The Enchantment of Lily Dahl Page 2

  Vince pointed his spatula at her. “At least people talk to you before they shoot you!”

  With Mike’s plate in her hands, Lily paused behind the counter. She could feel Martin watching her and glanced over at him for an instant. His sober face was measuring hers. Maybe he does have a thing for me, she thought, and laid Mike’s plate on the counter beside the six cigarettes that he had already lined up in front of him on the Formica surface.

  “You’re food’s here when you’re ready, Mike,” she said.

  He looked up at her and pushed a strand of long blond hair behind his ear, before he stuck a fresh cigarette between his teeth. Lily watched him light it. Six days a week for a year, she had watched Mike go through the same ritual. The job called for a whole pack of Kents, and when he was finished, Lily would find a row of twenty cigarettes on the counter, each one smoked just a hair shorter than the one before it. Looking at Mike, she felt sure that he was counting his puffs, but she knew he couldn’t be dragging too hard on it either or the butt would burn too fast. Mike lowered the cigarette to the black ashtray and began to snuff it with a gentle turning motion of his wrist and fingers. The first time Mike had left that perfect slant of Kents on the counter, Lily had been scared to throw them away. But Bert had said, “He doesn’t care about it once it’s done. Just sweep the masterpiece into the garbage. He’ll make another one tomorrow.”

  Lily walked back to the kitchen to pick up Martin’s food, and Vince started in right where he left off. “And because there’s no talking in this goddamned place, there’s no real sex. Ever think of that, doll? Look at the women in this town, hardly a single one with a speck of ‘cha-cha.’ In the winter they’re all covered up with those god-awful down parkas and in the summer they wear dresses that look like bags. Lipstick’s a sin. Jewelry’s a sin.” The man’s face was red. He had big jowls that shook when he moved his head.

  Lily grabbed Martin’s plate. “There’s plenty of sex in this town, Vince. Don’t be a dummy.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not fun sex. There’s a big difference.”

  Lily groaned. “Come on.”

  “You haven’t been around, baby. I’m telling you.” He held his arms out at his sides and wiggled his enormous hips back and forth. “Sex is shmooze in a dusky bar with a jazz band and a girl who looks like she likes it. Oh, honey, the nights I spend dreamin’ about Sandra Martinez,” the man groaned.

  “What you don’t know, Mr. City Man,” Lily said, “is that a cornfield can be just as sexy as a jazz club. You just haven’t been around.” Lily rolled her shoulder at him.

  Vince opened his mouth and pretended to be shocked. “Why, Lily Dahl,” he said. “You little devil.”

  “Don’t ever tell me I haven’t got cha-cha,” Lily said on her way out, and she heard Vince muttering something under his breath.

  The rain had stopped and Division Street looked brighter. When she put down the plate in front of Martin, he looked up at her with his serious face and his wide eyes, and she remembered how light his irises were—pale blue—a color that made her feel she could look right through them. As she left the table she felt a vague spasm in her abdomen, heard the screen door open and, turning toward the sound, saw the Bodler boys shuffle into the cafe. She sighed, but not loudly enough for them to hear it, and watched them walk toward the booth in the back just outside the bathroom with the sign Vince had put up that said “EITHER/OR.” If only they weren’t so dirty, Lily thought, as she looked down at the trail of mud on the floor behind the two men. If only it was just their boots that were dirty, and not their arms and legs and heads and butts and every square inch of their whole selves. Lily stopped in front of the Bodlers’ table and took out her order pad. She looked from Filthy Frank to Dirty Dick and back to Filthy Frank. The old coots were just as grimy as ever, only moister. She could see drip lines on their cheeks where they’d been rained on. Lily tapped her toe and waited. Frank would order. He always did. Dick never said a word. The Bodler boys were identical twins who over many years had turned out different. Nobody had the slightest difficulty telling them apart. Dick’s body echoed Frank’s but didn’t repeat it. Punier, balder, blanker, Dick had become a diluted copy of his brother.

  Everything they touched turned black. Lily looked down at Frank’s hands. She could already see smudges forming on the white table.

  “Well, what’ll it be?” she said.

  Neither man moved or even blinked.

