Shirley

by Susan Scarf Merrell

It mattered, oh, it mattered more than anything, to believe that if there had to be women in danger, there would be those who found them.

But can anyone who makes up fictions hour after hour and year after year be wedded to the truth?

You think you know where you are, you are sure of what you’ve lived through, and yet, at the same time, the whole thing seems a dream.

It was the smile of the mother-to-be who had never been mothered, the smile of the brilliant person in a woman’s body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell. I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her.

“Isn’t that the better way to be?” His mouth hung open; he’d never before deemed me worthy of notice. But I know I’m right: that was Jackson’s gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love.

I had the idea the house had created itself rather than been masterminded by its owners, as if it would produce a bassinet for me when one was needed, or shorten its staircases if someone was tired.

That friendships, even the best of them, don’t always survive. Oh, and this: that so much of what happens can’t ever be proved—the best we can do is write our paltry tales.

“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?”

But it is also the story of a first love so unforgettable that a woman is willing to risk losing all in order to regain it.

Anyone whose parents have failed them loves Roethke more than any other poet,

That it’s easier to forget than to endure the pain of remembering.”

I would take the fatness, and the cheating husband, and the messy house and the cats and the depression and all the rest. I really would. If I could know the world the way she did, render it amusing and sardonic and ever so smart, well, then, anything would be worth it. Any suffering, any past, any difficulty.

“It takes more than wanting,” she said cruelly. “You don’t have the language. You don’t want to share. You hoard your past. You clean it up. Withhold the details that make you what you don’t want to be.” “That’s mean.” “You lack courage, Rose. You aren’t brave.”

If I ever wrote anything, I’d wait until it was perfect before I showed it to Shirley. I wouldn’t waste her time.

“I got my figure back quickly, just like you,” she said. “Twins, and I was back in my own clothes before the month was out.” We were related by blood now. She was trying to like me, to make the best of things.

thou shalt not presume to know what history has not yet determined. Only time can tell,”

Do I display my member to an idiot? Then why the product of my brain, the most precious essence I produce?”

Nobody heard him, the dead man, and still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning. “Too cold always,” I whispered,

There is no warning, and so you won’t have one, either.

This is the worst moment that has ever been.