Flora (6 page)

Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? Was she
single-hearted
(not an attribute you hear mentioned much anymore, as in that old dismissal prayer that exhorts us to go forth “with gladness and singleness of heart”), or was she a member of that even rarer species, the pure in heart? I am still making up my mind.

It was getting dark when I sheared through the last clump of weeds in front of the garage door. My fingers ached from gripping the scissors. The weeds had been more resistant than expected. They had squashed easily, but were tough to cut. Every time I made another trip to the woods to dump their remains, I could hear them jeering, “We’ll be back, little girl, twice as many of us: we’ll be growing over your grave.”

Flora was listening to the radio in the kitchen and making a list of the groceries we were going to order tomorrow.

“Helen, sit down a minute and tell me what kinds of meals Mrs. Anstruther fixed for you.”

“Oh, just normal everyday things.”

“Such as?”

I was still outside with my slain weeds. And hovering just beyond them was a hospital door I wanted to keep closed. Behind it was Brian, transformed into a cripple because of my selfishness.

“What did she make for breakfast, for instance?”

“Oh, cream of wheat, oatmeal. French toast if we weren’t in a hurry.”

“No eggs?”

“French toast
has
egg in it.”

“But I mean—”

“And I had hard-boiled eggs in my school lunches.” Nonie always put in an extra egg for Brian. He enjoyed having to peel them. Nonie worried he didn’t get enough food in its whole state. His mother cut off the crusts on his school sandwiches, and carved smiley faces into his radishes.

We moved on to suppers. Yes, Flora said happily, she could do meat loaf and cube steak and macaroni and cheese. And she was sure she could make creamed chipped beef if she knew what kind of beef you used. Had my grandmother kept a box of recipes?

“No, it was all in her head. She cooked for her father until he married again.”

“Yes, the awful stepmother. That’s when she packed her bag and ran away and a handsome doctor stopped his carriage and said, ‘Young lady, can I take you somewhere?’”

“No, he said, ‘Can I
carry
you somewhere?’ And it wasn’t a carriage, it was a cabriolet.”

In all those letters, it would have been natural for Nonie to have related parts of her history to Flora, but that didn’t keep me from wishing she hadn’t. How many people could repeat accurately the things they were told? Look at that game, Gossip, where the sentence whispered into the first ear is unrecognizable when it reaches the last. People didn’t listen. Or they heard what they wanted to hear. Or changed it to make a better story.

“My grandfather was from South Carolina,” I explained to Flora, “and they say ‘carry’ down there instead of ‘take,’ when offering a ride. And he was thirty years older. She saw him as elegant, not handsome.”

Flora took these corrections with good grace. “If my fifth or sixth graders are as smart as you, honey, I will have my work cut out for me.”

I was teaching Flora how to play advanced jacks when my father phoned from Oak Ridge.

“Not much happening here on a Sunday night. Harker and I walked down to where they’re building some more houses for workers with families. Harker is my roommate. I’d say it was like being back at college, except Harker wouldn’t have been at college. But he suits me. He’s a master welder, deaf as a post, and laughs at everything I say. What have you girls got to report?”

“Brian Beale and a little girl have come down with polio. She’s in an iron lung and he may be a cripple for life.”

I had flung down this dramatic offering to get the attention of the parent I had not spoken to since he left me with the Huffs, but I soon regretted it.

“Where is Flora?” he asked.

“On the floor. We were playing jacks.”

“Let me speak to her.”

After she had imparted the information he wanted (the lake, the hospital, the little girl, Father McFall says we’ll have to take it a step at a time with Brian), she was reduced to monosyllabic yips in response to my father’s instructions. Then she passed the receiver back to me.

