Flora

“Why should she want to turn me against people I didn’t even know?”

“Because we weren’t the kind of people she could be proud of. Sometimes at night when I would wake up and throw my leg over her to make sure she was still there, she would get mad and say mean things. Oh, this has gone beyond far enough, Helen. Now go away and put it out of your mind.” Again she turned toward some kitchen duty that could save her.

“You might as well tell me what she said, because I’m not going away. You’re stuck with me until the end of the summer.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go away, Helen, I only meant—”

“She would get mad and say what mean things?”

“Oh, that my mother was trash and Daddy got left holding a package that wasn’t his, and how her father had been the only brother smart enough to leave the state and better himself, but then along came the influenza and dumped her right back to start all over with the people her father had struggled to get away from. When she was a little girl, she said, she used to lie awake in Florida and hear her father and mother make fun of them back in Alabama, imitating their accents. Her father had worked hard to get rid of his. Both he and her mother had acting ambitions. Now, aren’t you sorry you made me tell you such things?”

“Not really.” I was elated rather than sorry. Flora had given me two vivid snapshots of the woman I couldn’t remember.

AFTER FLORA’S EXPLOSION, or the nearest she had ever come to one, I felt things between us had seriously shifted. If I was going to get through the rest of the summer successfully (rather than abjectly), I was going to need new tactics.

In the daytime, walking around the house and its dilapidated grounds, or lurking on the Recoverers’ porch on my father’s side pretending to read a book while I waited for opportunities to steal across the hall and plunder Flora’s drawer for the next letter, I forced myself toward a subtler kind of thinking. Sometimes I was sure I could actually feel my brain stretching to make room for more intricate and convoluted paths. Not just stopping at the first old I-am-furious-so-I’ll-lash-out point, but letting it branch and divide into other possibilities. I could lash out and make her cry and get some instant satisfaction, or I could hold back and see what benefits came from my holding back.

After Flora’s outburst I went away and checked myself over for wounds and then added up the pluses and minuses. What was lost was that I now knew Flora didn’t adore my mother as much I had thought, but so what? How important was it that someone like Flora should adore my mother? What had been found were some valuable pointers to what Lisbeth really was like, and out of that finding branched another: that I saw myself not only capable but willing to behave as my mother had behaved under the circumstances. No, Lisbeth herself had not lived long enough to “turn me against them,” but poor Flora in her anguished disclosures had certainly made some headway. To the deplorable list of a father shot between the eyes during a poker game and a live-in Negro maid who owned half the house were now added a trashy mother and a father left holding a package that wasn’t his.

However, I was stuck with Flora for the rest of July and most of August. “You’re stuck with me!” I had shouted at her and rendered her instantly on the defensive. Being stuck with Flora, how could I make the most of my stuckness?

For a start, there were still those unread letters from Nonie in Flora’s drawer. I needed to find more reasons to be upstairs during the times while Flora was safely occupied downstairs. And what else could be wrested from this jail sentence with Flora? Well, I could squeeze more out of her about my mother. This would require a more subversive approach because, guilt-ridden over her loss of control, Flora was on guard against it happening again.

I worked on these things during my pitiful daytime rounds of our house and in bed at night, burrowing into Nonie’s sheets and hoping for further instructions from her. Her high-shouldered black purse (faithfully gone over with a cloth every Tuesday by Mrs. Jones) watched over me from its same spot atop the dresser. Her Easter hat lay in its tissues storing up its powers for those extreme situations when I would be driven to put it on again and angle myself just right in the mirror so I could evoke the back of her head.

When I needed to, I spoke aloud, in a husky undertone that couldn’t reach the type of person who might shamelessly crouch outside doors—and Flora, to give her credit, was not that type. The things I said, or asked, came out in a kind of automaton’s chant, as if I were being cranked up from inside and “played”:

Round and round but what else is there?

And then I would stop and wait (in midstep if I was walking around the house in daytime, in midbreath between the laundered sheets marked MASTER in Nonie’s bed at night) in case there was an answer.

I had lost all desire to walk down to my grandfather’s shortcut and explore the crater by myself. That whole experience had been ruined by the subsequent nightmare of a dismembered Nonie lying at the bottom and the old- lady shoes.

Round and round the house, “remembering” it when it had flower beds and a view painted by a recovering inebriate who bolted at the first whiff of adversity (“We could have named it the Starling Peake room, but how can you name a room after someone who ran off without paying?”); when it still had a grassy bank I rolled down over and over again while a woman turned her head elsewhere in restlessness or disappointment: the culmination of my outdoor rounds being the pilgrimage to the garage to sit in Nonie’s Oldsmobile and lay my cheek on the steering wheel and wish her voice back.

Occasionally it came, though not like the first time, when she told me to cut down the weeds, and not like the day I was walking down Sunset Drive feeling strange and she told me to sit down in the shade and let everything go. If it came through now, it wasn’t immediate and visceral like those first two times. It was becoming more like my memory of her voice—or worse, my ventriloquism of it. Unlike Mrs. Jones, I couldn’t accept with unconditional certainty that my dead one was speaking to me.

XVI.

“How many did you have in fifth grade, Helen?”

“How many what did I have in fifth grade?”

“Oh, sorry. How many children were in your fifth-grade class?”

I had to stop and count. “Twenty.”

“That many,” she said.

“Why?”

“They say I’ll have ten. Maybe twelve. It’s a rural school. I just wish I knew what they were going to be like so I could prepare better!”

“There’ll be some smart ones and some dumb ones.”

“You were one of the smart ones. Mrs. Anstruther used to write that your report cards were pure joy.”

“And there’ll be some you like and others you wish you could hit.”

“Oh, I would never do that.”

“I said ‘wish.’”

“I just hope they’ll respect me. And like me, too, of course.”

“Well, they will if you…”

“If I what? Really, Helen, I’d be grateful for your advice. What about your teacher?”

“Which one?”

“The teacher you had this past year for fifth grade.”

“We had different teachers for different subjects.”

“Oh, I’m going to be teaching mine all their subjects. Which teachers were your favorites?”

“That depends on whether you mean like or respect.” I knew I was edging into my smarty-pants mode, but it worked so well on Flora it was hard to forfeit the advantage. “I didn’t always like the ones I respected and I didn’t necessarily respect the ones I liked.”

“That’s very well put, honey. Respect is probably the most important, though, isn’t it? I mean, if you had to