HER FIRST IMPULSE WAS to find a blanket, though it was far too warm for that. As she stepped into the parlour for a copy of Woolf’s Between the Acts, Flossy was startled at the sight of Ruth asleep on the chesterfield.
For some moments, like this, of some days she could forget the youngster was even in the house with her. She glanced at the clock, nearly seven-thirty. She must have been there all night. In the morning’s half-light, with one hand fallen to the floor, a book at the end of it, not a frown, wrinkle or flaw, she looked more like twelve than her awakened sixteen. A gloss of fine perspiration gathered on the creases of her eyelids as they twitched in dreamful sleep. The morning’s red sunrise cast pink highlights along one half of her hair, cheekbone and nose. Sweat glistened at the crook of her elbow. She was girlishly curved, the skimpy camisole she wore scarcely concealing the rounds of delicate breasts. The ridge of collarbone extended from the middle of her throat out to a tiny bump at each shoulder dusted in cinnamon freckles. Feminine hips and slim tanned legs down to narrow feet showed her lithe and firm. She wore white athletic shorts that revealed soft blond down visible on her thighs and a massive blue-red bruise just above the right knee in the shape of a baseball, of which she was most proud. She’d taken a searing drive at the baseball game last night, recovered the ball, tagged the runner at third and thrown another out at second — a heroic finish at the bottom of the ninth.
Defenseless in sleep, Ruth’s face held all the radiance of youth. It was the sheer flawlessness of the breaking bud or unfolding flower that has met none of the brutality of a noonday sun, beauty at its purest that might in no time be all past, some small bone not fully formed slips from proportion’s ideal, the nose a fraction longer, the jaw more pronounced. Such youthful perfection Flossy had seen last but a season in some women. It too was fugitive, just as Mealie had said of light and colour; perfect beauty was fleeting.
As she stood there, wondering whether to risk awakening her by covering her or lifting the arm to the couch, a fragrance reached Flossy’s nose. She hadn’t noticed it before. Was it perfume? Not our Ruth. Maybe shampoo. The nose was getting more sensitive as everything else was fading. The synthetic odour seemed jarringly out of place here. Flossy might have expected, instead, the scent of an armload of clothesline-dried laundry. She would much sooner have put her nose near the flesh at the top of that youngster’s arm, her slender wrist, to smell sweet sleep on her skin, each finger to catch the air of peanut butter lingering from a late-night snack, the knee for hints of grass lifted from baseball to punished flesh.
She longed to put a hand over the sleeping brow, to smooth the tender young mind inside. “So little matters, Child. Shhh, there now, so very, very little. In half a year, this summer’ll be so far behind you.” An endless succession of such summers had vanished entirely from Flossy’s old memory.
Ruth hadn’t wanted to come to Great Village and somewhere over the last weeks or months, Flossy imagined, this lovely young creature had let sadness settle inside her. Perhaps even getting ready for Nova Scotia, she’d invited it in for a day. No doubt it would sit quietly, well-behaved, while Ruth felt slightly detached from everybody else’s energy and activity. When no one noticed — her friends, her mother, maybe her father didn’t call when he said he would — she would let it stay for another day or two, a pout gone unseen or unmentioned that wedged a toe in the sadness door.
Eventually, what started as low-grade moodiness would persist. Flossy had seen it with her students over the years like dejected little paper boats that no one could reach drifting farther away from shore. She’d seen quite a lot of it by Ruth’s age, sixteen, then younger and younger, as early as ten by the time she’d finished teaching. Sadness took up residence in them, a strange, troubled roommate with no boundaries that they were unable to turn out, until it became something they were merely observing as someone outside of their humourless selves. And sadness was demanding. Its own kind of grief, it drained the colour from everything in every direction. Things that normally made them happy could not. Music they once loved no longer moved. Nothing gave pleasure. They found nothing to amuse or console them and nothing to look forward to. It took over with no drama, no fury, just slow-rising grey water that left them ever so tired.
