The Reticent Storyteller

Parker Salisbury met Lilly where she worked mucking stalls and caring for the horses over at the Cloverleaf Stables. The riding academy ran equestrian programs for beginners through advanced and boarded a handful of privately-owned horses for local families. Parker and his construction crew were renovating a barn adjacent to the stable. One day in early December he wandered over to the paddocks to look in on the animals before heading home for the night. A young girl he had never seen before was mucking stalls.

The privately boarded horses were generally cleaned up and set right for the night early on, but when Parker entered the barn he could smell the stench of horseshit and rotting, pea-soaked hay. Most stalls were cleaned three times daily and yet this one clearly hadn't been tidied at all. The girl, who paid him absolutely no attention, quickly mucked out the stall. Disposing of the soiled bedding, she swept and washed the floor with a stable disinfectant. Once the surface was dry, she returned the clean bedding to its proper place, adding fresh material to make up for the straw she had removed.

"What happened?"

"No idea," she mumbled without making eye contact.

With all those freckles, the pale-skinned dirty blond reminded him of some adolescent character out of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. "I'm Parker." The lanky girl did not readily volunteer any additional information. "I didn't catch your name."

"Lilly." She nuzzled a brown quarter horse. With her short back and heavily muscled body, the beast was noticeably smaller in stature than the others, standing only sixteen hands high.

The adjacent horse stall proved even dirtier. Worse yet, the water bucket was upended. Before addressing the filthy bedding, Lilly hauled a compact, rubber tire from a neighboring, empty stall and threw it on the floor. Filling the dry bucket with fresh, cool water, she wedged it firmly in the center of the tire. Burying its muzzle in the metal pail, the spotted mare didn't raise her head for a good thirty seconds. Still ignoring the carpenter, Lilly scrounged up some fresh carrots and divided them equally between both horses. While the beasts were still munching their vegetables Arnold, the boss's son, stuck his head in the barn. "Simon quit. No notice. That's why the place is such a shithouse."

"And you didn't think to pitch in and help straighten things out?" When there was no reply, she added, "It is one thing to neglect your own horses, but the private-pay boarders will take their business elsewhere if they think we're understaffed."

"You think I don't know that?" Arnold shot back.

"Got anyone in mind for a replacement?"

"I'm working on it."

Squatting down on her haunches, Lilly began scraping a sticky tangle of yellow bot fly eggs off the mare's lower legs with a folding pocket knife. "I'm holding back on grain until they finish eating their hay so the animals don't bulk up on the high-protein feed."

Arnold grunted something unintelligible. Parker doubted he had even been listening. The boss' son wasn't working on anything productive. He never did. Even among the carpenters, he pranced around like Little Lord Fauntleroy giving orders in a supercilious, autocratic tone.

Arnold glanced at his watch, a purely theatrical gesture, before hurrying off. After he was gone, Lilly checked a Shetland pony that seemed to be favoring his left hind leg. "What's wrong with the horse?"

"Can't say just yet." She picked up the hoof and felt for defects but there were none, then she did the same with the coronary band. There were no dark spots indicating bruising or puncture wounds. She pressed down lightly on each frog with a hoof pick. The tissue was slightly spongy. Then she placed her freckled nose up close to the hoof.

"Is it infected?"

"Probably not. There's no foul odor," Lilly confirmed. She cleaned all four hoofs with the curved metal pick and found no cracks, rings, dishes or flares. The horse was moving about normally now. "Probably just a pebble."

"Yeah probably."

At first Parker thought the fair-haired girl with the wan features was morbidly shy, but after the third visit to the stable the following week he revisited his initial impression. To be sure, Lilly was aloof, disconnected from humanity, but there was nothing overtly pathological about her detachment. She was efficient and professional; she doted on the horses, loving them to distraction. "Would you like to go out some time?" Parker's heart was racing out of control as he blurted the words in a jumbled heap.

"A date?" She glanced at him with a stony expression. "Yeah sure. Why not?"

Parker's eyes brushed over the bony, angular physique. "Give me your telephone number. I'll call later in the week."

She jotted her number on a slip of paper then did something outlandish; even though he was standing there no more than three feet away, she turned her attention elsewhere, effectively blotting him out of existence. Her queer response creeped him out so bad that, reaching home, Parker flung the slip of paper with her phone number in the trash. But in the morning he lugged the plastic rubbish bag outside, dumping the smelly refuse on the lawn. It took him the better part of half an hour to find the raggedy slip of paper stained with coffee grounds.

