Shirley (19 page)

“I fell asleep.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“You saw a ghost,” she said. “It's in your eyes.”

I opened the icebox door and took out the milk. Shirley handed me one of the clean baby bottles, filled a saucepan with water, lit
the burner. “Give me that,” she said, and placed the bottle in the water while I dandled fretful Natalie. She shook the bottle, spreading the warmed milk throughout. Natalie settled into it with gusto, then proceeded to fall asleep before even a minute had passed, the nipple still clenched between her gums.

“What did you dream?”

I couldn't meet her eyes.

“Tell me, Rose. Whatever it is.”

I did not plan the words. “My coat,” I blurted. “My good blue coat. I stole it, from my sister Helen's employer.”

Shirley's eyes went shiny and expectant. I sat down at the table, the baby in my arms, and I said, “It was about money, you see. I'd never had any.”

She waited, the way you do when a cat is coming closer.

“I had to walk to school each morning, and then to work each afternoon, and home again in the dark. It was right before I met Fred. Not the coldest winter in history by any means, but I did need a coat. And Mrs. Cartwright had so many. Cashmere, wool, fur; black and gray, jaunty plaid, fox fur stoles, mink wafting around her ankles; car coats, evening coats of stiff satin, a velvet opera cloak, my god, she had so many. Her things filled closet after closet, she had so much and I had nothing.”

Shirley's back against the counter, she was peeling carrots while she listened, dropping the peels into the hand that held the carrot so she could face me as she worked.

“She offered it to me. That blue wool coat. And then I put it on and she liked the way it looked. She took it back. Mrs. Cartwright took back her promise.” I stopped, took a breath.

“Don't you see? When people do bad things, don't you see? They make everyone else around them bad. She broke her promise and made me a thief. I don't want to rub off on someone else the way that woman rubbed off on me.”

“You stole a coat.”

“She went to answer the telephone, and I put it in the bag of things she didn't want. My sister Helen let me.”

“That was kind of her.” Oh, and there was one other thing Shirley said. “You and your devilish blue coat. And you look so sweet.” She laughed to herself, gave the baby a pat, turned back to the pile of carrots on the counter. It was true. She always put the devil in shiny blue. Called him James or Jimmy or Jim, and always Harris. The demon lover had a name, and a look—tall and slim—and he was a writer, wasn't he? Shirley's devil was a blue-clad, slim aspiring writer. She had known about me before she ever met me, known I was coming. Just as she had known the truth of what happened with Stanley. Before it ever happened. Her only mistake was in getting angry a week too early.

A
FTER
N
ATALIE
FELL
ASLEEP
, and before I went downstairs to face Fred and have him face me, I went to look for Sally. It seemed imperative to make peace with her. To explain myself. If we were to be family—I was staying, wasn't I?—I would have to find a way. To be both one of them, the daughters, and also Shirley's friend. I saw that now. She wasn't in her room, although the toss of clothes on her unmade bed and the tumbled sweater and mud-damp boots nestling her open overnight case told me she hadn't yet returned to school. I stood in the hallway for a moment. No life up here, save mine and the baby's. No pulsing blood, no lungs expanded in quiet breath, nor air seeping in nostrils—just me, really, and those voices downstairs in the living room, tones humming and pausing, feeding the air. She wasn't home.

Back in the room, back on the bed, the baby's snuffling snores, the walls hovering around her crib like fairy godmothers—but the baby bestows the gift, that as she sleeps we imagine peace.

I took the back stairs again, letting myself quietly out the kitchen door. I borrowed the buffalo plaid jacket from the hook by the door—still muddy from when Shirley'd fallen (or said she had)
while wearing it weeks before—stuck my hands in the pockets, curled my fingers over the book of matches I found there. There were matchbooks everywhere in the house; we bought two boxes at a time. God forbid a reader or a writer had to break a train of thought in order to find a light! But these matches, advertising Charles Atlas's weightlifting course like all the others, had been crushed, even though half the book was still unused. As if someone, in a hurry or in excitement, had made a fist without realizing what they were. I palmed them thoughtfully.

I passed under the parlor windows. Marvelous that Stanley and Fred's endless ratiocinations continued even on an afternoon like this, not even a moment of respectful silence to mark the dramas of the weekend. If anything, Stanley's voice seemed to drum at the clouded window glass with a more enthusiastic tremolo than ever.
Damn Iago,
I muttered to myself, stamping through the back gates of the college, chilled despite the huge jacket, which came down far below my knees and probably made me look like a hobo.

