The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

  It might have been neater if what was outside the Arts Guild would stay out and what was inside would stay in, but that’s not how it worked. When Lily spoke to Lysander, she looked into Jim’s face and gave him the feeling she had for Ed, and Jim responded with an expressiveness she hadn’t seen in him before. And when she watched Cobweb tiptoe around Bottom, she perceived an ominous presence in Martin’s fairy that made him better than the others. He never abandoned character. Even when the little fairies snickered at the ridiculous head on Oren’s shoulders, Cobweb’s white face never faltered from its distant, nearly unconscious expression. Several times during rehearsal, Lily felt Martin staring at her, felt his eyes on her neck or back, and when she turned around he was always there to meet her glance, and Lily wondered if scientists had discovered how it is that you can actually feel someone’s eyes on your body. She worried about his hand. How had he hurt it? She wished she could remember what his hands had looked like in the rocking chair, but she didn’t have any memory of them.

  After rehearsal she put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Martin.” She spoke in a low voice she instantly regretted because it sounded confidential, but he turned, looked at her and smiled. His eager expression felt like a trap. “I have to talk to you,” she said and corrected her tone.

  Martin didn’t speak, but he took Lily’s hand. She let him do it, but she found the bandage rubbing against her palm unpleasant. As they walked through the door, Martin gripped her harder. She couldn’t understand why he would do this with an injury. She moved her fingers to signal that she wanted him to release her, but Martin only squeezed more tightly. “Your hand,” Lily said. “It’s hurting me.”

  Martin let go, but he didn’t say anything. They seated themselves on the steps, and Lily spoke to the street rather than to Martin, explaining to him what Dick had told her. “You don’t think,” Lily said finally, “that Dick made it up, do you?”

  “Dick doesn’t lie,” Martin said.

  “Well, I mean that he imagined it?”

  “No.”

  Lily turned to him. “You mean you were really carrying somebody across their field the day before yesterday?”

  Martin’s mouth twitched once. “Y-yes.”

  Lily hadn’t expected this response. She hesitated, then said, “Who was it?”

  Martin turned his face toward hers. He didn’t stutter. “You,” he said. “It was you.”

  Lily studied his face to see if he was joking. She opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “That’s not funny, Martin.”

  He looked at her with blank eyes.

  “I wasn’t there. You know that. Who was it? Dick was, well.” Lily sighed. “I think he was scared that, that the girl, was hurt, or…” Lily finally said it, “dead.”

  Martin shook his head. “Th-there are lots of things w-we don’t understand, Lily.”

  Lily gestured with her hands. “That’s bonkers, Martin. I sure as hell know where I am from one minute to the next. I sure as hell know I wasn’t with you in some alfalfa field outside the Bodlers’.”

  Martin stared at her without blinking.

  “Why are you doing this?” Lily asked him in an urgent whisper. “What good will this do?”

  Martin shook his head violently, then looked down at his knees.

  Lily grabbed Martin’s shoulder. “Martin, if Dick saw you, then he didn’t see me.”

  Martin didn’t answer. His face looked stony.

  Martin turned his head away from Lily. He stuttered something Lily couldn’t hear.

  “What?” she asked loudly. Then she heard people behind her talking near the door.

  Martin’s shoulders were shaking. He gasped. “Ma-mama,” he stuttered.

  Lily reached out for him. “Jesus, Martin,” she said in a whisper. “What is it?”

  “Everything okay?” Mrs. Wright said from the door.

  Lily didn’t answer.

  Martin stood up with his back to Lily. His head was lowered and his back rounded as though someone had hit him in the stomach. He grunted and Lily thought she saw saliva hit the sidewalk. Someone ran down the steps behind her. It was Mrs. Baker. She put her arm around Martin, and Lily watched him quake under the steadying arm. “Ma-ma-ma-ma,” he sputtered.

  Mrs. Baker held Martin but turned to Lily. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. We, we were just talking,” Lily said. She stood up. She rubbed her face hard and shook her head. “God,” she said and walked over to Martin, who was leaning on Mrs. Baker now, his head still down. “Do you want me to go, Martin?” she said and then looked up at the doorway. A dozen people stared down at her. She turned back to Mrs. Baker.

  “Maybe that’s best,” the woman said.

