Shirley (18 page)

But in the morning, when I woke, all the memories of the day before were with me, under the covers, denting the pillows, glistening through the window glass. I could barely breathe; rage overwhelmed me. I nursed the baby, each pull at the nipple another theft. I am surprised now, remembering this, that I had milk enough to give her. Natalie fell back to sleep, sated, and I slid from her and Fred, as if their very ability to remain calm was a cushion that could smother me.

He had not packed an article of my clothing, merely baby things and a change of shirt and boxer shorts for himself. The keys to Shirley's Morris Minor sat on the pine-paneled dresser, next to a crumpled handkerchief, Fred's limp wallet, and a stack of three folded diapers. My jeans from the day before were almost dry, stiffening over the radiator. I pulled them on, took the keys, and left.

Our room was on the second floor. Looking over the railing, I saw that we were one of only two cars in the partially cleared lot. I tiptoed down the staircase, holding the railing to keep from slipping in patchy snow turned to ice by the shoddy work of whoever had hastily swept the stairs. It was barely morning, stars still flickering vaguely against the brightening sky. Shirley's car started easily. It knew me; I'd probably driven it more than anyone else these past seven months.

I followed the signs north to Vermont, and found myself back in the driveway of the Hymans' house a little after seven in the
morning. The door was shut, the curtains drawn; the house was asleep. I tried the lift-and-turn ministration that worked for all the others but could not open the door. I stepped off the porch, and made my way around to the kitchen entrance, where I knew I would not be denied.

Lights were on there; the smells of coffee and toast drifted out as I turned the doorknob. Business as usual. I tiptoed to the kitchen. I would make her listen to me; once she heard my side, heard my story, she would be the one to apologize. I had not seen her do so before, with anyone, but I was certain she would want to, for me. In the light of day, we would both be kind.

It wasn't Shirley, but Sally. Was it the weekend? I had no idea what day it was. “Oh,” she said. “You're back.”

“I expected your mother.”

“I'm sure.”

“Have I offended you?”

“Me?” she said, turning the fried eggs for just a moment. They were for Stanley, then; he liked them just a flip of the spatula past sunny-side up. “I'm not interested enough to be offended.”

I had earned her rudeness, and yet it was a victory as well, to know that I bothered her. I told myself I was not going to grapple with a child. I left, went up the stairs and to our bedroom, and began to assemble the clothing Fred had left behind. A moment later, Sally appeared in the doorway, a plate of eggs in her hand.

“You're practically my age,” she said. “Thinking you're so tight with Shirley, so groovy, so above—”

I would have laughed if it hadn't been so sad. I wanted to apologize to her. Part of me wanted to ask her to the movies, or to walk
into town with me, or whether we might exchange sweaters—we were close in size—but I was a mother, a wife, and now a woman scorned. She was a child by comparison.

“I'm packing up my things. I won't be bothering you much longer.” And I opened the closet door and began to pile my few dresses on the bed, slipping the Hymans' hangers out as I did so. Sally left the plate of eggs on the dresser, picked up my good blue dress, the one with the four brass buttons, and folded it neatly. I did the same with the older blue dress, and she took the gray wool. Her hair smelled of baby powder, as if she'd borrowed Natalie's before I arrived. In less than five minutes, my clothing was packed. I looked at Fred's shirts, still on their hangers in the narrow closet, but left them.

I left behind all the Hyman children's old infant clothing, the soft, worn blankets and little sweaters. I loved those sweaters, bright oranges and soft creams, hand-knitted and uneven, the pills and pulls of their previous owners only adding to their value for me. “Take them,” Sally said indifferently, but I couldn't. I was far too proud to sneak even an old burp cloth in among those items that clearly belonged to Natalie. I wanted Shirley to know I'd been honorable, not grasping, that I'd left her completely. Sally unearthed an old pillowcase and tossed the baby's few things inside. I hauled my stuffed suitcase, careful not to bump against the scarred mahogany stair railings. All of a sudden, I was terrified I might alert the others to my presence, come face-to-face with Stanley.

