thoughts into words into pictures and i closed my eyes. my brain calmed, slowed, foot soldier words aligned themselves in sentences nonsense thoughts i’d never thought such things and as i woozed and floated embryonic in the clock-ticking electricity humming heat rising silence i began to know, to know—
i know who i love, i dreamed it, dreamed the words, was i waking or sleeping, i know i know
stanley—i said to him—stanley, stanela
but i was dead, how was it so, that i was dead and i was her and so i told him, stanley listen
when i was alive, i told him, and we were happy (decades of this, and weren’t we very?), we made a vow that whichever of us went first would be cremated, and sit in a jar on the dresser in our bedroom, keeping an eye on things.
was i waking or sleeping, i dreamed. i dreamed i was shirley, i dreamed i was shirley. i knew i was shirley i was. shirley
“you, you’ll remarry,” i told you. “men do. you won’t like to be alone.” there was no dig in this (i fucked dylan thomas on our porch, did i ever tell you? there was a party, and all our friends drunk as lords inside and it was winter. too much gin and he felt wobbly and i took him to the porch, where he grabbed icicles off the roof and tickled my neck with the cold end, then licked my frozen skin. and me, he lifted my woolen dress and drew down my tights, and yes, he fucked me, stanley, on our very own porch with you inside and some eager undergraduate stroking your shoulders as you held forth. but dylan thomas, stanley, dylan thomas—now that was a man worth holding against naked skin chilled and rubbery, dylan thomas—). i only wanted you to know i would not mind.
“don’t love her more than me,” i said, and you studied me, noting the brittleness in my tone, unsure whether i was about to lose my temper.
“impossible.”
twenty-seven years and if ever any man could kill me, it would have been you, it would have been you, stanley. did i ever tell you—how often did i tell you?—how much i hated you? you loved my prose, you loved our children, i do believe you even loved me, as much as it was possible. you are not you without me.
i asked you to kill me. i said, “don’t let me be humiliated.” i did not want to see the inside of an institution, the white walls of a hospital, to have my arms strapped tight, to take their pills instead of my own. “save me from—” but i did not know the word. it was you. save me from you, is what i meant to say.
“i love you too much,” you said, and then, because you were late for class, you went to work. i followed, stumbling after you on the ice-slicked path through the gates and through the woods to campus, and when i stood outside your office pounding on the door, pounding on the thick wooden door, the snow melting off my boots to puddle on the wooden floor, you kept the door locked, you kept whichever girl it was covered with the flesh of your warm belly, you did not stop what you were doing. not for me. you heard me: “stanley! stanley! stanley!”
but did you stop? stanley, you killed me years before i died. you would not let me go.
you could have let me in.
my mother told me not to trust you. i’ve always thought she boiled the sheets after we stayed with them, took the silver out and had it polished to a sheen, removed all traces of our lips from her glasses and our hair from her bathtub. not our kind, dear, but then i married you. fornicated with you. bore your children.
how i must have sickened her.
when i was alive, your women haunted me, although i never (rarely?) let you know. now that i am dead, now that i am watching you—your faithfulness is what destroys me. that foolish woman, what gift does she have, what wisdom, what more than tailoring and chopping onions and painting the lips red does she understand? she tinkles the piano keys and thinks herself my equal. and she is the woman who carries on for you, who raises our children, who keeps my own legacy aloft? and you bed her, and her alone?
no one can be wounded the way the dead can. i am the pebble in your italian loafers (also the reason you can own them). i am the shadow that curves over the swollen cracked plaster in barry’s ceiling, waking him in fear when the moon is bright. i am the acrid taste that flows from the kitchen taps after heavy rains. i am after you, i am part of you, i am everywhere, i love you.
my mother made so much of caste and class and i rejected it. remember, at that party in rochester, how she insisted we pretend you were not jewish? “they wouldn’t understand,” she said. and you agreed. you found it funny. She dressed my lumpen form in spinster gray though i was only twenty. she and my father danced instead of us; we sat in hardback chairs, watching. in her defense, i think she had no idea of what to do.
stanley. do not listen to that woman. you made a promise to me, and i am your wife. so many years, stanley, and what we gave each other. and you promised me. don’t you remember? whichever of us dies first will be cremated, and sit in a jar on the dresser in the bedroom, keeping an eye on things.
we were students; you read my story in the threshold. you said to your roommate, “this woman has something. i’m going to meet her,” you told him. “and if she’s anything like her writing, i’m going to marry her.”
wasn’t i? wasn’t i?
i’m here, stanley, as we agreed. in state, on the dresser, in the jar you selected so carefully and placed with such reverence. the girls laid out the lace scarf from my drawer, and you put the brass jar on it, and opened it, and all of you—even barry—gazed at me for a long, silent moment. i felt it then, all the love, how much i mattered, how very important i had been to you—the air itself pulsed with your loss—until Jannie mentioned that her boyfriend was downstairs and you suggested he come up and meet me. Jannie had a boyfriend, so quickly? me not even weeks dead, and someone new?
