Flora (9 page)

“A majordomo? Well, she’s kind of a combined butler and housekeeper. She organizes the household, sees what needs attending to or repaired and finds the proper person to do it, though I always kept the accounts myself and ordered the food and picked up people at the train station. Your grandfather never learned to drive an automobile, which I always thought was a shame; he looked so elegant driving a horse and buggy.

“He had struck up a friendship with one of the longer-staying Recoverers, Hyman Highsmith—we called him High—who had briefly studied medicine in Vienna before he was called home to Georgia to run his family’s button factory. He and Doctor Cam were roughly the same age and they were fascinated by this new field called ‘psychiatry.’ High ordered every book on the subject he could find, regardless of price, and whenever time permitted your grandfather would go away with him to lectures and seminars.

“When your father ran off with Willow Fanning, who had been with us a year and a half by then, your grandfather and
High had gone by train to New York to hear someone who had been hypnotized and cured by Freud. I was left with one other guest, a sweet recovering inebriate named Starling Peake, and the cook, and Beryl Jones. But by the time your grandfather and I brought Harry home from the hospital after his polio, Starling and the cook had fled because of the polio, and then your grandfather had his stroke and that was the end of Anstruther’s Lodge and the Recoverers. Only Beryl Jones stayed on, bless her. Let’s see, her Rosemary would have been five at the time. Poor little Rosemary. Poor all of us, really.”)

Flora was ironing barefooted. Her habit of going without shoes in the house I found somewhat obscene because her feet were childishly shapeless and uncared-for. I thought of Nonie’s visits to her chiropodist to have her long, narrow feet soaked and sanded and the corns on the knobbly joints shaved away and her almond-shaped toenails blunt-cut and buffed to a high pink sheen, though nobody was going to see them but us. I would wait in the reception room, leafing through the latest issues of ladies’ magazines with their mailing labels addressed to the chiropodist’s office. If there were other women waiting I surreptitiously examined their shoes and, on lucky occasions, their feet, some of which were beautiful and others grotesque. I would share my findings with Nonie as we drove home, and in turn she would report what the chiropodist had said about her feet. He once told her she had “haughty toenails,” which had made her laugh, but I could tell she was pleased.

Flora’s toenails were the opposite of haughty. They turned up like they were making too much effort to be friendly. This led me to wonder about my mother’s feet, which I had no memory of ever seeing. I was sure they had been different from Flora’s, just as her “bustline” had been different.

After the ironing board was put away and the motley assortment of Alabama clothes hung in the closet, it was time for Flora’s two predictable questions: “What do you think you could eat for supper?” (as though cajoling a languishing invalid with a picky appetite) and then, when that had been decided, her infuriating follow-up: “So, Helen, what are your plans for the day?”

“How can a person have plans when there’s nothing to do?”

“What did you do before?”

“Before
what
?”

“Well, before I was here.”

It was just amazing how she walked into these traps over and over again.

“Before you were here I was at Rachel Huff’s and they had a pool. And before that, I was still in school. And before
that …
” I paused before delivering my coup de grâce—“my grandmother was still here.”

Flora seemed about to bestow her gift of tears, but then actually said something new. “You’ve had such a strange childhood. I keep forgetting. You were with her so much. She was like your best friend. Tell me what kind of things the two of you did together.”

Now it was my turn to feel my eyes tear up. “We drove around, we went to movies, we went to her doctors, we shopped.”

“How about when you were here in the house?”

“We talked. Or she would go to her room and replenish herself and I would read or do homework. And then when she was rested we would talk some more.”

“You didn’t go out to play?”

“Around here there was nobody to play with.”

“Well, don’t children have little imaginary friends?”

“Did you have little imaginary friends?”

“It was different with me, with us, I mean, when your mother was still living at home. We had to help out. Lisbeth got the worst of it because she was older. I told you how she had to take care of our grandmother—”

“Yes, the bedpans. We don’t need to go into
that
again.”

