Shirley (9 page)

I slipped a foot out of my shoe and put it gently on top of Fred's oxford, tickling his ankle with my toes. He blinked and swallowed, choking slightly on a too-large piece of carrot. I surprised myself almost as much as I surprised him. It had been weeks since I had done more than tolerate his touch; I was uncomfortable about my size and clumsiness, embarrassed at the presence of the baby, as if the sounds of our lovemaking, even restrained, would impede its growth in some unknowable fashion.

I yawned, putting everything I had into showily smothering it.

Fred said, “You're tired. I'll bring you upstairs.” Stanley paused, mid-sentence, and muttered something about Iago being a patient fellow, willing to wait until after dinner. Even Barry bade me a cheerful good night. And Shirley told me to leave my plate. As I rose from the table, and Fred slid a hand under my elbow, Shirley grinned. A lusty, friendly grin. And then she asked Barry whether he'd read Sally's letter from Boston, and the attention of the family shifted.

Upstairs, we were intent and serious. When the bedsprings
began to squeak, Fred lifted and shifted my hips, maneuvering me off the high bed and carefully lowering us both onto the bare wood floor. He finished more quickly than I'd expected him to, and I clenched his naked bottom, not letting him free until I, too, was done. Then he brought me a damp cloth from the bathroom and I cleaned myself. He lay beside me on the bed for quite some time, his breathing matching mine, until I think he decided I had fallen asleep. He pulled his trousers back on, and his sweater, and closed the door with one soft, experienced click. His footsteps on the creaky stairs demonstrated both dexterity and knowledge. Had satiety done its usual trick, I doubt I would have known he'd left.

No mind. A roseate glow polished the tall windows that faced the bed, myopically resisting the dark world outside. I was warm, and had been loved, and the baby's heart pulsed within me. I couldn't tell if it was raining or if the pattering I heard was the constant ticking of the water as it rose within the radiator pipes. A veritable nesting doll of nurture—house, me, baby—in sweet placental drift.

A
FEW
AFTERNOONS
LATER
, I was once again deep in sleep on a couch, this time in the front parlor, when I was awakened by Stanley's hands on my shoulders—he was shaking me, although I don't believe he meant to be so rough: “Where is she? Why weren't you watching?”

He still had his coat on; as the flaps splayed open, I glimpsed dry bits of whatever casserole they'd served for lunch on campus; some dotted his beard as well. The room was cold; he'd left the front door open in his hurry. I tried to remember when I'd last heard typing, that soothing rhythm that lulled me through the days.

“She's gone?” I said stupidly.

He ran up the stairs without answering; I heard his footsteps in the wide hallway, the sound of their door opening, the squeak and thud of a cat unceremoniously rejected. And then the bedsprings as he sat heavily on their bed. I could picture the way his hands cradled his drooped head, the slump of his belly and the gapping of his shabby, speckled shirtfront. I'd been so deeply asleep that my arms and legs were numb and heavy. Only the baby's undulations had
the forthright confidence of waking. My eyes were open, but I could barely shift my gaze. Perhaps that's why I heard her footsteps crunching ice on the pavement, heard her turn through the trees into the yard and up the porch.

We had barely a moment before Stanley heard her, just enough for me to see the splash of a handprint along her cheek, the mud on her leg and on the mended pocket of the buffalo plaid jacket some unknown guest had abandoned at the house long before my time, the one we each grabbed when in a hurry. “Where have you been? What happened?”

“I fell.” Her voice was matter-of-fact as she brushed at a still-damp splodge on her calf. Stanley thudded down the stairs.

“You left!” He steered her into the kitchen.

“I slipped,” she said, the words trailing down the hall as if she wanted me to hear. It did not take a genius to know that she was lying. “I went for a walk and I slipped.” Such satisfaction in her tone; she was delighted to have worried him.

I sat up, held my breath so I could hear better. He said, “I told you I talked to her, I told you. I don't lie to you, I never have.”

Her voice was too quiet for me to catch her response.

“You didn't have to,” he began loudly, and then he, too, began to whisper furiously. One of the gray cats leapt onto my legs and turned, winding down into sleep with an insistent purr. I let her stay, ran my fingers through the soft of her fur. I even admired their battles. Nothing thrown, no neighbors gathering to gape and gossip. Whatever else they were—and I had not forgotten my walk with Shirley in the dark, or any of Mrs. Morse's aspersions—they were so very good at being married. I listened to their voices edge
and parry; soon enough I heard her laugh and his accompanying chuckle. They'd settled it, whatever it was. Then the clatter of the plates being drawn from the shelves and the clink of silver.

