Chapter Twenty

In their gate area at JFK airport, Flora thought of Edith Bunker and felt a flicker of guilt about her own tangible prosperity juxtaposed with that dun-colored life just a few miles away. No matter that Edith was a TV character. Fiction had to come from some real life. She looked around at the other people in the gate area, wondering if this was a special occasion for them, or if, like her, they were somewhat jaded by the familiarity of traveling. As unnatural and inconvenient as most machinations related to international travel were, they were behaviors paradoxically attached to privilege and excessive spending and pleasure. Flora loved the faraway anticipation of travel, that is, the period between when the destination is proposed and seriously considered, and for about three weeks after the tickets are purchased and the hotel rooms secured. Then anxiety worms its way in. Not anxiety about flying like so many people had, especially Ruth, who couldn’t go anywhere, but a floating feeling that she would forget something essential. About the day of travel and making connections and where would the meals be gotten and would they be godawful? And an idea about whether or not the whole thing was really worth it.

When making plans, the time away always seemed to Flora too short and hardly merited the hassle and cost. But inevitably, days stretch out in a surreal way when she’s not at home. And while that would seem to be a bonus of travel, it meant that those seemingly too-short trips were in the end too long. She was always ready to head back home a day early. She longed for her bathroom counter with all the space and storage capability, her impractically large bottles of Jergens and Jean Naté. Then the coming home is so delicious and comforting and relieving that she thinks maybe that is the reason for leaving in the first place. But she never learns or remembers and is always excited and then anxious and then impatient and homesick the next time a journey comes around.

From the time she had left Dawn at Woolworth’s, she had been occupied with errands preparing for the trip—she even went clothes shopping at Parkview Mall with Bea and Abby—and she forgot her regular appointment with Dr. Simmons. When she realized the time had come and gone on the day of the appointment—it was already past dinnertime—she was appalled by her lapse. It had never happened before and it was so unlike her that Dr. Simmons might be worried. It was too late to call and apologize. And she had even planned the topic for the session, a genuine one: she would air her anxiety about traveling with Abby.

It was arguable that missing the appointment was a petulant act of her unconscious, and certainly that would be the central topic for the next visit, pushing aside any prepared agenda items Flora was entrepreneurial enough to bring along. She thought for a brief moment about never going back to see Dr. Simmons, but that was cowardly and immature. Instead she would call and apologize and plan to return to her regular appointment after she returned. If she was going to stop her sessions, she would do it properly. When Will had patients who had spontaneously disappeared, he prophesied a terrible future for them. “They will be haunted by … damaged irreparably … like not tapering off medication … scarred … side effects …” Of course, it was mostly his pride that was damaged, though very briefly, leaving a mark as lasting as the elastic band depressions after removing his trouser socks. And anyway, Flora was not in deep analysis. She was merely a middle-aged woman grousing about her petty woes. She was wasting her time, and that of Dr. Simmons. She was not invested or committed. It was not the clandestine adventure she had hoped it would be.

If Flora wasn’t squandering her sessions with Dr. Simmons, she could be using them to improve her relationship with Abby, with Lillian and Ruth, with Grace, with Will. To figure out how to say the things she knew she should say that were right behind her lips. It was a known and expected, though not necessarily accepted, fact of human interaction that many people were unable to stop words coming out of their mouths that they knew were the exact wrong thing to say, and yet felt powerless to stop. Flora had the opposite problem, even though she was sure that her version was also hurtful to people. She was more likely to commiserate with that segment of people who can never say “I’m sorry,” for example, even when they know it is the exact thing that needs to be said and even if they actually feel it. Flora had that problem, too.

Though taking stock of her state, she could recognize a subtle change in her bearing over the last few months. She couldn’t remember the last time she had thought about the possible encroachment of the beast, and she went days at a stretch without having to break a promise to herself to spend five minutes on her Twist and Trim every time she lapsed into a bitter rumination. It was as if she had taken a medication, had a cocktail laced with one of those dystopian-named pharmaceuticals and suddenly the effects were upon her. She tried to think back to when the last time was that she had sat on the edge of her bed making up her mind and she couldn’t attach it to anything.