Yet somewhere along that dark way Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer had pulled herself back. Flossy didn’t know why or how but she could see a difference in just a week. Here in this unlikely village that all the young people fled just about as fast as they could, here in Flossy’s little house — a worn, dusty old place with lace curtains and crocheted doilies, books piled on every step of the stairs, windows that hoisted and clanked on pulleys that didn’t work and a bathtub with no shower and a leaky tap — here where Ruth had discovered a world turning lazily on its axis, where the business of each day was set out against the look of the morning sky or cobwebs on the grass and could be put off with impunity until tomorrow, she had somehow found colour again.
Of course they’d all merrily missed the train. Flossy knew that and knew how unfair it was to dump Ruth here. She must have thought the entire village had been left on the platform. Here was a youngster accustomed to activity, to doing and being and going and preparing. There were agendas for lessons and sports, for friends and movies, not an unscheduled minute in her normal life. In the village, by contrast, there was no driving force in their midst, nothing to catch, to hurry for, nothing that couldn’t be set aside for a good cup of strong tea, nothing the world revolved around except the long-ago written word. They ambled through their days like an aimless flock of guinea fowl turning this way or that according to whim, wind, scratchings or nothing much at all.
Ruth had dreaded coming and, that first weekend in the village, would discover the place to be far worse than anything she could have imagined. Flossy could still see the look on her face, some desperate fusion of disbelief and terror, when she broke the news that she had no television. Ruth had mumbled something unintelligible. Of course, there were no movies in town either, not even a local library to find a computer. Ruth sat down and Flossy fully expected tears. There she was, imprisoned in a one-horse town with an old woman and nothing but walls and walls of books. She did not envy her.
That first weekend Ruth had written her father, Jack, having just learned of another father. She didn’t have stamps to mail it and would not ask for any, so Flossy waited. Each time the young woman thought of taking it to the post office, something got in the way. Then Mealie happened to mention the post office had been closed a good dozen years anyway, though everyone still called it the post office and there it sat, boarded up in the centre of town. Ruth could only shake her head. When she finally did get some stamps at McLellan’s, she’d lost the urgency to send the letter and there it lay on her dresser, forgiven trespasses, beneath the baseball glove.
As Flossy lifted her outstretched arm to the chesterfield and pulled a cotton sheet up to her shoulders, Ruth emerged just enough into consciousness to blink twice, smile up at her and sink soundly back to sleep.
Now, when she cast her thoughts back over the few days Ruth had been there, Flossy couldn’t say how or where it had changed, or if there had been a particular moment when she’d first heard her young laughter mingle with her own over something outrageous Mealie had read from the paper. She felt as if Ruth had come up for air after being too long underwater.
“Listen to this.” Mealie flipped a corner of the paper down to be sure Ruth and Flossy were paying attention. “Bluey, a long-tailed macaw, was thrown out of a parrot show on the Isle of Wight for unbecoming language. It says here they even got him an elocution teacher — that could be a second career for you there, Flossy — but Bluey told his teacher to ‘take a sexual hike too.’”
Mealie had knees the size of Ruth’s thigh and from just about every perspective she was unavoidable in Flossy’s kitchen. Ruth didn’t take to her right away, did her level best to ignore her too, but couldn’t escape the heavy scrape of Mealie’s voice — audible, she complained, through two pillows stuffed against the ears.
Seated at the back of Mealie’s Life Studies class on Tuesday, though, it seemed Ruth had taken another look. Flossy was sure she’d only gone to get directions to the Truro bus terminal. At the class, Mealie set her up beside one of the lone wolves. He’d stumbled in behind all the rest, unshaven and yawning from a short night, but she knew him to be of robust talent and uncompromising about his art, so much so that even Mealie found him inspiring. Of course, she was taking a chance that Ruth would get her map to the buses, but she also knew the enthusiasm of the artist sitting beside her was infectious. Mealie was absolutely certain he’d notice that new face in the class and if anyone could move Ruth along the path of her own small peeve, it was this one. She left them entirely alone.
“Some knots’ve just gotta work themselves out, Pet,” she’d said later.
