Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  When she had a few exploratory conversations about teaching jobs, it was clear that Don Lennart was the only book of Flannery’s that was known. It was from a long time ago now (ten years), and the subsequent quiet novel that she was perhaps prouder of was a little-known ghost. Flannery’s authorial self had largely drained away.

  One day, folding and putting away shirts in her drawer, Flannery had one of her periodic urges to bring order to the jumble. She sorted the garments by color tone: taupe, white, ash-gray T-shirts of a simple cut by a designer Charles had informed Flannery looked good on her. They were easy to fold, all tailored the same way. Then, at the base of the drawer, an outlier caught her eye. A much-worn, half-faded, turquoise V-neck, made of a cheap cotton, that still faintly said, in orange, Sarasota.

  Flannery startled, as if she had come upon an old photo or love letter. She held the cloth up to her face but its Floridian scents were long gone, with only the recalled episodes left for her to inhale: the time she bought the shirt, on a beach with Anne, on that blighted spring break journey through Western Florida; and the times she wore it over days of Mexican heat and dust with Adele, across mountains and through beat-up old cities, and even on the occasion she first encountered Lenny. (Flannery was not about to dress up for him. As she wrote in her book, ‘Discovering your father is not a black-tie event.’) Which meant she was wearing it later that day, when she and Adele rolled around too close to the saguaro cacti.

  Same shirt.

  Another question for the scientists: where were those selves now, now that she was on the whole a woman who dressed in taupe and ash?

  If she put on the washed-out turquoise tee again, would anything come back to her of that more confident, freer, forgotten Flannery?

  Or had that person evaporated — turned into air?

  27

  Beaker, or universe? Shrinking, or expanding? Flannery got serious about her job search, to test this physics of the self. It was time to try her hand and mind in the wider world again.

  Ostensibly Charles was happy about the prospect. His visible surfaces were shiny with favor — ‘Terrific idea, I’m sure it will be good for you’ — gleaming with reassurance — ‘You realize there’s no need to do it for the money, right? So it’s OK if it doesn’t work out’ — and dulled only in occasional patches — ‘I hope you won’t get too tired. It could be a lot to take on.’

  After a round of calls and emails, and the digging up of old colleagues like bulbs in an abandoned garden, Flannery discovered that a woman she had always liked, a Brazilian poet and translator, was going on maternity leave from the Jesuit college, and they needed a replacement to teach introductory composition. This was basic stuff, and only temporary, but the position had the advantage of proximity to Ashbury Street. Still, when Flannery got off the phone with the dean offering her the job, she found herself crying. Charles was not around to see it, fortunately, but Willa was in the kitchen with her. Her puzzled daughter frowned into her mother’s streaked face, and Flannery explained how emotions could be paradoxical. ‘It’s a long word, Willerby, but you may as well learn it now.’ She sniffled slightly. ‘It means something like the opposite of what you would expect. So I’m happy, but I’m crying. See?’

  Willa puckered her lips together almost in the shape of a kiss, a characteristic expression when weighing over a line from one of her parents. She was a natural skeptic, and at four she was already well aware that adults lied to you, distorting information to make things simpler or create a prettier picture than the one right in front of you. (‘No, I don’t know how to put a games app on the iPad. Dad might.’ ‘I have no idea why your mother is so upset.’ ‘We weren’t arguing, honey, we were just having a discussion.’)

  ‘So do people sometimes laugh when they’re sad?’ Willa asked with the symmetrical logic of a Lego builder.

