The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Hustvedt, Siri

  Lily saw Bert move away from the cash register holding a copy of the Webster Chronicle. “Have you read the police log, Lil’?”

  Lily shook her head. She surveyed the tables to check on her customers. Everybody looked okay. Bert stuck the paper under Lily’s nose and she took it.

  “Get a load of the headline,” Bert said.

  Lily looked down at the police log on the Records page of the paper. The wits at the Chronicle had given that week’s log the headline “Squealer Apprehended on Division Street.”

  “Down here.” Bert’s finger pointed to the entry for Tuesday, June 11.

  Lily looked down at the paper. The print seemed out of focus. She had to concentrate on the letters to read.

  “Police made a traffic stop.… A fight was reported in Viking Terrace.… A black bag containing insulin equipment was found on Bridge Square.… A man on Albers Avenue reported noises in his basement. Officers discovered a gopher in a window well.… A woman on Dundas Street heard people talking outside her window. Police were unable to locate conversationalists.… A complaint of loud music at the Violetta Trailer Park was received. Officers asked residents to turn it down.… A pig was reported loose on South Division Street. Officers rounded up the critter and returned it to its owner.… A man carrying an injured woman was reported on Highway 19 at the city limits. Police checked the area but found no one.”

  Lily stared at the last entry. Then she looked up at Bert.

  Bert looked puzzled. “All right, it’s not that funny, I admit it.”

  Lily stared at the log again.

  “Lil’, hon, you okay?”

  Lily looked into Bert’s brown eyes. “Something’s going on, Bert.” She turned to the window. “I don’t know exactly what, but I think somebody’s hurt or even dead. She has dark hair. That’s all I know.” Lily walked toward the window and looked at the inverted neon letters that read “IDEAL CAFE” from the outside, and she felt Bert’s fingers brush her shoulder behind her. At her friend’s touch, Lily felt suddenly pained.

  “What are you talking about? Did you see something?” Bert said.

  Lily moved her neck and looked at Bert. “I haven’t seen anything,” she said.

  “It’s Shapiro,” Bert said. “He’s not good for you.”

  Lily made a face. “What does he have to do with it? It’s not him.”

  Bert stared at her, her lips slightly parted. Then she said, “What’s going on?”

  Lily rustled the newspaper in her right hand. She waved it at Bert. “I’m not sure.”

  When Lily wandered into the street after her shift and looked up at the Stuart Hotel for some sign of Ed, she regretted not explaining more carefully what she had meant to Bert. So many strange things happened in the world. All her life she had heard the most unlikely stories that were true. Hadn’t Mrs. Knutsen and Mr. Walacek dropped dead on the same day in houses right next door to each other on Elm Street? How often did that happen? Hadn’t Ernie Applebaum disappeared four years ago without a trace until he turned up last year with the carny people running the Shake ’Em Up ride for Jesse James Days, tattooed from head to toe? And hadn’t June Putkey attacked her mother with a knife in their kitchen on a Sunday afternoon? Had a single person in town known that June (who was known to Lily chiefly for the stickers she plastered all over her purse) had it in her to do such a thing? She snapped, Lily thought. But what had made her snap? Had she really hated her mother, or had she just hated her then? Lily imagined a knife in the girl’s hand and blood in a sink with dirty dishes. And then, Lily thought, there are people who don’t feel anything, people who can do anything, anything at all, like that man in Chicago. Martin had an article about him on his wall. Lily remembered that Gasey had been a clown at children’s birthday parties. Nobody had been able to see what was inside him. But Martin, Lily thought, Martin isn’t like that. And yet when she remembered Martin rocking in that chair as hard and fast as it would go, she wasn’t so sure anymore. Through the glass door of the hotel, she noticed Stanley walking up the stairs with a mop and pail. Just after his feet disappeared, she thought, Martin’s up to something. I can feel it.

