The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  “I was nearly blind in my left eye when I was a little girl,” Mabel said. Near-blindness was a stark reality in her life, something she was entitled to. Her own sister, after all, without her glasses, could hardly see the hand in front of her face. “A warped cornea,” she said. “Would you believe me if I told you that they gave me a new cornea, and that it came from your sister? That the woman at the eye bank made a mistake and told me where it had come from, even though it’s confidential information? And that’s how I knew, and that’s why I’ve been following you? Would you believe that?” The lie spilled out too rapidly to be believed, she thought, but she saw Wyatt’s hands shake as he threw away the broken glass. She held very still and waited. He held his fingers to the side of his jaw, pressing, as if trying to locate a toothache.

  “Did you hear me?” Mabel said, in a whisper too soft to be heard. “Would you believe such a thing?”

  “Go away,” Wyatt said. “Please go away.” But then he grabbed hold of her ankle. “Wait,” he said, though she hadn’t taken a step. He looked up at her. “Why would you lie about something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mabel said, truly uncertain of the answer. With just his one question, Mabel was ready to give up the pretending. In a way, she was relieved to be so quickly found out. Wyatt would lead her to the door, speaking softly but sternly, the way people spoke to people crazy and sad, assuring her no hard feelings but Please don’t come around again. Mabel would go home and write a simple note of apology. She’d blame her lie on her fucked-up upbringing—Mabel and Lily have had no fetching up, she’d heard more than once from the old farmers’ wives.

  But Wyatt had merely been thinking out loud, had asked, Why would you lie? when he had meant No one would tell such a lie. Meant So I have to believe you.“If you’d written a letter,” Wyatt said, “we wouldn’t have written back. Never in a million years. It would have been too hard to see a girl with Callie’s eyes.”

  “Just one eye,” Mabel said.

  “What?”

  “Just the one eye,” she said. “I just have the one cornea.” It was important to Mabel to establish this. It made the lie only a half lie in her thinking.

  As Wyatt stared at her, Mabel wondered if he was looking for some evidence of surgery—delicate scars where the pieces of shattered color had been stitched together. She felt conscious of her every blink and began to blink too much. She felt a lash sticking and put her finger to the corner of her eye. Wyatt squinted and flinched as if it were his own eye she touched.

  “Let’s sneak out the back door,” Wyatt said at the sound of someone on the stairs. He took Mabel’s hand. “Dad made a special appointment with Mr. Stitch. He wants to go practically all the time anymore, every day. But I don’t really believe in any of that. Brandi Stitch doesn’t talk to the dead. She’s nothing more than a fraud.”

  A fraud. Though it was something no one should want to be, Mabel didn’t mind the sound of it. I’m nothing more than a fraud, she told herself.

  Wyatt led Mabel outside and past the pool and down a slope of land to a tiny playhouse. The playhouse had a patchy roof of heart-shaped shingles, and the one last shutter dangled loose on its hinge above a short thicket of mulberry bushes. The birds had picked the bushes clean, and their black shit streaked the chipped whitewash of the walls. One note of whimsy remained of the house—the pipe chimney of the roof had a knot in its middle.

  Wyatt told her to duck to enter as he opened a short Dutch door. Snow White accepted a poisoned apple through such a door, the top half open, the bottom half closed, and the pumpkin eater’s wife was kept very well behind one.

  The playhouse was dark inside, so Wyatt reached up and screwed in tighter a bare bulb. When the light filled the room, Mabel saw the wallpaper still bright with a pattern of cherries and oranges and lemons like on the wheels of slot machines. Wyatt said, “Callie had wanted wallpaper like Willy Wonka’s; of course they don’t make candy wallpaper, but Dad did find some with those scratch and sniff pieces. So, do you recognize the place?” and he kind of laughed and winked, then pointed to his eye when Mabel didn’t get it. “Seeing with Callie’s sight?”

  “No,” Mabel said, though she didn’t mean to be rude. Much of the fruit on the wall had been scratched dull by Callie’s fingernail, but Mabel found a grape bunch near the ceiling still a slick purple. Mabel scratched lightly at it, releasing its sugar-wine scent, and she closed her eyes. No, she thought, I don’t recognize anything about any of this at all.