“Okay, Helen, here’s the deal,” he said curtly. “You’re staying on top of that mountain. I’ve been where I forbid you to go. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“As of right now you’re quarantined. Worse things than having to stay at home can happen to little girls. Like iron lungs, or death, or shriveled legs. I was luckier than most with the leg.
At sixteen I had my full growth. You are only ten—okay, going on eleven—and I forbid you to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken limbs of a child. Flora has her orders, and I depend on you to help her carry them out. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Flora went straight to pieces after talking to my father. She was indulging in the kind of panic adults were supposed to hide so as not to worry children. She stumbled around blindly, tripping over our abandoned jacks, wailing a litany of her many failings, which I tried not to hear word for word because it was too upsetting: she should never have taken this job, she was not good enough, smart enough, she could never fulfill my father’s expectations, she should never have agreed to take care of me.

How could I put her together again? What would Nonie do? First she would make you sit down. She would say something soothing and reasonable, though always retaining her edge of authority, and convince you that the crisis, whatever it was, could be managed. I told Flora we should go sit on the sofa in the living room so she could relay my father’s instructions while they were still fresh in her mind. He had said he depended on me to help her carry them out, but to do that I was going to need a list of what we were supposed to do and not do. While everything was still fresh in her mind.

We sank together onto the faded yellow silk cushions that held so many associations of “talks” it was like sitting down on my past, and I coaxed my father’s injunctions out of Flora. We were not to go into the shops, not even the ones in our immediate neighborhood, or take the bus to town to go to the movies or to any place where people gathered, not even to church.
I was not to go to my friends’ houses or have them to mine, and I was not to visit Brian in the hospital.

“We might as well curl up and die!” I would have screamed if there had been a guaranteed adult there to talk me down. But Flora was the one who needed to be talked down, and it was gratifying to see the influence I could wield on a person twice my age. My father had gone overboard because of his own history, I explained, but he would come around, she would see, next time he called he would loosen the restrictions; meantime we had to keep him calm so he could do his job and bring home some much needed funds at the end of the summer. As she could see from the state of the place, we could use some repair money. The pay was fabulous at Oak Ridge, especially when it was someone valuable like my father who was used to keeping order and knew about blueprints and building things. I told her if he chose to work there year-round he’d get double his salary as high school principal. And then, saving my clincher for last—or so I thought—I revealed to her that my father himself had been a victim of polio.

At this Flora perked up. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Anstruther wrote about it in the letters. Suddenly she had the two of them to care for, the doctor with his stroke and her son with polio and everyone else running out on them. But she rose to it, your grandmother did. She cooked the meals and cared for her dying husband and massaged Harry’s legs. Your mother called your father’s limp endearing in the note she sent with the wedding announcement.”

“You must mean the engagement announcement,” I corrected.

“No, honey. We didn’t even know she was dating someone
till we got the wedding announcement with her note. And then I’m afraid we thought—well, never mind what we thought—but later on, Daddy figured that Lisbeth hadn’t asked us because we wouldn’t have done credit to her. Lisbeth was very proud—well, she had every right to be, she was so superior.”

Thanks to my efforts Flora had regained charge of herself. Now I was the one floundering among misgivings. I couldn’t have said exactly what in her version of things unsettled me. I knew my parents had been married quietly in our church because, as Nonie said, Lisbeth didn’t want to put her uncles to the expense of an Alabama wedding. There was an elegant reception afterward at our house, after which my father and mother took a short wedding trip to Blowing Rock in Nonie’s car, which was brand-new then, and returned to their school jobs the following week.

I also knew what Flora had stopped herself from saying, having been apprised by Nonie of the facts of life through her resourceful use of the “Social Hygiene for Girls” pamphlet that had brought my father and mother together. She doled out supplements to this story as I grew into an age to handle them: what
exactly
the pamphlet had said, which parts had struck Nonie and my father as amusing or outdated when they read it aloud to each other over cocktails. (“It was a sad little production, full of unintended slipups. One I particularly remember was the misprint
impotent
when
important
was meant. And parts of it were insulting. It claimed that though a few well-brought-up young women were trained to safeguard their morals by the age of sixteen, most were not. I bristled at that. What was ‘well-brought-up’ but a code for privileged? I don’t claim to be more than a farmer’s daughter, but I was perfectly capable of safeguarding my morals at age sixteen.”)

