Chapter Eight

When out and about, passing pairs of women on the street talking animatedly with one another, Flora marveled that they had so much to say and that they didn’t find it too onerous to summon the energy to say it. When she caught snippets of their exchanges, it seemed frivolous—“We’re leaving on Tuesday and I have no time to get to the dry cleaners….”; “I told him I would never say anything like that”; “twelve or thirteen, I think”—and yet she envied them. Isn’t that what one was supposed to be doing? Communing with fellow humans about mundane things, forging bonds, finding pleasure in small intimacies? She was aware that in theory, yes, that was what made up a life, but she had little inclination to submit to it. The more time went on, in conversation and in life, the less it felt like a stubborn refusal and the more it felt like a physical impossibility.

At least once a day, Flora had a headful of things she could say that never made it out of her mouth. It was easier, she would conclude in the split second before launching into it, just not to say anything. What with the repeating or clarifying or worse, the bearing down that was so often requested—especially if Will contradicted or challenged her—it frequently didn’t warrant the trouble. There was little she could call up in recent memory that was worth uttering—no opinion, no information, no request or suggestion. Not only that, but she could anticipate an entire conversation in advance. She saw where it was headed, predicted what direction every participant would take, and could see the ending as clearly as if it were a printed script. It was easy enough to carry on something resembling a conversation without much input from her. With most people, you get them talking about themselves and you can turn down your attention, like the volume on a TV set. Flora still listened, made eye contact, and nodded at appropriate times, but she floated over the conversation with her thoughts on other things.

Perhaps as a result of all the sister-wrangling she had taken on in her childhood, she had used up her reserves too early. Cast repeatedly as the reasonable one, Flora would calm waters and level emotional tumult when Lillian’s nostrils would flare, registering an oncoming burst of unwarranted passion about something, or when scaredy-cat Ruth would visibly shrink in the face of some equally insubstantial perceived threat. They wouldn’t admit it and might not have been fully conscious of it, but all three of them depended on these roles. Flora needed her sisters’ relative extremes—behaviors that would likely be deemed merely standard to anyone outside the household—as much as they needed her shrewd stabilizing strategies, measures she enacted without thinking. But at some point in her middle adulthood, she didn’t have the energy for it anymore. It might be that she stopped saying things so that people wouldn’t think one or another thing of her and not expect too much or anything at all.

It wasn’t just with Will that she swallowed her words, it was just as often with Ruth or Lillian or one of her friends. Unlike Will, who might enjoy a contribution from Flora but would bat it around like a mischievous cat, she knew Ruth and Lillian and Grace would hang on her words, no matter how pointless, grateful for the camaraderie and a rare glimpse of Flora’s perspective.

Flora had been told by her friends and her sisters, even her restrained mother on at least one occasion, that she was wise and calm, and that these qualities—along with a sly sense of humor—made people gravitate to her. “You always understand what I’m trying to say,” Grace had once said to Flora. “I bumble around trying to get my point across and then you can sum it up so perfectly in just a few words.”

She knew what she was supposed to say at each conversational juncture and was sure she knew just what the other person wanted to hear. But she stubbornly, or lazily, or resignedly, withheld. Another wasting of a supposed talent. She was verbally generous only with her piano students and with Bea. She distantly wondered what happened to all the words she pushed back, if they built up like earwax or dissipated like bubble bath foam.

Being alone suited Flora. She never felt lonely and had a hard time relating to others who claimed to. Like Ruth. Ruth became antsy when left alone in her house, which she was frequently, what with all of her children grown and Carl working and driving so much every day since they moved to the lake house. But Ruth had friends. Even in that tiny little town of Naples she found people she didn’t mind spending time with. But for Ruth it wasn’t a concern that she might mind spending time with anyone. She was open and friendly to everyone she met and never complained about anyone’s idiosyncrasies or rude, selfish behavior. She went to lunch with women she met at the hair salon or at the supermarket. She invited the wives of Carl’s friends over for coffee, and they, too, would make the drive from thirty miles away because they preferred not to be alone.

By herself, Flora could think and daydream undisturbed. Her thoughts had the time and freedom to develop and settle, like Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf who discovered this fact and then required it, Flora thought. Flora wasn’t doing anything with her thoughts, however, not writing poetry or anything creative or productive, but she felt the most genuine and true and even-keeled without the friction of another person pulling her one way or another. If she wasn’t adding anything to the world, at least she wasn’t taking much either. Though as this thought tried to land, she was sharply aware of sitting in her large house that instantly felt like an atrocious palace.