As usual, the front door would not unseal itself for me. Sally jiggled the knob as she pulled the door slightly up and open. Sally said, “How will you get to . . . to where you're going?”

“I'll get a taxi at the train station.”

“Oh, then. Well, good-bye.” She paused, flushing the same pinkish pale her mother did when moved. “You don't understand her,” Sally said bluntly. “You think you do, I know you think so, but you don't.”

“Yesterday—”

“This has nothing to do with yesterday, whatever you tried to make my father do—”

“I didn't!”

“I don't care. She's not ordinary, not an ordinary person. You don't see it.”

“I do!”

“You used her. You took advantage.” I had never heard a voice like that, so furious the rage had burnt itself to ice.

“I protected her! My god, I would have stopped her, none of you stop her, you all know what she's done, what she's capable of doing! You don't stop her!”

Sally began to close the door. Her face was white, eyes narrowed. The hand on the door trembled. If I had ever looked at her before, I had not noticed she was pretty, that her bones inside her body moved fluidly, that her frame was graceful. I would have liked her, I thought, but then her lips twisted cruelly. “That's not what friendship is.
You
wouldn't know. Well, congratulations. You don't know Thing One about my mother. That won't stop you, I'm sure. You can brag about her to every jackass you ever meet. Whoop-de-doo.”

“She is my friend, she is!”

Sally shook her head dismissively. “Greedy, greedy Mrs. Nemser.”

“I hate you,” I said. “I hate you all.”

They were easier to blame than Fred. I see that now.

As I walked past the living room, I could not see inside the windows; they'd gone opaque in resistance to the lemony sunrise. I thought,
The house has closed herself to me.

I walked into town, past the library and grocery store and up the road, to the station. I waited until the train was due and the lone taxi arrived to troll for arriving passengers. “What will it cost to take me to Williamstown?” I asked.

The answer was twenty dollars. I didn't have it, but Fred did. I'd seen a little more than that in his wallet earlier. This was the end of Bennington College and the Hyman family, I vowed. No matter what they did, I would never see them again.

I opened the taxi door. The driver said, “Give us a minute, love. Maybe someone from the train'll need a ride our way.” If I'd been someone else, he'd have hauled his bony frame out of the car and taken my bags to put them in the trunk. “Get in, then,” he said, but I shook my head no, picturing Stanley's fat hand slithering up my leg. I'd wait in the cold.

“Get in, then,” he said again. But I didn't. Did I know what was coming or was I so stubborn it made me stupid? If I had an answer then, I hardly remember now.

G
OD
, I
WAS
YOUNG
.
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse.

I stood at the train station in the cold sunlight, shivering, trying to keep the bags I carried from sinking to the icy grime on the outdoor bench. When the train came near the station, the rails would begin to vibrate, first with a low, comforting hum that grew louder and more painful to the ear until the moment when it softened into the sweet exuberant rattle of arrival. My purse burned my forearm, so tightly had its strap wound around my flesh. I felt myself already a visitor to this place, not a familiar face in sight, and even if there were I could no longer claim to know anyone.

It was as the tracks began to resonate that I heard the chipper insistence of the Morris Minor's horn. I turned, uncertain what I would say to Stanley this time. Frost clouded the windshield. The taxi driver tilted his head with a demonic cheerfulness, didn't bother to castigate me for abandoning his vehicle. All's fair in love and trade, was what his eyes said. I remember his jacket was a worn corduroy, and that his knuckle skin was red and cracked where his
fingers curled around the black plastic of the steering wheel. “Sorry,” I murmured. He rolled up his window.

And as I opened the Morris Minor's passenger door, I suddenly knew that this time the driver would be Shirley, and though my breath caught at the thought of it, I slid in. Hands on my lap, purse clutched there, suitcase at my feet. And once again, I found myself in the front seat of the car, watching humidity bead down the inside of the frost-streaked windshield.

She uncranked her window. “Thanks, Mr. Donovan,” she told the taxi man. “I almost forgot my own houseguest.”

