADILLAC in gold-plated cursive, and MERCEDES and PORSCHE. She saw then, on the stairs, a trail of clothes—jeans, T-shirt, boxer shorts with heart shapes. When she got to the fringed moccasins, she knew Jordan was back. He was always buying hand-beaded moccasins; he liked to go out to the reservation to play the illegal slots and to get the government-issue peanut butter for cheap. Mabel picked up his clothes from the steps, along with a bent-up Polaroid photo of Lily and Jordan with a black bottle of Cava beneath a crepe-paper bell. A quickie wedding along the way, and me left uninvited. How not surprising, Mabel thought, surprised. Strangers for witnesses and canned wedding hymns. The bridal bouquet tossed into a pack of rented well-wishers. But Mabel was too glad to have Lily and Jordan back to be at all aloof or punishing. “You’re home,” she said, pressing her cheek against the closed bathroom door. “You’re home.”

  “Come in,” Jordan shouted out, “but don’t come near me. I’ve got lice.”

  Jordan sat naked in the empty tub, his hair standing on end with a thick shampoo. He’d covered his privates with a Penthouse magazine. “I’d give you a little kiss,” he said, “but I’m infested. I’ve got to sit dripping with this shampoo for ten minutes. I’m thinking of going to the filling station next to shower in gasoline. Anything to kill the damn parasites.” He spoke quickly and his tongue sounded like it was too heavy to lift around his words. Mabel wondered if he was hopped up on something. “I hope it’s all right that I came here,” he said. “I stole a bike from in front of the bus station. My dad’s going to be pissed off at me for leaving town, even though he did fire me. So I’m trying to avoid him. Though I could use him to float me a loan. Tell you what . . . if he gives me some money, I’ll take us all out for steaks . . . my treat. I know you love steak.”

  “Where’s Lily?” Mabel said, holding out the Polaroid, to let him know that she knew.

  “I don’t care,” he said, looking away. “Lily’s dead to me.” Then he said, “Not really. It’s just that she left me behind, in the middle of the night, without a word of good-bye.” Then he added, “In Vegas, on our honeymoon,” he said, his eyes wide with romantic misery. Jordan held up his hand. “You don’t want to hold me,” he said. “You don’t want this lice.”

  But Mabel had had no intention of going to him—she was struck cold with worry for Lily. It was easier when she could imagine Lily and Jordan gone off together. Mabel thought of the things of Lily’s she’d kept over the years: a baby tooth, an old barrette with strands of Lily’s hair caught in its clip. When she was little, Mabel had heard such things were useful to investigators looking for lost children. If Lily had ever turned up missing, Mabel could have offered the police a chewed-on pencil and a photocopy of the palm of Lily’s hand.

  “Did you see the stuff I brought you back from Vegas?” Jordan said, cheering slightly. “The lettering in the paper sack? I collected that stuff myself. I figured you could sell it in the shop. The kids buy that stuff and wear it as jewelry.”

  Mabel noticed Jordan’s skin was splotchy pink and red. She picked up an empty bottle of shampoo from the floor—SAV-MOR LICE KIT. “You’re only supposed to use a little bit,” she said, reading the directions.

  “I know,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ve probably OD’d on the stuff. But I could still fucking feel them crawling on me, after two whole treatments.” He held up his hands and bent and unbent his fingers, wiggling them, making them buggy. “They’re all over my fucking body. I just know I got ’em from sitting next to this one filthy friggin’ Boy Scout on the bus.”

  “I’m a little worried,” Mabel said. “You shouldn’t have used so much of this stuff. It’s toxic.” Must his every action tend toward the suicidal? Even the taking of his medicine? How could she care so much about someone so precariously perched in the world? “You’re even talking funny,” she said.

  “Oh,” and Jordan’s shoulders shook as he looked down with a silent laugh. “Oh, that.” He looked back up at her and opened his mouth wide. Mabel resisted the urge to reach out and touch the piercing, the tiny silver ball near the tip of his tongue. “When I was sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting for Lily to come back, I read a Cosmopolitan magazine that somebody had left laying there on a table. There was this article that recommended getting something pierced as a cure for heartbreak.” He lowered the magazine a bit so she could see the silver hoop piercing his navel, an outie that Mabel had always thought so adorable, so childlike. Then he turned his head around so she could see his left earlobe stuck through with a gold stud and the ring around the top of his ear. “If I knew you a little better,” he said, winking, nodding at the magazine at his crotch, “I’d let you see the one down below.” Then he laughed and said, “I’m just kidding. I’m not so heartbroken as to mutilate that.”

  He’d come back to Mabel and, no surprise, Lily had literally filled him full of holes first. “You shouldn’t have done it to your belly button,” Mabel said. “It was cuter before.” She turned toward the door and said, “You better wash this stuff off.”

  “You could stay a minute,” Jordan said, smiling and biting his lip, trying to seem cute and boyish. “Help me comb out my nits.” Then he kind of laughed, so she
’d know he was just joking about the combing.

  If all this had happened on some other day, maybe only days before, Mabel might have taken her sister’s husband naked and scrubbed to her bed and run her tongue over his, over all the metal pieces in his body, and over the scar on his wrist. She would have let him shut his eyes tight, let him keep his hands to himself, and would have let him think of whomever he wanted to think of.

  Mabel did still long to kiss him but only to know what his new tongue felt like. She’d kiss him once, she thought, and keep the kiss as a souvenir. “Can I try it?” she said, tapping her finger at her own tongue, kneeling beside the tub. Jordan smiled and opened his mouth on hers. A soft tongue breaks the bone, Mabel remembered her mother, in her religious phase, quoting whenever Mabel and Lily screamed in argument. A soft tongue, she thought, kissing Jordan, jimmying the cold metal bump, and she thought of the next line in Proverbs, a question she’d found when looking up her mother’s strange admonitions in her Girl’s First Bible. Have you found honey”? was the question. Though the Proverb had gone on to speak of excess and vomit, Mabel had always loved the sound of it: Have you found honey? God asks in his gentle interest.

  Mabel leaned back and wiped her lips with the back of her hand, feeling a sharp bite of headache from the chemical shampoo. She wouldn’t be his agonizing guilt, his little cruelty. He’d have to find some other way to hurt Lily.

  Mabel said to Jordan, “Some people shave their heads to get rid of lice.”

  Jordan looked toward the ceiling, squinting, probably seeing himself with all his hair gone and looking tough and angry. “Would you shave my head for me, Mabel?” When she nodded, he pulled the plastic curtain closed and turned on the shower to rinse off the shampoo.