Flora wasn’t aware of anyone else she knew who preferred solitude the way that she did, even among the only children she knew, who were few and far between. There was Grace, who’d had a brother who died two days after he was born, but Grace was the epitome of a social butterfly. And of course Bea. While Bea had the ability to entertain herself happily for hours on end—more so than any other child she knew—she had plenty of friends and loved spending time with them, too. Sandwiched in between two sisters, Flora had the temperament of an only child, subconsciously developing a protective buffer to ward off the unpleasantness of competition. And Abby. Her own daughter was an only child. If Will could see her thoughts, he would say Flora nearly forgot to acknowledge Abby in the category because she felt guilty and suppressed the haunting feeling that she should have tried harder to provide Abby with a sibling and that it was Flora who didn’t really want another child while Will would have been in favor of it. Letting herself slide into the imaginary analysis session, Flora lost her train of thought and didn’t concentrate on whether Abby was someone who relished or rued solitude.

As for Will, he was equally content whether he was alone or with people. He appeared to thrive, whether on his own with a book or a journal while twirling his hair absently at the crown of his head, walking slowly around the perimeter of the backyard with his hands clasped tranquilly behind his back, or with almost any number that constituted an audience. The tête-à-tête, though the mainstay of his profession, was not his most advantageous social situation.

Just before she stopped working, Flora anticipated the blissful quiet of her coming days, the sudden, magical disappearance of clamorous needing, consulting, and interstitial socializing—days devoted solely to reading. Being alone, however, was not a panacea, nor was she catapulted into a carefree existence. When she had been working regularly in a fluorescently lit, climate-controlled, windowless room at the hospital, Flora had been protected from the small, devastating sensations of a mid-afternoon weekday. The desolate engine of a retreating airplane, a dogged lawnmower, a squawking blue jay, or the monolithic light of a cloudless sky reliably lodged a cold, heavy brick in her stomach, even on a day when the pressing heat threatened to suffocate all life.

Acknowledging that the forced indoor lifestyle had shielded her from such torments—she had been aware of the triggering effects of the blameless atmosphere since she was a child, but her limited adult exposure had weakened her defenses—so did she belatedly appreciate the freedom from idle reflection. She was embarrassed to admit to herself the stupid, obvious truth that, as the voices around her disappeared, the voices inside filled the gap. She now occupied a strange perspective on her life. She likened it to an abandoned elevated train track from her youth. While she and her sisters weren’t invisible after they climbed the rusty stairs up there, they were situated at a level where most people walking along the sidewalks would not think to look, so they were hidden, in a sense, and able to see the world in a new way.

As a child, she loved visiting the rail bed. It was a getaway to a thrilling, surreal universe. As an adult, this unusual vantage point—her newfound solitude during daylight hours—is not something she seeks out on a Saturday afternoon for a lark. It comes to her, uninvited. Every so often, walking across the carpet of the tranquil living room, Flora is startled by the realization that she is in the middle of her life. How and when did she grow up and raise a child? How did this furniture get chosen and purchased and placed here? One moment ago she was a young girl, having a tea party with Ruth and Lillian under the elm tree in the front yard, and the next moment she is fifty-something years old and traversing her living room with an entire life arranged around her. The realization sometimes stops her in her tracks.

“Where did we get this?” she asks herself aloud during one of these spells, reaching over to the marble-topped coffee able to touch the stiff tutu on the statuette of Degas’ Petite Danseuse. She cannot recall. The moment is dizzying and chilling. She couldn’t reconcile that this same life she was in now was on the same continuum as when she was four years old and sixteen years old or even thirty. She remembered a visit with a dear great aunt, Delia’s sister, whom she loved but didn’t see much in her adult years. There was an occasion to visit with Great Aunt Caroline when Flora was in her early thirties and it was a dreamlike experience. It was as if Great Aunt Caroline was a famous historical person that Flora got to meet. How could this same person from a lifetime ago still be here? How could Flora’s long, segmented life be just one person’s small life? And every person walking around on the planet at the same time, having those same small but also extremely long lives? The life Bea was living right now would someday be this unreal to Bea and seem to belong to another universe. It was too much to contemplate. Sometimes Flora wished she could pause everything and let the flurry of thoughts settle into a tidy little bundle before carrying on.

