The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

“There’s this place I know,” Wyatt said, “where I go to pray. I mean, I don’t really pray to anyone in particular, I just . . . maybe pray is the wrong word.”

  “I’d love to go,” Mabel said. Just then she would have given herself over to any kind of religious indoctrination Wyatt offered up: a cupful of blood, a biscuit of flesh, a baptism in muddy waters, his hand holding her head deep, deep under for salvation.

  WYATT DROVE the Jimmy so that Mabel could stick her legs out the window to dry them off some. He took her down an old highway that had once been popular with motorists passing through the state on their way to vacation spots, once a string of roadhouses and drive-up diners. A row of wigwam-shaped motel rooms sat covered in graffiti, their triangular windows broken out and boarded up. A two-story—tall covered wagon, once a filling station and souvenir stand, still stood, one of its giant wheels having fallen off to crush an abandoned Chevy. There used to be a tiny carnival somewhere. Mabel had already been down this highway, scavenging, but had only come back with the pink hoof of a carousel horse.

  Wyatt pulled into the lot where the drive-in movie screen still towered above rows of speaker posts. The headlights shone on the rusted, splintered playground equipment lining the bottom of the screen. Someone had spray-painted JESUS SAVES on the screen, and beneath that someone else had painted GREEN STAMPS.

  “This is the place,” Wyatt said, parking. “But it’s dumb, I know.”

  “It’s not dumb,” Mabel said, pulling her legs in to hold them against her chest.

  “I’d like to make it into something again,” he said. “We used to come here when I was a kid. Back before Cody was even born. Callie was just a little thing. She’d sit up front with Mom and Dad, and me and Jesse would sit in the back sharing the popcorn. I loved having my family all together in one place like that, all of us in the car, just to watch some stupid cheap-ass movie. The popcorn tasted dirty, and the soda pop was all watered down, and the speaker popped and was so scratchy you could hardly hear anything right. But any given minute of my life, any given minute, I’d rather be back there. Within inches of my whole family, everyone perfectly content with every worthless thing. I could reach up and fuck with my mom’s hair-clip thing, and she’d get pissed. And I could reach over and tickle Callie’s neck. Jesse would fall asleep on my arm, and I’d let him, even though he had a big fat heavy head and was a little asshole to me most of the time. During scary movies, Mom would make us cover our eyes, and I’d really do it, you know? I’d cover my eyes and not watch, because she really wanted us not to, and I’d try to imagine what all that sound went with. I’d sit there with my eyes covered, picturing screaming women all bloody and cut and men full of knives and blood in their mouths. Throats cut, arms cut off. But I guess I’ll never feel so safe as that again.”

  Wyatt was leaning toward Mabel, his one hand on the seat between them, open. Mabel touched at the blue vein of his wrist. She wanted so much to kiss him. But he would never be able to even look her in the eye without seeing her complete dishonesty, without seeing much too much going on. She hoped for him to find someone normal to love. He should have someone with some complications but simple complications, easy ones. He should just meet someone, someone kind, and just know right away. Someone good for him.

  “Even if I couldn’t get it going as a drive-in again,” Wyatt said, looking down at their hands touching, “I’d like to do something with it. Even if I just set up a projector over there and showed the foreign movies I used to watch with my dad on Sundays on TV. Mississippi Mermaid and 8½, maybe on just a little corner of the screen.”

  Mabel leaned her head over more, her cheek nearly touching Wyatt’s shoulder, and she imagined Wyatt showing his foreign movies while she sold movie memorabilia in the old stucco concession stand. She imagined herself owning little things of interest, like the glasses Burt Lancaster wore in Sweet Smell of Success or Shelley Winters’s cigarette holder in Lolita.

  “We might do something about the pool,” Wyatt said, out of the blue. “I don’t know what. I don’t know what people do. Do they fill it with cement? With dirt? Or do they just keep it, and use it, like nothing ever happened? We’ll just do what other people do.” He closed his hand softly over Mabel’s fingers. “Why were you in the pool again tonight?”

  “I was looking for something,” Mabel said. “Something I dropped the last time.”

  “What?”