  Lily took a last look at Martin, who remained hunched but had stopped trying to speak. He was puffing hard and then Lily saw him bring his hands to his face and cover it. The streetlamp illuminated Martin’s left hand, and she saw clearly the wrinkled Band-Aids and piece of gauze that had been wrapped around his palm. But these only partially concealed numerous long, sharp cuts that ran in all directions between his knuckles and the top of his hand.

  Lily hurried away from the Arts Guild, across the railroad tracks. She paused once to turn around and look at the group of people gathered around Martin under the streetlamp and wondered what he was saying, if anything. Her knees shook as she walked. Lily looked up at the moon and thought, How the hell did all this happen? It’s like I’m involved with him now, like we’re in something together. “It was you.” A mysterious leaden guilt settled in Lily’s chest. What have I done? she thought and watched her white sneakers move forward on the pavement. She heard someone walking toward her and looked up.

  A tall man wearing a cowboy hat and a gun belt came striding toward her, and for a moment Lily thought she was seeing things. Like a gunslinger in an old Western, the dark figure approached, his hands held inches from the guns on his hips, and Lily guessed it was Dolores’s ghost, or maybe Tex. The man came closer and Lily recognized Hank. He said her name.

  “Hank, what are you doing in that getup?”

  “I’m Charlie Younger in the reenactment, remember? Rolf gave me the costume at the meeting. There’s more to it, but I’m on my way to the station, and I thought the guys would get a kick out of my six-shooters.”

  Lily looked at the pavement. “You didn’t tell me about it.”

  “They thought Allan Fisk was going to do it, but he punked out.”

  “Oh.” She looked at his hips. “Are the guns real?”

  “Of course not.”

  “They look real,” she said.

  A train whistle sounded loudly behind them, and Lily heard the guardrail fall across the tracks. Hank’s black sneakers were only inches from her own.

  “I miss you,” Hank said.

  Lily studied the loose rubber at the front of her shoe. Why don’t I miss him? she thought.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

  “Not really.” Lily rubbed a mosquito bite on the back of her leg with her sneaker. She could feel Hank’s anger, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Martin’s fit had exhausted her. She hung her head and looked down. The fact is, she thought, I’m really stupid with Hank. I’m not so stupid with other people.

  Hank waved the back of his hands at her in frustration. “If you think,” he said loudly, “that that guy’s going to stick around here for you, you’re dead wrong.”

  “Oh, Hank,” Lily said.

  “You know I’m right. What is he, fifteen years older than you? For Christ’s sake, Lily, you’re making a fool of yourself. He’s not even divorced. Everybody in town knows he’s going to leave you high and dry. He’s got women coming out of his ears, for Christ’s sake. He’s a fucking Don Juan. You’re no different from all the others.” Hank rubbed his forehead hard. “Not to him.”

  Lily raised her eyes. “I don’t care.” Her intonation was even, stubborn.

  “You don’t care!” br />
  “No.”

  Hank moved toward her. He bent down and looked in her face. “Who are you?” he shouted. “What are you?”

  Lily clenched her jaw shut. She kept her chin down and her mouth shut. Behind Hank she could see the grain elevator in the moonlight.

  “Answer me!” His voice broke.

  Lily bit her lip. “How can I answer that?” she said. She felt tears in her eyes all of a sudden, and she lifted her face to keep them from running down her cheeks.

  Hank held out his arms. “Oh, Lil’,” he said and leaned toward her.

  She put her arms around him tentatively. She remembered his smell and his shirt—the one that said “Minnesota Twins” on the back. She stood on tiptoe and whispered to him, “I’m sorry, Hank. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Lily pulled away from him and ran across the bridge and then past the Red Owl Grocery. She was still running when she reached Division Street. She slowed to a walk when she saw Rick’s and glanced at two men standing a few feet away outside the Corner Bar. One of them was wearing gray coveralls from Olaf’s Garage, and as she approached them she read the name tag sewn on his pocket: “Steve.” Lily noticed that his arms were too long for his short body, that he needed a shave and that he had clearly noticed her. When she walked past them, “Steve” started making panting noises, and in her peripheral vision she saw him throwing his hips back and forth. He smirked. For once Lily decided not to ignore the insult. She whirled around and started screaming, “What is it? I’d really like to know. What the hell is it that makes a shrunken little weasel like you think he’s some big stud, huh?”