  * * *

  When Lily walked through Ed’s door the next day, Mabel was sitting in front of the window only a few feet away from Ed’s canvas. The figure in the painting was the same size as Mabel herself. Lily looked at the splotches of color and the soft contours of the woman’s body, which were still unfinished. Ed hadn’t flattered Mabel, hadn’t turned her into someone younger or prettier. The woman in the painting was Mabel as Lily knew her, and yet this two-dimensional Mabel had a quality about her that Lily didn’t understand. Standing in front of the picture, Lily felt that Mabel was talking directly to her. The woman leaned forward, holding her thin white hands at either side of her face. Her eyes were narrowed as if to focus better and her mouth was open. He got her, Lily thought—that hot-wired look. But still something in the picture bothered her. She could feel it, and she must have been seeing it, but she couldn’t say what it was. Lily moved very close to the portrait. She sensed that both Ed and Mabel were waiting for her response and that she should have one ready, but she didn’t want to speak before she knew what she was going to say. Then she stepped back three or four feet to examine the painting again. The painting was making her uneasy. It’s her face, Lily thought. She looks wild, almost batty, and then Lily realized that she was looking at someone who was desperately happy, so happy that her expression could easily be mistaken for something else: craziness, pain, even fear. She’s so happy, Lily said to herself, because she’s talking to him. And although Lily had always understood that Mabel was lonely, she had never seen it so naked. “What do you think?” Ed said.

  Lily nodded. “It’s the best one,” she said in a flat voice.

  She glanced at Mabel, who looked very calm next to the canvas. “But,” she said, “it’s a little scary, too, because,” she stammered, “it’s so personal.” Lily wiped sweat from her upper lip. Her stomach gurgled. Maybe I’m coming down with something, she thought. Looking from Ed to Mabel, she sensed that between them they had made something she couldn’t touch. Not the painting. The painting had come out of it, but that wasn’t what she meant. Lily stepped away from the canvas and turned to Mabel.

  “There are lots of things I don’t know about,” she said. “Like painting, but I can tell that Ed painted you as you really are, and I know that takes a lot of talent. You must have told him all about yourself for it to work.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Maybe you even told him things you never told anybody before.” She looked at Ed. “But I wonder if he told you about him. I mean the stuff that really matters.” Lily took a deep breath. “All day long you sit here and listen to people telling you their most private thoughts—Tex and Dolores and Stanley and now Mabel. They’re telling you about their parents and their sweethearts, and even about their secret fantasies, and you take it all in like a big sponge—in the name of art.” Lily heard her voice go shrill on the last word. She tried to calm herself. “You’ve told me about yourself, but it’s nothing compared to what these people have been telling you. I don’t even know who your mother was.” Lily pointed toward the open door. “Right through there, I saw you giving Dolores money like she’s your oldest friend in the world, but you don’t tell me beans about it. And everybody in town’s jabbering about all the girls you’ve had, a goddamned assembly line of tits and ass, and from you, nothing.” Lily’s jaw shook. She hadn’t known she was this upset. Her own words were egging her on. “And then I hear you were over at Swensen’s digging up corpses to draw. Did you mention that to me? No sirree! And”—she stopped and looked at them—“just for the record, I’d like to know where the hell I fit in? The two of you are so tight these days, there’s no goddamned room for anybody else!” Lily looked at the two surprised faces. She waited, but neither one of them said anything.

  Lily nodded at Ed. Mabel looked white.

  After several seconds, Ed started talkin
g. His voice didn’t sound agitated, but his forehead wrinkled, and Lily was glad to see some sign of distress in his face. “I know that I’m stubborn about my work,” he said, “and I know that while I’m doing it, it’s sometimes hard for me to think about anything else. I feel responsible for the people I paint, because the portraits are not just about borrowing somebody’s body for a while. That’s why I gave Dolores money. I’m not done with her, just because I’m finished painting her. Do you understand?”

  Lily saw that Ed was looking for words.

