The Enchantment of Lily Dahl Read online

  Lily glared at Ida but said nothing. Bert gave Lily an uneasy glance. Then Ida crumpled the napkin in one fist, lifted her coffee cup from the counter and walked back to her stool.

  “Windbag,” Bert said.

  “He’s Jewish,” Lily said, observing the fact aloud.

  “Shapiro,” Bert said. “It’s a Jewish name.”

  “Oh,” Lily said. She felt herself blush and wondered why Bert knew such things when she didn’t. She looked at the clock. It was pushing seven. Soon there’d be another rush when the downtown merchants came in for a bite before opening their stores. Lily surveyed the room. She had missed the Bodlers’ exit. “God, Bert, you cleaned the scuz booth.”

  “So you owe me.” Bert picked up a stack of dishes, then motioned with her head toward the door.

  Hank Farmer walked in and smiled at Lily. His face looked a little swollen, but then all night at the police station would clobber anybody. He gave Lily a quick kiss on the cheek, and instead of straightening up, he kept his head level with hers and said, “I’m going home to sleep, but I’d like to see you later, okay?”

  Lily looked into his handsome face. He was so close she could see the faint scars of adolescent acne. A piece of dark blond hair had fallen onto his forehead. She didn’t answer him but looked past his cheek at Martin’s empty booth and studied the inverted letters of the neon sign in the window. She leaned back a couple of inches. “Call me,” she said. “I feel a little low. My period.”

  Hank nodded and kissed her again. She watched him bound out the door and across the street. He moved beautifully, and she thought to herself that he looked better from a distance. She stared through the window and fiddled with the pad in her apron pocket.

  Bert addressed Lily’s back. “I know you’re juggling love interests right and left here, Lil’, but you better get that fanny of yours back to work.”

  Lily didn’t bother to turn around. She wiggled her hips at Bert and said, “It’s seven. I’m going to play something before you-know-who gets there first.” Lily looked over her shoulder toward the jukebox and saw Boomer Wee coming through the kitchen doors.

  “Cut him off at the pass!” Bert yelled, flinging an arm toward Boomer.

  Lily made a dash for the jukebox, but Boomer was too fast for her, and by the time she reached it, he was leaning over the selections. His T-shirt had hiked up his back, exposing his white skin and bony spine. “Don’t you dare play that song. Get back to the dishes!” she hissed at Boomer, trying to elbow him away from the box. “You’re going to kill me with that song.” But Boomer blocked her and she heard the rattle of the quarter, the click of the machine and then Elvis started singing “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  “You little skunk,” Lily said to Boomer, who was smiling innocently on his way to the kitchen. I loved it, too, before I heard it 6,458 times, Lily thought, and walked over to Martin’s booth to clear it.

  The dirty plate, silverware, coffee cup and saucer had been stacked and pushed to one side of the table, but lying squarely in the middle was a white napkin, and on it, written in large, cursive letters was the word “mouth.” That was all. Mouth? Lily thought. A thin ray of sunshine eked through a hole in the cloud cover and lit the table at a slant. Lily picked up the napkin and stared at it. Could this be what he was talking about, the thing he was going to leave me on the table? How weird. The ink had bled into the soft paper. Lily shook her head, and then, without knowing why, she glanced around to see if anyone had seen her reading the napkin. No one was showing the slightest interest. Lily brought her hands together, crumpled the paper, and quickly stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she lifted the stack of dishes from the table and headed for the kitchen.

