Shirley (14 page)

I touched Fred on the shoulder. I think he was about to cut in on Stan and his mother, but Shirley called from across the room, “Stan. It's time for dessert.”

He didn't seem to hear her.

“Stan.”

His eyes were closed, his arm crossing Selma's broad back; he hummed along with the music. Burke lounged near Marvin's chair. I think Burke was reading over Marvin's shoulder; it was an Agatha Christie mystery, though I'm not sure which one. Fred and I waited near the couch, as if we both knew something was about to happen. I remember standing very still.

Shirley picked up the pie dish and dropped it, quite deliberately, porcelain shards and slippery apple slices scattering along the oak floor, tangling in the fringe of the Oriental rug. A single crash, no reverberation, its futility rendered even sadder by what followed.

Marvin read. Burke sipped his Scotch. And Selma and Stanley kept dancing. Shirley stood stiffly, her smile fixed and miserable,
eyes bright with fury or unshed tears, one of the more awful sights I have ever seen. A streak of soggy apple clung to the bosom of her wrinkled green blouse, as if someone had thrown it at her.

“Not waving,”
she whispered. It was a line from a poem of Stevie Smith's that Shirley had shown me a few mornings before. It broke my heart when I heard it first, and then again that evening.

Nobody heard him, the dead man, and still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning
.

“Too cold always,”
I whispered, a line from the next stanza. Shirley said nothing, but I could tell that she was grateful.

After a time, I knelt and began to pick up the larger pieces of broken china.

•   •   •

I
N
THE
MORNING
, at breakfast, the Nemsers emerged packed and cheerful, ate their eggs with gusto, and pronounced the visit, and their granddaughter, a grand success. We walked them down the hill and up the main road to the train station. The good-byes were enthusiastic, future visits promised, inside jokes alluded to, hugs exchanged.

Trudging back to the house, ahead of the men (Fred trailed behind, holding Natalie, as if afraid I might slip carrying her), squeezed close by the high snowdrifts on either edge of the sidewalk, Shirley congratulated me on my good fortune. “They're nice, Fred's parents. They won't do anything to hurt you.”

I wanted to say I didn't agree, but it seemed ungracious.

“Lou actually has a girlfriend. I don't know why she didn't want to tell you,” was what I said instead.

“Does she know?”

“Definitely. In fact, she's thrilled about it. Usually she can't stop bragging, how Lillian's father is a lawyer. And Lillian's house has two spare bedrooms. And Lillian's mother and her sister inherited an apartment on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Selma's dream bride for Lou.”

Shirley's cheeks were mottled pink, the texture slightly roughened by the cold.

“You should speak out more,” she said. “Say what you think.”

“No,” I told her. “Why make them angry with me? What good would it do? They already think I'm—they already think he married beneath himself.”

“Impossible,” she said. “Who wouldn't love you?”

“Oh, so many people. So very many people,” I said, thrilled at the thought.

She raised a pale eyebrow. “But why? What have you ever done?”

“I want to be somebody,” I told her fiercely, forgetting that she'd rejected this notion already. Rather, not forgetting, simply hoping that a second try might reveal an open doorway I'd not seen before. “Like you.”

“Like me?” Shirley's smile was small and odd.

“Of course.”

The men, behind us, began chuckling about something, a low rumble of approval. Stanley declaimed, “
Is this a dagger which I see before me?”
When I glanced back, the blanket had slipped from over Natalie's mouth and she, too, looked amused.

“I'm not somebody at all,” Shirley said. She took my elbow, as if for balance on the ice-streaked sidewalk.

“I want to be important, to matter. I want never to worry about money. I want to be free, and happy, and comfortable in myself, and not ashamed.”

“Perhaps you want a magic wand as well.”

“You think I'm silly.”

Shirley shook her head no. “I think you're young. I forget, sometimes, you're as young as my own children.

“Rose,” she said, “Fred loves you because you make the past better. You don't go where it's uncomfortable. Like his mother, you see the good side of things.”

“I don't want to be like Selma. I want to be like you.”

Her smile was small, her eyes so sad no sunlight glinted in them. The snow slushed with sucking sounds in the spots that weren't too icy to tread on.

“Be happy, Rose. What I do is the devil's work. You wouldn't like it.” I didn't answer. I fancied myself cruel enough to see the world like she did.

“Don't live in your head,” she said. “It doesn't suit you.”

