Shirley (17 page)

I had been angry before—oh, frequently—and I had known humiliation, but I had never considered the possibility of pain like this. He had said he loved me. He had said we were a family. He had said, god, he had said we belonged to each other, for richer and for poorer but mostly forever. The fury that roiled around me was grander for all that I had not expected it. I had ceased to fear betrayal, I had believed in him, and he had wounded me more completely than the woman who had given birth to me.

At least with her I had always known she was not to be trusted.

By now, it had to be at least three in the afternoon. The winter sun had shifted, signaling the slow turn into evening. I kept walking forward and higher, the path narrowing, my boots soaked through, my toes stiff with cold. I knew I should turn back, I told myself I would, and yet I kept marching on, my nose and cheeks stinging. I wanted to freeze to death, or so I believed. If an image of Natalie intruded into the dim netherworld of my thoughts, I dismissed it. She would have to grow up without me. He would never get over what he had done.

I would go back. I would pack my things, abandon them both. And Shirley and Stanley, I would speak not a word to them. I'd leave for Philadelphia. Return to my dreary job at the hotel. I'd make my way to California, become an actress. Or lead a women's group—they had made fun of women's groups, only last night, at
dinner.
The Feminine Mystique
had been the subject of Stanley's rancor; Shirley had not yet read it, but she was going to, because Friedan had attacked her unfairly. Of all the writers to call domestic, they had said. “I'm no one's victim but my own,” Shirley had claimed. I, on the other hand, fit Friedan's bill to a T. The child bride personified, Stanley had said. But I wasn't. I was just young. I was not in chains. I'd said that, at the table. They smiled sympathetically, had the courtesy not to chuckle.

What else had Shirley said? She'd quoted a poet, about the way that love always presents itself as a new idea to those who discover it. I have no memory of the exact words, the quote, who said it—all I remember is that we were so damn certain of ourselves.

And here, barely eighteen hours later, I was that other cliché: the betrayed wife. I imagined Shirley waiting for me, at the bottom of the slope, the engine of the Morris Minor running as she read—what was she reading?—I told myself she was reading Betty Friedan, as she had vowed to only a night earlier, that she would have found something in it, would say to me, “Enough, it is enough what our men have done.”

Yes, I told myself, I would find Shirley waiting, reading Betty Friedan, surrounded by the detritus of her family's life—records, books and student papers, discarded sweaters and shoes, one sweat-stained sock, a black umbrella with a bent rib—squinting into the text as evening began to circle the one timid car light, hair lank around her coated shoulders, reading glasses as fogged as the windshield, the pause before she raised her eyes to make sure it was me tugging the passenger door open. It would be warmer in the car than out, but only slightly, and I'd rub my hands together and tuck
them between my thighs. She'd light a second cigarette, pass it to me, silent. I'd hesitate. Automatically fearful of dropped ash, but oh, what could it matter, after all—I'd take the cigarette between thumb and middle finger, then switch, ladylike, to hold it between middle and index. We would smoke, watch a winter-skinny squirrel dart from birch tree branch to maple, then linger—tension throughout its entire frame—as if our alien presence was both no threat and the worst kind. Eventually, and quite calmly, Shirley would speak, her breath visible like so much smoke in the gloom. “We go,” she'd say. “We simply go.”

I wonder now how many women there were back then, women like me. Shirley and I were two poles so opposite we were the same. I'd never considered freedom; all I wanted was to be seen. Being limited, confined, was a form of love—therein lay safety. She'd had all the freedom possible and didn't want it. In hindsight, what passed for bold independence in the Hyman house was also insidious tyranny. All families have some form of it.

Women experienced in shame perhaps break differently than those who have been more simply loved. Nonetheless, even such as we had certain contractual obligations to our selves. I pictured all of it as I trudged: glee quivered through her voice, and defiance, and also intention. I yearned for those five words and the way she would say them, I would preserve them in the amber of my most jealously stockpiled dreams. The touchstone of the turn—

“We go,” she would say. “We simply go.”

If I had ever pitied her before, I would not have to now. She would leave behind Stanley, his sins and hers washed clean by
separation. No longer would she have to walk into Powers Market and have the hens cluck at her, their red-painted beaks achatter with the tales of her transgressions. Away from here, she could be free of jealousy, of remorse. I did not care what she had done, what she had lived through, what she had avenged. I loved her that much, you see. I blamed her for none of it. “Where?” I asked aloud. Hopelessness gave way, it vanished: with Shirley as companion, there would be both journey and arrival.

Without her, I couldn't say the same. Women disappear.

