Chapter Fifteen

“Do you work, Flora?” Dawn asked. They sat in one of the few booths at Woolworth’s, far from the window, underneath a framed, faded print of an ice cream sundae.

Flora blushed, inexplicably. It would be accurate to say, “I was a social worker for thirty years, but I stopped doing that just a few years ago. Now I teach piano lessons five hours a week at the most.” Instead, before reason intercepted, she blurted, “I’m a piano teacher.” It was the first time she had ever identified herself this way, not an announcement that anyone would find exciting, but Flora felt a pleasant surge of authority as it came out.

Dawn brightened. “Really?”

Flora still felt deceitful in every interaction she had with Dawn, but she felt less unscrupulous than she had a week earlier. After the failed linen shopping at JC Penney, she held out only two days before she returned to Oakdale Plaza, and if she happened to be moseying down the arcade just as Dawn was crossing the parking lot towards Woolworth’s, well, stranger coincidences have occurred. Dawn had not feigned obliviousness when she spotted Flora, as Flora would have done in her position, but instead instinctively moved toward her and looped her arm through Flora’s. And here they sat.

“Yes, well, I only have a few students, but it is the only job I have, so I suppose I am a piano teacher.” She laughed as she took off her glasses to read the menu and to avoid Dawn’s eyes.

“I have always wanted to play the piano,” Dawn said, dreamily, like an actress reading a line.

“Do you play something else?” Flora asked. Could she order the patty melt? She tried to convince herself of her nonchalance.

“Nothing. Well, I got stuck with the clarinet in fourth grade, but I quit real quick. Someone in my apartment building has a piano, and I hear them playing sometimes. It’s a kid, I think, because they’re not very good. But I still like the sound of it. Even the mistakes.”

“Well that’s fortunate! I can say that I have listened to my share of mistakes. And it’s not exactly music to my ears.”

“Could I take lessons with you?” Flora looked up from her menu to see Dawn with her hands pressed together in prayer, like Bea at her First Communion.

“Oh, I teach children really. I don’t think—”

“I’m like a child, Flora! I don’t know anything!”

“It’s just that—” Flora started to deliver a policy statement and explain that she had turned down other adults and then, almost as quickly as she had decided to call herself a piano teacher, she relented. Dawn would surely sense her lack of commitment to such a phony principle anyway. You have a contract, do you not?

“I could make an exception, I suppose,” Flora said, feeling again the surge of authority rush up and into the top of her scalp, causing a pleasant tingle.

Dawn’s prayer hands clapped gleefully. “Wow! Really? Thank you! I’d be so grateful!” Then assuming an utterly serious countenance, she leaned in and whispered, “Of course, don’t worry. I can pay you. I’m not broke. I’m even telling Mark he can keep his alimony. I don’t need it. I’m taking care of myself. I’m going to make it on my own.”

Flora took off her glasses and defiantly slapped her menu shut. “Like Mary Tyler Moore! Good for you!” With a cocktail of queasiness and elation, she told herself she’d figure out later how to secretly teach this young woman to play, which would necessitate weaving additional silken lies into her web.

“I will have the patty melt,” she told the waitress, when Dawn gestured to her to order first.

“I will, too,” said Dawn, who had not even opened her menu. She winked at Flora, and Flora had the urge to cry, the same tears that were pulled out of her from the Kodak ads.

“You got it, ladies!” The waitress took the menus and left Dawn and Flora to bask in the promise of a new project. If this feeling could be bottled, this would be enough to keep Flora from falling off the beam. It seemed such a simple thing to want—some as yet undisturbed perfect bubble of an idea. The feeling just after saying, “Yes, Will, I will marry you,” and the one just after the doctor told her she was pregnant. But they were perfect only because they were ephemeral. And if you only ever coasted on the feeling alone, nothing would ever really happen. It was perhaps her version of whatever people found so magical about LSD, which is the only way she could understand someone submitting to an “acid trip,” a pointless endeavor that was tragic because it had an end.

