The Enchantment of Lily Dahl Read Online Free PDF

sacred, and she avoided them. She had her poster, which she had chosen carefully in a store in Minneapolis, deciding against the famous one from The Seven Year Itch of Marilyn standing over the grate, her skirt billowing out from her thighs, for one less well known. She had bought a biography then, too, and had started it eagerly, searching among the details of Norma Jean’s life for the secret she had glimpsed in the movie, but after about a hundred pages, she realized it wasn’t there and stopped reading. As she lay in bed that evening watching Some Like It Hot, Lily laughed out loud at the men dressed as women and listened to Marilyn’s voice, to its halting rhythms and breaths, and near the end, she studied the dress Marilyn was wearing. It was like part of her body, she decided, hardly clothes at all, a magical movie dress Lily imagined herself wearing, not in Webster, of course, but in a faraway city, like Los Angeles or New York or Paris, where women went slinking into clubs and bars in next to nothing. She smiled to herself and took bites of the Milky Way she had bought especially for the movie.
    When it ended, Lily tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edward Shapiro’s windows were dark, and she wondered where he had gone. Through the wall, she heard Mabel blow her nose and start typing again. A copy of Glamour lay on the night table, and Lily picked it up. She turned the pages and stared at the clothes she couldn’t afford and then stopped to read a headline: “What Does a Man Want in a Woman?” It was a survey. Lily threw aside the magazine and began to recite her lines in a whisper. “So is Lysander.” She closed her eyes. “I would but my father look’d with my eyes.” She paused. “I do but entreat your grace to pardon me. /I do not know by what power I am made bold.” A breeze blew in through her open window, and the fresh air aggravated her restlessness. I could walk over to Rick’s and have a beer, she thought. She remembered Hank, felt troubled, and then after putting her hand down inside her jeans, she held her genitals for comfort and, still dressed, fell asleep.
    Once in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought she heard voices singing far away. Then she fell asleep again. At nine o’clock, she heard the church bells from Saint John’s and opened her eyes. Lily had been dreaming, and the Sunday bells had mixed themselves into the dream, which she had forgotten except that it hadn’t been pleasant, because the repeated clang bothered her. She could almost hear the congregation’s murmuring, that hollow, haunted tone people use to speak to the unseen, interrupted only by the occasional cough or a baby’s cry. As she pulled herself out of the muddy dream, she saw Pastor Carlsen’s face with its permanently sincere expression—an indistinct blend of pity and remorse. His face had always irritated her, not because she thought it was hypocritical, but because she knew it was real.
    *   *   *
    Lily never consciously decided to take the route that passed the Bodler place, but she found herself pedaling her bicycle in that direction and dreaming of the car she could buy with the money she had in the bank if she didn’t have to use it for college. Her father’s medical bills had eaten up the savings put aside for Lily’s education, and when Vince offered her a job at the Ideal Cafe and the room upstairs, she took it without complaint. Lily had told herself she needed time to think anyway. She needed to plan. Hank had a plan for himself and for her, but whenever she thought about the imaginary house in Minneapolis and the imaginary children and Hank Farmer forever, a part of her balked. So far she had managed to save $3,476.32 from her job, and that money promised her a life after Webster. Watching Edward Shapiro paint had launched new fantasies about New York, a place she had seen only on postcards and in the movies. Before he had moved into the Stuart Hotel, she had dreamed mostly