Shirley

by Susan Scarf Merrell

  I had not walked on the long paths through the campus at night before. The air pocketed in the dips on either side of the tarred road, along the swathes of field that I could sense only in the darkness. One who has never walked on unlit, untraveled roads in the dense, nearly crushing cushion of night air can’t possibly know how brilliantly, exhaustingly, each footstep echoes. There’s a tautness to it, a tension, and I have never felt so brave as out of doors in such drenched dark, finding my way through the impenetrable air.

  Shirley was furious. No fear in her, simply the stiff thudding of her robust frame, her thick-soled shoes. Her breath came quickly; as my eyes adjusted, I could see dense, foggy bursts of it. I tried to match my footsteps to her own; she was not a graceful woman, her rhythms unpredictable at best.

  “I suppose,” she said suddenly, “that you presume fidelity to be an outmoded and unnecessary feature of marital union?”

  “Me?”

  “Obviously.” Sarcastic.

  “You mean cheating? Do I think it’s okay to cheat?”

  “That is the question on the table, Counselor.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I hadn’t thought. We’ve never talked about it, but why would one marry and not be faithful? Why make those promises and not mean them? I don’t understand.”

  “We’re not supposed to own one another. Or to treat love as if it gives one the right to possession.”

  I listened to my own footsteps, the hesitance of my treads just a half- or quarter-beat behind each of hers.

  I said, “I don’t think I would want . . . I mean, marriage is possession, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you’re doing, giving yourself to the other person?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and all the familiar Shirley—witty, ironic—seemed to have drained from her voice.

  “Is Stanley—” I couldn’t finish.

  “Is Stanley ever not?” she said bitterly.

  I had read about open marriages. Somehow I assumed the people involved would be more attractive than Shirley and Stanley. They were old, and flabby, and sloppy, and although they had eyes lit by extraordinary intelligence, I didn’t want to touch or be touched by them. Stanley exuded something animal, something charged, but it didn’t work in a sexual way on me. Yes, he was attractive, but no, I was not attracted. I didn’t feel I should have to make that clear. I was married. That settled the matter. I was out of bounds.

  How innocent I was! Some of the least attractive people I know have done some monumental extramarital fornicating, bragged about it, left long marriages because of it. But I honestly couldn’t picture either of the Hymans in flagrante. They weren’t physical beings; even the effort to clear the table or carry a load of books from one room to another seemed demanding. And the notion of sexual pleasure, well, somehow it had always been connected to beauty for me. It was the beauty of Fred’s chest and stomach, the muscularity of his organ and the lean of his thighs—that was what made me yearn for him. Not what made me love him, but what made me want to make love to him. And the idea of Stanley, the idea of his penis as an object to emerge, erect, from the nest of that belly, from behind the zipper of those crumpled trousers—well, I did not relish the thought.

  And she was certainly no Lady Chatterley. I hated to let my mind draw the pictures it was drawing.

  “In the beginning,” she said softly, “in the beginning, it was fine. It was part of what made him Stanley, part of what made us special. Unique. More original than anyone else.”

  Ahead of us, car headlights appeared around a curve and began to bear down the road. We stopped in the grass, waving cheerfully as the white sedan passed us and headed toward the back gates, brake lights winking over the bump before the stone columns.

  “But you would think that after twenty-five years, you would begin to think that he would either settle into our life or leave it, not hang like this. Me or them. There is a never-ending supply of them.”

  “The students.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “They are so impressed by Stanley’s mind.” Again, the sour, sarcastic tone.

  I hadn’t pictured such a danger until this moment. I had been so tightly focused on our new friends, on the baby alive inside me, on the newness of all of it—I had assumed, I had simply assumed, that the language of marriage we all spoke was a common one.

  “Not Fred,” I said. “Fred wouldn’t.”

  She snorted. It was not a pleasant sound.