  She leaned closer to Frank and raised her eyebrows. He smelled like clay.

  The man opened his mouth, showing brown teeth interrupted by several holes. Then came the guttural rumble: “Two eggs, scrambled, bacon, toast, coffee.”

  “Coming up.” Lily turned away and looked over Martin’s head into the street. The weather was clearing steadily. Martin was reading now. He usually brought a book with him and read for a while before leaving. As far as Lily could tell, Martin read everything. He seemed to like history books, especially books on World War II, but he also liked novels—cheap ones and highbrow ones—and science fiction books and how-to books. She remembered him reading Anna Karenina in the cafe for several weeks, and when he finished with that he had started in on a book called A Hundred Ways to Make Money in the Country. Still, Lily figured all that reading had to do some good. He’s probably pretty smart, she thought, and then on her way to the kitchen she considered the fact that Martin had turned twenty-one and was most likely a virgin. She liked this thought, liked the idea of innocence in a young man. At the same time, she felt sorry for him.

  Only a few minutes later, when Lily was serving the Bodlers their breakfast and pouring them more coffee, she noticed a brown grocery bag sitting beside Frank in the booth and asked herself what the dirt twins might be hauling around with them. Then she watched Frank grasp his cup and looked down at his thumbnail—a thick, yellow husk—and staring at the fat, dirty nail started her thinking about Helen Bodler.

  No one doubted anymore that old man Bodler had buried his wife alive back in 1932, but at the time people thought she’d walked out on him and the twins. Bodler drank. His small farm, like a lot of other farms, was in bad trouble and the theory was he went mad from the strain. Lily remembered her grandmother telling her the story, remembered how she had leaned over the oilcloth on the kitchen table, her voice tense but clear. “Helen wouldn’t’ve left them two little boys and gone off without a word to nobody. She wasn’t that kind. I knew her, and she wasn’t that kind. Mighty pretty woman, too. People said she ran off with the peddler, Ira Cohen. Talk about rubbish. Cohen had a wife and six kids in St. Paul. Where’d he put her? In the back of the cart? The whole thing stank to high heaven from the start.”

  They found Helen’s body in 1950. The twins and another man, Jacob Hiner, were digging up the old outhouse on the property and unearthed her skeleton near it. Bodler had already been dead for eleven years. His two sons had fought in Europe, had come home and started up their junk business. Lily didn’t know exactly when they had stopped washing. The army enforced cleanliness, so it must have been sometime after 1945 that the Bodler twins became Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick. Had they married, the gruesome story of their parents might have aged faster, grown distant with children and grandchildren, but there were no more Bodlers. What the two brothers had felt when they discovered their mother’s bones frozen in a position of panic, a position that showed she had tried to claw her way out of her grave, was anybody’s guess. Illegible as stones, the two walked, ate and snorted out as few words as possible.

  Then, as she looked up, Lily saw Edward Shapiro standing on the steps outside the Stuart Hotel. Even from that distance, she could see that he was rumpled, as if he had just climbed out of bed. Lily walked toward the window and stopped. She watched the man scratch his leg, and at the same time, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bert waltz into the cafe and let the screen door slam behind her. After tying an apron around her waist, Bert sidled up to Lily and said, “So how’s the Ordeal this morning?” Without
waiting for an answer, she surveyed the booths, nodded at the twins and groaned theatrically.

  Lily nodded and moved her head to the right so she wouldn’t lose sight of the man on the steps. Bert followed Lily’s eyes and the two women watched him together.

  “Absolutely, definitely cheating material if I ever saw it.” Bert gave her wad of gum a snap. “It’s not often I get the urge to sneak out on old Rog’, but that one…,” and without bothering to finish the sentence, Bert shook her head. Then she whistled and turned to Lily. “Poor Hank, he’s in for it.”

  “I’m not married to Hank, Bert.”

  “Oh yeah, I thought you two were engaged.”

  “Not really,” Lily said and held out her left hand. “No ring, see. Anyway, who says I’d have a chance with a guy like that. He must be at least thirty, and he’s an artist, and—”

  “Honey,” Bert interrupted her, “with a bod like yours you’ve got a chance with anything male and breathing.” She paused. “Well, what d’ya know, Mr. Tall, Dark and Mysterious is coming over.”

