Flora (15 page)

And then I would stop and wait (in midstep if I was walking around the house in daytime, in midbreath between the
laundered sheets marked MASTER in Nonie’s bed at night) in case there was an answer.

I had lost all desire to walk down to my grandfather’s shortcut and explore the crater by myself. That whole experience had been ruined by the subsequent nightmare of a dismembered Nonie lying at the bottom and the old-lady shoes.

Round and round the house, “remembering” it when it had flower beds and a view painted by a recovering inebriate who bolted at the first whiff of adversity (“We could have named it the Starling Peake room, but how can you name a room after someone who ran off without paying?”); when it still had a grassy bank I rolled down over and over again while a woman turned her head elsewhere in restlessness or disappointment: the culmination of my outdoor rounds being the pilgrimage to the garage to sit in Nonie’s Oldsmobile and lay my cheek on the steering wheel and wish her voice back.

Occasionally it came, though not like the first time, when she told me to cut down the weeds, and not like the day I was walking down Sunset Drive feeling strange and she told me to sit down in the shade and let everything go. If it came through now, it wasn’t immediate and visceral like those first two times. It was becoming more like my memory of her voice—or worse, my ventriloquism of it. Unlike Mrs. Jones, I couldn’t accept with unconditional certainty that my dead one was speaking to me.

XVI.

“How many did you have in fifth grade, Helen?”

“How many
what
did I have in fifth grade?”

“Oh, sorry. How many children were in your fifth-grade class?”

I had to stop and count. “Twenty.”

“That many,” she said.

“Why?”

“They say I’ll have ten. Maybe twelve. It’s a rural school. I just wish I knew what they were going to be like so I could prepare better!”

“There’ll be some smart ones and some dumb ones.”

“You were one of the smart ones. Mrs. Anstruther used to write that your report cards were pure joy.”

“And there’ll be some you like and others you wish you could hit.”

“Oh, I would never do that.”

“I said ‘wish.’”

“I just hope they’ll respect me. And like me, too, of course.”

“Well, they will if you …”

“If I what? Really, Helen, I’d be grateful for your advice. What about your teacher?”

“Which one?”

“The teacher you had this past year for fifth grade.”

“We had different teachers for different subjects.”

“Oh, I’m going to be teaching mine all their subjects. Which teachers were your favorites?”

“That depends on whether you mean like or respect.” I knew I was edging into my smarty-pants mode, but it worked so well on Flora it was hard to forfeit the advantage. “I didn’t always like the ones I respected and I didn’t necessarily respect the ones I liked.”

“That’s very well put, honey. Respect is probably the most important, though, isn’t it? I mean, if you had to choose between being liked and being respected.”

“Maybe you won’t have to choose between them,” I magnanimously predicted.

“Why did you respect the ones you respected?”

I had to stop and think. “They made you feel they knew things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“The things they were supposed to be teaching you, of course—” But she kept goggling at me for the next wisdom I was about to impart, so I added, off the cuff, “And things about life in general.”

“I sometimes feel I know nothing about life in general,” Flora said despondently. “You know what I am afraid of, Helen? I’m afraid those kids will see right into me and despise me.”

“Well, if there is nothing in there for them to see, they won’t have anything to despise.” My father would have smirked at this cleverness, but, alas, Flora was on the verge of tears and I
knew it was time to jettison the smarty mode and do something to shore up her confidence.

“You know what we should do?” I said. “We should play fifth grade. You’ll be yourself as the teacher and stand behind the desk and I’ll be your fifth-grade class.”

“But how can you be a whole class?”

“You wait and see.”

“What desk should we use? Your grandmother’s? But we’d have to turn it around so I could stand behind it. And then those pigeonholes would block my view of the class.”

“We’ll use my father’s room upstairs. He has the perfect flat desk and the room’s practically bare, so it will be easy to imagine what we need.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Helen, he might not like that.”

“He’s not even here, and we can’t mess it up because we’re not going to bring anything in.”