Natalie, left behind, might learn to miss me. I'd meant to keep her safe forever, but I had already exposed her to love's treachery—her father's—and now mine would come as no surprise. My breasts, swollen and hot, ached with the milk I had not given her, but if I turned my thoughts away, did not allow myself her image, the discomfort lessened. I understood my mother better.

And yet still, I would say to Shirley, “Now, please, yes. Let's go.” She'd set the car in gear, and off we'd go, slip-sliding on the evening dark refreezing road.

•   •   •

A
H
,
IF
ONLY
I
COULD
SPIN
such gold out of the straw of my afternoon. But no.

My fancies had left the mountain but my physical self had not. I was still stumbling up the path in the gloom, still alone and unloved. Shirley would not come for me. This was mine to solve, and abruptly I felt certain that I could. I was not going to be the wife who goes calmly to her death, setting aside all hope of a future
without her man. I was going to return, and pack myself up, and leave him to stew in the poisonous mess he had created. I hated him beyond all reason, and I was done.

I turned, began trudging heavily down the slope. The trip in this direction was far faster, even though I slowed as I went, not quite brave enough to face what lay before me. My toes were cold and stiff with damp. It would be a long journey from the mountain back to North Bennington, and I girded myself to find the stamina. Hungry, cold, and tired, but self-righteousness propelled me.

As I emerged from the clearing, I saw her car parked at the sign by the entrance, its engine running, cold clouding the windows. I had imagined it, and made it happen, just as Shirley claimed to do.

In the moment of victory, I first thought of striding directly past the car, dignified and ripe with justifiable anger. I have always wanted to be that kind of bold, certain woman. But I'm me. I hated to think of Shirley alone out there, lost in her book, slowly getting colder and colder, and perhaps running out of gasoline, having wasted her artist's hours waiting for me.

I opened the passenger door, slid in, and said, “I'm not staying. I can't.”

“Y
OU
'
LL
DO
WHAT
YOU
HAVE
TO
DO
,” he answered calmly.

It was Stanley, not Shirley. Reading Betty Friedan, as if he'd not dismissed her out of hand the night before. They'd all been furious at her for the way she classified Shirley as a writer who romanticized domesticity. “I am a housewife,” Shirley had said irritably. “And I am a writer. I never ‘deny the vision.'”

“What does that mean?” I'd asked.

“She says that because I write I'm dishonest. Because I write about domesticity, as if that's all I write about in any case, and as if I pretend there's no work involved in writing.”

Stanley said, “She doesn't have the talent to shine your shoes.”

“I'd have agreed with her about so much of it,” Shirley said. “But to attack me?” She took a sip of wine, stirred the pea soup with the ladle and held out a hand for the bowls I was proffering. “I'm the one who's doing precisely what she wants women to do, and I'm the one upon whom she sets her doggish wit?”

Stanley said, “Her doggish visage. I'll review her.”

Shirley said, “Keep your razor wit stropped for a more worthy battle, S. Edgar. The book's been out a year; it's time we all forgot
it.” She turned to Stanley's childhood friend, another writer, up for two days to give a lecture. They were all writers, weren't they? “What's the gossip from town, Frank? Are you in love? News! News, please!”

•   •   •

H
E
WAS
FLIPPING
THROUGH
the pages of
The Feminine Mystique
, pen in hand. One thing I'll say for both Shirley and Stanley, their mutual support system was laudable. Nobody was allowed to go after Shirley, not without feeling Stanley's wrath. He closed the book, slid it onto the seat next to me. He looked amused—whether at Friedan or me, I cannot know, but then he almost always teetered on the knife edge between disdain and pleasure.

“I thought you didn't know how to drive.”

“I don't. But it's much easier than I thought it would be.” He placed a hand on my knee, rubbed it. “You look cold,” he said.

I shivered. “How did you find me?”

“Girls always run to the mountains, don't you remember?”

“Did he tell you? Did Fred tell you what he did?” I wanted to cry again.

“News travels,” Stanley said.

He rubbed differently, his fingers lightly moving along the inner angularity of my left thigh. “Don't,” I told him.

“Ah, Rosie. You've had a difficult afternoon.” I had. His fingers moved into the crease of my thigh, warming, circling back and down and again, my breath catching the pace, joining. I closed my eyes. He pressed, began to explore the zipper of my jeans.

“No,” I said, but there was part of me—and he could hear it in
my voice—that wanted revenge, and wanted him. There had always been a part of me repelled, a part of me entranced. I could almost hear our shared warm rising, the chill of my skin no longer quite so forbidding. He sighed. I opened my eyes. His were closed, and I had the sudden thought I could be anyone. Not Rosie. Not Rose. But any girl.

