The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

Armatrading album with her father’s handwriting on the back of the cover, in the upper corner: BOUGHT OCTOBER 12, 1977, FROM THE LICORICE PIZZA, OMAHA. HAD LUNCH AT THE JOE TESS CAFÉ—FRIED RAINBOW TROUT ON A SLICE OF RYE .
    Lily loved having found the record hidden at the bottom of a box of patched-up work jeans. Growing up, she and Mabel had listened over and over to their father’s favorite music. They would set a portable record player in the window of Mabel’s room and crawl out onto the roof where Lily would smear coconut-scented lotion on Mabel’s freckled back and Mabel would soak Lily’s hair with spray-on Sun-In. Hours later, Lily would crawl back into the house as a strawberry blonde. With lines of sunburn crossing their shoulders and hips, they walked downstairs to stand in front of the window air conditioner, both exhausted from their afternoon naps. Eventually they learned all the words to all the songs of ELO and Rickie Lee Jones and Roxy Music, all performers their classmates had never even heard of. Especially on summer days, whenever their father’s music played, Lily and Mabel adored each other, became Daddy’s precious girls, sun-kissedand sweetly sick from the overplaying of Todd Rundgren songs. They glossed their lips and saw themselves as tragically lost to the world. As Lily would drift off to sleep, she’d hear messages from her father in the songs, in the phrases she’d catch in bits and pieces in her drowsiness. Her father existed now to whisper promises in her ear.
    As each year passed, Lily’s memories of her parents inched a little closer toward the romantically impossible, and Lily had imagined herself a bit more like a character in one of the young-adult paperbacks the girls at school passed around. In these, girls suffered family tragedies or drank too much, or they smoked dope or feared pregnancy. For a few years, Lily had read and reread the battered
Summer, Finally
, about a sixteen-year-old named Summer having an affair with one of her father’s friends in the summertime. Lily kept the book hidden in her locker, certain passages marked in the margins by an X in fingernail polish, and the very idea of it all made Lily feel happily trashy and perverse. She had even jotted in her notebook the name of a boy who had signed her father’s high school yearbook (“Always stay the same! And shave that silly peach fuzz off your lip!”), Bart Youngblood, a name perfectly and creepily suited for her first-love statutory-rape fantasies. She would fall asleep with thoughts of resting her cheek on Bart’s naked chest.
    Lily unfolded a card table and chairs and set them in the center of her bus’s living room. She’d brought a cake home from the bakery where she worked, and she put it atop the table along with the wrapped Joan Armatrading record, somelilacs tucked into the ribbon’s knot. It was night now, the bus lit only by the Christmas lights and a row of candles on the dashboard. She sat down and plucked a candy rose from beneath Mabel’s name in blue and broke off its petals. She let each petal melt on her tongue as she tried to imagine what her mother would be like. Because her mother was so young when she had her babies, she would still be only thirty-five now. She could still very well be confused and afraid over all that had fallen apart in the past. Though Lily couldn’t yet understand how her mother, how any mother, could have left her girls and never returned, Lily would be generous and patient. For once, Lily would be the mothering soul. Lily’s questions would be gentle.
What songs make you think of him? Are there songs that make you think of us
?
    She looked up to the house, to the front room, where Mabel stood behind Jordan, her arms around his shoulders. Mabel looked at their reflection in the glass so that she could knot Jordan’s tie. Lily wasn’t jealous, she reminded herself. There was no jealousy. In only a few days, Lily was certain, Jordan would ask again,