Chapter Seven

A day is pinned in Flora’s memory. When she was four or five years old, at a party in a neighbor’s backyard, the birthday girl’s mother gave Flora a helium-filled balloon. The mother snipped the string of the yellow one Flora chose, tied a loop at the end, and slipped it over Flora’s wrist. Flora recalled the firm, warm balloon, and its pleasing rubbery smell as she pressed it furtively against her face before letting it float. She didn’t notice at first, but after a moment Flora sensed her empty wrist and by the time she looked up her balloon was a yellow dot in the sky. She felt like someone had punched her in the stomach and thought she might be sick then and there. She looked around to see if anyone had witnessed the event or her distress, but everyone was clustered around the picnic table, squealing around the impressively decorated cake. Without considering her impudence, Flora ran home, four houses away to where her mother sat in their own backyard. There she plunged her head into her mother’s lap, sobbing out her story in hyperventilating bursts. Delia smoothed her daughter’s hair for a few moments then gently pushed her up and off and whispered to her to return to the party, which Flora did with great reluctance, in a cloud of shame.

As an adult, Flora rarely wept. She hated that particular word especially, with its literary, biblical, melodramatic quality. Sobbing, to which she had succumbed that day of the lost balloon, was embarrassing. Even settling for the word “cry” didn’t help her feel any more compassion towards those who took to it all too readily. Her sister Ruth, for example, and her friend Grace were overly emotional. They would each tear up while talking about something sad, and it made Flora impatient. Couldn’t they control themselves and cry later, in private? Flora felt that words alone were enough to convey feeling. She didn’t need a cherry on top to drive home the point. It was excessive. Sometimes she felt they were doing it to get attention and sympathy, and this only fueled her irritation. Or it signaled weakness, something she disdained in herself and others, and that made her angry, too.

Anger was a familiar feeling for Flora. It seemed to be on a low flame within her in every waking moment. She imagined her blood infected with a malevolent substance, an inexplicable, essential component of who she was. One couldn’t have all their blood replaced, could they? So she had to live with it. It never completely went unnoticed by her, though it seemed to go unnoticed by most other people. No one would think of her as an angry person, because she kept the angry thoughts to herself. She never raised her voice or cursed or used physical force with people or objects—at least not when anyone was around. The most she ever revealed was impatience while driving, when she’d say “Rat fink!” when another driver cut her off. But she used her usual volume and didn’t even furrow her brow. Bea, who was often with her in the car when it slipped out, found this silly and laughed. Bea was one person who never provoked her anger.

Strangers might mistake her quiet nature for diffidence. When the words were on the inside, held at bay by a closed mouth and a vigilant superego, Flora could present as an innocuous, even kind, if enigmatic, person. If the words in her head were ever to escape through that portal, though, the cat would really be out of the bag, the deed done, her new fate established. She would thereafter be an angry person. Just a matter of a few millimeters, a couple of decibels, and a whole new personality would be ascribed. At times, that proposition tempted her. Would it be an easier way to live?

Flora took some pleasure in the fact that even Will could not seem to divine her true angry core, though he was subject to her “irritability,” as he characterized it, more than anyone. What he deemed objectionable, however, was only a glimpse of what was beneath the surface.

“Are we all out of olives?” he might ask, standing in front of the open refrigerator.

“I don’t know,” Flora might respond, in a tone that Will found too quick and sharp and lacking in actual concern or aid in answering the question, as she continued to stir the tomato sauce or wash a dish instead of stopping the activity or even looking in his direction. In truth she was irritable in such moments, wondering why it was her job to know about the olive supply when he was the one best able to see. She imagined a different, better wife in this situation who might turn off the faucet, dry her hands and join her husband in front of the shelves, cold air hemorrhaging into the kitchen, and say, “Oh, my, I thought we had some but it looks like we are fresh out. There could be some in the cupboard,” and she goes to look, finding none there either, and then promises to pick some up on her trip to the store the next day, then goes back to washing up. She assumed most other wives did act like that, kindly and unperturbed. They did on television. On certain occasions, she had a desire to talk with other wives about small moments like this, to find out if one of them, too, might confess to feeling annoyed by having to drop her activity to help her husband assess the olive situation, but none of her friends or her sisters talked about things like this. It confirmed her suspicion that she was unusually bad-tempered.