  “Just a toy. A plastic little figure, an animal. A panther.”

  Wyatt didn’t say anything for a minute, then reached over to touch at her ear, and his fingers tickled her neck, and she pulled away. He continued to tickle her skin, though, smiling. ’You’ve got something,” he said. “Hold still—you’ve got something there. Just let me get it,” and he then held before her face the plastic panther. He grinned wide and chuckled. “Voila,” he said. “A little trick.”

  Mabel had gone looking for it, but she hadn’t wanted to see it ever again, she realized. It should have been lost to them all years ago, buried deep in her father’s grave. Mrs. Cecil deserved to be long haunted by it, for taking it from their father’s coffin after Lily placed it there at his side. Mabel hoped Mrs. Cecil never slept peacefully again, not a wink, from worry of what thieves would pluck from her own coffin. Her pretty rings, her cameos and pins, her yellowed love letters, her pressed flowers, any piece of sentiment saved and saved and saved.

  “I’m sorry, Mabel,” he said. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I didn’t mean to upset you. I had thought it was maybe Callie’s or Cody’s, from when they were kids. I saw it floating in the muck tonight and picked it out of the pool. Here . . . here, have it back, Mabel. I want you to take it back.”

  “I don’t want it,” Mabel said, wiping at her tears with the backs of both her hands. “I don’t know why I’m crying. It’s just that I don’t know what the fuck to do with myself. Half the time. You know? I just, you know, I just wander around, I drive around, and now, do you know what I did? I dragged everything out of my house, and dragged it onto the front lawn, and, you know, now what? And, okay, so I do something else for a while, I do something else, but you know, there’s this sense that . . . fuck, Wyatt,” and Mabel leaned closer to Wyatt to whisper, not wanting, really, to say it at all. “There’s this sense that the worst hasn’t happened yet. But of course it has. It all has to be in the past, doesn’t it? The worst? We’ve had our share, Lily and me. But I don’t think it is all in the past. In my heart, I feel there could be something worse. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Do other people worry like that?”

  Wyatt kissed Mabel on the cheek, then kissed her lips. He held his fingers gently at her chin. Mabel held his other hand, and he squeezed back, almost too hard. They kissed for several minutes there in the Jimmy, and Mabel thought about nothing but where he might touch her next. She wanted to fall in love with him, and she was certain it would happen soon. Someday soon he would tell her things, and she would believe them easily.

  18.

  AS LILY DROVE HOME, SHE WATCHED a few small birds flying low and stirred into strange patterns by the wind. There were some ancients, Lily had read, who could read the patterns of birds in flight, like reading the settling of tea leaves.

  Lily had a vision of the lights of Vegas sprinkling through a threadbare curtain, a name tag still pinned to a sequined bikini top on the floor (HI MY NAME IS NUEVA), Jordan wearing only a yellowed, ruffled tuxedo shirt unbuttoned, and opening an envelope of international coffee. Lily’s visions were improving, becoming much more vivid.

  On the seat next to Lily, a pre-divorce kit bought at a bookstore lay spread out, its forms rustling in the wind from the open window.

  But Lily considered just driving on, taking a false name and becoming a missing person. Even if she couldn’t make a go of it as a palm reader, she thought, there were other good jobs to be had in a place like Omaha. She could learn some standards and sing lounge somewhere, or she could peddle secondhand comic books in a head shop. There were even som
e theater troupes that paid their actors. All through high school, Lily had been allowed only to play mothers and grandmothers because she was a little heavy and wore thick glasses. Just thinking of the old high school drama department wigs, so worn they had holes and bald patches, made Lily’s head itch.

  As she pictured herself shoehorned into her downtown ten-by-twelve rented by the week—drawers that pulled out of the wall, a sofa that converted, blouses hanging from the shower-curtain rod—the antique shop, painted with red letters, swam into view all ripply behind waves of heat. THIS JUNK SHOP FOR SALE, she read, turning onto the country road. Another fit of Mabel’s, Lily thought, not at all believing the words on the house.