The uncles in Alabama had thought Lisbeth and Harry had started a baby and had to get married fast. But when I didn’t come along until a full year and a month later they had to find another reason they hadn’t been invited to the wedding.

It was a short courtship for my parents because from the very first evening, when they were playing cards, Lisbeth had felt she was part of our family. It was understandable, Nonie said. Lisbeth had lost her mother when she was eight, and the nearest thing she’d had to a female to care for her after that was the Negro woman who lived with the uncles.

“Well, I lost
my
mother when I was
three
,” I would remind Nonie.

“Yes, darling, but after that you had
me
.”

“I think Lisbeth returned my love first,” Nonie would muse. “You know how your father often strikes new acquaintances as somewhat acerbic. I was the one who brought her out, made her feel at home. She liked me, she liked my style, and she liked the way we lived. Why, that first evening, she said she’d bring her poker chips next time she came—and then blushed to high heaven because she had invited herself back—it just showed how comfortable she already felt with us. We settled into our weekly threesome—I want you to know I became an excellent blackjack player—and it wasn’t long before Harry looked across the card table and realized this was the woman he’d been waiting for all along.”

I had been considering telling Flora how my father had caught polio when he ran away with Willow Fanning, but she had preempted my story with this information about my parents’ marriage, which I now had to find a place for.

That night I went to bed in my old room. The garage voice had said I should move on Tuesday, when Mrs. Jones came to
clean. I was to tell her what “the dream” had said and that she should make up Nonie’s room because I would be moving into it permanently. She was a great respecter of the supernatural, Mrs. Jones was. Her little dead daughter had spoken to her at the cemetery. “Momma, you don’t need to take the bus out here anymore, I’m not under this stone, I am at home with you.” The spirit of her uncle Al had begged Mrs. Jones’s forgiveness for wrongs he had done her as a child. “Say you forgive me, sweetheart,” he had said, “then open that window and let my spirit fly free.” Mrs. Jones had said aloud to him in her kitchen: “If you say so, I forgive you, Uncle Al, but you were always kind to me.” Then she had opened the window, and felt a great whoosh of air, and the next morning there was a big crow on the branch outside fixing her with its yellow eye. Mrs. Jones threw bread crusts out to it for several days, remembering how Uncle Al always brought her treats, and then one morning it made a strange triple caw that sounded exactly like “Bye, sweetheart,” looked her straight in the eye, and flew off for good.

Tonight and tomorrow would be my last nights in this room of my childhood, and the room seemed to feel this because it wasn’t being unfriendly anymore. Its wistful sadness was like that of a friend who knows you’ve outgrown the friendship and need to move on.

VIII.

After breakfast Monday morning Flora checked over our list for Grove Market.

“Would you like to call it in, Helen?”

“Not really.”

I wished I’d said yes as soon as she began speaking to the person on the other end, who could not have been grouchy Mr. Crump because he would never have put up with such dalliance. Why couldn’t she just coolly read off the list, with pauses to let the other person write things down?

“What, no fresh corn? We would have corn by now in Alabama. But then we planted our garden very early down there: corn, okra, spinach, peas, runner beans. I guess you wouldn’t have any okra this early either. No, I thought not. Too bad, we’ll have to do with canned corn, then. And does your meat market have something called chipped beef? Oh, in jars. How big are the jars? Maybe two jars then. And remember now, this all goes on Mr. Anstruther’s tab, he’s away doing important war work over in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We’re going to be ordering whenever we need something, is that all right? He doesn’t want my little cousin to go into public places because of this polio
outbreak. Oh, and two quarts of milk for my cousin, she’s still growing—wait, let me see if she wants anything else. Helen, can you think of anything else?”

I had gone beyond embarrassment. “Maybe some candy.”

“What kind?”