  “And I don’t pry,” he said. “Whatever people tell me, they tell me freely. I’m not picking at people’s souls for ugly secrets…” He sighed and rubbed his face. “And as for this red-hot lover business, I honestly don’t know what it’s all about. It’s been overblown to such a degree that I don’t even recognize myself.” He paused and examined Lily as if he were trying to remember something. He smiled. “I guess I was stupid to think that I could slide in and out of the funeral home without causing a stir. For years, I’ve been thinking of doing a series of paintings called ‘The Dead.’ I’ve always had something very quiet in mind, not sensational or ghoulish—no murder victims or anything like that.” He took a breath. “As for Mr. Hansen, the funeral’s tomorrow, and I missed my chance. I did a sketch from memory, but it’s not enough. It’s too bad because I liked his face.”

  Mabel was watching Ed very closely, and Lily could see signs of strain around her mouth.

  Ed continued to look at Lily. “As for you, I can’t see that my painting interferes in any way with my feelings for you.” He looked down at his hands, turned them over and flexed his fingers. “Being with you has made me very happy.”

  Lily knew Ed wasn’t lying, knew that he believed everything he had said, and yet she felt cheated by his answers. It all made sense, and yet there was something wrong with it. She didn’t know why his painting of Mabel changed what was between him and her, but it did. She just couldn’t explain it. She didn’t know whether Ed’s logic was false or whether logic didn’t work in trying to answer what she had said. It was like pointing at a squashed gopher on the road and having it explained to her with an algebraic formula.

  After that, the three of them hardly talked for about an hour. Mabel sat in her chair, and Lily found a place on the floor. Ed went back to the portrait, and Lily watched him. Sometimes he closed his eyes as though he were looking at a picture of Mabel inside himself. He paced, and Lily listened to his steps, back and forth, back and forth. Mabel watched Ed intently, and Lily felt sorry for her. She’s so happy to be near him, Lily thought. He painted her happiness, but he doesn’t see it. With the real person, he’s blind.

  When Ed asked Mabel to talk to him again, he didn’t ask Lily to leave, and neither did Mabel. Their conspicuous inclusion of her didn’t comfort her much, however. She might be allowed to overhear Mabel’s monologue, but her speech was meant for Ed and nobody else.

  “I met Evan only days after my twenty-sixth birthday in a bookstore. I loved him right away. After three days we were married, and we stayed together until he died—fifteen years. And that was short. We had no children. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Of course that was a long time ago. It might have been Evan. We never knew.” Mabel paused. “But it’s funny what you think about later, what you remember…” Mabel wasn’t looking at Ed or at Lily, but out into the room. “I remember how he changed with the seasons, his body, I mean, how he looked in different lights—summer and winter. You know, there’s a time when you feel the seasons moving—when fall becomes winter or winter becomes spring—that ambiguous threshold. He was lit differently, and he smelled different, and I”—Mabel rubbed her hands and looked at the ceiling—“I loved that change, but I also loved remembering that he had been like that before—last winter or last spring.… I’ve often thought about my marriage in terms of seasonal light.” Mabel cocked her head near her shoulder and smiled shyly. Like a girl, Lily thought.

  After a silence, Mabel said, “The grief was terrible, but it was ordinary, if I can use that word. It wasn’t anybody’s fault that Evan died. People die. They die suddenly like Evan or slowly like my father, and I wasn’t so stupid as to ask, ‘Why Evan? Why the person I loved most in the world?’ Why not, after all? It’s when you’ve made your own grief, when you’re guilty, that it can’t be borne.”

  Lily stared at Mabel’s rigid posture. What Mabel had said about guilt aggravated Lily’s own dread, not of Martin, she realized, but of herself. She heard Ed speak and Mabel answer him, but she didn’t listen to the content of their conversation. Ed moved toward the canvas. He looked at it, his eyes half closed, and spoke to Mabel. “It’s yours as much as mine. In about a week, I’ll want to know what the story is.”

  Mabel nodded. Her head seemed very small and her lips pale.

