Shirley (10 page)

T
WO
WEEKS
LATER
, winter was even more harshly set into the Vermont landscape, snow banked deeply on every road, so that the pavement was reduced to a slippery ribbon on which only one vehicle could pass at a time. The Jackson-Hyman home was halfway up the hill beneath the Bennington campus, and neither direction was passable for a new mother and fragile infant. Natalie, wrapped in several blankets, was carried out onto the snow-strewn porch twice a day, mostly so that I could smell the icy fresh air. Motherhood did not come to me easily. My breasts were enormous; I could not stop sweating; I resented my daughter's endless needs and struggled to find the determination to mother her that I had been so wedded to just weeks before. The house and its denizens had begun to irritate me. No one made the slightest attempt to coddle me, to celebrate my accomplishment. If anything, now I was reduced in status, relegated only to the chores of maternity.

Shirley, who had gone back to cooking—her version, which involved astonishing messes and haphazard cleanup, and was often inspired but sometimes failed disastrously—while I was in the hospital, was eager to get back to work on her book. It was impossible
to misunderstand this; she avoided the kitchen so assiduously that I had to imagine she was storing her lunch in her desk. The second day after my return she had Fred come ask me what to order for dinner. I believe I roasted two chickens, and listened as the Hymans and my husband cheerfully decimated them down to the bones, while I tried to soothe cranky Natalie in the hallway.

I thought perhaps we would be stuck indoors for eternity, the smells of Natalie's diapers just another stale note to add to the odors of pipe and cigarette tobacco, spilled liquor, food remnants, cat, and mothballs. I was shaky on the stairs—the birth had shocked me profoundly, I admit, and though I was consumed by the person it had produced, there was an
Et tu, Brute?
quality to the way my body had betrayed me I would not soon forget. Sleep was a constant thought—wanting it, falling into it, existing on the edge of it. I thought about my bed in the way I used to think about having money to buy clothing or makeup, as if those few square feet of mattress were the key to happiness.

When Natalie slipped into sleep, I followed her. When she awakened, I did, too. If Fred was home and interested, I would hand him the baby and hope to have enough free time to take a shower and brush through my hair. It was falling out in handfuls, and Shirley told me that constant brushing had allowed her to hold on to her locks after each of her four childbirths. For me, not blessed with Shirley's sharp tongue or her talent, my beautiful hair was one of the things that defined me, that allowed me to feel valuable. I kept a brush in my skirt pocket. Any few seconds I could grab, I would pull it out and try to cosset my cherished hair.

One morning, when the house was quiet—this about a month after Natalie's birth—Shirley brought a stack of laundered diapers into my room. The baby and I were drowsily lounging on the barely made bed, and I'd been studying, not for the first time, the formal prettiness of the missing Bennington student Paula Welden in the newspaper photo I'd excised from the article about her disappearance. Shirley glanced at the wrinkled photo, startled. “You held on to this?”

“Yes,” I said. “I worry about her.”

“It's late for that,” she answered.

“You knew her, didn't you?” Despite her earlier denial, I was certain of it. I don't know why. There was an uncomfortable silence. She was so rarely at a loss, it made me feel sorry for her. And that, for whatever reason, made me think of my mother.

“Were there any letters?” I asked.

“Just Geraldine. So that kills the workday.”

One had to be cautious when Shirley's mother was named; the only time I'd seen her cry all winter was while reading a letter Geraldine had sent from the West Coast. The arrival of these missives always gave rise to something—dramatic readings of the contents, even more alcohol than usual, sour mornings-after. Shirley, for all her derision of Geraldine, never failed to write back immediately, sitting over her typewriter to pound out the pages with the same fervor she devoted to her fiction. “If I sent my parents my most recent short story, it would have as much truth in it,” she said once, as she unwound the final sheet of a letter from the typewriter. “There. A letter to Mother that's good enough to print in
Ladies' Home
Journal
. Not a curse or a hair out of place, nor a complaining child. Not even an unwashed dish. That's going to please Geraldine.”

