Mabel got the blue case from under the sink and took out the electric clippers. She was anxious to see the true shape of Jordan’s head, and she hoped the transformation was shocking. When Jordan finished rinsing off, he reached from around the curtain to grab a towel to wrap around his waist, and he sat on the edge of the tub, his back to Mabel. “There’s a whole industry of porno about shaving,” Jordan said, chuckling. Mabel didn’t think she was a fetishist, but she did like the ritual of this afternoon haircut, the almost sacred act of specific order—the steam in the room and the buzzing of the clippers, the hair falling away in wet curls, the cold smell of the menthol burning her nose. After cutting the hair down to the stubs with the electric scissors, she followed the curve of Jordan’s skull with her daisy-wheel leg shaver, and she fully understood the meaning of the Roseleafs’ monthly haircuts and foreign movies. It was like making your own religion, building your own church in your own rooms.
When she finished, Jordan was smiling even before he looked in the mirror. Mabel had been startled when he’d turned around, and she looked forward to the getting used to it—that slow process of studying someone until they were newly familiar. Jordan touched his head only hesitantly, like he was afraid to feel the shape of the bone. “I think I like it,” he said. “I think it makes me look a little crazy.” His smile fell then, and he looked sad again.
Mabel slipped from the bathroom without Jordan even noticing—he was so intent on his reflection. Mabel went to Lily’s room and lay back on the bed, and she thought of her father, not a religious man, reading to her and Lily, not from the Bible, but from a slim book called The Blue Book of Fairy Tales. Mabel would lean against his arm to see the illustrations of characters who looked wan and wanting even after their lives were bettered.
Mabel thought of Rose-Red and Snow-White often in the forest alone gathering red berries. No mishap ever overtook them, her father read. The first day Lily was gone, Mabel had cleaned and straightened Lily’s bedroom, and now Mabel decided to put it back the way it was. When Lily came back, she’d be comfortable, knowing her room was left untouched. Mabel took the clothes she’d washed and hung and she tossed them back on the floor. She rehung a sheer nightie that had been left hanging in the window at the end of the curtain rod. She unmade the bed, and she knocked over the stack of magazines next to the nightstand. She moved around the perfume bottles atop the vanity, taking out the stoppers, knocking a few over. She picked up the newspaper clipping she’d left on Lily’s pillow, and she crumpled it up and shoved it in her pocket. A small plane had gone down off the coast of Virginia, the clipping reported. A mother of one of the crash victims said that her daughter had been booked for an earlier flight, but had been late. “She’s always running late,” the mother was quoted as saying.
16.
LILY DROVE MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR hours nearly nonstop, existing mostly on liters of Jolt cola. The few minutes she slept sitting up at a rest stop had been long enough to dream of her father and her mother in a dry desert garden. Her mother tore the husk from a tomatillo and held the little green apple-like thing to her father’s teeth black with gun powder. Her father dipped her mother in a tango, the blood keeping his hair matted atop his half a head, and he whispered My little piece-of-shit cunt in her ear, and she giggled at the sweet nothing.
On the road, Lily played the radio, hooking onto a station and staying with it until she could only hear a few words here and there spoken or sung amid the static. As each station dissolved, she hesitantly moved on to another, when there was another, and got to know the other towns somewhere up ahead or around. She learned the jingles of businesses she would never patronize and the names of the streets on which they could be found, and she’d devise little lives for herself—the three-dollar breakfast steak at Kitty’s Knife and Fork before 6, then off to her free guava juice with every kiwi-acid facial at the Electric Beach Tan & Spa, then shopping for dresses and deep-discount electronics at the Sun on the Lake Mall. She could follow it all with two-dollar dirty-martini-doubles at Flim’s, where she would mention this ad and get a free cigar.
LILY STOPPED at the Motel Modern, only a few hours from home, and stayed for two days. She imagined herself an elegant ruin, a newly divorced woman going by her maiden name and staying at the motel for as long as she could afford. FORWARD ALL MY MAIL TO: LILY ROLLOW, C/O THE MODERN. Cocktails drunk alone at a little table in a safari-theme lounge. Dresses pressed by housekeeping and left hung on the doorknob.