Tormented by her unqualified lack of control over her own actions, Flora drove home in a preoccupied state. She stood at the laundry room door to let Toto out to piddle and stayed there long after Toto had returned to be let in. He stared up at her and she stared through him, unable to think of anything other than how to extricate herself from the deep, dark hole she had excavated. She couldn’t have Dawn as a piano student. She couldn’t even safely have one more conversation with Dawn. Is this how adulterous men conducted their lives, scheming to avoid one party finding out about the other? Did the men worry as much as Flora was worrying now? Or did they just fabricate business trips and late meetings and weekends at the office to finish work? She knew the answers: Yes, they were always scheming. No, they did not worry. They just carried on.

She madly flipped through the various excuses she could serve to Dawn. She has too many students. Her piano is badly out of tune. She is taking a hiatus. She really did need to honor her children-only policy. Toto scratched the door, and Flora laughed out loud, at the dog and at her own predicament. “Another fine mess!” But in truth, this was a novel experience. Messes were not something she knew how to deal with. Her life had a low excitement level, as she preferred it, and that reduced the likelihood of messes. How was she of all people in such a situation? What had come over her?

Dawn lived, as it turned out, not exactly in the train station underfoot like the storybook cricket and cat, but a few miles closer to downtown—the most charming part of the city, Flora determined, when Dawn wrote down her address on the back of Flora’s grocery list. The neighborhood’s sidewalks were lined with tall trees arching over the streets, and the houses were old and most had porches and surprising combinations of paint colors that gave it at once a bohemian and patrician vibe, as Steve Levy might say. As Flora drove slowly down Dawn’s street, struggling to read the house numbers, she found that as she neared her destination, the trees became more sparse, then disappeared, and the houses lost their porches while the yards here and there gained a chain link fence as well as children’s toys and bikes seemingly abandoned mid-activity.

Dawn lived on a block whose southern side was comprised of a row of institutional, red-brick apartment buildings. There was no green space since the building was flush with the sidewalk, as if too big for its lot. It had been a matter of years since Flora was forced to parallel park, and she perspired and swore heavily as she maneuvered the car into the open spot she found another block away. Walking towards the dreary building, she felt overdressed and foppish, clicking along the sidewalk, stepping gingerly over the virile weeds sprouting through the cracks. She should have realized Dawn could not afford to live in one of the houses with an eggplant exterior accented with avocado trim. She was reminded, grimly, of the many times she had made trips to her patients’ homes when they couldn’t come to the hospital because they had no money for transportation or no one to watch their children. She always felt out of place then, too, and even more so when she was inside their homes—usually apartments, and on streets not unlike this one. She was suddenly so crushed by the tangible memory of the smells—burnt toast, perfumed dryer exhaust—and the visible chaos of unfolded laundry and open cereal boxes on a table in a room that served as kitchen, dining, and living room, that she nearly forgot her purpose in the moment.

The name on the buzzer read D. Farrington. Flora was grateful for an elevator and the lack of any discernable odor, even in the oppressively narrow, carpeted corridor of the fourth floor as Flora found her way to 4D. The door was ajar and before Flora could knock, Dawn, dressed in an ankle-length yellow peasant dress, opened and filled the doorway like a ray of sun. Her feet were bare and her toenails were a frosted white. How Flora longed to pad around barefoot, to have painted toenails.

“I have a surprise!” Dawn said. She opened the door wide, revealing a spacious, orderly room with minimal, ersatz furniture—a rattan sofa with lime green cushions, a transparent, inflatable orange ottoman, a red beanbag chair. The candy-colored spectrum was mitigated by a chocolate brown shag rug covering the lion’s share of the wood parquet floors and a large abstract oil painting depicting black figures against muted swaths of teal and emerald. Despite the overcast day outside, the room was filled with light thanks to the two southern-facing windows, minimally covered by sheer gold curtains that were the wrong size and did not meet in the middle. Not one item in her field of vision suited Flora’s taste whatsoever—though the painting, to her surprise, asked to be looked at for longer than a glance—yet the entire effect was so honest and warm that it put Flora at ease. She felt a wave of tenderness, thinking of Dawn choosing the items for her new independent woman identity, likely unaware of the irrepressible girlishness it disclosed.

