Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

She didn’t know she had slept until she woke to the feeling of fingers moving across her forehead. Half awake, she thought it was her mother, and she began to say “Mom,” but didn’t finish the word. She heard Ed’s voice saying, “Don’t do anything crazy. Just stay where you are.”

Lily opened her eyes and saw Mabel withdraw her hand quickly. She was lying on Ed’s bed, and outside it was night. Lily looked at Mabel. “What’s going on?”

Mabel looked tired, and her disheveled hair fell around her face. “You didn’t have rehearsal, so we let you sleep. Ed carried you to the bed. You didn’t stir.”

Lily sat up. “Who’s on the phone?”

“Dolores Wachobski, I believe,” Mabel said, raising her eyebrows and twisting her mouth to one side. “She seems to be having some kind of emergency.”

Lily looked at Ed. He had hung up the telephone and was standing. He rubbed his mouth.

Lily said, “What does she want?”

“She’s had a bad scare, more ghosts and mishegoss. ”

Lily puzzled over his last word but didn’t ask him about it. “You’re going over there?”

Ed walked toward her. “There’s no one else, Lily.” He reached into his pocket, feeling for car keys, and she heard them jingle.

“I’m going with you,” Lily said.

Ed looked at her. “I honestly don’t know what to expect. She’s plastered and raving.”

“I don’t care,” Lily said.

“I don’t care either,” Mabel said.

* * *

Ed drove to the trailer park, which lay on the riverbank across from the Dairy Queen with its huge illuminated ice-cream cone. Through her open window, Lily smelled the water and felt the station wagon rock on uneven ground. A turquoise trailer shone for a moment in the headlights before it disappeared with the dying sound of the motor.

Ed pounded on the door of Dolores’s trailer, and when no one answered, he walked inside. The long room Lily saw from behind Ed wasn’t at all what she had expected. In the first place, it was very clean. In the second place, it was fussy. There were knicknacks everywhere: carefully arranged porcelain children, angels, dogs, cats and horses, a large blue-and-white Madonna with child, a big bowl of cat’s-eye marbles, and a number of objects with little sayings or slogans on them: a small stuffed Cupid held up a sign with the word “LUV” on it. “B.S. ARTIST” was written on a miniature license plate that hung over the sink. “Woman of Power” had been stitched into a needlepoint pillow that lay on Dolores’s carefully made bed, and as Ed headed toward the bathroom to check it, Lily noticed yet another sign — a wooden heart with the words “Little Girl’s Room” carved into it.

Just before they left the trailer to search outside, Lily noticed a photograph propped on the dresser. She could feel Ed’s anxiety and saw that Mabel had already gone outside, so she glanced at it for only a moment, but the little girl in the picture, dressed in a fluffy white confirmation dress, was obviously Dolores, and the slender woman beside her had to be her mother. As she headed for the door behind Ed, Lily understood that she had not deduced the identity of Dolores’s mother, but had recognized her, not from life, but from Ed’s cartoon figure in the narrative boxes above Dolores’s painted head.

They each took a different direction. Lily walked toward the river, trudging between rows of trailers as she listened to a disc jockey drawl out the name of a song. Lily felt the gravel road end, heard the music stop abruptly and waded into the tall grass near the riverbank. Ed was calling Dolores’s name, but Lily couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth. A mosquito whined in her ear and she swatted it blindly. The trees and the water ahead darkened suddenly and, looking up, she saw a cloud drift across the moon. The grass made her legs itch, and she bent down to give them a good scratch before she tromped forward and felt a hard object roll under her sneaker. Lily squatted in the grass, reached out for the thing and felt the cool, round glass of a bottle in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside it, and when she raised it to her nose, it smelled of whiskey. As she crouched in the grass holding the half-empty bottle, the moon came out from behind the cloud and lit the tops of the trees along the river. Through them she could see the shine of river water, and then, only feet away to her right, a white hand was curled in a loose fist. She crawled toward it. Dolores was lying sprawled out on the flattened grass, face up. She’s breathing, Lily thought, looking at the woman’s huge breasts move up and down. “Vomit, piss and booze,” Lily thought and held her breath against the stench. The woman’s skirt was hiked up around her waist, and her pale flesh glowed through a big rip in her stocking. Lily leaned over Dolores and whispered, “Get up!” But Dolores didn’t move. Taking the woman by the shoulders, Lily started to shake her. She shook gently at first, waiting for a response, but the woman’s head seemed as heavy as a bowling ball. Lily shook harder. “Wake up!” she whispered. Nothing happened, and looking down at Dolores’s unconscious face, Lily felt a surge of irritation. She shook Dolores violently. The woman’s head thumped against the ground as Lily threw here entire strength into shaking her, and that was when she realized she was enjoying it, that this shaking had an energy, a life all its own, and that it felt so good she didn’t want to stop, and she shook more. Dolores opened one eye, and Lily saw a glimmer of liquid white. The woman’s mouth parted and her lower lip drooped. Lily let go of Dolores’s shoulders, but the flabby, stupid expression on the woman’s face hadn’t gone away. She looked at the hole in the black stocking and slapped it. When Lily withdrew her hand, her palm was stinging, but she lifted her arm to do it again. At the same moment she heard Dolores groan, and the sound startled her. She hadn’t expected her to wake up at all. But that’s what was happening. Dolores had raised herself up on one elbow and was staring at Lily through eyes that looked like illuminated slits in the night.

Lily started to shout for Ed and Mabel. She called out their names until her voice was hoarse, and even after they answered her, she kept yelling their names over and over again, as if she was the one who needed to be saved. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she wiped them away when she saw Ed racing toward her. He puffed hard as he knelt over Dolores, who raised herself to a sitting position, threw her arms around him and began blubbering words Lily couldn’t understand.

Not until Dolores was lying on her bed did Lily see how sick she looked. Her skin was flat white, her eyes red, and the flesh around them a curious shade of violet. Running makeup had turned her cheeks black and green, and partly digested food littered her naked chest and the front of her blouse.

Mabel was the one who wiped Dolores’s face with wet paper towels, who cleaned her chest and arms, who removed her filthy clothes and ruined stockings and managed to get her under the sheets. Throughout her cleanup, Dolores moaned the word “No.” She tossed back and forth on the bed, her movements so meaningless that it took Lily a while to understand that the woman wanted to sit up. Finally, she managed to raise her body by herself and yelled at them, “Look at me! Am I cut?” Her head flopped forward. “Am I cut?” Then she started to cry, and Lily found the crying much worse than the moaning or shouting.

Mabel crawled onto the bed and grabbed hold of Dolores’s shoulders. She looked very small and thin beside Dolores, but her decisive movements compensated for her weakness. She pushed Dolores back down on the bed, grasped the woman’s flailing hands and held them tightly. “You’re not cut,” she said. “Do you hear me? You’re not cut.”