Mealie was easier-going than Flossy in that regard. It was the artist’s eye that saw everything on a bit of a slant. Walking back to the van after class, she’d talked to Ruth about complementary colours, pulling a colour wheel out of her grimy canvas bag and stopping in front of a dress shop display window to show her how certain colours were used together — that blue with orange, chartreuse and purple — and explaining to her which colours would go best with her terracotta hair and complexion: avocado, chocolate, aqua and soft blues. They went inside to try some dresses on so Ruth could see it was true.
As they drove back to Great Village, Mealie even said she’d much prefer to drive Ruth to the train or bus station if she were determined to go, rather than have her try to find her own way, would buy the ticket if she needed money. Her back door, Mealie said, was always open and she should just come by when she thought it was time.
As they talked about it later, Flossy had to agree it would be much better than having her disappear in the middle of the night. Once Ruth was offered that clear and easy way to leave, she promptly and mysteriously settled in. Much against her will, she’d taken to Mealie, had asked if she might go back to the class the following week.
“Horror-scopes,” Mealie announced that morning at the breakfast table. “What’s your birthday, Peapod?” She leaned towards Ruth.
“June 24.”
Mealie looked down the columns. “Cancer. Let’s see. Spotlight on creativity, prosperity, marital status.” She turned a corner of the paper down to plant an eye on Ruth, who giggled, before continuing, “Follow your heart as Venus rules. Virgo plays a role.” The eye again, “Who’s Virgo?” she asked coyly.
Ruth shook her head. “What’s Flossy?”
“Capricorn: ‘Big changes ahead. Focus on long-term goals. Surprise in store.” She looked up from the paper and croaked, “That’s no doubt the party we haven’t told you about.”
“Yours, Mealie,” Ruth urged her on.
She read, “Scorpio: Don’t confuse wishful thinking with facts. New love on horizon, if you are ready,” she peered over the paper again, “and you thought Mr. Third Baseman was hanging around here because of your braided little tail.” Ruth put her hand to her mouth and giggled. “Money picture bright. Taurus figures prominently. Who’s Taurus?”
“Phil’s Taurus,” Ruth chirped.
A huge smile peeled across Mealie’s face. “What’d I tell ya?”
Flossy stayed out of it.
RUTH HAD SETTLED IN to Flossy O’Reilly’s world, nearly a century in reverse, like a dry-rock wall settles in to a slope it’s meant to lean against for the better part of a lifetime. It was the last thing anybody expected, but no one more so than Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer.
It may have helped that Flossy passed her the keys to Falstaff that first weekend in the village, and told her just to hold on to them, which pleased the youngster enormously. She washed that old tank on Sunday and cleaned it inside-out as if it were her own first car. Flossy and Mealie watched from the kitchen window. When Ruth finished, Mealie said Falstaff probably wouldn’t start with all that primping, but it did.
Each morning after Mealie went back to the studio to paint and Jimmy set off on his rounds, regardless of the tasks at hand, Flossy and Ruth would jump into the old Valiant and head for the shoreline.
“There’s tangible weather out there,” Flossy’d say from the kitchen door, gusts of wind blowing every piece of clothing away from her small frame, “Get your shirt on.” The harder it blew, the more determined she was to be out in it. Sometimes they’d take their shoes off and stroll a mile along the beach, as far as the O’Reilly homestead. If the sky were low and broody, they’d sit and watch birds, pick rocks or examine filmy creatures caught in tidal pools. Ruth loved collecting rocks, would fill her pockets with a vast array of shapes and colours. Flossy showed her geographical points of interest, where the old Spencer lighthouse had stood at the Point, where cottages squatting along the edge of the bay had to be hauled back three feet each year, where an entire sports field and the Chisholm farm, farther out beyond those cottages, had been sheared away by the tides, lest Ruth think there wasn’t much power in the calm lapping at the water’s edge.
They would talk, sometimes Flossy would take out her own small booklet of copied-out poems, those she was determined to learn by heart. She would read these softly when they stopped, as Ruth picked rocks. “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end …”
Staring out into the bay, Ruth asked, “How do you tell if the tide’s going out or coming in? It always looks like it’s coming in.”
