Siri Hustvedt: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“It’s open,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep.

Without turning around, Lily saw Mabel enter the room in the mirror. The old woman walked quickly, her long robe sweeping the floor, and stopped when she reached the chair.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to catch you before work and ask you how the play was going and tell you that if you’re still having trouble with the part, I might be able to help. You know I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream for, well, close to thirty years, and it struck me last night that I could coach you. Hermia’s a wonderful part, really, and you’re perfect for it. What do you think?” Mabel delivered this speech fast and with few breaths, addressing Lily’s reflection in the mirror, all the while waving her hands for emphasis, and once her fingers brushed the top of Lily’s head. Then she let her hands fall and rested them lightly on Lily’s shoulders. They were both silent for several seconds, and Lily stared at their faces in the mirror and at Marilyn’s between them, and she thought that the three of them looked strange together. Mabel’s small heart-shaped face, with deep wrinkles on her forehead and around her eyes and mouth, had an intense expression that could have been either defiance or concentration. Marilyn wasn’t smiling either, but her lips were parted to show teeth, and her fingers indented the flesh of her right breast. There was something too perfect about the way the three of them were framed in the mirror, and it bothered Lily. It created an annoying stillness that made her think suddenly of things that were alive and things that were dead, and she shrugged her shoulders to release herself from Mabel’s touch.

“Monday’s good after work. I need help. I remember my lines, but half the time I don’t know what they mean.”

The woman clasped her hands. “We’ll have tea first.”

Mabel’s happiness irritated Lily for some reason, and she said nothing more.

Mabel left the room. She didn’t say good-bye. Instead, she recited some of Lily’s lines from the play: “Dark night, that from the eye his function takes.” Lily saw Mabel put a finger to her ear. “The ear more quick of comprehension makes; / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense.”

The woman’s voice was thin and old, but her delivery had a nuance and understanding Lily knew she lacked completely. That’s why she did it, she thought, to show me how natural and good she is. Isn’t that what Mrs. Wright had been telling her in rehearsal? “Just speak in your natural voice,” and Lily had thought to herself: But what is my natural voice?

* * *

The early customers who straggled into the Ideal Cafe were all men, all regulars, and none of them had much to say. Between five and six the place was pretty quiet. The men who came in during that first hour didn’t have wives or girlfriends, but every one of them would have had a story to tell if he’d chosen to tell it, a story about the accident, death, bad break or quirk of personality that had turned him into what he was now: a solitary character who arrived at the crack of dawn to eat his breakfast alone in a room full of other solitary characters who were eating their breakfasts alone.

Pete Lund usually arrived first, after chores on his big farm east of town. Pete’s wife had died of breast cancer a couple years back, and he had taken to eating his meals out. A year ago when Lily first started working, he had placed his order aloud, and it still stood: a cup of black coffee, two eggs, scrambled, and three pieces of white toast with strawberry jam, not grape jelly. After that, he hadn’t bothered to speak. When Lily approached him, he nodded at her, and she put in the order. Harold Hrdlicka, who had bought the old Muus farm, took his eggs sunny-side up with hash browns, and Earl Butenhoff from the Stuart Hotel ate a bowl of Wheaties before his eggs — once over easy — and finished off his meal with a fat, usually half-smoked stogie that he carried around in his shirt pocket. By five-thirty that morning they had all arrived, each one sitting in his own booth waiting for food. Pete was staring over the counter at Vince’s collection of “semiantique” windup toys. Harold was reading the Webster Chronicle, and Earl studied the tabletop between repeated throat-clearings — during which he spat gobs of yellow mucus into a huge, stained handkerchief that he pulled in and out of his pants pocket. From the kitchen, Lily could hear Vince singing “Anything Goes” in a low voice. She could hear the rain outside and smell bacon and sausage on the grill, and from the street came an odor of wet pavement, grass, and what she supposed were worms crawling onto the sidewalk, and as she moved from table to table with her pot of coffee, she felt happy and hummed along with Vince under her breath.

Martin Petersen walked into the cafe around six, took his usual seat in the booth by the window and started staring at Lily. Every time he came in for breakfast, he stared. She was used to it, not just from Martin, but from lots of people. She had suffered through braces on her teeth, breasts that wouldn’t grow and a reputation as a tomboy, but the year she turned fourteen, it had changed, and now after five years she had grown used to her looks and the staring that went with them. Sometimes she liked it, and sometimes she didn’t, but she had learned to pretend that she didn’t notice. Martin, however, was different. He always studied her calmly and deliberately as if it were his job to look at her, and because she couldn’t penetrate what he meant by those long stares, Martin’s eyes made her a little uncomfortable. But at the same time, she felt oddly drawn to him. Martin was mysterious. She had heard rumors that he was gay and rumors that he was a person who had no interest in sex. Linda Haugen had once whispered to her in confirmation class that Martin had been “born both” and that “they took the girl half away.” But this had to be nonsense. The secret of Martin wasn’t his body, but it wasn’t his mind either. He gave off something peculiar — an air of hidden knowledge or intuition that sometimes made Lily feel he was looking at her from a great distance even though he was only inches away.

Lily couldn’t remember not knowing Martin Petersen. The house where Martin lived as a child and where he still lived wasn’t far from Lily’s own childhood house on the outskirts of town, and she and Martin had sometimes played together in the woods or near the creek. He had stuttered even worse then than he did now. A couple of times, she had taken Martin home with her to play, but Lily had never gone to Martin’s house. There had been something wrong with his father, and whatever it was, it had made Lily’s mother nervous enough to leave it unexplained. When Lily was eight, Martin’s father, Rufus Petersen, had killed his dog — a bitch about to give birth. He shot her and left the bleeding carcass down by the creek, where Lily’s father had found the poor mutt and buried her along with her unborn pups. Lily remembered the blood on her father’s shirt from the dog, and remembered that he had cursed Rufus Petersen with uncommon violence. She had played with Martin less often after that, but he rode the same school bus that she did, and she remembered he was teased mercilessly for his stutter. Once Andy Feenie and Pete Borum had beaten up Martin behind Longfellow School, and she remembered him coming around the brick building, bawling loudly as blood poured down his shirt from his nose. In high school, Martin had kept mostly to himself, and he and Lily hadn’t talked to each other much, but she had felt connected to him anyway, and sometimes they had run into each other at the creek, where Martin fled his house to read books and be alone. His father had left the family by then, and his young mother who didn’t look young was sick with leukemia, and his older brother and sister were fending for themselves and, some said, running wild. Mrs. Petersen died during Martin’s last year of junior high school, and there had been a mess with the welfare people. Hard knocks, Lily thought, one after the other. The other Petersen kids had left town, but Martin had stayed on in the family house and was working as a handyman. The word was that he was very good at it. Reliable and honest, they said, and people were calling him all the time to fix this or that, to do some painting or small carpentry work, and Lily had a feeling that life was better for him now that he was grown up.