The answering machine on the counter blinked the number 3 at her. Calls to her father; calls to the dead. I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone right now—could he get back to you never? Actually, he’s deceased at the moment—would you like to leave a message? Flora picked up the small white box and held it in the bowl of her hands. About the size of her father’s heart—this thought accosted her. When she allowed herself to consider what had happened to him, she felt like fainting—a dissonant ring in her ears, a clouding overcrowding her eyes, a sickening yanking of the crown of her head toward the ground. She yanked the cord out of the wall and threw the machine in the trash. She would regret that later. But then, she was in the regret business these days.
She had bought the machine for him years ago as a Christmas present. Exactly the wrong gift for him, but he had made himself a message, reluctantly asking callers he’d been lucky enough to miss to tell him who they were and what they wanted.
“You don’t have to use it,” she’d told him, seeing his good manners dueling it out with his lust for solitude, the two impulses equal and extreme.
“No, no,” he’d said. “It’ll be good for me. Important to keep oneself gently tethered to the outside world.”
But was that true? Maybe it was time to untether. To hell with good manners and the outside world.
Flora stood in the shadow-darkening kitchen, still in her coat, her hands against the smooth butcher block of her father’s counter. She felt winded, and brittle. Her fingers were twigs; they could be snapped off. Her nails were as thin as paper. If only they could have been left behind, too. She could have scattered a trail of fingers and toes and other breakable bits and pieces out the window of the cab, like Hansel and Gretel hoping against hope to find their way back home.
As a child, Flora hated to be told to go to bed; to be expected to sleep while others sucked more life from the day was the height of unfairness. Now she longed for someone to send her to sleep. Sleep, she would sleep. But where? She couldn’t sleep in the master bedroom, her father’s bed. There was a double bed in the little guest room on the ground floor, off the living room, but she couldn’t sleep in the guest room. She’d stay where she always stayed—if she stayed—in the room called “hers,” sleep in the narrow twin bed under the yellowing blanket that had once been new, and near perfect.
She left the body bag where it lay, and took herself up the narrow back stairs, her fatigue the fatigue of the old, stepping, leaning, pausing, up to the small, neat room of dresser, desk, and bed, all the surfaces bare and buffed and signless. The lone ornamental object, a palm-size silver clock, read five-twenty-five. She opened the closet. It, too, was bare but for one small box she’d left behind years before. Flora was not a keeper of notes exchanged in long-ago classrooms. Her childhood bedrooms—there were multiple—had not been preserved shrine-like, like those of some of her friends, friends with families like time capsules; you checked on them ten years later and nothing had changed.
She pulled her feet out of her sneakers and let her coat slip to the ground, and she climbed into the tightly tucked sheets of the bed with her fraying clothing still on. She pushed her fragile hands between the safety of her knees. It was a canopy bed, the bed she’d dreamt of as a little girl and one day gotten. The canopy had long since disappeared, and now it was just a large boxy metal frame, the blueprint of a tomb. She closed her eyes. The sharp, shrill blare of the telephone (ring wasn’t the right word, was it?) startled her. Flora did not like to answer its assault. She never had, but now even less. The phone rang, with no machine to interrupt it, on and on, and then stopped—almost violently, the sound vanishing, leaving behind the ghost of noise.
On the day they moved to Darwin, Flora’s mother went shopping. She bought a rough-wooled cardigan and a white bumpy bedspread. She bought them, not liking them, because it’s easier to focus on disliking small, specific things than your life in general. The pattern of the sweater imitated panes of stained glass—cool and dark—and it went for many years unworn. Finally, she passed it off to a friend, or a garbage can. The bedspread did find use, in Flora’s parents’ bedroom, one of the few rooms in the institutional house whose furnishings fell under her mother’s jurisdiction, and she kept it until the day she and Flora left the house ten months later, when she burned it in one of the living room fireplaces, though it was nearly summer, and hot, and she had to cut it up into small pieces first to do so.
