Chapter Three

The hurtling train continued on its course. The time between the leaving of her parents to the present, where she was sitting for her own granddaughter, felt, at occasional alarming moments of awareness, more like three years than three decades. Now, in the unimaginable year of 1974, Abby brought Bea over to their house every Monday and Wednesday after Bea got out of school. Those were days that Abby taught at the community college. Flora thought it was impressive that Abby was a college professor and told her so often, with the intention of making Abby feel good about herself and her accomplishments, as mothers are supposed to do. But Abby would always wave away the compliments and even seem angry that Flora offered them. “It’s just a job,” Abby would say, not looking at her mother but instead unnecessarily fixing something on Bea’s person such as her dress collar or poking a loose lock of hair behind an ear, then chucking her chin. It was a reflexive response. Every time Flora said something nice to Abby, Abby would seem slightly upset and then focus on her own daughter.

“Your haircut is very flattering,” Flora said.

“I hate my stylist,” said Abby.

“Your dad says your research paper was astute and clearly written,” said Flora.

“It was mostly the work of my co-author,” said Abby.

Flora tried to make sense of the negative interplay, but every time she would concertedly think about it, the thought would slip away too quickly before she allowed herself to be distracted by something easier to address.

The course Abby taught was in abnormal psychology. She had studied psychology in college and then went on to get a Master’s degree and even begin a PhD program, but she was never awarded the degree because she couldn’t find the time to work on her dissertation once Bea was born. She never talked about the dissertation anymore, or about going back to the university to finish in order to get the degree that would make her a doctor. Flora’s admiration meant nothing. She knew it bothered Abby that she had unfinished business, but they never talked about it because Abby exuded a definite air of not wanting to. Will chided Abby about it from time to time. “When you finish your doctorate,” he’d begin a booming diatribe, but Abby would cut him off before Will had a chance to predict her future. “Dad. Stop,” Abby would say in an even tone, the “p” of the “stop” ending in a firm, horizontal line on her face. She never hesitated to demand that he cease and desist, and somehow, miraculously, he would. No one else could get Will to stop once he got started. He would press on, loudly and forcefully, right over whoever was protesting or looking pained, and everyone in the room would sit tight until he was done.

Abby didn’t talk to her father about things any more than she talked to Flora, but the two of them, Abby and her father, were so much more alike than Abby and Flora herself. It wasn’t just their chosen professions. As they each had impatiently replied to friends and family many times, every one of them thinking they were the first to remark on the similarity, Will was a psychiatrist, and that was not the same field that Abby had planned to enter since psychiatrists go to medical school and psychologists do not.

“Well, look at you!” said Ruth to her niece, “following in your father’s footsteps!” which both Will and Abby answered with a withering stare, confounding poor Ruth.

But Abby and Will shared qualities like a sharp mind, strong opinions, and, Flora thought with some remorse, a streak of cruelty. So while Abby and Will didn’t have pleasant or lively conversations about common interests, as anyone outside the household might assume that they would, they had a wordless, private bond that they both seemed to resent.

Abby could have chosen another subject to study. Flora thought Abby was artistically inclined when she was younger, very courageous and outgoing, and quite talented in theater and music, and was also always an A student in French, but she didn’t take those skills seriously as life choices when the time came to make such decisions. She took a psychology course her first year at college, and she came home animatedly talking about the fascinating things she had learned and soon thereafter declared that she wanted to be a psychologist. Flora remembers a sudden high-pitched inner noise when Abby made the announcement, but she hoped the sensation didn’t register on her face.

While the charge that ran between Will and Abby put Flora on edge—the threat of an argument or emotional outburst was ever present whenever they were in a room together—she privately envied them. How satisfying it must feel to crack open a line of reasoning with high volume and genuine passion. But even more privately, she envied their intimacy. They behaved more like Flora and Will should, in a pairing that had its flaws, yes, but that was balanced, alive, and where each was deeply knowledgeable of the inner workings of the other. As much as Flora winced at the flying sparks between her husband and daughter, she longed for such benign danger—at least the conditions for such—in her own marriage. She had the sense that she was to blame for this lack, but she didn’t quite know where her accountability had lapsed or if she had the gumption to do anything about it. Flora had occasionally revisited the conversation she’d had with Will the day they met, marveling at her own forthrightness in describing her research and bravely sharing her opinions with Will—an expert in the field—about theories of the criminal mind. He had gently played devil’s advocate with her, urging her to continue arguing, and she had thrilled to it. She could see that Abby enjoyed it, too, because her spark hadn’t been extinguished as Flora’s had over time.