Given Will’s official expertise in the human psyche, it would stand to reason that he would be highly observant and sensitive to what his wife was thinking or feeling, even if she was prone to a passive poker face. But the simmering anger somehow never worked its way into his list of diagnoses perhaps because there didn’t seem to be a sanctioned category for it. Will thought he detected many other things wrong with Flora and told her so, unsolicited. “Your trouble is …” was a frequent preamble. She was neurotic, he said, for her sensitivity to sound. She was frigid. Anhedonic. He labeled her as a classic neurasthenic personality, not so much as an explanation for her irritability, fatigue, and headaches, but rather as a broad criticism. He had lately begun telling her that menopause was the cause of this and that, though he was ignorant to the fact that her periods had stopped years ago, and her only symptoms, as far as she could tell, were burning hot legs at night and excessively dry skin in roving patches. Will offered these psychological reports at various times and venues, but always when he was impatient with her or with someone or something else and never when he was completely sober. He delivered them when they were alone and when they were with other people. She accepted them with expressionlessness regardless of the venue.

Because he couldn’t read her face, he whipped up all manner of things to say about her, speculating based on her actions and the few self-reports she uttered. She must have been a challenge for him, she thought, feeling a warm pocket of satisfaction and a spike of rage. What would he have done with her as patient? Ask her questions about her feelings about her father? Even though Flora didn’t think there would be much to find in her childhood which had all the elements of a happy one—kind, if strict, parents who spent quality time with their three congenial daughters, asking them questions about their days and conversing with them like intelligent people—Will seemed like the kind of psychiatrist who could chip away until raw nerves were exposed. Aha! He would effectively proclaim. There is your trouble! Not until he could find some even tiny speck of evidence that pointed in the direction of Flora being in love with her father so that she secretly wanted her mother dead, or whatever it was that seemed to be at the root of Freudian belief, not until she hesitated or wobbled in one response giving him the pouncing opportunity, not until then would he feel like they were making any progress or that he was doing the job he was hired for. But it wasn’t just Will, of course. His lot was all like that.

This is how she imagined sessions with his patients going, no matter what ailment they first presented with. She knew he had patients who were severely disturbed, with schizophrenia and manic depression, and who required hospitalization and medication, and who called him up via his answering service so that their dinner hour was often interrupted. Flora admired the courage of Will’s patients going into analysis when, so often, it seemed the excavation site, once opened, would remain that way, serving only to make the patient more exposed and vulnerable and everything worse. But it was probably more debilitating misery than courage that drove them to it.

Will would respond to the after-hours summonses immediately, call the patient, and proceed to talk them loudly through their crises. Early on in their marriage when he returned these calls, Flora found it exciting. She felt like the wife of a celebrity, witnessing behind-the-scenes action to which few were privy. She was curious to know who was on the other end and just as fearful that she would find out. Miraculously, he never slipped and used the patient’s first name, even though he often seemed agitated enough with them to forget where he was. “You are falling into the same pattern. Don’t you see this?” he would shout, causing Flora to wince as she imagined the wretched person on the other end who had been distraught enough to call her shrink on an early Thursday evening.

He used to return the calls from an upstairs phone, and she never made an effort to eavesdrop. Now, even though there were phones in just about every room of the house, he would pick up the handset from the one mounted on the kitchen wall, not even bothering to repair to a private spot. Flora wondered—was it a performance? A lack of seriousness for the patient? Did he expect Flora to be the one to vacate? She could have sat there and listened blatantly to the entire one-sided conversation, and sometimes she did though often the patient on the other end would be wailing or shouting themselves so that she was, for all intents, sitting right in on the session. When she did leave the room it was not out of respect for the patient’s privacy but to escape her husband’s volume.

