Flora

by Gail Godwin

  “How do you know that?”

  “I worked on cars like this before I joined up. My name is Finn. I’m your grocery deliverer. One thousand Sunset Drive. Sounds like a movie.”

  I started to shake hands but remembered my father’s warnings. This person had been all over town delivering groceries. “My name is Helen Anstruther,” I said.

  “The one who likes the Clark bars.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I heard her ask you when I was taking your order. I fancy them myself.”

  He wasn’t a foreigner, but he wasn’t a local either. His speech was different. On his sleeve there was a patch with an eagle’s head.

  “Were you in the war?”

  “I was, I was. I was supposed to jump on D-Day but I got sick in England and they had to ship me back to the military hospital here.”

  “It must have been your lungs then.”

  “Now how did you know that?”

  “It’s their specialty. My grandfather helped them start that hospital. He was a doctor. This house used to be his convalescent home where people could finish recovering from lung problems. Or sometimes mental problems.”

  His high-pitched laugh resembled a cry of pain. “The perfect place for me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I had a collapsed lung and then later came the mental problems.”

  Then here came Flora flying out of the house, apologizing for having been upstairs, as if her presence were required before any two people could start an interesting conversation, apologizing for “our” driveway, and oh, what a cute machine, but such a hot day to be outside riding around bareheaded.

  “This is Finn, who’ll be delivering our groceries,” I cut her off. I introduced her simply as Flora, leaving off the cousin part.

  Flora plunged into a handshake, all polio warnings forgotten, and said she hoped we hadn’t weighed him down by ordering too much, we would try not to order too often.

  “Oh, I have people who order every single day,” said Finn.

  “My goodness, every day?” exclaimed Flora, sounding foolishly impressed.

  “Many of our customers don’t have refrigeration.”

  “We didn’t have refrigeration back in Alabama when I was growing up,” Flora eagerly volunteered. “Just this one little icebox in the cellar with a block of ice. The iceman brought us a new block twice a week.”

  Shut up, I was thinking, but Finn only smiled at her. “I’ve got this one lady,” he said, “who doesn’t hesitate to phone the store whenever she remembers something she forgot.”

  “She must be a rich lady,” I said sarcastically.

  “Ah, no,” he said. “She’s a lonely old lady who’s losing her memory. But I always fit her in. It’s no trouble at all.” (He sweetly pronounced it “a-tall.”) He seemed like a kind, good-humored person, if a little odd-looking. It was certainly kind of him to pretend not to notice what a fool Flora was.

  Somehow we got the grocery bags into the kitchen without her embarrassing me again, though she did keep calling me her little cousin and had started up again about the okra. I made sure Finn got a good look at our Frigidaire, which was more up-to-date than anything else in the house. This was not Flora’s Alabama. It would have been interesting to hear about his collapsed lung and even more about the mental problems, but I needed to get him away before he started dreading his future deliveries to these two isolated females at the top of their holy terror drive.

  “WHY DO WE always have to eat at six?” I asked Flora, when she started rolling out her biscuit dough.

  “Because that’s when people eat.”

  “We never used to eat at six. We ate at all different times. My father and Nonie had to have their cocktails first.”

  “Well, you and I don’t have any cocktails.” She looked very proud of her clever reply.

  “But it’s still afternoon outside.”

  “Go outside then. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  “Did that Negro maid make biscuits every day back in Alabama?”

  “I’ve told you, Juliet isn’t a maid. She’s part owner of our house.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “Well, it’s true. Many a time she’s had to make the whole mortgage payment by herself. When Uncle Sam dies, it’ll be all hers.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Aren’t you your uncle’s next of kin?”

  “I’ll have a job teaching by then. I can make a down payment on my own place if I want one. I might even be married.”

  “Married?”

  “Don’t look so surprised. So far, two people have asked me.”

  “What was wrong with them?”

  “Why should anything be wrong with them? Because they wanted me?”

  “No, no! I just meant—”

  “I know, honey. I was teasing. One was a lawyer. The other owned a farm. He’s the one who offered to drive me to that interview in his truck. Maybe I’d have done better to let him. The subject of my not driving might never have come up.”

  “What about the lawyer?”

  “He was too old, for one thing—he had two grown children. I worked for him one summer and he was very nice to me. But I wasn’t really attracted to him.” She giggled. “He had little hairs growing out of his ears.”

  I recalled the hairs growing out of my father’s ears. Rachel Huff’s mother had told her that with Nonie gone my father would probably want to marry again.