The Lalique crystal warthog, on the end table beside the couch, aligned her memories somewhat, and time finally stacked up in a more logical way. The warthog was one of the several Lalique pieces—the others being the more typical birds and bud vases—she had bought on trips to Paris, at the shop near Montparnasse. She and Lillian found the warthog that they deemed ugly-beautiful before they had ever heard the term jolie laide, and Flora bought it to commemorate the dangerously uncontrollable laughter they shared amidst the humorless mirrored shelves. The spinning bubble feeling ended abruptly, returning her to the present where her eyes fell, remarkably, on the black and magenta spine of Asimov’s Of Time and Space and Other Things on the bookshelf at the far end of the room. She felt more grounded but also bereft and remained in a disoriented sensation for several minutes as she padded on her toes to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and extracted two Stouffer’s lasagnas.

A bookworm contest was afoot in Bea’s third-grade class, wherein each student wrote the title and author of a book they’d just read on a circle of construction paper, and the teacher, Ms. Fontaine, taped them consecutively onto the wall with the idea that the bookworms would grow over the year and wind around the room, even if it meant having to tape them over part of the chalkboard, the cubby holes and the classroom door.

Though there was no such competition in her own grammar school, Flora would have won handily. Through encouragement from no one in particular and far more than anyone in her family, Flora was a voracious reader and was rarely without a book by her side. She didn’t acknowledge it until long after she was married and was still spending many of her free moments reading novels—usually those focused on a female character who was somehow misunderstood, she realized in hindsight—but she did prefer the unchallenging company of fictional characters to those living and breathing and disturbing and expecting in her midst. The same was true of the characters in movies and, when it came into existence in her life, television. While she was a genuine avid consumer of literature and popular culture and had a reputation as such from an early age, her interior motive was the construction of an ersatz circle of friends and acquaintances who offered much but demanded nothing.

Bea’s bookworm was the third longest in her class so far and while she didn’t seem to care about competing for length—she had read ten books before Thanksgiving whereas the leader, Debbie, had read three times as many—she was keen on originality. She wished to avoid content overlap between her worm segments and those of her closest competitors. There was significant redundancy what with all the Laura Ingalls, Nancy Drew, and various horse-themed books, so Bea asked Abby and Flora for ideas to help forge her own path. It so happened they both independently suggested Little Women.

Flora could barely remember the story at all, having read it when she was Bea’s age, though she could access vague impressions of the sisters: Jo the renegade, Amy the artist, genteel Meg and angelic Beth and her tragic demise. And Marmee, the pillar. She hadn’t remembered Abby reading it at all, and maybe she hadn’t, but Flora was not going to ask her. Flora and Bea read some of the book together. Instead of Bea’s usual retreat to the TV room while Flora prepared cocktails and then dinner, the two sat together in the living room, while they could still read by the sunlight as it crawled across the room. Bea read from the worn library hardcover in her lap while Flora, shoes removed, positioned herself perpendicularly to Bea, propped up by two square silk pillows against the low arm of the sofa, her legs extended until they just touched Bea’s leg. She wiggled her toes to signal to Bea that she was ready. Bea read well and without faltering, but in her eagerness to entertain, she consistently over- and mis-emphasized words and syllables. After a few paragraphs, as Flora managed to relax into the jarring cadence, Bea recited a passage that piqued Flora. “I’ve been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”

The bit that came next described the comfort that confession provided for Jo, learning that her mother was also imperfect. Bea read on, ignorant of the loss of Flora’s attention. True to form, Marmee’s confession did not have a comforting effect on Flora but rather merely rekindled her own anger. It did not invoke a sense of solidarity or the resolve to share her flaw with someone who looked up to her. It simply made her mad that people—women—had to be angry; that they had—yes had—to hide it; that they had to struggle just to control it. It did not mollify Flora, as it had Jo, to know that other people carried anger around in their bodies and minds for decades. In theory, Flora knew she could not be unique, but she often felt as though she was. And she didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, because there was a limit to that. Flora believed that if she began talking about it, if she opened the valve even the slightest, she would vomit like Regan in The Exorcist, continually, until it was all out of her. That notion, repulsive though it was, actually offered some pleasurable comfort.

