The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (7 page)

“What?” her mother said, as if she hadn’t expected a voice, as if she’d only been asking the room or a ghost in the room. She then left the plates on an old piano bench long since separated from its piano, and she skulked away. Mabel was very hungry and ate both pancakes before Lily woke.

Lily sat up in bed. “What flew up out of the ditch?” she said, in a choked, waking voice.

“It was a crane,” Mabel told Lily.

“It was something worse than a crane,” Lily said, pulling at a sheet and covering her naked body up to her chin. Mabel thought Lily might be right; all the cranes had passed through weeks before, before it had even turned spring. Hundreds had died with ice in their feathers. Mabel had seen it on the news—a man lifting a frozen crane from a frozen tree, then tossing the carcass atop other carcasses in the back of a pickup truck. It broke Mabel’s heart even more to think of her crane in the ditch, having survived the ice only to get hit on her family’s Sunday morning drive.

“I’m hungry,” Lily said, standing from the bed with her sheet still wrapped around her. She hid behind the closet door to change into a sundress with a daisy print. Lily had newly found this modesty, and Mabel was convinced she was only pretending. She just wanted to hurt Mabel, to hide her round, plump body away and leave Mabel alone with her terrible bones and sickly olive skin. The old farmers’ wives and widows frequently descended upon the house to weigh and measure Mabel. Though they never marked down any measurement, they were certain, with each visit, some fraction of a fraction of an inch had dissolved from her body. They examined her in her underwear. One old woman, who wore long skirts and always held a white stone pipe, constantly unlit, in her long fingers, would tap that pipe at the knobs of Mabel’s shoulders and elbows, sending a ringing down through all her
bones. But Lily they pinched and adored, admiring of the way she moved indifferently about them all like a rowdy cherub.

In the few months since their father had died, Lily had wanted to be close to Mabel. They had spoken that winter in a mock sign language, wiggling their fingers in the air and pretending to understand each other. They’d faked silent conversation at breakfast and at dinner, even outside in the cold, their fingers hidden by mittens. But now, with the spring thaw, Lily had changed.
I’ll only love you more
, she seemed to be saying,
if you don’t look at me, if you don’t speak to me, if you don’t touch me, if you don’t know me
.

Mabel followed Lily into the hall, and down to their mother’s room. The door was closed and locked. Lily pressed her lips to the keyhole. “We’re hungry,” she said. Their mother spent much of her time sleeping in her bed. The only reason they’d gone out that Easter morning was because Pastor Lenny had been by a few days before. He’d told their mother that Mabel and Lily desperately needed the guidance of church. He’d spoken so loudly, his voice coming up from so deep in his throat and his chest, it had seemed he’d blow the whole house down with his prayer. If she and Lily were minister’s daughters, Mabel thought, they could steal a wafer and lick it. They could explore all the mysteries of the altar—take a sip from the baptismal font, blow out the everlasting flame and inhale its curl of smoke.

“Come downstairs,” Mabel said. She felt guilty for eating Lily’s pancake. “I’ll find you something.”

Downstairs, Lily sat at a table in a corner of the shop, and
Mabel went to the kitchen. The kitchen was nothing but a narrow closet lit by one faint bulb. Mabel looked into the refrigerator and found only uncooked ham wrapped in newspaper and a jar of apple rings. “She has to eat something,” Mabel said aloud, plucking the mold from a slice of bread, then opening a can of sardines found in a drawer.

The table was still set for tea from the day before. In the teapot, tea bags steeped in black water and a horsefly did a dead-man’s float in someone’s half-empty cup. The day before, as usual, Lily had ignored the old women who gathered with their grandmother for bridge and stood on a chair with a key to wind all the clocks on the wall. It was as if Lily knew her clock-winding would drop the women into quiet and hesitance, would turn them reflective, pondering what a young girl winding clocks might mean to their old lives. Above the thick ticking grown noisome in the room, Mrs. Beard said, “Mr. Beard thinks he’s finished his breakfast before I’ve even cooked it. He’s dressed for bed hours before he’s tired. He doesn’t even know a clock anymore.” As she spoke of how she was teaching him time again, her spotted and wrinkled fingers gracefully drew a clock in the air, creating a round face and the long and short hands, casting fragile shadows against the wall. But Mabel was anxious for old age; she admired the old women’s resignation and knowledge. She thought it must be a powerful thing to know for certain that you wouldn’t die young.