“It’s just lovely, Dawn. What a nice home!” Flora nodded approvingly as she looked at the panorama, feeling marmish with her handbag over her forearm. She suddenly realized her sunglasses were still on. She took them off and had to squeeze shut her eyes from the burst of light.

“Well, thank you, but this is not the surprise. It’s over here.”

Flora turned in the direction where Dawn pointed at a large boxy shape covered with a faded beige and brown tapestry. Dawn plucked the fabric at the top of the mystery box and flung it up and off, revealing an electric piano. Dawn grinned and raised her shoulders in glee.

“I got my own piano!”

Flora thought of Bea’s plastic organ in her bedroom, and another wave of affection passed over her. She wished she could sit down to better digest all of the sensations, from every corner of the room.

“Wonderful!” Flora used the opportunity to confirm her enthusiasm and simultaneously get off her feet by sitting on the low wooden stool at the piano. She could see the instrument had seventy-three, not eighty-eight keys, but it was fine for a novice. It was a surprise, since Flora was expecting to be using the piano of Dawn’s neighbor, who Dawn had ferreted out when she heard the clunky playing. Flora had no idea how this conversation could have begun, much less ended, with such a generous offer, but she herself had succumbed to Dawn’s charms, so she shouldn’t wonder. The neighbor, Paula, whose daughter was simply noodling around on a piano bequeathed by Paula’s recently departed mother—it had to be hauled through the window of Paula’s fourth-floor apartment three doors away from Dawn’s—was happy to let Flora and Dawn use the piano one day a week in exchange for Dawn occasionally being available to check in on the girl if Paula was stuck late at work. It was an admirable transaction and while Flora did not relish the idea of listening to the sham piano sound, she was relieved that they didn’t have to interact with another household for the venture. They could stay right here, in this bright, warm space.

“How was I going to practice? I need my own piano, right?” Yes, Elise Spencer. How do you practice? “And I’ve already started. Paula gave me two baby beginner books that were in her mom’s piano bench.” Binch, was how Dawn pronounced it. Dawn indicated the slim books atop the piano’s, well, top. No photographs or other character-revealing tchotchkes on this instrument. But then again, Flora was finding that her private eye’s skills were becoming less necessary as far as learning about Dawn.

A week later, as she sat on the lime green sofa, Flora slipped her hand into her blazer pocket, praying that she had one of her pillboxes stashed there. If she took an aspirin now, before the throbbing, she would stand a chance to scare off the headache for the rest of the day. Her fingers didn’t find any comfortingly hard object. Instead they touched a piece of accumulated lint or a knot of thread. Grass butt grass butt grass butt. Surely she had worn this jacket since then? But perhaps not. She drew her forefinger around the interior of the pocket expecting to find bits of the desiccated weed stuck in the crevices, but the lining was clean. She grasped the joint between thumb and forefinger, amazed to feel it still intact. She let it go and quickly removed her hand from the pocket, surreptitiously sniffing her fingers under the guise of rubbing the tip of her nose.

Dawn was back with two glasses of ice water. Flora drank half of hers before setting it down on the Lucite table in front of her. There had been a few more pieces of furniture acquired since Flora’s last visit. Though no protection would have been necessary on such a surface, Dawn had arranged a stack of round cork coasters there, and Flora placed her glass on one of them.

A bookcase fit perfectly against the narrow bit of wall between the kitchen and the hallway. Two of its three shelves were empty. The top shelf held what looked like a small stack of floral-pattered cloth-bound books that could be date books. Or journals. Not locked diaries, but the type of book into which a woman might transfer the agitating thoughts from her mind to the blank cream-colored pages. Something that she should expect to be opened only by her even if it didn’t have a flimsy little lock on it. Something that might allow her to loosen something.

Dawn noticed Flora contemplating the bookcase. “I know,” she said. “A bookcase with no books in it. I found it on the street and thought it would inspire me to read more. I used to read so much as a kid, but I haven’t really spent much time reading in years. Not since I left home. I remember Little Women. Well, but I don’t really, hardly at all. Just remember that I thought it would be so fun to grow up in a house full of girls like that.”