He waved in forgiveness, his grin an acknowledgment of both respect and amusement for the oddity that was Shirley Jackson. She cranked the window up and sat, rubbing her palms along the steering wheel, crooked fingers extended out as if at any moment she could begin to type a life in thin air.

“Don't say a word,” she ordered. Was she still angry? I obeyed, allowing the expansive silence of companionship to lift me once again. I loved her enough that her wanting me at all was sufficient to impale the breastplate of my fury's armor. I forgave without a moment of wavering, even though I tried not to give in quite so easily. “Come back to the house. You're part of it, you're part of us.”

I closed my eyes, savoring the thought.

“You want us to be perfect, but we're not. Not a one of us, Rose. Not a one. We all do things to one another, we all hurt one another; we're cruel or unkind or unforgivable in a multitude of other ways. Stanley, lord knows, Stanley has hurt me countless times.” She paused. “And I him, albeit in my own fashion.”

“I didn't do anything. I didn't do what you thought I did.”

“No, Rose. You didn't.”

“I'd never do such a thing to you. I thought you knew that. I thought you knew me.”

Her face was tired. “Please come home.”

“I've never told anyone,” I said, straightening in the seat to gaze at the smattering of heavily scarved and hatted passengers alighting from the train, shabby suitcases clutched in gloved hands. Such lucky innocents—anticipating adventure or returning from it—while I, returned to the Eden of the Morris Minor, knew far too much for someone who had lived so little. I wanted Shirley to understand the full measure of my loyalty. “I've never even told Fred.”

“Told him what?”

“I'm your friend, no matter what. I don't care what you did. I don't.”

Cold as the air was in the car, I felt the warmth of her breathing and my own, the way our rhythms matched. She said, slowly and oh so carefully, as if this was what I'd meant, “Each marriage has its own mysteries, Rose. Yours will survive.”

“I thought Fred was just like me, I thought he'd claimed me, I was his.” My eyes filled again, how dull to cry so much.

“It changes nothing, really. We soldier on. Don't you see, Rose? You can't leave this life, not the baby, or even Fred.”

“I've never hurt him,” I said, sniffling, starting to love my tragedy a little now that I could share it. I'd have been a perfect woman for a man who beat me, I suppose; I should count myself lucky to
have been courted by those of kinder cruelty. “What he did, what he did to me, to me and Natalie, it isn't fair.”

“No.”

“Then I can't stay, don't you see? I have to go.”

“That's silly.”

Her tone pragmatic, as if I were one of the daughters, as if my anger had been rebellious instead of righteous—as she spoke, I found myself increasingly relieved. Why? I can't say. I suppose because more than anything I wanted to find a reason to return.

And I did feel the pull not only to my husband and our daughter, but also toward the book-laden tables and the musty couches, the Asian masks and Shirley's odd figurative paintings on the walls, the dirty dishes accumulated on the window seats and atop the counters, the heady musk of tobacco and spilled bourbon and burnt chicken skin, the cats in mock sleep on stairs and desks, the spill of sweaters and jackets on the velvet loveseat in the front hall. I missed it all already, and it missed me. I imagined I could hear the walls heave a plaster sigh that ran from basement to attic, their cool surfaces undulating in relief that I had realized I was needed. Those maple floors needed my feet to soothe their anxious planes; those high-foreheaded windows depended on my vigilance to monitor the coven of evergreen trees that parleyed in swaybacked communion in the yard. Of course I would go back.

She put the car in gear, turning her thick neck to look over her shoulder as she reversed. Her skin pulled with her head's movement, gauzy fabric wringing and unwringing as the car straightened and we began to drive toward the house. I don't know what I
was thinking; I remember I felt calm and safe again, as if Shirley would make things right.

And then she said, very thoughtfully, “If anybody's a child bride, it's you, Rosie. And Friedan's wrong, because you aren't helpless at all.”

I wasn't?