Shirley picked sleeping Natalie up from the bed with expert efficiency, the sateen edge of the baby's blanket swishing dust motes from the wood floor. “You must always tell the truth,” she sing-songed against Natalie's scalp. Her skin, like Natalie's, was pale, thickly dimpled, comforting to the touch. She was better than a mother to me. And when she held my baby, I did feel linked to my own history, my past and future. Love, not of the body but of the ineffable—the love of self that also means the love of others, the love of self not from the swollen, satisfied connection of organ to organ but something slighter and more true, the pull forward and backward of the atoms of our being. “Nattie, Nattie, little one, you will always tell the truth.” And witches' curses (fairy godmothers' gifts) come to pass, in stories and in life.

How strange a wish, wasn't it? Shirley lied as a professional duty. But of course she somehow created truth. She chose the best side of the story, shaped and polished it, not so it was perfect, but so it was real. She told me once: “Things have to be true in the world of one's characters, they have to be true in that world, have to happen there.” She did not work for the census or take legal depositions, but she ferreted out useful truths all the same. In a story of hers called “The Summer People,” Shirley wrote about an elderly couple who is treated royally by all the citizens of their summer community until that one year when they decide to stay on after the holiday season. What follows is terrifying, and a reminder about how situational graciousness can be. Sometimes when I think about how much I loved Shirley, how good she was to me, I try to quell
the nagging idea that all of it was conditional, an accident of timing, of mutual need.

Natalie began to fret, and I sat up to take her back. The baby's body folded into my crooked elbow, and I was flooded with a sense of relief I did not yet understand. Owning Natalie made me feel safe. She needed me so much. I was already wary of the day when I would be insufficient and she ashamed. Our heritage requires it, the grim memory of my childhood is written in my soul; I cannot move fast enough to outwit my past. I could sniff her shame arriving on the wind. Would that I could avoid it.

I opened my blouse and my brassiere in order to nurse the baby. Natalie latched on, pulling at my nipple, and I sighed with the pleasure of it. Of mattering so. And Shirley sat on the bed and leaned against me, close to my breast, so that I could feel the brush of her breath against my skin. I have never been so close to another human, not ever, as the three of us were at that moment.

•   •   •

J
UST
A
FEW
YEARS
AGO
, I mentioned to the mother of one of Natalie's friends that I had known Shirley Jackson, and she lit up with a kind of savage delight: “That dyke,” she said. “Poor woman, to have to pass as straight all those years. What a life she must have had.”

“Dyke?”

She nodded, leaning back against the park bench with an ostentatious thud. “Oh, yes, everyone knows Shirley Jackson was gay,” she told me. “Think of her writings, those novels, the way women were always . . . ever so close. You know.”

“I knew her,” I protested. “There's not a chance.”

“Innocent Rosie,” she said, as if I weren't nearly thirty, an adult in my own right. “That's the way women handled it, back then.”

We slip, we careen through time. We slide, we lurch back to our beginnings.

“She liked men, I know it,” I said, remembering the way Shirley looked at Stanley, wanting to entertain him, fascinated by him, enmeshed in him.

“Nobody likes men,” the woman said, waving her daughter over to tie an errant shoelace. “Nobody likes men,” she repeated, as the child scampered back to the swings.

“Hah.” I thought it had to be a joke.

“Men don't like men. Women don't like men. They're many things, but they aren't likable. Men aren't for liking. Women are for liking. Men are for, well, other things.”

I laughed out loud.

“It's not funny,” she said. “It's true.”

I looked around the playground. It was a pretty fall afternoon. None of the other mothers were paying attention to us, pairs of heads tandemed one toward the other, bench after bench of coupled souls confiding, while children ran and scuffled dirt and leaves or jounced on the teeter-totter. Was it possible that men weren't friends with us? I wasn't sure. I never was sure. No matter what Fred and I did to each other, I loved him. I mostly felt more connected to him than to anybody else, except my daughter. But I didn't always tell him what I felt. I treated him with a certain wary consideration, but it was born of knowledge and respect, not fear or sense of
danger. He was my friend. I was kind to him. And I liked him. I really think I did.

