Free Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell Page A

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 warmedwax with her fingers, working intently, as if there were no higher calling.
    â€œYou stopped early,” I said.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œRosie,” Shirley said. “We all have pasts that shame us.”
    I held my breath.
    â€œWe all do.”
    I shook my head, re-dipped the candlestick into the bowl of steaming water.
    â€œFire 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.”
    â€œWe 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?”
    â€œYes,” 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.
    â€œYou can tell me anything,” Shirley said, picking at the wax with her misshapen fingers.
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œI 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 thesink. 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,