Those college years were the last time Flora remembered Abby talking animatedly about anything. As soon as Abby finished college and moved with two friends into a two-room basement apartment near the university, even though she was only a thirty-minute drive away, she and Will rarely saw her. When they did, she was irritable towards them and answered their questions in clipped sentences with a corresponding lack of emotion.

“How is the apartment coming along?” Flora asked during one of Abby’s rare visits after moving out.

“Fine,” said Abby from inside the freezer where she was plowing through the ice bin in order to fix herself a ginger ale.

“Have you found curtains for your bedroom yet?” Flora asked.

“Nope,” said Abby, taking her drink to the kitchen table which Flora had already set for dinner. She opened the newspaper, laying it on top of the clean dinner plate, and proceeded to read and jiggle the ice in her glass as if filling the air with the sound would preclude any further attempts at conversation.

And it did. Flora went back to her ministrations at the stove, hoping Will would come home any minute to liven things up.

And he did.

“Darling daughter!” Will roared upon entering the kitchen. “To what do we owe this miraculous event?”

“Come on, Dad,” said Abby with irritation, not lifting her head from where it hung over the newspaper.

“Where are we going?” he asked, issuing his well-worn response. It had made Abby at least snort with acknowledgment of his joke when she was a teenager, but no more.

It was as if Abby had reversed the way things normally went, at least in books and on television, where teenagers are morose and stubborn and difficult, and then, as they get older, they become allies with their parents, especially when they have kids of their own. Abby, while occasionally a challenging teenager in terms of her rambunctious behavior, was relatively entertaining to talk to and would answer questions in a way that made her parents feel that they had produced a child who was happy and normal. As a young adult and now as a mother, it was a chore for everybody involved. Bea, even as early as the age of five, usually served as the unwitting mediator. She could not be unaware of the tense atmosphere generated by all of her grown-ups and tried to ease the situation in small ways that she couldn’t possibly realize she was doing. She would begin to chirp incessantly, following any of Abby’s brusque responses, about anything that had happened at school that day, directing her monologue at her grandmother, for the most part.

Flora was grateful for Bea’s fondness of her and reciprocated. She loved Bea with every speck of her being in ways she didn’t remember feeling about her own daughter when Abby was a child. Perhaps this was the love of a grandparent and nothing to feel guilty about, but Flora did feel guilty and wished she didn’t because she was afraid to demonstrate her full love for Bea without Abby getting angry about that, too. When Flora and Bea were on their own together, they would take turns scratching one another’s backs or combing one another’s hair, displays of intimacy that Flora would be embarrassed and even a bit fearful for her daughter to witness. Flora theorized that her position as the middle sister was the reason that she sought balance and order in nearly every situation. She had been eternally concerned with dispensing equal amounts of everything to her sisters when she had something to share—candy, compliments, attention. The preoccupation extended to her parents, to people she worked with, to her patients, her friends, and now to her daughter and granddaughter. In the end it was unjust, because some people needed more of these things than other people, but Flora would nevertheless withhold in some cases, in order to maintain equity. Maybe she could blame Delia for this trait, as Will would do, holding fast as he did to the notion of the cold, schizophrenogenic mother. Delia was fervid about all three girls getting the same amount of this or that. Her father, a professional ostensibly charged with safeguarding justice, also instilled in his daughters the idea of equal treatment, though Flora was confused by overhearing his frequent use of phrases like “He deserved it” or “He didn’t deserve it” when talking about certain clients or friends. She could never tell what he actually meant by deserve, but there was a hint in his tone that made her think it was about something more complicated than simple fairness.

But Flora’s sisters were not afflicted with this pathological need for balance, and therefore Flora didn’t think her parents were necessarily to blame. It was Flora’s family position, the particular makeup of her cells, the alignment of the stars, and a thousand other unknowable reasons that she was the way she was. Would it do her any good to discover the actual, definitive source of her personality? When she observed Abby’s transformed disposition, she realized how unkind it was to be so withholding. Did Flora want to go the rest of her life like that?

Abby broke her typical terse conduct for a short time when she began going with Kevin and brought him home to meet Flora and Will. While they had met at the university where Abby was getting her degree, Kevin was not a fellow student, nor a professor, but a member of the staff of the university’s buildings and grounds.

“He is not a janitor,” Abby had corrected Will in the intrepid, measured tone with which she addressed her father. “He’s a skilled worker who earns a good, honest living doing essential work.”

They had met during the one instance where Abby auditioned for and was cast in a play during her senior year and Kevin was recruited to lend his woodworking skills for the set. Abby was proud of Kevin and especially of the artful wood furniture that he made for their house and as gifts for friends and family—chairs and tables and bookcases and toys. He was quite a craftsman and was permitted to use the space at the university, on his off hours, where they had all manner of dangerous and expensive saws and sanders and toxic varnishes that he couldn’t afford to own.