Lily went into town and bought white pajamas and a portable typewriter at a swap meet. She wanted to write her mother a letter; she had no idea what she’d say, but she’d say it in the efficient alphabet of a machine, making her words appear carefully thought out. But when she typed out a test line, Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, the letters floated and fell from the line, looking like a clown act.
Lily stayed in her pajamas all day. She’d close up the curtains tight to block out all sun, and drape her scarf over the tiny lampshade to cast the walls with a pink glow. Lily practiced her palmistry for Omaha. She could spend her weekends in the Old Market, she figured, reading palms and tarot for cheap on the sidewalks in front of the galleries and cafés and antique shops open late. She didn’t know much about the technical aspects of palm reading, but she didn’t think she really needed to be very good to work the Market—for years a caricaturist had attracted long lines of people who would pose, laughing, anticipating, then step away not recognizing anything about themselves in the scrawls on the page. A carriage driver made a fortune in tips trotting lovers down the rough brick street, around corners of urban decay, the smoke-like steam from the stacks of the Campbell’s soup factory obscuring the sky. Lily could make a nice living off the sorority girls alone.
Lily stood in front of her room waiting for Irene, the motel owner’s flirty teenage daughter who had checked her in. The sky was overcast, and Lily’s skin was bubbly neon in the sign’s light. A few tiny drops of rain sprinkled against her bare legs and arms and felt like they were touching her from the inside, felt like the needling of limbs fallen asleep.
Irene had claimed to belong to a group of high school lesbians who nightly drank mock menstrual blood (bloody mary mix and sweetened condensed milk) in honor of their saint, Brandon Teena. Brandon, a young woman who’d lived as a boyish, soft-spoken man, had been raped, and later murdered, in a small southeast Nebraska town some years before. “I’d cut off my penis, if I had one,” Irene had growled at the boys flocking at her side the other afternoon, wearing Doc Martens and cut-off Levi’s and just a pink lacy bra.
Irene stepped from the back screen door of the motel office, holding a tray with two drinks. “Pink ladies,” Irene said. At the top of the plastic swizzle sticks were silhouettes like those on trucker’s mud flaps, of busty women in recline. Irene’s only cosmetic was the polish chipping from her nails. As she held out the palm of her hand to be read, Lily asked the color of her polish. “Numb,” Irene called the freon blue.
Lily tried to see what she could in Irene’s palm. Despite having carefully skimmed the book on palmistry, Lily had trouble discerning a fork from a prong, a cutting off from a termination, the girdle of Venus from the mount of the moon. Even with a map of the hand unfolded atop the bed, Lily couldn’t remember what anything meant. She measured the lines of Irene’s hand with a piece of thread, then thumbed anxiously through her palmistry book.
Lily had wanted to predict something of interest, to reward Irene for her patience, even something sad like childlessness or death in another country. But all she could find in her hand was the possibility of jaundice for one month and maybe disease of the spleen late in life.
Irene took Lily’s hand in her own then and ran her finger along the lines of Lily’s palm. Irene hmmmed with mock consideration. “Just as I thought. You’ve got no fucking future in palm reading,” she said. Irene turned Lily’s hand over and touched at the opaque sphere of the ring Lily still wore. “What
else did you do out west,” Irene said, “besides leave your husband?”
“I found my mother,” Lily said, though her mother probably hadn’t been lost for years. Her mother may have had a few madwoman months wandering the desert, picking imagined pieces of her husband’s brain from her hair, but that was all before Ana and the nuns and the years of widowhood like a constant girls’ night out.
Lily lay back in the bed feeling—what was the word?—sanguine, the word of a lady in a hotel. The Hotel San Guine. Sanguinity was something someone like Irene would never know, Lily told herself. Even perfection would not be good enough for Irene; perfect was too close to not quite good enough. Things, for Irene, would have to be better than perfect, pluperfect? Words Lily didn’t even know rushed into her head to attach themselves to meaning. Lily held her own hand before her face—her inability to decipher anything from the thicket of lines in her own palms, the lines like spilled pick-up sticks, relieved her. Her character, her future, was thankfully etched nowhere in her skin.