When Mabel brought Lily her sandwich on a plate, Lily said, “Take it away.” She performed a lethargic puppet show
for herself with two raggedy puppets that normally hung from nails in the wall. “Fish,” Lily said in the shrill, disgusted voice of the puppet on her left hand, a sailor in a cap. The sailor lay a lazy kiss against the head of the other puppet, a Spanish senorita. Then Lily lowered her hands and let the puppets slip off to the floor.

“I thought you said you were hungry,” Mabel said. “You have to eat.”

Lily held her fat fingers in the air, pinching at the imagined lid of a pot, holding its handle, then pantomimed the pouring of tea. She smiled sweetly and mouthed polite conversation to the absent guests. She then expertly peeled a fictional orange.

Annoyed by being left out of Lily’s silent party, Mabel began to noisily clear the table, stacking cups and saucers onto a tray. Bent at the back, she carried the tray to the kitchen. She happened to look out the window and saw people in the old Riordan house on the hill. One wall of the abandoned house had fallen away with the weight of the last heavy snow, and all its insides were exposed. There was nothing to see but the bare wood of walls and floors, the squares where doors and windows had been. But only a few days before, as Mabel had walked up the hill, examining in the palm of her hand the husk of a locust, she happened to glance up just as the sun shifted. The house filled, for only a second, with a sharp light, and shadows of things not there fell and moved.

Mabel took the opera glasses from the windowsill and looked at the people in the Riordan house. They tiptoed over
the floor like walking across an icy pond. They bent, picked things up, put things in their pockets. Mabel hated that they found things to take; she’d been through the house several times and had found only the chipped enamel of a piano key. One woman even climbed the stairs to the second floor, something Mabel had been much too afraid to do. The woman appeared weightless and undisturbed walking across the weak wood planks of the floor that was barely there.

Suddenly, Mabel worried that these women were birdwatchers, part of one of the many groups that passed through looking for cranes and herons and prairie chickens. She put the opera glasses in the pocket of her robe and headed for the front door, determined to go find her wounded crane before these women did. She wanted to be the one to care for it, to nurse it back into flight.

A fire engine, as it wailed past, shook the road next to the shop, and the rows of empty perfume bottles and atomizers jingled against each other. At the kitchen window, Mabel saw the smoke rising from a neighboring field. In the last week, farmers had been burning the old stalks from their fields before plowing, and sometimes the wind, with a mean-spirited twist, would shift directions and send the flame somewhere unintended. Mabel already missed winter, missed breaking the brittle stumps of cornstalks beneath her heavy winter boots. In winter, when the wind blew and the snow on the plains broke like dust, she couldn’t tell where the ground ended and the sky began. But on quiet, windless days, Mabel could nearly hear the smoke leaving the chimney.

As Mabel looked for her coat at the front of the shop, Lily stood, grinning, in front of the wall of clocks. “What?” Mabel said. Lily looked Mabel directly in the eyes for the first time in weeks. She held something in her mouth. “What do you have?” Mabel said. Lily kept silent, then slowly pointed to the Swiss clock that hadn’t worked for years. On the tiny wheel beneath the face, the tiny woodsman still stood, his ax still lifted, but the little girl with braids was gone.

Mabel had always wanted to steal the little girl from the clock, to hide it in a chamois bag. Lily tugged on the sleeve of Mabel’s robe, the little wooden girl on her stuck-out tongue. Mabel wanted to rip the tongue clean from Lily’s head.

“Why did you take that?” Mabel said, but she already knew the answer. Lily broke the clock because Mabel wouldn’t. How had Lily even known Mabel wanted the little girl? It seemed it should have been nothing but inconsequential to everyone else. But Lily, with her hateful instinct, knew. Lily took her tongue, and the girl, back into her mouth.

Mabel made a fist, lifted it to her shoulder, and punched Lily. She only barely hit Lily’s ear, but it startled Lily, and she fell, hitting her head against the table before dropping to the floor. Lily’s glasses were knocked from her face, and Mabel noticed a new scratch beneath her eye that slowly reddened with blood. But Lily didn’t cry; she sat with her mouth open, nodding her head quickly like a clucking chicken. When she brought her hands up to press at her own throat, Mabel realized she was choking on the wooden girl. Mabel was too
frightened to scream, though she wanted to, and she spun around in a circle, looking all along the walls of the shop for some suggestion of what to do. Lily opened her mouth wide to Mabel, as if expecting her to reach in.

