Flora (7 page)

“Clark bars.”

“How many?”

“Five,” I risked.

“Five Clark bars,” Flora relayed without batting an eye. “And can you tell us approximately when your delivery person will be coming? Not that we expect to be going anywhere! And you ought to know our driveway is a tiny bit rough.”

Our big event of the morning was the walk down our tiny-bit-rough driveway to fetch the mail. Flora had two letters, I had nothing. She kissed the handwritten envelope (“Dear Juliet, at least somebody loves me!”) but ripped open the typewritten one first, scanned the contents, and began to cry.

“What?” I said.

“I expected it. But still—”

“What?”

“They said no, and it was my first choice.” Bravely she replaced the letter in its envelope and scrubbed her eyes with her fists like a child. “They
say
it’s because I don’t drive. The thing is, someone offered to drive me to that interview, but it would have been in a truck and I thought I’d make a better impression if I arrived alone on the bus. It was this darling little school in the middle of a field. Fifteen sixth graders. I could have handled it real well.”

“But you had three interviews, so you still have two more chances.”

“I wonder if I had told a lie about the driving—I could
have learned to drive later. But this was probably their way of letting me off nicely. If I had said I could drive they would have had to have come up with some other excuse for not wanting me.”

“You have to start thinking better of yourself, Flora.”

“That’s exactly what Mrs. Anstruther said in her letters.”

“Well, it’s true. Others judge you at your own estimation.”

“Her exact words! You’re so lucky to have had her, Helen. I’m such a mess. Not like your mother. Nobody had to tell Lisbeth to think better of herself. Maybe you have to be born with it. Were you born with it? I don’t know. But, being her daughter, your chances are better than mine.”

“Who cares whether you were born with it?” I asked. Yet Flora had set misgivings buzzing in my head. “You have to at least
act
like you have it.”

“That’s just what your grandmother would have said!” crowed Flora, almost knocking me down with a hug.

Father McFall telephoned to report that Brian was “holding his own” in the hospital and that he had conveyed my message. Annoyingly he kept skirting around my questions about Brian’s condition. “But I’m still hoping to drop by and visit with you and your cousin this week.” He offered it like a consolation prize for not telling me anything I wanted to know.

“My father said we can’t have any visitors. He said we can’t even go to church.” I was glad to be able to punish Father McFall in this small way.

The phone again. This time it was Annie Rickets, my favorite acid-tongued little friend. “Can you talk?”

“Sort of.”

“Is she around?”

“Upstairs in her room.”

“The dear old Willing Fanny room.”

“Oh, Annie, I’ve missed you.”

“You’re going to miss me a lot more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just joking. How is it going with her?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Except for—?”

I lowered my voice: “Kind of naïve.
Huge
inferiority complex. Not that we’ll be going anywhere for people to notice. My father has quarantined us to the house. Did you hear about Brian?”

“I heard he was pretty bad. His acting career’s probably over, unless he does wheelchair parts. But at least he’s not in an iron lung like that little girl. So how was your week with the high-living Huffs? Did you get lots of
swimming
in?”

“I’d have gotten in a lot more if I’d known the summer was going to turn out like this.”

“I heard a really odd rumor about him.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Huff. Some people think he doesn’t exist.”

“That’s crazy. He’s always sending packages.”

“You can send packages to yourself.”

Though I knew Annie’s best rumors originated inside her own fiendishly inventive head, that didn’t make them any less appealing. They always had a rightness about them, like the rightness of what ought to happen next in a good story. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you heard this rumor,” I said, and waited for her usual answer.

“Well, when you’ve got not one but two parents working for the phone company, you hear a lot. You can listen in on
anything if you have the right equipment. Which brings me to my exciting news. We’re being transferred.”

“Wait a minute. Is this some more of that joke?”

“What joke?”

“What you said a few minutes ago about how I was going to miss you, but then you said you were joking.”

“It’s no joke. I just wasn’t ready to tell you yet. They’re moving us to this boring little town in the flatlands. Daddy will be regional manager and make lots more money and Mammy will stay home with us. She’ll probably die of resentment and boredom or kill us first, I haven’t decided which yet.”