“Well, I’m just saying. There wasn’t time for us to have imaginary friends. And even with the big difference in our ages, we had each other.”

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

“Want me to go with you?”

“No. I’m going out to look for an imaginary friend.”

“Well in that case,” Flora said, my sarcasm seeming to wash right over her, “I think I’ll sit on my porch and write some letters and work on my lesson plans. What a luxury, to have a porch right outside your bedroom.”

XI.

Nobody until Flora had called my childhood strange. Even Annie Rickets had never implied that. And what right had Flora of all people, dumped in her infancy by a runaway mother, growing up in a house partly owned by the maid, to pronounce on what was strange? Every time she opened her mouth about the Alabama life she had shared with my mother, out came something I wished I hadn’t heard. If, according to Flora, my mother always got tired of her favorite clothes and her favorite things, what would have happened to me if she had lived? That is, if I had been among her favorite things. Which would have been worse? Never to have been a favorite or to become an ex-favorite, cut in half and passed on to someone left behind?

As I crept down our treacherous driveway in my blue Keds, I tried not to feel terrible about hurting Mrs. Huff’s feelings. I also wished I could recall a time I had walked down this driveway with somebody other than Flora. Our two recent walks had somehow turned it into a Flora thing, displacing better walks, walks with Nonie to the mailbox, or possibly even further back, with my mother when I was two or three. Did my
mother ever hope for any mail? For years Flora’s letters had lurked in our mailbox, her young, indiscreet letters that Nonie had destroyed after reading. Before that, Flora had probably written to my mother, saying how she missed her, splashing adolescent tears on the stationery. It was sickening to think of the younger Flora’s fat envelopes arriving year after year, biding their time until she had outlived both Lisbeth and Nonie. Now she was in our house, awaiting envelopes addressed to herself in our box, hanging her clothes in our closets, the awful truncated dress being the worst: the upper half of my mother cut away because Flora’s “bustline” was way too big. Lisbeth, in her few unsmiling photos, was wand-thin and had no bust to speak of, but now I worried which way I would go. Would I soon be pooching out in front like Flora? So far, my chest was flat, but one of Annie Rickets’s boobies, as she called them, had risen under the nipple like an insect bite. “What if the other one never pops out?” she had said and laughed. “Do you reckon they’ll put me in the circus?”

Though I knew it was too early (Old One Thousand was last on the postman’s route), I checked the mailbox. A black ant inside sped off in a snit. Maybe later today there would be a letter from my father. (“Hope I wasn’t too fierce about the quarantine, Helen, but I want you to grow up to be a beautiful girl with nice straight legs …”)

Though
beautiful
was not a word my father used about people. He liked his compliments to have room for reservations. Flora had become a “looker,” he’d said, “but certainly not in your mother’s style.” Did he think I was becoming a looker, which, when he said it, carried a faint whiff of vulgarity, or was I developing in my mother’s style—which was what? Mrs. Huff, a commenter on everybody’s looks, was always telling Rachel if she
would hold herself like me she would convey “a certain something.” Conveying a certain something sounded more like the style my father would approve of, but it didn’t mean you were good-looking. Mrs. Huff had also said, “You take after your grandmother,” and Annie Rickets had said my grandmother looked like a mastiff driving a car. Brian Beale, during his asking-for-my-hand proclamations, regarded me with complacent possessiveness, but had never actually mentioned looks. (It was painful to think of him, especially since I still hadn’t written any letter.) “That certainly suits you,” Nonie would say in the store. “It’s very pretty on her,” the saleswoman would chime in. “It’s
smart
,” Nonie would emend. “It’s
elegant
.” When one front tooth came in sticking out a little, the dentist said, “If Helen can get in the habit of pressing her finger against that tooth when she’s reading or studying, we can most probably avoid braces.” A year later he pronounced that our tactic was working and that “my beauty” would not be compromised. But he said it in a jocular way.