I
DID
NOT
GO
TO
RETRIEVE
Natalie and Fred from the motel in Williamstown. Shirley dropped me off at the house and left almost immediately. She took Stanley with her, but it would have been okay in any case. He greeted me with the same matter-of-fact directness that characterized most of our interactions, tucking a plump finger into the pages of his book to welcome me back, then accepting the jacket Shirley proffered without demur. They were gone before I'd even removed my blue coat.

I was tired, and like a child I hoped that Shirley and Stanley would make all right for me, that I could wait at home while they fixed all of it, wove Fred's remorse into a golden purse of academic glory. I don't apologize for being young. Although I wonder at the girl I was.

The front door creaked as I pushed it shut, and all was tranquil inside. To be sure, the house greeted me with a sigh of its foundation, even the walls trembling slightly in welcome as I climbed the stairs, suitcase in hand. I was so tired, and so very relieved to be back there that even the dust-strewn light in the long upper hallway seemed to caress my skin. I went past Barry's room, Sally's, Jannie's,
and down the length of the hall to the back, past all the school drawings and bookcases stuffed with paperbacks to the room that Laurie had once been king of, the room that now belonged to me. Suitcase unpacked, toothbrush back in the bathroom. I flushed the toilet and listened for the water running through the pipes. The bathroom windows glinted along the distorted planes of the ancient glass, and the sun divided into separate streams that glowed along the wooden floor. I almost felt the fingers of the sunlight curling like more cats against my toes, as if even the sunlight that filtered onto Hymaneal floors welcomed my return. Hardly a night gone by, but the house had missed me. If Sally had been home, she'd have felt what I felt, that I belonged there. Of course, she wasn't. No one was, and so I went back to my room and waited, princess in the tower, listening for the car in the driveway, or any other sound of life.

I sat on my bed, against the pillows, and I began to wonder what the house knew, what it had watched, whether it believed in me more than Fred or liked us both the same? How did I measure up to Sally, or she to Shirley or Shirley to Stanley? I floated somewhere between relaxation and sleep, and I felt the pulsing of the house's life begin to throb inside me as if we shared a single heart. Not that the walls spoke, nothing so insane, but I could feel the history of footsteps treading its floors. The slamming of doors, the rumpled bed linens, the broken glasses and books left abandoned by bedsides, the arguments and the laughter, the spilled drinks and worn socks and burnt stews and crumpled pages. I smelled flowers and semen, vomit and sweat, the sour scent of cigarette smoke, the achy sweetness of bourbon in the bottom of a glass come morning. History, the history of lives here lived, our history.
The thought was comforting, like the monotonous churn of the waterwheel down in the village reservoir, over and over and over so that crashing water lost its violence, became its own continuing momentum—

thoughts into words into pictures and i closed my eyes. my brain calmed, slowed, foot soldier words aligned themselves in sentences nonsense thoughts i'd never thought such things and as i woozed and floated embryonic in the clock-ticking electricity humming heat rising silence i began to know, to know—

i know who i love, i dreamed it, dreamed the words, was i waking or sleeping, i know i know

stanley—i said to him—stanley, stanela

but i was dead, how was it so, that i was dead and i was her and so i told him, stanley listen

when i was alive, i told him, and we were happy (decades of this, and weren't we very?), we made a vow that whichever of us went first would be cremated, and sit in a jar on the dresser in our bedroom, keeping an eye on things.

was i waking or sleeping, i dreamed. i dreamed i was shirley, i dreamed i was shirley. i knew i was shirley i was. shirley

“you, you'll remarry,” i told you. “men do. you won't like to be alone.” there was no dig in this (i fucked dylan thomas on our porch, did i ever tell you? there was a party, and all our friends drunk as lords inside and it was winter. too
much gin and he felt wobbly and i took him to the porch, where he grabbed icicles off the roof and tickled my neck with the cold end, then licked my frozen skin. and me, he lifted my woolen dress and drew down my tights, and yes, he fucked me, stanley, on our very own porch with you inside and some eager undergraduate stroking your shoulders as you held forth. but dylan thomas, stanley, dylan thomas—now that was a man worth holding against naked skin chilled and rubbery, dylan thomas—). i only wanted you to know i would not mind.

