locale and men with gray mustaches whispering into the ears of young ladies. Her mother never wrote much in her letters, but Mabel felt invited to read between the lines for the exotic intrigue and secrets.
Even this month, as Mabel read of nuns and worship, as her mother wrote of being lost then found, Mabel still envisioned lascivious Mexican priests (as beautiful as the young Ricardo Montalban in the old movies Mabel watched during the day) and virgins stuck through with stigmata. “Look,” Mabel said, handing Lily the photo from the envelope. In it, their mother knelt at an altar, holding a candle in one hand, cupping its flame with the other, her face only a spot of pale white. Little lizards, their mother wrote, crawl in through the windows sometimes. I throw lit matches at them, hoping they’ll leave the way they came in, but they never do. The sisters, though, charm the lizards into a jar and take them out to release them back into the bushes beneath the windows where they live. In the letter, their mother told of her failed engagement and her new job in a desert vineyard owned by nuns near the border of Arizona. Their mother was still a rather young woman, having had Mabel much too early in her life. Mabel’s mother had been only fifteen, her father only eighteen, a couple of brats who thought they were in love for a few minutes. Mabel thought they’d been foolish to try to make a go of it; she would have had an abortion, plain and simple.
Lily held out her hand for the milagro—a tiny iron prayer piece. Their mother had often enclosed milagros through the years, the pieces shaped like body parts, little legs and arms and hands. A heart, a pair of lungs, an eye. When you have pain, Mabel’s mother had once written, in your tooth, or your arm, or wherever, you leave the milagro at a site of prayer. Lily never left the milagros anywhere; she hoarded them, and she acted like they were meant only for her, something secret shared with her mother. Mabel knew there were no messages for Lily in these tiny pieces of metal, but she was jealous nonetheless. Lily, with her distance and sly half smile and her way of not meeting your eyes, could take anything in hand and grant it mystery. As a little girl, Lily had tormented Mabel by plucking the most meaningless of junk from the antique shop—a bunch of half-broken glass grapes, an ugly, naked porcelain doll, its head a mange of rat-nest human hair—and turning it desirable, making Mabel curse herself for not first recognizing the beauty of the poor, neglected things. Even just a few weeks before, Lily had laid claim to a dilapidated school bus without seats or tires that was parked in the back. Their grandmother had used it as storage, and Lily emptied it of its junk in order to convert it into a private room for the summer. She still kept all her things in her upstairs room, still had to come in to use the bathroom, and still spent most of her early evening hours in the shop next to the window air conditioner, but nights she slept in the bus on a thin mattress draped with mosquito net. Lily called it her apartment, and she had even painted its inner and outer walls pink.
Lily put the milagro in her mouth and knocked it around with her tongue. She looked through all the summery dresses on the rack in the corner, the wire hangers shrieking on the metal rod, and picked out a sleeveless dress with a cherry print. The dress reminded Mabel of the one Marilyn Monroe wore in The Misfits. Lily took off her jeans, then stepped into the dress that fit tight and wouldn’t zip. But how pretty she looks, Mabel thought. Lily wasn’t all that fat anymore, but she wasn’t thin either, and what fat she had she carried well. Many men liked Lily for her head of curls and her old-style horn-rimmed glasses. Mabel picked up a pliers from a toolbox and went to Lily to fix the stuck zipper.
“How’s Jordan able to buy a car, anyway?” Mabel said. “His dad fired him last week.” Jordan’s father was the barber in Bonnevilla, and Jordan had done nails, buffing and inching back cuticles and gluing on tiny fancies, at a table in the back of the barbershop. Now Jordan only worked a few nights a week, playing his guitar for tips at the steakhouse in town.
“You’d know just as well as I would,” Lily said, pushing aside a collection of scarves to see into a full-length mirror. “Considering you and him have been so chummy lately.”
“What do you mean?” Mabel asked.
“You talk to him a lot when I’m not around. I mean, when he comes here, and I’m not here, I know you two talk to each other.”
“What are you trying to say, Lily?” Mabel asked, coaxing. She felt a blush hot in her cheeks and throat, anticipating a scuffle. She didn’t like arguing. Dispute and confrontation made her throat swell shut and her eyes run. But she felt so much closer to Lily when Lily was provoked. Mabel and Lily were just orphans, really, like Orphans of the Storm. In the shop was a box of glass slides for projecting on the screen of movie theaters. Though Mabel had seen only a few of the silent movies featured on these coming-attractions slides, she’d often cast the pictures onto the wall with a flashlight, imagining the stories behind the strange titles: The Sibyl’s Handmaiden; Chinatown Wastrels; The Yellow Piano; The Phantom Limbs of Captain Moore. The satellite dish in the backyard piped in some old-movie channels that Mabel watched religiously. She most longed to see all the movies of the Gish sisters. She loved the pictures of them holding hands or of them both sweetly gazing upon a common object, their peaked cheeks pressed together, their rouged, puckered lips tiny like black pansies. Why must Lily be so distant? Mabel wondered. Why couldn’t we be sisters famous for our devotion?
As Lily spoke, she tied up her curls in a ponytail with a souvenir scarf of the Niagara Falls depicting honeymooners going over in barrels. “What am I trying to say?” Lily said. “Well, Mabel, I’m trying to say that when I’m not here, you and Jordan talk. That’s what I’m trying to say, and I think that’s pretty much exactly what I fucking said. What I said is what I’m trying to say. The fucking end. I think a better question would be, What the fuck are you trying to say?”
“You know exactly what I’m trying to say,” Mabel said, though not sure herself. She pinched the pliers onto the head of the zipper and gently closed Lily’s dress, careful not to catch Lily’s soft pink skin in the ragged teeth.
“I don’t have the first mother-fucking clue what you’re trying to say to me,” Lily said. Before Mabel could speak again, Lily continued. “Is what you’re trying to say to me that I’m accusing you of trying to steal Jordan away?”
“Yes,” Mabel said, looking at Lily’s reflection in the mirror. “Yes. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Why can’t you ever just say what’s in your head? What are you so afraid’s going to happen?”
“Look,” Lily said, “you may feel guilty . . . you may have a guilty conscience about the time you spend alone with Jordan, or the feelings you may have for Jordan, but that’s your own thing. I’m not accusing you of anything.”
There are photographs of us, Mabel thought, evidence of two sorrowful and frightened sisters, and there are notes we wrote to each other. Complete and utter orphans, she thought. “Why don’t you ever talk to me about things?” Mabel said softly, fussing with the back of Lily’s dress, smoothing out a wrinkle. She was so worn out by her own complaint. Lily’s absence was an old absence.
“I talk to you,” Lily said, walking to the stairs. Her voice built as she went up to her room. “I talk to you all the time. Don’t you ever listen?” This was Lily’s way of turning everything around, Mabel knew, her way of trying to come across as the one sorely misunderstood.
Mabel thought of a retort, and she ran over to stand at the bottom of the stairs. “Who are you trying to convince, Lily?” she called up. “There’s no one here but us.” Think of us old, she would have said if Lily hadn’t slammed the door. Think of you in your wheelchair and me with a rat on a platter, me all Bette Davis late-career screech.
Mabel picked up a dusty perfume bottle and pinched at the bulb of the atomizer, misting her throat with a fragrance that somehow suggested flappers and Gatsby. The thing was, Mabel hadn’t spoken much to Jordan
