The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Siri Hustvedt

  “Between?” Lily said. She dug her feet into the cave floor.

  “Between you and me, between Becky and you, between Dahl and Doll, between the word and the flesh, between you and you.”

  Lily looked at her fingers, which were oddly yellow in the kerosene glow. “What are you saying?”

  Martin rubbed his mouth. He seemed disappointed and began to explain slowly as he stepped toward her.

  “Stay back. Don’t come near me.”

  Martin looked hurt, but he didn’t approach her. “I, I,” he stuttered and winced. “I made you, so she, you, is between us. And between you and Becky—older than Becky, younger than you, the way you were, the way Becky would’ve been.” He rocked his shoulders to his own voice, turning his speech into an incantation. “She is the in-car-na-tion,” he said, giving each syllable the same weight, “of your name into its thing…”

  Lily shook her head. “That’s the oldest joke in the world, Martin—a stupid pun. That’s all I ever heard on the playground. It’s stupid—”

  He interrupted her. “N-n-n-no! It’s very important.” Martin worked to control himself. “The word becoming flesh, Lily—the in-between moment, before—”

  “No. It’s not flesh! It’s not real! It’s a doll!” The words came back to her, high, crazy. Lily felt a tear rolling heavily down her cheek.

  Martin seemed to grow calm with her anger. “It’s doll flesh,” he said. Lily thought he looked smug.

  “And, Lily, it’s you before—”

  “Before what?” She spat at him. She didn’t mean to, but she saw saliva fly.

  “Before you changed.”

  “Changed?” Lily took another step backward. “How do you mean changed?” She whispered the last sentence. I’m cramped in here, she thought. It’s too small. I can’t see.

  Martin wrinkled his forehead and stared at her. “It’s you in another form.”

  Lily didn’t answer him.

  “You’re a woman now,” he said softly. “But you didn’t used to be,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “D-d-d-d,” he sputtered. “D-A-H-L,” he spelled. “I’m Dahl, too. Underdahl. Don’t you see? It’s all part of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “H-E,” Martin spelled. “It’s in Hermia; it’s in Helen; it’s in Underdahl.” Martin motioned with his hands. He turned to the doll.

  “The letters?” Lily said. “You think ‘H’ and ‘E’ mean something?”

  “There are lots of ‘H-E’s’—they keep moving, from one to the other, depending—Hermia’s father. Helen’s husband … Becky’s father … Hal Dilly.” Martin smiled.

  Lily breathed out several times. “That name,” she said, “who does it belong to?”

  “I went between you and me. You were my disguise.”

  “What?”

  But Martin kept talking. “They would’ve killed him, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s a Jew, Lily. The Nazis would’ve killed him.”

  “Ed wasn’t even born yet.” Martin hadn’t moved, but Lily said, “Stay away from me.”

  “I-If he’d been there, they would have killed him.” Martin was whispering at her now, his face gold in the lamplight.

  “Don’t say that, Martin.” Lily felt like crying.

  Martin held himself and rocked back and forth a couple of times. He chanted again to keep his stuttering in check, and he said, “She’s the under-doll, Lily, you.” The singsong intonation of his voice had become unbearable, and Lily shook her head back and forth at him.

  Martin took a step toward Lily. “You never forgave me for the refrigerator.”

  “The refrigerator?” Lily said. She put a hand to her forehead.

  “At the Overlands’. The refrigerator in the garage.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Snow White.” Martin said. He walked toward her.

  “Get back,” she said.

  Martin stepped back.

  But Lily stood very still. “The drawing,” she said slowly, “is a refrigerator?” Did she remember a refrigerator? Had something happened at the Overlands’? Snow White, she thought. I was Snow White in the third-grade play. She remembered Andrew Wilkens only pretending to kiss her, because he didn’t want to get girl cooties. But Martin?

  “In the garage,” he said. “I tied you up and shut you in the old refrigerator. It was lying on its back.”