“don't love her more than me,” i said, and you studied me, noting the brittleness in my tone, unsure whether i was about to lose my temper.

“impossible.”

twenty-seven years and if ever any man could kill me, it would have been you, it would have been you, stanley. did i ever tell you—how often did i tell you?—how much i hated you? you loved my prose, you loved our children, i do believe you even loved me, as much as it was possible. you are not you without me.

i asked you to kill me. i said, “don't let me be humiliated.” i did not want to see the inside of an institution, the white walls of a hospital, to have my arms strapped tight, to take their pills instead of my own. “save me from—” but i did not know the word. it was
you
. save me from you, is what i meant to say.

“i love you too much,” you said, and then, because you
were late for class, you went to work. i followed, stumbling after you on the ice-slicked path through the gates and through the woods to campus, and when i stood outside your office pounding on the door, pounding on the thick wooden door, the snow melting off my boots to puddle on the wooden floor, you kept the door locked, you kept whichever girl it was covered with the flesh of your warm belly, you did not stop what you were doing. not for me. you heard me: “stanley! stanley! stanley!”

but did you stop? stanley, you killed me years before i died. you would not let me go.

you could have let me in.

my mother told me not to trust you. i've always thought she boiled the sheets after we stayed with them, took the silver out and had it polished to a sheen, removed all traces of our lips from her glasses and our hair from her bathtub. not our kind, dear, but then i married you. fornicated with you. bore your children.

how i must have sickened her.

when i was alive, your women haunted me, although i never (rarely?) let you know. now that i am dead, now that i am watching you—your faithfulness is what destroys me. that foolish woman, what gift does she have, what wisdom, what more than tailoring and chopping onions and painting the lips red does she understand? she tinkles the piano keys and thinks herself my equal. and she is the woman who
carries on for you, who raises our children, who keeps my own legacy aloft? and you bed her, and her alone?

no one can be wounded the way the dead can. i am the pebble in your italian loafers (also the reason you can own them). i am the shadow that curves over the swollen cracked plaster in barry's ceiling, waking him in fear when the moon is bright. i am the acrid taste that flows from the kitchen taps after heavy rains. i am after you, i am part of you, i am everywhere, i love you.

my mother made so much of caste and class and i rejected it. remember, at that party in rochester, how she insisted we pretend you were not jewish? “they wouldn't understand,” she said. and you agreed. you found it funny. She dressed my lumpen form in spinster gray though i was only twenty. she and my father danced instead of us; we sat in hardback chairs, watching. in her defense, i think she had no idea of what to do.

stanley. do not listen to that woman. you made a promise to me, and i am your wife. so many years, stanley, and what we gave each other. and you promised me. don't you remember?
whichever of us dies first will be cremated, and sit in a jar on the dresser in the bedroom, keeping an eye on things.

we were students; you read my story in
the threshold
. you said to your roommate, “this woman has something. i'm going to meet her,” you told him. “and if she's anything like her writing, i'm going to marry her.”

wasn't i? wasn't i?

i'm here, stanley, as we agreed. in state, on the dresser, in the jar you selected so carefully and placed with such reverence. the girls laid out the lace scarf from my drawer, and you put the brass jar on it, and opened it, and all of you—even barry—gazed at me for a long, silent moment. i felt it then, all the love, how much i mattered, how very important i had been to you—the air itself pulsed with your loss—until Jannie mentioned that her boyfriend was downstairs and you suggested he come up and meet me. Jannie had a boyfriend, so quickly? me not even weeks dead, and someone new?

“daddy,” she groaned. “he'll think i'm crazy.”

“you are,” barry said.