  Lily would act like she hadn’t even noticed. She wouldn’t entertain a single scolding from Mabel, and she’d pay no heed to Mabel’s pouts. She was a grown-up in a rush. A few words about their dear mother and her cute bungalow and her work with the nuns, about the exotic chaos of the streets of Mexico, then an I must be off. Forward all my mail . . .

  But when Lily pulled into the drive, she noticed everything gone from the porch, even the swing, and the Coke machine that ca-chunked when you pulled out a ten-ounce bottle. Those things weren’t supposed to be sold; her grandmother had promised Lily the Coke machine way back when she was a little girl, and the porch swing was for summer nights.

  Lily sat in the car a minute to regain her composure. Her last cigarette had nearly torn in half at the bottom of her purse, but Lily lit it anyway, and it sat bent and barely smoking at her lips. That fucking bitch better not have touched one goddamn thing in my bedroom, Lily thought, then heard the tsk-tsking of her mother, and she saw the nuns, a whole murder of them, dressed as they hadn’t been, in long black robes with rosaries dangling clear down to their knees.

  Lily stormed up the walk. When she opened the front screen door, she saw the room empty but for a salon chair and a bald man painting over the wallpaper. Someone else was living in her house, and she didn’t know what to do. She closed the door, then knocked on it, and the so-strange feel of her own screen door rattling under her fist started her to crying. The bald man kept on painting, his back to her. He wore a large pair of radio headphones clamped at his ears, and he swayed a bit to the music he heard.

  Lily ran back to the car, sick of crying in front of strangers. She started the car, but Omaha suddenly seemed like a rancid town, the Old Market a place where a person could be left for dead. She could smell the smoke of clove cigarettes and the pepper of patchouli and could hear herself being raped at midnight by a unisex punk with a blue Mohawk twenty years too late. No, Lily wanted to be safe again in her own upstairs room, stripped down to her undies, listening to the Sugar Pie DeSanto tape she’d stolen from Ana’s car and drinking Canadian whiskey from a clay goblet Jordan had crafted for her in a pottery class.

  When Lily glanced up to her bedroom, she saw her little pink nightie, hand wash only, that she’d hung in the window to dry days before. It caught a breeze and did a short cootchie dance for her. With this evidence of herself still in the house, Lily got out of the car to investigate. She went to a side window to look closer at the bald man painting. He wore no shirt with his bib overalls that didn’t fit, the legs at “expecting a flood?” length. When she realized that the man was Jordan, she was filled with worry and confusion—the house had been sold and emptied, and Jordan was full of cancer and chemo. But he looked too healthy; he’d put on some weight in his cheeks, and some pink, and the stringy muscles of his arms twitched with his brush strokes. The buttons at the side of his overalls were undone, flashing a bit of fleshy, naked hip.

  But the back of his head seemed just skin and bones, the flesh too close to the skull for Lily’s comfort.

  Lily pressed her forehead against a pane of glass gone foggy with age, the glass frosty like panes of sugar. Maybe they could take lessons with a priest, Lily thought. She’d heard of earnest newlywed Catholics studying manuals on marriage preparation and getting quizzed in a church office. Lily and Jordan needed such a ritual with an ancient celibate in a room of smoky light and leather-bound books, of hot tea and honey poured in a cup, the cup set in a saucer, the saucer set on the end of a massive desk of dark wood.

  Deep in the room of the priest, Lily felt something hit her head, then saw something land near her foot. It was a piece of toast, and she looked up to see Mabel tossing the bread down at her from the roof above the side porch. Mabel sat there with her breakfast outside her bedroom window. “Did you see the salon chair?” Mabel said. “The Rayette Falcon? It’s got an ashtray built right into the arm of it.”

  Mabel tossed another piece of bread at Lily. Lily picked up the crumb and ate it though she’d filled up on the Moons Over My Hammy special at Denny’s. Mabel was pretty in a chenille robe, even with the every which way of her hair. She had the segments of an orange atop a paper napkin open on her lap, and at her side was an actual butterfly in a bamboo-looking cage. The butterfly opened and closed its wings slowly and contentedly, with the rhythm of sleeping breath.