  Lily stared at him. “Was it a game?” she said. She was trying to remember. She didn’t speak or move. Do I remember playing with Martin? Snow White? Wasn’t it my cousin George who I played that game with? Hadn’t it been George who slobbered her face with kisses behind the grapevines? Lily remembered a pinched sensation between her legs as if she’d had to pee. Had she been in the darkness of a shut refrigerator, closed in, unable to breathe? Was that it? Or was she remembering George? She had played girl to his boy, and the funny thing about it was that there was as much pretending in playing that girl as if she hadn’t really been a girl to begin with. There was something, though, some vague sensation of being shut in. Or was it her grandparents’ outhouse? George had closed the door and left her there, and she’d heard him laughing about the poop and the stink. “It wasn’t you,” she said.

  Martin didn’t blink. “Y-you never forgave me. At first you wanted to get in. I dared you. I dared you, and I stuck you down and closed the door. I-it was s-so heavy.”

  Lily shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she whispered at him. “Why were you at the Overlands’?”

  “To be with you, Lily.”

  Lily leaned toward him. “Have you made this up, Martin? Are you lying to me now?”

  Martin started to shake his head back and forth quickly. “You, you died, Lily.”

  “What?” Lily turned her head and looked at the opening in the cave wall that would take her out.

  “I-I-I suffocated you. Th-there wasn’t air for you to breathe in the refrigerator. I sat on it.”

  “But I’m here, now, Martin. Don’t be stupid. Even if it did happen, we were kids, right, playing a game?” Lily examined Martin’s face. Stubborn, inward, his expression blocked her words and their meaning.

  “I tied you up.”

  “No,” Lily said. It made her uneasy. Had he tied her up? Had she ever been tied up in her life? Why did she feel as if she had? Why did she know the sensation of rope chafing her ankles and wrists? Had it happened?

  Lily looked into Martin’s eyes. They were wide open. “Th-th-then after a long t-time, I looked inside, and, and it was over.”

  “No, Martin,” Lily said. “No.”

  “Y-you were d-d-dead. I killed you.” He paused. “A-and then I kissed you, and y-you stood up in your white dress—”

  “No,” Lily said.

  Martin nodded. He whispered, “Like Hermia.”

  “I didn’t even own a white dress when I was a kid, Martin. My mother hated white. It got too dirty, and out there…” Lily shook her head.

  “Y-y-you did,” he said forcefully. “And so did Becky. She wore it in her coffin.”

  “Stop it, Martin,” Lily said. “Stop it!”

  Lily felt tears running down her cheeks. “It isn’t true. You’re saying it to”—she paused—“to…” She couldn’t finish. Why would he say it?

  Martin bent over the wheelchair and lifted the doll into his arms again. Lily could see that its body was stuffed with some kind of cotton fill. When she stared at the face, she saw that the color of its eyes was wrong. The kerosene lamp flickered in the draft and Lily took a deep breath. “The eyes are blue,” she whispered at Martin. “They’re blue.”

  “I-I gave her my color,” he said. Martin held the doll up toward Lily. She moved backward and stopped. He was offering it to her, and for a moment Lily thought it looked like some poor princess being sacrificed to the giants. Martin’s chin trembled and his white eyelashes fluttered. “I-I want you to have her.”

  Before she could stop him, Martin had rus
hed forward and thrust the doll at her. She grabbed it and felt its hair brush her arm. It’s just a doll, she said as she looked down at it. It’s a thing. Lily fought the dread that welled up inside her.

  “I can’t, Martin. Take it back.” Lily tried to return the doll to Martin, but he lifted his hands in the air and stepped away from her, the white gauze of his bandaged hand waving before her.

  “I, I want you to take her!” he said in a loud voice that reverberated inside the cave. “It won’t work otherwise.”

  Lily stared at him. “What? What won’t work?” The doll couldn’t have weighed much more than fifteen pounds, but its arms and legs were awkward to hold and its head rested heavily on her right arm. She looked down at its placid face and noticed that its red lips were slightly parted and drawn together, and this expression, whatever it was, revolted her.

