The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (2 page)

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.

Martin always wanted the same breakfast—poached eggs on toast—but unlike Lily’s other early customers, he had never been happy with silence. It wasn’t enough to say to him, “The usual?” and let him nod. He wanted an exchange, so instead of Martin stammering out an order and getting flustered, he tapped out a little rhythm on the tabletop with his fingers, rat-tat-a-tat-tat, and Lily answered him with two raps of her own, tat-tat. The tapping had started soon after Lily began working in the cafe and had made them friends again, after a fashion. No one else was in on it. Those beats were a little language all their own, and Martin seemed so happy to order his breakfast in code, it made Lily happy, too.

That morning they went through the routine again. Martin rapped the table.

Lily slapped her index finger twice against the edge of the table and said, “You’ve got it, Cobweb.”

Martin had landed the tiny part of Cobweb in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and Lily thought it would be friendly to acknowledge it, although she wondered if Mrs. Wright hadn’t taken charity a little too far by casting Martin in any role, no matter how small. She hadn’t rehearsed with Martin yet. So far practice had been limited to the actors with big parts, but it was hard to imagine Martin as any kind of actor, much less a fairy.

When she gave Vince Martin’s order in the kitchen, the fat man leaned across the stove and said, “Where’s the funeral? It’s so quiet in there, you’d think I was cooking for a bunch of stiffs.”

Lily grinned and shook her head. “You say that every morning, Vince. It gets noisier in an hour. You know that.”

“This is one dead little burg, baby doll. It’s big-time excitement around here when one of them old Lutherans lets out a fart.”

Lily smiled at Vince. He was in a good mood this morning, and she felt grateful. “Go back to Philadelphia then, why don’t you, if it’s so perfect there,” Lily said and picked up the plate of French toast for Mike Fox. “Must be great, people shooting each other in the streets, muggers, pickpockets. I read the papers, Vince. Sounds like paradise.” Lily backed through the swinging doors.

Vince pointed his spatula at her. “At least people talk to you before they shoot you!”

With Mike’s plate in her hands, Lily paused behind the counter. She could feel Martin watching her and glanced over at him for an instant. His sober face was measuring hers. Maybe he does have a thing for me, she thought, and laid Mike’s plate on the counter beside the six cigarettes that he had already lined up in front of him on the Formica surface.

“You’re food’s here when you’re ready, Mike,” she said.

He looked up at her and pushed a strand of long blond hair behind his ear, before he stuck a fresh cigarette between his teeth. Lily watched him light it. Six days a week for a year, she had watched Mike go through the same ritual. The job called for a whole pack of Kents, and when he was finished, Lily would find a row of twenty cigarettes on the counter, each one smoked just a hair shorter than the one before it. Looking at Mike, she felt sure that he was counting his puffs, but she knew he couldn’t be dragging too hard on it either or the butt would burn too fast. Mike lowered the cigarette to the black ashtray and began to snuff it with a gentle turning motion of his wrist and fingers. The first time Mike had left that perfect slant of Kents on the counter, Lily had been scared to throw them away. But Bert had said, “He doesn’t care about it once it’s done. Just sweep the masterpiece into the garbage. He’ll make another one tomorrow.”

Lily walked back to the kitchen to pick up Martin’s food, and Vince started in right where he left off. “And because there’s no talking in this goddamned place, there’s no real sex. Ever think of that, doll? Look at the women in this town, hardly a single one with a speck of ‘cha-cha.’ In the winter they’re all covered up with those god-awful down parkas and in the summer they wear dresses that look like bags. Lipstick’s a sin. Jewelry’s a sin.” The man’s face was red. He had big jowls that shook when he moved his head.

Lily grabbed Martin’s plate. “There’s plenty of sex in this town, Vince. Don’t be a dummy.”

“Yeah, but it’s not
fun
sex. There’s a big difference.”

Lily groaned. “Come on.”

“You haven’t been around, baby. I’m telling you.” He held his arms out at his sides and wiggled his enormous hips back and forth. “Sex is shmooze in a dusky bar with a jazz band and a girl who looks like she likes it. Oh, honey, the nights I spend dreamin’ about Sandra Martinez,” the man groaned.

“What you don’t know, Mr. City Man,” Lily said, “is that a cornfield can be just as sexy as a jazz club. You just haven’t been around.” Lily rolled her shoulder at him.

Vince opened his mouth and pretended to be shocked. “Why, Lily Dahl,” he said. “You little devil.”

“Don’t ever tell
me
I haven’t got cha-cha,” Lily said on her way out, and she heard Vince muttering something under his breath.

The rain had stopped and Division Street looked brighter. When she put down the plate in front of Martin, he looked up at her with his serious face and his wide eyes, and she remembered how light his irises were—pale blue—a color that made her feel she could look right through them. As she left the table she felt a vague spasm in her abdomen, heard the screen door open and, turning toward the sound, saw the Bodler boys shuffle into the cafe. She sighed, but not loudly enough for them to hear it, and watched them walk toward the booth in the back just outside the bathroom with the sign Vince had put up that said “
EITHER/OR
.” If only they weren’t so dirty, Lily thought, as she looked down at the trail of mud on the floor behind the two men. If only it was just their boots that were dirty, and not their arms and legs and heads and butts and every square inch of their whole selves. Lily stopped in front of the Bodlers’ table and took out her order pad. She looked from Filthy Frank to Dirty Dick and back to Filthy Frank. The old coots were just as grimy as ever, only moister. She could see drip lines on their cheeks where they’d been rained on. Lily tapped her toe and waited. Frank would order. He always did. Dick never said a word. The Bodler boys were identical twins who over many years had turned out different. Nobody had the slightest difficulty telling them apart. Dick’s body echoed Frank’s but didn’t repeat it. Punier, balder, blanker, Dick had become a diluted copy of his brother.

Everything they touched turned black. Lily looked down at Frank’s hands. She could already see smudges forming on the white table.

“Well, what’ll it be?” she said.

Neither man moved or even blinked.

She leaned closer to Frank and raised her eyebrows. He smelled like clay.

The man opened his mouth, showing brown teeth interrupted by several holes. Then came the guttural rumble: “Two eggs, scrambled, bacon, toast, coffee.”

“Coming up.” Lily turned away and looked over Martin’s head into the street. The weather was clearing steadily. Martin was reading now. He usually brought a book with him and read for a while before leaving. As far as Lily could tell, Martin read everything. He seemed to like history books, especially books on World War II, but he also liked novels—cheap ones and highbrow ones—and science fiction books and how-to books. She remembered him reading
Anna Karenina
in the cafe for several weeks, and when he finished with that he had started in on a book called
A Hundred Ways to Make Money in the Country.
Still, Lily figured all that reading had to do some good. He’s probably pretty smart, she thought, and then on her way to the kitchen she considered the fact that Martin had turned twenty-one and was most likely a virgin. She liked this thought, liked the idea of innocence in a young man. At the same time, she felt sorry for him.

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.