The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert Page A

and she’d closed her mouth around the awful smoke. She’d stolen sips from her father’s beer and thought it tasted of moldy bread.
    Mabel was not Mabel’s real name; she’d chosen it after her father killed himself. Many nights her father had come home and had winked and said to her mother, “What’s cooking, Mabel,” though her mother’s name wasn’t Mabel, and she never cooked at night. He’d call her Mabel at other times, like when he thought the girls were in bed and no one else could see him or hear him, standing in a towel in the hallway after an evening bath. He’d call her mother Mabel and he’d put his hand in her blouse and he’d kiss her neck and whisper in her hair, his breath the smell of the anise seeds and baking powder he used to brush his teeth, the way he’d brushed histeeth in his Catholic boy’s school. Though Lily and their mother never complained about calling Mabel by her new name, they did at times seem startled by the sound of it, would jump as if they heard Mabel’s father’s deep morning cough again on the other side of the bedroom wall.
    Mabel’s father had been an insomniac, and Mabel had sat up with him many nights as he fretted and drank Alka-Seltzer for his nervous stomach. Sometimes they’d play rummy; sometimes he’d just talk to her, telling her about what he thought his life would be like someday. He thought he might like to take some courses and become a stage technician. He had played Mitch in A
Streetcar Named Desire
in high school, and people had told him how much they’d liked him in the part. But it was ridiculous to think of becoming an actor, he knew. So he’d hang lights for local presentations and plays, paint sets, and even sew costumes. Sometimes his eyes were red and wet, and he rubbed at them and sniffled, and Mabel never knew if he was crying or just sleepy. If Mabel would start to drift off, her father would make a pot of coffee and give her a cup with lots of milk and tablespoons of sugar. He’d go on about some other things, like how his parents always loved his brother more and how he’d done some drugs in school and how he’d wanted Mabel’s mother to have an abortion, but was now so glad that she hadn’t, because he loved Mabel so much and couldn’t imagine how things would be without her. But he did imagine things without her, again and again, as he described a life he’d have if he didn’t have responsibilities.
    Mabel picked up Lily’s glasses from the nightstand and put them on, and everything in the room stepped forward and large into her sight. The black wardrobe, its doors gaping open, threatened the room like a cornered beast. The glasses gave Mabel a headache and she took them off and the room fell back again, everything, again, what it was supposed to be. Mabel wondered if Lily needed these glasses in order to notice the world at all. Mabel thought of her grandmother’s friend, a blind woman in black-lensed, octagonal spectacles. “I’m very blind,” the woman said just the day before, “but I know there have been changes in the atmosphere. In the mornings, I sense a difference in the light of my room.” Maybe that was all the impression life made on Lily, Mabel thought, an impression as slight as the shifting of shadow and color.
    Mabel’s mother carried in a tray with two plates of pancakes. Lily loved pancakes, even for her dinner and supper. Her mother set the tray on a trunk and hesitantly touched Lily’s shoulder. “Lily?” she whispered, then cringed. “Lily?” Sometimes Lily slapped or kicked the person waking her. “Lily?” she whispered, even more softly. Her mother looked to Mabel. “Should I leave her sleep?” she said, and Mabel said, “Yes.”
    “What?” her mother said, as if she hadn’t expected a voice, as if she’d only been asking the room or a ghost in the room. She then left the plates on an old piano bench long since separated from its piano, and she skulked away. Mabel was very hungry