  ‘They sometimes do.’ Flannery reached out for her daughter’s hand. Willa’s was salty from eating crackers, Flannery’s from her brief tears. She had a vivid recollection of herself and Adele in a stuffy hotel room in San Miguel de Allende, in hysterical giggles as they traded impressions of Flannery’s father, the preposterous, wizened hippie they had met earlier that day. Flannery was already working up the material about the Malcolm Lowry–spouting antiques dealer, and referring to him as Don Lennart, with a faux Mexican accent that mimicked the man’s own. Len Jansen had long, thin, mouse-gray hair that fell crookedly, the way hair does on a cheap Halloween costume, and the dome of his head was shiny and bald, though only visible when he removed his dusty Castro hat, as he did when he got hot, or flustered. He spoke in a dated sixties slang and had an inability noticed by both women (though kept out of their comic routines) to look Flannery in the eye. He kept referring to them as ‘girls’, as if, as Adele said in one sharpish moment, ‘he were a hippie Hugh Hefner,’ and though Flannery kept laughing at this and at all they were saying to each other, laughing till she could hardly breathe, till tears were streaming down her face, till she was clutching the sore overworked muscles in her stomach, she did begin even then, and certainly later, to consider that the ache might also have as its source something bleaker than amusement.

  ‘It’s weird, honey, but yeah. They do.’ She gave Willa’s hand a salty squeeze.

  That paradox had been at the heart of her complicated book.

  28

  Charles was a complex composite, volatile under certain conditions, though even after some years Flannery was still trying to figure out exactly which. In large part, the man was pleased about Flannery’s new employment. Yet at points the structure of support broke down unexpectedly, the solid Charles changing form and releasing toxins.

  It came out as irritability. As curtness. Most significantly as a failure to appear, when Flannery asked him on days she was teaching to collect Willa from the preschool. Charles, who was punctual when his work required him to be but rarely otherwise, just would not show up on time.

  Flannery saw the call come in, silently, in the last ten minutes of her class one Monday when she was trying to explain what a thesis paragraph was. BLUEBERRY lit up the screen on her phone. She breathed in sharply, talked fast, and let her class out five minutes early so she could return the school’s call, before listening to their message.

  ‘Oh, hi, Flannery,’ said Kim who ran the school. ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK now. Charles just got here.’

  ‘Just?’ It was a quarter to two. Willa had been due to be collected by one. ‘But . . .’

  ‘She was a little sad, but Mercedes stayed with her in the Apricot classroom and they colored together. Willa’s fine now.’

  Flannery found herself caught in a hot/cold, sour/sweet state, wanting to be warmly appreciative of Kim and her staff, while alight with upset at her husband’s carelessness. She and Charles had deliberately selected a low-key, homey preschool for Willa — ‘Not one of those places that tries to turn out prodigies by dousing the kids in Mozart and teaching them to count to ten in eleven languages,’ as Charles put it — and this allowed Charles to believe that, like wives, the teachers at the Blueberry Preschool would be flexible and understanding if he did not arrive at ‘the precise minute’ he was expected.

  ‘It wasn’t a minute, Charles,’ Flannery said crisply to him that night, after Willa was asleep. ‘It was forty-five minutes.’

  ‘They didn’t seem to mind.’

  ‘They were being nice. Mercedes had to give up her lunch break.’

  Charles shook his head, unperturbed. ‘You’re letting yourself get way too upset about it. Is there something else that’s really bother-ing you?’

  ‘No! It’s this. This is what’s bothering me. Getting that call.’ Flannery steadied her voice, and added calmly, ‘I just want to feel I can rely on you.’ She touched his arm as she said this, but he pulled away from her.

  ‘I showed up, didn’t I?’ Charles spread his hands in front of him, a case c
losed gesture. ‘You need to work on this, Flannery. Trusting people. Not everyone is going to do things exactly the way you do, but it all works out fine.’

  Some recognition of her distress would have gone a long way, but all right — trust. She trusted that he wouldn’t be that late again. But he was, a few times, and then a teacher called Flannery one day to ask if it was all right to take Willa with her while she went to get her groceries, as Charles had not yet appeared. Flannery cut her class short again, screeched over to the Blueberry, showing up sweaty and apologetic, and announced, as Willa listened, her eyes wide and probably feeling the tension in her mother’s hand, that they would find another arrangement for pickup.

