Shirley (12 page)

“Rowanberries, look! Ah, Rose, a rowan tree's a rosebush with a noble heart. It saves the red foxes in winter, welcomes the birds back for spring. First sign that winter's over is robins snacking on them. I like to have a branch on my desk, it's good protection, or so we witches say.” She twisted the thin branch left to right and back again, forcing the fibers to tear until the laden bough came off with a snap.

“Protection from what?”

“Lovers find one another, evil's vanquished. Rowanberries attract love and repel wrongdoing. Roses, Rose! I'll bite into one. Give me rowanberry lips, although my eyes aren't blue enough for Robert Graves.” She popped a berry in her mouth, winced at the flavor. “Bitter berries, but small price to pay.”

“Stanley will hate it if you catch cold,” I said.

She considered this with a certain detachment, but it was just
for show. Already, she was returning to the car obediently. I followed, huddling over Natalie. We sat quietly for a minute or so, trying to warm up. I watched the icicles dance at the ends of the tree branches and imagined I could hear the tinkling sound they made, such delicate wind chimes capping the brutish beech tree limbs.

“Whatever happened to her, really, isn't as important as what we remember,” she said. That idea was so large and complicated I could hardly imagine all its permutations, and so sat silent as our breath fogged the inside of the windshield.

“The worst part is how people forget,” she said eventually. Natalie gurgled something plaintive in her sleep. I stroked a chilled baby cheek with the pads of my cold fingers. “They just forget, that's what I wanted to say in the story I wrote. That it's easier to forget than to endure the pain of remembering.”

“Yes.”

“And feeling what you lost, and imagining what could be the truth. I hate the notion of what-if. And yet I believe it better to be missed than to be forgotten.”

“Yes,” I said again. I hugged Natalie even tighter, until her eyes opened in surprise and she gave a wail. I would be a mother worthy of missing. I would.

Shirley sniffed suddenly, and then again, with the intensity of a hunting dog.

“What is it?”

“Fire.”

No,
I thought.
He'll never leave me alone.
But I kept my face still and calm, hoping that for once Shirley would not guess the images
in my mind. Wherever in the world he'd landed and whether he was alive or dead, it seemed my father wanted to be caught, and caught by her.

“Where?” I asked.

“A long, long time ago,” she said. She closed her eyes, breathed in deeply. “But coming again.”

I was silent. My damned father. His scent clung to my soul.

A fire coming could mean only that he would whisk me off, the only times I knew him cheerful and full of stories of the old country, of his mother's cooking or the way light lingered in the mornings in the rocky hills behind the village—hills that had protected them all when they were forced to run. And I'd be adoring him, and proud to be descended from this infinite and never-ending line of sturdy survivors. Loving and admiring, and then the car he'd borrowed would pull up behind a row of buildings in some random town and he'd say, “Sit here,” if I was lucky. Because sometimes he wanted me to pour the kerosene with him; it went faster that way, and I'd be dizzy with the smell and with the honor—he never took my sister with him—and I'd be proud when he praised the splashing pattern I created in the narrow hallway at the back, where the stock of toys or insurance files or ladies' undergarments were stored away from customers' view. Fire. He always made me leave before he set it, but there was the sound of lost oxygen in the darkness nonetheless. A siren in the distance, and he would pound the wheel, push the car a little harder. “Sleep, Rose,” he'd order. I'd lie down on the seat, close my eyes. A heart pounding so hard takes a long time to slow. I sniffed my fingers; no kerosene touched them, and yet the scent clung. Smelled it for days,
no matter the soapy diligence with which I washed my hands. Remembering, I smell it now.

“Who is Graves with the rowanberry lips?” I smoothed the blankets around Natalie; her lips were dark red, even more beautiful than the succulent berries clumped limply on the branch on the seat next to me, droplets of snowmelt glistening. I wanted to read whatever Shirley read. I wanted to know enough to keep up with her, with all of them. If I took a book from the Hyman library each time I finished one, I'd not make a dent in what they had. But I wanted to, desperately. Already, I had read Horace's odes and Emerson's essays, Poe's stories and Hawthorne's, anything to keep up with them at table. To laugh along with the way they spoke to each other, catching reference after reference without effort. Ah, me, I hoped to master being one of them. Or at a minimum, to have their respect.