  * * *

  Lily told Hank not to come that night. When she heard the disappointment in his voice, she felt bad, but Some Like It Hot was on TV that night, and she wanted to watch Marilyn alone. Hank had teased Lily about Marilyn, had said she was dizzy on the subject, and once when Lily had tried to articulate her feelings about her, Hank had grinned through the explanation. After that, she had stopped talking about Marilyn to Hank or anyone else. The Marilyn story had started with Bus Stop. Lily was still living with her parents then. That was before her father’s cancer operation, before they moved to Florida to get away from the winters, and she had stayed up watching the movie until two o’clock in the morning. The coat in the very last scene had clinched it. The cowboy had taken off his jacket and put it around Marilyn’s shoulders, and when she snuggled into it, her whole upper body had moved and trembled as if she were being kissed on her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and when Lily had looked into Marilyn’s face on the screen, she had felt she was seeing a wonderful and dangerous happiness that was so strong it was almost pain. The scene had made her want to act more than anything in the world, and the next morning she had told her parents that she wanted to be an actress. They hadn’t said much. Her mother told her in a gentle voice that high school plays and real theater were two different kettles of fish, and her father said a B.A. prepared you for everything. But Marilyn had made Lily think about acting in a new way, and she started wondering if it wasn’t a way of being very close to the heart of things, that maybe acting actually brought you closer to the world rather than farther away from it.

  After Bus Stop, Lily found Marilyn Monroe everywhere: in magazines, tabloids, comic books, on T-shirts and stickers, on posters and flags. She noticed little statues of her in ceramic and metal and rubber and saw her face and body emblazoned on ashtrays, mugs, pencils and clocks. But for Lily these icons were no more than crude approximations of the person on the screen, cheap leering versions of something intimate, almost sacred, and she avoided them. She had her poster, which she had chosen carefully in a store in Minneapolis, deciding against the famous one from The Seven Year Itch of Marilyn standing over the grate, her skirt billowing out from her thighs, for one less well known. She had bought a biography then, too, and had started it eagerly, searching among the details of Norma Jean’s life for the secret she had glimpsed in the movie, but after about a hundred pages, she realized it wasn’t there and stopped reading. As she lay in bed that evening watching Some Like It Hot, Lily laughed out loud at the men dressed as women and listened to Marilyn’s voice, to its halting rhythms and breaths, and near the end, she studied the dress Marilyn was wearing. It was like part of her body, she decided, hardly clothes at all, a magical movie dress Lily imagined herself wearing, not in Webster, of course, but in a faraway city, like Los Angeles or New York or Paris, where women went slinking into clubs and bars in next to nothing. She smiled to herself and took bites of the Milky Way she had bought especially for the movie.

  When it ended, Lily tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edward Shapiro’s windows were dark, and she wondered where he had gone. Through the wall, she heard Mabel blow her nose and start typing again. A copy of Glamour lay on the night table, and Lily picked it up. She turned the pages and stared at the clothes she couldn’t afford and then stopped to read a headline: “What Does a Man Want in a Woman?” It was a survey. Lily threw aside the magazine and began to recite her lines in a whisper. “So is Lysander.” She closed her eyes. “I would but my father look’d with my eyes.” She paused. “I do but entreat your grace to pardon me. /I do not know by what power I am made bold.” A breeze blew in through her open window, and the fresh air aggravated her restlessness. I could walk over to Rick’s and have a beer, she thought. She remembered Hank, felt troubled, and then after putting her hand down inside her jeans, she held her genitals for comfort and, still dressed, fell asleep.

  Once in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought she heard voices singing far away. Then she fell asleep again. At nine o’clock, she heard the church bells from Saint John’s and opened her eyes. Lily had been dreaming, and the Sunday bells had mixed themselves into the dream, which she had forgotten except that it hadn’t been pleasant, because the repeated clang bothered her. She could almost hear the congregation�
�s murmuring, that hollow, haunted tone people use to speak to the unseen, interrupted only by the occasional cough or a baby’s cry. As she pulled herself out of the muddy dream, she saw Pastor Carlsen’s face with its permanently sincere expression—an indistinct blend of pity and remorse. His face had always irritated her, not because she thought it was hypocritical, but because she knew it was real.

