Flora

dressing table. Hardly past infancy, I had begun clambering up this bench and flailing my little legs until I achieved a sitting position in front of the three-way mirror. In the long mirror was myself as a whole child, from curly top to socks and shoes. The mirrors on either side were shorter because they only started above the drawers where Nonie kept her grooming items. They gave you what was called your profile. You could never see your own profile except in mirrors like these. People had preferences about their profiles. A movie star would tell the cameraman, “Shoot my left profile, it’s better.” And if you adjusted the side mirrors, pulled them closer around you like a wrap, you could see more reflections from more angles, even the way you looked from the back. But who would want to see any more Helens? Certainly not the pair I had left behind in the living room. Not Brian, not the Huffs (despite the birthday card), certainly not Annie Rickets (“You’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”). Not Father McFall, not my father, and sometimes not Nonie (“I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.”). Even for Mrs. Jones, one of me was probably sufficient.

Okay, Annie, I’m here, taking that good, long look you recommended. I’m not going to ask you what you would see if you were standing behind me—the way I was not standing behind Nonie that day she was trying on the Easter hat. In fact, I’m not going to think your thoughts, at all. I can imagine only too well the kinds of things you would say about what just happened in our living room. No, shut up, I said I wasn’t going to think about it. This is just between me and me. Helen in the looking glass assessing Helen on the bench.

Now she’s picking up the glass, which is dusty, and swallowing more cognac and making a face. How could Nonie enjoy this stuff? Wine I could see: like all sophisticated children, I had been allowed wine mixed with water on special occasions. But this was like swallowing pepper. It made you shudder all the way down. Nonie said it stimulated your heart more than wine.

Maybe I would grow up to have a faulty heart. I might have one already. (“Her little heart just stopped. Barely four months after her grandmother died, she was found dead. Found dead on her birthday in the grandmother’s bed. It was the cleaning woman who discovered her. The person who had been staying with her for the summer thought she was just sleeping late. ‘There was too much excitement the day before. I mean, with her father and the bomb and all. She’d had a long day and was a little cross by the end of it, but I never suspected there was anything wrong. I ought to have checked on her, but she said she was very tired and didn’t want to say good night and closed her door. Now I will never forgive myself. I just wasn’t up to the task. I failed her father and I failed her.’”)

Beyond my closed door, the dance music went on. They could be dancing now. The firm palm of Finn bracing her back, the twilight blue dress swishing all over his legs. (“You are so good to her, Finn. You will make a wonderful father someday. But, did you see the way she tossed back that brandy? Her father would kill me if he knew. Of course, he doesn’t set a very good example himself. She’s such a moody child. Smart, but so moody. There have been times when I thought we were doing real well, and then there have been other times when I’m counting the days and the hours and the minutes until I can say good-bye forever to this strange old house.”)

I stood up and pushed away the bench and pondered my full length in the long mirror. A girl in a shapeless blouse and skirt and socks and loafers because her nice dress no longer fit. I would need new clothes for school and who would be there to say, “Now that’s smart”? I was not tall enough to drape a hand over my dancing partner’s shoulder, but Finn said he hadn’t gotten his full height until seventeen. “Hair the color of wheat” sounded just like Flora: “And over here Juliet Parker has planted us a little field of wheat.” I preferred “tawny,” or “dark blond.” According to Finn, all my features were the right distance from each other, which Flora said meant better than pretty. But Finn had also praised Flora’s far-apart eyes. Flora said my looks would improve if I would look happier to see people when they came into a room. I smiled at myself in the mirror and the image responded with a simpering grimace. If you were really happy to see someone come into a room, you wouldn’t necessarily smile. I had seen people not smile who were glad to see me. Brian didn’t smile, he just looked as though something that belonged to him had reappeared. Nonie wasn’t a natural smiler, either. When she was really appreciating something I’d said or done, she looked like someone looks when they have been proved right.

(“She’s a little girl who’s had a lousy summer,” Finn might be saying as he danced Flora round the threadbare carpet. “Seeing nobody but us, one friend getting polio, the other moving away, and the third one you say she doesn’t like so well. And it’s her first summer without her grandmother. She’s entitled to a few moods. And didn’t she thank me sweetly for the pencils, and you for all the things you did for her today?”)

I gulped another swig from the aperitif glass and kept my mirror face from registering the cognac’s ravaging passage down my gullet. I practiced looking like a person happy to see someone without needing to force a simpery smile. There. You did have some control over how you appeared to others.

A welcome new feeling of invulnerability lit up my insides and I decided to be generous on the eve of my eleventh birthday and go back and say good night like the kind of person people would want to see more of.

THEY WERE NOT dancing to the music as I had permitted them to do in my thoughts, and they were not on the sofa where I had left them. The tray and the coffee things were gone from the coffee table, but the glass of milk remained. The plate underneath had been removed, but two Fig Newtons and a shard of pound cake huddled together on the sailboat napkin from my sixth birthday. Flora was obviously planning to pay a bedtime visit against my wishes. Our two sketch pads, Finn’s and mine, lay at one end of the sofa, both opened to the Flora portraits. Maybe Finn had gone already, but why had I not heard the motorcycle?

I crossed the carpeted dining room and was about to enter the kitchen when a muffled sound made me stealthy. Flora and Finn were locked in an embrace by the sink. This was no movie kiss. Their mouths mashed together as though each was trying desperately to disappear down the other’s throat. I fled, stopping briefly by the coffee table long enough to pour the glass of milk over the two portraits of Flora and the unguilty sofa cushion that happened to be lying beneath.

XXVII.

How was it that I was magically skimming our treacherous driveway in the almost-dark without a single stumble? And in my leather-soled loafers, not my rubber-gripping Keds. (Was I doomed for the rest of my life to think of Mrs. Huff every time I thought of Keds?)

I felt weightless and glowing with the power of revenge. Was it the cognac or was it the hilarious replay of myself dumping the milk—or was it both? Just beneath the hilarious replay crept a curdling flow of loss and shame. I needed to outrun this flow until it had hardened solid and could no longer suck me into it.

Sunset Drive was already in darkness, but the tops of the trees, raucous with insect life, made black cutout designs against a greenish metallic sky. What color would Finn give it, or did his “special names” apply only to dresses?

The last time I had walked down Sunset Drive by myself had been at midday in early summer. Flora’s clothes had just arrived and I was fleeing her Alabama talk and her insulting notion that I had undergone “a strange childhood.” On this midday walk I had hoped to get some of myself back only to find it slipping away with every step I took. At this first bend in the road, I had looked through a veil and seen Sunset Drive going on just the same without me. And then had come the awful draining away and the loss of words to account for what was happening to me. That’s when Nonie’s voice had told me to sit down on the ground in the shade and let everything go.

“Don’t children have little imaginary friends?” Flora had wanted to know, ironing her Alabama clothes and telling that story I would rather not have heard about a certain skirt. When I said I was going for a walk, she asked should she come, and I said no, I was going out to look for an imaginary friend.

And then someone’s boots creaked and someone’s armpits smelled and I was brought back from nothingness by someone saying, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Together we scuffed downhill so I could show him my grandfather’s shortcut. I pointed out the streetlight at the hairpin curve that “ruffians came all the way across town to shoot out,” and he delighted me by falling into the same trap I had fallen in when Nonie explained about the ruffians. “Why didn’t they shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town?” he wanted to know. “Because,” I crowed triumphantly, “they already have.”

The ruffians had been here again—no streetlight illuminated the hairpin curve tonight. But my eyes had grown