THEY HAPPENED IN QUICK succession: cows bawling, car door slamming, and Ruth scooting to the house, interrupting the Woolf diary Flossy had begun reading once again.
She pulled the screen door to let Ruth in.
“You see that?” Ruth asked, shifting her eyes over her shoulder.
Flossy looked out to the field behind the garage. The day’s light was but a glow on the horizon. Not twenty feet from where they’d parked the car, three beautiful big Holsteins were craning their necks over the fence, in the exact same place they stretched across every night at about this time to eat Flossy’s grass and nibble the peegee hydrangea at the corner of the garage.
In a place the size of Great Village, the country was never much farther than a few houses away, especially when the Bower lad let his cows graze along the hill that stretched behind their houses.
“Don’t worry about them,” Flossy motioned towards the cattle.“They’re the Bishop’s cousin’s. They won’t bother you. About this time every night they stroll by to see if the wind gods have delivered any of your grandfather’s apples and just work their way up here.” Flossy could see that she’d not understood as Ruth’s eyebrows contracted.
“The bishop?” Ruth asked. “How’s he got cows for cousins?”
“She,” Flossy corrected, “and they’re really step-cousins, I should think.”
“The cows are step-cousins?” Ruth’s eyes widened.
“No, no,” Flossy smiled, drawing her inside, “well, I’m not sure now, maybe they are step-cousins.” Glancing out the window again, she offered, “There is a slight family resemblance, don’t you think?” In the tangle of absurdity there was brief but palpable ease, so that Ruth momentarily forgot herself and giggled.
“Now then,” she set about clarifying, “the Bishop’s a poet: Elizabeth Bishop. She used to live here in Great Village. We all call her the Bishop; she wasn’t a bishop. And the cows aren’t her cousins — they belong to her step-cousin. It’s possessive. He lives up that way.” She gestured behind.
Looking back outside from the safety of the closed screen door Ruth mumbled, “I thought they were coming over.”
“No, no. They just prefer my flavour of green, if you can call that grass green, and cows are dreadfully curious. Did you know that?” Flossy asked. “Worse than cats.” Standing back and taking a good look at her, she said, “Maybe they were checking out the new hairdo. Let’s have a look.” As Ruth twirled, Flossy reached up and gave a small tug to the braid at the back. “Last I saw you, Ruth,” she said, “you were half my size with twice my hair. Now I’m half yours with twice yours.” She thrust her voice into her sentences as if she were wading through hip-deep water. “Your mother’s upstairs resting. Let’s get you something to eat?”
“Okay.”
“And after that, we’re going to raid Mr. McNutt’s baking apples. We’ll beat the step-cousins to them.” She glanced outside. “Your mother says you’re a baseball player. If I knock them off with my walking stick, you could catch them. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Ruth ate her ham and tomato sandwich quietly. She was wearing long, baggy shorts, clunky running shoes that made her feet look two sizes larger than they were and a slim blue T-shirt concealing a shallow chest. She had won Richard’s slender body in the genetic pairing and even without the hair, Flossy knew that face would draw gazes in the village with its lovely combination of Highland Scots red colouring and dark eyes. Those eyes were an intelligent, warm brown, her father’s through and through, eyes that might have called out from the past and chastised some other, more reflective mother.
In Marjory’s absence, she seemed affable enough.
Flossy was just clearing the table when Marjory came back down the stairs.
“She’s taking all maths and sciences next year, then applying for university,” Marjory interjected cheerfully to Flossy as she entered the room, while quietly telling Ruth, “Sit up straight, dear.” She put her hand out to touch Ruth’s shoulder but her daughter jerked away.
“For?” Flossy asked.
“Applying for university,” Marjory repeated. “Next year,” enunciating thickly before blowing her nose. Ruth had claimed her school prize for the highest average in both physics and math. “Left the boys in the dust,” Marjory chuckled. The marks were already good enough to get into university — maybe she’ll take medicine, she added.
“I still have Grade Thirteen,” said Ruth shifting uneasily and staring at the floor. “I haven’t even finished high school yet,” she said, glancing at Flossy.
“Science and math will open up such possibilities,” Marjory gushed. Ruth asked to be shown her room. The apples, Flossy realized, would have to wait. With a sudden inclination to shave her own head, she thought of those strange medieval saints who lived their lives up on the tops of poles so that no one could bother them as they prayed, never coming down. Wasn’t it Mealie who’d read about them? She looked longingly at the Woolf books, closed in front of her, not an arm’s length away. Perhaps she could take just one or two books up the pole with her — Shakespeare, Woolf, Bishop. Three, then. Oh, for a little tobacco shop or a pole to live way up on top of so that she could finish this troubling Virginia Woolf story in peace and quiet. Right away she realized she tossed and turned far too much in her sleep to live way up on top of a pole like that.
Flossy’s hearing was not as good as it used to be, but you didn’t need to hear a thing to detect the strain between the mother and daughter in her kitchen. She was much better talking with one person at a time, one face to watch without distraction. Even then, sense could shift with a dither of concentration. What she already knew was that something lay between these two that was deeper and darker than words spoken or lost from faulty hearing. Ruth had returned to the kitchen but she wasn’t giving any ground. Flossy dearly wished they’d turn around and take their disputes back home with them.
Here it was, not quite nine in the evening, they hadn’t been in the kitchen much more than two hours and she was longing to get back to her books, glancing at the clock and wishing for solitude, far removed from the little mother-daughter dust-up before her. Mathematics and physics, no doubt she’d find algebra equations pencilled on the bathroom wall. Driving all that distance and not saying a word to each other, my oh my.
She thought of her own mother. It had been many years, too many, before Flossy had taken a hard look at her mother’s flat, swollen-knuckled farm hands. Those red cracked hands were nearly twice as wide as those of any other woman she’d known and they never held still until the last two years of Lillian O’Reilly’s life. Yet Flossy didn’t fully understand the burdens they’d had to bear while she had her mother with her.
From year to year, inside the O’Reilly gnarl, Flossy had only been able to see what those lean Depression years had meant to her alone, chores before dawn and late nights falling asleep over lesson plans, the rage digging in its sharpened talons. What her mother had held up under had been many times worse, but Flossy couldn’t see anyone else’s burden then and saw even less how she might be compounding her mother’s. In the whirlwind of her own resentment, she hadn’t appreciated a thing until it was almost too late: all those years when she might have comforted her mother, been a friend to her when she needed it most, all the things she didn’t see then and couldn’t make up for now.
She looked back to the two guests sipping tea at her table whose eyes would not meet, who refused to give each other that. How was it that mothers and daughters, up close like this, could see so little of each other?