  The rest of the afternoon passed slowly. Lily lay on the floor with a pillow while Ed painted, and Mabel sat quietly in her chair. Lily took out a copy of the Star that was in her bag and began to leaf through it. She had bought it because it had a picture of Marilyn on the cover. But when she turned to the article inside, she saw it wasn’t about Marilyn at all, but a housewife in Normal, Illinois, who was gradually turning into Marilyn Monroe. Although it was written in the third person, the article was called “The Spirit of Marilyn Monroe Is Taking Over My Body.” A series of six photographs accompanied the article, showing the slow transformation of Angela Hokenburg, a brown-haired, long-nosed person, into the radiant, platinum Marilyn. Lily studied the pictures. The story was trash, but it made Lily think of the photos she had seen of Norma Jean on a beach somewhere with her brown hair and unplucked eyebrows. They turned her into Marilyn Monroe, too, Lily thought.

  She didn’t know she had slept until she woke to the feeling of fingers moving across her forehead. Half awake, she thought it was her mother, and she began to say “Mom,” but didn’t finish the word. She heard Ed’s voice saying, “Don’t do anything crazy. Just stay where you are.”

  Lily opened her eyes and saw Mabel withdraw her hand quickly. She was lying on Ed’s bed, and outside it was night. Lily looked at Mabel. “What’s going on?”

  Mabel looked tired, and her disheveled hair fell around her face. “You didn’t have rehearsal, so we let you sleep. Ed carried you to the bed. You didn’t stir.”

  Lily sat up. “Who’s on the phone?”

  “Dolores Wachobski, I believe,” Mabel said, raising her eyebrows and twisting her mouth to one side. “She seems to be having some kind of emergency.”

  Lily looked at Ed. He had hung up the telephone and was standing. He rubbed his mouth.

  Lily said, “What does she want?”

  “She’s had a bad scare, more ghosts and mishegoss.”

  Lily puzzled over his last word but didn’t ask him about it. “You’re going over there?”

  Ed walked toward her. “There’s no one else, Lily.” He reached into his pocket, feeling for car keys, and she heard them jingle.

  “I’m going with you,” Lily said.

  Ed looked at her. “I honestly don’t know what to expect. She’s plastered and raving.”

  “I don’t care,” Lily said.

  “I don’t care either,” Mabel said.

  * * *

  Ed drove to the trailer park, which lay on the riverbank across from the Dairy Queen with its huge illuminated ice-cream cone. Through her open window, Lily smelled the water and felt the station wagon rock on uneven ground. A turquoise trailer shone for a moment in the headlights before it disappeared with the dying sound of the motor.

  Ed pounded on the door of Dolores’s trailer, and when no one answered, he walked inside. The long room Lily saw from behind Ed wasn’t at all what she had expected. In the first place, it was very clean. In the second place, it was fussy. There were knicknacks everywhere: carefully arranged porcelain children, angels, dogs, cats and horses, a large blue-and-white Madonna with child, a big bowl of cat’s-eye marbles, and a number of ob
jects with little sayings or slogans on them: a small stuffed Cupid held up a sign with the word “LUV” on it. “B.S. ARTIST” was written on a miniature license plate that hung over the sink. “Woman of Power” had been stitched into a needlepoint pillow that lay on Dolores’s carefully made bed, and as Ed headed toward the bathroom to check it, Lily noticed yet another sign—a wooden heart with the words “Little Girl’s Room” carved into it.

  Just before they left the trailer to search outside, Lily noticed a photograph propped on the dresser. She could feel Ed’s anxiety and saw that Mabel had already gone outside, so she glanced at it for only a moment, but the little girl in the picture, dressed in a fluffy white confirmation dress, was obviously Dolores, and the slender woman beside her had to be her mother. As she headed for the door behind Ed, Lily understood that she had not deduced the identity of Dolores’s mother, but had recognized her, not from life, but from Ed’s cartoon figure in the narrative boxes above Dolores’s painted head.