The movers were huge, the largest men Flora, who was eight, had ever seen. One made a muscle and let her hang from it, swinging her around. Another pulled her braids and told her how in grade school he’d once cut off a girl’s pigtails, snip, snip, while she sat in front of him in class. He seemed to still find it funny, but from then on, for a long while, Flora feared that at any moment someone might sneak behind her and snip her braids sheer off.
A job had brought them there, to Darwin, to the house. Her father had liked his job in the city, but how could he turn down an offer like that—to be president? The president of Darwin College.
“He always goes where he’s asked,” Flora’s mother told her.
But then, she never said “Don’t.” In his new contract with Darwin, he’d arranged to teach his Hardy seminar every spring in addition to his administrative duties, so he felt he really wasn’t giving anything up. “It’s the best of both worlds,” he said.
“You have two?” her mother observed. “I’ve got zip.”
In memory, Flora saw that first house in Darwin—the big house—as though under a magnifying glass. The red Formica counters in the kitchen, the scratchy gray industrial rug on the third floor and along the back staircase, the teal-and-brown paisley wallpaper in her bedroom, which she knew to be ugly but loved anyway—all the materials enlarged and vivid, as though directly in front of her nose. She saw the redbrick facade of the house that way, so close she could almost feel its grainy roughness pressing against her palm. They called it “the house,” not “home,” the way, after the divorce, her father called her mother “your mom,” never just “Mom.” The fact that it was a house, a freestanding house, was in itself remarkable. Coming from the city, they found internal staircases the height of luxury; upstairs meant rich. For a long time after Flora left the house, every dream she had was set inside it, no matter what the subject, or who the cast of characters, as though her unconscious couldn’t afford a change of scenery. The setting of dreams, it was dreamlike, like something in a story someone else had told her.
The President’s House. A borrowed mansion. The house came with the job, and left with it, too. Darwin owned it, and furnished it, and repainted it when it needed repainting, and scheduled parties to be held in it. And they lived there—Flora, and her mother, and her father. They lived in a house that was like a hotel. It employed a support staff—a full-time housekeeper and a cleaning woman and two gardeners to manicure the elaborate grounds, and a crew of waiters and waitresses who worked the parties. There were two formal guest rooms, the blue room and the gold room (which was really yellow), each with its own bathroom, where trustees of the college and their wives stayed several times a year. Each guest room had two twin poster beds, as though it were out of the fifties, and sometimes Flora and Georgia slept in one of them, for a little variety. There were two velvet-swaddled living rooms that stood back to back, ignoring each other, one with a baby-grand piano, and each with a fireplace, and a library with walls of bookshelves filled with books that weren’t theirs, that were really nobody’s, and there was a veranda—not a porch, a veranda—painted moss green and populated with white wicker furniture, and in the dining room, there was a table so long, it seemed impractical, made for sitting on, not at, long enough for Flora and Georgia to cartwheel across.
Flora first met Georgia at her father’s inauguration, an event she resented deeply because she was required to wear a stiff, scratchy dress. Beyond the discomfort, the dress was hideous: a busy mauveish brown print, with deeper mauve-brown ribbons edging the sleev
es and girthing her middle, gouging her flesh and making her fidget. The worst kind of little-girl dress. Her mother had picked it out, saying, “This is the first time in your whole life I’ve told you what you had to wear.”
“Maybe if you’d done it before, you’d be better at it,” Flora told her.
There was a small triumph in the matter of footwear: She could wear her black patent-leather shoes, which she wore as often as possible.
“They don’t go with the dress,” her mother pointed out.
“Thank God,” Flora said.
But it seemed a bad omen: Darwin meant itchy, ugly dresses; Darwin meant you didn’t get to choose.