17.
BY THE END OF THE AFTERNOON, MABEL and Jordan had emptied much of the shop onto the lawn. Mabel dropped into the Rayette Falcon, a chair of sparkly red vinyl with a clear, cone-shaped hair drier sprouting up from the back of it. She’d found it one day in the alley behind a hair salon. RAYETTE FALCON was written in silver across the cone.
The few people who drove past drove slow, rubbernecking at the sea of junk and THIS JUNK SHOP FOR SALE still in red across the front of the house. These people might wonder what was to become of her. They might speculate about her ambitions. What would they make of it all? Mabel wondered, daydreaming.
Jordan sat cross-legged at Mabel’s feet to practice his nail polishing on her toes, anticipating his father hiring him back as manicurist at the barbershop. Despite his break up with Lily, he seemed to want to make a life for her. Mabel had suggested a proper wedding in the house now that everything had been moved out, and Jordan had just shrugged but had sat on the porch as he’d eaten his lunch studying 1960s and ’70s bridal magazines he’d found in a box.
Jordan had wanted to paint Mabel’s fingernails, but Mabel didn’t feel like having her hands held. She sat in the Rayette Falcon holding a ship in a bottle, uncorked, and she ran her finger through the bottle’s dust. A spider had found its way inside and, like a black sea monster, crawled over the mast.
“You could sell all this shit on eBay,” Jordan said. “Those Internet junkies will put a price on anything.”
Mabel reached into her pocket to feel the little wooden girl from the Swiss clock. She held the girl like a tiny Buddha between her fingers, rubbing it with her thumb, working the luck and the wisdom from it. She wished she’d kept the plastic panther for Lily and had not dropped it down the drain of the Roseleaf pool. When Lily returned, Mabel could show her the front room, empty but for a china cup or a china saucer. Inside the cup could be the Swiss girl lying next to the panther. Tiny things, but Lily would certainly remember them. She would more than remember them. There was no reason to believe that anything so small, anything so long lost so deeply in childhood, could ever resurface. Lily would never, ever expect it.
MABEL TOOK the bicycle from near the front porch and rode the miles toward the Roseleaf Ranch; once there, she would toss the bike in the back of the Jimmy still parked near the pool. She just wanted to sneak back to retrieve Lily’s plastic panther from where it stuck in the pool drain, but she wasn’t at all afraid of being seen. She welcomed any kind of response from Wyatt, should she see him—disgust, weeping, threats of violence even. She was willing to offer hours of lengthy explanation and begging for forgiveness.
Darkness fell by the time she reached the house, and she rode up next to the Jimmy. She stepped onto the hood to climb up and over the wall and walked to the edge of the pool. The deep end still held rain from the day before, the water brown with muck and dead leaves. The only lights lit in the house were upstairs.
Mabel rolled up the bottoms of her jeans, but when she stepped in, the dirty water reached above the cuffs. She walked lightly, careful to avoid any broken glass or sharp twigs. The shattering reflection of the full, white moon made the water look clear, and she crouched down to lower her head and her tongue to take a drink from the sea of tranquility. Mabel would not have been surprised to see Callie Roseleaf only fractions of inches tall and clinging to the skeleton of a leaf skimming the water.
You had to be in a certain state to receive a ghost, Mabel supposed when she could see nothing unusual in the pool. She lowered her face even further, holding her breath and closing her eyes, feeling the water gently washing her skin with silt and something that felt like ash. Mabel covered her mouth and her nose with her hand and lowered her head to let the water wash in and out her ears. She could only hear her breath moving nowhere.
Mabel kept her head in the water, kept her face covered, and listened to the movement of the nearly still pool. She thought no more of Lily and the panther or even of Callie. She thought of Callie’s mother, the mother of those boys, who was too weak to repair anything. Like Mabel’s own mother, Mrs. Roseleaf couldn’t bear to live in a world where things could go on, could mend, following such great loss. She wanted the pain to stay devastating, that was all. Mrs. Roseleaf loved her boys and her husband. But it wouldn’t have been right to let everything fall back into some kind of order. She had to get away as far as she could, to keep everything from being the same again. It was a maternal impulse. Of course it was. A deep desire to keep your dead as a constant ache in your heart, and not just a memory or a pain somewhat eased. It had to always be that thing that ruined your life.
