Free Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell Page B

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.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œWill your parents visit? Do they ever come to stay?” I asked deliberately.
    â€œWhy, 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-drenched 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.
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    S TANLEY 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 singsome 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