“I’m just taking a ride with my—” Flora gestured in the direction of the path, but Paul had ridden ahead, so there was no need to explain what exactly he was to her.
“No, I mean in Darwin, in February?”
Flora started to answer, but Esther cut her off again. “No, wait, sorry, whoa. I heard about your father, Flora. I’m really, really so sorry about that. How horrible. Super intense. Are you okay?”
Tears welled in Flora’s eyes. Those three short words—“Are you okay?”—were so demolishing. Esther swooped in and hugged her again.
After a moment, Flora pulled away. “I’m okay,” she said, sweeping her knuckle below her eye. Esther reached up and brushed away the tears on her other cheek.
“I know you are,” she said. “But shit, it sucks. He was such a charmer, your dad.”
It would require so much less energy to cry in front of this old friend who’d seen her cry many times before, years ago, in a different life, to let herself weep right there on that path devoted to physical fitness and satisfaction in the natural world, but Flora caught her breath and rubbed her face dry, and Esther didn’t take her eyes off her as she did. “What about you, Esther? Tell me about you.”
“Me? Yeah, well. I have a kid.” She fanned her arms toward Lily in a sweeping game-show-hostess motion. “Wasn’t quite banking on that, but you know, shit happens, right? And so I had to move back in with my mom and stepdad—oh joy, right? You know how excited I must have been about that. Remember in high school how crazy they made me? And they still do, but things are much better now, I mean, much, much better. I guess I’ve finally grown up a little, I don’t know, or maybe they’ve mellowed with age, but whatever it is, it’s totally manageable. And totally necessary because the prick f-a-t-h-e-r kind of vanished when we got the news, and I was not up for being the single mom of a newborn, you know? And while I’ve been here, to prevent myself from completely dying of boredom, I started this nonprofit, kind of a political thing. It just seemed like Darwin was a good place to do it, with all the self-righteous old lefties running about—I mean, look at these people.” Esther pointed to the cyclists cruising by. “The whole sanctimonious ‘Darwin knows best’ thing, I get so tired of it, you know? Sometimes I can’t believe I’m really living here again.”
Flora watched the Darwinians in their unflattering spandex and conscientious helmets. “God, I know,” she said.
“But, yeah, it’s going pretty well. And I think I’ll be moving out soon. Now that Lily is older, we can hack it alone, right, Lil?” Another solemn nod. “I hope so. Wow, I really hope so.”
Flora laughed, giddy, exhausted. “Wow, Esther, it sounds great. So impressive you’re doing all that.”
“Yeah? Thanks, Flo.”
“Really. A big day for me lately is going into town to run errands.”
Esther’s forehead creased in concern. “I’ll keep you in my prayers. I know you’re going to get through it.”
Was that a joke? But then Flora noticed a delicate gold cross hanging around Esther’s neck. Not an architect; a Christian. “It’s so good to see you,” Flora said.
“You too, you too.”
“So what’s it called, your organization?”
“Oh, man, I wrestled with that one. It seemed so important, and on the other hand totally trivial. So I’m just calling it Intelligent Darwin. Kind of a play on Intelligent Design, but also that’s what it’s about, how this place desperately needs to wake up from its liberal elitist hypocrisy and accept that there are other ways of looking at the world. That there is room out there for both ways to be taught, side by side. I’m proselytizing, aren’t I? I’m so used to making my pitch, it’s hard to turn that mode off. Wow. Who would have thought back in high school, when I was baked out of my brains, smoking those Parliament Lights like it was my life’s work, that it would come to this.”
“P-Funks,” Flora said, their name for the cigarettes.
“I mean, could those things have been any worse for the environment? With those plastic filters. Shit. But what did we know, right?”
“So wait,” Flora said. She scanned Esther’s face. Her sincerity was plain. But then, Esther had met all her wildly divergent phases with smooth-faced earnestness, as if the contradictions were a problem of interpretation. “Your organization is pro–Intelligent Design?”
