Flora

“There’s not a lot to do up here.”

I was prepared for some discussion of the book about the traveling doll to back up my lie, but Mrs. Jones simply nodded and said she’d take it back and bring me another one next Tuesday. “Maybe this time she’ll have one of those in that series you like.”

“We had someone to dinner on Sunday,” I told her.

“That was a change for you.”

“It was only that Finn who delivers our groceries. But Flora thought we should ask him.”

“Was it nice?”

“Yes, but I ate too much. Nonie never made such huge meals. After dinner, he drew a picture of our living room to send to his mother. And he drew this portrait of me.” I got it out of the top drawer of Nonie’s dressing table to show.

“Why, it’s good enough to frame.”

“Do you think it looks like me?”

“Well, it makes you look older, but they’re your features and you look that way when you’re… pondering something. Why weren’t you wearing your nice dress?”

“Oh, it seemed too formal,” I said. For an extra reason I almost added that he was only the person who delivered the groceries, but I stopped myself in time. What if Mrs. Jones were to think I wouldn’t have dressed up for her, either, as she was only the person who cleaned the house? I was going to have to be more careful of people’s feelings. I had lost enough friends.

The outgrown dress was back on its hanger in the closet, a little rumpled from its punishment on the floor, but looking like any dress waiting to be put on again.

AS JULY BEGAN to crawl forward, I fantasized that my father would show up for my birthday in early August, even though it would fall on a Tuesday this year. He wouldn’t announce it in his postcards, the latest being of a black bear and her cub standing in a meadow (“Greetings from the Great Smoky Mts. Nat’l. Park”) with its less than satisfying message: “Thought you and Flora would like these two, whose ancestors were among our state’s first settlers. Lots of construction going on here. Will phone soon.” He wouldn’t hint at it in a phone call, either. His car would just drive up sometime around the middle of the seventh, raising a cloud of dust and… what would he do then? I couldn’t recall very well what he had done in former years, because Nonie always did so much. She treated the day like a national holiday. Last year, for my tenth birthday, a huge gift-wrapped box waited on the dining table all through the day while Nonie and I went to lunch at the Downtown Cafeteria and then to a wonderful Gene Tierney movie in which she fools people into thinking she’s been murdered. Afterward Nonie drove us out to the Recreation Park, where we both rode the merry-go-round and had ice cream sundaes. When we returned to the house I opened her presents, but we left the big package on the table for when my father got home because it was supposed to be from him, though I knew she had probably chosen it and wrapped it herself.

It was dusk when my father finally came in and made himself a tall Jack Daniel’s. When I opened the package and thanked him he raised his eyebrows at the white Samsonite suitcase with my initials, H.D.A., in gold and said, “Ah, now you’re one of us.”

At first I thought he meant because my initials were the same as theirs, Honora Drake Anstruther’s and Harry Drake Anstruther’s.

But then he added, “Now you can run away.”

“Why would I want to run away?”

“Oh,” he said, smiling into his glass, “it seems to run in the family. Doesn’t it, Mother?”

It was later that evening, after supper, when he had refreshed his drink and stumbled up to bed, that Nonie told me the fullest version yet of Harry’s running away at sixteen with Willow Fanning.

(“It was a sad thing, darling. She tricked him because she wanted a man to travel with her. By then Harry had his full growth and looked more like twenty than sixteen. And then, when they got to where she wanted to go, she dumped him. He caught polio coming home on the bus. At least she had paid his fare.”

“Where did she want to go?”

“To meet up with another man.”

“But how did she trick my father?”

“By making him think she adored him. Young men are pushovers for coquettes. And an invalid coquette is hard to resist. I often worried she’d ruined all women for Harry. But then your mother came along, the very opposite of a coquette.”)

FLORA GOT ALL the mail. Packages from the school where she would teach fifth grade. Today she had a letter from a teacher at her school who said he would be glad to teach her how to drive so she wouldn’t need to be dependent on the bus.

“That’s very kind of him, now all I need is a car,” remarked Flora, but so good-naturedly it could not qualify as sarcasm. “He was right nice, he was on the committee that hired me. Who knows, Helen? Maybe I’ll follow in your mother’s footsteps.”

I knew where this was going and did not respond.

No week went by without a letter of several pages (on both sides) from the faithful Juliet Parker. (“She says the blight got the first tomatoes but luckily there was still time to replant… Oh! Uncle Sam and Aunt Garnet are going to wait until I’m back for their remarriage ceremony, isn’t that sweet?”)

And then one day Flora looked up beaming from Juliet’s latest letter and announced, as if a prize were being bestowed on both of us, that “they” would so much like it if Flora could send them a recent picture of “Lisbeth’s girl.”

“There aren’t any,” I said.

“But surely—didn’t you and Rachel Huff snap pictures of each other? No? Well, I’m sure we can find something recent. How about a school picture?”

“No,” I said.

“No school picture?”

“Just no. Not that I can send down there. I don’t want my picture passed around by people I don’t even know.”

Flora’s face went through some drastic changes before she turned her back on me. I thought she might be cranking up for a crying spree, but then, still turned away, her voice, cold and dry, said, “You sound exactly like her.”

“Like who?”

“Like Lisbeth when she was being cruel.”

“Cruel how?”

Flora heaved a great sigh and made as if to throw herself forward into some kitchen project for next meal.

“Cruel how?”

“That’s enough said. It’s more than enough.”

“You can’t just stop there.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“You’ve got to tell me or you’ll be cruel.”

Flora turned around and treated me to what was for her a scathing once-over. “One time—it was your comment about your snapshot that reminded me of it—she went into the family album and cut herself out of the picture of all of us Daddy had taken with his new camera. Just scissored it out with manicure scissors and put the picture back in the album. It wasn’t discovered till much later and Daddy asked her why she had done it.”

“What did she say?” I could not imagine myself doing such an extreme thing, though I was thrilled by it.

“She said it was because she looked particularly nice in that shot and she wanted to have just a picture of herself without the rest of us around.”

“That’s not exactly cruel.”

“Oh, there were other— No, I’ve said enough. I’ve said too much. It’s just that you were so like her when you said, ‘Not that I can send down there.’ Like it was beneath you. And yet you were hardly three when she died. She wouldn’t have had enough time to turn you against us.”