“When?”

“Daddy’s already down there looking for a house. We’re supposed to move in three weeks. They’re paying for the Mayflower van and we don’t even have to pack up our own stuff. My rotten little sisters will share a bedroom in the new house and I’ll get one all to myself.”

“You sound awfully pleased.” Two out of three friends cut down in two days. I was on a losing streak, like Flora with her jobs. Only she still had two out of three left.

“You can come visit. It’s only a bus ride down the mountain. You’ll be able to stay over at my house for a change. Maybe I’ll give my room a name like the rooms at your house.”

Then she ruined everything. “But the truth is, and we’re both smart enough to know it, Helen, we’ll probably never see each other again.”

SLOWLY IT CREAKED
into afternoon and I was beginning to see how the whole summer was going to be. Meals and Flora.
Flora and meals. We couldn’t go anywhere and nobody could come to us. To escape Flora, who was already preparing supper, though we had hardly finished with lunch, I had gone to the garage to sit in Nonie’s car. I had been waiting very quietly, trying to summon back the voice from yesterday, when a motorcycle roar shattered the stillness. I slammed out of the garage in time to see it buck over the crowning bump of our hill. It was a three-wheeled affair with a storage trunk behind. A skinny man with pointy features and close-cropped bright orange hair dismounted, mouthing my father’s worst obscenity. But when he spotted me, he quickly socialized his face and called, “You folks have one holy terror of a driveway.” He wore khakis, the pants stuffed inside high lace-up boots.

“We’re having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I said haughtily.

“Well, it is and it isn’t.”

“What?”

“The war. We still have the Japs to beat.” He looked past me into the open garage. “Oldsmobile Tudor touring car. Nineteen thirty-three.”

“How do you know that?”

“I worked on cars like this before I joined up. My name is Finn. I’m your grocery deliverer. One thousand Sunset Drive. Sounds like a movie.”

I started to shake hands but remembered my father’s warnings. This person had been all over town delivering groceries. “My name is Helen Anstruther,” I said.

“The one who likes the Clark bars.”

“How did you know that?”

“I heard her ask you when I was taking your order. I fancy them myself.”

He wasn’t a foreigner, but he wasn’t a local either. His speech was different. On his sleeve there was a patch with an eagle’s head.

“Were you in the war?”

“I was, I was. I was supposed to jump on D-Day but I got sick in England and they had to ship me back to the military hospital here.”

“It must have been your lungs then.”

“Now how did
you
know
that
?”

“It’s their specialty. My grandfather helped them start that hospital. He was a doctor. This house used to be his convalescent home where people could finish recovering from lung problems. Or sometimes mental problems.”

His high-pitched laugh resembled a cry of pain. “The perfect place for me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I had a collapsed lung and then later came the mental problems.”

Then here came Flora flying out of the house, apologizing for having been upstairs, as if her presence were required before any two people could start an interesting conversation, apologizing for “our” driveway, and oh, what a cute machine, but such a hot day to be outside riding around bareheaded.

“This is Finn, who’ll be delivering our groceries,” I cut her off. I introduced her simply as Flora, leaving off the cousin part.

Flora plunged into a handshake, all polio warnings forgotten, and said she hoped we hadn’t weighed him down by ordering too much, we would try not to order too often.

“Oh, I have people who order every single day,” said Finn.

“My goodness, every day?” exclaimed Flora, sounding foolishly impressed.

“Many of our customers don’t have refrigeration.”

“We didn’t have refrigeration back in Alabama when I was growing up,” Flora eagerly volunteered. “Just this one little icebox in the cellar with a block of ice. The iceman brought us a new block twice a week.”

Shut up
, I was thinking, but Finn only smiled at her. “I’ve got this one lady,” he said, “who doesn’t hesitate to phone the store whenever she remembers something she forgot.”

“She must be a rich lady,” I said sarcastically.

“Ah, no,” he said. “She’s a lonely old lady who’s losing her memory. But I always fit her in. It’s no trouble at all.” (He sweetly pronounced it “a-
tall
.”) He seemed like a kind, good-humored person, if a little odd-looking. It was certainly kind of him to pretend not to notice what a fool Flora was.

