Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Dolores lifted her head and looked at Lily with large, sincere eyes. “Tell the old lady thanks for the food and stuff.”

“What?” Lily said.

“The stuff she brought over to me Sunday morning. It was real neighborly of her. I was pretty low at the time, so I didn’t say much, but she’s a good woman, and I’d like you to tell her so. Tell her I’m glad she told me what she did. She’ll know what I mean.” Dolores smiled sweetly. Then she tossed her long hair over one shoulder and said, “See you around,” her voice lilting with false femininity. She tugged her dress down to her knees, wiggled her buttocks into the seat and turned the key. Lily moved back from the window and would have let Dolores drive off with her bicycle if she hadn’t seen it in the partly opened trunk. “Stop!”

Lily’s screaming at Dolores and the subsequent ordeal of untying the rope and lifting the bicycle out of the trunk didn’t go unnoticed. It wasn’t clear whether Dolores felt the customers in the Ideal Cafe staring at them or whether she saw Beulah Bjornson stop dead in her tracks outside Tiny’s Smoke Shop to watch them. If she did, she didn’t show it, and Lily couldn’t help admiring her obliviousness even if it was just an act. She took her bicycle by the handlebars and said, “Thanks, Dolores.” Then she added, “I mean it,” because for some reason she did.

Wheeling her bicycle toward the cafe window, Lily looked inside. Two middle-aged women in Martin’s booth stared back at her, and before Lily had time to squelch the impulse, she had dropped the kickstand on her bike and was making goggle eyes at them. She stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers. It was a silly, childish thing to do, but looking at those two astonished faces through the glass, Lily couldn’t help feeling it was worth it.

Walking up the stairs, Lily heard scraping noises from Mabel’s apartment. She should be at Ed’s now, Lily thought. Something’s gone wrong. Mabel was sweating when she came to the door, and Lily realized that she had never seen the woman perspire even in the worst heat, but now drops of sweat stood out on her upper lip, and her forehead shone with moisture. She was wearing a big white shirt rolled to the elbows, and her thin white arms were trembling.

“Mabel,” Lily said. “What’s going on?”

“I moved it back.” She gestured at the room with a limp hand and sighed. “The whole room.… I didn’t know where I was anymore. It was so stupid of me. I thought it was time for a revolution, you know, a new order, but I found it awful, just awful.… I was so unhappy with the sofa over there.” She pointed. “It was like trying to learn Russian at fifty-seven. I did try that. My brain had calcified by then, and I simply couldn’t do the cases, much less those sounds. It should have been a lesson to me, but oh, no, I had to be clever and bold and disrupt it all. My nerves simply couldn’t take it, and pushing all that heavy furniture around…”

“You moved the furniture? When did you move the furniture? Are you crazy? You should have asked me to help you.” Lily looked at Mabel’s hands. The knuckles were red and swollen. She studied Mabel’s face. “Dolores says thank you for the food, and she said that I was supposed to tell you she’s glad you told her what you did, that you’d know what she meant.”

“You’ve been to see her, too, have you?” Mabel looked closely at Lily.

“No. I ran into her at Frank and Dick Bodler’s.”

Mabel looked puzzled. “You don’t mean those men with the bags who look like they just crawled out of a mine?”

“Yup,” Lily said and folded her arms. Then she said softly, “Why did you go to see Dolores?”

“I wanted to ask her about Ed and, and the portrait.”

“Why didn’t you ask him?”

“I wanted the other side. And I wanted to know about the ghosts.” Mabel wiped her upper lip. “I have to sit down.” She sank into the sofa and sighed, her legs straight out on the floor in front of her.

Lily sat down beside her. “What did she say?”

“Not a thing. I talked. I guess she heard me. I wasn’t sure.”

“She’s fresh as a daisy now,” Lily said.

“The portrait’s bothering me, Lily.” Mabel rubbed her cheek gently, as if it were another person’s skin. “I don’t know what to do. You should see it now. We worked today. It’s, it’s, oh, I don’t know, when I look at it, I feel upset. I’m well aware that no one’s going to care one way or the other about the identity of the old lady in Edward Shapiro’s painting, and yet I feel that I’m being pulled into a crisis a part of me willed and another part resists. I’m not sure Ed fully understands it. I’m not sure he even knows what he’s doing, but there’s something in him that’s aggressive, not his manner, you understand, but the work — he strikes the heart.” Mabel swallowed. “He painted his wife. Did you know that?”

Lily shook her head.

“It ended the marriage.”

Lily didn’t say anything.

“I guess it started out all right, and then something went wrong. He didn’t go into it in detail, but you know what he said?”

“No.”

“He said he saw her, really saw her.” Mabel looked into Lily’s eyes.

Lily moved her eyes away from Mabel to the window. She wondered what Ed had seen, and why she found it upsetting, but she said, “It’s just a painting, Mabel. You’re all worked up over nothing.”

Lily stared into Mabel’s white face and she spoke to her softly. “Is it the story in the boxes?”

Mabel turned away. She didn’t nod or speak.

“Partly,” she said in a soft voice.

Then a suspicion took sudden hold of Lily. “I’d be careful what you tell Dolores. You shouldn’t trust her, Mabel. She could easily blab anything you say to the girl who does her nails down at Miriam’s, to Willy at the shoe repair, to anybody!”

“I’m not sure that’s who she is, Lily.” Mabel smiled with her mouth closed. Her eyes looked shiny as she pushed away a wisp of hair from her forehead.

The two women sat on the sofa beside each other without talking for a long time. Lily thought about being fired and about rehearsal and that Martin would be at the Arts Guild, and then she told Mabel about Martin. It was a partial confession because she omitted details that had become part of the story, even though they weren’t really a part of it — Helen Underdahl Bodler and the shoes she had stolen and burned and buried, Dolores in the grass, and Dick and Frank in that house. But Lily told her about Martin’s note and the map, about Becky Runevold and the rocking chair. She told her about leaving work and snooping in Martin’s house and finding the T-shirt. Mabel listened intently. She listened so hard her small body tensed all over, and when Lily finished, Mabel lifted her chin, stared at a blue wooden egg that lay in a bowl on the coffee table and said, “There are any number of explanations for that shirt,” she said. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

Mabel’s words echoed in Lily’s head after she had said them. She remembered touching the blue fabric, remembered feeling it was tainted, the sign of an unspeakable thing. Why had she been so sure that it had belonged to the girl people were seeing? Why hadn’t it entered her mind that it might belong to somebody else: Martin’s sister or a friend? Lily looked into Mabel’s face. “Yes,” she said. “But I feel there’s something…”

The woman folded her hands in her lap and said, “Yes, there is something. A mind burning holes in the world.”

Lily didn’t answer this, and yet she didn’t deny that the enigmatic sentence made a kind of sense to her.