Flora (11 page)

“Well, Mrs. Jones comes to the house every week and Father McFall came to the house and he goes to the hospital to visit a polio patient, and Finn’s already
been
in the house when he carried our groceries in.”

“Then maybe we should ask him.”

“Will you ask him over the phone or wait until he comes with more groceries?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. The phone might be the easiest. When I’m calling in our next order I could ask him.”

“But someone else might be taking orders when you call in.”

“Well, if it’s him, I’ll ask. Or would you rather do the asking?”

“No, no, no!”

“But what should I cook?”

“Everything you cook is good.”

“Oh, Helen, thank you for that. We’re not having too bad a summer, are we?”

“Not too bad.” I felt I should agree.

“I could do Juliet’s rationed pork dish. It always turns out well.”

Alabama again! But at least it was something to look forward to.

THIS IS WHAT
I dreamed after Finn brought me home on his motorcycle. I can remember every detail of it still. It is one of those dreams you can spend a whole life deciphering.

I was going down my grandfather’s ruined shortcut, leading the way to show someone the crater. The person behind me was someone my age. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I was being very bossy and superior and giving directions. “Now I know it looks scary from above, but it’s easy if you’re careful.” I showed how to grab hold of the sassafras tree. (“You can tell it’s a sassafras because it makes this shushing sound that no other tree makes. Then once you have a good hold of it you put one foot down on this big old root. Like this, watch me.”)

Then without turning around I knew who was behind me and it was the most wonderful thing. It was Nonie as a girl my age, when she was still Honora Drake who lived out on the farm, only she was visiting me for the day. In the dream I knew the old Nonie was dead, but this was even better. Mrs. Jones had been right when she happily proclaimed, “That’s the thing about the dead. They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

I had been sent this new Nonie exactly my age to play with
and she was going to be better than any of the others, smarter and more fun than Rachel in her wildest dreams, sharper-tongued than Annie, more adoring of me than Brian. I felt an ecstasy in body and heart. I felt I had been set free to do anything I wanted. Without turning back to look at her, I called triumphantly: “Just wait, there’s a whole house down there, with little side rooms and living flowers growing out of the floor. So set your first foot firmly on the root, the way I’m doing, and then slowly bring your other foot down, and—”

But there was a shriek like a big bird and something dark flew over my head and landed in a sickening thump below me. Only it wasn’t a bird, it was an old woman all in black and she wasn’t in one piece. Parts of her lay flung all over the floor of the crater. There was one leg turned sideways in a thick stocking and its black old-lady shoe. I can still see that shoe, its black lace in the lace holes, the perforated design on its vamp, its clumsy raised heel. And then Nonie was calling to me from somewhere among those flung-down parts: “Quickly, darling, go in my purse.”

“We didn’t bring a purse!” I knew she meant her little vial of pills, but how could we have brought a purse when the girl behind me had been too young to carry a purse yet? Her voice was fading now, still calling for the purse, leaving me to wake with the knowledge that I had utterly failed to save the person who loved me most.

Not a dream I could tell Mrs. Jones. I had told her simply that I had waked up one night feeling sad, and then about the hat. The sad part came after I had waked up in Nonie’s bed. It had felt as though my own body had been flung down dismembered in the crater. But Nonie’s bed did the job I could not accomplish for her in the dream, it put me back together. I felt the
life flowing from the center of me into all my extremities, and was soon brave enough to turn on the lamp.

Nonie’s purse was still in its place on the dresser—Mrs. Jones understood it needed to stay there—and I went over to it and took out the vial and shook out one tiny pill and swallowed it. Maybe I would die. I was still enough under the influence of the dream to feel this would be a fitting end for me. I ran back to the bed and lay down, but nothing happened. So I got up again and headed to Nonie’s closet. My own clothes hung inside now, and my shoes were on the floor. Hers were still there in their boxes. She was particular about her shoes and wouldn’t have been caught dead in those old-woman shoes from the dream. She preferred I. Miller pumps, size 8AA, in black or gray, with a three-inch tapered heel and a V-shaped vamp to accommodate her high instep. Her bedroom slippers were always narrow suede Daniel Greens. I checked a few boxes to make sure some evil nighttime thing hadn’t substituted the old-woman shoes.

