Chapter Four

Abby and Kevin went to the movies or to parties many weekend nights, and Flora had made it clear that she was happy to look after Bea if she and Will were in town. On Saturdays when Bea spent the night, Flora and Bea made a ritual of watching All in the Family together. Flora was relieved that Kevin and Will at least didn’t have the kind of contentious relationship that Archie and Mike did. Of course, Will could not have been outwardly more different from Archie Bunker, but Flora often fiddled with the idea of them being two sides of the same coin. Will could be just as intolerant as Archie. On one end of her imagined spectrum was Archie’s anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and so on bigotry, and on the other end was Will’s elite snobbery posturing as forward-thinking. Flora also thought that Will, as she had to admit she herself did, was too quick to make assumptions about people who weren’t like them, either in skin color or social class. Knowing only one black couple didn’t make them special, she knew, but she had to admit to being proud of it just as Will was. Nevertheless, she was embarrassed that he showed off about it. She liked Connie and Michael quite a lot, and she felt sorry when they were at one of their dinner parties because she suspected they knew why they were invited.

Will was also similar to Archie, when she really thought about it, in the way he behaved towards his wife. Flora felt a kind of kinship with Edith, even though Edith and she would probably never have occasion to be friends in real life, because where would they both be? Where could they have crossed paths and met? Edith lived in a rundown row house in Queens, New York, a place that Flora could not imagine but for which she had a soft spot since it was the birthplace of her beloved Louis Armstrong. It was also, improbably, the same part of New York that included Kennedy Airport, where Will and Flora found themselves at least twice a year en route to Europe or Scandinavia or the various cities in the U.S. where Will had conferences to attend or talks to present. Flora would join him on the domestic work getaways from time to time if it was a city she particularly liked, such as Chicago or San Francisco. She’d spend her days shopping and sitting in cafés, or sometimes—without confessing it to Will—she’d see a matinee movie. She liked the days on her own and rued their end when she would often serve as a counterpart to the wife of one of Will’s colleagues.

But Edith. Edith wouldn’t do any of those things because she couldn’t afford to. She might never have had a reason to go to the international airport that was possibly a stone’s throw from her house, for all Flora knew. But the airplanes being so close with their ear-splitting and air-polluting take-offs and landings probably made living in that house even more of an unsavory lifestyle than just being blue-collar already did.

Archie was almost always unkind to Edith, calling her a dingbat and shouting at her for the smallest of things that inconvenienced him. If his beer wasn’t in his hand the moment he wanted it, he’d yell, and Edith would run, quite literally doing a little jog, into the kitchen to fetch it for him, placing it on the wooden table beside his worn old chair with a cheerful, “Here ya are, Archie!” and maybe even give him a little affectionate peck on his cheek to which he would respond with a wild gesture as if she were a gnat, saying something along the lines of, “All right, Edith, ya don’t have to maul me!” The parallels to Flora and Will’s life were superficially amusing. Will would almost always be home by the time cocktail hour rolled around, which was unofficially but quite regularly at 5:00 p.m. He would make his own Manhattan or Martini, but to do so, the olives and lemon twists and the ice bucket and the tonic water would have to be on the bar beside the piano. It was also expected that the Planters’ dry roasted peanuts and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish be present in the small lotus bowls that Will would skillfully carry along with his drink over to his favorite jade green velour chair near the fireplace. If for some reason those ingredients were not on the bar when he was ready for them, he would not, like Archie, shout for Flora to get them, but would sigh heavily and go to the kitchen to do so himself.

Flora sometimes knew just what time it was and that at around 4:45 she should be getting things ready for them—she partook of cocktail hour, too, and enjoyed a gin and tonic with lime most evenings—but she would convince herself that she had lost track of time and would maybe be lying in bed reading or doing the crossword or in the spare bedroom they used as an office writing monthly checks at the Hitchcock desk. She would continue to convince herself of this lapse even though she quite clearly heard his car pull into the driveway and the sound of his pulling up the garage door. She would continue her activity, waiting for the sound of his opening the freezer and loudly rummaging in the ice bin to put the ice directly into his glass, dismissing the formality of the bucket. Once she sensed that he was installed in his chair and probably reading the evening paper, she would come down the stairs, always tiptoeing if her shoes were off since her heeled shoes had robbed her of the ability to walk flat-footed.