  Mabel lifted the cage by its short chain, startling the butterfly to thrash its wings against the bars. “I’m starting a new business,” Mabel said. “People don’t like to toss rice at weddings anymore because the birds eat it, then it blows up in their stomachs. So some brides pay big bucks to have the guests open cages of butterflies on the church steps.” Mabel touched at the cage. She shushed at the insect. “I’ve been feeding her milkweed from the ditch,” Mabel said. “I’ve only been able to find this one, though.” Lily had heard about area crops of genetically altered corn that was believed to kill caterpillars with its pollen, threatening the monarch population, but she didn’t have the heart to tell Mabel about it. “I’ve got to make money somehow,” Mabel said, “since I got rid of everything from the shop. Had most of it hauled to the junkyard. And I told Jordan I’d pay him for doing some work around the house.”

  Lily glanced back inside. Gone were even the strips of flypaper with forty-year-old fly corpses and the box full of dentures.

  Lily remembered the short bottle of sherry her mother had given her at the vineyard, and she went to the car for it. When she returned to the side of the house, she stepped up on the windowsill, holding on to the rain pipe. Mabel held out her hand and helped her up to the porch roof. “Pretty ring,” Mabel said, flipping open the top, knowing the secrets of its compartment. Mabel touched her fingertip to the bit of desert dust that had collected inside. Then she released the butterfly. “In honor of the wedding of my sister,” she said. And it set off in a swag, unexpectedly quick, off past the felled tree turned nearly to stone in the pasture, over the creek of rock and sand and the sagging bridge of the gravel road.

  Lily showed Mabel the clear bottle without a label, marked only NO. 139 across the glass with a black grease pencil. The peachy liquid inside looked as thick as pancake syrup, and Mabel blinked and covered her eyes when the wine caught the glare of sun. “We don’t have a corkscrew anymore,” Mabel said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Lily said, and she reached into the bedroom window for the end of the heavy curtain. She wrapped the curtain around the bottle and smacked it against the house, like christening a ship, again and again, until the cork poked out a bit from the lip of the bottle. She pushed the cork out the rest of the way with her thumbs and handed the bottle to Mabel.

  “It’s not even nearly noon,” Mabel said, taking a drink, then handing the bottle back.

  “That’s okay,” Lily said. “It’s just a dessert wine.”

  They passed the wine back and forth and looked off across the land. Lily thought she could see her matrimonial butterfly and its dotted-line path as it flew above the neighbor’s field of cut straw and toward the condemned grain elevator at the edge of town. Lily and Mabel drank much of the wine quickly, and Lily, though not drunk, could feel the warmth of the wine at her temples and in her throat.

  “Is this wine from the nuns?” Mabel said.

  “Yes,” Lily said, and
she decided she’d never tell Mabel what their wicked stepsister had said. For Mabel, the suicide could stay the act of a lone gunman, with no witnesses. “I think Mom would’ve liked you better,” Lily said. “You’re more quiet. And you don’t cuss so much.”

  “I cuss a lot,” Mabel said.

  “Not really,” Lily said.

  “Yeah,” Mabel said. “I sure do. I’m a real salty bastard.” Lily and Mabel both giggled, linking arms like old-lady confidantes.

  “I called her a piece-of-shit cunt,” Lily confessed in a whisper, and Mabel’s wide-mouth shock and shriek of laughter was so satisfying to Lily that she leaned over and bit Mabel lightly on the shoulder.

  “I could help you get the shop back together, Mabel,” Lily said.

  “I don’t think you’d make such a great antiques salesman,” Mabel said. “You couldn’t sell snatch on a navy ship.” Lily could not believe how funny that was, and she fell forward to bury her laughter and gasps into Mabel’s stomach. The bottle fell from their hands, rolling down the slope of the roof. Lily and Mabel grabbed for the bottle, crawling quickly to the edge to see it drop to the ground, amazingly, without spilling a drop. The bottle landed with a thump without breaking, the little bit of sherry just an inch from the lip. Leaning over the edge beside Mabel, Lily felt the spin of vertigo, the clouds dipping and lifting in her sight. She still laughed as she grabbed hold of Mabel’s arm, steadying herself. She felt as if the house was tipping slowly forward to gently tumble her and her sister into the tall, soft grass gone to seed.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.