“Don't worry. We won't be around to see the fires,” Shirley said. She smoothed her skirt, straightened her blouse, gave a halfhearted swipe to a damp spot on her skirt.

“We won't?”

“Some might call it fortunate.”

“How do you know, how do you do it?”

To her credit, she did not pretend to misunderstand. “I've always been able to.” She laughed. “I know what cats think.”

“I can only guess what that is.”

“They're more interesting than you'd suppose.”

I nodded, inexplicably charmed at the notion of all Shirley's cats competing for her attention, even slyer and more insistent than the children.

“There was a camp here, a little cottage. Years ago, when Paula disappeared. It burned down, though. I remember when it burned.”

She pointed behind us, and I turned in the seat and for the first time saw the low white ranch house perched in the snow at the very far end of the parking circle, the barbed wire and wood paddock that held four horses, the two dingy windows. Inside, a small child peered at us, as if perched backward on a couch. “Do you know them?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Probably. They bought the place after the fire here.”

I said, “How did the fire start?”

She studied me. “You're made of good, aren't you, Rose? You aren't like other girls your age.” I sat taller, hugging the baby inside my coat.

Potency surged through me: I was a mother now, with a perfect husband and such an extraordinary friend, I thought that anything was possible. “I want to be important” burst out of my mouth, stark truth. The words hung in the frosty air as if they might etch letters into the ice sheen on the inside of the windshield.

“No, you don't.” How dry her tone.

“I do. Maybe I could write. I love books. Perhaps you'll teach me, to hear what cats think and imagine that dead people are still alive. And parents miss you when you disappear. I want to believe what you believe.” Slipping so quickly from eager to desperate: I would take the fatness, and the cheating husband, and the messy house and the cats and the depression and all the rest. I really would. If I could know the world the way she did, render it amusing and sardonic and ever so smart, well, then, anything would be
worth it. Any suffering, any past, any difficulty. “You'll always matter, you'll never be forgotten.” I was breathless with the thought of it. “You'll live forever,” I told her. “You'll live in books.”

She turned the key to the engine with an angry slip of the wrist. It sputtered reluctantly, and its struggles made Natalie cry. I'd said something wrong. It seemed so unfair, when I'd been trying to tell her that I loved her. She was my hero, and she hated the idea that I admired her. Did worship look so much like its envious twin?

“It takes more than wanting,” she said cruelly. “You don't have the language. You don't want to share. You hoard your past. You clean it up. Withhold the details that make you what you don't want to be.”

“That's mean.”

“You lack courage, Rose. You aren't brave.”

“All I am is brave,” I said hotly. “You have no idea, you have no idea what I lived through, what my life was like. And you change your stories all the time—you do, you've told me so yourself!”

“I clean them up to make them read better. I don't care what the hell I look like, or anybody else.” I found that hard to believe. Her chin trembled—anger or self-pity made manifest—and I told myself it was a kindness not to respond. But honestly, I couldn't speak. I felt that sick, sad nausea that comes when you've told your truest truth and gotten no more notice than if you'd asked to borrow a stamp or whether a hemline was even. Mostly, I did not want to cry.

“I regret nothing,” she said then, quietly. I pretended not to know what she imagined my accusation to be.

We returned to the house in silence. As we headed toward town I wished I were Shirley or any other woman in the world. Not
Paula Welden, of course. But with Natalie's gaze steadfastly fixed on mine, I wanted more. I wanted to be worthy.

•   •   •

B
ACK
AT
THE
HOUSE
, Sally was reading in the parlor, sprawled across the long, shabby sofa as if she'd been there all week. For me, it was the first indication that Friday afternoon had arrived. Sally's presence always signaled the end of the workweek. Natalie another week older and Sally installed back at the dining room table, where her banter with the writers and artists and critics who lounged there put my feeble efforts to shame. Yes, I admit it; my heart did the proverbial sink into the pit of the stomach. As usual, she did no more than lift her eyebrows at the sight of me. We were at war, unspoken, but war all the same.