The coincidence alarmed Flora. “Bea just read Little Women. I read some with her and discovered parts of it that I might have ignored or not understood when I was her age.”

“Maybe I’ll read it again, too. You know, Flora, I admired you even before I met you.” Dawn sat on a new chair—a wide chrome frame with a black leather hammock seat—her legs curled next to her.

“Oh? How? I mean, what do you—”

“Abby sometimes mentioned things about the way she grew up and I just really envied the idea of that intellectual home. So cultured. I feel like I was supposed to be born into a family like that.” This is not my right life. Flora wondered what other things Abby had mentioned and was surprised to learn that any of her reports would come across as positive. Did she share her father’s crutch of self-flattery?

“It’s easy to romanticize other people’s lives,” said Flora. Who knew that better than Flora herself, she who sat on people’s piano benches, misreading their lives based on trifling clues.

“Well, I know no family is all happiness, but I could have used a smidge less unhappiness in mine. But anyway, when I met your husband, I really just wanted to ask him all about his life.”

Flora leaned toward Dawn. She was sure she misheard. “When you met—”

“As his patient.”

Flora flushed. The top of her head prickled. She stammered a few words. “I didn’t … when?” She picked up her glass again but just held it, not trusting her body to drink.

“I went to see your husband, the shrink!” Dawn said, raising both hands as if to say, “Ta da!”

Thankfully, Flora’s startled state did not allow her to blurt, “I know! I read your file!” Instead, she found her composure and said, “No, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you knew him. Of course he maintains his patient’s confidentiality, so I wouldn’t know.” Would that I maintained such ethics, she didn’t blurt either.

“Well, of course. I don’t know how you would know. I mean I don’t think Abby even knew. Nobody knew!” Dawn laughed. “I only saw him once anyway.”

Flora put the glass down again. This revelation was the more astonishing.

“Don’t get the wrong idea. I thought he was very professional and smart and I’m sure he helps many people, but he wasn’t the one for me. I can’t really explain it, but it just didn’t feel like the right place for me. I felt a little bit weird about him being Abby’s father. He didn’t know that I knew her, of course. But that was only part of it. I guess I just wanted somewhere comforting to take myself for my first crack at analysis, and I figured if he was her father, he probably wasn’t a murderer or a rapist or a total crackpot.”

“Well, if those are your standards.” Flora laughed, and successfully drank some ice water, and laughed some more. She laughed out all the worry and guilt she had carried around for the past two weeks. All the way back through the stalking and deceit and willingness to continue the deceit, but not including the ethical misbehavior. When she bumped up against that she still felt sick about it. It was something she must never reveal to anyone. What occurred to her as she and Dawn—who caught Flora’s laughter and raised it—wound down from the hilarity of the air-clearing, was that Dawn had no idea what was scrawled on those sheets of paper in her file. She might remember what facts about her life she shared in her intake—her only session—but Will would not share with her what his conclusions were, not so soon. Therein lay the reason that none of the things he wrote about her ever felt credible or authentic to Flora. They were just one man’s hasty judgment of a woman he had just met. If she had spent more time with him, had seen him the next week for another fifty minutes and maybe one more after that where they got to the point of Will telling Dawn what her trouble was, she might have believed him. But her gut instinct, which may not have served her in the past, served her that day. How did these young women, like Dawn and Trudy, know so well what they didn’t want and realize that they could just walk away?

“To be totally on the up and up with you,” said Dawn, placing her glass directly on the Lucite, “I couldn’t believe I asked you to be my piano teacher! I mean, even though I only saw Dr. Rose one time, it would be trippy for me to show up at his house, with his wife, playing the piano. I mean, imagine! And even when I saw you at Dunham’s that day, part of me knew it was not really copacetic to be asking you to coffee, but us Southerners, you know, it’s just in our nature to rush toward people and to trust everybody. It’s gotten me into trouble more than a few times, I can tell you. But like I said, I always had a good feeling about you. So, it was just meant to be, I guess.”

