Siri Hustvedt: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Only a few minutes later, when Lily was serving the Bodlers their breakfast and pouring them more coffee, she noticed a brown grocery bag sitting beside Frank in the booth and asked herself what the dirt twins might be hauling around with them. Then she watched Frank grasp his cup and looked down at his thumbnail — a thick, yellow husk — and staring at the fat, dirty nail started her thinking about Helen Bodler.

No one doubted anymore that old man Bodler had buried his wife alive back in 1932, but at the time people thought she’d walked out on him and the twins. Bodler drank. His small farm, like a lot of other farms, was in bad trouble and the theory was he went mad from the strain. Lily remembered her grandmother telling her the story, remembered how she had leaned over the oilcloth on the kitchen table, her voice tense but clear. “Helen wouldn’t’ve left them two little boys and gone off without a word to nobody. She wasn’t that kind. I knew her, and she wasn’t that kind. Mighty pretty woman, too. People said she ran off with the peddler, Ira Cohen. Talk about rubbish. Cohen had a wife and six kids in St. Paul. Where’d he put her? In the back of the cart? The whole thing stank to high heaven from the start.”

They found Helen’s body in 1950. The twins and another man, Jacob Hiner, were digging up the old outhouse on the property and unearthed her skeleton near it. Bodler had already been dead for eleven years. His two sons had fought in Europe, had come home and started up their junk business. Lily didn’t know exactly when they had stopped washing. The army enforced cleanliness, so it must have been sometime after 1945 that the Bodler twins became Filthy Frank and Dirty Dick. Had they married, the gruesome story of their parents might have aged faster, grown distant with children and grandchildren, but there were no more Bodlers. What the two brothers had felt when they discovered their mother’s bones frozen in a position of panic, a position that showed she had tried to claw her way out of her grave, was anybody’s guess. Illegible as stones, the two walked, ate and snorted out as few words as possible.

Then, as she looked up, Lily saw Edward Shapiro standing on the steps outside the Stuart Hotel. Even from that distance, she could see that he was rumpled, as if he had just climbed out of bed. Lily walked toward the window and stopped. She watched the man scratch his leg, and at the same time, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bert waltz into the cafe and let the screen door slam behind her. After tying an apron around her waist, Bert sidled up to Lily and said, “So how’s the Ordeal this morning?” Without waiting for an answer, she surveyed the booths, nodded at the twins and groaned theatrically.

Lily nodded and moved her head to the right so she wouldn’t lose sight of the man on the steps. Bert followed Lily’s eyes and the two women watched him together.

“Absolutely, definitely cheating material if I ever saw it.” Bert gave her wad of gum a snap. “It’s not often I get the urge to sneak out on old Rog’, but that one…,” and without bothering to finish the sentence, Bert shook her head. Then she whistled and turned to Lily. “Poor Hank, he’s in for it.”

“I’m not married to Hank, Bert.”

“Oh yeah, I thought you two were engaged.”

“Not really,” Lily said and held out her left hand. “No ring, see. Anyway, who says I’d have a chance with a guy like that. He must be at least thirty, and he’s an artist, and—”

“Honey,” Bert interrupted her, “with a bod like yours you’ve got a chance with anything male and breathing.” She paused. “Well, what d’ya know, Mr. Tall, Dark and Mysterious is coming over.”

“Nah,” Lily said. “He never comes in here.”

But Edward Shapiro was striding across the street toward them, and Lily grabbed the coffeepot off its heating coil and began to pour coffee into Clarence Sogn’s cup, even though it was nearly full already, and once she had done that, she wiped her hands on her apron for no reason and felt her heart beating and told herself not to be stupid. She didn’t see him, but she heard him come through the door, and at the sound she straightened her back and pulled in her stomach. Just as she turned to look at him and saw him sitting at the counter, she felt a slow, warm sensation between her legs and knew it was blood. Shit, she thought. I never keep track. She stared at Edward Shapiro from behind. He was leaning forward and the fabric of his blue work shirt had tightened across his shoulder blades. She moved her eyes down the back seam of his jeans that disappeared into the red covering of the stool, and she could almost feel his weight. The man was lean, but the idea of his heaviness aroused her. Even if he did see me, he’ll never recognize me, she said to herself and watched Bert pour him a cup of coffee. She wished she were on the other side of the counter with the coffeepot. She wished she didn’t have to run upstairs to her room for a tampon. She waved at Bert, mouthed the word “curse,” raced to the back of the cafe and through the door to the stairwell.

Sitting on the toilet in her apartment, Lily felt grateful to be off her feet. Her jeans and underpants were lying on the floor, and she was looking down at the blood stain on the white material of her underpants, its red brilliant against the denim and the dull blue floor tiles. She didn’t want to move, but after several seconds she reached for her tampons, unwrapped one and pushed it inside her. She glanced down at the blue string between her legs, at her bare knees and the lines of their bones, and had one of those sudden, curious feelings, more sensation than thought, and more familiar to children than adults, that she wasn’t really there in the room at all, that she had been blown out of her own head somewhere else, and that every thing she was looking at was no longer itself, but a kind of inanimate impostor. Lily changed position to get rid of the feeling and then changed into a fresh pair of underpants and jeans.

She opened the back door to the cafe slowly. She wanted to look in on Edward Shapiro at the counter, but he was gone. Instead, she saw Martin only three or four feet in front of her, standing beside the Bodlers’ booth, and at that very second, he was handing Filthy Frank two twenty-dollar bills. Half a minute later, she would have missed the whole transaction. Frank took the money, picked at his greasy shirt pocket and tucked the bills inside. Then he handed Martin the bag. It was the way Martin took the bag that gave Lily a start. As he reached for it, his fingers trembled with expectation, and his eyes rolled upward so that for an instant his pupils disappeared and all she saw was white. His lips parted, and she heard him exhale. Lily didn’t know what she was seeing, but whatever lay inside that dirty grocery bag, it had affected Martin in a way that embarrassed her. She suffered for him, for his oddness, for his not knowing how to act, for that horrible expression that was much too private for a cafe. She pushed the door open, and in her hurry to get past him, accidentally brushed his elbow. Damn, she said to herself as she confirmed that Shapiro had really and truly vanished. She felt a light touch on her shoulder, turned around and saw Martin staring down at her. He stuttered out her name and said, “I’m leaving something for you on the table.”

She glanced down at the bag that Martin was holding in his left hand. “A present for me?” She knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. The question was prompted by irritation with him, and she heard an edge in her voice.

He shook his head, and Lily turned away from him to avoid his face.

She hurried over to Bert and said, “So, what’s he like?”

Bert looked up. “To whom are you referring?” she said with an artificial sniff.