And
Damn Iago,
I muttered again, a few minutes later, passing a group of girls huddled in the shelter of the barn entrance, trying to light their cigarettes. They were bare-legged despite the weather, in shorts and kneesocks topped by winter peacoats, and each girl seemed more assiduously to avoid my nod than the one next to her. Campus gossip was like city gossip, apparently—less than two days and even perfect strangers could identify the pathetic spurned faculty wife at a glance. Iago with his drive toward troublemaking for entertainment had met his equal in Stanley, I thought, a fellow who tempted a good man to destroy his own love and then went after the foolish wife. Why not bed her, reap a practical benefit from the
season's entertainment?
Damn Iago.
But how could I be mad at Stanley, who had never deceived a soul? Shirley knew him for who he was, as did his kids and his students and everyone else who met him. Scratch Stanley and there was only Stanley beneath the surface. Brilliant, childish, generous, selfish Stanley.

Scratch Shirley at your peril. Hadn't Stanley's lover Caroline discovered this? Shirley was no pitiable Desdemona. Action did not frighten her. “I am pragmatic,” she had said. And I believed her. I wanted to be like her, and so I sought her daughters. Peace was a practical solution. Nonetheless, I liked knowing the matches were in my pocket.

I wasn't sure where Jannie's room might be, nor did I feel comfortable asking any of the girls I saw, so I went down to the dormitories and began walking through the buildings in search of her nameplate. She was on the second floor of the third building; her door was ajar; she was in there with Sally, cuddled together on the bed like puppies, both asleep. I cleared my throat.

Down the hall I heard giggles through another open door. Somewhere a shower ran, and a toilet flushed, and a violin made nearly pleasurable sounds. The hallway rug was worn almost to the wood, patched in places, smelling of old perfume and pencil shavings. My damp loafers felt heavy.

On Jannie's floor was a pile of partially knitted wool, a scarf she had undertaken before Christmas. Back then I'd been jealous watching Shirley teach her a better way to cast on stitches, and I'd been pleased to see how Jannie dropped the project when Shirley stopped paying attention to it. But here was the scarf, at least a foot longer than it was the last time she'd had it at the house.

“You keep secrets, too,” I said. But Jannie remained asleep. She was short, like Shirley, with pale brown hair that swirled limply on the pillows without tangling into Sally's blonder curls. They breathed the same way, shallowly and through their nearly touching noses. Sally's hand slept on Jannie's; I imagine their feet were intertwined beneath the patchwork quilt. I cleared my throat. Loudly. I wanted to have it out with them. I think I had the idea that if they forgave my rudeness I'd be able to go back to the house a grown-up, someone that Fred and Stanley and of course Shirley would have to take more seriously as well.

“Wake up,” I said. “Wake up.” But nothing. I stood for a moment longer, and then turned and walked slowly down the hall. Just before I entered the stairwell, I could swear I heard Sally's giggle, suppressed by a sweatered elbow or length of quilt, but audible all the same. I stopped. I didn't hear her again.

I stayed in the hallway, my heart pounding. Everywhere around me the sounds of life being lived, laughter and running water, someone jumping, another girl's high voice recounting the story of an evening debacle at rapid, excited speed. I held my breath, tiptoed the length of the hall to Jannie's door.

They were cheek to cheek, still, sitting up now, heads against the wooden headboard. As I entered the room, their smiles froze.

“I didn't think you were asleep.”

“How dare you come here?” Sally said. She swung her legs to the floor, began digging around for her shoes with stocking feet. Jannie sat up straighter against the headboard, silent.

“I wanted to explain, to tell you why we came back,” I said.

Sally shrugged the shoulder of her brown cardigan back up,
checked the buttons, drew the sleeves carefully down to her wrists. “It's not as if we're interested.”

“I don't want to have trouble, I didn't want you to be angry.”

“Why would you care?” She stood, began rooting in the tangle of sweaters and slippers and books and notebooks on Jannie's floor for her jacket.

“Because you were right, what you said to me. I am the same age as you”—I looked to Jannie—“and I have been trying hard, so hard, to be a good guest at your house, to be part of your family—”

“Part of Shirley's family,” she said snidely.