On their first date, Parker brought Lilly to the company Christmas party at the Marriott Hotel. Pulling up in front of the moss green ranch house, the front door opened, and the young girl came down the brick stairs. Mrs. Truman was peering out the bow window with a muddled, wide-eyed expression as though she were watching her daughter heading off on a first date. "Pretty jacket," Parker noted.

The girl who mucked stalls for a living wore a camel-colored, wool blend coat with slight pleats under an empire waist. "It's very warm." Lilly glanced at him with a flat affect, rested her hands palms down on her lap and stared straight ahead.

When they reached the third intersection, Parker said, "Did you get the job at the stables after high school?"

"No, I went to college first."

"Which one?"

"Brandeis."

"How many years did you attend?"

"Six."

"So you've got a master's degree." Lilly nodded distractedly but didn't bother to elaborate. "What did you study?"

"Victorian literature."

This tight-lipped girl attended one of the most expensive, Ivy League colleges on the east coast but worked an entry-level job for chump change! Parker felt slightly nauseous. He pictured the slip of paper blackened with coffee grounds and wondered if he might have been better off abandoning the crumpled, sheet where he had tossed it several days earlier.

At the function hall, Lilly stripped off her stylish coat to reveal a black strapless dress with a sweetheart neckline and tiered satin band at the waist. She wore no jewelry. Her hair, though neatly brushed, hung limply about the bare shoulders. With her alabaster complexion and dusting of freckles the effect was stunning.

"Now who's this gorgeous creature?" Thelma Kowalski cornered them in the hotel vestibule. A frumpy blond whose amorphous body was forever expanding in myriad directions, Thelma was married to Rick, a journeyman carpenter. Parker genuinely liked the woman despite a fatal flaw: like a busted spigot, her garrulous mouth ran from morning until night. He introduced the ladies. "God, you're such a skinny Minnie! It would take two of you to make one of me and just barely." Thelma laughed raucously at her own joke. For her part, Lilly seemed modestly pleased. She smiled, only responding in monosyllables. But then, nobody, not even Rick, could hold his own once the chatty wife had a couple of drinks to lubricate the perpetual motion machine that was her tongue. Lilly, who didn't care for liquor, was nursing a Shirley Temple, sipping the bubbly liquid with the cherry, as though it had to last until New Years.

"Lilly, works over at Cloverleaf Stables," Parker noted, "caring for the horses."

"Aw shit! I just love horses beyond all human comprehension," Thelma gushed. "When I was fourteen, my family vacationed at a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and we spent every day from sunup to dusk riding through…"

A half hour later, the cocktail hour was winding down and guests began moving through the buffet line. "Having a good time?"

Lilly spooned a helping of Swedish meatballs onto her plate. "Yes, why shouldn't I?"

Parker reached for a dinner roll. "I don't know. You seem a bit quiet, that's all."
Lifting a chrome cover off a tray, she placed a dollop of butternut squash laced with brown sugar and cinnamon alongside the spicy meat. "It's just my nature. Some people like Rick's wife are more outgoing. I'm reserved, that's all."

Lilly Truman, Parker mused, was one step removed from catatonic - a zombie out of Night of the Living Dead - and the best she could do was lame excuses. They ate in silence, the other people at their table picking up the slack with light conversation. Nobody seemed to care that the wisp of a woman in the strapless evening gown next to Parker contributed nothing - not a feeble word - and showed no interest making friends. "How's your meal?"

"Good. How's yours?" she replied.

A staggering four words, counting the contraction as two!

"Fine, although I think the chef was a bit heavy-handed with the black pepper in the meatball gravy. You haven't touched your salad."

Lilly cut her scalloped potatoes into manageable chunks and speared a portion on the tangs of her fork. "I'm saving it for last."

Six words under the previous rule.

"Did you notice the desert selection?" A separate table decked out with cheesecakes, éclairs, brownies, cherry Danish and assorted chocolates had been set up next to the coffee urn.

She paused, but only momentarily before negotiating the seasoned potatoes between her thin lips. Parker noticed that she wore no makeup - no lipstick, eye shadow or blush. "Everything looks scrumptious!"

A loss of three!

After the meal, Thelma Kowalski took Lilly aside and began bending her ear. The woman was sloshed - sloppy drunk - confiding some teary-eyed story that neither her husband nor Parker were privy to. The men were camped out at the bar.

"Pretty girl," Rick sipped at a Heineken. "She don't talk much, though."