  Wyatt opened the door of a cardboard oven. Inside were cassette tapes, and he popped one into a tape player on the windowsill. Mabel didn’t recognize the song or the singer’s voice, but the sad, lazy twang of the music made her think of women in cowboy hats and turquoise rings.

  “I just come out here to hide and drink,” he said, picking up a half-empty bottle of wine stoppered with a broken cork. “Callie used to ask me to come in and join her tea party, to sit with her dolls, but I never did.” He held the bottle, but didn’t open it. “She’d make little invitations for me, but the most I ever did was stand outside the window here every now and again and take a little pretend sip from a cup.”

  Mabel held a miniature china sugar bowl in the palm of her hand and studied the intricacies of the tiny, pink painted roses. For a moment, she envied Callie her short sweet life, her brother at her window, her dolls in their chairs.

  “I had always wanted a playhouse like this,” Mabel said.

  “We built it from a kit,” Wyatt said. He produced a pear from somewhere and sliced off a piece for her. Mabel ate it in one bite, then plucked a seed from her tongue. People like Wyatt were the only people she should be around, Mabel concluded—people just sick about missed tea parties and other lost minutes.

  Cries of Wyatt’s name came down from up the hill. Wyyyy-aaaaat, in the slow deep voice of fathers calling across farms for children. Wyatt, still holding the bottle, grabbed Mabel’s hand again. His thumbnail was black, maybe from a hammer blow, and he wore boots that looked to be made of snake. They ran from the playhouse, across the ranch and across neighboring fields and pastures, over creek beds and through patches of tall wild grass. When Mabel realized she should have her shoes, they’d gone too far to go back. Wyatt took Mabel deep into a cornfield, which was like dipping into a cave, the air too thin, too wet to breathe. Sunlight fell against the leaves of the stalks, casting green shadows, and the various music of crickets and grasshoppers made it hard to hear anything else. Stay out of the fields, Mabel’s grandmother had once warned years before. You can’t find your way out when the corn’s above your head. You get all turned around, and you don’t know your left from your right. The day after hearing that, Mabel walked into a neighboring field, stepping only a few rows in. Her intention was not to get lost but to catch a glimpse of where lost was. But she hadn’t anticipated that the leaves would be as sharp as the edges of paper and would leave tiny, tattling red marks on her face and arms and legs. When her grandmother saw her, she burst into tears in the kitchen, her hands shaking as she attempted to tie up a pot roast with string. “I should never warn you girls about anything,” she cried. “You hear about it, then you try it out.”

  11.

  MABEL CAUGHT HER DRESS ON A barb of a fence as they trespassed onto some pastureland. Buckthorn, she’d thought, identifying the wire; many farmers had been selling off their collections of snippets of barbed wire fence, and Mabel had got to know all the different kinds and their value—brotherton, twist oval, necktie, arrow plate. Mabel examined the long rip. “Caught on the devil’s hatband,” she said, as Wyatt stuck his fingertip through to touch the skin of her leg.

  Wyatt led Mabel up the short, grassy side of what seemed a hill but wasn’t a hill at all; it was an earth-covered storage shed, an abandoned bunker that had stored the bombs and munitions manufactured at a nearby factory during World War II. Like the other sheds lined up for miles across the government land, it was covered on three sides by dirt and grass and
patches of heather and wild daisy. Mabel looked out at row upon row of the deceptive mounds of earth like sacred tombs lined up in mystery formation. With her feet bare, she could feel the hollowness of the hill beneath her, could feel the wind working, circling through the empty shelter.

  The sun had set and the air was cool, but Mabel took off the beaded sweater as she sat in the grass. Wyatt handed Mabel the sweet white wine for a swig.

  “ ‘And the fragrance of your breath like apples,’ ” he recited quietly. “ ‘It goes down smoothly for my beloved,’ ” he said, “ ‘flowing gently through the lips of those who fall asleep.’ ”

  “Let’s hear some more,” Mabel said, wanting more of his solemn, preacher’s voice. She lay back in the grass and watched dark clouds move too quickly, like in time-lapse, across the sky. They needed the rain; they all said it.

  “ ‘Sustain me with raisin cakes,’ ” he continued, the Song of Solomon, Mabel thought, recalling her father’s love for the more musical passages of the Bible. “ ‘Refresh me with apples, because I am lovesick.’ ” Wyatt could have been a minister, Mabel thought. He was handsome in a way that wasn’t at all frightening, and his voice, something like a stage whisper, you could feel in your spine. He could convince you of the existence of all sorts of impossible things.