“Did you know? Did you know that he was—did you know what he was doing?”

“It's small-minded to consider them the same thing, sex and love. Provincial.”

“Conventional.” I pushed his hand away. He tapped my thigh delightedly, then slid it back.

“Yes.”

“I never claimed to be anything else.”

“Look at you, Rosie, those earnest eyes of yours, always watching all of us, drinking it all in, wondering and pondering. You are hardly conventional.”

“It's only a year we've been together. Only a little more than a year! We're married! We have a baby!”

“Fred's a good man, and he loves you. Why doubt him?”

“Doubt him? I don't doubt what I saw, Stanley!”

“But what does it matter? What is it about The Act? Sex is a form of exercise, a set of sensations, a way to find release. Nothing more.”

“So he's having sex with her? Not simply kissing her in public?”

“Perhaps not the finest location to choose.”

“How long has he—” I couldn't say the words. “With her?”

“Who?”

“I don't know! I don't know who she is!”

“And nor do I. The students consider the professors to be unusually interesting. I'm not sure which particular young lady this might have been.”

Even more sickening. How many “particular young ladies” had there been?

“Get out,” I said. “Switch seats with me. I'll drive us back. It's better.”

He shrugged, as if to say it was my loss, and opened his door. How could he not understand the insult inherent in the ease of this; my lack of acquiescence mattered so little? The engine had been on all along, no need to wait for it to warm. I slipped the shift into first gear, pressed foot to gas, and leveraged the car tires back onto the road.

I was exhausted. I was furious. At Fred. At Stanley. At myself. “Was Paula Welden your student?” I asked. I did not see his face, but I could hear the way his breath held, for just that moment.

“Who?”

“Paula Welden. The girl who went missing.”

“I never knew her,” he said, his tone utterly noncommittal. When I glanced over, he was stroking the cover of the Friedan book thoughtfully, his meaty palm obscuring the title, his fingers lazy on the spine.

“You remember her, though, don't you? You remember when she disappeared?”

I had never heard Stanley's voice so deliberate and calm, the way the hostage speaks when the bad guy has the gun to his head. “No,” he said. “I don't recall.” I knew he was lying. He knew I
knew. I focused on the asphalt road ribboning before us in the dusk. I did not want to hit a deer.

The Morris Minor clambered over the refrozen ruts in the driveway. Icicles dripped from the porch eaves, glints of light in the late-evening gloom. My heart pounded as I turned off the engine. “I can't go in,” I said, and Stanley paused, his hand already on the door handle.

I started to cry.

“You're young,” he said, almost tenderly. “What hurts now will hardly matter, much sooner than you know.”

“You don't understand!”

“But I do. I do, little Rosie. This, too, shall pass.”

“You have no idea,” I said fiercely. “It isn't fair, it isn't right.”

“Ah. You're quoting Shirley.”

Her words were the right ones; I had not meant to do that. “It's not okay,” I said. “You can say so all you like; I won't ever believe you.”

Sudden arc of bright light in the gloom. Shirley emerged from the house, coatless, and marched down the steps to the rutted drive. She pulled my door open, blocked me in. “Where did you take him?” she demanded. “You left your baby crying for her supper, took my husband off to nurse instead? How dare you? How dare you steal my car?” As if it were the missing car infuriating her.

“I didn't,” I began.

“Oh yes, as if there's any other explanation. As if Stanley got in the goddamned car and drove it himself.” Her glare so baleful it makes my heart hurt to picture it even now.

“You don't know what happened?” After Stanley's appearance
at the mountain, I assumed my humiliation had been broadcast by the village crier. If Stanley knew, how could Shirley not?

“I know what happened,” she said harshly. “What happens every single time. Stanley's a veritable magician of the loins. Far more compelling than any friendship I might have to offer.”

“I would never!” I began, while her words growled over mine: “But you obviously did.”

“Shoil,” Stanley said, “you haven't—”

“In the house,” she snapped. “Get in there, Stan, we have dinner guests. You have multitudes to devastate before the port is passed.”

“You're wrong,” I tried to say, not wanting her to be. Wrong. Ever. Preferring almost to be at fault than to see her with this particular flaw. But then she said something I'd not imagined she ever would, words so horrible my own mother would never have uttered them, the worst words ever.

“And you, worse than a murderer, stay out of my house,” she hissed. “I befriended you. Take your oh-so-tolerant husband and your crying baby and go. You are no longer welcome here.” And then she slammed the door open, lumbered back up to the porch, and stood there, arms crossed against her ample chest. “I'll get Fred,” Stanley said, wiping condensation off the windshield with a gloved hand.