She was cheerful and he sober as we laid the table, folded the well-laundered napkins. It did not appear to be an effort; rather, they seemed mutually satisfied with whatever they'd agreed to. Later, at dinner, Stanley brought up Spinoza and proceeded to explain why the mind and body are of the same essence, for the benefit of Barry and poor Mealtime, who seemed to be paying an extraordinary price for pot roast, delicious as it was.

•   •   •

T
HE
FOLLOWING
WEEK
, it was a Tuesday, Mrs. Morse at the library jumped up as I entered. “Did you hear?” she asked. The downy hair on her lined cheeks caught the light from the hanging brass fixtures over the reading table. To be that old was unimaginable to me.

“Hear what?” I asked, looking forward to the gossip.

“What she did? The lady of the house?” Mrs. Morse placed both hands on the oak reading table and took a gaspy breath, as if her heart were racing.

“Who?”

“Your Mrs. Hyman!”

“What did she do?”

“Oh my, oh my word, she went to visit the professor's lady friend. Everyone knows about it, everyone. Scared her half out of her wits, the things she said, her witch's threats. Told her to get out
of town. That's what I heard. Everyone knows it. Everyone in town. Mrs. Hyman left a mark on her arm like Satan had burned her to the flesh!” Mrs. Morse's rheumy eyes were open so wide her crow's-feet had stretched flat. “And now, I think she's gone! Run away! I haven't seen her since before the weekend, when she came in to drop off her books.” A sob of excitement. “She took out
Herzog
.”

“It's a big book,” I said mildly.

When Mrs. Morse shook her head, her tightly set bob barely shifted. It was only Tuesday, after all; by Friday, her gray hair would droop loosely in a multiplicity of directions and she'd have her fingers in it whenever she remembered, trying to twist the curl back to its original enthusiasm. “She's always here on Mondays, to read the Sunday
New York Times
. Like clockwork, every week. Something's wrong.”

“I'm sure it's not.” I tried to hand over my books, but Mrs. Morse was too excited to see the proffered stack.

“I tell you, that Shirley Jackson, she did something. She's not right, I tell you. Her and her witching ways. If that lovely woman, if something has happened to her, it's your lady did it. I promise you that.”

I didn't know what to say, and so I repeated myself, said firmly that I was sure the woman would turn up. I wanted to say Shirley never went anywhere without me, I almost said it, but it wasn't true. Had she left the house once that week, or was it twice? When were the dreams true? Never? Ever? I had no idea.

“Do you remember a woman named Paula Welden?” I asked impulsively. “A student years ago? Who disappeared?”

Mrs. Morse's rheumy eyes went wide. “She did that, too, did she? Another friend of Professor Hyman's, I suppose. Well, I must say—”

“That's not what I meant,” I said. “What do you remember about her—that's what I wanted to know.”

Mrs. Morse leaned closer, with a fierce twist of the lips. “No smoke without fire, isn't that what they say?”

“No, that's not what I meant!” But it was as if I'd plugged some eccentric machine into a wall socket; she was off to her desk, gathering up her ring of keys to go to the file room where old newspapers were stored. Aghast, I left my books on the returns desk and slipped out the door.

Later, as I unpacked the groceries from Powers Market, as I placed the potatoes in the bin and the leg of lamb in the refrigerator, I did not recount the day's gossip but pretended I'd not been in the mood to collect any stories—such vagaries a pregnant lady is allowed. I did not want Shirley to know what others were saying or, worse, what I myself had done. Or perhaps it was that I did not want to see her face as I exposed her. I did not want to know the truth.

B
UT
LATE
IN
THE
EVENING
, long after the dishes were done and perhaps because she looked so relaxed in her armchair, one leg tucked underneath her skirt, ice cubes melting in a glass of white wine as she turned the pages of yet another Agatha Christie, I had to ask.

“If you
did
do something, something practical, to make things different—”

“To assert my claim?” Eyebrows raised along with the glass; was she amused or merely pretending to be?

I folded my own legs beneath me, took the crocheted blanket off the back of the leather couch. The men's voices from the dining room a waterfall of tenor and bass, and from outside, the chill stroking of the February gusts against the windowpanes. On the one hand, I was hoping for a story, a fire-in-the-fireplace, brandy-in-the-glass kind of tale. On the other, I wondered if she would confide in me. If there was actually something to confide.

“Shoving down the stairs and poisoned mushrooms have been my characters' choices,” she said, tilting her wineglass to catch the light from the brass standing lamp behind her chair. The little
glimmer of the liquid-drenched ice cubes seemed to take all her attention. “And of course a little fire-setting here and there.”

My own throat felt very dry.

“But as I've gotten older—wiser—I've begun to realize how potent a weapon simple fear can be.” She sipped her wine, glanced at me as if we were strangers, and picked up her book again. I admit she frightened me just then, more than a little. But it did not reduce in the slightest or alter by degree my love for her.