“Doesn’t it? They never stop rolling in,” Flossy explained, “they just roll in less and less when it’s going out.” She pointed to a rock in the distance. “Look at that big rock about four hundred yards out there … now bring your eye down to some other rock or landmark at the water’s edge … and back to the big rock.” She paused for two or three minutes. “Now look down again to the water’s edge. See a change?”
Ruth said, “I’m not sure … maybe.”
“Well, you could check the newspaper like everyone else.”
“Does it always come back in the same way?” Ruth asked.
“Twice a day, about a half-hour later each time: it’ll come in, go out and be back to do it all again in twelve and a half hours. In the old days, a gang from the other side of the bay, in Noel, would get on a boat in an evening sail across with the high tide to Portaupique where there used to be a dance hall. As soon as the dances were over, everybody would pile back onto the boat and ride the tide home again by six the next morning. A fair few romances straddled those shores over the years.” She closed her book and they strolled on.
As Ruth poked for rocks up ahead, Flossy let her mind drift back to Roger Fry. She’d been thinking about him all morning, the influential British art critic who’d become a lifeline to Mrs. Woolf. Shortly after his untimely death in 1934, Virginia Woolf was persuaded to work on his biography, which she finished the year before she died. Virginia seemed to have poured her grief into that labour and, when she’d finished articulating his vision, she likened it to a child, their child, hers and Roger’s. Once the biography was born, however, Flossy could see Mrs. Woolf beginning to slip and it seemed as if no one was noticing. She could also see, in that final year of Mrs. Woolf’s life, how vital Roger’s encouragement had been to her throughout her writing career, a form of intellectual wall around her: as long as Roger liked her books, Virginia could rest assured they were good. Unlike so many of her Bloomsbury friends — or perhaps Virginia’s perception of them — Roger was not the slightest bit withholding. As one of her most ardent critics, he always understood what she was trying to achieve in literature — so similar to what he and others were attempting in painting — and gave unstinting encouragement. With him gone, it seemed as if Virginia Woolf had lost her moorings. In that last winter, she described a “vast sorrow at the back of life,” an emptiness, owing in part to Vita’s drift to another lover and Roger’s death. Of her work, she’d declared, “no echo comes back.” Roger Fry had been her echo and with him gone, Mrs. Woolf had begun the long descent that would end in suicide.
Throughout his life, Roger Fry had himself survived his share of ridicule for trying something new. After curating exhibitions of some of the European Post-Impressionists, including works by Manet, Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gogh, he was denounced by Britain’s art establishment, incensed that such rubbish paintings should have any claim on art.
Fry always said everyone needed two lifetimes: one to find out what to do and another to do it. He was determined to go back and look at the painting Masters every ten years or so — Michelangelo, da Vinci, Renoir — not to see how they had changed, but to see how he had with ten more years of living. Flossy loved this tidal notion. She couldn’t think of one area of her life where it couldn’t apply. There was always a need to look into the distance, up close, beyond again and back. So much could be lost, she knew, by the look that never looked again.
“See that sandbar way out there, up out of the water with grass growing on it?” Flossy held a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun’s glare as she spoke, “was never there when we were children. There’s change out here but so incremental you can’t see it until it’s behind you and then you can’t imagine how it ever came to be.”
They walked along a little farther and Flossy stopped again. “It’s always been instructive to me,” she said, “how each day’s small wearing away can change a coastline, can change a person too.”
Apart from their walks by the shore, Flossy and Ruth had found quite a lot to do in Great Village and beyond, things the young woman had never done before. They’d dug clams and made chowder together; Flossy showed her how to make pastry for a raspberry pie and on Sunday after her mother had gone they’d driven to Parrsboro to watch summer stock in an old ship converted into a theatre. There were blueberries to be picked and the Economy Clam festival with Bobby McLellan’s band, Badd (the band formerly known as Horridd, according to Mealie). After a trip to the weir, Jimmy was bringing Ruth as wide a variety of fish as he could find and showing her how to cook them with herbs and garlic on Flossy’s barbecue, but gradually, apart from the trip to the shore each day and baseball, the young woman seemed just as happy to be at home. More often than not, Flossy would find her stretched out on the parlour chesterfield, an oh-so-charmed Oscar Wilde curled beside her, reading one of the books left in piles throughout the house.