  During supper, I thought about Finn, but kept him to myself. Then Flora said brightly, “I hope we didn’t go against your father’s wishes by letting that nice delivery boy carry our groceries in. Do you think we did?”

  “Did what?”

  “Go against your father’s wishes. But your cleaning woman is coming tomorrow, isn’t she? Mrs. Jones. She must have been going in and out of all sorts of public places, too. We can’t be expected to live completely in a vacuum, can we?”

  “We’re doing a pretty good job, if you ask me.”

  IX.

  Mrs. Jones arrived at nine on Tuesdays, bringing back the clean sheets and towels she had dropped off at the linen service the week before. She had been cleaning this house for thirty years. She remembered the doctor in his final years, and my father as a teenager before his polio. She remembered the Recoverers and she remembered my mother and she remembered me before I could remember myself. Her own little Rosemary had been alive when Mrs. Jones started coming to our house. She still brought her lunch in Rosemary’s old school lunch box, a thermos of hot tea (which she said kept her warm in winter and cool in summer), and her own table-model radio, which she carried under her arm and plugged into the wall sockets of the different upstairs rooms as she went about her work. Starting with the kitchen, she did the downstairs rooms in the morning. She didn’t like to be talked to when she was scrubbing the kitchen floor because she said being on her knees and the rhythm of the arm motions made it the ideal time for going over her life. She didn’t play the radio in the morning, radio was for the afternoon upstairs. Guiding Light and All My Children were for the Willow Fanning room; then a silent break for the Willow Fanning half bath and the front upstairs bathroom (she considered tiled floors with their proximity to water unsafe for plugged-in devices); then on to Ma Perkins and Pepper Young’s Family in the Hyman Highsmith room; then Stella Dallas and Lorenzo Jones for the two nameless Recoverers’ rooms, whose guests had been more forgettable, except for the one who had let us down. When a Girl Marries was for my grandfather’s consultation room, and she finished her day with Portia Faces Life in his half bath, which had a wood floor.

  “I admire that woman,” Nonie said. “Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days. How many people do you know who can do that?”

  On this Tuesday, Flora took it on herself to welcome Mrs. Jones to the house. “I’m Helen’s first cousin once removed. Her mothe
r and I grew up together in Alabama. Sometimes she was like my big sister and sometimes she was like a little mother. Did I meet you at the funeral reception, Mrs. Jones?”

  “No, ma’am, I wasn’t able to make the reception.”

  “Oh, please, call me Flora. And whatever I can do to help you, just let me know. I’m Helen’s caretaker for the summer while her father’s away, but I’ve got plenty of free time for housework.”

  “Oh, my routine more or less runs me,” said Mrs. Jones. “I would get all turned around if someone was to try to help. I do the downstairs in the morning, and then if it’s warm like today I eat my lunch upstairs on the south porch, and in the afternoon I turn out the upstairs rooms.”

  “Well,” said Flora, “in that case, I guess I’ll go up and work on some lesson plans. I start teaching school in the fall. I’m in the Willow Fanning room.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know. I do that room first, after I’ve swept the upstairs porches.”

  “Well, don’t worry, I’ll make myself scarce. I have some shelf reorganizing I want to do in the kitchen. But I already went and stripped my bed for you.”

  “That was thoughtful, but there was no need.”

  I lurked about while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees and went over her life. I tried some more of my library book, but my own life seemed more urgent and mysterious than the girl researching someone else’s old house. I walked around our house, forcing myself to acknowledge more signs of decay, and fantasized that we would somehow come into money and make everything nice again. I heard my father forbidding me to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken legs of a child, and pictured Brian Beale’s ten-year-old legs withering this very minute beneath the covers of his hospital bed. I knew I should be writing a note to him in time for postman to take it away, but couldn’t make myself do it. I thought of Finn, with his pointy features and carrot crew cut, rushing over to the lonely old lady on his motorcycle whenever she remembered something she’d forgotten to order. He’d roar up in front of her modest little house that didn’t have a refrigerator and tell her it was no trouble “a-tall.” I prepared some interesting things I would say to him next time—if I could get them in before Flora interrupted and brought things down to her level.

  I materialized when I heard Mrs. Jones starting on my grandmother’s room.

  “I can still feel her in here,” said Mrs. Jones, holding her feather duster aloft in front of the blinds like a conductor raising his baton.

  “I had this dream.” I got right to the point. “She told me she wanted me to move into this room. She said you would understand.”

  Mrs. Jones clasped the duster to her breast. “She mentioned me?”