  * * *

  Lily never consciously decided to take the route that passed the Bodler place, but she found herself pedaling her bicycle in that direction and dreaming of the car she could buy with the money she had in the bank if she didn’t have to use it for college. Her father’s medical bills had eaten up the savings put aside for Lily’s education, and when Vince offered her a job at the Ideal Cafe and the room upstairs, she took it without complaint. Lily had told herself she needed time to think anyway. She needed to plan. Hank had a plan for himself and for her, but whenever she thought about the imaginary house in Minneapolis and the imaginary children and Hank Farmer forever, a part of her balked. So far she had managed to save $3,476.32 from her job, and that money promised her a life after Webster. Watching Edward Shapiro paint had launched new fantasies about New York, a place she had seen only on postcards and in the movies. Before he had moved into the Stuart Hotel, she had dreamed mostly of Hollywood and California, but watching the man in the window had turned her eastward, and now she imagined herself walking in crowded streets beneath towering buildings on her way to an audition, a script tucked under her arm. Lily pedaled harder with the wind in her face and looked out at the cornfields, the stalks still short but growing taller in the wide, flat fields. The sky had cleared since yesterday, and the sun was hot on her face. When she came to the end of the driveway that led to the Bodlers’, she stopped, climbed off her bicycle and looked at the ruined farmstead turned junkyard.

  The Bodler place was such a spectacular eyesore, it was almost gorgeous, a sight that made people whistle in disbelief if it didn’t stun them to silence. A mountain range of refuse had formed in the front yard, great heaps of junk so high they hid the house, garage and fallen barn behind them. These multicolored towers that included parts of bicycles and cars, old appliances, wires, pipes, lumber and innumerable moldering somethings never failed to impress Lily. She remembered searching for toys in the piles when she came here with her father as a child. She remembered feeling both exhilarated and uncomfortable as she dug in the mounds of junk. That was before she had heard the Helen Bodler story, and yet she had known that the old farm with its two dirty men was a place apart. She had never been inside the house. Her father used to go in to speak to Frank, but he had always asked her to wait on the step, as though he didn’t want her to see what was inside. Once, after her father had left her in the yard, she had walked around to the side of the house and pressed her face to a windowpane. She had seen hazy piles of objects and furniture, and then out of nowhere she had seen a face—an enormous, only vaguely human face, its great mouth hanging open, its tongue flickering like a snake’s, and Lily had run gasping from the window. She did not tell her father about it. She did not tell anyone about it, and only years later did she assume that she had mistaken Dick Bodler for a monster.

  The brothers’ old green truck wasn’t parked in the driveway today, and there wasn’t a junk picker in sight. Lily listened to the sound of her feet scraping against dirt and pebbles in the driveway and looked up suddenly when she heard a crack above her. A loose piece of canvas from a baby stroller had caught the wind, and she heard it crack again. Otherwise the place was very quiet. Birds chittered, the grass rustled, and she could hear car motors in the distance. When she reached the garage, she paused and looked in through the open doors. The sun cut a sharp rectangle on the earth floor, but beyond that light the interior looked almost black. She could make out a chaos of boxes, old tools and farm equipment, and she inhaled the odor of mildew and cold, damp earth, two smells she liked. Lily had no intention of going inside. The sun and air had made her slow and a little sleepy. But then she saw a suitcase lying on a crate, one corner of it illuminated by sunshine, and she walked toward it. Feeling only vaguely curious, she touched its cracked leather surface, then tugged at its handle. It felt full, and its unexpected weight attracted her. Lily dragged it into the light, hesitated for a second and opened it. The bag was filled not with odds and ends as she had anticipated, but with neatly packed clothes, as if someone had planned a trip, never taken it and then forgotten about the suitcase altogether. The clothes inside had belonged to one woman. They were all the same tiny size, and whoever she was, she hadn’t worn them for a long time. Lily couldn’t date them exactly, but examining a long shapeless dress, she guessed it had been fashionable during the twenties or thirties. Lily seated herself on the dirt floor and pulled out a threadbare camisole with a liver-colored stain. Although she knew it was childish, she pitied the stained garment, pitied it the way she would an unhappy child or whining animal. She folded it, replaced it carefully in the suitcase, and then noticed a fabric pocket under the lid that bulged with something. She slid her hand inside and took out a pair of white shoes. These had held up better than the clothes. Only slightly scuffed, they looked like shoes their owner had saved for church and going to parties. Lily guessed they would fit her. Her mother had always said she had Cinderella feet: size five. Lily pulled off her sneakers, slid one bare foot into a shoe, then the other. The shoes had no tongue, only laces. She tied them quickly and stretched out her legs, examining her feet in the old-fashioned shoes. She liked the curve of their stacked heels and the softness of the leather. They fit snugly. In fact, they pinched, but the tightness around her feet gave her pleasure, a sensation that was almost erotic—tense and warm.