“Queen Mab?”
“Lady Partridge.”
The two older women could hoist entire conversations with Ruth perched on a fulcrum waiting to see if they were being serious or silly.
“You could have been like Amy Lowell, if you’d aspired a little higher, and be driving around Great Village as we speak in a mauve Rolls-Royce with a cigar clenched in your teeth.”
Flossy said, “I’ll ponder it.”
“Hmn.” Mealie turned a page.
Ruth began picking up the biographies Flossy left at the edge of the table, then reading the writings that also appeared, marked with strips of white paper. Flossy talked of the times, too, who else was writing, the uniqueness of each artist’s contribution to the literary canon.
as the two of them walked along the shore picking rocks that day and watching the tide, Flossy turned to Ruth.
“I used to bring your mother down here when she was little.” It was a windy day. The youngster turned as if she hadn’t heard, then she did and shrugged.
“See that tree?” She pointed up to one loaded with apples above them that was leaning over the cliff at a right angle to the shore on its slow tumble to the rocks ten feet below where Flossy and Ruth were walking now at low tide. The tips of the branches were growing straight up towards the sun. Half of the tree’s tangle of root was exposed, washed clean of soil and bleached white as whale bone set out against the red cliff. The other half was buried in the bank. In spite of the inevitable destruction ahead, the tree was loaded with one final harvest. “It gave us the best baking apples in this whole area. Let’s get some.”
Flossy picked up a long stick and teased each apple free. Ruth easily caught them and stuffed them into the plastic bags Flossy carried in her pockets.
“I’d never have believed it when your mother was up there so many years ago.” They looked up at the tree. “It’ll be gone in no time … another storm, maybe two. I tried to get Jimmy to graft this one onto one of his trees once but he was never so fond of apple pie that he did it with much heart. Now, maybe if you’d asked him …”
Ruth grinned. “He just likes me ’cause I love his dog.”
They all noticed Jimmy’s attentiveness. He’d even come out to the baseball game last night with Logie. In fact, a good number of the villagers were strolling over to the baseball field, now that the Ironclads were making a modest showing and to see the new shortstop everyone was talking about. Flossy noticed a few winks exchanged among the fans when Ruth was up at bat. There hadn’t been so much excitement in Great Village since the smelts were running in May.
“Is it hard to do, grafting?” Ruth asked.
“Nah, your grandfather showed me. All you need is a good clean paring knife, some rooting powder and something to hold the two pieces of branch together, wax or elastic, snug bark to bark, until this apple twig heals itself to a branch of your tree. That grandfather of yours could put knitting needles into the ground and make them grow.”
Flossy looked out towards the water and watched the waves roll in, her small head high. “You have to get to my age to see how the unresolved ache can erode a life, Ruth. And I’m not sure just what’s worse: the slow erosion, like my brother Thomas, or the rug pulled from beneath you, like your mother.” Ruth was quiet, watching the ground. She bent over and picked up a green and purple stone.
They walked quietly back along the roadway uphill towards the car with their bags of apples. It wound its way through the woods and eventually levelled off at the old Spencer orchard. Flossy stopped to catch her breath and bent to pick up a yellow transparent apple that had rolled onto the road.
“Why is my mother,” Ruth paused for a moment, “like that?” “Like what?”
“She messes everything up. She promises to do things then she doesn’t have time and sometimes she doesn’t even tell the truth.” Flossy stepped away from the road and headed towards an ancient tree that had been split down through the trunk with one half tumbled to the ground. She turned and sat down on it and patted a spot beside her where Ruth joined her. They were both perspiring and the small cast of shade from the half of the tree that was still alive provided relief on a day so hot the grass crackled beneath each footstep. In the meadow not far from them they watched for a minute as a flock of starlings dipped and dove like a black sheet being shaken up into the air before settling into an old maple close to the woods.