Will and Flora had several of Kevin’s pieces around their home even though the style did not quite match their tastes.

“These kids are on the edge of being hippies,” Flora told her friend Grace, as she tried to describe her discomfort with the presence of the wooden pieces. Abby and Kevin wore bell bottoms and suede and had shag rugs in their house, and they occasionally attended protests against the Vietnam War and injustices at the university, but thankfully Flora had no reason to believe they used any psychedelic drugs.

“They don’t really go for the kind of eating that hippies do though,” Flora said. “They’re not vegetarians, not particularly concerned about having enough fruits and vegetables in their diets, nor in Bea’s.” They subsisted on quick and easy-to-prepare things out of cans and boxes and the freezer, just as Will and Flora did more and more often.

Grace nodded. “I know just what you mean,” she said. “Trudy has taken to yoga lately and the sound of that yoga woman’s voice on the television gives me the heebies. Is it some kind of cult, I sometimes can’t help but wonder? But then Trudy drinks a diet pop right afterwards, which I don’t think is part of the program.”

The rustic wooden fixtures, along with an ample collection of pottery, were part and parcel of the bohemian aura that one recognized upon entering Abby and Kevin’s cottage-like house. In contrast, Will and Flora lived in a large, split-level home that was carpeted wall-to-wall in every single room other than one of the bathrooms and the foyer and the finished basement. The tables were either glass or marble-topped and the seating options were upholstered with high-quality fabrics. The general look was modern and sleek and sophisticated, not at all resembling the styles of other couples in their middle age, yet neither did it fully represent the natural, organic look that the younger generation was going for. Abby and Kevin knew this, and they learned after having gifted Will and Flora a pair of handcrafted end tables and a magazine rack, both of which found homes in the least used of their four bedrooms, that they should probably stop giving them wooden objects.

Flora knew that Will would have been on cloud nine had Abby come home with a black or Hispanic man. He enjoyed making a show of his open-mindedness to all of their friends, for example, by inviting the one black couple they knew over for dinner in combination with their white friends. When the couple, Connie and Michael, came over one Sunday afternoon with their daughter, Kelly, who was the same age as Bea, Will took a series of photographs of the two girls posing by trees and holding hands in a pretend game of Ring Around the Rosy. He chose the best two to display in a booklet-style gold-plated frame and placed it on top of the piano, the first place that a visitor’s eyes might land after walking up the five steps from the uncarpeted foyer into the fabric-hushed living room. If one failed to notice the photos, as Will observed from their initial glance about the room, he made sure to point it out. Because it was his granddaughter, and grandparents are allowed to boast about their grandchildren, he picked it up and brandished it with impunity. “Look at my beautiful granddaughter, Bea, and her friend Kelly who is the daughter of our dear friends Connie and Mike!” The visitor would smile and nod appreciatively and then it would be Flora’s turn to speak and offer the visitor a cocktail which then Will would concoct at the marble-topped bar table to the left of the piano.

It was not that Will pretended to be unprejudiced. He was a genuinely liberal-minded person who voted for liberal-minded candidates, going so far as to puncture their flawlessly manicured lawn with campaign signs for whoever the Democratic or progressive independent candidate of the moment happened to be. In this, at least, Flora was thankful that he was in agreement with his daughter and son-in-law. Numerous heated arguments were had around Will and Flora’s dining room table during their many dinner parties, because they had friends of all political stripes and Will loved to hold court and so did many of their male and a couple of their female friends. No one questioned Will’s commitment to civil rights and the rest, but it would have completed the picture so nicely, Flora knew he secretly thought, if his daughter had chosen a man of a different race to bring into the family.

As it was, Will did not particularly like his son-in-law. He disdained Kevin’s lack of education beyond the two years of community college he had completed, and for his blatant Catholic upbringing and overly large family that consisted of six siblings, Kevin being somewhere in the younger half. Though Kevin and Will had a perfectly cordial relationship—Kevin was certainly more talkative than their own daughter—Kevin knew that Will thought he was beneath his daughter and it made Kevin not like Will very much back. Abby was well aware of how both men felt as they each gave her an earful about the other on occasion. Flora was subject to the unkind things her husband said about Kevin—usually some version of calling him stupid—and sternly reproached him whenever he would start in. Publicly, Will bragged about his son-in-law, stealing his daughter’s approbations of her husband which he could get away with as neither she nor Kevin ever heard these positive reviews themselves, going on about how he was a working-class man who “eschewed the trappings of academia and the corporate milieu” in favor of the honest labor of working with one’s hands. He came from a poor family and took no handouts from anyone and was ably supporting his wife and raising his beautiful granddaughter and Will was proud to call him his son. All of this added to the picture Will liked to paint of his life for himself and others to admire.