Somehow we got the grocery bags into the kitchen without her embarrassing me again, though she did keep calling me her little cousin and had started up again about the okra. I made sure Finn got a good look at our Frigidaire, which was more up-to-date than anything else in the house. This was not Flora’s Alabama. It would have been interesting to hear about his collapsed lung and even more about the mental problems, but I needed to get him away before he started dreading his future deliveries to these two isolated females at the top of their holy terror drive.

“WHY DO WE
always have to eat at six?” I asked Flora, when she started rolling out her biscuit dough.

“Because that’s when people eat.”

“We never used to eat at six. We ate at all different times. My father and Nonie had to have their cocktails first.”

“Well, you and I don’t have any cocktails.” She looked very proud of her clever reply.

“But it’s still afternoon outside.”

“Go outside then. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“Did that Negro maid make biscuits every day
back in Alabama
?”

“I’ve told you, Juliet isn’t a maid. She’s part owner of our house.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Well, it’s true. Many a time she’s had to make the whole mortgage payment by herself. When Uncle Sam dies, it’ll be all hers.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Aren’t you your uncle’s next of kin?”

“I’ll have a job teaching by then. I can make a down payment on my own place if I want one. I might even be married.”

“Married?”

“Don’t look so surprised. So far, two people have asked me.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“Why should anything be wrong with them? Because they wanted me?”

“No, no! I just meant—”

“I know, honey. I was teasing. One was a lawyer. The other owned a farm. He’s the one who offered to drive me to that interview in his truck. Maybe I’d have done better to let him. The subject of my not driving might never have come up.”

“What about the lawyer?”

“He was too old, for one thing—he had two grown children. I worked for him one summer and he was very nice to
me. But I wasn’t really attracted to him.” She giggled. “He had little hairs growing out of his ears.”

I recalled the hairs growing out of my father’s ears. Rachel Huff’s mother had told her that with Nonie gone my father would probably want to marry again.

During supper, I thought about Finn, but kept him to myself. Then Flora said brightly, “I hope we didn’t go against your father’s wishes by letting that nice delivery boy carry our groceries in. Do you think we did?”

“Did what?”

“Go against your father’s wishes. But your cleaning woman is coming tomorrow, isn’t she? Mrs. Jones.
She
must have been going in and out of all sorts of public places, too. We can’t be expected to live completely in a vacuum, can we?”

“We’re doing a pretty good job, if you ask me.”

IX.

Mrs. Jones arrived at nine on Tuesdays, bringing back the clean sheets and towels she had dropped off at the linen service the week before. She had been cleaning this house for thirty years. She remembered the doctor in his final years, and my father as a teenager before his polio. She remembered the Recoverers and she remembered my mother and she remembered me before I could remember myself. Her own little Rosemary had been alive when Mrs. Jones started coming to our house. She still brought her lunch in Rosemary’s old school lunch box, a thermos of hot tea (which she said kept her warm in winter and cool in summer), and her own table-model radio, which she carried under her arm and plugged into the wall sockets of the different upstairs rooms as she went about her work. Starting with the kitchen, she did the downstairs rooms in the morning. She didn’t like to be talked to when she was scrubbing the kitchen floor because she said being on her knees and the rhythm of the arm motions made it the ideal time for going over her life. She didn’t play the radio in the morning, radio was for the afternoon upstairs.
Guiding Light
and
All My Children
were for the Willow Fanning room; then a silent break for the Willow
Fanning half bath and the front upstairs bathroom (she considered tiled floors with their proximity to water unsafe for plugged-in devices); then on to
Ma Perkins
and
Pepper Young’s Family
in the Hyman Highsmith room; then
Stella Dallas
and
Lorenzo Jones
for the two nameless Recoverers’ rooms, whose guests had been more forgettable, except for the one who had let us down.
When a Girl Marries
was for my grandfather’s consultation room, and she finished her day with
Portia Faces Life
in his half bath, which had a wood floor.