Flora abandoned the Hungarian goulash on her plate during one of these recent calls, descended one and a half flights to the basement, and lay down on the decommissioned psychiatrist’s couch beneath the painting of Dizzy Gillespie. She could still hear Will’s roaring but could no longer make out actual words. The cool leather was soothing, despite the certain fact of silverfish or spiders within inches of her. The couch had been bequeathed to him by a former medical school professor upon his retirement. In the early years of his private practice, Will had used the couch, proud purveyor of the psychoanalytic tradition, but as he gradually embraced a more heterodox style, incorporating theories and techniques gleaned from academic journals and conferences, he began to offer his patients the option of lying on the couch or sitting in one of two nubbly fabric-covered armchairs while, she presumed, he sat in the other writing notes on a legal pad. Most opted for the chair, and Will had no qualms about using their choice as a crude initial assessment: “Choosing the couch,” he said, “correlates with passivity and quixotic expectations of analysis. The chair, which necessitates at least an attempt at looking me in the eyes and vice versa, indicates a willingness to expend the requisite effort.” Both chairs sat in front of a sprawling oaken desk at which Will would ultimately, often, write out a prescription. She knew this because enquiring friends had prodded him about his life as a shrink over the years, and he answered them freely. He never divulged anything about his patients, at least not with their names attached. But he enjoyed talking about them anonymously, and their dinner guests were rapt as he described the lives of people who might very well be people they stood beside at the dry cleaners or the bank, looking like everybody else on the outside but tormented by demons on the inside.

For Flora, emotional displays were not to be witnessed by anyone. When she’d received a letter about the passing of her college friend Vicky, she’d been sitting with Will at the kitchen table. As soon as she grasped the letter’s contents, she slipped it coolly back into the envelope and set it aside for later. It’s not that Flora never cried, but she did so only when alone, like the dancing. They weren’t planned sessions. It was not as if she felt like crying and then made a mad dash for the powder room so she could shed her tears in peace. The jags came unbidden. Often they sprung while she had the television on in the morning. Something on the news, be it perversely sad or touching, say a commercial for Kodak, would cause her to begin the sniffling, tear-streaming state that she hated so. She felt foolish while it was happening, but also refreshed, and welcomed the confirmation that she was human and did have normal, if erratic, feelings.

This latter reaction, a reminder that she was not made of stone, made itself especially clear when she saw a live being, not one on the TV news, who was suffering some kind of humiliation—a derelict man begging for money outside the bus depot, a crooked old woman making her way down the sidewalk as teenagers whooshed by her, a donkey at Lollypop Farm, where she sometimes took Bea on a Saturday, who was carrying a child around a small enclosure. She still rued, forty years on, causing the startled and offended look on the face of the family poodle, Poppy, when she kicked snow at her because she wouldn’t do her business as she stood out in the backyard shivering. Occasionally, the feeling would well up in the face of nature—a tree missing an evident bough or a tromped-upon daffodil along some garden’s edge. Less frequently but sometimes more charged, a repeatedly unworn sweater in the back of her bureau drawer.

These feelings she recognized as empathy, a word that Will paraded often. Because she found his uses ostentatious—“I have a great deal of empathy for my patients who suffer from schizophrenia,” or “She lacks empathy with what her son is experiencing, which indicates sociopathic tendencies”—she tended to believe that her sharp emotional well-ups were something different. The word that came to her mind without thinking about it was “thread.” It wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, especially since it was a different kind of noun than empathy, but she could almost see a thin, silver filament connecting her soul or her heart, or perhaps merely her brain, to the beggar, the donkey, and the forsaken daffodil. And occasionally to Abby, who did clearly suffer. But with people, even the sad beggar, she could just as quickly feel disdain, depending on her mood or the wind. She could one minute be looking at the unfortunate man leaning against the bus depot’s brick wall and begin rummaging in her pocketbook for change when a loud car horn or a fire truck siren would jolt her so violently that she gave up on trying to help the man and instead wished he’d had the wherewithal to get his life together to get a job. Why was it her task to give him money when he looked able-bodied enough to at least find work mopping the floor of the bus depot?

She’d had a more robust stock of empathy at one point. It had been required for her job at the hospital. But it waned as time went on, as her patience ebbed, and as she had fewer opportunities to employ it now that she was not working. These days, when it materialized, it might start out bright, but it flickered quickly and disappeared without warning. Helping people was gratifying, but she had a limited intrinsic capacity to receive what people released out and toward her.