  Lily dropped the doll.

  Martin screamed. He screamed like a woman, and the noise broke something inside her. She turned around and was about to run, when she heard Martin scream again. He grabbed her ankle and tripped her. Lily clawed the cave floor, but Martin had thrown himself on top of her, and pulled her around by the shoulders. He still had the doll, and he pressed it into her while he held her down, its hard head between them, pressing against Lily’s throat until she gasped for breath, but Martin didn’t release her. “I c-c-can’t breathe,” she choked out. His embrace was powerful, and Lily could see the muscles in his arm bulging as he squeezed her. She fought him, jerking her head back hard and fast to free her throat, and once her head was away from his grip, she slapped at his hands and hit the doll several times. Then Martin started crying. In the shifting light of the lamp, she saw him shaking and heard his sobs.

  Lily threw herself toward the passageway. She scraped her knee but didn’t stop. She crawled through the tunnel across the first room and out the little door. She didn’t shut it. The light astonished her. No noise came from the cave, and walking to her bicycle she had a sense that her legs wouldn’t hold her, that they had gone bad all of a sudden, and she asked herself how she could ride home. She sobbed as she trudged up the embankment to the road, and that was when the dog appeared. A Border collie came trotting along the road toward her. She didn’t know him, but she bent down to pet his neck, and as she looked into his face, she suddenly found it curious that he couldn’t speak. The dog cocked his head to one side in a gesture of confusion or sympathy, and Lily pulled the animal toward her. She pressed her face into his neck and cried. The dog stood very still and whined a little until she let him go.

  * * *

  Lily went straight to Mabel’s apartment. She didn’t knock but threw open the door and said in a loud voice, “It’s a doll.” She saw Ed first, and then Mabel, whose earnest, drawn expression made Lily wonder if she hadn’t interrupted an intimate conversation. Mabel’s hand had been on the manuscript, and when she saw Lily, she had withdrawn her fingers quickly. But Lily didn’t speculate on what had been happening between them. She had a story to tell, and she told it. Lily didn’t know when she began talking that she would omit the part about the refrigerator, but she did. Had she been sure that Martin was lying about locking her up, she would have told it, but she had doubts. Martin thought she had died and come back to life. Could she have lost consciousness and then woken up while he watched? If it never happened, why did the story awaken in her a sense of having been bound and locked in? Why did she recall the panic of losing air and yet not remember any of the details? Kids lock other kids in cellars and chests and closets and even old refrigerators all the time. Hadn’t she heard a story about a girl who died in one? When she had finished, Mabel said, “Should we call the police?”

  “Is it against the law to make dolls?” Lily said. Mabel didn’t answer this.

  “You could charge him with assault,” Ed said. His voice had more emotion in it than Lily had ever heard. He clenched his fists and leaned toward her.

  Lily looked at her watch. Hank was at the police station. She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, really. Nobody’s dead. That’s the important thing.”

  “What did it look like?” Ed said. “The doll?”

  Lily tried to describe the doll, but it didn’t translate easily into words, and she couldn’t remember the name of the material Martin had used and baked in his oven. She sensed that she had disappointed Ed a little.

  “Was it well done?” he said.

  “Yes,” Lily said. She looked into Ed’s face, pressed her lips together and then said, “It was very well done. He said that it took him a year.”

  Before Ed and Lily left Mabel, they checked her ankle. Lily squatted in front of the woman’s naked foot. It was better, but still swollen and blue. It was an old foot with protruding veins and corns on the bent toes. Lily made an ice pack and when she placed it under the ankle, she looked up into Mabel’s face, and for the first time asked herself how long the old woman would live.

  * * *

  Lily told Ed she wanted to sleep in her own bed that night. She said it was to be close to Mabel, in case she needed anything, but this wasn’t true. Her neck was still sore from her struggle with Martin in the cave, and Lily felt vulnerable. She wanted to lie in her own bed with Ed, and she wanted to hear Mabel through the wall, wanted to know that she was there.