  “She said, ‘Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural.’ Those were her exact words.”

  “Dear me if that doesn’t sound just like her. The dead can speak to you anytime they like, whether you’re awake or asleep. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”

  “She said I was to ask you to make up her room for me.”

  “Did she say we should empty out drawers, or what?”

  I considered a moment. “No, just make up the bed. I’ll go through her things myself.”

  “That’s what I did with Rosemary’s things. I went through them a little at a time and let them bring her back.”

  “You know, I think I am growing up,” I said.

  “Well, surely you are.” Mrs. Jones had laid aside her duster and started on the bed, as though being guided by Nonie.

  “No, I mean I’m understanding things this summer that I couldn’t understand even this past winter.”

  “Like what, dear?”

  “Well, like Rosemary’s diphtheria and my mother’s parents in the flu epidemic, all in the same year. Before, I just couldn’t get my mind around it. Your seven-year-old daughter and those people from such a long time ago. It was the same year, 1918, but I just couldn’t see how they could all fit into that same time period.”

  “That’s the thing about the dead,” observed Mrs. Jones happily, lifting up the mattress pad and giving it a vigorous shake. “They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

  She let me help make up the bed. “It’s the right thing that you should have this room,” she said. “You’re the lady of the house now.”

  “But I’m not going to tell Flora about the dream.” Here I had to remind myself that Nonie had considered the whole truth too much even for Mrs. Jones. Even I had almost forgotten that Nonie’s voice in the garage told me to say the instructions came to me in a dream.

  “Well, that’s up to you, dear.”

  “Flora is very—” I hovered between wanting to betray and wanting to appear loyal. “I’m not sure she’d be able to understand. I’m just going to tell her moving in here was something I decided to do and leave it at that.”

  “Well, like I said,” Mrs. Jones reiterated, “you’re the lady of the house now.”

  AT SUPPER I let Flora go on about all she’d accomplished while Mrs. Jones had been cleaning the house. In the morning she’d answered Juliet Parker’s letter and walked it down to the box just in time for the mailman, which made me feel guilty because I hadn’t written my note to Brian. Then she’d worked up some fifth-grade geography lesson plans and created a behavior chart for her class: “You know: neatness, courtesy, self-control, so they’ll know what I expect from them.”

  In the afternoon she had reorganized the cupboard shelves and the refrigerator. “I kept thinking how that nice delivery boy said so many people still don’t have them and I felt positively luxurious.”

  “His name is Finn.”

  “Is that his first name or his last?”

  “He just said Finn. He was in the war until his lung collapsed, so he’s not exactly a boy anymore.”

  “You two really had a conversation, didn’t you? I heard you talking a lot with Mrs. Jones, too. You miss your friends, don’t you, honey?”

  “Mrs. Jones was helping me move into my grandmother’s room.”

  “Oh, well, goodness, that’s a change.” I could see she was taken aback.

  “It’s something I decided to do,” I said. I quoted the voice in the garage: “It was her place and now it will be my place.”

  “It certainly is a nice big room,” said Flora, “if you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”

  “I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”

  I COULD HARDLY wait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could repair the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”

  “You’d have to cut down years of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.

  Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off, listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the tow
n. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.

  “Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it.”

  In the final scene the mother comes back to the store with the police next morning. And in the children’s department, she sees a group of child mannequins and one of them resembles her daughter so much she goes into hysterics. But the police and the manager soothe her and assure her they will find her little girl before the day is over.

  “Look at my arms,” said Flora, rubbing them up and down. “They’ve got goose bumps. Oh, honey, I hope this won’t give you bad dreams.”

  The program made my heart long for Nonie. There were things about it to discuss that she would be so good at. But I would have to wait until bedtime to figure out what those things were.

  X.

  The way my days registered seemed to change after I moved into Nonie’s room. Events stopped marching forward in a straight, unselective procession and began clustering themselves into bunches, according to mood and subject matter. There were the things Flora said and did that slowly compiled a picture of what I could expect from her. There were my retreats into the sanctuary of my new room, where I seemed to merge with Nonie and came out thinking and speaking more like her. Was this shift in perceptions something my memory has imposed? Well, what is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?

  The shift may have begun that morning, when I told Mrs. Jones I was growing up because I could now understand how her little Rosemary and my mother’s parents could have died in the same year.

  Lying in Nonie’s high, roomy bed, freshly made up for my occupancy, I felt it was inviting me to stretch my legs and arms into its extra adult space and to observe life from a larger field of vision.