  Steve glared at Lily. She could see he was searching for a retort while making an effort to hold on to his leer. Then his friend started laughing, and Lily saw Steve’s expression change to uncertainty. Laughter followed her down the block, and she heard Steve say, “What’s her problem?” She walked slowly, conscious that their eyes were following her, and she made certain her posture was erect, her gait dignified. When she reached the alley beside the Ideal Cafe, Lily turned, seated herself on the ground beside one of the large garbage cans and cried.

  It took her a long time to fall asleep that night. Mabel was typing in the next room. There was no light in Ed’s window, and although she knew he might be lying on his bed at that very minute, exhausted from hours of work, she also knew he might have gone out, and Lily wished she could wave her hand or mutter an incantation and look in on him wherever he was. Instead, she played her tape of Don Giovanni softly so Mabel wouldn’t hear. She remembered Dolores’s ankle buckling in Ed’s room, and it made her think of Mabel’s shaking hands and of Martin’s stutter, that word he had started but never finished outside the Arts Guild. She felt unsteady herself. Everybody’s quivering, she thought. Everybody except Ed. She remembered his hand on Dolores’s hip. And as Lily pictured his quiet face and deliberate movements in her mind, she realized that the calm in him was also something hard and stubborn, that Ed was like a man who, finding himself in a terrible storm on the road, refuses to turn back and instead plants his feet on the ground, leans into the wind and keeps on walking.

  Noises from the street, Mabel’s typing, and half-conscious thoughts accompanied her first two hours in bed when she was neither really awake nor really asleep. Moonlight shone too brightly on her eyelids through her thin curtains, and lilliputian voices chattered lines from the play. Her pillow was too hot. She fluffed and patted and turned it over again and again. Just before she felt herself finally dropping into sleep, she heard Howie Bickle’s voice in her head. Howie was Starveling in the play and Moonshine in the play within the play. A slow talker from a farm west of town, he dragged out every vowel: “This lantern doth the horned moon present.” Then, after what seemed to be only minutes of sleep, she heard the alarm ring and sat up in bed. Moonlight was still shining through the window, which didn’t make sense, but Lily stood up, walked toward two rectangles of light that illuminated the floor and saw a young woman lying there with her eyes closed. Lily bent over to examine her. “So you’re here,” she said. The woman didn’t answer, but Lily didn’t expect an answer. She looked down at the body and noticed a long piece of white fabric wrapped tightly around her hips, her shoulders and breasts. The fabric puzzled Lily. Why was her stomach bare? Lily looked at the girl’s navel with interest, and while she looked, a word suddenly came to her that solved the problem of the young woman: “bellclose.” The word elated her. I know, she said to herself. I know. But then as quickly as it had come, the feeling left her, and she thought, She can’t be here. I’ve got to get her out. Lily bent down to lift the young woman off the floor, but the body that looked as soft and white as dough wouldn’t budge, and after tugging hard, she discovered that the young woman’s hands had been attached to the floor with screws. Lily panicked, and in her panic she began to suspect she was dreaming and tried to fight her way out of the dream and away from the moonlight shining on those bloodless palms screwed to the floor, but telling herself to wake up had no immediate effect. She was drowning in the dream and struggled toward its surface, flailing and kicking her way up and out as she told herself to wake up. With her hands above her head, she pressed against something soft and wet, bursting through it to find herself awake and lying in her bed. The moonlight had disappeared. Nobody was on the floor. Had the nightmare taken place outside her room, Lily might have found comfort in waking to those four walls, but the distance between dreaming and waking had been too close. She sat up in bed and tried to recover the word in the dream that had made her so happy. She felt herself reaching back for it, finding it not in her head, but in her mouth. She had said it in the dream: “bellclose.” It’s nonsense, she said to herself. Mabel wasn’t typing anymore, and in the silence of her room, Lily tried to stay awake, but couldn’t. She slept again, dreamed again, and found the young woman on the floor again. I’m dreaming, she said to herself. I have to wake up, and Lily woke in her room and looked out and saw the moonlight shining down on the young woman’s body. And so it went all night. Time after time, she told herself to wake up, and she did, but sometimes she woke from a dream inside the dream and found the body again. After a while the police came into the dream and Hank with them. They broke through the floor, poked their feet through the ceiling and crawled in from the window. They pounded at her door in a rhythm as steady and relentless as a drum machine.