  I had never before noticed a creakiness in my hip and thigh, but suddenly I felt pain sear my leg, up into the muscle at my groin. I doubled over. Shirley patted my back.

  “I’m not upset,” I told her. “I’m fine, it’s my leg, the baby moved in a funny way. Fred would never.”

  “The devil is a most extraordinary teacher.” I never could equate plump Stanley with the tall blue-suited devil of Shirley’s fiction. I suppose she made her devil thin and blond simply to confuse—

  “Why would you say that?” Yes, I could hear the whiny aggrievedness in my voice, could hear but not control it. “Why would you stay? Why ever would you stay with him?”

  She turned back in the direction of the house, walking with stiff purpose. I kept up with her. The movement helped the pain. And I had never been the sort of woman who storms off confidently in a fit of fear, or fury.

  “I keep trying to understand why I would leave,” she said. “Or who I would be, without him. Or what I would want or think or do. Don’t get me wrong, silly Rose, I do know I am most to blame if I stay. I fully understand. But I have no idea who I would be.”

  I took her hand. It lay soft and slightly cold between my own.

  She said, “We were your age when we began. Students at Syracuse. Children, I suppose. And now, after all this time, no matter who he . . . screws . . . no matter who he beds, I don’t have the slightest idea how I could go. Where I could go. I know why, I fully understand why. I just don’t know what life I would make.”

  “I’ve always believed in fighting for yourself,” I said.

  She burst out laughing. “You, little Rose? You?”

  At that age, at that time, I felt wise as often as I felt foolish. And every time I was reminded of how little I knew I found it painful and surprising, as if my own frailty had once again crept up to tease me. It doesn’t change. The Me I think of, the Me I know, may never outgrow her teenage self, shy and self-effacing. I can imagine my own daughter will one day seem older than me; she has a sterner core.

  Perhaps that’s why it is so easy for me to recall the way it felt when Shirley called me Little Rose. And how the night smelled, the odor of cold that one smells only in New England—apples and oak leaves and freezing water, and the day’s sun caught in the grass, a blanket of fog around my shoes. I was gratified by her affection, gratified, as if the insult of it was a form of kindness.

  I knew so little of love or what it felt like. I could only assume the guises it would take from the novels I had read. And Shirley herself, part creation and part creator, was wisdom and art made manifest. She put an arm around me and leaned some portion of her weight against my shoulders, and I bore it for her. We walked in silence down the long drive, out of the campus and back to the house. Upstairs, Barry’s guitar was louder; he was singing. His voice was lovely. The men’s debate, at the table, had continued—so many words respoken I could no longer parse the sentences: motivation, pluralism, unconscious, melodrama, complexity, revelation, damnation, imagination, hierarchical, democracy, weakness, temptation. They had not noticed our absence.

  The phone rang as I hung our coats in the closet. Shirley, fresh Scotch in hand, paused at the door to the parlor. She did not look at me, nor back at the dining room. The phone rang, five, six times, and then stopped.

  “For whom the bell tolls,” she said. I wasn’t sure how to answer. “Perhaps we mus
t create a spell to silence a most insistent pest.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said earnestly. “There has to be a spell for getting rid of someone like her.” I tried to imagine who the woman might be. Was she someone I’d seen in the village or on campus? My mind could not create a more compelling woman than the one in front of me, the one Stanley already had.

  She leaned in so close that I could feel the chill still clinging to her hair. “Sometimes,” she said, “one has to dispense with spells. Be pragmatic. Take action.”

  “Take action?”

  “Yes, action. One has to be practical.” Her eyes were unaccountably dark, her mouth taut. I would not want her to be angry with me, not ever, I thought. I felt a tingling pulse through my fingertips and along the curve of my ears, where the heat of the house was challenging the cold I’d brought in with me. “Some situations demand spells, but others, well . . .” She paused, studying me, as if deciding how much she was willing to say. “I am not afraid to take matters into my own hands.”

  I nodded.