One of Flora’s social work colleagues had confessed that she could work more comfortably with male clients after she had her own son because she viscerally understood, finally, that all men were once helpless and bewildered little boys. Flora didn’t need to have her own boy child or to have anyone explain it to her. She knew about the neediness of men. And so she sometimes saw the empathy thread connecting her to Will, too, even though she was able to despise him in the very same moment. She could discern his weaknesses clearly, like the black outline of an image in a coloring book. He used his booming voice and aggressive comments to overpower an abiding fear that someone might think he was not enough. (Oh, now she sounded just like him, his critical, professional analysis rubbing off on her.) It was why she didn’t really feel hurt by his criticism. She saw a little boy, learning by osmosis and occasional verbal lashings that he had darn well better be big and important. They didn’t leave Russia for him to be nothing. And so on. He had never told her this. She surmised. She often considered his childhood in comparison to her own, two silent home movies on a split screen, his in black and white with scratchy scenes of babushkas, horses in the streets, dour faces, hers in a muted but colorful palette rife with gardens, Mozart, and couples dancing.

Sometimes the compassionate reverie almost moved her to a desire to exhibit affection, then she’d hear him shouting on the phone and her usual irritation would snap into place. Maybe he had it rough as a boy but did he have to choose this method to combat it? As a social worker student and trainee, she and her peers were constantly reminded not to judge. But didn’t people still have choices? In the end, Flora felt it was this inability not to judge, even privately, which kept her from being able to continue her work. It was tiring enough talking to people who didn’t want to talk to you, but on top of it, trying to hold back the feelings was too difficult. It was not how she wanted to spend her small reserves of energy. Other people were better suited to that work.

As for the comments Will made about her, she was resistant to what she believed their intention was, which was to get a rise out of her. It’s not that he was so far off base in noting her hatred of loud noises or her continual complaints of fatigue and frequent unconscious sighing, but he wasn’t able to point to something that felt like the heart of her feelings. But neither was she. How could she blame Will for not seeing deep inside her if she wouldn’t let him? She selfishly wanted him to read her mind but didn’t want his usual antagonistic, critical reaction to what he found there. She wanted him to see it, understand it, empathize, and accept it as a reasonable emotion. But she couldn’t even seem to do that for herself.

Flora struggled with what she thought was normal human feeling and what was unique to her. She went back and forth on these warring conclusions throughout every day. The question didn’t preoccupy her, but it was as if it were sitting to the side of her purview, somewhere above and behind her head.

While she didn’t take Will’s jabs to heart most of the time, she was affected by any remarks that concerned her role as a mother. According to Will, Flora’s relationship with Abby was not atypical but neither was it nourishing. He accused Flora of envying her daughter (really, Flora believed, it was Will who was envious of Abby), which exhibited in a demonstrable coldness toward Abby. He was justified in the observation and it was something that she loathed in herself. She wished she felt more nurturing and loving, or rather, she wished she could act on those feelings that did exist, as she did so easily toward Bea, but it did not happen naturally.

As she lay on the outmoded couch on the recent weeknight evening, the goulash gone cold, Flora allowed herself to revisit Will’s analysis of her feelings about Abby. How did she miss the obvious one thing about Abby’s life that was enviable? Her marriage to Kevin, a man who seemed to admire his wife and treat her lovingly, despite her moodiness and shortcomings. Of course, no one can know what a marriage is really like behind closed doors, but they seemed happy as a couple even if Abby didn’t seem happy as an individual. Odd that. But Flora was glad because it meant that Bea would grow up in a loving environment and if she was lucky she would ward off the seed of anger that was apparently being passed down the matrilineal line. Maybe Abby, too, cried at television commercials and wished she could be less angry. Abby and Flora were actually the same, had the same tainted blood. The difference was that Abby wore it on the outside and Flora hid the expression of it. Again she wondered which was the more difficult way to live.