"She doesn't talk at all," Parker replied morosely. It was a relief to have the mute creature temporarily off his hands. Normally Parker might have indulged in a few more drinks, but he wanted to deliver Miss Truman to the family homestead without incident.

"You ain't gonna see her no more?"

"She's not my type," Parker confirmed. "Not a bad girl, just…" Truth be told, he hadn't a clue what she was and didn't much care.

Around eleven, the Christmas party wound down without a glitch. On the ride home, as they reached the outskirts of Brandenberg, Parker said, "You got a master's degree from one of the finest colleges in the country and shovel shit for a living… that makes sense?"

"It's a matter of perspective," Lilly replied obtusely. She didn't seem to find his intrusiveness objectionable, which only riled Parker all the more.

"Why not put your education to practical use?"

"Such as?"

"I don't know - teach college, take a job in publishing… write the great American novel." The silence that ensued suggested none of the choices represented viable options. "Okay then," he continued, shifting gears, "tell me something about yourself."

”I'm not much of a talker."

"We've just spent the evening together, and I feel like I don't know you much better than before I pulled up in front of your house."

She was sitting like a mannequin, her hands folded in her lap. "I read an interesting short story the other night. I'll tell you that instead."

"I don't want creative fiction," he fumed. "I want to learn about your family, friends, hobbies, interests away from the stables..." Now he was really getting upset. "Do you have any vices? Maybe you're a compulsive germ freak or bulimic who goes on eating binges then sticks a finger down your throat to vomit." He shouldn't have said that, but they were only a few blocks away from the Truman residence. "That's what I want to hear."

"No," she replied evenly, not the least bit ruffled by his burgeoning hysteria, "we will do it my way." Sitting there in the car with the motor running in the driveway, Lilly told a silly story about an elderly Russian couple, who hired a local official to write a letter to their married daughter, who had moved to a distant province the previous year. The educated bureaucrat included nothing that the illiterate peasants told him to put in the letter that ultimately degenerated into a jumble of unintelligible drivel. But in the end, the daughter was so overjoyed to receive news of her parents that her heart comprehended every heartfelt sentiment and bit of newsworthy gossip intentionally omitted.

Lilly sat with her hands folded in her lap, the heater purring a soothing accompaniment to her passionate monologue. "You see, in Chekhov's tale the local official had written utter foolishness, but the daughter only took in what her heart could grasp and, in the end she was overcome with feelings of gratitude and devotion for parents too poor and sickly to make the trip." The story having wound to an end, Lilly breathed out heavily and her hazel-flecked eyes went dead.

The pale cloth curtain covering the bow window fluttered several times as Mrs. Truman surreptitiously glanced out. Only the mother's eyes were visible. Once finished, Lilly let herself out of the car and remarked, "I had a swell time, Parker." Hurrying up the slushy walkway, she disappeared into the house.

"Good riddance!" he muttered as he threw the shift in reverse.

New Years came and went. Thelma Kowalski asked, "Where's that kind-hearted Lilly? I so enjoyed our little chat at the Christmas party."

"What exactly did the two of you talk about?"

Thelma tapped the side of her cheek with a stubby index finger. "Funny thing is, I don't remember. She's a great listener, though."

"Yeah, that seems to be her strong point," Parker noted sourly.

Once rid of her, Parker had no intention of ever laying eyes on the dirty blond with the freckle-dappled skin. But a week passed, then another. They finished up the Cloverleaf Stable job and moved on to a condo project, part of the mayor's inner-city, gentrification program. At the time, Parker was too embittered to give the Russian tale much thought, but he wasn't so cocksure anymore. Rick and Thelma were separated. They suffered a horrendous blowout the second week in January and the husband moved into a studio apartment. "I can't live with that loudmouth bitch!" he confided. "She sucks all the oxygen out of the air."

Five weeks passed. Parker returned to the Cloverleaf Stables. "How have you been, Lilly?"

"Good. And you?"

"Just fine."

"How is it that you can spend the better part of half an hour telling me an elaborate, make believe story about Russians who live a hundred years ago but can't string two sentences back-to-back about current events?"

Lilly shrugged. "I don't know."

"Do you ever feel an urge to unburden yourself… to spill your guts?"

She stared at him wistfully before running her tongue over her lips "Hardly ever."

"Well, that's an honest answer." The barn smelled sweetly of fresh hay. The horses were fed and settled in for the night. "That's a pretty horse," Parker gestured in the direction of a dappled animal with a cream-colored hind quarter.

