Flora (26 page)

Each new time Finn spun me around while continuing to talk to Flora above the music, a certain object began to annoy me. I became vexed, then indignant, then enraged, by the eight-ounce glass of milk set down so emphatically among the cozy coffee things.

The music stopped for a commercial break. “You are going to be a fine dancer,” Finn said, releasing me. “Helen doesn’t know her own powers,” he remarked to Flora.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Flora, now busily pouring coffee into the two cups. “I was saying to her only the other day ‘I feel I should pay your father tuition for all the things I’ve learned from you this summer.’”

“It wasn’t the other day, it was this morning,” I corrected. “And you didn’t say you learned them from me, you just said
learned
.” It suddenly occurred to me that both of them were patronizing me, making me feel important so they could say things to each other over my head.

“You’re right, honey, it was this morning,” Flora instantly capitulated. “My, what a full day it’s been. So many things happening in one day.” She tucked her twilight blue skirt closer to her body, indicating Finn should sit next to her. “Come have your coffee while it’s hot.”

“Did anyone hear me say I wanted milk?” I asked, still standing in the middle of the carpet where Finn had left me.

“Well, no, but you always have a glass at”—she swerved wildly, just avoiding the bedtime word—“the end of the day.”

“Yes, but tonight I want to celebrate my father.” I walked over to the sideboard, and opened the center cabinet, which smelled musty from staying closed all summer. Out came the cognac bottle and the fluted crystal aperitif glass Nonie always used for her nightcaps. I sloshed the glass full, raised it to the orange sky outside the western window, and before Flora could react I drank it down.

“Oh, honey, no—” she said with an intake of a breath, like someone begging a person not to jump off a high building. Except that I had already jumped.

I poured a second glass and raised it to the pair on the sofa. “I’d like to drink to my father for helping make the bomb,” I said.

Finn was the first to collect himself. “Hear, hear,” he said, raising his coffee cup before he’d even put in the cream. “To Helen’s father.”

“To Helen’s father,” Flora barely whispered, raising her cup.

We all three drank. I would have liked to drain the second glass, but my nose and chest were still on fire from the first. I managed a respectable gulp, and then said, in a somewhat shaky voice, “I think I’ll sip the rest of my nightcap in my room.”

“Don’t you think that’s enough, honey?” Flora half-rose to take the glass away from me, but I cut her short.

“Good night, Finn. Thank you very much for the pencils and the art lesson. No, please, don’t get up. Good night, Flora. Thank you for dinner and all the things you did for me today.”

“Would you like for us to come and tell you good night after a while?” Flora asked, sounding defeated.

“No, thank you. I’m really very tired.”

HERE I WAS
again on the upholstered bench that fitted into the alcove of Nonie’s dressing table. Hardly past infancy, I had begun clambering up this bench and flailing my little legs until I achieved a sitting position in front of the three-way mirror. In the long mirror was myself as a whole child, from curly top to socks and shoes. The mirrors on either side were shorter because they only started above the drawers where Nonie kept her grooming items. They gave you what was called your profile. You could never see your own profile except in mirrors like these. People had preferences about their profiles. A movie star
would tell the cameraman, “Shoot my left profile, it’s better.” And if you adjusted the side mirrors, pulled them closer around you like a wrap, you could see more reflections from more angles, even the way you looked from the back. But who would want to see any more Helens? Certainly not the pair I had left behind in the living room. Not Brian, not the Huffs (despite the birthday card), certainly not Annie Rickets (“You’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”). Not Father McFall, not my father, and sometimes not Nonie (“I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.”). Even for Mrs. Jones, one of me was probably sufficient.

Okay, Annie, I’m here, taking that good, long look you recommended. I’m not going to ask you what you would see if you were standing behind me—the way I was not standing behind Nonie that day she was trying on the Easter hat. In fact, I’m not going to think your thoughts, at all. I can imagine only too well the kinds of things you would say about what just happened in our living room. No, shut up, I said I wasn’t going to think about it. This is just between me and me. Helen in the looking glass assessing Helen on the bench.