“Hello, dear,” she would say, in an affected relaxed manner. “I lost track of time. Glad you’ve got your drinky.” Will would crunch on a bit of ice, not look up as he responded, “Yes, dear. All is right with the world.” It was not quite the Archie and Edith dynamic, but she knew her husband would much prefer if everything was in place for him. If she could write the scene herself, how might it go? Flora would either be lounging about or tackling a to-do item, but at any rate she’d be upstairs when Will’s homecoming was imminent and then audible. He would enter the house, bound up the various half-flights of stairs to where she was, with his coat on and still cold and surrounded by the exhilarating tang of the garage air.

“There’s my love!” he’d say, wrapping his arms around her from behind, if she were sitting at the desk, and roughly kissing her cheek with his wet, cold lips. “What’ll you have from the bar tonight, m’lady?” And she’d smile and pat his hands at her abdomen and respond, “The usual, please.” And he’d jet back down the stairs, then hang up his coat, then rummage to fill the ice bucket and the lotus bowls.

But as she reviewed that imagined scene, it felt completely false. It was the kind of scene that she saw on old TV shows or heard characters in books and movies wishfully describe as they lamented their actual fate, which was far more stultifying or brusque or even malicious than what Flora experienced. No, this saccharine scene was not what she longed for. She wanted the scene to play out as it did in reality, until the point of her padding down the stairs, disrupting her own activity no matter how pointless. Will, as her husband, served the theoretical purposes of protecting her from intruders or the disgrace of spinsterhood. But he was the intruder himself when it came to her peace of mind. She didn’t want to feel compelled to leave the room at all, but she couldn’t conjure up any alternative or ensuing scene. If she could have anything happen next, what would it be? She only saw a screen of snowy static.

Would reimagining the scene in some dramatic way bring the picture into focus? She tried to let her mind go loose so that something could occur to her, some crazy idea, but she failed. She did have one recurring image, though, that she forced out of her mind’s eye as soon as it entered—and it did creep in more and more. She saw herself smashing the television with an axe, right down the middle, while Archie or an ad for margarine was on the screen. She felt immense relief each time the blade crashed down onto the plastic exterior and then the thick glass screen, sparks and cartoon zizzing noises when the blade reached the innards. Though she tried to keep the image from returning, the feeling of relief was so sublime that sometimes she deliberately let the scene play. What kind of dramatic turn in her actual life—without damaging anyone or anything—could capture that same sublime feeling?

Every once in a while on an episode of All in the Family, Edith would stand tall and become righteously indignant about something and maybe even shout at Archie who would be shocked and angry but would quickly repent for his brutishness and she would forgive him and there would be a happy ending with the two of them showing affection and the live studio audience applauding in appreciation of everyone’s comportment. There was a sense, on the program, that Archie dearly loved Edith despite the way he often treated her, just as there was supposed to be a sense—though it was an opportunity for debate at their dinner parties—that Archie was a good person despite his ignorant bigotry. Flora enjoyed the show in many ways, but she did not believe that Archie was a good person or that he really loved Edith, at least not the way he should. One night when they were watching, Bea asked Flora during a commercial break, “Why is Archie so mean to Edith all the time?” and Flora truly did not know how to respond to her sweet seven-year-old granddaughter. For a moment she wondered if Bea should be watching the program at such a young age. In that same moment she wondered what Kevin and Abby were like with each other at home and what Bea saw and heard. She thought that if anyone was mean in that house, it would be her own daughter, not her son-in-law, who, if he had a temper, was extremely good at concealing it.

It felt like she thought for a long time before answering, and she certainly thought about it for far too long—for weeks—after she answered Bea, but she tried her best in the moment to do what she thought was right. “Relationships between husbands and wives are sometimes very hard and people don’t always behave the way they should when they talk to each other. They talk or yell without thinking and they might hurt the other person’s feelings but it doesn’t mean they don’t love the person,” Flora said with as much confidence as she could fabricate. Bea twisted her lips as if she were thinking about that. Flora wanted to say so much more, but the girl was only seven. She felt like she was lying to her granddaughter. She didn’t believe the last part of what she had said. But she hated to think that Bea might think the grown-ups in her life, the people she counted on to show her how to be, might not love each other. But what if she was letting Bea think that it was fine to be mean to people even if you truly deep down inside loved them? Would Bea grow up to be mean to people? Or, even worse, thought Flora, would she grow up to let people be mean to her and convince herself that their true feelings toward her were something else?