Once on the plane, seated on the aisle with Bea in between her and Abby, Flora’s thoughts turned at first to her recent biopsy. The visit with Dr. Pavlik had been swirled in with a series of activities during the past week and she didn’t have the luxury of extravagantly worrying about it. She barely registered the bandage on her breast and completely forgot to take care when showering the day after her appointment. Only once, in a short spell of panic, did she have to will herself to think only of the trip, to focus on Bea’s enjoyment, her time with Lillian. And things with Abby would hopefully just fall into place amidst everything. Let the bustle of that week continue into this one. Clearly, it seemed, the secret to contentment, or at least the circumvention of malaise, was setting up a Rube Goldberg series of distractions.

But in the low light, as the hours moved infinitesimally forward, it seemed every other passenger on the plane had either fallen asleep or found a comfortable distraction in a book, a game, or watching Paper Moon on the cabin screen. Flora could not settle on a way to pass the time. The Canadian Club and tonic water she had ordered from the beverage service’s first tour hadn’t dulled the gradually mounting undercurrent of agitation she was trying to ignore. She had hoped to find herself in that pleasantly meditative state reserved only for protracted air travel, but she couldn’t access that transient, airborne bubble now. She was hyper-aware of the Band-Aid on her breast. Abby didn’t even tell me she was pregnant. Or that she was hoping to have another child. She was visited by an imagined scene wherein she and Abby were arguing about Flora’s secret biopsy.

“You didn’t tell me about your miscarriage,” Flora would say. “So you might understand my desire to keep this from you.”

“It’s different,” Abby would reply in her tight, irritated tone.

“But it’s not different. We all die.” Flora’s nonsensical unbidden reply signaled foggy thoughts and the potential for sleep. To lasso the opportunity—she craved the temporary oblivion with a sudden urgency—she pushed her swollen feet into her shoes, quietly unbuckled her seat belt to avoid disturbing Bea, and crept back to the galley to request a Canadian Club from the stewardess who sat alone engrossed in a paperback of Jonathan Livingston Seagull held close to her face in the near dark.

As the whisky massaged her nerves and slowed her vibrating thoughts, a different scene played out before her. She would clear the air with Abby, disclose her friendship with Dawn, tell her she knew about the miscarriage, share her own experience from decades earlier. She would tell her about her biopsy and there would be a new channel open between them. They would have a philosophical conversation about birth and death. It would be an altogether unforeseen result of Will’s gift, this communion out of ordinary time and place.

Seconds later, it seemed, came the nauseating shock of being awakened by the smell of industrial breakfast, and shades being whipped upwards, and by excited, uncontainable chatter from those who had somehow slept soundly for hours. Bea tickled Flora’s forearm playfully, and Abby leaned forward to issue a gentle “Bonjour, Maman.”

As they made their way towards Paris proper, from the moving sidewalk in Charles de Gaulle—a feature that made Bea manic with glee—to the bus to the taxi, Flora’s airplane mood gradually sloughed off, without her full awareness of its absence. Paris, a place with which she felt unduly intimate for having spent a total of only a few weeks of her life there, was a solace. The graceful shapes and restrained colors of the buildings alone eased the fatigue and any lingering queasiness. She had neglected to take an aspirin upon waking and reflexively reaching for her pillbox in the taxi, she was stunned to find that she didn’t even have a headache.

Thanks to Lillian’s scrupulous planning—a full and airtight agenda for each day of their visit—it was blessedly easy for Flora to remain distracted even from her own potentially calamitous thoughts for nearly the entire trip. Will had surprised them by reserving two hotel rooms, and Flora and Abby managed to conceal their relief when they learned of this upon checking in. Bea would take turns sharing a room with her mother and her grandmother, it was decided by Bea. Even in the brief periods when Flora was alone in her room, she was drained from jet lag, activity, and sensory stimulation, so that even her steadfast insomnia was tamed.

The weather was miraculously glorious throughout their stay. Parisians were trickling back home after les vacances, beneficially diluting the tourist pool. Abby was easily convinced to avoid the crowds at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but when Bea learned there were donkey rides at the Tuileries, Flora and Bea were forced to wait in a dusty line in noonday sun for an hour to appease her. Berthillon was open and within walking distance from their hotel, which called for a ritual of a different flavor of ice cream four evenings in a row. Bea was bananas about the Metro; they visited the Arts et Métiers where Arthur lectured; a day trip to Fontainbleau because Lillian assured them it was more beautiful than Versailles; the Saint-Ouen Flea Market whose immensity at first had Flora dizzy and ready to admit early defeat but she soon became immersed in the wares and bought herself a small gold pin in the shape of a rosebud. Lillian thoughtfully incorporated a requisite amount of sidewalk café sitting where Bea always garnered courtly attention and gratis pastries from the waiters.