If she had been more enthused by the idea of motherhood and had tried harder to have another child, she supposed, she wouldn’t spend so much counterproductive time in her head, creating turmoil out of nothing. (“Tempest in a teapot,” her mother reliably decreed whenever one of the sisters would express excessive dismay. All three of them reacted to the mild proclamation as a scold.) More likely, however, she would have resented the interruption of her aimless broodings. But Flora didn’t like being a mother enough, wasn’t good enough at it, to take on more than Abby who was, for the most part, blessedly self-sufficient. Which is why they had a frayed connection now. If either one of them had needed the other more, it would have been stormier, but they would know each other better as they snagged on one another’s jutting imperfections as opposed to their smooth, sliding past of one another. Flora was impenetrable and mysterious to Abby and vice versa. Just as people make assumptions about what’s under the surface in her, so she did with Abby. She felt sorry about this but didn’t know how to do anything to change it.

As for the envy, no, she did not truly feel any towards Abby. Perhaps Will and Freud would say it was deeply buried in there somewhere, but she could not sense it herself. She had both genuine pride in Abby’s accomplishments while at the same time a reserved curiosity about what she thought and felt. There was nothing in Abby’s life that would have been something that Flora wanted for herself. Abby’s life had an aura of difficulty to it, where everything she did seemed effortful and joyless. Perhaps it was because of the scowl that Abby wore most of the time. It was a scowl that Flora felt upon her own face, but whenever she looked in the mirror to assess the frown lines she might be tattooing on herself, she didn’t see what she felt. She saw a smooth, impassive reflection, that of a stranger or someone she had known from long ago.

They ate creamed chipped beef on mashed potatoes, not on toast as it was featured on the Stouffer’s box. It was a favorite of Bea’s and she serenaded her dinner to the tune of “This Old Man.”

“Creamed chipped beef, creamed chipped beef, creamed chipped beef but not on toast, with mashed potatoes it’ll be so good, you won’t want any other food.” She rhymed “food” with “good,” to Flora’s animated approval.

“You are aware, are you not, Béatrice,” said Will, hyperbolically pronouncing her name in French even though her namesake was Kevin’s Irish grandmother, “that if you sing at the dinner table, you are destined to marry an insane man?”

“Grandma must have sang at the table then!”

The three of them laughed uproariously at Bea’s swift and clever retort. Will reached over to roughly pinch her cheek. “That wit comes from your Judaic DNA, you know! It will take you far.”

“You should also know, my little shayna maidel, that chipped beef is strongly associated with the U.S. military, affectionately referred to as ‘shit on a shingle’ by the soldiers in World War II,” Will orated as Flora silently predicted the next line: “I am quite certain that my wife is the only person who buys this commercial edition purveyed by the Stouffer’s company.”

“I love it,” said Bea, chewing with her mouth open. Flora pantomimed a mouth closing with her left hand to correct her. Bea displayed her compliance by humming “This Old Man” and brandishing her spoon in tempo.

“I can see that you do. All I ask is that each time you are served this delicacy, be sure to reflect on the sacrifice of the servicemen who lost their lives to protect the freedoms that you now blissfully enjoy, such as eating creamed chipped beef on mashed potatoes while blithely singing ridiculous tunes at the dinner table and—” he looked under the table, “in stocking feet, no less.”

Bea giggled.

“Oh, Will,” said Flora. “Enough lecturing.”

“Batchigaloop!” Will said in reply, which always accompanied his burps, even when he was in the other room and thought no one was listening.

Bea giggled.

The phone rang. Flora let her fork-holding hand hit the table too hard and looked at Will accusingly.

“Can I get it?” asked Bea, leaping out of her chair.

“No. If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium,” Will said, before he left them alone with their rations.

“But it’s not Tuesday,” whispered Bea to Flora, in the disproportionate silence left by Will’s absence. “It’s Friday.”

“He’s just being silly. He means that he knows it’s one of his patients, and he doesn’t want to take the call at the dinner table.”

“Or he’ll marry a crazy lady,” she said, and returned to her humming and her mashed potatoes. Flora smiled, once again appreciating her granddaughter’s exceptional good humor, especially in contrast to her own, as well as her unwitting intuition. Will may well have married a crazy lady. Flora did sometimes wonder if this was the case.