  * * *

  At work the next day, Lily’s arms and legs felt weak. The caffeine from the five cups of coffee she had drunk to clear her head raced through her body, and she felt suddenly aware of her nerves, which seemed to be vibrating just beneath her skin. Vince was unusually quiet that day, but Boomer yattered on about Graceland and Elvis sightings every time she came into the kitchen. At about nine o’clock she was standing across from Vince, staring at two sunny-side-up eggs for Russell Malecha, when Boomer started waving the doughnut he was holding in her face and said to her in a falsetto voice, “Earth to Lily, Earth to Lily.”

  “What is it, Boom?”

  “Heard you’re already two-timin’ yer new boyfriend.”

  Lily picked up the plate of eggs and started for the door. “Where’d you hear that rot?”

  Boomer shoved the doughnut into his mouth. Powdered sugar stuck to his lips as he widened his eyes behind his lenses. “Heard it from a kid who don’t lie. Said he saw you at the quarry, stark naked.” Boomer chewed. “With some cowboy.”

  Lily’s back was pressed against the swinging door and she stopped. “Cowboy? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Said you was lyin’ on his lap, sleepin’ or sunbathin’ or somethin’.” Boomer opened his mouth and grinned, revealing half-chewed doughnut coated with saliva bubbles.

  “Shut your mouth, Boom.” Lily heard her voice rise. “Whoever you talked to is cracked. You hear me? Cracked. I haven’t even been to the quarry this year, and as for cowboys—what the hell is a cowboy? This town doesn’t have cowboys, not real ones, anyway. This is complet
e shit.”

  Vince stared at Lily, his eyes small, and Boomer went on chewing the doughnut with a surprised look on his face.

  Jiggling a frying pan of sausages, Vince said, “You feeling all right? Wrong time of month?”

  “No, Vince, it’s not the wrong time of the month. How’d you like it if people were talking that kind of crap about you?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d love to be known as the guy hanging around the quarry with naked broads.”

  “It’s not the same,” Lily said, and pushed her shoulder into the door behind her. She looked again at the two perfect yellow yolks on the plate and felt suddenly light-headed. “It was you.” That’s what he had said. The cafe looked new to her when she turned around, and for a moment the red booth where Martin usually sat undulated in the sunshine that came through the window, and Lily thought, I’m dizzy again. I have to sit down. She moved the plate into her right hand and reached for the counter with her left. I’m so tired, she thought as an explanation. She took a couple of breaths, delivered the eggs, and when she turned away from Russell, a fragment of the dream came back to her—the white material that bound the woman’s breasts and marked her flesh with a deep red line like a cut.

  A week earlier Boomer’s story wouldn’t have touched Lily, and she knew it. It was listening to Boomer after she had listened to Dick, Dolores and Martin that had unnerved her. The stories didn’t match, but they overlapped, and the similarities among them were making her skittish. Either there was a virus on the march in Webster that caused hallucinations or everybody was seeing the same thing and thinking it was something else. When Lily stood in the cafe and watched Bert making lively conversation with Emily Legvold, who had recently left the Moonies and looked like herself again, Lily decided the visions weren’t imaginary. There were too many. Then through the window she saw Mrs. Pointer walking with a group of kids from the Elizabeth Barker School. The children shuffled along in twos and held hands. A chubby boy, who looked about sixteen, broke away from his partner. Turning to the cafe window, he scrunched up his face and then did a little dance for the people inside. He had the distinctive features of Down’s syndrome—small eyes and a flat nose. The silly joy in his face as he wiggled his hips and threw his head back jolted Lily from her meditation, and she laughed. He saw her and bowed. Lily watched the kids laugh and clap. Mrs. Pointer walked calmly through the line and stopped beside him. She took him by both shoulders and started to rub the boy. His face looked frenzied now, and his tongue darted in and out of his mouth. Mrs. Pointer continued to rub his shoulders with strong strokes, and the boy’s expression grew calmer. Then, taking his hand in hers, she drew it toward his partner’s—a girl with two short braids that stuck out on either side of her head—and folded their hands together with a little shake that seemed to mean they shouldn’t let go. She walked back to the head of her class and signaled for them to continue walking, which they did, and soon every child had passed out of view.