The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (5 page)

“
Good news will be brought to you by mail
,” she had read, brushing the cookie crumbs from the rabbit fur of her winter coat’s lapel. Lily could still remember the café, though she’d never been there since. She remembered the long walk up steep stairs and picking at the pearl in the inlay of the wood
tabletop. The dark, ornate chandeliers, with their silhouettes of rolling dragons and black orchids, looked too heavy to be held up by the ceiling. Lily remembered the cold, white sky bright in the cross-shaped windows. There’d been some stained glass in the panes, reminding Lily of church.

“It will be a love letter from Daddy,” Mabel told Lily, treating Lily like she was an infant needing consoling and assurance. Lily wanted to sock Mabel in the jaw for it.

“No,” Lily’s mother said. She started to cry and she pressed a paper napkin to her cheek. “No love letters. He doesn’t love me. Why should he love me? Would you?” Lily never knew what to do when her mother cried, when she asked the questions that made no sense, so she did what she always did, which was to look down and wait for Mabel to do something. Mabel finally reached across the table and gently stroked the rabbit fur. “I wish I wouldn’t cry in front of my children,” her mother said, trying to smile.

Lily wished she wouldn’t either. No matter how often her mother cried, Lily never got used to it. When her mother would fall apart, and her mother might fall apart in the middle of anything, Lily couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think. Sometimes Lily would start crying too, and sometimes that worked to make her mother stop.

At that lunch at King Fong’s that day, all three of them sat there distraught, their cosmetics-counter makeovers streaming down their faces, staining the collars of their new blouses. As Lily looked down at her hands and her chewed nails, she saw the price tag still dangling from the cuff.

Good news actually did arrive by mail a few days later, just as the fortune cookie predicted. They’d entered a raffle at the department store and each of them had won a free set-and-style from the hair salon at the back of the store, and the pink coupons featuring a cartoon lady in ridiculously big curlers came to their grandmother’s house in a pink envelope. By that time, however, they’d moved back into the apartment in town, and they actually stayed with their father through the rest of that winter and most of that summer and never made it back to that department store. It had relieved Lily to watch the coupons over the months fade and curl in the sun on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.

JORDAN
, in a dark blue suit with baggy trousers, his hand-painted tie depicting long-legged women in polka-dot bathing suits, brought down a bucket of ice and a bottle of whiskey for the Manhattans. In his back pocket, he carried a bottle of apple cider. Jordan liked all the sweet drinks, all the coolers flavored like soda pop, and the ices with pieces of fruit. But Lily thought booze should taste like dirt and smoke and wood, and she preferred bourbon or a dark beer.

“
When ’arf of your bullets fly wide in the ditch
,” Jordan quoted from somewhere, examining the portable martini glass, “
don’t call your martini a cross-eyed old bitch.
”

Mabel carried the sweet vermouth. She looked pretty but too thin in a clingy dress that changed colors from blue to green to purple as she moved in the candlelight. When their
mother abandoned them with their lazy grandmother, all the farmers’ wives and widows in the area left recipes to encourage their grandmother to cook, to fatten Mabel up. When looking at the yellowed recipe cards, Lily had dreamed of life in their warm little homes, of pictures of Jesus on the walls and the smell of cinnamon and clove in the kitchens.

Mabel put the bottle on the table and opened her other hand to let five chokecherries roll out. A tree on the other side of a fence down the hill dropped the fruit onto their land every late summer. “I didn’t have any maraschinos,” Mabel said.

Lily ate the sour chokecherry from around its tiny pit, and with the sharp taste she saw her father standing in the pasture, tearing his jeans on barbed wire, the muscles in his arms straining as he reached up to pull down a branch. Even with the branch bent, Lily still couldn’t reach the chokecherries, and he’d shake the branch, and she’d try to catch them as they rained in front of her. Because of the sandburs that stuck in Lily’s socks, her father would carry her back across the pasture. She’d lay her head on his shoulder and press her lips against his neck, touching her tongue to the salt of his sweat.

“Do you think our mother knows?” Lily said, dropping a chokecherry into the Manhattan that Jordan shook together for her. “About why Daddy did it?” It was a question Lily and Mabel had passed back and forth between each other for years, a question worked smooth like sea glass.