“too soon to let him know.” that was sally. and all four of you laughed, and turned, and it was barry who remembered to put the lid on the jar. without it, a stumble or a shove and i'd have been gone, scattered across the floor like crumbs from a bread knife.

laurence's wife came by to see me—was it the next day? does it matter? time flows so smoothly; i should have seen this before—and she sat down on the bed, her baby weight a flaccid layer atop the springy surface of her skin. it would have stopped my breath, had i any. perhaps i, too, was beautiful once.

stanley licking the new wife, how he slobbers in his eagerness; he can't taste enough of her. she must be delicious. he sleeps, his arms circling her. i'm here, stanley, where you put me. here remembering how you slept turned away, your
knees bent into your chest—“i sweat too much, shirl; i can't touch anyone while i sleep.”

you seem to sweat a lot with her.

i know what a story is; i spent my life telling them. but you have stolen from me the structure of the only tale i lived. i believed you, stanley; i believed in your endless infidelity, the honesty of knowing you would always lie. the boundlessness of your anger, your lust, your need for novelty: that happiness was beyond your reach. that no woman was ultimate to you.

“so beautiful, the way you smell, your skin, the softness of your hair,” and you sigh and hold her tighter. god, stanley, i'm sitting here on the dresser; don't you see me? don't you notice me? do you not even remember me as you take her, night after night, tell her how beautiful she is, how you had never dreamed of holding a woman who felt like her. looked like her. damn you, stanley, was i that ugly?

there is no solace for me here.

clymene, who lost her son because his foolish father let him ride a chariot far too near the sun, she knew. she wandered the earth looking for poor phaethon's bones, and when, at last, she found them, knelt sobbing. her daughters (his sisters) at her side, mourning for their dear lost brother until fully four months had passed. and then, as if they hadn't lost enough, before clymene's eyes the girls complained of stiffness, their silky skin turned to bark, leaves sprouted from the follicles where auburn locks once curled.
“no, mother, please. please stop! those shards of bark are me, don't pull at me, it hurts!”

and thus clymene lost all. phoebus the father still had his days to ride through, drawing the sun across the sky, but she, clymene, the patient housewife, was left with naught. what could she do but kiss the rough trunks of her daughters, stroke the leaves that now adorned them, list from one maiden to the other wondering if there were words she might have left unspoken, honest words, that might have allowed them to live?

dead, i have one thing you do not. i never age. i curse you to wrinkles and strands of gray hair swept across the dome of your balding head. i curse you to erections that do not rise. i curse you to greeting each morning with relief, another night survived, a heart still beating. i curse you and i hate you and i will not leave you.

because i love you.

•   •   •

I
WOKE
WITH
A
START
, my heart pounding, to the sound of their footsteps on the rickety front porch. Cheerful voices, the slam of the door, Natalie's cry, the concomitant tingling in my breasts. I was not rested, not at all. I was out of breath; I could feel the clamminess of my skin. Shirley's voice downstairs, not dead, despite my dreams. When had I slipped, and into what world, where had my dreams taken me?

I'd dreamt she was dead. No. I'd written her dead. The devil's work was what she said writing was, and now I knew it to be true.
The house had come to me like a person while I slept,
whispered whispered
that everything was about to change. I knew enough about Freud to feel as guilty as if I'd killed her myself. I wiped a hand across dry, swollen lips. Downstairs, the baby's sobs grew louder. Fred's voice trying to calm her . . . afraid to bring her up to me . . . afraid of what I would do. Stanley's voice was loud, almost in song. He was too cheerful.

I swung my feet to the floor, felt for my shoes with my toes.

They were still in the front hall in their coats, all very convivial, as if they'd stopped somewhere for drinks. Shirley took my entrance as her cue to head into the kitchen. The men eyed me warily. I took Natalie from Fred's arms. “D'you need me?” he asked. “Should I come up with you?”

I told him I was fine. He looked away first, answering a question of Stanley's, something ballad-related, in his usual calm voice.

The baby was cranky. I brought her up to the bedroom and tried to nurse, but she wouldn't latch on, no matter how much I petted and coddled her. The truth was my milk was virtually gone. I carried her down the back stairs, to the kitchen, where luckily the milkman had delivered that morning. Shirley was in there, smiling to herself, humming as she rinsed frozen corn to defrost it; I flushed, remembering my dream, and she tilted her head quizzically.