“And you arranged it so we could have our lessons here. My goodness, that seems like a lot of trouble.” Flora’s own psychic burden of the recent few weeks lessened in retrospect, knowing that Dawn had been suffering simultaneously. Even the illusion of managing a situation this uncontrollable aligned with her nonsensical, pointless need for balance and order. She would have to sit uncomfortably with the fact that Dawn’s secret was out—though she hadn’t meant to be keeping it—but Flora’s was not. However, that afternoon they agreed that they would keep their student-teacher relationship confidential. Why did Abby or Kevin or Mark or Will need to know?

The arrangement at the electric piano, with Dawn on the wooden stool and Flora in a too-low bucket chair of scuffed white leather procured from the bedroom, was not conducive to teaching. Flora had to hold her arm at an awkward angle or in a half-standing position in order to demonstrate a succession of notes. Dawn seemed unaware of the contortions, focused as she was on what Flora was saying. She was an attentive student and a quick study, learning a few bars of Bach’s Prelude in C Major in one lesson. It reminded her of Chicago’s Color My World, she said. When Flora didn’t immediately agree, because she couldn’t place the song or the group Chicago, really, Dawn put it on her record player and Flora was sorry. It was one of those songs that made her feel cold and sad and that kept her from turning on the car radio. But she could see how Dawn had made the comparison—the stolid pace and simplicity. Flora had always felt that the Prelude was like a classic story arc and she liked how such a simple piece gave her so much. She was glad that Dawn had a pleasant association with it, but Flora hoped it wouldn’t preclude her own.

When Flora needed a break from her uncomfortable posture, she sat back in the bucket chair and contemplated the oil painting on the wall. “That’s such an interesting painting,” said Flora, looking at the tableau of bluish-green patches and black figures that now seemed more like trees than the possible people she saw the first time she encountered it.

“You think so?” Dawn turned to join Flora’s gaze. “I painted that, you know.” She continued looking at it, as attentive as if it were the first time she’d seen it.

“You? I had no idea! Dawn, you are full of surprises! It’s quite impressive.” Flora wished she’d said something more complimentary than her very uninteresting “interesting.” Now she was in danger of overcompensating. “Do you have more? Do you still paint?”

“No and no. That was my one hit and I retired,” she said. “I took a class when I was first married, but it was hard to find a place to set up work space in our house, and I didn’t keep at it. I was always jealous of Kevin and his woodshop, you know? Maybe if I’d had a special place like that.”

The mention of Kevin caused Flora’s gut to stir uncomfortably. She wished they didn’t have these people in common.

“A room of one’s own.” Dawn didn’t seem to register the allusion. While Flora had not actually read Virginia Woolf’s essay until just a few years ago, and had only a cursory grasp of it at that, Dawn might have read it in a college class taught by a firebrand literary scholar. But she didn’t even know if Dawn had attended college. Flora’s lack of knowing or even wondering about that until now pleased her.

“Do you ever think about starting up again? Could you do it here?” Flora looked around the apartment, which, if it were to accommodate an easel and all the accouterments of the activity, would necessitate relinquishing at least a quarter of the furnishings Dawn had only recently installed. But it wasn’t out of the question. While Flora seemed to be seriously considering the feasibility of this, Dawn continued looking at the painting with concentration.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not something I need to do. It’s a hassle, all those tubes and canvases. It’s not cheap either. Maybe I just had that one in me.”

Flora looked again at the painting with Dawn. Each time, it appeared differently than it had a moment earlier. Now the blue-green looked like ocean and the black figures like sea creatures. She never felt at ease talking about abstract art. She never knew what to say to or ask of the artist. But since Dawn was a novice, and because she was so guileless herself, Flora felt fine asking the blunt and boorish question, the one no one was ever supposed to ask. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Nothing really. I think I just liked the colors—I think we were learning about colors in the class at the time—and the black shapes were just something else to look at.” She shrugged and laughed. “But I like it. I don’t know. Maybe I should take a picture of it and show my shrink. Maybe she could figure it out.”

Flora had taken piano lessons—as did her sisters—from the age of eight through high school. Though she only achieved mere competence, she enjoyed the solitary nature of the instrument. Her diligent and cheerless practice never amounted to anything constructive, other than her transforming it into an extremely part-time job.