"It's an Appaloosa. They were originally bred by the Nez Perce Indians near the Palouse River. The breed has four, distinct patterns: the spotted blanket, leopard, snowflakes and frost."
"I gather this one would be named Snowflake."

"You’re a quick study."Lilly grinned. "They make excellent trail horses."

Okay so Lilly could talk expansively about two topics: Russian literature and horses. A weird anomaly! Parker pointed at a lone horse off by itself in a separate paddock. "Why is that one separated from the others?"

"Parasites… bloodworms." They crossed the crushed stone path to get a better look. "The gelding was losing weight, its coat turning dull and rough. He was also rubbing his tale with hair loss. Arnold didn't want to call the vet,… claimed it was an unnecessary expense, but when I explained that a single parasite could lay two hundred thousand eggs a day and infest the whole stable, the jerk reluctantly placed the call."

As they were heading back through the field toward the parking lot, Lilly pulled up, knelt down and began tugging at a patch of star thistle. "This stuff is poisonous,...brings on colic. Any horse foraging might accidentally eat the weed along with clean feed and get sick." Parker also began tugging at the noxious plants. Ten minutes later all the weeds had been ripped up and hauled away.

They were back in the parking lot. The sun was fading, bleaching the landscape into various shades of gray and murky greens. Lilly was following a hawk circling the pines on the far side of the highway. "How do horses breathe?"

"How do horses breathe?" he repeated the question word-for-word in a deadpan voice. "I don't know... like humans I suppose."

"Horses can't breathe through their mouth," Lilly clarified. "That's why God gave them such huge nostrils. Also, their pricked ears can rotate a full hundred and eighty degrees, allowing the animals to listen to sounds all around them."

Parker's features relaxed in a tepid smile. "And why exactly are you telling me this?"

The hawk resurfaced, hovering lower now over a grassy meadow rimmed with maples and pine that bordered the Cloverleaf Stables. Maybe it had spotted a field mouse or plump rabbit. At any rate, the predator was minding its own business, fulfilling its intrinsic destiny. "I don't know. You don't like it when I'm quiet. I'm trying to be sociable the only way I know how."

Parker was engulfed by a wave of self-loathing. "There's no need to change things. I prefer you just fine the way you are, and wouldn't have it any other way." He stepped closer and grabbed her forearm. "Would you like to go out again?"

"Yes."

"How's this Friday. We could grab something to eat and catch a movie afterwards."
"What time can I expect you?"

"Around seven."

On the fourth date Parker brought her by his apartment and they made love. In her phlegmatic way, Lilly took as good as she gave. "I read a wonderful story by Frank O'Connor, the Irish author."

"Really." He was lying naked on his back calculating how many pounds of anodized nails he had to buy over the weekend for a roofing job on Monday.

"This middle-aged man discovers that, years earlier, his wife gave birth to a child by another man …"

Yes, there it was again! Lilly was slipping into that throaty storyteller's mode. The gabled roof under construction runs sixty by forty feet so, figuring five pounds of nails per square foot…

"Are you listening?" Lilly tapped him gently on the shoulder.

"Yes, of course."

"But you were snoring."

"No, I'm awake now."

"Anyway," Lilly had shifted on her side, a forearm draped across his chest. "The husband decides to travel back to County Cork, to find his wife's missing child and…"

On Wednesday when the crew broke for lunch after installing the fascia trim on the new construction, Rick, asked, "How come you never say shit about Lilly?"

"What exactly did you want to hear?"

"I don't know… does she make you happy?"

"Yeah, she's good," Parker offered guardedly.

"Sometimes she acts like a deaf mute."

"Yes, that's true."

Rick gave him a tortured look. "Thelma's a freakin' talkaholic. She never shuts up. That's why I left… cause of her god-awful motor mouth. She don't never hardly give it a rest. Twenty-four-seven….blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like Chinese water torture." He inched closer. "I told Thelma she gotta put a rag in it or I'm gonna file papers… put an end to this farce-of-a-marriage once and for all."

Parker took a swig of ice tea and bit into a roast beef sandwich. He didn't hold out much hope that Rick's wife would 'put a sock in it' or much of anything else. Their marriage was doomed. But then, more people than Parker cared to admit confabulated, spewing their noxious, verbal diarrhea in a dozen different directions. They bullshitted you half to death - offered you up a potpourri of half-truths, verisimilitude and misinformation - wasting time and grey matter.