  “Not when the situation demands it.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it, without uttering a word. “Good night, little Rose,” she said abruptly, and she winked. I have never forgotten this. She winked.

  She was joking, of course. She was the kind of woman who would laugh when things were most tragic. As much as I admired her stories and her novels, I admired this even more. “Sleep well,” I told her, but then I was the one who went upstairs.

  Later, when Fred came to bed, I did not mention that I’d gone out for a walk. I let him feel the baby kicking—this had just started and was fascinating to me—then I kissed him, turned on my side, and went to sleep.

  Seven

  “I’LL HELP WITH THAT,” Shirley said. I was melting wax off the candlesticks—the Hymans had a motley collection of them, formal cut glass, silver flutes, shabby braided brass, and sturdy pottery. To my mind, she treasured them beyond their value. She generally preferred that I use chipped saucers and juice glasses and rinsed-out jam jars for the sturdy candles whose light we nightly dined by. When we set the table with some of the good sets of candlesticks, we were en route to a more celebratory evening.

  After those raucous evenings when our customary numbers were enlarged and the table vibrated with sparring and laughter and liquor, I always spent a good morning hour returning the candlesticks to pristine condition. I loved this task. I loved the melted wax odor, slightly sweet yet redolent of flame. A better smell to me than the cat, cigarette, and pipe residue that laid flat stale prints on every surface in the house from day to day.

  This was a few weeks later; perhaps November had begun. I moved over to make room for Shirley at the sink. She chose one of the sterling silver bouquets, elegant draped petals in which the taper would form pistil and stamen, and began to peel the warmed wax with her fingers, working intently, as if there were no higher calling.

  “You stopped early,” I said.

  “I smelled fire.”

  Observations like this one did not surprise me, not anymore, and I calmly asked if she’d called the fire department. “Oh, no,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was a fire from the past, a big one, and I could smell how the wind carrying the screams and falling ash had come from far away. Far away and years past. Who would I call upon for help?”

  I bent my head over the sink. The squat blue candleholder I was denuding was from a local potter who’d come to dinner one night; thinking about her elfin chin and yellowing smile, the long gray ponytail slung like a squirrel’s tail over her right shoulder, was more pleasurable to imagine than the memories I was now suppressing. Thoughts of my father were ones I never wanted to have. I gritted my teeth. The baby kicked inside me, suddenly alert.

  “Rosie,” Shirley said. “We all have pasts that shame us.”

  I held my breath.

  “We all do.”

  I shook my head, re-dipped the candlestick into the bowl of steaming water.

  “Fire consumes whatever’s in its path, life or structure or forest. Some say the world will end that way.” She looked at me quizzically; I didn’t know what she meant. “There’s no greater force with which to reckon.”

  “We moved so much,” I said. “If only there were a spell for keeping people in one place.”

  She rested the silver candlestick on the drainboard, wiped her hands on her skirt. With glasses off, her eyelashes were pale as an infant’s, her wide face guileless. I bent back over the steaming water. “The experience that makes you who you are. Would you genuinely want to change that?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprising even myself with the force of the single syllable. I would have, I would have given almost anything to begin as a different person in a different family, with fires only in fireplaces and a mother who dressed me in the morning and was there for me in the afternoon. A snack on the table, and questions about what I’d learned in school. I’d been at friends’ apartments when their mothers asked such things, and, oh, envy was the word for what I felt.

  “You can tell me anything,” Shirley said, picking at the wax with her misshapen fingers.

  “There’s nothing to tell.” A childhood like mine is a cancer; you know it will spread and alter everything it touches, and when you want to preserve the good things, you would be foolish to let them near such poison.

  “I won’t breathe a word, if it helps you to bare the tale, as Dr. Toolan encourages me to do, well, I’d be honored to receive your confidences.”