I didn't know what to say. I was hurt that she did not see herself in me. I hadn't really imagined myself a writer; rather, I'd imagined myself her perfect daughter, the heir to her craft. Perhaps I didn't write—not yet—but I was living a writer's life. I lived Shirley's life. Right at her side.

“And one more thing,” she said harshly, as we turned in to their driveway. “Don't expect fulfillment to seek you out. It won't find you if you hide up there in the back bedroom, waiting. If you want to be someone, do something. Whatever it is. Stop hiding behind
me, or Fred or anyone. Find what you love. Go out into the world and do it.”

She worked the sticky doorknob up and left, pushing the old door open with an expert jounce of the hip. “Don't stay so still,” she added, her voice softening. “Left or right's no matter, Rosie, just the fact of turning.”

M
Y
MOTHER
. A slivered moon night, that part of winter before the snow has fallen, cold hits the body like a shock and we are outside, my fingers frozen, and those are her limbs by the crumbling stucco wall: her arms, her legs swept into a pile by some insane and diligent gardener. Her eyes are closed; her mouth is peaceful. I want to wake up, I admit it, I'm not ashamed.
Wake up. Wake up!
I tell the truth, confess it here:
Momma, I saved myself instead of you.

O
KAY
THEN
,
I thought. I would try. I had my pencil, and the yellow pad I'd taken from Fred's briefcase.
Okay, then.

Begin at the beginning.

stanley will be home at any moment.

yes. stanley will be home, and should he catch me at these ramblings, he would not call me cynara, he would pompate until my ears went numb. and numb they are, no funds to pay for heating oil and stanley up at the college and laurie and jannie safe upstairs napping under piles of blankets. camping in, i told them, and laurie said he was a pie-near and then jannie seemed to want to be one, too, although with her only identifiable words being
balana
and
momma
, it is not an entirely foolproof interpretation. i left them up there, buried under mounds of covers, laurie taking firm positions for both of them about which one would drive the horses first—a spackled one and a shiny black one for a knight, they seem agreed on that—and which would be the indian prisoner in back. the top of the stairs hidden
underneath a stack of resentful dirty clothes, and laurie's baby overalls need the hems taken up if jannie is not to fall down said stairs with her first unskilled steps, and still the shopping to do but if i walk down the hill to powers market everyone will be talking about that girl, that poor girl, and if she is still alive.

I write in lowercase, no capitals, just as Shirley does. It helps me think like her.

the reward her parents offered is enough to keep us in heating fuel for seven years.

weak-eyed stanley too blind to join the search party and me scared unto death about what might be out there. last night in bed, stanley said how could i be frightened? the dark i said and what they might have done to her. who, he said? out there in the mountains, i told him. did he know her? he said no, she was not in his class, and i wondered if he would have liked her. if she is—was—one of those girls who sit slack-jawed in the front row, admiring the professorial pearls he spits at them. would he have had her in for office hours? stanley i said, i can close my eyes and see her, the pretty blond girl from the pictures in the paper. paula, paula welden, of some place in connecticut. the father a businessman and she the oldest of four sisters, the first to leave the family home. lord knows there must be white columns and an imposing porch and a long, rolling lawn with hedges maintained like stanley's beard.

Ah, me, I have it, don't I? I know Shirley. Does she know how well I know her?

girls like me, girls like us, we don't run away. we want to, oh lord, we grow so weary of the unending crusades against lank hair or for trim waistlines; how we straighten our spines, how nicely we shake hands with the fellow's parents. before they arrive, we enjoy a quick scotch with father, a private treat in the side parlor before mother comes back to take me in, to introduce me to mike or dick or some other suitable boy who smiles correctly and puts a hand under my elbow to guide me to the door. all four parents grin at us and pretend they are not already assessing how we will do together in life, what progeny we will produce, how well i will manage the staff, whether he will keep me in the style to which i have been raised. they know what clubs we will join, where we will sail, how i will allow him to win at chess, to teach me golf. i am tipsy, and i let him help me into the passenger seat of his neat roadster, but i am tricked up to be this girl. oh stanley, i cannot remember my lines, cannot stick to the part. never could, and as a result, here we are.

She will be proud of me.

a girl of eighteen knows so much, and is only eighteen, only eighteen. i am going to be thirty years old in a week, wife, mother, writer, a person of some considerable
accomplishment and yet. ten years older than paula welden and we are both such fools. such mortals . . .