"In the bedroom my wife's a goddamn prude." the carpenter was thinking out loud. "Thelma don't like to experiment - take liberties, if you know what I mean." Parker nodded and took another bite from the sandwich. "Nothing kinky… won't watch skin flicks. No nothing."

"That's too bad." Parker rose to his feet rather abruptly even though a slightly overripe banana was nestled under a paper towel in his lunch box. "Gotta get back."

"One more question." Rick sounded like a frantic tourist, who had fallen overboard on a cruise ship and was watching the vessel laze off into the sunset. "Do you love Lilly?"

Parker grunted something unintelligible and shook his head up and down.

"Can you picture yourself living apart?"

"No, not hardly."He grabbed his steel-shank Estwing framing hammer off the ground.

Rick flashed him a tortured look. "Lucky you!"

A year passed. Parker Salisbury slid a felt ring box from his pants pocket, held the silver cube chest high, but didn't bother to show his future mother-in-law the modest stone. "I'm asking Lilly to marry me."

Edith Truman didn’t rush forward to embrace him; neither did the fair-skinned woman with the curly brown hair streaked with gray suggest it would be an honor welcoming him into the family. Rather, she cleared her throat and observed, "Lilly isn't like other girls. You'll have to accept your new wife on her own peculiar terms… just as her father and I have over the past twenty-six years." Mr. Truman had passed away a year earlier.

“I’ve dated my share of women since high school," Parker replied, "and Lilly doesn't resemble anyone in the universe."

Most parents might have taken such a crude remark as a rebuff - a back-handed compliment if not flagrant affront - but Mrs. Truman only stared at him with genuine sympathy. Only now did her normally stoic features ease into a pleased expression. "And when were you planning to ask her?"

"Tonight, at dinner." They had been dating a year now. Parker was taking Lilly into Boston to celebrate. The girl would probably sleep over his apartment. She texted him a half hour earlier - something about being stuck in traffic and delayed getting home. "I'm at a distinct disadvantage," Parker confided.

"How so?"

"What I feel for your daughter far exceeds anything Lilly could ever experience for me." He scrupulously avoided the 'L' word. The first time he told Lilly how he felt she observed, "I'm sure Thelma and Rick loved each other once and now look at them."

"That's pretty damn cynical," he grumbled.

"Words come cheap," she replied harshly. "Treat me nice. That's all that matters."

A half hour later, the front door burst open and Lilly rushed in. "Traffic was awful," she explained, slipping off her jacket and scarf. "I'll just be a moment." She hurried upstairs to change out of her work clothes.

Mrs. Truman led him into the den that doubled as a family library. "Good luck tonight and, for what it's worth, I'd be delighted to welcome you into our family." Hugging him briefly, she left the room.

An avid reader, Lilly's father installed floor-to-ceiling, mahogany shelves along three walls. Once when Parker asked Mrs. Truman, which of the hundreds of books in the library her daughter had read, the woman replied cryptically, "It might be easier to say which Lilly hasn't read."

Parker's future bride didn't so much read books as she devoured them, cannibalized the hardcover classics. As he perused the titles, several authors jumped out him. There was a clever tale about a simple-minded servant with a parrot by Flaubert. Lilly served up the bittersweet story like an hors d’oeuvre before their last debauched lovemaking. And Guy de Maupassant - Parker vaguely recalled a tale about a prostitute who outfoxed a sadistic Nazi officer during the French occupation. On a shelf slightly above eye level he spied Candide. Voltaire, according to Lilly, wrote like a zonked-out hippy from the psychedelic sixties. Or at least that’s how it seemed when she described the main character's hallucinogenic romp across sixteenth-century Europe.

On the far wall was a collection by Willa Cather. Did it contain Neighbor Rosiky? Lilly recounted that brief character sketch between strings in a duckpin bowling alley off route one in North Attleboro. A few rows down Edith Wharton had been misfiled. Parker moved the nineteenth-century socialite to the opposite end of the collection, where she rightfully belonged. George Elliot - her novels ran a thousand pages or more. Lilly Parker ignored Silas Marner in favor of vignettes - some comical, others painfully sad - from each of Elliot's major works. And Turgenev, the Russian…

"I'm ready now." Decked out in the same stunning dress she wore their first date, Lilly floated into the room.

Reaching into his pocket, Parker rubbed a thumb reassuringly over the fuzzy surface of the ring box. "Come in and close the door. There's something I want to show you, darling."