Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.
The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.
Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.
She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.
“Why?” she demanded.
The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.
“Because you’re pretty….”
He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.
“Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli – Giacometti.”
“You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”
“No.”
Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.
Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.
Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.
One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.
On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.
“Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”
“He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”
Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.
She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could not make contact with her eyes. The movement made the hair impersonal. It didn’t belong to Shell. The blanket was moving. With the other hand her mother was doing something beneath it. The same rhythm.
There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.
The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.
“Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty….”
Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very ancient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.
When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.
It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.
Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.
Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection.
