The Enchantment of Lily Dahl Read Online Free PDF Page A

first.” Lily looked over her shoulder toward the jukebox and saw Boomer Wee coming through the kitchen doors.
    “Cut him off at the pass!” Bert yelled, flinging an arm toward Boomer.
    Lily made a dash for the jukebox, but Boomer was too fast for her, and by the time she reached it, he was leaning over the selections. His T-shirt had hiked up his back, exposing his white skin and bony spine. “Don’t you dare play that song. Get back to the dishes!” she hissed at Boomer, trying to elbow him away from the box. “You’re going to kill me with that song.” But Boomer blocked her and she heard the rattle of the quarter, the click of the machine and then Elvis started singing “Blue Suede Shoes.”
    “You little skunk,” Lily said to Boomer, who was smiling innocently on his way to the kitchen. I loved it, too, before I heard it 6,458 times, Lily thought, and walked over to Martin’s booth to clear it.
    The dirty plate, silverware, coffee cup and saucer had been stacked and pushed to one side of the table, but lying squarely in the middle was a white napkin, and on it, written in large, cursive letters was the word “mouth.” That was all. Mouth? Lily thought. A thin ray of sunshine eked through a hole in the cloud cover and lit the table at a slant. Lily picked up the napkin and stared at it. Could this be what he was talking about, the thing he was going to leave me on the table? How weird. The ink had bled into the soft paper. Lily shook her head, and then, without knowing why, she glanced around to see if anyone had seen her reading the napkin. No one was showing the slightest interest. Lily brought her hands together, crumpled the paper, and quickly stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she lifted the stack of dishes from the table and headed for the kitchen.
    *   *   *
    Lily told Hank not to come that night. When she heard the disappointment in his voice, she felt bad, but Some Like It Hot was on TV that night, and she wanted to watch Marilyn alone. Hank had teased Lily about Marilyn, had said she was dizzy on the subject, and once when Lily had tried to articulate her feelings about her, Hank had grinned through the explanation. After that, she had stopped talking about Marilyn to Hank or anyone else. The Marilyn story had started with Bus Stop. Lily was still living with her parents then. That was before her father’s cancer operation, before they moved to Florida to get away from the winters, and she had stayed up watching the movie until two o’clock in the morning. The coat in the very last scene had clinched it. The cowboy had taken off his jacket and put it around Marilyn’s shoulders, and when she snuggled into it, her whole upper body had moved and trembled as if she were being kissed on her cheeks and neck and shoulders, and when Lily had looked into Marilyn’s face on the screen, she had felt she was seeing a wonderful and dangerous happiness that was so strong it was almost pain. The scene had made her want to act more than anything in the world, and the next morning she had told her parents that she wanted to be an actress. They hadn’t said much. Her mother told her in a gentle voice that high school plays and real theater were two different kettles of fish, and her father said a B.A. prepared you for everything. But Marilyn had made Lily think about acting in a new way, and she started wondering if it wasn’t a way of being very close to the heart of things, that maybe acting actually brought you closer to the world rather than farther away from it.
    After Bus Stop, Lily found Marilyn Monroe everywhere: in magazines, tabloids, comic books, on T-shirts and stickers, on posters and flags. She noticed little statues of her in ceramic and metal and rubber and saw her face and body emblazoned on ashtrays, mugs, pencils and clocks. But for Lily these icons were no more than crude approximations of the person on the screen, cheap leering versions of something intimate, almost