“I might want to have a few of my books on the desk,” said Flora, already into the spirit of things. As my guardian she seemed pleased and grateful that the two of us were getting along again, yet she was also like my contemporary who couldn’t wait to play this interesting new game. For Brian I had made up our Auditions game, and Annie and I together had created our Bad Habits game, which we never tired of, in which we took turns imitating unfortunate habits of people at school—no one, from the janitor to the principal, was exempt—and having the other guess who was being mocked.

Flora would have begun right away, but I suggested we should start next morning so it would be like the first day of real school. I told her to wear a dress and put on her high heels to practice entering the classroom. I was eager to begin, too, but I needed some time to prepare. Not only did I have to be all those children,
but also I was going to have to make up the action and direct it as we went along.

“How should we begin?” asked Flora next morning. After breakfast, she had dashed upstairs to put on her nice suit and her heels. “I left off my nylons, because I have to save them. I hope that’s all right.”

I was already seated on the bare floor in my father’s room, about ten feet out from the desk. “You’ll come in,” I said. “No, not yet! You have to get in the proper mood. You’re making your first entrance. This will be their first impression of you. Just remember there’s ten of me here, in all shapes and—”

“They said there might be twelve.”

“Well, for our purposes we’re going to have ten.”

Flora went out in the hall, and when I gave the signal she came in. Her walk was all right, but her face was bunched with nervousness. I decided to go easy, however, until she got into the part.

“Good morning,” she said brightly after scurrying behind my father’s desk. “My name is Miss Waring. I’ll write it up here on the board.” She turned away, and while she was writing in the air above her, I felt a strange pang. Miss Waring had also been my mother’s name, the name she must have written on her classroom’s board the first day she came to teach at my father’s school.

Flora whipped around and gave me a shy look of triumph (see how well I imagined the board!). “Now I’m going to go around the room and have each of you say
your
name …”

Flora’s torturous word arrangements could drive you crazy, but if I stopped her to say she sounded like she meant to
walk around the classroom
I might put a crimp in the confidence she was beginning to build.

But I couldn’t let it pass when she pointed at me and said, “Will you say your name for me, honey?”

“No, no,
not
‘honey.’ Just point to the person and nod in a cool, friendly way.”

“Oh, okay.”

“And they’re only going to have first names. It’s too complicated to think up family names, too.”

“Good idea.” Assuming a passable cool, friendly demeanor, she pointed and nodded.

“My name is Angela,” I piped up in a saccharine voice, sitting up straight and clasping my hands over my tummy like a goody-goody. A class always needed one of those.

“Angela,” she repeated, with a little too much gratitude, but I let it go. She pointed and nodded again to the next child.

I hunched over, emitting a dangerous growl.

“I didn’t quite get that,” she said.

I growled again, more angrily.

“I’m sorry, but I—”

“Don’t apologize! He hates school and he wants to hate you. You’ve got to be firm and show your authority.”

“You will have to speak up, young man,” Flora said firmly.

“Jock!” I bellowed.

“Jock,” she repeated calmly, not rising to the bait. “And you there, next?”

I undulated my shoulders suggestively. “I am Lulabelle.”

Flora tittered.

“What’s funny? You’re not supposed to laugh at people’s names.”

“I’m sorry, Helen, it’s just that you’re so good at this—”

“You have to stay in character,
Miss Waring
, and for Pete’s sake stop saying you’re sorry.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

Then we both started giggling. Flora became my age for a minute. It made me wonder, almost sadly, whether she had played enough as a child.

After the coquettish Lulabelle came dumb and timid “Milderd,” who couldn’t pronounce her own name.

“Is that
Mildred
?” suggested Miss Waring tactfully.

“Yes, ma’am. Milderd.”

“All right. And—” She nodded at the next student.

“Brick,” I said in a strong, masculine voice, already seeing his potential as a leader.

“Can someone be named Brick?” asked Flora, derailing the whole thing.

