Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“I tied you up.”

“No,” Lily said. It made her uneasy. Had he tied her up? Had she ever been tied up in her life? Why did she feel as if she had? Why did she know the sensation of rope chafing her ankles and wrists? Had it happened?

Lily looked into Martin’s eyes. They were wide open. “Th-th-then after a long t-time, I looked inside, and, and it was over.”

“No, Martin,” Lily said. “No.”

“Y-you were d-d-dead. I killed you.” He paused. “A-and then I kissed you, and y-you stood up in your white dress—”

“No,” Lily said.

Martin nodded. He whispered, “Like Hermia.”

“I didn’t even own a white dress when I was a kid, Martin. My mother hated white. It got too dirty, and out there…” Lily shook her head.

“Y-y-you did,” he said forcefully. “And so did Becky. She wore it in her coffin.”

“Stop it, Martin,” Lily said. “Stop it!”

Lily felt tears running down her cheeks. “It isn’t true. You’re saying it to”—she paused—“to…” She couldn’t finish. Why would he say it?

Martin bent over the wheelchair and lifted the doll into his arms again. Lily could see that its body was stuffed with some kind of cotton fill. When she stared at the face, she saw that the color of its eyes was wrong. The kerosene lamp flickered in the draft and Lily took a deep breath. “The eyes are blue,” she whispered at Martin. “They’re blue.”

“I–I gave her my color,” he said. Martin held the doll up toward Lily. She moved backward and stopped. He was offering it to her, and for a moment Lily thought it looked like some poor princess being sacrificed to the giants. Martin’s chin trembled and his white eyelashes fluttered. “I–I want you to have her.”

Before she could stop him, Martin had rushed forward and thrust the doll at her. She grabbed it and felt its hair brush her arm. It’s just a doll, she said as she looked down at it. It’s a thing. Lily fought the dread that welled up inside her.

“I can’t, Martin. Take it back.” Lily tried to return the doll to Martin, but he lifted his hands in the air and stepped away from her, the white gauze of his bandaged hand waving before her.

“I, I want you to take her!” he said in a loud voice that reverberated inside the cave. “It won’t work otherwise.”

Lily stared at him. “What? What won’t work?” The doll couldn’t have weighed much more than fifteen pounds, but its arms and legs were awkward to hold and its head rested heavily on her right arm. She looked down at its placid face and noticed that its red lips were slightly parted and drawn together, and this expression, whatever it was, revolted her.

Lily dropped the doll.

Martin screamed. He screamed like a woman, and the noise broke something inside her. She turned around and was about to run, when she heard Martin scream again. He grabbed her ankle and tripped her. Lily clawed the cave floor, but Martin had thrown himself on top of her, and pulled her around by the shoulders. He still had the doll, and he pressed it into her while he held her down, its hard head between them, pressing against Lily’s throat until she gasped for breath, but Martin didn’t release her. “I c-c-can’t breathe,” she choked out. His embrace was powerful, and Lily could see the muscles in his arm bulging as he squeezed her. She fought him, jerking her head back hard and fast to free her throat, and once her head was away from his grip, she slapped at his hands and hit the doll several times. Then Martin started crying. In the shifting light of the lamp, she saw him shaking and heard his sobs.

Lily threw herself toward the passageway. She scraped her knee but didn’t stop. She crawled through the tunnel across the first room and out the little door. She didn’t shut it. The light astonished her. No noise came from the cave, and walking to her bicycle she had a sense that her legs wouldn’t hold her, that they had gone bad all of a sudden, and she asked herself how she could ride home. She sobbed as she trudged up the embankment to the road, and that was when the dog appeared. A Border collie came trotting along the road toward her. She didn’t know him, but she bent down to pet his neck, and as she looked into his face, she suddenly found it curious that he couldn’t speak. The dog cocked his head to one side in a gesture of confusion or sympathy, and Lily pulled the animal toward her. She pressed her face into his neck and cried. The dog stood very still and whined a little until she let him go.

* * *

Lily went straight to Mabel’s apartment. She didn’t knock but threw open the door and said in a loud voice, “It’s a doll.” She saw Ed first, and then Mabel, whose earnest, drawn expression made Lily wonder if she hadn’t interrupted an intimate conversation. Mabel’s hand had been on the manuscript, and when she saw Lily, she had withdrawn her fingers quickly. But Lily didn’t speculate on what had been happening between them. She had a story to tell, and she told it. Lily didn’t know when she began talking that she would omit the part about the refrigerator, but she did. Had she been sure that Martin was lying about locking her up, she would have told it, but she had doubts. Martin thought she had died and come back to life. Could she have lost consciousness and then woken up while he watched? If it never happened, why did the story awaken in her a sense of having been bound and locked in? Why did she recall the panic of losing air and yet not remember any of the details? Kids lock other kids in cellars and chests and closets and even old refrigerators all the time. Hadn’t she heard a story about a girl who died in one? When she had finished, Mabel said, “Should we call the police?”

“Is it against the law to make dolls?” Lily said. Mabel didn’t answer this.

“You could charge him with assault,” Ed said. His voice had more emotion in it than Lily had ever heard. He clenched his fists and leaned toward her.

Lily looked at her watch. Hank was at the police station. She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, really. Nobody’s dead. That’s the important thing.”

“What did it look like?” Ed said. “The doll?”

Lily tried to describe the doll, but it didn’t translate easily into words, and she couldn’t remember the name of the material Martin had used and baked in his oven. She sensed that she had disappointed Ed a little.

“Was it well done?” he said.

“Yes,” Lily said. She looked into Ed’s face, pressed her lips together and then said, “It was very well done. He said that it took him a year.”

Before Ed and Lily left Mabel, they checked her ankle. Lily squatted in front of the woman’s naked foot. It was better, but still swollen and blue. It was an old foot with protruding veins and corns on the bent toes. Lily made an ice pack and when she placed it under the ankle, she looked up into Mabel’s face, and for the first time asked herself how long the old woman would live.

* * *

Lily told Ed she wanted to sleep in her own bed that night. She said it was to be close to Mabel, in case she needed anything, but this wasn’t true. Her neck was still sore from her struggle with Martin in the cave, and Lily felt vulnerable. She wanted to lie in her own bed with Ed, and she wanted to hear Mabel through the wall, wanted to know that she was there.

Ed smiled briefly at the poster of Marilyn when he walked into her room. He had seen it before, but he appeared to take note of it for the first time, and there may have been irony in the smile, but Lily wasn’t sure. Then, without a word, he picked her up, carried her to the bed and made love to her. His touch was different that night. He paid more attention to her face than he had ever done before, stroking her cheeks and eyebrows and mouth with his fingers and then tracing the line of her neck. He reminded Lily of a blind person sealing a face in memory through its contours. And Lily was glad he didn’t hold her too hard. Her skin felt sore and raw, and every muscle in her body seemed to have been strained. Even her bones hurt her, although she didn’t know how that was possible.