Flora

Helen, what are your plans for the day?”

“How can a person have plans when there’s nothing to do?”

“What did you do before?”

“Before what?”

“Well, before I was here.”

It was just amazing how she walked into these traps over and over again.

“Before you were here I was at Rachel Huff’s and they had a pool. And before that, I was still in school. And before that…” I paused before delivering my coup de grace—“my grandmother was still here.”

Flora seemed about to bestow her gift of tears, but then actually said something new. “You’ve had such a strange childhood. I keep forgetting. You were with her so much. She was like your best friend. Tell me what kind of things the two of you did together.”

Now it was my turn to feel my eyes tear up. “We drove around, we went to movies, we went to her doctors, we shopped.”

“How about when you were here in the house?”

“We talked. Or she would go to her room and replenish herself and I would read or do homework. And then when she was rested we would talk some more.”

“You didn’t go out to play?”

“Around here there was nobody to play with.”

“Well, don’t children have little imaginary friends?”

“Did you have little imaginary friends?”

“It was different with me, with us, I mean, when your mother was still living at home. We had to help out. Lisbeth got the worst of it because she was older. I told you how she had to take care of our grandmother—”

“Yes, the bedpans. We don’t need to go into that again.”

“Well, I’m just saying. There wasn’t time for us to have imaginary friends. And even with the big difference in our ages, we had each other.”

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

“Want me to go with you?”

“No. I’m going out to look for an imaginary friend.”

“Well in that case,” Flora said, my sarcasm seeming to wash right over her, “I think I’ll sit on my porch and write some letters and work on my lesson plans. What a luxury, to have a porch right outside your bedroom.”

XI.

Nobody until Flora had called my childhood strange. Even Annie Rickets had never implied that. And what right had Flora of all people, dumped in her infancy by a runaway mother, growing up in a house partly owned by the maid, to pronounce on what was strange? Every time she opened her mouth about the Alabama life she had shared with my mother, out came something I wished I hadn’t heard. If, according to Flora, my mother always got tired of her favorite clothes and her favorite things, what would have happened to me if she had lived? That is, if I had been among her favorite things. Which would have been worse? Never to have been a favorite or to become an ex-favorite, cut in half and passed on to someone left behind?

As I crept down our treacherous driveway in my blue Keds, I tried not to feel terrible about hurting Mrs. Huff’s feelings. I also wished I could recall a time I had walked down this driveway with somebody other than Flora. Our two recent walks had somehow turned it into a Flora thing, displacing better walks, walks with Nonie to the mailbox, or possibly even further back, with my mother when I was two or three. Did my mother ever hope for any mail? For years Flora’s letters had lurked in our mailbox, her young, indiscreet letters that Nonie had destroyed after reading. Before that, Flora had probably written to my mother, saying how she missed her, splashing adolescent tears on the stationery. It was sickening to think of the younger Flora’s fat envelopes arriving year after year, biding their time until she had outlived both Lisbeth and Nonie. Now she was in our house, awaiting envelopes addressed to herself in our box, hanging her clothes in our closets, the awful truncated dress being the worst: the upper half of my mother cut away because Flora’s “bustline” was way too big. Lisbeth, in her few unsmiling photos, was wand- thin and had no bust to speak of, but now I worried which way I would go. Would I soon be pooching out in front like Flora? So far, my chest was flat, but one of Annie Rickets’s boobies, as she called them, had risen under the nipple like an insect bite. “What if the other one never pops out?” she had said and laughed. “Do you reckon they’ll put me in the circus?”

Though I knew it was too early (Old One Thousand was last on the postman’s route), I checked the mailbox. A black ant inside sped off in a snit. Maybe later today there would be a letter from my father. (“Hope I wasn’t too fierce about the quarantine, Helen, but I want you to grow up to be a beautiful girl with nice straight legs…”)

Though beautiful was not a word my father used about people. He liked his compliments to have room for reservations. Flora had become a “looker,” he’d said, “but certainly not in your mother’s style.” Did he think I was becoming a looker, which, when he said it, carried a faint whiff of vulgarity, or was I developing in my mother’s style—which was what? Mrs. Huff, a commenter on everybody’s looks, was always telling Rachel if she would hold herself like me she would convey “a certain something.” Conveying a certain something sounded more like the style my father would approve of, but it didn’t mean you were good-looking. Mrs. Huff had also said, “You take after your grandmother,” and Annie Rickets had said my grandmother looked like a mastiff driving a car. Brian Beale, during his asking-for-my-hand proclamations, regarded me with complacent possessiveness, but had never actually mentioned looks. (It was painful to think of him, especially since I still hadn’t written any letter.) “That certainly suits you,” Nonie would say in the store. “It’s very pretty on her,” the saleswoman would chime in. “It’s smart,” Nonie would emend. “It’s elegant.” When one front tooth came in sticking out a little, the dentist said, “If Helen can get in the habit of pressing her finger against that tooth when she’s reading or studying, we can most probably avoid braces.” A year later he pronounced that our tactic was working and that “my beauty” would not be compromised. But he said it in a jocular way.

How would my father describe me to someone? (“Yes, I have a daughter, Helen; she’s going on eleven. She’s—”) For instance, to his roommate, Harker, the master welder, at Oak Ridge. But the roommate was deaf and laughed at everything my father said.

I had no plan for my walk. Walking was not something I normally did. None of us walked, really. The main reason I was doing it was to escape from Flora and get some of myself back. I headed downhill because that was the way we always headed in the car. The other way, uphill, soon turned into unpaved road through forest being thinned but still undeveloped, a road mostly used by loggers, which eventually joined up with a county highway on top of the ridge.

But I was not getting myself back. To the contrary, I felt myself slipping away. A veil seemed to rip and through it I could see Sunset Drive going on exactly the same without my needing to exist. This thought made me queasy.

What would happen if I didn’t return? Flora would slide and scuttle down the driveway, yipping at the ruts, until at last she would come upon me, standing like a statue on Sunset Drive. “There you are, Helen! I was beginning to get worried.” And then she would come closer and see that my eyes were blank, like a statue’s. There would still be my features, but my life spirit would have departed. I’d be like the little girl who turned into a mannequin.

Then I was so close to the rip in the veil that I was more on the other side of it than I was in myself. It was like being conscious of losing my mind at the exact moment I was losing it. I reeled and felt faint. I couldn’t even find words to think about what was happening to me.

Move over in the shade, darling. You still know what the shade is, don’t you? That’s right. Now sit down on the ground and let everything go.

There was a back-and-forth shushing of leaves, like a broom tenderly sweeping a floor. I was able to hear the tender sweeping without needing to know if I existed. Then a loud roar drowned out the gentle shush and there were footsteps and someone said, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”