“Parents sometimes give their children family names for first names. His mother’s maiden name was Brickstone,” I improvised, “which is on his birth certificate, but everyone calls him Brick.”

Next was Suzanne, alert and confident, with an assertive ponytail, the kind of girl you hoped would pick you as her friend. Then came Timmy, who had a chronic snivel and cough and would maybe die during the school year. After that was Ebenezer, a sly young mongrel who took things that weren’t his, like Nonie’s stepbrother, Earl Quarles. Then there was Jason, who would be either a positive or a negative influence on the class, I hadn’t decided yet. And last of all was a definitely negative girl named after that homely doll in the book I couldn’t read. Hitty’s ill-natured smile would spook the teacher until Miss Waring started wishing she could slap her.

“YOU ARE SO
good at this,” Flora would say, shaking her head in awe. Not during our class practices anymore, because during
those I had pretty successfully weaned her from lapsing out of character. “I feel I know these children. I want to keep them interested. I love what we did with Alabama history, having them be the Indians and then the Spanish and French and so on. I lie awake at night and think about them, I think up ways to help them improve. For instance, what if I asked little Mildred to practice using the word ‘dread’ in different sentences? ‘I dread the dentist,’ and so on. She might find she could pronounce her own name after all.”

“Better not use that example, though. If she doesn’t dread the dentist, it might make her start.”

“Oh dear, you’re right. You know, maybe it’s just as well, Helen, that I won’t have someone like you in my real fifth-grade class.”

“Why is that?” I asked, though I could tell she was going to say something flattering.

“You’re just so quick and imaginative I couldn’t keep up with you, that’s why.”

“But how do you know there won’t be someone—I mean, it’s possible that you’ll have someone like Brick or Suzanne,” I deflected modestly.

“No,” said Flora. “
You
made up Brick and Suzanne, whereas this is a rural school and … oh, I don’t know. Your mother used to say Alabama’s education standards were woefully behind. That’s why she practically starved herself so she could finish college at Chapel Hill and get a North Carolina teaching certificate.”

“How do you know she starved herself?” This was the first I’d heard of it.

“Because we all had to help her out. I mean, not me, I was still a child, though I contributed little candies for the food packages. But everyone sent money orders, even Juliet. And, even
then, Lisbeth had to go to bed early so she could do without the dinner meal.”

“How did you know this?”

“Well, Lisbeth still wrote to us fairly often in those days, and she would describe what it was like to go to bed on an empty stomach. She said she would curl up in a ball so she felt fuller in the middle and then pull the blanket over her head to keep out the sounds of other students heading off to dinner. It made Daddy cry to think of her suffering like that for an education. Juliet said that was when he started going out and playing cards for bigger stakes.”

I, too, lie awake at night now, when I am older than Nonie ever became, and think about those children, the only fifth-grade class Flora ever got to teach. Brick and Suzanne and Lulabelle and Ebenezer and Jock and Jason and Hitty and Timmy and Angela and little “Milderd.” I round them up in whatever order they present themselves on that particular night and meditate on whatever pattern they want to form. It might be winners and losers. It might be who improved the most, or who disappointed the most, or who got together with whom years later and revealed something heartwarming or shocking. The combinations seem endless. Or maybe I should simply say I have not reached the end of them yet because I always fall asleep before the possibilities are exhausted.

It has puzzled me how those ten imaginary students could have played such a comfortable, even comforting, role in my night life for so many years. Their continued existence has always stayed innocently parallel to the remorse that I am still growing into. Sometimes I think those classroom hours with Flora stay safe and separate from the rest of that summer because they
were filled with hope and promise and mutual development and even closeness. We were making up a game that needed both of us. (Does anyone, of any age, make up such games anymore?) But right here,
right in here
somewhere, in what we were making together, is located the redemption, if there is to be any.

[undated]

Dear Flora,

Here is a quick reply before today turns into one of “those” days. Harry is under the weather and taking a day off and I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.