“Elizabeth Bishop, our Bishop of the step-cows, wasn’t born here but, like you, her people were from Great Village and she belonged. She has a poem about a sandpiper, an exceptional poem. I’ll let you read it when we get back. It’ll remind you of your mother, though I suspect the poet was probably seeing herself in the feverish running of those birds along the shoreline, the frantic scurrying at the water’s edge, searching for something but not seeing anything but what’s on the ground immediately in front of them.”
Ruth waited.
The wind blew up for a minute and when it passed, Flossy continued. “You know, they all disappoint, one way or another. They can’t help it. It’s in the nature of parenting and if you have a child someday you will too, but differently than your mother has disappointed you. You’ll correct your disappointment but you’ll likely end up correcting something that doesn’t mean a lot to your child.” She looked out across the dry land. They needed rain badly; one careless cigarette could send this whole field up in flames. “There’s an infinite number of places where we can miss each other.” She thought of William and Lillian dragging their conflict into the midst of the children. “Parents have another generation’s concerns they’re brooding over; they’re out there somewhere fishing their hearts out for something you’ve never even heard of, something that wouldn’t interest you in a hundred years. My generation never got over the wars, the Depression, a feeling that the bottom could fall out of everything at any time, that nothing would hold. You never quite get over that kind of fear,” she patted her tummy, “in here. We’ve all got closets stuffed to the gills with plastic bags and aluminum pie plates in case we’ll need them someday.” A cicada was whining in the hot afternoon. Ruth rolled one running shoe back and forth over an apple on the ground.
Flossy took a small bite from the transparent apple she’d been polishing with her handkerchief and promptly spat it out. “They always look so much better than they taste,” she said, tossing it away. She removed her hat and wiped her forehead. “Your mother was a lovely bright child, so like you, but she was bumped around, first by her mother’s illness, which went on, honestly, what seemed forever so that we all got used to it. You can actually get used to someone dying, Ruth.” She stopped and stared into the distance, remembering Patricia’s last days. They were quiet for some moments. “We got used to waiting and seeing what would come next with your grandmother’s illness. She was so good-natured about it. Funny, actually. It was remarkable when I think of it. Then all of a sudden she got sicker and died within days and, as incomprehensible as it may seem, we weren’t ready.” Flossy always believed that Patricia just got fed up with being sick, with the body’s daily rebellions, the peeling off of something else that wasn’t going to recover, like an unwelcome guest who’s had enough of sleeping on a lumpy couch and finally leaves. Within days she’d folded up and died.
“You might have thought we’d had time to prepare because your grandfather and I knew it was coming. You could get lost in the day-to-day there too, watching the small changes at the water’s edge, like Bishop’s sandpiper, and missing what’s happening in a larger way out on the bay. And if the adults weren’t ready to lose her, well you can just imagine how badly we’d prepared little Marjory and the boys. It was a hard loss. Then he whisked them away from everything they knew, off to Ontario within a week of their mother’s death.” She went quiet remembering them setting off in the old brown station wagon that day, all three children crying, Marjory inconsolably. “So many goodbyes,” she murmured. “He was obstinate, your grandfather, couldn’t talk to him. Your mother had all her bearings taken away,” she said gently, “so she’s always looked outside herself for them. And, you know, they’re never there.”
“Sometimes she doesn’t even tell the truth.”
“I’d say she’s got a gambling problem,” Flossy leaned into Ruth affectionately. “I think your mother’s torn in so many directions, so many people needing her, that she gambles on who she can disappoint most and least. Every day she juggles all the things she has to do with what she can put off.” Flossy reached down and picked up three small apples, tossing them into the air until one dropped. “Oops.” She threw the others away too. “It doesn’t mean, therefore, she thinks you count least and that’s why she changes her plans with you all the time,” she spoke deliberately. “It means she’s counting most on your forgiveness.” She looked at the young woman beside her who didn’t say a word in reply. “It’s an easy mistake to make.” They got up then and made their way back along the dusty road towards the car.