I brought the laundry into the living room and began to pair socks while Sally and Shirley hashed over the week's events. Sally had brought a story to share with her mother, something she'd written for school, and I was pleased when Shirley began to criticize it. “You trivialize your gift,” she told her daughter, and I had to suppress a little smile of satisfaction. If I ever wrote anything, I'd wait until it was perfect before I showed it to Shirley. I wouldn't waste her time.

Stanley came home next, and was pleased to hear that we'd been out, even more so because we'd been to Glastenbury Mountain. “Always the best place to ferret out the next piece of the plot,” he said approvingly.

“We weren't working,” Shirley said, defiant and a little excited. Challenging him to tell her no, to say that a day without writing
disappointed him or even that it pleased him—daring him to tell her what to do.

Was I the only one to breathe in sharply? Bright-eyed, observant Sally watched them both as well. Only I saw something darker there, I thought, the result of knowing Shirley best.

“Your girls always go to the mountains, don't they?” Stanley said finally. It took me a moment to realize it was Shirley's characters he meant.

“I suppose they do.” Dry Shirley, giving him nothing, and yet she was flirting.

“What does Natalie say? Not Rosie's baby but yours—the girl in
Hangsaman
?”

“Remind me,” she said, delighted.

“Oh, what was it?” He shook his head from side to side, amused, thoughtful. A game, of course; it was Stanley, and so he remembered precisely, he always did.
“‘A tree is not a human thing, with its feet in the ground and its back hard against the sky; it cannot tolerate the small human tendernesses moving beneath . . .'”

“I thought you would do the part before that, when they're in the woods and she's scared.” She had sat up, straighter, and her cheeks were flushed with pleasure.

He nodded. “I can do that, too, Shirl.”

She waited. I watched her watch him as he examined the voluminous storage depot that was his memory, and saw them both grin, relieved, when he nodded to himself, having accessed precisely the snippet of her prose he wanted to recall:
“‘Or choose perhaps a throne higher than the moon, on a black rock, where sitting we can rule the world, where the stars are around our feet and the sun rises
when we glance down and beckon'”
—he cleared his throat—
“‘where far below there are contests to make us laugh and above us there is nothing but our own crowns and sitting there forever we can watch and end eternity with a gesture of our finger . . .'”

“A veritable steel trap, that brain of yours, S. Edgar.”

They were both so pleased with themselves I was startled when Stanley went to the sideboard and poured their evening drinks. Somehow I expected to keep talking about Shirley's novel
Hangsaman
a bit longer; they seemed to be having such a good time. As I continued with the laundry, I thought about the book, Shirley's second novel. It had been written at Bennington, but Natalie was hardly the well-bred Connecticut girl I imagined Paula Welden to be. I'd forgotten her when we picked the baby's name. No one had mentioned it, either. Maybe every girl has a little bit of Natalie in her. And a little Paula Welden, too.

“Lost girls go to the mountains,” Shirley said lightly, sipping her drink, and we laughed together; even Sally and I momentarily joined in the sheer pleasure of knowing that in this often confounding world, there was a clear destination for the sorrowful, the angry, and the confused. Someplace far from this house, from this lovely nest of brilliant, fascinating people. Glastenbury Mountain. Now that I knew the mountain's dark secret, I need never visit her slopes again.

Before Fred returned from the college, I had all the laundry folded. As I hoisted the basket to the stairs, it seemed that the very walls smiled from behind the watercolor paintings by Shirley and the children's school photographs. Thrummed in approbation, approval of my industry and dedication. I went from room to room,
stowing clean laundry in the correct drawers, proud and cheerful. In our room, Natalie snored gently, one fist curled by her plump cheek. I tucked her blanket around her feet, and took the back stairs down, empty laundry basket in hand. Shirley and Sally sounded happy in the kitchen, where they were finishing up dinner preparations, stewed peaches and a lamb stew. When Sally laughed loudly, I smiled agreeably so as not to set my teeth on edge. And when Fred came home, I hugged and hugged and hugged him until he practically had to peel my arms off his shoulders. He was my family, after all, and he had promised to love me forever. We went upstairs. I told him everything, repeating everything I'd learned about Paula Welden, about the mysterious way she'd disappeared. Almost everything. I did not say anything about Shirley, about how strange her voice had been when she'd said she'd never met the girl. And I did not tell him that Paula Welden reminded me of me, of how invisible one can be and still be somewhere on this earth.