“Don’t look so shocked, Flo.” Esther laughed, clapping her hands together, a gesture Lily echoed. “I’m not a leper, just a Christian. I got pregnant, the guy flaked, and I was all set to get an—well, to end it, and then I couldn’t. And I began to see things differently. To understand what my parents had been trying to tell me all those years. That they weren’t trying to control me, though it really felt like that. But no, they were trying to save me. I know, Flo, you should see your face right now. It must be super weird for you, hearing me talk like this, seeing my conversion. But I’m still the same Esther, just a little less messed up.”
Flora felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Paul. She had almost forgotten she had come there with him. It had taken him a while to notice she was gone.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Esther, this is Paul,” Flora said. “Esther and I went to high school together.”
“How do you know this character?” Esther asked her. “How are ya, Paul?”
“You two know each other?” Flora said.
“I roped Paul into doing some pro bono stuff for me—you know, dealing with some IRS nonsense for I.D., et cetera.”
I.D.? Id. Flora waited for Paul to explain their connection. He was smiling widely, dimpling them indiscriminately. Obviously, he found Esther quite amusing. Who was this man? Volunteering his time to the anti-Darwin lobby? She hoped to God Paul and Esther had never had sex.
“Paul was my father’s lawyer,” she felt she had to say. “He drew up his will. That’s how we met.”
“That’s intense,” Esther said. “And now you’re—”
“Biking,” Paul said. “You can’t put it off forever.” He nudged Flora with his elbow—a pal-like, brotherly nudge.
“Cool,” Esther said, turning from Paul to Flora. “So, Flo, give me your number and I’ll call you. I’ll ditch the missus”—she nodded toward Lily—“and we’ll catch up.”
“Good luck with that,” Paul said. “She doesn’t answer the phone.”
“That’s not true.” How did he know that? She hadn’t known he’d noticed.
“Okay, well then, here’s my card. I know, weird, I have cards, right? But call me sometime.” Across the bottom, below the contact information, ran a single line of Scripture printed in cursive: And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Esther thought herself so different, so far from all the other Darwinians; in truth, they were all seeking illumination, a way out of the darkness through their separate and opposing methodologies. But what was so bad about darkness? And wasn’t faith, of any sort, a whole lot of trouble to go to?
Flora slid Esther’s card into her back pocket and climbed onto her bike. How did one take leave of a believer? “Peace be with you”? “Take care, Esther,” she said, and she pedaled off down the path without waiting for Paul, into the uncomprehending darkness, to which she was accustomed.
Her parents might have let life go on as it was, but it was Dr. Berry who said no. A terrible thing had happened, but her father was still her father. She couldn’t keep avoiding him and his house; she couldn’t keep running away.
“You’re a horseback rider, you know the expression—‘You have to get back on the horse,’” Dr. Berry said.
That was a metaphor. Studying poetry in school, Flora had learned about metaphors. She’d known about them for a while, but now she understood them, mostly. Dr. Berry wasn’t really talking about horses. So it wasn’t worth explaining that she had never gotten on the horse in the first place.
“I don’t want to get back on,” Flora told her. “I didn’t li
ke it that much to begin with.”
“Didn’t like what?”
“The house.” That’s what they were talking about, wasn’t it? “It’s not even our house anyway. It’s Darwin’s house.”
“You never liked it? Never liked living there?”
Flora thought it through. “I loved it. But I didn’t like it much.”
That earned a slight smile. “Is there anything you could do to make you like it more, to make it feel more like your house?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
She did not ever want to see those bunk beds again, with their glow-in-the-dark star stickers spelling out FLORA across the top headboard and GEORGIA across the bottom. She did not want to climb the steps they’d jumped from or see the emptiness of the third floor. “If it looked different, maybe. New furniture, a new wardrobe for the house.”
Flora guessed Dr. Berry would laugh, but she said, “Sounds like a good idea.”
So the next week, they went shopping, Flora and her father, performing their shrink-certified homework, at a department store in the mall, over an hour away. It was the longest they’d been alone together in months, and soon they exhausted all their topics of conversation.