Flora was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any intervals in the schedule where she and Lillian might be alone, but when Bea announced that she and her mother had been invited to story hour by the eccentric proprietor of Shakespeare and Company as they purchased a copy of Alice in Wonderland, Flora guessed that her sister had strategically timed their visit to the shop. Lillian and Flora stole to the garden behind Notre Dame and found an unoccupied bench in the shade. They fell into their natural pattern instantly, their slow, Southernish sister talk, and picked up where Lillian’s last letter had left off, wherein she befriended an American painter who woke up one day to find both legs completely paralyzed. Lillian smoked a cigarette, looking enviably glamorous as she did so. Whereas the swagger that Flora displayed with Ruth was to counterbalance Ruth’s diffidence, with Lillian Flora felt she was the apprentice, but in a way wherein she felt protected and understood. Sometimes Flora thought of the three of them as two-dimensional fairytale siblings, so predictably hierarchical were their personalities. Will was mildly entertained when flattening them into birth order automatons, but he had little occasion to comment on them because they got on so well. Lillian would be an obvious target for envy, given her splendid exile, but Flora had none for her, only a persistent melancholy that they had been living away from one another for so long. Only rarely did Will invoke middle child syndrome as an excuse for Flora’s dampened ability to take a stand or display passion of any sort.

“She deserves her happiness,” Flora had once said to Will when he was burrowing for some discomfort on her part with regard to her sister living in Paris and unintentionally disclosing some envy of Arthur who had been successful in and fulfilled by his academic career.

“Assuming that the implied condition is that Lillian is a good egg, you therefore, by inverse and contrapositive logic, would argue that bad eggs do not deserve theirs.”

She would very much like to have responded, as she once would have, “That’s right. I believe many people do not deserve their good fortune, but I would argue that if they’ve acted unethically or uncharitably, then they aren’t capable of being truly happy anyway.” But they were almost always rhetorical, these hooks, so she knew better than to engage. No matter what she said, he would find a flaw in her logic and win the day. And he would never bother to pursue. Her silence was also a victory for him. Or it didn’t register at all. Their very first conversation at Wells College was the last time she remembered Will being impressed or even very interested by anything she’d said.

“How surprised were you that Will cooked this up?” Lillian asked.

“Very.” Just as she had kept thoughts of her health situation at bay—as she had surprised herself by being headache-less after the plane ride, so was she astounded by her fortitude in toting around this weighty unknown—she had not thought of Will or the photo in his desk drawer or Abby’s doomed pregnancy. She wasn’t flattened by it all, as she would think that she would be if someone had read her fortune in January and told her the armful she’d be holding in August. She suddenly wished to share all of it with Lillian but tamped down the temptation. As for Abby, it was not her secret to tell, and she was not supposed to know. The same could be said of Will’s—Flora’s suspected understanding of the guilt-ridden gesture that was this trip. Though weren’t they now both hers as well? As for the story that was hers alone, it was best, she decided, to wait until there was anything to tell, if anything at all, her ersatz optimistic persona added. And Dawn. She couldn’t even share an ultimately pleasant story—that of a vibrant new friendship—because of its wicked origin. Every so often Flora remembered that not only was she having a surreptitious rendezvous with a former patient of her husband’s whose file she had snooped upon, but the former patient was also a former friend of her own daughter. The deceit radiated and penetrated in multiple directions and dimensions.

As Lillian talked, Flora longed to let her tightly rolled woes unfurl until they reached the Seine where they would be weighed down by the brown water and its unexpectedly strong current and carried out until they froze in the North Atlantic and finally sunk to the bottom to disintegrate. But time was short and raising any of these topics would be a jagged dark line through a beautiful snapshot of the moment. “Share yourself,” Dr. Simmons had once said to her, instead of goodbye, almost as if in code. Flora wasn’t fooling her. But Dr. Simmons couldn’t know what a great propensity the Devereaux girls had for fretting unnecessarily.