  As Lily sat on the dirt floor of the garage, looking at her feet in somebody else’s shoes and pondering that satisfying pressure on her toes, she thought she heard a step outside the garage, then a person breathing. She stopped breathing herself to listen. A car with a broken muffler passed on the road, and she listened as its loud rumbling faded away. Was there someone in the grass outside? Did she hear footsteps again? Lily shook her head. No, she thought. She reached forward to untie the shoes, and when her fingers touched the laces, she was struck by the thought that these were Helen Bodler’s shoes, that she had packed her suitcase all those years ago to run away from her husband. With a shiver of excitement Lily removed the shoes and in that same instant decided to take them. After closing the suitcase and returning it to its original place, she found an old paper bag, dumped the nails out of it and dropped in the shoes. Then she dug in her pockets and came up with two dollar bills, a quarter and a dime. I’ll leave this as payment, she thought.

  The heavy inner door to the house stood open. Lily looked through the screen door and into the kitchen. She could hear flies, a low uneven buzz, and inches inside the dim room she made out long rolls of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, crusted black with insects. The room smelled strongly of mold, and when she looked down at the floor, she thought the cracked linoleum squares were oozing liquid. It’s just wet, she thought, from yesterday’s rain. The house probably leaks like a sieve. A couple of feet inside the dark room, Lily could see a table. To run in, slap down the money on the table and rush back would take seconds. Still, Lily hesitated. She listened. The house was silent. Her eyes had adjusted to the murky room within, and she could see a rifle resting against the wall. I’ll count to fifteen, she said to herself, and then run. This method had never failed, because Lily had never cheated on herself. The numbers changed according to the degree of the challenge, but they always worked. The silent count had been responsible for her eating that worm on a dare when she was eight during recess at Longfellow School, for prompting her over the cliff into the ice water of the quarry in May when she was thirteen, and for her greatest triumph—that night only four years ago when she lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train, and then, only seconds before it hit her, rolled out of the way. Bert had been furiou
s, but the boys had all shaken her hand and beat her on the back. The count helped her face more mundane trials, too: like getting out of bed at four o’clock in the morning to go to work. Lily counted, pushed on the screen door, took a step, heard the noise of a car in the driveway, turned her head and slipped. She fell half in and half out of the door, her left arm flat in a pool of cold slime. Coins rolled across the kitchen floor, and she sat up as fast as she could to look at the driveway. With relief she saw that it wasn’t the twins’ truck, but an old blue Chevy with a bashed fender. The floor had left a yellow film mixed with dirt on her arm and Lily wiped it with the bottom of her T-shirt. Then, holding the bag of shoes behind her, she walked down the steps and paused for a second. She saw a dollar bill float over the grass as it caught the wind. I must have dropped it on the step when I fell, she thought. It blew further away. Lily let it go, and began to invent a story for the person driving the car, in case the person wanted to know why she had been sprawled in the Bodler’s doorway. She would say she was leaving money for a purchase and fell. It was true, of course, but also wasn’t.

  The Chevy stopped, and Lily watched an obese woman slowly ease herself out the car door. “Give your brother half of that one, Arnie, or I’ll smack you,” she said to the backseat. The woman’s hair had been bleached to a crisp. Lily stared at her enormous belly and thighs in double knit bermudas. She took three heavy steps and puffed. When Lily passed her, the woman said “Hi,” in a dead voice, and Lily said “Hi” back. She glanced into the car and saw two remarkably similar blond boys sitting in the backseat. One was clearly older, but both tanned faces were streaked with tears, snot and Oreos. Lily moved beyond the car, heard its door creak open and the woman say, “Truce, babies. Come and give Mama a hug.” Lily looked back for a moment to see the boys climb out of the car and fling themselves into the flesh of the now squatting woman. When the woman’s arms closed around them, Lily turned back to the road and started to run toward her bicycle.