Shirley (15 page)

“What were you trying to do?”

“Figure it out.”

“Figure out what, precisely?” I have heard her use this voice with the children. It cuts.

I mumble that I don't know. Because even though I do, I don't.

Shirley sits on the bed, setting the resentful springs to tuneless song. Folded clothes clutched against her belly. “You think you know how my mind works, do you?” she says. “You have no idea. You have no idea what goes on in here”—her skull—“and never will.” How dare she, when she moves around inside my thoughts as if I've sold her acreage?

“Writing is the devil's game, Rose. Must I continually remind you?” I open my mouth. She shakes her head; she isn't finished. “You start a fire, it goes where it will. But storytellers must stay with their blazes.” I want to tell her something important, but words fail me. “No driving off to safety, no hiding from what you've done,” she says. “You aren't willing to live in that other world and let this one muddle on.”

“I am,” I want to say.

“Acquire your own sins. This one is mine,” she whispers sweetly. The words do not match the tone, and though I cannot hear the
anger, I am certain it is there. I should respond. I blink, wiggle my fingers, begin to feel some movement in my calf muscles. “Don't get up,” she orders gently, as if I am ill. “Stay there.”

How many times have I heard her talking with others about their writing? Am I the only one unfit to enter this kingdom? I am so sleepy I can't make sense of it and so I drift.

Her hand gentle on my forearm, fingers light as dust; I know her touch, or do I dream it? Is this a spell? Delicious paralysis creeps like a blessing along the length of me. My eyelids drift downward. My own breath sinks my chest, spreads through the gullet with the warmth of Stanley's whiskey. So comfortable here under the covers, and I am so very, very tired. Natalie's dreaming whinny, softly audible as it climbs the incline of dented pillow to my cheek and ear, reminds me of the blissfulness of trust, of letting go.

Shirley's breath, spreading hot into the depths of my ear canal. “Be honest, little Rose. You didn't write the truth here, did you? You couldn't, could you? You couldn't write what you believe.”

I swear she has not touched me, her hands are nowhere near my heart, and yet I feel the pressure of her palms, she is pressing down, she is pressing down, it hurts. It hurts so much,
stop,
I want to say,
stop!
I will not see it. I will not see what you want me to, I will not see what you did!

But of course I have to; it's what she wants. And now I see her with Paula, there is fire, I know fires when my father builds them, and now her careless feminine method: witch's luck in the way she piled wood on wood, her disdain for kerosene, her pyre hot enough to melt bone. Such fury at a woman who has taken Stanley's attention for a beat too long; why this one? Was she special? The luring,
first with tea and then whiskey and then the walk up into the mountains. This second seduction, frame by frame, she shows me: famous writer, easily impressed young girl. Shirley has an eye to the long game; she knows how to plan. She blocks out her scenes. She draws the houses where her characters linger. She outlines and diagrams; she has a mind for order. She puts it all in place; events play out the way she wants them to.

I am her pawn.

She knows I know, doesn't she? And she knows I'd never say, not even in a story. My loyalty is my greatest virtue.

“Stay away from what's mine.” Her voice is hard and soft at the same time; she wants me to hear and obey. “Stay away from what's mine.”

I will,
I think.
I will never disobey you.
I can breathe now, I can breathe again. She has given me so much, earned my perfect loyalty. And she has shown me that loyalty is the only possibility.

I nod with my eyelids, all I can move, no longer sure if I am dreaming or awake. “That's what friends do,” she says. I blink again. Wanting her to know I am on her side, on her side more even than my own. That's what I feel—she and Natalie, they are the women I live between, the two whom I belong to, whom I protect and to whom I have sworn fealty. I sigh. I sleep. I slip. And when I awaken, when Natalie's hungry wail pulls me back to the world, the dimness of evening has begun to shade the floral wallpaper between the windows and I am as groggy as I have ever been. The walls hover on their axes, leaning microscopically closer so that I feel their concern. The house is worried when I have not rested well. It likes the baby calm; it wants me healthy. It has plans for me
I don't yet understand. My arm hurts; I will have a bruise there, I can tell. My body is sore and tight along the calves, as if in my dreams I have run for miles, trying to catch up with someone.

I never see my foolish pages again, nor does she mention them. I meant to honor her. I loved her, and I understood her, and I wanted her to know it. Maybe she did. But of course she knew precisely what I wondered, she saw the direction of my thoughts. Even now, when I re-create in my mind everything that followed, the question of whether her attitude to me changed after that afternoon remains.

Admit it, Rose.
Yes. I might have been to blame for what came next. Such misunderstanding, when all I intended was to show I saw her clearly. “Don't whine about it,” Fred would say. “Move on. Make things right by what you do the next time.” I know, I know, I know. I'm stuck reliving all the idiocies of the past, a poor example to anyone who stumbles on these pages. But likely no one will. These are my secrets, awkward as they are. And they are safe with me.