M
Y
PREGNANCY
IS
WELL
ADVANCED
. We have begun to joke about names at the dinner table: Dulcinea, Thor, Prufrock. It has snowed so deeply that there are full days when Shirley and I do not go out of the house, trusting to Mr. Powers at the market to get our chickens to us, our flour, our coffee, our cans of peaches in syrup. Her writing project consumes her. She is happy.

One morning, Stanley asks me what I have read of it. Shirley's typewriter is already clacking away in the parlor, and Stanley's eggs are my responsibility by default. I sigh as I stand over the frying pan, one hand on my back, hair curling over my damp forehead. Slattern in training. Fred has already left for the college; he had a student to see.

“Read of Shirley's novel? Nothing, not really,” I say, although in fact I have glanced at the newest pages by the typewriter on several occasions. I don't want either of them to know. I love the bits I've read. The woman in her book is a middle-aged runaway, a widow who discards her entire life to begin again in some anonymous town, with a new name and no history. She is a psychic, or so she claims. I think she is Shirley, or Shirley is she. But could it be that
Shirley always becomes her characters, that when she wrote a schizophrenic, she became one, and that when she wrote an agoraphobic, she became unable to leave the house? In any case, Angela Motorman seems to please her.

“It's good, though, she says,” Stanley announces, and the way he studies my face, I see that he is certain I know precisely what the material contains.

“Don't you read her work?”

He sips his coffee, flicks through the pile of papers he has brought to breakfast, but does not pick up his red pencil and begin making teacherly comments. “I always read her work in progress,” he says, and then he sips again.

“Well, then.”

“She doesn't want me to read this,” he says.

I flip the eggs over, for just a moment, so that the glossy yolks begin to lose their sheen, then slide them sunny-side up onto his plate. He takes two pieces of toast, rye, with butter. No juice, just the endless cups of coffee. He has not shaved yet this morning, although he is fully dressed. Perhaps he will go off to work this way.

Even with my slippers on, the chill of the floor creeps into the soles of my feet. As I bring the frying pan to the sink, I shiver involuntarily. When I turn around, having soaked the pan, Stanley has already finished his eggs. A few dark crumbs speckle the front of his sweater, and I think there is a dab of egg at the side of his lip. I don't tell him. After more than five months sharing his home, a part of me remains wary of Stanley's potential for anger, for violence, for passion. Fathers, I know, are unpredictable at best.

He brings his yellow-streaked plate to the sink, layering it into the soapy water I've just left in the frying pan. “Do you sew?”

I nod yes.

“I need a button,” he says, and he thrusts his shirt collar toward me between pinched thumb and forefinger. He smells of cigarette smoke and something I can only call the odor of sleep, and his nose is close to my neck. I am big with child, huge with my husband Fred's child, and I am very young but I am certain there is something charged between me and Stanley Hyman. I look through my lashes rather than directly meet his eyes.

“I'll get a needle and thread.” On the pantry shelf there is a tiny basket with the basics: white, blue, and black thread; several needles stuck into a wine cork; a small scissors; and a thimble. I unwind a length of white thread, try to get it through the eye of the largest of the three needles. My hand trembles.

He stands in the doorway, pleased with what he has created. I tap the thread end against the needle again and again; every so often it slides partly in and then out, and I am holding my breath. Suddenly my legs feel damp, and I have peed on the Chinese slippers Shirley gave me at Christmas. Those embroidered red silk shoes my first Christmas present ever.

Stanley chuckles.

I have never been so ashamed in my life; I did not feel a muscle letting go.

“Your water,” he says.

A small clear puddle between my feet.

“The baby,” Stanley says. “Shirley!” he calls, and the typewriter
pauses. “It's time for her to go, our little Rose. The baby's coming! I'll go up to campus and get Fred. You drive her to the hospital.”

In the bustle that begins then, Shirley's pale cheeks are rosy with officious pleasure. Later I suppose I wonder if she anticipates how badly this will hurt, if she both envies me and is delighted that this pain is coming to another. Stanley moves quickly; they both do. I am in the car, my suitcase at my booted feet—ungainly Shirley knelt to do them—before I actually comprehend what has begun to happen.

Shirley grinds the gears, trying to head safely down the hill. The Morris Minor slides and shifts, and I should be worried we will go off the road, but I am somewhere else, somewhere deep inside where muscles knot and pain feels oddly distant even as its waves rise and surround. Natalie is about to arrive, although I still don't know it will be her. At this moment, just before, she is a perfect stranger I would not recognize were I to stumble upon her unexpectedly.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong.

Henry James's words, the opening of
The Turn of the Screw
, and that sentence is more perfect than any other description I might give: my daughter, perfect manifestation of the imperfection of love, will shift my understanding in precisely this way.