One afternoon as Bea and Flora played a duet of Heart and Soul on the piano, Will leaned on the doorframe listening and nodding with zeal, as if he were hearing Sergei Rachmaninoff. When they finished, Will applauded hyperbolically and Bea curtsied. Then Will said, “You know, Freud was bothered by his sisters’ piano playing, and so his parents removed the piano from the home,” and headed toward the TV room. Flora had felt ridiculously self-conscious playing with Will around even before that ambivalent comment. She had all the space and time in the world to play the piano for pleasure, but she never did, not even when she was alone.

She felt a vicarious lightness thinking of Dawn painting in the bright light of her apartment-studio, the ambient sounds of neighbors pursuing ordinary activities, the occasional siren passing by or plane overhead, but otherwise in unfettered peace.

After a few weeks of Flora visiting Dawn on Tuesday afternoons at her apartment, the piano lessons organically fell away. Dawn was a compliant student and showed some progress in the rote pieces they played from the beginner’s lesson book. But then instead they sat and talked. Dawn made artificially lemon-flavored iced tea from a powdered mix. During one visit, after three or so piano lessons had been delivered—after many tiresome attempts, Flora had persuaded Dawn that she shouldn’t pay her for the lessons because Flora didn’t need the money and Dawn did—and after more than an hour of chatting, Flora felt the tug of professional responsibility and suggested they get to playing. Dawn waved her hand and said, “Let’s do that next week. I am practicing, I promise!” It was a tacit understanding that the lessons were a pretense. They didn’t return to them, though, weeks later, Dawn would surprise Flora with one of the simple minuets from a beginner lesson book Flora had left with her. She had taught herself to read the notes. Flora was touched and impressed. Dawn reminded her of Sam Goldman, in her enthusiasm and pride. She mentally juxtaposed the elfin dark-haired Sam and the golden Dawn and had them play Heart and Soul.

“I remember a birthday party I had at my house,” Dawn said, during one of these visits. “I was turning maybe twelve? I had a bunch of girlfriends over, and my dad was drinking all day and at first my friends thought he was funny. He was funny, and he could be very charming and entertaining. You know, they say that about drunks all the time. But of course he went too far, and he started to get moody and annoyed by the racket and was telling everyone to shut up. I was so embarrassed and so mad. What I especially remember from that night, though—my birthday, remember—was way after everyone was gone and I found my dad in the upstairs hallway. He had a beer in his hand—it must have been a case he drank that day, I swear—and he was just leaning against the linen closet door, and his body was all weirdly crooked, like he would just melt right into a puddle if that door wasn’t keeping him propped up. It made me sick to my stomach to see him like that. I felt pity but at the same time was so pissed off. How dare he? I thought. Not even about the way he embarrassed me in front of my friends but how dare he not be the right kind of father who I could count on. I had to take care of him. I had to put him into bed that night. Of course my mom had given up on him. ‘Let him dig his own grave,’ she’d always say. She was dead asleep already. But I couldn’t stand the thought of him collapsing there and passing out on the hallway floor, staying there all night.”

Dawn leaned forward in her lotus position on the leather chair, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, shaking her head slowly, lips pressed into a near smile. Flora had no experience in her past that resembled Dawn’s. She had heard similar stories from patients when she worked at the hospital, and she had heard far worse. Alcohol drove the plot of many of them. She never became inured—in fact the opposite was true. The more she heard about how heartless and selfish people could be, the less she felt able to do a damn thing about it. Ultimately, she stopped trying.

What right did Flora have to complain or be irritable about anything? Flora’s father had never given her a haircut while under the influence, like Dawn’s had, forcing her to go to school the next day with a wildly chopped mess, too ashamed to look at anyone all day. Frank had two fingers of Scotch before dinner on Friday evenings and Delia occasionally joined him with a sherry. The once-a-week cocktail, as far as Flora knew, was the only time they ever consumed liquor. Every day, it seemed, was another display of decorum, moderation, and calm in the Devereaux home. She had never been deprived in any way. She had the right kind of father who she could and did count on completely, perhaps blindly, but isn’t that a luxury that should be afforded to children?