Then I took down the shiny new hatbox with the horse-drawn carriages going round and round it. At first I planned just to stroke the hat, but when I carried the box over to the bed and lifted the hat out of its tissues and saw her hatpin in it I felt compelled to sit down in front of the three-way mirror and try it on myself. Experimenting with different angles I found that if I slouched down in a certain way I could visualize how she might have looked if I had been standing behind her in the store.

XIII.

I had to flee the kitchen in embarrassment when Flora was inviting Finn to dinner after placing our order. She was going on too long, making it sound like we never had people to dinner—which we never did, but why did she have to tell things like that? I couldn’t stand it anymore when she started discussing the menu with him, making sure he liked pork and of course bringing in the marvelous Juliet, who had discovered how to bathe wartime rations in a wonderful sauce.

I shut myself in my old room. Its window was brighter for daytime reading, and also I felt I was making amends to it for my abrupt desertion. I lay on top of my old silk baby quilt Brian and I had used for reading, but didn’t open the book yet. Mrs. Jones had brought it from the library when she returned the one I hadn’t finished. This one,
Hitty
, didn’t look too promising—it was about a doll—but Mrs. Jones had chosen it herself, after consulting with the librarian, and I knew I would have to at least skim enough that I could “report” on it so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Finn was coming to dinner on Sunday. Flora had invited him for six o’clock. I had heard that much before she started in
on how nice for us some company would be and launched into Juliet and the wartime pork. I was reminded afresh that my biggest fear concerning Flora was how her lack of reserve would reflect on our family. How, people would ask, could someone as picky as Principal Anstruther go off and leave his daughter, who had just lost her irreproachable grandmother, with a young woman who didn’t know any better than to read letters from the dead woman to the funeral guests? How exactly was this Flora related to the Anstruther family? Well, she was first cousin to Helen’s mother: the two girls grew up together in Alabama. Oh, her
mother
, I see.”

So far, only Lorena Huff had pronounced on Flora as “that emotional girl” who had read the letters, and Father McFall probably had his own reservations after quizzing her during the drive home from church. If Flora would only show more reserve, I could cover for her, but she would babble the most embarrassing things when least expected. It was bad enough when we were alone, but who knew what she might say to Finn?

At least she had been offered a job and had accepted. What if all three letters had said no? Would my father have felt sorry for her and found it a convenience for himself to keep her on? After having given it some careful thought, I no longer dreaded he might marry her. He was too critical, she wasn’t his type, he would always be rolling his eyes and leaving the table and carrying fresh drinks up to his room. The idea of them sharing a room was preposterous. But my father was perfectly capable of keeping her with us to serve his needs. She could cook. (When I finally came around to admitting that Flora cooked better than Nonie, it made me think less of cooking.) My father would teach her to drive Nonie’s car and it would be Flora who picked me up
from school. Lorena Huff would be right, after all: I would have a live-in governess.

But now it wasn’t going to happen because Flora had a job and she had written to accept and they were going to send her the schoolbooks and schedules so she could start planning. She would be gone from Old One Thousand the last week in August and my father would be back with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches and his cocktails, complaining about his job kowtowing to small-town faculty egos and waiting to be replaced by some younger man with connections.

And why should I care about what Finn thought of Flora? From the beginning he had been “my” person, someone I had connected to before Flora flew out of the house. I looked ahead to more conversations when he would ask me about my thoughts and to future adventures when he would teach me more things and praise me for my bravery. Yet I was sophisticated enough already to perceive that he was something of an outcast type himself. He had admitted to mental problems (I was eager to hear more about those), and if you looked at him critically, as someone like my father would certainly do, he was a little ridiculous, with his sharp, pointy features and orange spikes of hair and skinny body, dancing a jig in a hole in the woods. And on the motorcycle, when I had held him around his waist and laid my face against his damp back, his rank male smell made me screw up my nostrils.