Are ye James Herries, my first true-love, come back to Scotland again?

paula did not like potatoes, the way the starch left her hands sticky, and mrs. cummings did not like paula, and so she had to peel not one basinful but two before she was released from waitress duty for the afternoon. elisabeth had a boy in the room, no one paula knew. not that elisabeth was a tramp, precisely, but it did seem unfair that paula was always the one who found the sock on the doorknob. she should go in and get a heavier coat, push the door open and grab her jacket, but elisabeth twisted things so she would end up being the one to say she was sorry and if there was one thing paula did not want to do today, it was apologize to anybody. sallie ann's coat hung over one of the sconces in the common room, where it had been on and off since the rain began the previous week, but paula did not take it. her father believed neither in borrowing nor in lending, and he was going to be angry about economics—and her other grades—and was it paula's fault that the professor didn't like her. didn't see her, paula fumed, stuffing her cold hands into the pockets of her light jacket, didn't see her; was she invisible?

Not true, not true, not true . . .

paula did change her clothes. she never touched potatoes. she served the other students and ate her own lunch, and went back to her dorm where elisabeth was studying. she put on jeans and a red parka and took off, on a walk. she liked to walk. she liked to walk alone.

at the end of the campus driveway, paula dashed across route 9, trudged along the southern directed lane and within minutes, a truck pulled over and waited, frozen rain raising trills of steam on rusted metal.

“need a ride? it's cold to walk.” the man's face was kindly, his work-worn hands awkward against the fine black circle of the steering wheel.

she thanked him, slid up onto the front seat. he's going far as town, he said. she aimed to hike the trails on glastenbury mountain, she told him, and he said maybe it's late to be heading up into the hills, half past three already and the weather so bad all week.

“could be mudslides, and the sun'll seem like she's set e'en earlier than usual.”

the girl shrugged. he will remember later, he will tell the chief on tuesday afternoon when he hears she's gone missing, he will remember how skinny her shoulders hid inside the red parka. she was from good people, he thought, or looked like, but the way her eyes kept darting around and her fingers tangled over one another, she gave him the willies. she wiped her nose on the skin back of her wrist; he recalled that later, crushing his cap between his hands,
shoulders hunched in his good green coat. he sat at sheriff peck's desk at the station, trying not to think about the other time he'd been here, back when mavis and he were new-married and maybe once't a while he'd had too much to drink. that one time, he'd let his feelings get the upper hand, the way she harped and picked at him about the fencing, as if she'd known aces about how to run a farm. and here now, mavis gone near three years and he would give a month of sunday mornings to tell her how much quiet she'd left behind. when they folded up the hospital cot and cleaned her medicine bottles out of the icebox, that was the first time since 1918 he'd felt alone and it turned out not to be what he'd looked forward to all those years.

never been a man of much imagination, had he? but now he pictured that poor unhappy girl, her stuffed nose and her reddened eyes, and the way her dirty-blond hair curled out from under the lip of her hat. and the jittering of her knee under her clasped hands. mavis would have asked her was she all right. maybe offered her a drink of water or brewed up a fresh pot of coffee once they'd tumbled down the rutted drive to the farm. but he'd only nodded and showed her the entrance to the trail, said she'd got no more'n an hour to walk before she should climb down the mountain.

“you get the notion she was meeting someone?” clyde peck's idea was the girl had a boyfriend she intended to catch up with, that no girl would hike that trail alone on a sunday afternoon in the rain, so close to sunset. had to be a boy involved, sheriff peck said.

“i hadn't thought it,” he admitted. mavis would say he never thought about matters like this, the way he should have. fool woman wanted him asking and asking about her feelings all day long, as if they ever changed. proof of love was he never hit her but the once. he worked the farm no matter how much his back ached. no matter the weather. no matter the year. when she got sick, he took care of her, didn't he? why'd he have to ask her all those questions on top of it?

“if we'd had a child, after—”

“the one you lost,” sheriff peck agreed, moving forms and papers around on his desk, looking for his cigarette lighter.

“if we'd had a child, i might have thought. but i don't know girls, see? girls like that, from the college.”

“she was pretty,” sheriff said, not looking up to meet his eyes.

he nodded, not saying he'd not realized it. he'd not paid enough attention.