  “There was a group of religious girls at school,” Mabel said, “who used to invite me and my sister, Lily, to church things—ice cream socials and church fairs. I remember a ventriloquist. When he opened his dummy’s mouth for it to talk, you could see the wire at the back of its throat. I couldn’t keep from looking at the wire, though it was awful and I could practically feel it when I swallowed.” Mabel swallowed, pained just at the thought of it. Wyatt swallowed too, touching a finger to his throat, but he asked her nothing more about this sister named Lily, or about any other detail of Mabel’s life. This was fine with Mabel; she didn’t mind, for a time, being a girl whose only misfortune had been one bad eye.

  Wyatt lay down near Mabel. He closed his eyes, and Mabel watched him rest. She pictured him as a boy, his chest smooth and flat, his legs chicken-like in a pair of swimming trunks.

  Mabel studied Wyatt, his sideburns too long and crookedly cut, and a long, fallen eyelash on his cheek. His hair curled at the back of his neck, and there were a few too-early grays in the black. “You need a haircut,” she said, though he didn’t really. It just seemed a thing you said to a guy you liked.

  “Haircuts aren’t until Sunday,” he said.

  “Sunday?” she said.

  “Ever since we were little kids, Dad has given us haircuts on the last Sunday afternoon of every month. He used to pull the TV into the kitchen because they showed old movies on the educational channel. We boys liked the foreign ones because sometimes they’d show some titty. Contempt” he sighed, “Brigitte Bardot in a bathtub.” Wyatt smiled and winked and thumped his hand against his chest like a fast heartbeat.

  Mabel reached over and lifted the cross from his chest, running her thumb along the tiny silver Christ in agony.

  “I bought that at that little gift shop at Stitch Farm,” Wyatt said. “I just liked it.” She sat up on one arm and knew that her shoulder strap had slipped, showing off her bra some, but she left it. Wyatt pushed the strap back up. If I kissed you, Mabel imagined him saying to her, I wouldn’t want you to think it was because I was thinking of my sister or anything like that. Because that would be weird. Wyatt closed his eyes again to the few raindrops that fell in his face, and he licked some drops from his lips. The early evening became as pitch dark as night. In the split seconds that lightning struck and lit the sky, all the dark clouds lit up. “Sinister,” Wyatt said, pointing to the electricity. “Did somebody tell you how Callie died? Is that why you were in our pool today?”

  “You and your family nearly saved her life,” Mabel said.

  Wyatt smiled and winked. “Or just made her death longer,” he said, joking in that way people do to show they’re scrappy in the face of terrible loss.

  WHEN THEY RETURNED to the Roseleaf house, all the lights inside were out, and Mabel saw the dot of a candle flame at the window. She and Wyatt ran in to the front room, both of them soaked, and Mr. Roseleaf tossed them each a beach towel. “They think they spotted a funnel,” he said with a smile, a transistor radio held at his ear.

  “This is Mabel, this is Tyrone Roseleaf,” was all Wyatt said in the way of introduction.

  “What’re you kids drinking tonight?” Mr. Roseleaf said.

  “One old-fashioned,” Wyatt said. “Cocktail?” he said to Mabel.

  “I dunno,” Mabel said, reaching back to twist the rain out of her ponytail. “What’s good?”

  “Anything that doesn’t need water,” Mr. Roseleaf said. “No pump without electricity.”

  “I’ll have a vodka gimlet,” Mabel said, just because she liked the sound of it. It seemed what Ingrid Bergman would drink in a Hitchcock movie.

  “You heard the girl, Daddy,” Wyatt said, taking Mabel by the hand and rushing her down the shag-carpeted basement steps. Jesse and Cody were on the floor, drinking highballs and playing poker with sticks of gum by flashlight. Cody tossed back a shot of something clear and shuddered as if from hearing fingernails on a blackboard. “Put away the nudie cards, boys,” Wyatt said. “A lady’s present.” Cody slapped at Wyatt’s ankle as Wyatt took Mabel close for a dance. Their clothes very wet, Mabel got a chill and stifled a sneeze. “On rainy days,” Wyatt said, nodding toward an old Bakelite battery-operated, “that little AM station in Bonnevilla goes all Louis Prima, between the weather alerts.” Wyatt rocked his shoulders, singing along to “Banana Split for My Baby,” and held his hand low on Mabel’s back. Mr. Roseleaf stepped up to them with a tray of drinks. A penlight in his mouth gave the bourbon a red glow from the maraschino cherry.