Mabel slowly lifted her head from the water and saw down the hill a bit, to the old playhouse all lit up. Then she noticed Wyatt lying back on the battered patio lounge chair enjoying a beer and a tomato. He took a big bite from the tomato, as if eating an apple. The tomato’s juice dribbled down his wrist and his arm.
Mabel and Wyatt met each other at the edge of the pool, and Wyatt pushed back a string of dirty, wet hair from Mabel’s cheek. Mabel felt about to cry. She couldn’t bring herself to face Wyatt with some lame apology; she should leap from the pool and run away to spend a few days writing a long ad for the classifieds—everything right to say for only nickels a word.
Wyatt offered her a bite from his tomato. “A hothouse red,” he said, when she refused. “I’ve decided to start eating better,” he said, then dropped the remains of the tomato into the pool. He took the cigarette from behind his ear and put the butt to the pout of his lip, posing squinty eyed and cocky in the silver light of the moon.
Mabel remembered a photo booth at the Ben Franklin on the town square; a few months after her mother ran away, their grandmother took Mabel and Lily to the variety store and bought them new dresses, dressed them up in the dressing room, then shoved the girls, price tags still dangling, into the booth. “Sit nice,” she’d insisted. Then at the post office, she put the black and white photo strip in an envelope, and she made Mabel address it and write a note begging her mother to come back. A few weeks later, Mabel collected the mail and found the envelope returned to sender, her mother having moved once again, the red-stamp hand pointing an accusing finger at Mabel’s rural address. But Mabel had liked getting a letter from herself: We miss you so much, Mabel had read over and over, and she’d used the photo strip as a bookmark to mark off the days in her diary.
Wyatt took Mabel’s hand and led her to the ladder at the side of the pool, where he helped her step out. “No more huevos rancheros for me,” he said. “No more Tabasco and eggs. I want my organs to be healthy enough to pass on to somebody else when I’m dead, I guess.” Mabel wasn’t looking at his face, but she could hear the wink in his voice. He handed her the cigarette, and they leaned back against the wall. She held her lips at the filter of his cigarette, not to smoke, but to feel it still wet from his puffing at it.
She returned the cigarette to him, running her fingers against his. “You look tired,” Mabe
l said. He looked roughed up and out of sorts. He wore a fancy Western shirt with pearl snaps and yellow roses hand-painted at the shoulders, but the sleeves had been cut off, and he wore it untucked. He was unshaven, his hair unwashed, his red eyes rubbed sore.
“Jesse kept us up all night again,” he said. “There’s this waitress at Closed Mondays who had those . . . you know, those Norplants put in her arm as part of her parole.” He rubbed his upper arm where the contraceptive would have been implanted. “But they had to take them out because they were making her dizzy all the time. The drug company settled a class-action suit with Norplant users, and she got a check for a couple thousand dollars. When we got back from Stitch Farm, she was waiting here for us, waiting to invite Jesse to move to Portland, Oregon, with her. Fastest growing city in the country, she says. I didn’t say a word. Not a word. We just all got drunk on Asti, and I passed out in the tub. I didn’t say a word, not even when Jesse told me they were going to stop off in Ogallala to snatch the waitress’s boy from his foster folks. Not a word. Not a word from me. Jesse’s just got to destroy himself and be fucking done with it already. I can’t baby-sit the no-dick little fucker no more.”
Mabel glanced over at the house, and the bright light of an upstairs room gave her spots in her eyes. She wondered if Callie’s ghost had returned, transmogrified into the clear lightning bolt that floated at the corners of her vision. “What kind of a person comes up with a lie like the lie I told?” Mabel said, partly under her breath, her voice scratchy. She honestly thought he might have some kind of idea. “Why would anyone lie about something like that? Who would do it?”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. He held her hand and leaned his head against hers. Mabel closed her eyes to see the picture they’d make—a sad pair, lost in monochrome.
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Page 16