  “Nah,” Lily said. “He never comes in here.”

  But Edward Shapiro was striding across the street toward them, and Lily grabbed the coffeepot off its heating coil and began to pour coffee into Clarence Sogn’s cup, even though it was nearly full already, and once she had done that, she wiped her hands on her apron for no reason and felt her heart beating and told herself not to be stupid. She didn’t see him, but she heard him come through the door, and at the sound she straightened her back and pulled in her stomach. Just as she turned to look at him and saw him sitting at the counter, she felt a slow, warm sensation between her legs and knew it was blood. Shit, she thought. I never keep track. She stared at Edward Shapiro from behind. He was leaning forward and the fabric of his blue work shirt had tightened across his shoulder blades. She moved her eyes down the back seam of his jeans that disappeared into the red covering of the stool, and she could almost feel his weight. The man was lean, but the idea of his heaviness aroused her. Even if he did see me, he’ll never recognize me, she said to herself and watched Bert pour him a cup of coffee. She wished she were on the other side of the counter with the coffeepot. She wished she didn’t have to run upstairs to her room for a tampon. She waved at Bert, mouthed the word “curse,” raced to the back of the cafe and through the door to the stairwell.

  Sitting on the toilet in her apartment, Lily felt grateful to be off her feet. Her jeans and underpants were lying on the floor, and she was looking down at the blood stain on the white material of her underpants, its red brilliant against the denim and the dull blue floor tiles. She didn’t want to move, but after several seconds she reached for her tampons, unwrapped one and pushed it inside her. She glanced down at the blue string between her legs, at her bare knees and the lines of their bones, and had one of those sudden, curious feelings, more sensation than thought, and more familiar to children than adults, that she wasn’t really there in the room at all, that she had been blown out of her own head somewhere else, and that every thing she was looking at was no longer itself, but a kind of inanimate impostor. Lily changed position to get rid of the feeling and then changed into a fresh pair of underpants and jeans.

  She opened the back door to the cafe slowly. She wanted to look in on Edward Shapiro at the counter, but he was gone. Instead, she saw Martin only three or four feet in front of her, standing beside the Bodlers’ booth, and at that very second, he was handing Filthy Frank two twenty-dollar bills. Half a minute later, she would have missed the whole transaction. Frank took the money, picked at his greasy shirt pocket and tucked the bills inside. Then he handed Martin the bag. It was the way Martin took the bag that gave Lily a start. As he reached for it, his fingers trembled with expectation, and his eyes rolled upward so that for an instant his pupils disappeared and all she saw was white. His lips parted, and she heard him exhale. Lily didn’t know what she was seeing, but whatever lay inside that dirty grocery bag, it had affected Martin in a way that embarrassed her. She suffered for him, for his oddness, for his not knowing how to act, for that horrible expression that was much too private for a cafe. She pushed the door open, and in her hurry to get past him, accidentally brushed his elbow. Damn, she said to herself as she confirmed that Shapiro had really and truly vanished. She felt a light touch on her shoulder, turned around and saw Martin staring down at her. He stuttered out her name and said, “I’m leaving something for you on the table.”

  She glanced down at the bag that Martin was holding in his left hand. “A present for me?” She knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. The question was prompted by irritation with him, and she heard an edge in her voice.

  He shook his head, and Lily turned away from him to avoid his face.

  She hurried over to Bert and said, “So, what’s he like?”

  Bert looked up. “To whom are you referring?” she said with an artificial sniff.

  “Ah, cut it out. Give me the dope.”

  “He came and went like lightning, but for the minute he was here, I’d say he was real class, real nice and not stuck-up at all.”

  “Yeah?” Lily said. She slid behind the counter and poured Matt Halvorsen more coffee. “Did you talk about anything?”

  “He said he’d take a doughnut.”

  “That’s deep,” Lily said.

  “I said, ‘Which one?’ and pointed at the case. Then he said in New York you don’t get to pick ’em, and I said, ‘Well, this ain’t New York,’ and he said he knew that, and that he’d take the one without the hole, more for your money. He swilled down his coffee in three seconds flat, grabbed the doughnut and ran out the door.”