  The first sip of the gimlet sent a tingle clear to Mabel’s fingertips. Another sip, and she had to have a seat in a corner recliner. She realized she hadn’t eaten anything all day but a few fries at Closed Mondays. She wished she’d asked for the old-fashioned, so at least she’d have the cherry to eat.

  Wyatt and Mr. Roseleaf sat down to the game of poker, Wyatt next to Jesse like they hadn’t had the knock-down, drag-out just a few hours before. Mabel refused the invitation to join them; instead she kicked her feet up in the recliner and watched the boys fancy-shuffle the cards and announce each game with a sharp’s side-of-the-mouth mutter: Devil’s Weed and Double-Humped Deuces Wild; Pretty Maids in a Row with Diamond Ear Bobs; The Queen’s Been Raped and All the Knaves Are Guilty.

  Later in the evening, the rain stopped, the wind no longer shaking the glass of the narrow basement window. Mabel even thought she saw some light beneath the door at the top of the basement steps. But the Roseleafs ignored the electricity and continued with their happy hour in the dark. Mabel pinched her nose and downed another glass of vodka, determined to learn to love the booze, so she’d be invited down in future storms.

  Back at her own house, she’d often dragged Lily into a closet for disaster preparation. Mabel, a stubborn little girl, had never believed that hurricanes would not touch them so many miles from the shore and that earthquakes only happened on fault lines. A box in the closet contained only necessities: cans of Spaghetti-Os and Spam and Vienna sausages, a crystal radio Mabel had built from a paper kit, a book, dated 1909, on wolf and coyote trapping. If you are using small animals for bait, Mabel had read aloud, by candlelight, to Lily in the closet, such as jack rabbits, cotton-tails, prairie dogs, badgers, or sage hens, use the whole animal, if your method will allow of it, and do not skin the bait, as that will make the coyote or wolf suspicious.

  Mabel drifted off to sleep, and she dreamed that Lily tried to kill her with ladybugs, lettuce, and gasoline. When she woke, the moon was out from behind the shreds of clouds. All the Roseleafs were asleep on the basement floor. Mabel wanted to wake them and continue with their party in this cramped basement room. The night reminded her of the scene in Some Like I
t Hot, when all the band members toss a party in Jack Lemmon’s sleeping compartment on the train, mixing their drinks in a hot-water bottle. Mabel had seen the movie as a little girl and had always longed to be invited to an impromptu midnight party in a tiny space.

  Mabel’s dress was still wet and cold, so she took it off and crawled, in her bra and underwear, to Wyatt. She put her nose to his throat to smell his aftershave. She noticed the dry skin on his neck, peeling from a sunburn, and she peeled a piece away. Lily burned every summer and her dry skin flaked off in sheets. She let Mabel peel at the dead skin as she sat in her bikini, her back bare. The simple act had so satisfied Mabel that she’d often picked Lily’s skin sore.

  Mabel put her ear to Wyatt’s lips to try to hear what he mumbled in his sleep. When he stopped talking, she held her mouth above his, stealing the taste of candied cherries and whiskey. She breathed in his sleeping breath, breath that had helped keep his sister alive for a while as she perished at the very bottom of the pool.

  Mabel was afraid for that day when Wyatt learned of her deception. She thought of those mothers she read about in a magazine—women who secretly poisoned and sickened their children in order to bask in the attention of doctors and nurses when they carried their babies into hospitals. The mothers were said to have “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” a name Mabel loved. Mabel realized she must have a similar syndrome, in her lying to the Roseleafs. And this kind of Munchausen-by-proxy had been blossoming for years—there’d been a girl in grade school Mabel had loved, a wrinkled, bald-headed child with a disease that aged her prematurely by decades. Progeria, another wonderful name, suggesting some island principality. Mabel had longed for a touch of progeria, only to be closer to that little girl who wore a beret crocheted with bluebirds and birdhouses.