Mom must know something
was Mabel’s usual answer, but tonight she simply said, “No.” Mabel took a ribbon of frosting
from the cake and ate it, then sipped her Manhattan, cringing from the bite of the whiskey. “What could she know, really?”

“Seems to me,” Lily said, “she’d have some thoughts.”

“He had children too young,” Mabel said. “Married too young. He was as young as you are now.”

“This isn’t so young,” Lily said, though she couldn’t imagine having a baby to look after. She could still remember taking baths in the kitchen sink, her mother washing her hair with a bar of soap. Her own childhood was still fresh in her mind. “How old were you that one birthday?”

“Eight,” Mabel said, knowing exactly what Lily was talking about.

“You ever hear about Mabel’s eighth birthday?” Lily asked Jordan, and though he nodded, Lily talked about it anyway. Lily put her bare feet up onto Jordan’s knees, and crossed her ankles. “Grandpa had died not too long before, but Grandma still had a bull in the pasture. Daddy had helped her sell it, so he put it into the back of the pickup, and me and Mabel and Mom all crammed into the front with Dad to take it to some farm down the road.”

“There were tall railings up the sides of the truck,” Mabel said, “and the bull broke through them and ran away.” They followed the bull as it ran into town trampling through somebody’s backyard tomato plants, disrupting a picnic in a park, tearing down Chinese lanterns and a badminton net. Mabel always denied it, but she had cried as the night dragged on, the bull ruining her birthday. But Lily had loved watching something from her tiny life shake awake the whole sleepy town.

“I forget how you caught him,” Jordan said.

“We forget too,” Lily said. “We think we may have lost him somewhere.” It tired her to fill in all the details. She liked how she could just merely suggest something to Mabel, and she could watch the recognition in her face. There hadn’t been much of anything that they hadn’t seen together.

Lily reached over and tugged a bit on the sleeve of Jordan’s suit coat, covering his wrist. She’d have to do something about that scar if she was going to show him off to her mother. “I need to find that last letter Mom wrote to us,” Lily said.

Mabel just looked at Lily over the top of the Manhattan she only barely sipped. “Why?” she finally said.

“I need the return address.” Lily was tempted to invite Mabel along on her journey, but she knew better. Mabel, her mother, everyone, needed to understand that Lily needed no mothering. They would all see that, in spite of everything, Lily had turned out a good, capable person.

“I was just reading in the paper,” Mabel said, “of a woman in Mexico bitten by a brown recluse spider. They had to cut off her arms and her legs and part of her nose.”

Lily straightened up in her chair, ready to tell Mabel of her plans. “Mabel . . .” she started, pushing her glasses down on her nose so that everything blurred. She nervously pulled at a loose string at the hem of her dress. “Mabel.”

“I already know that you’re going to see her,” Mabel said. “If that’s what you’re about to tell me. Jordan told me already. About the two of you going to find Mom.”

Lily pushed her glasses back up to see Mabel scowling and concentrating on picking her chokecherry from where it had sunk to the bottom of her Manhattan. Lily looked over at Jordan who couldn’t even meet her eyes; he fussed with the end of his necktie. The cool demeanor Lily had practiced all afternoon turned into a migraine headache and tiny bolts of colored light in the corners of her vision. Was everything intimate just gossip to him? He wanted Mabel’s attention too much of the time, and it was beginning to make Lily too sick of it all. “Fuck you,” Lily said, lifting her feet to kick Jordan’s knee. “I could fucking beat the crap out of you,” giving him a whack at the side of his head with her open palm.

“Could you not,” Jordan said, drowsy-sounding, cringing, “not, you know, slug me?”

“Jordan,” Mabel said. “Maybe you should leave us alone for a few minutes.”

“Fuck off, Mabel,” Lily said. “He’s my boyfriend, I’ll tell him when he stays and when he goes, all right?”

Jordan started, “I should just tell you . . .”

“Oh, just get the fuck out of here, Jordan,” Lily said. “I mean, I have so fucking had it with you right now.” She immediately regretted having said it, and she stumbled over the last few words of her outburst.
Tranquility
, Lily thought, hearing the useless recitation she had found in some self-help paperback someone had left behind in the bakery.
Peacefulness. Serenity
.

As Jordan stood, shaky as if on new legs, Lily wanted to
grab the lapel of his pathetic suit and demand that he ignore her and her fits.