The night before, she’d fallen asleep to the sound of her father’s slow, thoughtful footsteps pacing the long hall outside her bedroom door. This was how he wrote his speeches, in his head, walking back and forth, back and forth, like words on a page, and only going to his typewriter when the thing was composed and whole. His footsteps paused now and then, and she could imagine him looking off into the air around him, poised in place by an idea. He did this in conversation; if they were walking down the street together and he came to a good point in his story, he would stop and stand still, and Flora would stop, too, to listen, both of them recognizing that some stories needed one’s full attention, that some words deserved stillness.
At the inauguration, he led a parade of the faculty and trustees to the tinny music of the brass band, the ominous melodies of momentous occasions—not “Pomp and Circumstance,” but its first or second cousin. “Pompous Circumstance” was how Flora had heard the name as a very little girl, and it had become the family’s term for these events. Those in the processional wore their long robes with their richly colored velvet hoods—the costume getting fancier as the degree got harder. The plan had been to process into the quad, but the day went wet and gray, so the world of Darwin assembled instead inside the old gymnasium with its shiny, squeaky wooden floors and its smell of sneakers. Her father gave his long speech. Her mother smiled and shook hands and laughed and nodded, but you could see the strain in her eyes—you could always see things in her eyes, like when she had been crying, or when she’d had too much to drink. Flora tried to read her eyes like a barometer, to see what was on the horizon, what was coming her way.
Georgia, whose mother was a neuroscientist on the Darwin faculty, had been to many such Darwinian celebrations and wore a weary expression of knowingness.
“Why did they name you Georgia?” Flora asked her. “Why not Mississippi?”
“Because of all the famous women Georges,” she said, as though it should be obvious. “My mom thought it would be auspicious.”
“Oh,” Flora said, not knowing any women named George. Did auspicious mean suspicious?
“I guess George used to be a woman’s name. You know George Eliot, right?”
Flora nodded. She hated not knowing things. Her mother would say, “You’re not supposed to know everything automatically—we all start out not knowing.” But the not knowing made her feel alone and ashamed. She was forever looking up words in the dictionary so as not to have to ask anyone what they meant. She would look them up nervously, furtively, scouting over her shoulder, straining to hear if someone was coming up behind, not wanting to get caught in the act of discovery. It seemed unfair of life to start you out with nothing, to leave it all up to you. And so many times one mystery would lead to another, the definition as confounding as the word itself, like the time she heard someone say “blow job,” and looked it up, only to be confronted with fellatio.
“Why did they name you Flora?” Georgia asked.
“I don’t know. They liked it, I guess.”
“Flora,” Georgia repeated, looking thoughtful and scholarly. “Better than being called Fauna, I think.”
Flora eyed her skeptically. Had she just been insulted?
“I’m precocious,” Georgia explained.
They sat under their chairs on the floor, crouched, fake-whispering. It was rude, and Flora waited for her mother to scold them, but she didn’t. Georgia taught Flora the folk songs they sang at the school she went to—the school Flora would be going to in a week: “The Sloop John B,” “The Titanic,” “The Golden Vanity.” This was life in the country; this was new—singing songs about boats.
Later, walking to the new house with her mother in the light rain while her father lingered with his new colleagues, Flora waited for her to say something, and finally she said, “I saw you made a friend.”
“I guess. What does precocious mean?” Her mother was the one person Flora could admit ignorance to, the one person she trusted with her questions, though her mother’s answers were often confusing and possibly unreliable.
“It means pain in the ass,” her mother said.
It was the twilight of the day, the twilight of the season, a late-August twilight. That time of day in that season, the blurring of the blue day into the blue night, the blending of earth and air, made things bigger, fuller. Life froze; paused to revel in itself.
“What did you think of the inauguration?” Flora asked, the new word unwieldy in her mouth.
“A good show. They sure know how to put on a show.”
“Pompous Circumstance?”
Her mother just smiled at her as though from far away.
“Did you meet any new friends?”
“Ah, Flo,” her mother said. “The wife of the boss never has friends.”