Now she’s picking up the glass, which is dusty, and swallowing more cognac and making a face. How could Nonie enjoy this stuff? Wine I could see: like all sophisticated children, I had been allowed wine mixed with water on special occasions. But this was like swallowing pepper. It made you shudder all the way down. Nonie said it stimulated your heart more than wine.

Maybe I would grow up to have a faulty heart. I might have one already. (“Her little heart just stopped. Barely four months after her grandmother died, she was found dead. Found dead on
her birthday in the grandmother’s bed. It was the cleaning woman who discovered her. The person who had been staying with her for the summer thought she was just sleeping late. ‘There was too much excitement the day before. I mean, with her father and the bomb and all. She’d had a long day and was a little cross by the end of it, but I never suspected there was anything wrong. I ought to have checked on her, but she said she was very tired and didn’t want to say good night and closed her door. Now I will never forgive myself. I just wasn’t up to the task. I failed her father and I failed her.’”)

Beyond my closed door, the dance music went on. They could be dancing now. The firm palm of Finn bracing her back, the twilight blue dress swishing all over his legs. (“You are so good to her, Finn. You will make a wonderful father someday. But, did you see the way she tossed back that brandy? Her father would kill me if he knew. Of course, he doesn’t set a very good example himself. She’s such a moody child. Smart, but so moody. There have been times when I thought we were doing real well, and then there have been other times when I’m counting the days and the hours and the minutes until I can say good-bye forever to this strange old house.”)

I stood up and pushed away the bench and pondered my full length in the long mirror. A girl in a shapeless blouse and skirt and socks and loafers because her nice dress no longer fit. I would need new clothes for school and who would be there to say, “Now
that’s
smart”? I was not tall enough to drape a hand over my dancing partner’s shoulder, but Finn said he hadn’t gotten his full height until seventeen. “Hair the color of wheat” sounded just like Flora: “And over here Juliet Parker has planted us a little field of wheat.” I preferred “tawny,” or “dark blond.” According
to Finn, all my features were the right distance from each other, which Flora said meant better than pretty. But Finn had also praised Flora’s far-apart eyes. Flora said my looks would improve if I would look happier to see people when they came into a room. I smiled at myself in the mirror and the image responded with a simpering grimace. If you were really happy to see someone come into a room, you wouldn’t necessarily smile. I had seen people not smile who were glad to see me. Brian didn’t smile, he just looked as though something that belonged to him had reappeared. Nonie wasn’t a natural smiler, either. When she was really appreciating something I’d said or done, she looked like someone looks when they have been proved right.

(“She’s a little girl who’s had a lousy summer,” Finn might be saying as he danced Flora round the threadbare carpet. “Seeing nobody but us, one friend getting polio, the other moving away, and the third one you say she doesn’t like so well. And it’s her first summer without her grandmother. She’s entitled to a few moods. And didn’t she thank me sweetly for the pencils, and you for all the things you did for her today?”)

I gulped another swig from the aperitif glass and kept my mirror face from registering the cognac’s ravaging passage down my gullet. I practiced looking like a person happy to see someone without needing to force a simpery smile. There. You did have some control over how you appeared to others.

A welcome new feeling of invulnerability lit up my insides and I decided to be generous on the eve of my eleventh birthday and go back and say good night like the kind of person people would want to see more of.

THEY WERE NOT
dancing to the music as I had permitted them to do in my thoughts, and they were not on the sofa where I had left them. The tray and the coffee things were gone from the coffee table, but the glass of milk remained. The plate underneath had been removed, but two Fig Newtons and a shard of pound cake huddled together on the sailboat napkin from my sixth birthday. Flora was obviously planning to pay a bedtime visit against my wishes. Our two sketch pads, Finn’s and mine, lay at one end of the sofa, both opened to the Flora portraits. Maybe Finn had gone already, but why had I not heard the motorcycle?