Flora had long accepted as fact that revealing her true feelings with anyone would constitute an act of willful harm, and that was one reason she sequestered her angry thoughts. The other reason was the fear of not being able to stop. Sometimes it was the vomiting Exorcist girl she conjured, other times it was Mount Etna’s eruption, killing everyone in its path. She had not considered the idea that sharing her anger could help someone. Maybe if she had said to her patients, who were each of them justifiably angry, “I feel that, too,” she would have had an unrecognizably different relationship to the idea of them. She could replace “patients,” she acknowledged, with just about anyone in her life, and it would also be true. She knew this because when she listened to and watched and felt and received Dawn’s anger, she felt tangible, ecstatic relief.

Over the course of her life, Flora’s reticence had been censured and pathologized by her father and her husband respectively, and had seemed to disappoint her mother, her sisters and her friends, her psychotherapist, and she suspected, her daughter, too. She had also chastised herself for what increasingly felt like an affliction, almost an addiction to not speaking her mind. But as she listened to Lillian, she abruptly and clearly saw herself from a different angle. Rather than spinelessly keeping mum to avoid disapproval in order to protect herself, she believed that she was proudly protecting the thoughts themselves. Once her words were spoken and left to float into the air, she imagined vividly, they oxidized and became something else, either harmful and radioactive or inert flotsam or simply misunderstood. Whatever they became, they no longer belonged to her. She cherished her thoughts, she realized with a jolt of pleasure, even the bad ones. They were as essential a part of her makeup as were her internal organs, which also needed to stay inside her in order to thrive. “A defensive justification,” she could hear the critics saying. “Words are meant to be shared and interwoven with other people’s words, not hidden, pointless, and wasted.” But in the moment she was satisfied with her theory.

Though she let none of the words escape with Lillian, she felt something loosened anyway, and she recognized that her ability to be diverted over the past few days was an accomplishment as well as a balm.

Upon returning to their hotel, sweaty, dusty, and drunk with fatigue, Bea requested a slumber party. She wanted all three of them to stay in one room.

Flora and Abby both began stammering excuses as to why that just wouldn’t work.

“Grandma snores,” said Abby.

“It wouldn’t be right to waste one of the rooms that Grandpa got for us,” said Flora.

Bea pouted. “I wanted you to read Alice in Wonderland with me.”

“We could read a little, and then I’ll go to my room and you stay with Grandma,” said Abby as she looked at Flora with raised eyebrows. Flora sensed some nuance of feeling in the suggestion that she couldn’t place.

Flora and Bea agreed, Bea outwardly gleeful and Flora, as tired as she was, found a thread with Abby and felt an unfamiliar maternal urge provoked by some unnamed thing. The three of them removed their shoes and Flora and Abby sat on the bed with two pillows apiece stacked behind them, their aching legs and blistered feet stretched out before them. Bea sat cross-legged, in between and facing them. They passed the book around after each one had read two or three paragraphs. Flora much preferred reading Little Women with Bea, but in her self-focused way, she was even finding commonalities with Alice. “ ‘Come, there’s no use in crying like that!’ said Alice to herself, rather sharply,” Flora read. “ ‘I advise you to leave off this minute! She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).’ ” I do that, too, Alice.

While Flora read and then passed the book to Abby, Bea curled herself into a ball tucked in between them. She was asleep by the time Flora’s turn came around again. Abby didn’t make a move to get up and follow through with the plan, as Flora had expected she would as soon as the opportunity arose.

“I wish we could stay longer. I mean, in Paris,” Abby said.

“So do I,” said Flora. And it was true. One of the few times a trip was not too long. She felt tired and vigorous at once. She smoothed Bea’s hair. “It’s been loverly.”

“Loverly,” repeated Abby, resting her head wearily on the quilted headboard and closing her eyes.

Flora did the same and woke herself some moments later with her own light snoring. She did snore. Abby and Bea were immobile, Abby’s mouth slightly open, Bea’s hair across her eyes as if to intentionally block the light. Flora crept quietly to the bathroom to begin her ablutions and as she was bent over the tiny porcelain sink, Abby tapped on the door.

“Bonne nuit, Maman. Je t’aime,” she said in a stage whisper. Flora reached blindly for a towel but when she was able to reply, she heard the room door click closed behind her.

On the reverse plane journey, Flora experienced a half-waking state where she was still in seat 28H and her daughter and granddaughter were still to her right. In the rest of Row H to her left, stretching to the other side of the plane, were Lillian, Ruth, Grace, Esther, Dawn, and Dr. Simmons. She leaned forward to observe them, each reading or dozing or watching the movie. Dawn caught her eye and winked, like the window mannequin in the opening to That Girl.