I have it, Shirley. This is a story, one you would write.

where is paula? today some of the students and her professors took off up the long trail, along with the police and other locals who know the mountain well. gone to meet her lover, i imagine.

he is dark-haired and dark-eyed, and she has never been alone with him before. no. she knows him from home. he is . . . he is the gardener. no. he is her childhood best friend,
the boy from next door, who their crowd all thought was destined for her. after the last basketball game, senior year, sitting in his father's steamed-up pontiac parked down the street and around the corner from both their houses, he tells her, he is going away.

her cheek against the stuff of his letter sweater, breathing in the effort of the game, the nutmeg scent of his skin, the steady gait of his heart, she turns her mouth toward his, expecting the brush of his lips. she opens her eyes. his elbow rests along the rolled-down window. he watches the dark eddy around the mortons' house, the bulwiches' and mrs. gavin's newly shabby colonial. “where,” she whispers to the glimmer of skin at his neck, “where will you go?”

how seriously he clears his throat.

“james harris,” she teases, “how can you leave your one true love?”

“i could never leave you, not ever, not dead nor alive,” he tells her, lifting her blond hair out of the neck of her jacket. “i will be back if it takes seven years.”

“i'll wait for you,” she promises. “i'll never love another.”

that night, pressed between the cold seat of his father's car and the warmth of his bare chest, paula plights her troth and is undone with love of him. when he walks her to her door, he rebuttons her blouse correctly, and tells her to wait for him. “no matter what,” he says, and when he swings off the porch, he runs between the hedge and she sees the lights turn off at his house. only then does she go inside and stare at herself in the bathroom mirror, thinking,
now i know
what it is to be loved.
she had wanted him to leave her his varsity jacket, but he did not hear her when she asked.

in any case, he will need a warm jacket, won't he?

in the morning, he is gone, leaving nothing behind for her, no note, no letter, no flowers to press gently between the fragile pages of a book.

when the harris parents ask her, she tells them what she knows. it sounds like so little. “he wants to try his luck,” she says, stumbling lamely over the words.

“where, though? where has he gone?”

mr. harris says, “stop bothering the poor girl, she doesn't know. he didn't even confide in walter. why would he tell her?”

mrs. harris takes paula to james's bedroom, and it is the first time she has been to this other sacred place where a piece of his soul is squirreled away.

mrs. harris walks unsteadily through the door and crumples onto james's bed, running a trembling hand over the thin ridges of his navy cotton bedspread. paula stands in the doorway, uncertain whether she is allowed inside. so many trophies james has accumulated, his baseball statues and his golden basketball hoops, and the ribbons of red and blue and gold along the underside of the bookcase, under his desk. a photo of his old dog, ginger, the yellow-haired girl who died before they entered junior high.

paula wants to tell her lover's mother.
we are betrothed to one another, he has vowed eternal love to me. where have you put my picture? where have you hidden me?

“you knew his friends, didn't you?” mrs. harris asks, the handkerchief damp between her fingers.

paula nods.

“was there a girl, someone special? who we might talk to? his father and i, we would appreciate it if you would tell us, paula. his friends, joe and sid and walter, they are so certain there was no one girl, that he played the field. but if there's anything you girls know? anyone we should talk to?”

i am the girl, i am that girl,
paula tells herself angrily. if mrs. harris would look up, the old cow, if she had ever opened her eyes. but joe? or walter? why would they lie? they must be protecting her, or james himself.

his letter jacket slung across the back of his desk chair.
i want that jacket, i will have it,
paula thinks. but when she reaches for it, mrs. harris reaches faster, snatching the coat onto her lap.

“no,” she tells her lover's mother calmly. “i don't know of any girl.”

•   •   •

“W
HAT
IS
THIS
?” Shirley asks. The sheaf of scrawled-on paper in one hand, a pile of folded baby clothes lodged in the crook of the other elbow. Natalie and I, dozing curled together on my bed. For a moment, I am bleary enough to believe I am dreaming, but no, she has found my dumb pages, the ones I'd been tinkering with before I drifted off. “You've been writing.”

I do not answer.

“Are you writing
me
?”

Her laugh is not a pleasant one. It's hard to speak; my voice has not yet awakened. Even my limbs feel heavier than normal, thighs and knees weighed down as if I've been drugged. I cannot wriggle my toes and fingers, and still I want to move my tongue and lips, form the words, tell her I did not mean to steal. That was not ever my intention. More, it was a game: I wanted to
think
like her, to know what it felt to be her. I imagined that I knew.