“daddy,” she groaned. “he’ll think i’m crazy.”
“you are,” barry said.
“too soon to let him know.” that was sally. and all four of you laughed, and turned, and it was barry who remembered to put the lid on the jar. without it, a stumble or a shove and i’d have been gone, scattered across the floor like crumbs from a bread knife.
laurence’s wife came by to see me—was it the next day? does it matter? time flows so smoothly; i should have seen this before—and she sat down on the bed, her baby weight a flaccid layer atop the springy surface of her skin. it would have stopped my breath, had i any. perhaps i, too, was beautiful once.
stanley licking the new wife, how he slobbers in his eagerness; he can’t taste enough of her. she must be delicious. he sleeps, his arms circling her. i’m here, stanley, where you put me. here remembering how you slept turned away, your knees bent into your chest—“i sweat too much, shirl; i can’t touch anyone while i sleep.”
you seem to sweat a lot with her.
i know what a story is; i spent my life telling them. but you have stolen from me the structure of the only tale i lived. i believed you, stanley; i believed in your endless infidelity, the honesty of knowing you would always lie. the boundlessness of your anger, your lust, your need for novelty: that happiness was beyond your reach. that no woman was ultimate to you.
“so beautiful, the way you smell, your skin, the softness of your hair,” and you sigh and hold her tighter. god, stanley, i’m sitting here on the dresser; don’t you see me? don’t you notice me? do you not even remember me as you take her, night after night, tell her how beautiful she is, how you had never dreamed of holding a woman who felt like her. looked like her. damn you, stanley, was i that ugly?
there is no solace for me here.
clymene, who lost her son because his foolish father let him ride a chariot far too near the sun, she knew. she wandered the earth looking for poor phaethon’s bones, and when, at last, she found them, knelt sobbing. her daughters (his sisters) at her side, mourning for their dear lost brother until fully four months had passed. and then, as if they hadn’t lost enough, before clymene’s eyes the girls complained of stiffness, their silky skin
turned to bark, leaves sprouted from the follicles where auburn locks once curled. “no, mother, please. please stop! those shards of bark are me, don’t pull at me, it hurts!”
and thus clymene lost all. phoebus the father still had his days to ride through, drawing the sun across the sky, but she, clymene, the patient housewife, was left with naught. what could she do but kiss the rough trunks of her daughters, stroke the leaves that now adorned them, list from one maiden to the other wondering if there were words she might have left unspoken, honest words, that might have allowed them to live?
dead, i have one thing you do not. i never age. i curse you to wrinkles and strands of gray hair swept across the dome of your balding head. i curse you to erections that do not rise. i curse you to greeting each morning with relief, another night survived, a heart still beating. i curse you and i hate you and i will not leave you.
because i love you.
• • •
I WOKE WITH A START, my heart pounding, to the sound of their footsteps on the rickety front porch. Cheerful voices, the slam of the door, Natalie’s cry, the concomitant tingling in my breasts. I was not rested, not at all. I was out of breath; I could feel the clamminess of my skin. Shirley’s voice downstairs, not dead, despite my dreams. When had I slipped, and into what world, where had my dreams taken me?
I’d dreamt she was dead. No. I’d written her dead. The devil’s work was what she said writing was, and now I knew it to be true. The house had come to me like a person while I slept, whispered whispered that everything was about to change. I knew enough about Freud to feel as guilty as if I’d killed her myself. I wiped a hand across dry, swollen lips. Downstairs, the baby’s sobs grew louder. Fred’s voice trying to calm her . . . afraid to bring her up to me . . . afraid of what I would do. Stanley’s voice was loud, almost in song. He was too cheerful.
I swung my feet to the floor, felt for my shoes with my toes.
They were still in the front hall in their coats, all very convivial, as if they’d stopped somewhere for drinks. Shirley took my entrance as her cue to head into the kitchen. The men eyed me warily. I took Natalie from Fred’s arms. “D’you need me?” he asked. “Should I come up with you?”
I told him I was fine. He looked away first, answering a question of Stanley’s, something ballad-related, in his usual calm voice.
The baby was cranky. I brought her up to the bedroom and tried to nurse, but she wouldn’t latch on, no matter how much I petted and coddled her. The truth was my milk was virtually gone. I carried her down the back stairs, to the kitchen, where luckily the milkman had delivered that morning. Shirley was in there, smiling to herself, humming as she rinsed frozen corn to defrost it; I flushed, remembering my dream, and she tilted her head quizzically.
“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.
Twenty-one
AFTER NATALIE 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 t
he 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.
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