“Yes. And for Fred, to make sure Fred makes a good place for himself here.”

“He's certainly done that.”

“I know,” I said, and again I started crying. Even I was tired of my tears.

They watched me coldly.

“I wanted it all to be different, to be special, don't you see? And now look what's happened. What he did.”

“What did he do?” Jannie asked. She honestly did not seem to know.

“Screwed a student. At least one.” God, Sally's voice was cruel. Just the tone of it was like being stabbed.

“He did?” Jannie asked with interest.

“Your father taught him exactly what to do.”

Jannie blinked several times, took her glasses off, cleaned them, and replaced them on the bridge of her nose. “My father?”

“You know what he is.”

Sally said, “Don't listen to her Jannie, don't. She's making it up.”
Sally's pale skin was as red as the jacket Paula Welden wore the afternoon she took off from campus and headed for the Long Trail, bright, bright safety red—Had this been her room, I wondered, and why not? It could have been—and Sally took Jannie in her arms and lifted her to standing. “We're going to dinner,” Sally told me. “You can tell them we're eating on campus tonight.” A sheen of sweat glistened across Jannie's forehead.

“Are you ill?” I asked, but no one answered.

She went down the hall to where the bathrooms were. Sally said, “She doesn't think about our father the way you do, she doesn't like to. So save your histrionics for the house, for people who have no choice about listening to them.”

I was stumped. I said, “You know about Stanley, don't you?”

“I'm no fool. I see things.”

“But she—”

“What's the difference, Rose? Let her cling to what she clings to; it won't hurt you.”

I clutched her arm; I could tell it was too hard; she tried to shake me off. “I dreamed she'd died,” I said. “Shirley. I dreamed she died and Stanley married someone else and everything was awful.”

Sally's breath came hard. She glanced at the doorway, but Jannie was not yet back. “You're crazy,” she said. “You're crazy and evil enough for Shirley to write about you, but I won't give you the pleasure. Get out of here.”

“I'm trying to help,” I said.

“Then go away.”

She left me in Jannie's room, and I heard her down the hall, pushing open the bathroom door. After it closed, I could hear her
voice but not her words, and I left, walking slowly, fingering the matchbook in my jacket pocket with one hand, the other holding on to the banister for balance.

Outside, I felt eyes on me everywhere, as if the students were mockingbirds perched high inside each dorm window, staring and laughing, sneering and chattering as I made my way up the drive. Their cars blocked my path, their disdain seemed to float in the air like dandelion weed; all I wanted was to get back to the house. I clutched the matches tightly; with my fingers I could tell that less than half the book was used, but all I wanted was to be in my house. My house, Shirley's house, the place where I was safest. Where even if Fred had wronged me, I was needed.

I did not let myself think about the students. How lucky they were to have been loved enough to be there, to be children without babies, to be young enough to fuck their professors and go on with their studies and their dreams. I had never been young enough to take any risks, I told myself furiously. I had never, ever been lucky enough, or safe enough, to make mistakes. What freedom that would be.

I strode back to the house filled with self-pity and rage. When an image of Paula Welden appeared, a captioned picture in the boldly headlined tabloid in my head, I dismissed it and marched on. Whatever Shirley had done to her, there on the mountain, Paula Welden had been loved. Not even she had endured the misery and betrayal that had been my lot since birth.

Oh, I realize how this sounds, how awfully childish, how awfully selfish I was. I do not defend myself. I only want to tell the truth.

•   •   •

I
SAID
TO
F
RED
, not half an hour later, “Even with what you did, you need me.”

“I do,” he said. “And I'm sorrier than I can say.”

“You need me,” I said again.

He nodded.

“We made a promise, we have a life together, our whole life, and now I'll never forget, I'll never forget what you did!” Somewhere downstairs, someone closed a door, perhaps to give us more privacy. Stanley put on one of his jazz recordings. It made me mad. I wanted them to hear us. I wanted everyone to be with us, all of them, I wanted them all to be a part of what had been done to me, to celebrate my injury, to atone for it, to make it right.

“Shh,” Fred said. “The baby.” But Natalie slept through all of it, and downstairs life went on as normal, and that was the way of it. I know we talked some more, and there were apologies and promises, but honestly, the fact that we were both there, in the same room, made all discussion moot. The inevitability of going on was understood.