He told her again how impressed he’d been with her Macbeth, her sense of the language. “It’s hard stuff,” he said. “But you’re a natural. As if you’d been speaking in iambic pentameter from the word go. You have poetry in your soul, Flora-Girl.”
“Thank you,” she said, formal and shy, as if he were someone else’s parent.
They were silent for a while and then he asked, “Any word from the Wizard?” and Flora turned and looked out the window at the other cars as they passed them.
“Not yet,” she said.
Her mother had gone shopping on the day they moved to Darwin, but she had made mistakes—the point had been to make mistakes. At the mall, in the home department of the windowless store, with its furniture arranged as though in rooms—bedroom after bedroom, den upon den—Flora was careful not to make mistakes. They bought a new rug and a new lamp and a new desk. Best of all, they bought a bed to replace her old bunk beds—a canopy bed, something she’d always coveted now hers, like the bed of a girl in a story. She couldn’t quite believe it was hers, strange to have the longing no longer necessary. If you wanted to, you could swing from the thin wrought-iron bars, from which a gauzy white fabric hung, but Flora didn’t want to.
The new furniture was delivered and the old given away and the workmen from Darwin Buildings and Grounds came and they pulled up the carpeting and they pulled down the paisley wallpaper, and Flora helped. It was her first afternoon in the house, and she spent it scraping, yanking, tearing, gummy grime embedding itself beneath her fingernails. Destruction felt good, though she saved a small strip of the paisley, folding it into the pocket of her pants and later tucking it into the top drawer of her new dresser. They listened to Top 40 on the radio on a scratchy, paint-flecked boom box, and drank cold soda Betsy brought up for them when it was time to take a break. “The guys,” as Betsy called them, teased Flora: What, was she trying to take away their jobs, working so hard like that? Trying to make them look lazy? She laughed and shook her head no. That was the thing about the President’s House—there were so many people around and it was never boring, never empty. It was her mother who had hated living in the house, not Flora.
A week later, there was newness—the bed where the dresser had been, and the lamp, which was a standing lamp, now by the bed, not on the desk, and the rug blue and pink and fringed, and on the walls they’d painted wide blue and pink stripes and the room looked like wrapping paper; it looked like a present.
The Tuesday after the room was done, she and her father went back to Ponzu for the first time in ages, the last time they would ever go.
The hostess asked, “Where’s your sister?”
Flora looked at her father. “It’s just us tonight,” he said.
On the car ride home, he said, “That Chinese restaurant in town is pretty good.”
The next day, Flora told her mother how much she liked the new room, how it was better being in the house than she’d thought it would be, thinking her mother would be glad for her, but what she said was, “Funny. He was so reluctant to change anything when we first moved in.” Though Flora could remember her mother saying, “Why bother?”
“Would you rather I hate it there?” Flora asked her.
“No, of course not.”
“You don’t think I should have a new room?”
“Don’t you think you and your father need to talk about all that’s happened, too?” her mother said. “Shouldn’t you tell him how you’re feeling? I don’t know that problems can be solved in the long run through furniture.”
Then Flora felt a little bad about the new room, too, in addition to loving it so much. She cared about the wrong things. She was materialistic, a bad thing to be in most places, but especially in Darwin. She was not too good for this world, like Georgia, who almost was. No, she was just bad enough for it. But the room was so beautiful—Flora couldn’t believe it was hers. It was just how she wanted it. She loved it guiltily, madly.
17
The Underworld
THEN THE SNOW CAME. It formed itself into steep banks with a tough, crusty shell. You walked on top, yards above the earth, until your foot sank through the crust, half your leg suddenly vanishing. Shoveling the front steps became Flora’s new vocation, replacing the coffeepot cleaning. A large truck plowed her driveway, the noise of scraping and mechanical heaving that first morning rousing her rudely from bed, but by the time her coat and boots were on, it had scuffed itself away, and days later a bill arrived. This was life in the country. On the sidewalks, salt crunched underfoot. A snowman in professorial regalia appeared on the Darwin quad. But inside her father’s house, all was warm and dry. Paul’s friend the contractor had stayed the leaking of the roof, the sound of men working, fixing, laughing, filling the house for days.