Mabel found her voice and shouted up the stairs for her mother, uncertain that she would even respond. But her mother did come running from her room, her door slamming into the wall as she threw it open. She hurried down the stairs and, needing no explanation, she put her hands beneath Lily’s arms and lifted her to her feet, then put her hands above Lily’s stomach and squeezed her as if she was a bagpipe. The little wooden girl popped from Lily’s mouth and flew away to be lost in the clutter of the shop.

“That’s it,” their mother said matter-of-factly as Lily coughed. She licked her thumb and wiped the blood from Lily’s cheek.

“Is she all right?” Mabel said, but she was already so relieved. She was relieved that Lily no longer choked and that it was her mother who saved her. Her mother’s cheeks had color, and she stood up straight and ran her fingers through Lily’s hair, scowling at the terrible rat’s nest it had become.

“When was the last time you had a bath?” she said, kneeling to take Lily into her arms, pressing her lips against her forehead. “You’re all right,” she told her, sounding convincing for the first time in weeks. “You’re lucky. People choke on things all the time. I should know, I used to be a waitress.”

“She choked on the little Swiss girl from the clock,” Mabel said, gently pinching Lily’s shoulder as apology for hitting her. “I wonder where it went?”

“We need to find it,” their mother said, jumping up and setting Lily on her feet. “We need to put it back on the clock before your grandmother gets back. You girls have to stop running roughshod over this place.”

Punish us
, Mabel thought.
Spank us. Correct us
. As the three of them moved about the shop, they picked things up and put things back and quickly became distracted from their mission. Lily tried on an old felt hat and pulled the lace of it down over her face. Mabel’s mother sorted through a box of reading spectacles, testing different pairs by holding them before her eyes and reading from a framed list of hotel laws. Mabel opened the drawer of an apothecary and took from it a cornshuck doll, its skirt half eaten by mites. Mabel then sat on the floor next to a chest full of single, unmatched shoes, and she tried each one on. Lily pressed the dents from the plastic head of a doll.

They lifted things, examined them, then put them in the wrong places; they scooted aside tables and chairs to make paths for themselves; they picked up boxes to look in the boxes beneath them. The shop, a secondhand shop where nothing ever changed hands, where the prices had all faded from the tags, possessed an order and permanence Mabel relied upon. It was as if the layers of dust and webs that covered everything anchored everything to the floor. Mabel had even hidden things of her own in the shop—there was a letter,
from her Aunt Phyll, folded up and tucked behind a hat band; inside a toaster was a honeymoon photo of her mother and father in front of Mount Rushmore. Mabel even kept the pieces of a busted record, a recording, made in a booth at the state fair, of her father singing an old song—“Chuck E.’s in Love.” Mabel had hidden the pieces inside a long, white glove inside a long, yellow box.

Lily’s act of theft, Mabel thought, her taking the little wooden girl, had changed something in the house, had changed the gravity in the room, lifting their mother from her bed. Mabel looked to the ceiling, worried about the chairs and rolls of carpet tied to the rafters with frayed rope and knots that hadn’t been tightened in years.

They all quickly bored of their search and collapsed into a dusty sofa. Mabel rested her head in her mother’s lap; Lily lay against her shoulder. Mabel felt so at ease. For weeks, she had been too worried about them all to feel at all safe. She feared that, with her mother shut up in her room, her grandmother off robbing old farms and churches, that someone would sneak in to steal Lily away, to molest her; they wouldn’t take Mabel because she was too thin and prickly, but Lily they would find adorable. Someday, Lily would be found in the city, feral and dirty and mute. Mabel would be brought in to coax her from her silence. She would dress up in a gray wool skirt and a white blouse with a bit of lace at the tips of the collar. She’d ask private questions only a sister could ask. She’d ask Lily in a quiet voice, “Where did they touch you?” She’d ask, “What did they make you touch?”

Lily took the plastic cork from a small vial and sprinkled some perfume on her wrist. She ran her wrist along her neck and chest. She then held the vial before her eyes to try to read the faint lettering, but even with her glasses so thick, she seemed unable to make it out. “Wild Skin,” Lily pretended to read, though Mabel could see that it said only “Do not drink.”