I crossed the carpeted dining room and was about to enter the kitchen when a muffled sound made me stealthy. Flora and Finn were locked in an embrace by the sink. This was no movie kiss. Their mouths mashed together as though each was trying desperately to disappear down the other’s throat. I fled, stopping briefly by the coffee table long enough to pour the glass of milk over the two portraits of Flora and the unguilty sofa cushion that happened to be lying beneath.

XXVII.

How was it that I was magically skimming our treacherous driveway in the almost-dark without a single stumble? And in my leather-soled loafers, not my rubber-gripping Keds. (Was I doomed for the rest of my life to think of Mrs. Huff every time I thought of Keds?)

I felt weightless and glowing with the power of revenge. Was it the cognac or was it the hilarious replay of myself dumping the milk—or was it both? Just beneath the hilarious replay crept a curdling flow of loss and shame. I needed to outrun this flow until it had hardened solid and could no longer suck me into it.

Sunset Drive was already in darkness, but the tops of the trees, raucous with insect life, made black cutout designs against a greenish metallic sky. What color would Finn give it, or did his “special names” apply only to dresses?

The last time I had walked down Sunset Drive by myself had been at midday in early summer. Flora’s clothes had just arrived and I was fleeing her Alabama talk and her insulting notion that I had undergone “a strange childhood.” On this midday walk I had hoped to get some of myself back only to find it slipping away with every step I took. At this first bend in the road,
I had looked through a veil and seen Sunset Drive going on just the same without me. And then had come the awful draining away and the loss of words to account for what was happening to me. That’s when Nonie’s voice had told me to sit down on the ground in the shade and let everything go.

“Don’t children have little imaginary friends?” Flora had wanted to know, ironing her Alabama clothes and telling that story I would rather not have heard about a certain skirt. When I said I was going for a walk, she asked should she come, and I said no, I was going out to look for an imaginary friend.

And then someone’s boots creaked and someone’s armpits smelled and I was brought back from nothingness by someone saying, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Together we scuffed downhill so I could show him my grandfather’s shortcut. I pointed out the streetlight at the hairpin curve that “ruffians came all the way across town to shoot out,” and he delighted me by falling into the same trap I had fallen in when Nonie explained about the ruffians. “Why didn’t they shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town?” he wanted to know. “Because,” I crowed triumphantly, “they already
have
.”

The ruffians had been here again—no streetlight illuminated the hairpin curve tonight. But my eyes had grown used to the darkness, and I could make out the entrance to my grandfather’s overgrown path that followed the broken-down railing until it dipped out of sight into the crater. (“Ah, I know what you’re capable of … I’ve seen you jump into the unknown. … I know, I know. It’s our secret.”)

Branches slapped and brambles clawed as I felt my way through the indistinct undergrowth, no yipping Flora following close behind at noontime, no fast-moving paratrooper crashing ahead
in daylight. I hoped, vaguely, to be hurt. Not killed, or crippled like Brian, or even to have my face scarred for life with slashes, but just damaged in some way that would make people sorry I’d had to go through this night and equally amazed that I had come out of it as well as I had.

I tripped and went down. Reaching out with my hands, I groped emptiness just ahead of where I had fallen. I was at the edge of the crater! I had almost gone over! But no, it was just a deep rut, like the bad one on our driveway the garbageman and the towing man had covered with a piece of board. Nevertheless, I decided to crawl the rest of the way to the crater on my hands and knees. My plan was to let myself carefully down its side, holding on to the sassafras tree the way I had been taught. And then what? To be found curled at the bottom, exposed to the night? But it would be harder to freeze to death in August than in November, when he had done it, and I had no intention of taking off my clothes and being found naked.

I scraped my knee badly while edging backward down the slope, and paused to reassess my strategy when I finally gained hold of the sassafras tree. Crouching at its base, I indulgently dabbled in the blood running down my leg. When it kept coming, I wiped some of it on my face and licked its metallic flavor off my fingertips.