  “I don’t want to.” I would not tell another soul, I thought. Not ever. And then I made my mind go blank. I am not Eleanor, I thought, and grabbed onto the sink edge, abruptly afraid that I might fall. I am not.

  Shirley looked so sad; faint lines across her forehead, damp on her cheeks. A clicking began in the hot-water pipes beneath the sink. I had the sense the house was impatient, that it wanted me to tell, and I imagined the way the pipes that carried heat and water up its veins were like a lifeblood, I the child inside these walls, a Russian doll nesting in its fecund iterations. “I have to sit.” It didn’t help; my heart was pounding.

  Shirley placed the second silver candlestick in the bowl of hot water, dried her hands by patting them on the dish towel on the table. Her hand on my shoulder was warm; she grasped me firmly; in a moment, I could feel the pulsing of the blood in her fingertips, and it did what she intended—it slowed my heart, it calmed me down.

  “We’re not so very different,” she said softly. “We hoard secrets of the prison house and could such tales unfold. Why, poor Dr. Toolan tries to inspect the palatine bones with his fat butcher’s fingers; no matter how enthusiastically he stimulates the maxilla and mandible, there are certain matters I hold entirely to myself. God knows my mother doubts that. She thinks I reveal far too much, but mostly that’s because the way I write embarrasses her country club soul. Even so. There are some things I don’t like to let myself think about. Secrets even from myself? I wonder sometimes . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  I stood and returned to my task, did not look at her—I did not want to see her face. Whatever she thought she’d suffered as a child, it was nothing compared to what I’d endured. Peeling the last resistant hunk of opaque wax from the base of the candlestick, I let my fingers caress the smooth glazed surface, brushed the water from the porous underside.

  “Will your parents visit? Do they ever come to stay?” I asked deliberately.

  “Why, Rosie,” she said. “You have a cruel streak.” It amused her, I could tell. She thought I was too small a presence to inflict real injury. She picked at the wax on her candleholder a moment longer, a more deliberate rhythm now, as if she had already returned to the typewriter in her mind.

  She was right, of course, but wrong. It was a diversionary tactic. I did not want to confess my father’s sins to her, and so, though she knew the what of it—could smell the rain-dre
nched ash and melted roof shingles in the history of my skin, clinging to the memory of the clothing I’d worn when, as a tiny girl, I accompanied him on his business—I would not deliver the how or the why. Just think what subject matter I might have been.

  They did what they had to do, my parents. They did what they chose to do: lord knows I cannot justify any of it, and she might have been able to, Shirley. I could have told her. Could have seen my life created in her words, become a creature settled for posterity in black and white. But I wanted to be her friend, you see. And I was certain no one likes the spawn of petty criminals. Except a man like Fred Nemser, that is, and even his affection I did not actually understand.

  • • •

  STANLEY HAD AN ODDLY EVOCATIVE VOICE. Shirley couldn’t carry a tune, but Stanley could perform vague mimicry, so that listening to him sing, while not entirely tuneful, left one thinking about the artist he was imitating, and in a not-unpleasant way. The balladeers of the Appalachians, for example, were well served by the reedy nasality of his singing. I remember the way he would sing some of the morning’s intended classroom offerings, out on the porch, his breath visible smoke trailing up into the slatted ceiling. When Fred sang to me, his mouth close to my ear as we huddled under our quilts in the cold bedroom, it was language lulling me to sleep. When Stanley sang, it was a story, complete in detail from start to finish, as if the characters were people he himself knew and wanted others to be introduced to. They were his friends, James Harris and Barbara Allen alike, close to him and real to him.

  I was often jealous as Stanley swung his briefcase around the corner and disappeared behind a snowdrift. If I were someone else, another girl, from another world, I would be able to follow him up that hill, onto the campus, and sit in the lecture hall and soak up all the infinite variety of his thoughts. I envied my own husband when he set off, minutes later, his long legs enabling him to catch up to Stanley with ease.

  “Remember everything,” I would call. “Tell me later.”