H
OW
LONG
CAN
I
AVOID
TELLING
what Fred did, about that March afternoon when I walked the baby carriage up the slushy road and onto campus? I'm stalling. I admit it. Maybe you need to know him better first. But perhaps you aren't like me; perhaps forgiveness comes easily to you.

There is one other event I should mention, as it happened only days before.

My mother's whereabouts continued to worry me. I was desperate to reach her, honestly. I wanted her to know that I had made a life. I wanted her to see Natalie, to hold her. Somehow the birth would not be a complete truth until my mother had shared it.

I steeled my courage and called my sister Helen's employer, Mrs. Cartwright, in Wayne, one more time, the week following Marvin and Selma's visit. “Ah yes, Rose,” she said, “I've had you on my mind. I've meant to write you a letter, but what with the holidays and the weather, I haven't got around to it yet.”

“My sister Helen's come back?”

“I didn't want to tell you why we let Helen go, not while the children were home for the holidays.”

This was mid-March. And her children, Bitsy and Midge, were in their late twenties, married, with children of their own. Like their mother, they were pompous, stiff-necked, and hardly as civil as they imagined.

“In any case, Helen and your mother were given permission to stay above the stables just before Christmas. Mr. Cartwright extended himself. I wasn't so certain, given your father's history, and of course Helen was always honest with me about your mother's proclivities—”

I swallowed. Helen looked so much like my mother, rail-thin and worry-lined, though she was barely four years my senior—she'd worked for Mrs. Cartwright since the day she turned fourteen, and she was scrupulously truthful, scrupulously good. Helen's sacrificial devotion to my mother was what freed me. I knew it and was grateful, although I never understood the why of it.

“So when the Rolex disappeared from Missy's room”—that's right, it was Missy, not Midge—“the one we'd given her when she left Foxcroft, we spoke to Helen. We told her there would be no further warning, that the next, well, event, would mean the police would be called.”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“And the Rolex was returned, without another word,” Mrs. Cartwright said smoothly. “I found it on Missy's shelf, where it belonged, the next morning.”

“So that was that.”

“It should have been.”

Although I had been out to the Cartwrights' home only once, trailing my older sister as she walked the half-mile from the train
station in order to help her carry home several bags filled with clothing Mrs. Cartwright no longer deemed worthy, I could picture her precisely. I can only imagine the undergarments needed to restrain her volume inside her tautly fitted sweaters. The day I met her, she bent over to pick up some imagined dust mote and I caught a glimpse of her ankles, swollen above the band of her pink-and-gray argyle socks. Cashmere and soggy floral perfume, stiff blond hair and perfectly pointed fingernails, pale blue eyes that seemed too weak to pick out others' failings and yet never failed to do so—she was a selfish, hateful woman.

That December afternoon, Mrs. Cartwright had piled a heap of old clothing on the breakfast table in the kitchen, bright tangled mounds of castoffs that, even well worn, were worlds better than any sweaters or slacks Helen and I owned. We were to donate them to our temple, Mrs. Cartwright instructed, to help the needy. Helen and I made no eye contact, but each of us was already imagining how to cut Mrs. Cartwright's trousers to fit our frames, how to narrow the shoulders of the blouses and take in the skirts. I could not help myself, I drew a dark navy coat from the pile and slid my arms into the sleeves, sighing at the warmth. Finally, a winter's walk without shivering! Mrs. Cartwright eyed the coat with her vacant gaze. “There's nothing wrong with that,” she pronounced. I nodded, in blissful agreement.

Helen took a step backward, away from me.

“I'll keep that,” Mrs. Cartwright said. “I'd forgotten how nicely it falls.”

The phone rang; her eyes brightened as if whatever intrusion it might portend would be infinitely more worthy than the current
one. Mrs. Cartwright left the room without another word, not even a dismissive one.

She was a hateful, selfish woman. Even her husband had sighed after he let me in the kitchen door, when he heard the sound of her sensible pumps clicking down the long main hall.

I'd not seen Mrs. Cartwright since the afternoon she took her coat from my hands and threw it over the back of a kitchen chair. I wanted that coat so badly. For a moment, it had belonged to me and my entire being had felt protected. Oh, I wanted that coat.

And then the phone rang, or her husband called for her. Something happened and she left the room. I remember how my breath caught when she left the room.

And I remember how we trudged to the train station with those bundles in our arms. Helen and I did not discuss Mrs. Cartwright and her navy coat, not that evening or ever. We had both learned very early how to avert our eyes, but usually Helen liked to correct me. She was the guiding angel of our family and she took obligation seriously. That day, however, my sister was more than kind.

“Did my mother . . . did something else happen?”