“If you’ll excuse me, Birthday Girl,” Jordan said, brushing his fingers against the cheek of the always-quiet, always-collected Mabel. The whole bus creaked as Jordan headed toward the door, the slow tap of the high heels of his fake-alligator cowboy boots echoing. Lily lowered her head, again disgusted by her own tears, which always welled up when she most wanted composure. She lifted her glasses from her cheeks to wipe at her eyes.

“Lily,” Mabel said softly, reaching across the table to touch at her elbow. Lily wished she didn’t always bring out the sugary sweet pushiness in her sister. Lily had planned for it to be the other way around that night, for Mabel to be angry over Lily’s decision to go find their ungrateful mother and for Lily to remain distant and consoling.
Mabel
, Lily would have said, gently taking her hand.

Lily thought of again reminding Mabel of that day their mother left them. Mabel had screamed and bawled, stumbling along the front walk of the antique shop, grasping at her mother’s quick scissor-stepping legs. “Don’t,” their mother said, pushing at Mabel’s head. Mabel grabbed the back strap of her mother’s sandal, and she slapped Mabel’s hand away. “Goddamn it, don’t. I’m going to trip.”

Lily had stayed on the front porch, not fully understanding. Her mother had not announced her departure, had only suddenly appeared in makeup and brushed hair, freshly ironed skirt and blouse, a small suitcase packed. As her mother
rushed through the shop, her eyes to the ground, Lily sneezed from the breeze of heavy perfume. Mabel looked up from her comic book.

Mabel had known right away and had fallen suddenly into a fierce fit of crying. When their mother finally reached her car, she tossed her suitcase into the backseat, and Mabel reached in and tried to grab it back out. Their mother wrestled it from Mabel and tossed it back in. Mabel tried to get it back, but their mother held on to Mabel’s sleeve in order to close the door.

“Give me a break, Mabel,” her mother shouted at her. When the door slammed was when everything stopped. Mabel’s screaming stopped; their mother’s leaving stopped. They both stood still there next to the car, looking at each other with fear. Lily hadn’t realized it just then, but the tip of Mabel’s finger had caught in the door, and she’d pulled it out to hold her hand shaking before her. Her mouth was open wide, her jaw shivering, readying for the worst shriek of pain Lily would ever hear.

Though their mother lifted Mabel into her arms and seated the violently kicking girl in the front seat of the car, though she sped her to the emergency room for a few minutes of wrapping and splinting then brought her back to the shop to put her to bed and to lie beside her, nothing had changed her intentions. She slipped away for good after Mabel cried herself to sleep.

“You’ve been a mess yourself from time to time,” Lily said, leaning back from the table. She took the lacy handkerchief
that Mabel offered. Lily dried her cheeks, then held the hanky in her lap, running her finger along the cursive of the name of its original owner, “Penelope,” embroidered at the edge.

“Lily,” Mabel said, “why do you even want to see her? She doesn’t care about us. She hasn’t even called us in years. Did she even send me a birthday card? Does she even
remember
that it’s my birthday?”

“So you mean to tell me,” Lily said, “that you don’t have the least bit of interest in seeing her again? Ever? There’s nothing you want to know about her? Nothing you want to ask her?”

Mabel picked off a little corner of the birthday cake and ate it. “You’re not going to learn anything. She’s not going to tell you anything useful.”

Lily tore off a bit of cake for herself. “You don’t have to hate her so much. Our lives aren’t ruined or anything. There’s nothing wrong with us.”

“There’s nothing wrong, I know,” Mabel repeated, almost beneath her breath.

“I think she meant to come back, don’t you?” Lily didn’t wait to let Mabel disagree. “I just think time may have passed differently for her. What seemed like forever to us, probably went very quickly for her. And, you know,” Lily said, tearing off another edge of the cake, excited to be at her mother’s defense, “it could be that she’s been waiting for us to come find her.”

“What the fuck were we supposed to do?” Mabel said,
raising her voice. “Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases? With our grade-school watercolors . . . or our, you know, our fucking macaroni pictures for her to put on her fucking refrigerator? We were babies.”

Lily was so relieved to hear Mabel’s voice shake, to hear her sigh and cuss and to see her twisting her hair. Lily cocked her head with Mabel’s gesture of concern and reached across the table to touch at her elbow.