Born just over a year after the Spanish Flu had dissipated, she lost no loved ones in two wars and had experienced a third only via Walter Cronkite and a few friends’ stories about a friend of a friend whose son was killed. She could turn off the TV, turn off her knowledge of the event, and go into the kitchen and make a pot roast. It was an option available to her along with her myriad shoes and dresses and whims, like choosing to work or not to work. She could sit and watch wrenching accounts of atrocities on the 6:00 p.m. news as she required herself to do from time to time while Will watched with complete absorption, and test herself, trying to fathom what it would be like to be hurled into a horrible reality, a hellish existence, and have no choice but to live in the enveloping anguish and terror with no hope of escape. But it was impossible. She had no purchase. Her entire life consisted of skipping from one smooth, stable stone to another across a rushing creek. On some days, the idea that her easy lot made her dull and repressed, that she offered no hard-won wisdom to the world, did not move her one way or the other. It was just a fact. On other days, it made her angry at no one in particular. Most days, she didn’t think of it at all. It was as familiar and undistinguishable to her as the floral wallpaper in the kitchen.

Flora could see that Dawn, too, was someone for whom tears, even shed over ostensibly sad things, sprang from anger. Anger that things had to be sad at all. She could, if she gave it a minute, calculate what Dr. Simmons and Will would each say in response to Dawn’s birthday story. She could reach into the recesses of her professional armory and pull out the appropriate social worker response, as if Dawn were one among her caseload. But she wanted to share stories and not just give or receive them transactionally. What she wanted to say was what Marmee said to Jo: I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it. Like you, Flora would add, addressing Dawn. Though where Dawn’s guise was sunshine, Flora’s was haze. Flora also knew there was more to Dawn’s past, however, because of her prying. The birthday story was a kind of guise, too.

She took too long to formulate a response, and Dawn didn’t seem to expect one.

“Do you believe in God?” Dawn asked, idly, as she picked at the chipping polish on her thumbnail.

No one had ever asked Flora this question. Not even in Sunday school. Especially not in Sunday school. Her sisters had never asked her, or each other. Will had never directly asked her. Flora had never, she now recognized, asked it of herself.

“No,” she said. Dawn had a way of eliciting spontaneous replies from Flora, answers to questions that she didn’t know she had answers to until the words were out of her mouth. Once they were out, she felt as proud and awed by them as a toddler of their bowel movement.

Dawn continued chipping, not reacting to Flora’s reply.

Irregularly and infrequently, Flora experienced fraction-of-a-second moments when she could at once feel the weight of human existence, see but not feel bottomless sadness, and behold complete clarity about the meaning and purposeless of life. She would pay a fine sum of money to control and elongate these moments and to have them occur at will because in them she felt whole, solid, and sure. Not happy, since she also possessed the knowledge that happiness was an illusory emotion. She saw the earth from the distance of outer space, like a blue marble, as a grammar school student would find in a reference book. She didn’t believe in God, but every so often, without warning, she knew what it might feel like to be God.

“Do you?” Flora asked.

“Yes.” Dawn continued chipping. Flora had not expected that to be her reply, figuring her question had just been one of those soul-searching and illuminating exercises that young people were all about now. She was suddenly struck with terror and the certainty that Dawn had set out to convert her all along. It had all been a ruse, a clever, long game. Flora wanted and needed to escape urgently.

“But not the way I used to. I can’t believe I’m saying it, since my family was very religious. At least we went to church all the time. Baptist. I was pretty into it as a kid and even some as a teenager, until I left home. But I don’t dig the whole organized religion thing anymore, and I haven’t had any dealings with God one way or another in a long time now. I seem to get along pretty well without asking him for things or doing things for him. But I still believe.”

Flora felt herself slump with relief and hoped Dawn had not detected the violent curves of fear followed by shame that had just occurred before her. She took a long inhale and exhaled slowly to steady herself. “You’re making it on your own,” Flora said, and Dawn stopped picking and laughed at that.

“Like Mary Tyler Moore,” said Dawn.