My father liked to trap people in epithets. Brian was Little Lord Fauntleroy and Annie was Lady Uncouth. Nonie’s stepbrother, in tears at the funeral home because he couldn’t “see Honora,” was the Old Mongrel. What would my father’s epithet for Finn be?

Nonie preferred an indirect approach to judgment. “Is she
the kind of person we’d like to invite to dinner?” she had asked my father on the evening he brought home the girls’ hygiene booklet Miss Waring said she could not teach. What would Nonie have said about Finn? I couldn’t hear her initiating a dinner invitation, but suppose Flora had said to her as Flora had said to me, “Maybe we should ask him to dinner, or would that be wrong?” Nonie would have responded exactly as I had done (this realization cheered me): she would have first asked, “Why would it be wrong?” This response, I now understood, would have given her more time to think about the rest of her reply. And what would that have been? Here I drew a blank, though in time I would become so proficient at channeling Nonie’s responses that they would become inseparable from mine. Or rather, from what mine would have been if I hadn’t had Nonie inside ready to speak for me before I knew what I wanted to say.

But still, I was impatient to see Finn on Sunday. If only I could be sure Flora would not ruin everything with her eagerness and disregard for what should be left unsaid.

In the new library book, a doll was writing a memoir of her first hundred years. I had to remind myself that Mrs. Jones’s Rosemary had still been in the doll-playing stage when she died of diphtheria. The librarian had told Mrs. Jones that all the books in the series I liked were checked out and said this doll one was suitable for readers through the age of twelve. If all the books in my series about girls and houses with mysteries were checked out, the fickle librarian must have been recommending them to other people besides me.

I leafed through the illustrations again, the first one of the doll (Hitty) taking up a quill pen to begin her memoir. Hitty had a square face, a thick neck, goggle eyes, and an ill-natured smile. I had been able to deduce from the chapter titles (“In
Which I Travel,” “In Which I Am Lost in India”) that this was one of those books grown-ups dote on because it sneak-feeds young minds with plenty of history and geography.

I heard the phone ring, but it couldn’t be my father because he called in the evening. Maybe it was Finn calling back to say he couldn’t come on Sunday. I imagined him hanging up the phone at the store and thinking,
I can never get through a dinner with that excitable woman who sounds desperate to have company. If it was just Helen and me it would be different
.

Flora was knocking at my door (at least someone had taught her to knock). “Helen, it’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s your friend Annie. Why don’t you talk to her on the upstairs phone? I’ve got things to do in the kitchen and you’ll have your privacy.”

“She doesn’t sound so bad,” said Annie as soon as Flora had hung up downstairs.

“Oh, Annie.” My sigh spoke volumes.

“Just thought I should let you know I’m leaving town this afternoon.”

“This afternoon!”

“They’re cutting the phone off in a few minutes, and I didn’t want you to call me up and hear ‘That number has been disconnected.’ Not that you
have
called me up a single time.”

“I didn’t realize you were leaving so soon!”

“I guess time runs differently up there at Shangri-la. I said three weeks, and it’ll be three weeks on Monday.” There was a frosty tone beneath her usual teasing.

“Oh, Annie, things have been so— Oh, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything, Helen. Actually, I called to say a few things to you.”

“What?”

“Remember our lemon squeezes? You would tell me what I did that really bothered you and then it would be my turn to tell you. One time you told me I chewed with my mouth open.”

“We haven’t done a lemon squeeze since third grade.”

“No, but I remembered it and I make sure nobody sees the inside of my mouth anymore. In fact, I was having a moment of gratitude toward you just now because when I’m making my new friends in the flatlands I’ll know not to do it. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but—?”

“So I’ve decided to do you a favor and tell you a few lemon-truths before I ride out of your life forever.”