Shirley Read Online Free PDF Page B

over the years, no one ever talked about it. A woman freely admitting, without shame, that she was working for money! Particularly an artist, the kind of woman with the right to behave with any eccentricity. That was the brilliant Shirley I’d seen the night before; now her admission of financialobligation—with its implicit confession about financial need—made her only more fascinating.
    â€œYou don’t love it?” I blurted. “The writing?”
    She pulled out a kitchen chair, dropped her heavy frame into it, stubbed her cigarette atop the mound of butts in the ashtray. “You come right to it, don’t you?” She was amused, not angry, or so I hoped. On the shelves behind her, dishes were piled willy-nilly, bowls stacked with plates of all sizes, teacups and coffee mugs teetering against one another. A cuckoo clock ticked hollowly, water gurgled in cranky pipes, birds called to one another in the yard. A fly buzzed against the window screen but didn’t find a way in, despite the many gaps in the webbing. I waited without speaking for Shirley to continue.
    â€œSit,” she said, and I did, taking the chair opposite hers, my back to the kitchen door.
    I have never known any other person, not in all my life, as unpredictable about silence and sound as Shirley Jackson. That winter of our friendship, there were more times like this one, when we sat in placental silence, than there were hours when she skittered out stories the way one might have expected. This very first morning, it was as if we were trying to get to know each other without speech or movement, merely measuring each other against the cadences of our breathing as the morning sun drifted, slowly, down the kitchen hallway and streamed along the dark, scuffed wooden floors.
    After the longest time, when I could trace some vital pulsing in her that matched both my own and that of the life evolving inside me, I abruptly began to feel her as invasive, to feel her mind seeping into mine and wandering through the network of my thoughts. Asif she, and the baby already growing, were forces larger and more powerful than what I was myself. And then I could no longer process clearly, could not articulate a whole and complete idea any longer. I wanted to say something, to break the silence, but my throat went tight; my hands, against the cool of the kitchen table, were sweaty. I forced my eyes to blink, raised them to gaze at her; her own eyes were closed and she was humming softly, her fingers moving against the edge of the table as if sorting out the sounds on alien piano keys.
    I opened my mouth and closed it. I had never felt so hollow or so grounded; I had never felt so
seen
. Not by anyone, not even Fred.
    In one of Shirley’s stories, one I’ve read only recently, a young girl travels with her brother and his wife to a solitary hotel on an island made of rock. She steps out onto the rock of the island ahead of the others, and soon discovers that, in her eagerness to be first, she has marked herself the island’s next spirit prisoner. She will not be able to leave, ever, and all because of that first excited dance off the boat and onto land. I wonder, sometimes, about such accidents, the turns of fate that determine so much of our lives. I am not a particularly smart woman, nor even a canny one, and yet I have been able to learn from experience. I admit, honestly, that when I thought I loved Fred, back in the beginning, I only loved the dream of love. I wanted a home, to be cared for, to be able to believe in another who would not betray me, who would never leave me. Fred, dear as he has been, has betrayed me terribly, even though he has never left me behind. Stepping onto the island of marriage was a way forward; I didn’t know it was an option that would limit what came later. And Fred, bless and curse him, must have beensimilarly cavalier: Or else why me? And yet our rhythms seemed to match.
    Even at our worst,