  Ed smiled briefly at the poster of Marilyn when he walked into her room. He had seen it before, but he appeared to take note of it for the first time, and there may have been irony in the smile, but Lily wasn’t sure. Then, without a word, he picked her up, carried her to the bed and made love to her. His touch was different that night. He paid more attention to her face than he had ever done before, stroking her cheeks and eyebrows and mouth with his fingers and then tracing the line of her neck. He reminded Lily of a blind person sealing a face in memory through its contours. And Lily was glad he didn’t hold her too hard. Her skin felt sore and raw, and every muscle in her body seemed to have been strained. Even her bones hurt her, although she didn’t know how that was possible.

  And then later, when he stood naked in front of the window with a cigar between two of his fingers, and Lily lay on the bed watching the smoke move toward the ceiling, he told her he was going back to New York the next morning to see Elizabeth.

  Lily didn’t want to look at him, so she stared at the ceiling and said, “For good?”

  “I have to come back. My things, my work…”

  “You’re going back to her?”

  “She wants to try again.”

  Lily heard him inhale smoke, then blow it out.

  “Aren’t you going to look at me?” he said.

  “No.”

  He moved to the bed and sat down. The only light in the room came from the streetlamps outside, and Lily turned her head away from him and studied the shadows on the rumpled sheets near her thigh. “Those things you said about her,” Lily said.

  “It’s all true.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I owe it to her,” he said in a soft voice.

  “Because you’re guilty?”

  “Something like that.”

  Lily couldn’t say what came over her at that moment or why she acted the way she did, but she refused to cry or fuss, and that refusal freed her from herself. It had something to do with Martin and the doll and the cave, but she didn’t know why. Maybe she was tired of drama. It wasn’t only pride that kept her from throwing herself at him and begging him not to leave her, it was that she could imagine the scene beforehand: every stupid, sordid moment of it, just like a soap opera on TV, and Lily knew that if she acted desperate, she would never see him again, and that her only hope was her toughness. Whether that toughness was real or not didn’t seem to make much difference. She said, “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Ed said.

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Don’t you have anything else to say?”

  Lily shook her head.

  Ed opened his mouth to speak, but Lily sat up and put her finger over
it. “No,” she said. “That’s what you owe me. The last word.”

  Lily slept deeply. The rain came during the night, and she woke to a light spray on her face from the window. Ed was gone. He had left a note on her night table, and Lily switched on the light to read it: “Couldn’t sleep. Went home to pack. I love you. Ed.”

  * * *

  Before Martin Petersen walked into the Ideal Cafe at seven-fifteen the next morning, Lily’s shift was uneventful. Vince was in a particularly good mood, as was Boomer, whose spirits rose and fell with his boss’s. Boom gave Lily tidbits of gossip—the Hell’s Angels were in town and rumor had it they would crash the dance at Rick’s that night. Linda Waller was reportedly having an affair with Mr. Biddle, the high school basketball coach, and Lily’s ex-boyfriend Hank Farmer was “sticking it to” Denise Stickle. Lily did not respond to this last bit of gossip but stared blankly at the image of Elvis on the boy’s chest smudged with sausage grease and thought that Denise was the perfect choice for Hank’s revenge, if it was revenge and not “true love,” and it did occur to Lily that knowing that Hank and Denise were an item might give more punch to Hermia’s fight with Helena onstage.

  When Lily saw Martin through the screen door with a large grocery bag in one hand, she turned cold. She walked quickly into the kitchen, and standing behind the door, she put a hand on her chest to quiet her racing heart. Vince watched her critically but didn’t say anything. She took a deep breath. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Boomer imitate her gestures. She ignored him and left the kitchen. Martin was sitting in his booth. He had placed the bag close to him on the seat. Lily imagined the doll’s head inside it, then remembered Martin’s arms around her neck and she touched the spot on her throat to feel for soreness, but it was gone. He can’t do anything here, she thought. Lily walked over to his booth.