When I told Flora at supper that I was going outside to cut down some weeds with the kitchen scissors, she merely asked did I want her to help.
“No thanks, I need to do it by myself.” I was sitting at the head of the dining room table, Flora having insisted it was my rightful place when my father was not here.
“Okay, honey.” She got up and started clearing the dishes, and that was that.
I felt as though I’d gotten away with something. Every other person in my life at that time, adult or child, would have made some remark about my intention or the impracticality of the scissors, but not this literal-minded cousin. In all the years since, I have come across few people who can keep their personalities out of your business. I haven’t been one of those exceptions myself. Someone I once wanted badly told me at the end of his patience with me, “I have yet to find a person willing to let me do what I have to do without making clever comments or saying what I ought to do.”
I say Flora was literal-minded. Was that it? Was she inclined to take things at face value because she was prosaic, unimaginative, lacking in cunning? I recall her being all of those things at various times. Once when I was mad at her, I called her simple-minded, and she bowed her head modestly, as if I had paid her a compliment, and said, “I expect I am.” Later that summer I told someone Flora was simpleminded, but he said he thought I must mean simple-hearted.
Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? Was she
It was getting dark when I sheared through the last clump of weeds in front of the garage door. My fingers ached from gripping the scissors. The weeds had been more resistant than expected. They had squashed easily, but were tough to cut. Every time I made another trip to the woods to dump their remains, I could hear them jeering, “We’ll be back, little girl, twice as many of us: we’ll be growing over your grave.”
Flora was listening to the radio in the kitchen and making a list of the groceries we were going to order tomorrow.
“Helen, sit down a minute and tell me what kinds of meals Mrs. Anstruther fixed for you.”
“Oh, just normal everyday things.”
“Such as?”
I was still outside with my slain weeds. And hovering just beyond them was a hospital door I wanted to keep closed. Behind it was Brian, transformed into a cripple because of my selfishness.
“What did she make for breakfast, for instance?”
“Oh, cream of wheat, oatmeal. French toast if we weren’t in a hurry.”
“No eggs?”
“French toast
“But I mean—”
“And I had hard-boiled eggs in my school lunches.” Nonie always put in an extra egg for Brian. He enjoyed having to peel them. Nonie worried he didn’t get enough food in its whole state. His mother cut off the crusts on his school sandwiches, and carved smiley faces into his radishes.
We moved on to suppers. Yes, Flora said happily, she could do meat loaf and cube steak and macaroni and cheese. And she was sure she could make creamed chipped beef if she knew what kind of beef you used. Had my grandmother kept a box of recipes?
“No, it was all in her head. She cooked for her father until he married again.”
“Yes, the awful stepmother. That’s when she packed her bag and ran away and a handsome doctor stopped his carriage and said, ‘Young lady, can I take you somewhere?’”
“No, he said, ‘Can I
In all those letters, it would have been natural for Nonie to have related parts of her history to Flora, but that didn’t keep me from wishing she hadn’t. How many people could repeat accurately the things they were told? Look at that game, Gossip, where the sentence whispered into the first ear is unrecognizable when it reaches the last. People didn’t listen. Or they heard what they wanted to hear. Or changed it to make a better story.
“My grandfather was from South Carolina,” I explained to Flora, “and they say ‘carry’ down there instead of ‘take,’ when offering a ride. And he was thirty years older. She saw him as elegant, not handsome.”
Flora took these corrections with good grace. “If my fifth or sixth graders are as smart as you, honey, I will have my work cut out for me.”
I was teaching Flora how to play advanced jacks when my father phoned from Oak Ridge.
“Not much happening here on a Sunday night. Harker and I walked down to where they’re building some more houses for workers with families. Harker is my roommate. I’d say it was like being back at college, except Harker wouldn’t have been at college. But he suits me. He’s a master welder, deaf as a post, and laughs at everything I say. What have you girls got to report?”
“Brian Beale and a little girl have come down with polio. She’s in an iron lung and he may be a cripple for life.”
I had flung down this dramatic offering to get the attention of the parent I had not spoken to since he left me with the Huffs, but I soon regretted it.
“Where is Flora?” he asked.
“On the floor. We were playing jacks.”
“Let me speak to her.”
After she had imparted the information he wanted (the lake, the hospital, the little girl, Father McFall says we’ll have to take it a step at a time with Brian), she was reduced to monosyllabic yips in response to my father’s instructions. Then she passed the receiver back to me.
“Okay, Helen, here’s the deal,” he said curtly. “You’re staying on top of that mountain. I’ve been where I forbid you to go. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As of right now you’re quarantined. Worse things than having to stay at home can happen to little girls. Like iron lungs, or death, or shriveled legs. I was luckier than most with the leg. At sixteen I had my full growth. You are only ten—okay, going on eleven—and I forbid you to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken limbs of a child. Flora has her orders, and I depend on you to help her carry them out. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Flora went straight to pieces after talking to my father. She was indulging in the kind of panic adults were supposed to hide so as not to worry children. She stumbled around blindly, tripping over our abandoned jacks, wailing a litany of her many failings, which I tried not to hear word for word because it was too upsetting: she should never have taken this job, she was not good enough, smart enough, she could never fulfill my father’s expectations, she should never have agreed to take care of me.
How could I put her together again? What would Nonie do? First she would make you sit down. She would say something soothing and reasonable, though always retaining her edge of authority, and convince you that the crisis, whatever it was, could be managed. I told Flora we should go sit on the sofa in the living room so she could relay my father’s instructions while they were still fresh in her mind. He had said he depended on me to help her carry them out, but to do that I was going to need a list of what we were supposed to do and not do. While everything was still fresh in her mind.
We sank together onto the faded yellow silk cushions that held so many associations of “talks” it was like sitting down on my past, and I coaxed my father’s injunctions out of Flora. We were not to go into the shops, not even the ones in our immediate neighborhood, or take the bus to town to go to the movies or to any place where people gathered, not even to church. I was not to go to my friends’ houses or have them to mine, and I was not to visit Brian in the hospital.
“We might as well curl up and die!” I would have screamed if there had been a guaranteed adult there to talk me down. But Flora was the one who needed to be talked down, and it was gratifying to see the influence I could wield on a person twice my age. My father had gone overboard because of his own history, I explained, but he would come around, she would see, next time he called he would loosen the restrictions; meantime we had to keep