A pause. Even down the wire, I could hear Mrs. Cartwright pursing her lips in the hall mirror, perhaps shaking her head dismissively. The telephone table, under a grandiose mahogany-framed mirror across from the obscenely wide front staircase, was her station, I knew; there she sat, hour after hour, scratching names off lists as she telephoned on behalf of charitable causes, cajoling her friends and acquaintances into pledges in exchange for bits and dribs of gossip and syrupy-tongued slander. My mother was
simply a story to her, but one with limitless possibilities for self-aggrandizement.

“I hate to be the one to tell you, my dear. I know how difficult it must be, how devastating it must be to hear—”

“It's fine,” I said. “Please tell me.”

She sighed. The same sort of suppressed heave Mr. Cartwright had made at the sound of her footfalls. “Ah, dear . . .” I wonder if she had forgotten my name in the excitement of imminent cruelty. “Your mother extracted a large sum of money from my desk. The Christmas bonuses were in envelopes, in the drawer here, the hall table drawer. And I had given out most of them, but not the gardener's, nor the mailman, and there was a special bonus I'd set aside, for Helen herself, as she had so graciously worked on Christmas Day. But your mother . . . ah, dear.”

“She took my sister's bonus?” Even for my mother, this seemed surprising.

“She denied it. But of course there was no doubt once the envelope was found.”

“With her things?”

“No. She'd dropped it on the path to the stables.” Mrs. Cartwright's injury seemed compounded by my mother's disregard for order.

“The police? Were the police called?” I kept my voice as neutral as I could.

“We would never do that to poor Helen. Your sister has enough to bear.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course we had to let her go.”

“But do you know where she went? Do you know where they are?”

Cold and clipped as the answer was, I could hear the pleasure it gave her. “No, my dear. I couldn't give her a reference. Not after the events. I would have no way of knowing where they are.”

I swallowed. I had dreamed about my mother, hadn't I, just as I had dreamed of Shirley? It was this house, the way it played with my mind—such ideas had never washed through me before I arrived here. Were the images I dreamed creating truth? Or had Shirley's witchery infiltrated, made me able to divine the future?

“I'm sure you understand,” Mrs. Cartwright said.

“I don't, actually,” I told her. Sweat broke out across my brow and under my breasts. My voice stayed low and even, but I could have cracked the telephone receiver with the pressure of my fingers.

“Pardon me?”

“I don't. Helen worked ten years for you. You let her go without a reference. No proof my mother was the one who took the money. None. But you assume. She has the reputation, she must be guilty.”

The silence was brief, shocked.

“You have no right to use that tone with me,” she said.

“I do. I have rights. I have all the rights that you do.”

“That will be all,” she said firmly, and in my mind's eye, I could see the way she pressed a fat finger down, disconnecting us.

I was in the kitchen, on the downstairs telephone, the one bracketed to the wall to the left of the shelves where Shirley kept her potpourri of plates and bowls and cups. On that wall hung a framed Valentine's card Stanley had once given her:

O, Shirley J, you are my darling,

You are my looking glass from night till morning,

I'd sooner have you without a farthing

Than Katie Keogh with her ass and garden.

Love,
Stanley E.

It was on a cut-out red paper heart, typed, and someone—Shirley? Stanley? Clever Sally?—had framed it against a square of black velvet. Oh, I envied Shirley.

I was alone in the house, as I had been careful to be, before picking up the telephone and dialing Mrs. Cartwright's number, a long-distance call being a matter for consideration and planning. Shirley was at the doctor; her son Laurie was visiting his in-laws and had come early to drive her there. Fred and Stanley were at the college. Upstairs, Natalie slept. There were dishes to do, and a meal to plan, and I began the task. I had been rude to someone impossible, and this act had not made me feel as brave as I had hoped it would. If anything, it left me even more disenfranchised. I kept my eyes low as I began the dishes. I did not want the house to feel my resentment, to recognize my loneliness.

And then I thought,
Oh, hell, get used to me, house. I'm here to stay.
And I added soap to the water. Fred and I, we were too polite, too eager to please, too aware of our own youth and inexperience. We needed to be tougher, I told myself, letting the tap water run warm across my fingers. I placed a damp palm on the wall to the right of the sink window, and watched my soapy print sink in. We needed to grow up. We needed to be rude.

I thought,
I will tell Mrs. Morse at the library that she is wrong about Shirley.
I turned the water off, took the roast from the refrigerator, removed the butcher's paper.
No,
I thought defiantly,
I will tell Mrs. Morse that she is right. I will tell Mrs. Morse how very right she is.
And I looked straight at the kitchen walls and I thought,
I wonder what Mrs. Morse knows about fires, I wonder if she remembers every single one?

That night, Burke came to dinner, along with his wife and one of Stanley's students, a besotted young girl. I tried a recipe for pork roast stuffed with figs. Shirley had never made anything like it. Everybody said it was delicious.