  Lily pressed her lips together. “His eyes are kind of unusual, wouldn’t you say? They go up a little. Did you notice?”

  Bert nodded. “Almond shaped. That’s uncommon, at least around here.”

  “He’s uncommon, all right.”

  Lily and Bert turned their heads to spot the eavesdropper.

  Ida Bodine walked toward them, carrying her coffee cup. The tiny woman wore her hair in a towering beehive to compensate for the missing inches.

  “Gossip radar,” Bert said to Lily in a low voice.

  “He’s got somethin’ goin’ up in his room,” Ida said. “I’ve been hearin’ things.”

  “What kind of things?” Lily said.

  “Bangin’, creakin’. More than once I’ve had to tell him to cut the racket—opera music blarin’ till it busts your eardrums. It’s my job as night manager to keep things runnin’ smooth-like, and that one’s made my job a regular hell.”

  Night desk clerk, you mean, Lily thought to herself. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she said aloud. “A little noise.”

  Ida sipped her coffee, her eyes on Lily. “That ain’t all. I seen people goin’ in there when I start work at six, and they don’t go in the front door neither, go in the back from the river side and stay in there with him for hours. And they ain’t what you call ‘nice’ folks neither.” Ida nodded.

  “I think a man’s got a right to see anyone he pleases,” Bert said.

  Ida looked straight at Bert, cocked her head to one side and smiled with false sweetness. “Tex?” she said.

  Lily looked at Ida, who had put down her coffee cup and folded her arms across her chest. It did seem unlikely. Lily conjured an image of the big man—six feet five with long red sideburns, a nose bent from too many fights and a big beer belly hanging over his pants. Vince had banned him from the Ideal a couple of years before Lily started as a waitress, and she rarely met up with him, but Hank knew Tex from the city jail, where he sometimes spent the night in one or the other of the two cells. Hank’s summer job as a dispatcher at the Webster Police and Fire Department had made him an expert on the big redhead’s misdemeanors. It was true that his crimes usually didn’t amount to much more than disturbing the peace, but he disturbed the peace at a pretty regular clip and drove the officers batty. Tex’s last offense had taken place last Thursday, when he bar
ged through the doors of the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall out on Highway 19, howling like Tarzan as he loped down the aisle dressed in nothing but a pair of leopard bikini underwear, a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots.

  “I’d say Tex must’ve paid that Shapiro fellow eight or nine visits, and the last time I seen him, he was comin’ out of the room buttonin’ up his shirt.” Ida’s face puckered in disgust.

  Bert gaped at Ida in mock horror. “Why, Ida Bodine,” she said. “If the man’s a fruit, I’m a five-eyed alien from the next galaxy.”

  Ida sniffed. “I’m just sayin’ what I seen, nothin’ more.”

  “Come on, Ida,” Lily said. “Edward Shapiro taught at Courtland. He had a good job there—”

  Ida interrupted. “His wife left him, didn’t she? It’s gonna be divorce.” She hissed the last consonant. “Tell me this, if he’s so hoity-toity, big professor and all, what’s he doin’ in the Stuart?”

  Lily glanced at Bert, then back at Ida. “I think he’s painting.” Her tone had more vehemence than she had intended.

  Ida raised her eyebrows. “You know what they say about the paintings, don’t you? They’re pictures of Webster, and they ain’t none of our beauty spots. I guess he’s done the grain elevator and the tracks and the dump and made ’em real ugly to show all of us here that we’re a bunch of hicks.”

  Lily had only seen the backs of Shapiro’s paintings, but she wondered why he would paint outdoor scenes inside.

  “Now where did you get that information?” Bert said.

  “Around.” Ida narrowed her eyes.

  Lily leaned over the counter toward Ida. “And what law says he can’t paint whatever the hell he wants?”

  Ida moved her head back from Lily. “Well, la-di-da,” she said. “If you aren’t takin’ this personal.” The woman retrieved a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed either side of her mouth with it. It was a gesture of absurd, extravagant femininity that made Lily want to laugh. Ida lowered the napkin and clutched it in two hands. “What I’d like to know, Lily Dahl, is what’s that New York Jew to you?”