“No, don't! I don't want to talk to him!”

My legs would not move. Of course Stanley would tell her the truth. He would explain, and she would come back out to me, she would help me. She would tell me what to do.

Stanley slammed his door, crunched over the lawn to the path, and stopped briefly at Shirley's side. She did not move, did not turn
to look at him. In a moment, he went into the house. She remained on the porch; I remained in the car. I wanted her to come to me, to be the comfort and the wisdom that would guide me out.

It was colder in the car with the engine off, and my breath quickly fogged the windshield even further. Shirley stayed up on the front porch, watching me. She was not going to come, not going to help me. Stanley came to the door behind her and watched for a time, as if he, too, were confused. I saw Fred pass by the living room window, Natalie in his arms, and then the younger Hyman daughter, Sally, knelt on the couch to peer over its back and glare out at me.

Two coated figures scrambled past the Morris Minor, a woman and a man, each carrying a paper-sacked bottle of wine. They paused, the woman bussing Shirley's cheek. Words were exchanged, both dinner guests glanced curiously toward me and the car, then opened the front door and let themselves in.

My teeth would not stop chattering.

Stanley came to the front door, opened it, and spoke to Shirley. He had a drink in hand, offered it to her. She did not respond, remained unmoving, staring through the dark as if she could see me.

I did not know what I was supposed to do. Nor do I have any sense of how long we stayed this way.

Eventually, however, I was the one that broke, pushing my door open with an agonizing creak of metal and ice.

“Don't,” she said cruelly, a single syllable in the dark.

“What?”

“Don't you dare come in this house.”

“Shir—”

“You of all people should know, should know better. You are no longer welcome here.”

“But I—”

“I thought we were friends,” she said bitterly. “Of all the women in the world, you were the last one I'd imagined could do such a thing to me.”

“But I didn't, I haven't! It was Fred! Fred and a student!”

Something flickered across her face. She knew I was telling the truth, I saw it, and then I saw her face harden again. Now, looking back on it, I'm fairly certain that she hated me for being her, just then. She couldn't bear to remember how awful she had felt, how rotten that very first betrayal had once been. She believed me, but it was not enough.

“I can't have you here, not anymore,” she said coldly. “I can't ever trust you again.”

She turned on her heel, entered the house, and locked the door loudly and with a flourish. I saw her in the living room, both hands extended to greet the couple she'd invited to dinner. Her hair glinted red under the electric lights. A smile on her face—not a false one but a determined one—and no one even glanced out the window toward where I stood, in the freezing night, utterly bereft.

I let myself back into the car and sat. What would my next move be? The first fury of the afternoon's discovery was now so compounded that confusion had replaced blood and breath inside me. Any action seemed more dangerous than simply sitting. Even if I froze to death.

I sat and sat. Breath fog filled the front seat. I could no longer feel my fingers or toes. I drifted, numb inside and out; perhaps I
slept. I know I did, drifting into a dream of sitting in the car, destroyed by the day's events, and drifting back awake. I was no longer cold. I dreamed the car was moving, jouncing down the long hill away from campus, and along the big road heading south, and then I woke, drifting, and dreamed myself awake.

Fred was in the car, Natalie in the back, wrapped in blankets, and pinpoints of starlight speckled the dark, dark sky. Heat slowly warming me through, down to the ends of my fingers and toes, behind my knees, my bottom. I must have lifted my head.

Fred, seeing me awake, continued driving for a long moment, in silence, and when he spoke, his voice like a frog's croak, awkward and unused to language, he said, “I can't even begin to apologize. I can't.”

I was crying again, silent tears seeping down my cheeks.

“Things happened up there, things on the campus. I got confused, I did things I shouldn't have, it was wrong, and I know it.”

“I can't go back there.”

“We've left. We've gone. We won't go back.”

“Your class,” I said.

“I won't go back.”

For some time, he drove without speaking. I closed my eyes again, fell back to sleep. When I awakened, we were parked outside a motel in Williamstown, and he had opened my door. “We'll sleep here,” he said. “We three. And in the morning we'll figure out what to do.”

I let him guide me inside the drab little room, turn on the stall shower, unpeel damp clothes from my spent body. I stood under the hot pounding water until my toes began to burn. I was so tired that
even now I can hardly recall what it felt like to slip under the covers, to feel his breathing body next to me, listen to the baby's gentle snores. I fell asleep without pondering the ethics of where I was. I fell asleep because I could no longer stay awake. I did not dream.