  So Flannery did. She was resourceful, like any mother. Elsewhere in the world this might mean making sure enough water had been collected from the well, or bartering services for food; in San Francisco, parental ingenuity was largely spent on transportation. It was all about the car. (In the moms’ group Flannery once heard a woman say wryly, ‘Why do they call it being a stay-at-home mom? All I ever do is drive.’) Flannery worked out a midweek plan with one of the other Blueberry families, and also shared childcare with Nick, who had recently adopted an undersized, energetic mixed-race boy named Theo. Flannery enjoyed watching the two kids in her rearview mirror, car seats strapped in on opposite sides of the Subaru back seat.

  ‘They look like an estranged couple at the symphony, sitting as far away from one another as they can,’ she observed to Nick once she dropped Theo off.

  ‘“Mozart again! I’m so bored by Mozart.”’ Nick rolled his eyes, channeling his little doughnut-shaped boy as a fussy symphony-goer. ‘Seriously, though,’ he added, kissing Flannery in thanks. ‘These two are going to get married one day, right? I’m counting on it.’

  Flannery talked about Theo a few weeks later, over a family dinner. Charles had brought home a huge shopping bag of deli treats — Sicilian pizza, chicken wings, green bean salad — for what he called a ‘Friday night scavenge’. He laid out the containers on the gray slate counter and let the three of them dive in. It was excessive (there were not one but two fruit tarts for dessert), but Willa loved it, and Flannery was content not to have to cook.

  Her story was about the drive with both kids, which took an hour and a half, door to door. Flannery replayed Nick’s Mozart joke for Charles’s benefit.

  ‘So you see? It all worked out,’ Charles said, as he piled a plate high. ‘Willa gets to ride with Theo, and you didn’t have to hammer me about being late!’

  Flannery hadn’t thought of herself as hammering her spouse. ‘Well, kind of . . .’ She laughed awkwardly, as if it would be impolite to challenge him. ‘Though my head is full now of all the logistics. It blocks out a lot of the rest.’

  Charles just nodded. ‘Yeah, that was always going to be the tough part about going back to work,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I might have waited till she had started kindergarten.’

  This If I were you, spoken casually across their broad, marble table by her daughter’s father, clarified the two possibilities before Flannery. She could protest, pointing out Charles’s hypocrisy (Why is this my problem, and not ours?), and in the process lessen herself somehow, shrinking as she argued helplessly against assumptions about mothers and fathers, work and responsibility, that were larger than the two of them and their marriage, larger even than Charles Marshall’s massive sculptures. A cartoon image came to her mind of a diminutive figure pounding inconsequential fists against a massive, implacable wall.

  Or she could swallow her distaste and indignation, in order to keep for Willa something Flannery thought of, with increasing irony, as ‘the peace’.

  Willa’s mother, like countless women before her, swallowed.

  29

  Flannery sought solace in the place she had always found it before.

  Not in another person — Flannery knew she must not lean on her beloved Willa that way, the poor kid would topple over — but in stories. Imaginary friends, not unlike those that populated her daughter’s world.

  But she could not find them. They were flat on her page. The characters did not live or breathe, and they comforted her as much as paper dolls — that is, not at all.

  Flannery tried to talk to Charles about her slow, disappointing attempts to write again. He was an artist, she was sure he would understand what she was talking about. Charles worked with passion, diligence, integrity. Flannery loved him for it. However you responded to his pieces (some found them powerful and provocative, others heavy-handed), you knew they were his: his spirit, eye, hand, intelligence, ego. Charles Marshall built what he saw, with his idiosyncratic vision, and you felt him in the objects he produced.

  ‘What if it’s just . . . gone? The muse, or whatever.’ Flannery posed her fear to Charles as she served him a cobbler dessert she had made, on another evening. She sat down and, without realizing it, began wringing her hands. ‘What if I’ve dried up?’

  ‘Give yourself a break,’ Charles said, through mouthfuls of hot apple. He exuded comfort. ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. Go easy. You’re a mother.’

