In Reach (15 page)

Good God, Teresa thought, but she said nothing.

“I found out because Billy—we called him Billy, then—walked me home one day.” Flora’s voice went on, in fits and starts. She spoke in such an undertone that Teresa had to lean forward to hear.

Billy had red hair and freckles. He could make people laugh. He got invited to parties. Flora never did. Flora had lank brown hair, and it wasn’t cut in what others called a style. When it got too long, her grandmother hacked it off with a pair of scissors, all in one hunk.

One day, Billy followed her after school. She forgot to lie about where she lived and just kept walking because they were talking about art. Billy had been places, Spain where Picasso painted, and France. He had seen van Goghs and Monets. Billy’s family had money. By then, they’d reached the corner of her block.

“I have to go, Billy.”

“Okay. Is this where you live?”

She pointed to the third house, the one with the broken fence, collapsed steps.

“See you tomorrow.” Then he grinned and took off in the opposite direction. She watched him go for a while, and then went home. Grandma grabbed her arm the minute she was inside the door.

“What do you think you’re doing, you little shit?”

“Ow. You’re hurting me.”

Grandma dragged her to the kitchen and plopped down in a chair, still holding onto Flora’s arm. She bent it in a way that hurt. Gouged her thumb into Flora’s tender flesh above the wrist.

“Ow. Ow.”

“Stop sniveling. I’ll hurt you more than that if you start whoring around with boys.”

“He walked me home. That’s all.”

“You’re just like your mother.”

“Leave my mother alone.” Flora could make her voice hard against Grandma if she needed to. She was almost as tall.

Grandma levered her arm until Flora sat in the chair next to her. Grandma leaned into Flora’s face, big yellow teeth and sour breath. Flora thought of the witch in Hansel and Gretel, but immediately felt guilty because her grandmother had sacrificed her youth for her and her mother.

“Your mother got pregnant when she was seventeen.”

“I know that.”

“She followed your uncle Cyrus to the roller skating rink. Somebody was bothering her, so she left. She said Cyrus’s friend, Joe-Joe, raped her in his own backyard.”

“Mom was raped?”

“Oh, there was a trial and everything. The defense attorney said it was Aletha’s fault. She sashayed around those boys, wiggling her hips. She got pregnant, and then she had you.”

“My dad was a rapist?”

“You just watch yourself, young lady, or the same thing could happen to you. Boys only want in your pants.”

Flora squirmed. Grandma still held her arm like a vise. “Not Billy. He talks about art.”

“Hah! He doesn’t give a flying fart about art. And if you don’t get that, I’ll have to lock you in the house for the next ten years.”

Grandma’s eyes were focused and sharp, beady, penetrating through Flora’s skin.

Flora looked down. “Can I go now?”

“No more Billy.”

Flora nodded.

Flora stopped talking. Her face had lengthened, the corners of her mouth drooped. Teresa stood, put her hand on Flora’s shoulder. Then Teresa gathered up all the cups and saucers, the plate of cookies, and carried them to the kitchen. She stood for a while looking out the window above the sink. Petals had fallen off a peony bush, cushioning the ground pink. A solitary fly buzzed between the window and the screen.

When Teresa had composed herself, she went back to the dining room. Flora sat, cradling her forehead in her hands.

“I’m sorry. If it’s too much . . .” Teresa could see that Flora’s whole life had been too much. “I’ll let myself out.”

Teresa stopped to breathe on Flora’s front stoop. Though the days were long in summer, she was surprised to find the sun still shining.

At home, tensions ran high. Otto didn’t so much move through his days as slam through them. Doors, plates on the counter, shoes on the porch, books on the floor. Wherever he could make a statement. At night, propped against the headboard in their room, Teresa and Warren whispered about their son.

“He still hasn’t talked to Coach.” Even in these low tones, Warren’s voice rang with accusation.

“How do you know?”

“Cuz I asked Gary. I ran into him in Jack & Jill.”

“Maybe we should let up on the football.”

“This whole town revolves around football. It’s like snubbing his nose, if he doesn’t go out.”

Teresa chewed her lip. “The Polanski boy doesn’t go out.”

Warren rolled his eyes.

“He could get hurt.”

“Hell. He won’t play that much.”