Flora asked herself only much later that night, while lying in bed, where the paranoia and distrust had crept in from, unbidden. The answer, no less surprising and as clear as if it were being projected onto the ceiling by the magical digital clock was the revelation that she had been harboring a sense that such an unlikely friendship between two women from different generations and upbringings was too good to be true. What did Dawn get out of it? Flora allowed herself to wonder. Unlike the overconfident, older, male counterpart in a sexual May-December tryst, she could be sure it was not her worldliness. Did Dawn, who deducing from Will’s notes about the man she’d taken up with as a teenager, have a fixation on parental figures? Will might in fact suggest she was in love with Dawn, or that she was looking for someone to admire her the way her own daughter did not.

In a marked departure from her usual nighttime perseverations, she regarded the musings as inconsequential and let them float away like cottonwood seeds just before she fell asleep.

Weeks passed and more words came out of Flora’s mouth, quite possibly, than had come out in the previous year in total. Many of the thoughts that had stayed behind her pressed lips, jamming her thoughts, ideas she assumed would dissolve forever, now had their unexpected day in the sun and someone received them. And that someone understood and said, “I know” and “Same here” quite a lot. She even shared her God complex with her, and Dawn said she had similar moments of knowingness that she tried to unsuccessfully capture like a butterfly. A friend had told Dawn that she could make it last if she dropped acid, a prospect that terrified Dawn and Flora alike.

The topics at the top of Dawn’s head often seemed to be about her childhood, betraying herself as an analysand, a term Will used and which Flora despised. Ha! thought Flora, but not your analysand. They didn’t talk about their husbands the way exasperated or desperately unhappy wives would. Precious little small talk, to Flora’s pleasure. They dove right into the center of the pie, flouting the rules of social discourse between two people who barely knew one another, especially two as far apart in age and circumstances as Dawn and Flora.

While Flora was gratified not to surrender time to complaining about their husbands, she was nonetheless burning with curiosity to know more about Dawn’s marriage, how and why she left. Emboldened by and giddy from their growing familiarity, Flora did something she would never do with any of her other friends—she asked her outright.

“I really think it boils down to the fact that Mark wanted to have a baby, and I just never did,” Dawn responded just as forthrightly. “I did get pregnant though.”

“Oh. Did you—” Flora stammered.

“No illegal abortion, thank God. I had a miscarriage. Pretty early on. And Mark was real upset. He accused me of not taking care of myself, drinking and smoking, and maybe I did at the beginning because I didn’t know I was pregnant! But no, it just happened one day. It didn’t hurt, and I didn’t feel anything.” She sliced the air with her elegant fingers. “I felt nothing.” Then, after a long pause, “I can’t even imagine what my life would be like now if I had a child. I’d still be married, that’s for sure.” More ponderous silence followed as they both contemplated an alternate life.

“I had a miscarriage, too.” Flora had never said the words aloud, even when it happened. In her head, and in the doctor’s mouth, the words were “lost the baby” even though Flora never truly felt it was a baby. It was only six weeks on. Will had used the medical term, but only once, and they never talked about it again.

“Oh, man. You did?”

Flora nodded, hands clasped placidly across her abdomen, not concerned in the slightest about concealing her distended, middle-aged belly. “No one knows. I never told my sisters. Abby doesn’t know. It was a year before she was born.” It did not escape Flora’s notice that Dawn was younger than her own daughter and that she shared things with Dawn that she never had with Abby: secrets, a cigarette, her feelings about Abby. Her guilt abated with each meeting until it was nearly gone.

“I didn’t feel anything either,” said Flora. “Nothing.” The beast had a gleaming, raised-letter invitation to visit during that time but did not make an appearance until nearly twenty years later.

They looked at one another. Dawn’s cockeyed smile appeared. In an effortless transition from her curled position, she got up to retrieve a candle shaped like an owl from atop the nearly vacant bookcase.

“I’m always saving things instead of using them. I just bought this today at Pier One. What am I waiting for?” The lighter she pulled from her sweater pocket was a man’s lighter, heavy and silver. She placed the owl on the table between them and lit it. They looked at it in silence. Their exchanges, utterly absent of suggestions or platitudes, were pure and free.