2
Paris, Athens, Rome, Darwin
SHE WOKE UP ravenous and disoriented. She’d eaten nothing but broth in days, her insides aslosh in briny liquids. Had she eaten at all yesterday? Her dreams had been someone else’s. His, maybe. Dreams full of people she didn’t know, weather she’d never encountered. Even lying down she was light-headed, her jaw stiff and sore as an old man’s joints from a busy night of clenching. Where was she? So many times Flora had wished to run away, to leave everyone she knew, everything but her own skin behind—even her own skin if she could—but she had never managed it, unless you counted the time nearly twenty years ago when she and Georgia ran away from school, or the time a year later when she did it again, alone, but then she had run away to the house she lived in, and now, if you thought about it, she had done the same thing, run away to her father’s house, run away home.
Her house: She was a landowner, a mint member of the landed gentry, a different Flora, financially, than she’d been a month before. In addition to leaving Flora the house—which he owned free and clear—and his pension and savings, minus five thousand dollars, which went to Mrs. J., her father had named her his literary executor: the most formal title ever bestowed on her, a grown-up title. It was all very organized; he was a gentleman till the end. But what did it mean to inherit words? All those orphaned words, words she did not want to read. She was their guardian. They were peeking sorrowfully out at her from their manila folder in her suitcase downstairs and from the piles on the study desk, woeing their bad luck in life in ending up with her. His LPs he’d left to Rubie—his best friend, Ira Rubenstein—with the exception of his opera collection, which went to Flora. And most of the books also went to Flora, except his first editions and other rare things, which he’d left to the college.
“Nothing for me, after all those years of service?” her mother had asked, only half a joke.
Flora grabbed her sneakers and coat from their puddle on the floor and went downstairs. From the body bag she extracted fresh shirt and socks. In the downstairs bathroom she doused her face and examined it. Not too deranged. Certainly not for Darwin. She closed the front door without locking it and walked into town.
Darwin in November looked bleak, the streets emptied of life, as though posing for a Hopper. The cursed spot next to the post office, which welcomed a new restaurant of some new ethnicity with every passing season, was in a Burmese incarnation. The art-house movie theater, still playing its obscure Romanian films, as desultory as ever—how was it hanging on? A front, surely. Maybe all
the businesses surrounding the town common were mere facades, elaborate stage sets of the cozy academic enclave. One solid push would knock them over. The banner above Pleasant Street advertised an out-of-date anti–Columbus Day rally.
At Gus Simonds’s shop, Flora filled a basket with milk and eggs, bread and coffee. Hungry for the first time in days, she couldn’t see past breakfast. Her fingers felt more robust in the faded light of morning, but she kept her mittens on inside, in case. Gus’s had long been the place to buy basics—the makings of a modest meal, new notebooks for school, greeting cards, Halloween costumes, and green-and-gold Darwin College paraphernalia. Flora’s favorite T-shirt growing up had been one that listed PARIS, ATHENS, ROME, DARWIN. Next to each word stood a simple rendering of the iconic structure—Eiffel Tower, Parthenon, Colosseum, and the college library. As with so many Darwinian outputs, it was difficult to read the tone: self-deprecating or self-important?
Gus was a man of indeterminate age. He could pass for fifty, but then again, he might be nearing his seventies. His colorless hair matched the morning—not quite gray, though no longer blond—a little like her father’s hair. His face had the wide wrinkles of a man who spent his days outside in the sun. He looked misplaced-caged, almost—standing behind his register.
“Flora,” he said gently, recognizing her as she pulled her hat off.
“Gus,” she said back.
“You’ve come home.”
“Here I am,” she said.
“I miss your old man,” he told her. “Really I do. This town won’t be the same without him. You know, he came in here with Larks for the paper every morning at seven, like clockwork. Often my first customer. My first words spoken were to him. We started our days together.” Flora added the local newspaper, The Daily Darwin Gazette, to her pile of groceries. It was nearly eleven. “Where is Larks anyway?” Gus asked.
Maggie Pouncey Page 2