  ‘I’m not beating myself up. It’s . . .’ Flannery could not work out how to reply. She was not seeking permission to let the work go, as if it were a chore, something to take off her to-do list. ‘I just feel . . . you know . . .’ She put her hands up over her mouth. ‘Muzzled. Like I can’t speak. Can’t . . . breathe, almost.’

  ‘Oh, Beauty.’ Charles gazed at her with his pelt-brown eyes. He moved closer to her.

  ‘Like you would feel if someone, you know, chopped off your hands or something. And you couldn’t make pieces. You couldn’t work.’

  ‘So violent!’ Gently, he pulled Flannery’s hands away from her mouth, and kissed them, one after the other. ‘Here. Let’s take off that muzzle.’

  She was bewildered, but she didn’t resist. She realized that Charles thought he knew the perfect solution to his wife’s difficulty.

  Doesn’t he understand? The question, like a trapped moth, fluttered around Flannery’s stifled mind. I thought he understood.

  She was wrong. They were not reading each other, which made Flannery wonder if they ever had.

  30

  Flannery thought that she had given herself to a man who loved a writer, whom he found attractive. But gradually she realized, in quiet moments — as she drove, chiefly — that Charles Marshall loved an attractive woman who happened to write. After the conversation between them that night, Flannery came to believe that if she did dry up and never wrote another book, Charles would neither mind nor worry. He would do his own work, regardless, and he would feed his many large appetites, regardless, and if Flannery continued to be on hand to help with these nourishments, so much the better.

  That such an eventuality, her typing fingers running empty of words, would mean that Flannery herself had disappeared might not present itself as a serious problem for Charles.

  Flannery started to sleep less well at nights. The body lying next to her own was causing Flannery’s to be tense and agitated, and she found it hard to recapture her sense of warmth toward the man. Her thoughts moved in repetitive insomniac circles.

  Then they started taking her to Anne.

  Not so much to dwell on the love she and Anne had had, the steep swoop of that passion like a hawk’s dive, the hot and lush entanglings. Rather, on something Flannery knew now: that Anne Arden, twenty years earlier, in the course of a six-month affair, had more truly seen Flannery than Charles Marshall did after these years they had been together.

  Flannery moved beyond that melancholy knowledge, however. She drew strange midnight comfort from thinking of the love Anne had with someone else. With Jasper Elliott.

  During the wakeful one and two a.m.s Flannery began to perceive what she did not have, and would never have, with Charles — the various ways she had, through her own flaws, gotten her marri
age wrong. From there Flannery’s itinerant night mind traveled to the ways she imagined that Anne had gotten love right.

  The affair between Flannery and Anne ended in New Mexico, over an embarrassing encounter, when with the dumb energy of a clumsy puppy Flannery had flown out to Albuquerque to surprise Anne, who was interviewing for a future job. It was a grand gesture, which failed. The surprise went the other way, when Flannery discovered the company Anne was keeping in the form of the lean, elegant Professor Elliott pouring wine for them both in the hotel restaurant.

  A part of Flannery, though stunned to see Jasper, had expected him. Even in the most heated months between her and Anne there had always been a figure in the background — a memory, a history. A future, too, the younger woman now understood. Jasper had been there before Flannery, and he would be after, too; Flannery was a parenthesis, a dependent clause. Anne had not spoken of him directly, though stories from her past often involved an unmentioned, cherished other. Flannery could feel the man at times in the room with them, someone who had already known and treasured Anne. In Albuquerque Jasper became real, with a substance and dimension Flannery wished passionately that he lacked.

  A crucial virtue of Anne Arden was that she was not, unlike Flannery, a mumbler or a waverer. Anne enunciated; she was decisive; she did not lie. She excused herself from the table, took Flannery back to her room and, in tactful privacy, delivered her news. Their relationship was over, and she was with Jasper now. Yes, she broke Flannery’s heart, but the way she did it was like a merciful monarch: unequivocal and absolute. There was no appeal, and there would be no repeal. Flannery did not cry. She faced the guillotine with a calm strength that surprised even herself.