Flossy slowed. “What seems like dishonesty to you, well, we all indulge it a bit, don’t you think? Most of us don’t resort to outright lies. They’re like a hole in the pocket: you’ve always got to remember they’re there or important things fall through, but it’s so terribly hard to be truthful, entirely truthful and kind at the same time. Try it yourself; try to be conscious of it for a day even, then a week. We all stretch that fabric for convenience, or ego, sometimes privacy or the plain old burlap of getting along, not wishing to hurt or offend. Some days, I’ll tell you Ruth, I’d dearly love it if Jimmy would forget I ever ate fish. I don’t have the heart to tell him, though, to drop me off his route for a week. It would be just like him to take it personally and then I wouldn’t see another fresh fish until Mealie dumps my ashes out here in the bay,” she gestured over her shoulder. “You’d think it would be a small thing to put out there and have accepted, but he’d see ingratitude, and there’d be voices around his dinner table, let me tell you, to keep that chorus humming. We’re all full of nettles and nobody knows quite how to handle anybody else.”
Ruth had become a hard listener and was learning how to wait.
“What I don’t understand is why did my mother go and tell me about that other guy?”
“Well, you were coming and he was going to be here too. Richard has always been a dear friend to Mealie and me. She had to tell you both or change her plans.” She stopped and looked up into Ruth’s eyes. “It’s my fault. I insisted. You needed to know about your father and he needed to know about you. It was the right thing to do. I hope you’ll understand that more as you look back on this summer. Of course, your mother wouldn’t be the first parent to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” They continued walking. The car was hot inside. The two women climbed in, opened all the windows and drove slowly back to the main road.
Flossy raised her voice to be heard. “What do you say we turn left at the stop sign and drive down shore for some fried clams.” “Sure.” Ruth could eat endlessly without showing an ounce and she loved food, would devour anything that was put in front of her. They stopped at the main intersection of Highway 2 and Flossy continued.
“I’ve discovered that there’s nothing so capable as the human mind to rationalize a shameful decision,” she said. “Sometimes we get so entangled in fear and justification that we’ll do almost anything to avoid the truth, what’s right.”
Ruth looked across at her.
“I’m talking about myself here.” Flossy smiled at her and looked out to the countryside. “From your end of a lifetime, you think adults give a lot of thought to the things they do, that they reason everything through. From all I’ve seen in eighty-two years, there’s a fierce lot of muddle out there and what isn’t muddle is most often fear. Seldom, seldom are people doing their level best.” The sky was filled with fluffy clouds today. “She’s not a bad person, your mother. She’s lost her compass. To my mind, there’s always a lot to learn from context and history; it’s true that you assess a work based on the work, but there’s surely some clarity to be gained by understanding context. I thought I knew a lot about Mrs. Woolf until I crawled into her skin with those diaries and the letters alongside the novels and other writings. They made me realize what an emotionally crippling early life she’d lived and how insatiable was her need for affection later.”
Ruth was a careful driver, hands always on the wheel unless she was changing gears, seldom letting her eyes leave the road, observing the speed limit and heeding all the stop signs that all the rest of them ignored.
“You and your mother don’t have a lot of time left together. You could be gone from home in another year. If you leave her too far behind, by the time you’re ready to take that second look,” she reached across and patted her arm, “and you will be some day,” she said, nodding, “she may not be around.”
“Do you think my mom will talk to me?”
“I think she probably longs for nothing more. None of us talks about the things that hurt, Ruth, voluntarily, the things nearest our hearts. You’ve got to be patient. Go find your uncles, Richard, your father, ask them about their lives, your mother, all of it, then decide whether or not she deserves your compassion, but don’t write the essay before you’ve done the research.”
Ruth nodded.
The old woman nodded too. “And don’t forget,” she said, “if you don’t make a few good mistakes when you’re young, you won’t have a thing to talk about when you’re old.”