Other things, like the snowplowing, that her father had set in place before his death still continued. Like Mrs. J. Because Flora’s father had left her money, Mrs. J. insisted on coming twice a month to clean, though Flora tried to tell her it seemed silly; she had plenty of time to do it herself, and the house, with just her in it, never got that messy. Or maybe Mrs. J. did not like to leave anyone too long alone in the house—Cynthia, Flora, anyone who wasn’t Lewis. Maybe she liked to make sure Flora hadn’t fucked anything up too irrevocably—the dog still breathing, the roof still standing.
Also, his subscription to The New York Review of Books. The big-headed cartoons unnerved Flora. She read only the classifieds. She imagined everyone read only the classifieds, with the exception of Paul, whom she’d caught in the act of actually reading other things. But she couldn’t get enough of the self-parody of intellectuals: “Deeply moral 50-something MWM seeks discreet and cultured 30-something WF for talks about Foucault and meaningful orgasms.” Curious omission of a comma—did that mean talks about meaningful orgasms? How riveting.
At first, it had seemed a novelty that she was permitted by law, even expected, to open another person’s mail—her father’s mail, like his journal, and his house, hers. The first and last credit-card bill had presented a puzzle. What, specifically, had he bought for $46.82 at Finch’s Books? Was it Cynthia he had taken to dinner at that seafood restaurant by the shore he liked so much? Even after she’d contacted everyone, with Paul’s help closed accounts and changed names, mail kept arriving for Lewis Dempsey; to the junk mailers of the world, he was still alive. Did he want a gym membership? Was he aware of recent alterations to the state’s recycling rules? Had he given up on animal rights? Even Darwin College still sent him the odd invitation: cocktails in honor of the young classicist who’d published a new translation of Thucydides; the Religion Department was hosting a panel of prominent atheists—would he be interested in attending?
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Flora made her way
across snow and salt to class and back again, the rest of her quiet, studious week taking shape around the lectures, which were themselves bookended by her bedridden weekends with Paul. She loved the class, loved hearing Carpenter read aloud from the poems they discussed. She’d forgotten how much she loved being read to. When Carpenter read, he was a young man, lighter, his voice crisper, and less wrinkled. In her reading, Flora knew exactly what she liked, her taste clear and definite, and she loved when Carpenter pointed to the exact moments she had particularly noted and underlined, the feeling both of kinship and of knowing the right answer. She loved watching the relationships between students shift and evolve in the room, who sat with whom, and the sudden burst of noise as the class, released, lifted from their seats. Her favorites were the ones who looked nervous when they raised their hands and blushed when Carpenter approvingly responded. Had Flora wasted all her years in school? Why had she not liked it more then, when it mattered?
After class one day, Carpenter sidelined Flora. “Ms. Dempsey!” he called over the heads and headphones of undergraduates. “How are you finding the course?” His pale eyes through his pink glasses searched for affirmation.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “I love being back in the classroom. Though, really, it’s all new to me. I’ve never read Eliot, you know.”
“No!” Carpenter sounded breathless with dismay, as though she’d admitted to complete illiteracy. “Your father never encouraged it?”
“He did, some. But he didn’t like to press. And I was always more of a prose reader.”
“Surely one doesn’t have to choose between the two—as a reader or a writer!”
“True. I was just going to stop by the library and take out the edition of The Waste Land with Pound’s annotations,” she told him.
“Borrow mine!”
“That’s kind of you to offer.”
But Carpenter insisted. “It’s right in my office. Have you ever been down to the Darwin tunnels?” he asked. “I despise wearing an overcoat, so when on campus in the winter, I rarely see the light of day.” He laughed joyfully at his own idiosyncrasies.
Maggie Pouncey Page 20