Then Warren reached around Teresa to switch off the bedside lamp, brushing her nipples and letting his lips rest against her neck. She had to admit; their sex life had improved. Nothing bonds like a common enemy.

Two weeks went by before Teresa found an opportunity to get back to Flora’s. There was no rush since Flora’s auction date was set for mid-September. Teresa had her hands full with the Tremain auction. And Otto. She had to ride herd on him to make sure he kept to the rules they’d imposed on him. To their surprise, Otto took a job. He hired on at Hardee’s. He made a friend, some new kid named Quentin Strickland. What kind of person is named Quentin, Warren had said, but Teresa assured Warren that Quentin seemed normal. He wore baggy jeans and T-shirts. He slouched, unkempt and surly. Around her, he was largely inarticulate. A regular guy. They should be grateful.

Now, she and Flora were seated once again at the dining room table. Flora wouldn’t budge on keeping her art activities secret. Too bad, but Teresa had to admit people weren’t likely to care about an artist they’d never heard of, even if she did have a painting hanging in the governor’s mansion in Lincoln, which Teresa found out by Googling Flora’s name. She’d learned that Flora had showings in Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York. She’d disappeared from the art scene abruptly, and no one knew why.

“So,” Teresa said, once the tea had been poured. “How did you get started painting?”

Flora scooted forward in her chair. Teresa leaned in to hear her. Their foreheads nearly met across the lace tablecloth. This time, Flora seemed eager to resume her story.

By the time her grandmother told her about the rape, Flora’s mother was already institutionalized. Her mother had depres
sion. Her mother heard voices. Her mother had tried to strangle her grandmother, and Flora had to hit her mother with a croquet mallet to get her to stop. After that, Grandma had her mother committed. Grandma said that was the best way; her mother could get the care she needed.

Flora took a series of three buses across town to visit her mother. She sat with her in a stale room, no curtains on the windows, tile floor. The walls bilious green. Her mother rocked on the edge of the bed. Her hair hung in dirty strings, the ends frayed where she chewed on it. She hadn’t had a recent bath. Flora sat on a hard-backed chair, not too close.

“Grandma made spaghetti last night.”

No response.

“I got my report card.”

Flora knew that report cards were a big deal in some kids’ households. She knew that a report card like hers (3 C’s, 2 D’s, 1 F, the F in math) would be a very big deal to kids whose parents were part of the
PTA
, the same ones who showed up for parent teacher conferences. She missed a lot of school. Often, she didn’t feel well. Plus, she was needed to go to the store for milk and eggs, to pick up her grandmother’s medicinal whiskey in the brown paper bag from Skip Jaffrey, take the rent to Herm Griffith, their landlord.

Flora liked riding her bike to Herm’s because it was down a lane on the outskirts of Lincoln, and she passed a field with three horses. If she pedaled fast enough, so her grandmother wouldn’t think she’d gone astray or gotten herself into what Grandma called a compromising situation, in which case she might be sent to her room or made to kneel on rice on the kitchen floor until her knees bled, she could take a few minutes to study the horses. A black one with a white blaze of lightning on its forehead, a reddish-brown one with four white stockings and a swayed back, and the third, her favorite, gray and dappled with stars.

She held the way they looked in her head all the way home—and then, after the supper dishes were washed, while Grandma dozed over an open book in her chair, Flora sat at a tiny desk in her room under the eaves and drew horses. She loved the way their manes flowed under her pencil. She practiced until she could make the three of them gallop across the page, graze under a tree, stand together like old friends gossiping. She observed their distinct personalities—the bold black, the timid red, and the affectionate gray—and found ways to bind those attitudes to the paper.

At school, though she didn’t do well in math (having missed out on fractions), she could draw. “When you get to junior high, you can take an art class,” Mrs. Jordan said.

Sitting with her mother in the institutional place for sick people, Flora said, “Mrs. Jordan said I could take art in junior high.”

No response.

“She says I’ll love it. ‘When you get to junior high, Flora, you can take art.’ That’s what she says.”

Flora got quiet and real still after telling this. Teresa waited in the silence. She could hear Flora’s labored breathing. Shadows from the afternoon sun danced against the wall. Teresa was afraid Flora would pass out or have some kind of attack. After a while, Teresa said, “You’ve had a hard life.”

