Flora

“Oh dear, you’re right. You know, maybe it’s just as well, Helen, that I won’t have someone like you in my real fifth-grade class.”

“Why is that?” I asked, though I could tell she was going to say something flattering.

“You’re just so quick and imaginative I couldn’t keep up with you, that’s why.”

“But how do you know there won’t be someone—I mean, it’s possible that you’ll have someone like Brick or Suzanne,” I deflected modestly.

“No,” said Flora. “You made up Brick and Suzanne, whereas this is a rural school and… oh, I don’t know. Your mother used to say Alabama’s education standards were woefully behind. That’s why she practically starved herself so she could finish college at Chapel Hill and get a North Carolina teaching certificate.”

“How do you know she starved herself?” This was the first I’d heard of it.

“Because we all had to help her out. I mean, not me, I was still a child, though I contributed little candies for the food packages. But everyone sent money orders, even Juliet. And, even then, Lisbeth had to go to bed early so she could do without the dinner meal.”

“How did you know this?”

“Well, Lisbeth still wrote to us fairly often in those days, and she would describe what it was like to go to bed on an empty stomach. She said she would curl up in a ball so she felt fuller in the middle and then pull the blanket over her head to keep out the sounds of other students heading off to dinner. It made Daddy cry to think of her suffering like that for an education. Juliet said that was when he started going out and playing cards for bigger stakes.”

I, too, lie awake at night now, when I am older than Nonie ever became, and think about those children, the only fifth-grade class Flora ever got to teach. Brick and Suzanne and Lulabelle and Ebenezer and Jock and Jason and Hitty and Timmy and Angela and little “Milderd.” I round them up in whatever order they present themselves on that particular night and meditate on whatever pattern they want to form. It might be winners and losers. It might be who improved the most, or who disappointed the most, or who got together with whom years later and revealed something heartwarming or shocking. The combinations seem endless. Or maybe I should simply say I have not reached the end of them yet because I always fall asleep before the possibilities are exhausted.

It has puzzled me how those ten imaginary students could have played such a comfortable, even comforting, role in my night life for so many years. Their continued existence has always stayed innocently parallel to the remorse that I am still growing into. Sometimes I think those classroom hours with Flora stay safe and separate from the rest of that summer because they were filled with hope and promise and mutual development and even closeness. We were making up a game that needed both of us. (Does anyone, of any age, make up such games anymore?) But right here, right in here somewhere, in what we were making together, is located the redemption, if there is to be any.

[undated]

Dear Flora,

Here is a quick reply before today turns into one of “those” days. Harry is under the weather and taking a day off and I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.

I was so relieved that you had nothing to worry about, after all. I found myself almost wishing you had kept the worry to yourself. I knew a girl—this was of course many years ago—who did discover she had something to worry about. It was not her fault, she was forced, but, as I say, this was ages ago, another lifetime, really, and I was to lose touch with her. I have often wondered how things turned out. I think I remember hearing through the grapevine that she married someone older and I like to hope things worked themselves out.

Since you asked my advice, even though your little crisis has passed, I will say to you what I’ve said before. Keep yourself to yourself until you’ve got a ring on your finger and even then don’t tell everything. Especially not then.

I would just add it’s a smart habit to destroy correspondence. Old letters can fall into the wrong hands. I have to admit that I shuddered when you mentioned rereading my letters. I do wish you would deposit their main message—that I care about you and want you to be your best—in your heart and then destroy the letters.

Take care, now.

Yours truly,

Honora Anstruther

XVII.

Though our Fifth Grade game brought Flora and me closer and gave us something to plan for each day besides the next meal, it also gave me shamelessly easy access to Nonie’s letters across the hall in Flora’s drawer. After we’d finished, Flora, flushed with her successes—of which she had more and more, because she obeyed directions well—would gather up her books and say now she’d better get down to the kitchen and earn her board and keep. She would ask me what I would like for dinner and cheerfully offer tasty suggestions when I said I didn’t care.

After our classroom hour in my father’s room, I would fling myself flat on the floor, my arms and legs outspread like a prisoner on a rack, and dramatically declare myself worn out. And Flora would say, “Well of course you are. That imagination of yours must just guzzle energy.” At last she had stopped asking what I was going to do with the rest of my day. This was partly due to my ungracious replies during the first weeks, but the tide really had turned when I was able to say, lying on my back on the bare floor, “I’ll stay here awhile and plan tomorrow’s class while everything’s fresh in my mind, and then I’ll go out on my father’s porch and read.” The perfect child who knew how to keep herself quietly occupied. And Flora would cross the hall and change out of her teacher dress and high heels and scuttle downstairs on her funny bare feet with the upturned nails, humming one of her tunes.

On a subsequent raid of the drawer I’d had a setback. The letters were no longer in their neat packet with the earliest conveniently at the bottom. The ribbon had been untied and cast aside and they were scattered all over, some detached from their envelopes. It was as if another unauthorized person, more careless or more desperate than me, had been plundering the drawer. I realized that of course it had to be Flora rummaging around for some remembered advice to help her get through something.

The new disarray allowed me to snatch up a letter at random and retreat to safety without having to spend time making the packet look untouched. But it destroyed my plan of reading the letters as they had been written. I had been hoping to construct a chronicle of how Nonie had been lured into the correspondence and what she might have revealed to Flora that she hadn’t had a chance to reveal to me before she died.

Forced to read the letters (some undated, often the ones missing envelopes) in this haphazard fashion, during which Nonie gamely responded to Flora’s various crises, I wasn’t sure whether Flora was sixteen or eighteen or twenty when she was having them. I wasn’t even sure what some of them were: Nonie could be maddeningly oblique. I needed Flora’s side of the correspondence because she was sure to have spilled all, but hadn’t I watched those letters disappear into Nonie’s pocket, doomed to the place of no rereadings? And she had surely taken her own advice and destroyed them as soon as possible.

I also felt let down by the, so far, few mentions of me in the letters. I had yet to read about the little girl whose report cards were such a joy and who was the chief reason for Nonie to go on living. “I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house” was not a description of the person I thought I was.

“OH DEAR, I hope Finn is all right,” Flora said after ordering our groceries.

“Why shouldn’t he be?” I asked, though I had been wondering about him myself but didn’t want to be the one