Bea’s laughter brought Flora out of her bitter musing. Shaking, and with tears running down her face, she was flopped dramatically over onto her side, gasping for air.

“For the love of Pete,” said Flora. “What is so funny?”

Bea attempted to gather herself and pointed to the page, stifling new bursts. “This word!” She collapsed again, and Flora sat up and leaned over the book where Bea’s finger was jammed into the page below the word “bosom.”

Flora was disappointed and annoyed that Bea would exhibit such a childish reaction. Was she no better than an eight-year-old, or a fourteen-year-old, boy who couldn’t conceal his glee when encountering the mere suggestion of the human anatomy?

“I said it wrong when I was reading with mom and she cracked herself up until her stomach hurt!” Bea lost control again and was now grabbing her own stomach. Flora started in, too. The two of them laughed until Bea took a long, convalescent breath.

“You have some ’splaining to do, Lucy,” said Flora, imitating Ricky Ricardo, aware that she might provoke another attack but unable to resist the giddy oasis.

“I said it like blossom. But without the L. Bossom. And mom didn’t understand and grabbed the book and when she saw it, she laughed like I just did for a long time. And then she made me laugh, too, even though I didn’t really know why she was laughing. Like you just did!”

Flora imagined the scene. She had not seen Abby and Bea reading together, well, ever. She was heartened by what she now conjured. She saw them sitting on their own living room couch with the dingy and thinning locomotive-themed upholstery, Abby with a cigarette in one hand, her shapely, sheer nylon-clad legs crossed as she sat next to her daughter.

“So how do you say it? I can’t remember.”

“Bosom,” said Flora. She tried to think of something that rhymed but failed. “Bosom,” she repeated.

“Bosom,” said Bea, nodding with finality, as if they’d just agreed on something important.

They hadn’t heard Will open the front door and suddenly he was standing before them.

“Bosom,” he said, matching their certainty. “I will use it twice in one sentence. I am tickled to be home in the bosom of my family with my sweet granddaughter and my stunning wife and her beautiful bosom.”

“Will!” snapped Flora, though emitting a leftover laugh.

Bea giggled.

“Louisa May Alcott’s father, Amos Bronson, was a transcendentalist and a collaborator of Thoreau and Emerson, you know,” bellowed Will, from the coat closet where he roughly hung his jacket causing a cacophony of hanger chiming. Bea looked at Flora with a comical frown; Flora frowned in response.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” said Flora.

Flora put on her shoes and the two of them went into the kitchen via the left side while Will entered the kitchen from the other doorway, still talking about Alcott and his cronies, unconcerned with his audience’s divided attention. Just tall enough to reach the Goldfish from their spot at the back of the counter, Bea poured a generous amount of them into a lotus bowl set out by Flora. Will rummaged in the icebox, and Flora preheated the oven. Still buzzing and pleasantly rumpled from the laughing fit, Flora wore a faint smile and was aware of herself in the scene in her kitchen. Moments like this fit into the category of happiness, she knew. But the moment she put a frame around it, she saw the edges dissolving and felt her hovering observer-self settle back into her earth-bound body with uneasiness, suddenly hyper-aware of her bloated belly and her tired eye sockets and sagging shoulders.

She thought of Marmee. So tired, she must have been. Raising four girls on top of hiding her anger. Or was she angry, in part, because she was raising four girls? Flora had raised only one and she felt put upon. Not because raising a child was too much to ask of her, but to be a certain kind of person while doing so perhaps was. But who was asking her to do that? Will? Abby? It was not spelled out. But it—the expectation—to do what? be what? was there, and it infuriated her. When the baking pan wouldn’t slide smoothly out of the cupboard, she pulled it too hard and three of them came out together, clattering obnoxiously, causing Will to shout something that she couldn’t hear.

“Can I go watch TV now?” asked Bea rhetorically as she exited the room.

Flora heard the TV go on, its electric fizz filling the air, and she longed to share Bea’s ability to become absorbed in the colors and plots and exaggerated voices. She stepped for a moment into the living room, trying to get herself back to the previous mental state she’d slipped into on the couch, only ten minutes ago but it might as well have been ten days ago and ten miles away. Just listening to Bea read, barely taking in the words, she had been lulled by the promise of the moment lasting longer than it ever could, as the chilling room firmly reminded her.