The commercial break ended, much to Flora’s relief, and because Bea was an obedient automaton in the face of the television, Flora knew that any elaboration on her point would fall into a void. So she left it at that and told herself it was fine. It was the best she could do, and besides, what she had said wasn’t entirely untrue. Flora wondered how she had made it through motherhood with Abby. She didn’t recall fretting so much when asked blissfully childish questions by her own daughter. Perhaps Flora had been too young as a mother to be aware of the nuances of life to be concerned about how she responded to her daughter. Maybe she was more invested in Bea’s development as a person because she had seen how raising a girl could go. Flora juggled the feeling that she didn’t actually like who her daughter had become along with the idea that she had somehow caused it, had planted a seed of disappointment when Abby was young that took root and blossomed when Abby herself reached maturity, when she struck out in the world on her own.

These skittering thoughts caused Flora to flash on a recent memory. Weeks earlier, when she was an entire absurd hour early to see the dentist because she had been up since 5:00 a.m. and couldn’t stop the forward momentum, she thought about where she could kill the time. There was the option of waiting in the car in the dentist’s parking lot, but she would appear to be loitering and anyway, she had nothing to read. She could mill about at the shoe store next to the dental office, but it was too small and overly supplied with overly attentive salesmen. The coffee shop across the street was off-limits because she couldn’t eat or drink before having the hygienist look in her mouth.

Abby lived a mile away. Before overthinking the unprecedented decision to stop by for no reason, early on a weekday, Flora had nearly driven there. Bea would be at school, Kevin at work, and, Flora quickly calculated, it was a day that Abby would likely be home preparing for her class.

The weak light and colorless sky belonged exclusively to a Tuesday morning, prompting a nauseating and unfamiliar feeling. She had never been to their house on a weekday. No one was walking on the sidewalks or sitting in a front yard. Flora envisioned housewives watching game shows in the dens of the mismatched clapboard, brick, and stone houses on the street. Her head ached dully. Maybe Abby would offer her a cup of coffee that Flora would have to rebuff. Or maybe they would sit on the concrete front step in between the tulips and pansies that Kevin had planted and surrounded with fresh mulch. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine what might unfold because she had never stopped by without a purpose or invitation—or when Abby was the only one home. She turned into the driveway, cautious not to hit the poorly placed fire hydrant on the berm. After parking behind Abby’s red VW bug, she could see that the inner side door to the house was wide open. She rapped on the metal frame of the exterior screen door. When Abby didn’t appear in short order, Flora quietly entered the cool utility room, stepping onto the shag rug remnant that served as a mat. Waiting in the still silence for a few seconds, she took one step up toward the kitchen but stopped mid-stair when she heard someone crying. Was it the TV coming from Abby’s den? A soap opera? Carefully attuned to its repeat, Flora was certain it was a live person. A terrible, guttural sound, and completely foreign. It had to be Abby—who else could it be?—but Flora had not heard Abby cry since she was an insolent teenager, during which instances Flora always ungenerously felt the drama and tears were affected.

Flora wanted to escape and abort the entire ill-conceived endeavor as quickly as possible. She didn’t give more than a second’s thought to the idea of going into the house to find her daughter and see what was wrong. She knew Abby would be first startled, then annoyed, and it wouldn’t benefit either of them. Besides, she couldn’t very well get into a serious conversation now—she didn’t have that much time. As she pivoted on the step to make her retreat, she noticed an ashtray on the kitchen counter and in it, she saw what was clearly a marijuana butt. Flora had always wondered if Kevin and Abby smoked grass, and now she knew—at least one of them did. Bea was used to their cigarettes, surely, but what if she found this? Again, without thinking, clouded by fatigue and light-headedness, Flora picked it up and gently put it in her jacket pocket.