“Some of it,” Flora said. “Some of it, I got real lucky.”

“I’d like to hear about that lucky part.” They both chuckled over that.

Otto took to going out on Friday nights with Quentin. Teresa and Warren stayed up late, worried and waiting. They pictured their son lying at the bottom of a ditch or passed out in the backseat of Quentin’s car. They’d never met Quentin’s parents. The Stricklands attended the Presbyterian Church. Quentin’s dad was a manager at the ethanol plant. His mother had been a yoga instructor, but
there wasn’t much call for yoga in Reach. She was skinny and fit, just what you’d expect.

Otto had an 11:00 p.m. curfew, but he invariably walked in ten or fifteen minutes late. This became the territory of their arguments. They knew Otto did it on purpose, just to rankle them, and it did rankle them because it was calculated. They couldn’t let it go, but it didn’t seem serious enough to ground him.

He stopped banging around the house. He grew secretive and quiet. He slinked in and out of rooms, as if they weren’t present. Even when they spoke to him, he reacted as if he hadn’t heard or as if they were calling to him from some distant place he’d forgotten. He spoke in grunts. He wore slouchy clothes, ill-fitting jeans that impaired his natural grace. His walk became a stutter, his voice guttural. He slept a lot, when he wasn’t working. The slack skin under his eyes looked bruised. His face took on an unnatural pallor.

One morning in late July, Teresa and Warren were sipping coffee over a Saturday morning breakfast. They kept their voices low, not wanting to wake Otto. He’d been late, again. There had been shouting, some shoving. If asked, they would have said Otto needed his rest, but the truth was that neither of them had the energy to confront their son. Teresa had planned to make waffles, but instead they were eating toast with peanut butter. Warren’s jaw hung slack. He was growing older before her eyes. Teresa knew her hair looked ratted and wild.

“Don’t worry about it,” Warren said. “I was exactly the same way at his age.”

“You were?” Teresa found this hard to believe. At fourteen, Warren was sitting beside his daddy in the pickup, learning how to do the auctioneer’s prattle by selling off telephone poles on the side of the road.

“Sure. It’s normal for a boy to sow some wild oats.”

Teresa stood. She moved over to pour more coffee.

“Normal,” she said. Then, with more force, “Remember how we worried when he kept bringing home those dead birds, conducting funerals in the backyard?”

“Yeah. We damn near drove ourselves crazy over that one.”

“He got over it.”

“Right.” Warren knew his lines. “Then, when he told his teachers he was a descendant of Black Elk. Remember that?”

She laughed. Actually laughed. “Oh, yeah. We thought we had a compulsive liar on our hands.”

“How about that imaginary friend?”

“Sir Edwin. That was during his knights and dragons stage.”

Warren took her hand. “He’s fine.”

“The important thing is . . .”

“. . . He knows we love him.”

By now, she was seated on Warren’s lap. She gazed tenderly at his dear face. He ran his hands down her shoulders and arms, but she was too tired to respond. Instead, she rose and tightened the belt on her robe.

“You’re right,” she said. “We just have to get through this stage.”

The next few weeks Teresa had a hard time keeping Flora’s story from infiltrating her mind at inopportune moments. For instance, she thought about Flora learning of her mother’s rape after she and Warren made love. Snatches of Flora teased her brain when she thought about Otto. She missed a whole sermon one Sunday thinking about her last teatime with Flora. Flora had the tea and cookies on the table when she arrived. They scarcely talked about the auction at all before Flora launched into the lucky part of her story.

The first day of junior high, Flora could hardly sit still, so great was her anticipation for art class. First period after lunch, she flew into the art room. Her stomach churned, and she could barely breathe. Her hands were clammy. The teacher—Mr. Faraday—had blond hair and long, elegant fingers. He wore horn-rimmed
glasses that he pushed up on his nose with his forefinger. This was his first school.

Mr. Faraday handed out scissors, paste, and construction paper. Then he drew a pattern on the blackboard of a tulip bouquet in a squat vase. “This is what we’re going to make today.” He said some more things about color and design, but Flora didn’t hear him. Cut and paste? Like kindergartners? She burst into tears.

Mr. Faraday got the class going before he stood over her desk. “What’s the matter with you?” He sounded like a toy wound too tight.