•   •   •

S
HIRLEY
AND
I
LOVED
ONE
ANOTHER
, I admit, and we were close, but if anything, what lingers for me now is a sense of being part of her, and her a part of me. A sense of being seen. But I do recall something else she said that wintry morning, something that perhaps explains her better than anyone ever could. I remember the quiet envy in her voice when she watched me grip baby Natalie against my bare skin. She said, “You love her, don't you?”

And I shrugged, and maybe laughed lightly. Of course I did. My daughter taught me that love was not a choice.

“I loved mine,” she said. “As best I could. I do love them.”

“Of course you do.” Remarkable, given where I came from, how easy this was for me to know.

“My mother. So young when I was born. Do you know, they tried to abort me?”

“What?” Geraldine had told Shirley that?

Shirley nodded, her cheek still gentle against the skin above my breast, her breath mingling with the baby's.

“Why would anyone say that to a child?”

“She wanted me to know. What a sacrifice she'd made for me. That was what she wanted me to know.”

My own mother, who stole for me, neglected me, and then disappeared from my life—a pathetic, self-pitying being who would have squeezed a corpse to see if there was something liquid left in
it, something she could make use of—even she knew what love was. I can bring to mind the aromas of coffee and cloying musk cologne, the silky slide of her face powder and the brittle ends of her hair-sprayed do, and it adds up to my mother as she leans down to kiss me good night. I am young, perhaps four years old, and I have been alone in some apartment all evening while the others were god knows where. At least my father wasn't home. My mother loves me. Whatever else she is, and not much of it is good, she is a woman who loves her little girls.

“That's horrible, that's vicious,” I told Shirley, lifting Natalie off the breast, breaking our momentary trinity. I burped the baby. She was half asleep, and I placed her in the bassinet, tucked her blanket tight, and watched to make sure the drift into sleep was real.

Shirley tapped a finger on the photo of Paula Welden. She shrugged her fleshy shoulders, not meeting my eyes. “We do what we do,” she said, mockery rippling through the words.

“Yes,” I said uncertainly.

“Do you want me to put the clean diapers away?”

I did. Shirley opened the second dresser drawer and placed the baby's things inside.

“What do you think happened to her?” I asked. “To Paula? After she left the campus? After she hitched the ride to Glastenbury Mountain?” Shirley pushed the drawer shut with a bang, rattling everything on the dresser top: my hairbrush and Fred's shaving things, the baby's talcum powder.

“I've told you, no one knows,” she said irritably. That I had elicited an edge was slightly thrilling. I tucked the baby's blanket more tightly.

“She ran away for love, that's the story I prefer,” Shirley said slowly, selecting her words. “Paula Welden, that is. She ran from what was stultifying to what would allow her to feel alive.”

“Did you know her?” I could not help myself.

Shirley paused. “Rose.”

My throat was tight with the danger of it.

“I told you before,” she said. “I never knew the girl.” That flat delivery.
I never knew the girl,
and yet I'd heard that note before, that rigid, rejecting tone:
Don't ask,
it said to me.
Whatever you do, don't ask.

And then, out of the blue, she said, “Think what she did to her mother, disappearing. It is our children who betray us. Not we who betray them.”

Was she right? Perhaps I had betrayed my mother, not understanding who she was. But I could not believe that. I had seen my mother clearly and never failed to love her. If Natalie does that for me, I'll be satisfied. Of course she'll leave us, won't she? Growing up requires it. At first it will seem a condemnation of every happy moment that has gone before. But I'll come to terms with it. I'll grow to like the new arrangement, the shift in power, the sense of freedom. I expect the pleasure comes later, a chatty letter filled with good news when all you'd been expecting were bills.

“I want to see it,” I said. “The place where Paula Welden disappeared.” I grabbed a sweater, drew it over my head.