How would my father describe me to someone? (“Yes, I have a daughter, Helen; she’s going on eleven. She’s—”) For instance, to his roommate, Harker, the master welder, at Oak Ridge. But the roommate was deaf and laughed at everything my father said.

I had no plan for my walk. Walking was not something I normally did. None of us walked, really. The main reason I was doing it was to escape from Flora and get some of myself back. I headed downhill because that was the way we always headed in the car. The other way, uphill, soon turned into unpaved road through forest being thinned but still undeveloped, a road mostly used by loggers, which eventually joined up with a county highway on top of the ridge.

But I was not getting myself back. To the contrary, I felt
myself slipping away. A veil seemed to rip and through it I could see Sunset Drive going on exactly the same without my needing to exist. This thought made me queasy.

What would happen if I didn’t return? Flora would slide and scuttle down the driveway, yipping at the ruts, until at last she would come upon me, standing like a statue on Sunset Drive. “There you are, Helen! I was beginning to get
worried
.” And then she would come closer and see that my eyes were blank, like a statue’s. There would still be my features, but my life spirit would have departed. I’d be like the little girl who turned into a mannequin.

Then I was so close to the rip in the veil that I was more on the other side of it than I was in myself. It was like being conscious of losing my mind at the exact moment I was losing it. I reeled and felt faint. I couldn’t even find words to think about what was happening to me.

Move over in the shade, darling. You still know what the shade is, don’t you? That’s right. Now sit down on the ground and let everything go.

There was a back-and-forth shushing of leaves, like a broom tenderly sweeping a floor. I was able to hear the tender sweeping without needing to know if I existed. Then a loud roar drowned out the gentle shush and there were footsteps and someone said, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Finn’s boots creaked as he squatted down in front of me. A strong, sweaty smell came from him. His narrowed green eyes scrutinized me with concern. Parked across the road was his three-wheeled motorcycle with its storage trunk.

“We didn’t order anything,” I said.

“You didn’t, no, but I was bringing you something anyway. What the bejesus were you doing?”

“I was just …” I started pushing myself up from the ground. His strong hands hauled me the rest of the way.

“When I came around that curve, you didn’t look up or move a muscle. You were like a catatonic.”

“A what?”

“Someone who’s been shocked so bad they sit staring at nothing all day. I’ve seen soldiers like that.”

“I was just thinking, is all.”

“And were they productive, your thoughts?”

He was smiling now, the skin around his eyes had little crinkles, and it struck me how sadly timed things could be. Here I had been planning for days what I would say to him when he came again and wishing Flora and I would run out of things so we’d have to order again. But just now I was trying to hold on to the voice that had spoken of shade and called me darling, and the scary thing that had preceded that, the horror of losing myself, which was already fading. And here he was, actually asking me about my thoughts, which nobody had bothered to do since Nonie. But as they were not thoughts I could tell anyone, I made up something.

“I was thinking about my grandfather’s path through the woods—it’s just down there. He had a shortcut made for his patients so they could walk to the village without having to go round and round on the road. Only we didn’t call them patients, we called them our Recoverers. And I was thinking whether we could repair it to surprise my father when he came home, but it’s all grown over and there’s this dangerous crater right at the beginning. We would probably need a tractor or something to fill it in.”

“Will we go and take a look at it?”

It was a strange way of putting it, like he was consulting the future.

“Don’t you have to deliver people’s groceries?”

“Like I said, I was bringing you something.”

“Me?”

“Well, the both of you. I found some okra.”

“Okra?”
I repeated stupidly.

“She was so disappointed when we didn’t have it the other day.”

“They grow it down in Alabama,” I explained, wanting to encourage him to keep our families separate. “That’s where Flora comes from.”

“Ah, Flora.” He sounded relieved to have been supplied with the name. “They must grow it up here, too, because they were selling the first crop at the farmers’ market this morning.”

“I could show you the shortcut,” I said. “It’s just down there, around the curve. But it’s awfully rough in there, so we’ll have to be real careful.”

“Well, you lead the way … em, how do you like to be called?”