Perfect Reader (13 page)

Georgia’s house, with Madeleine and Ray, was sanctuary. They waited on Flora, as though she were an invalid or a princess, Georgia waking her with a tray of toast and tea, as Flora’s father had for many years done for her mother. They made her lunches of peanut butter and jelly on white bread—her longtime favorite, and a sacrifice for them, as they, like the rest of Darwin, did not believe in white bread. White bread was a near sin in Darwin. Weeks after their arrival in town, another mother had pulled Joan Dempsey aside in the school parking lot to ask if she knew how harmful processed foods could be for a growing child, and suggested she buy wheat instead.

“My daughter would rather die than eat whole-wheat bread,” Joan had replied. “From what I gather, starvation is more harmful to a growing child than junky bread.” She’d been irate for days, disproportionately so, complaining to Flora’s father that he had moved them to the kingdom of granola, that she didn’t know how much longer she could take it. “In the city, a person would have a moment’s hesitation before intervening in a case of actual child abuse. In Darwin, lack of whole grains constitutes abuse. Clearly,” she concluded, “these people have not suffered enough.”

So Flora continued to eat white bread, and peanut butter so smooth its natural state could not be traced, and jelly sweet as dessert; she was getting too old for such unsophisticated fare, but sophistication, when it came to lunch, was gross. Weekends at the McNair-Wallachs’, Ray would cut her sandwich in half diagonally, not horizontally, the way her parents did, and he would make one for himself, too, and some other kind of sandwich with greens and sprouts for Madeleine and Georgia, and the four of them would all sit down at the table to eat.

“Delish if not nutrish,” Ray would say, eating one of his halves in three bites.

Sometimes they would bring the gerbils and mice down to the kitchen from Georgia’s room and eat to the sound of the turning of the tiny rodent wheel, the squeaks and roots of rodent life. Flora helped Georgia build obstacle courses from toilet paper rolls and shoe boxes, but she never really liked the animals or wanted to touch them. You picked them up by their stringy tails, which seemed mean and risky—would the tail hold? “Squirming fur balls,” her mother called them, and the description stayed with Flora. Still, she lifted the lid of each cage one by one, dutifully, somberly, holding by turns Mozart and Scherzo, Archibald and Reginald, their jumpy hearts pushing into her palm.

And then they’d go on outings—a trip to a nearby farm to pet sheep, an afternoon collecting and boiling sap into their very own maple syrup at a sugar shack, a visit to Ray’s woodworking studio, where he would teach Flora and Georgia how to use the tools and machines, the lathe and the sander, surrounded by the seared smells of man-madeness. In Flora’s family, conversation was the primary activity, what you did with other people: You talked about ideas; you made witty, surprising remarks; you said something rude, but accurate, devastating in a good way—during a meal, or a journey, over the top of your newspaper or a book. But conversation had let them down. Madeleine and Ray were right to have found other things. Their life was not so flimsy, so breakable. For them, Flora even started to eat wheat bread, though she didn’t tell her mother and still ate white at home.

One day at the studio, they made a picture frame out of a beautiful mottled wood. You could see in it the subtle dark veins; you could see how the wood had once been alive. When Flora got back to the house, she presented it to her mother, but her mother was distracted, working on one of her projects that led to nowhere, clippings spread on the floor in a ring around her, the room stale, her ashtray full.

“Hey, nice. What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

“Put a picture in it.”

“Good.”

“Maybe a picture of me and Ray and Madeleine. Since we made it together.”

“Ummm. Okay.”

“I love Ray and Madeleine,” Flora announced. “They’re my good parents.”

A line never quite undone.

9

The Living

F
LORA HAD KEPT HER MOTHER WAITING
at the Beagle Inn, and her mother didn’t like to wait. She’d been born prickly, and her prickliness was sharpening with age. She’d never felt she fit in Darwin, and still she didn’t. Both of Flora’s parents were large people—and not only in her own mind. Her mother, in heels, was well over six feet tall. When she’d yelled at Flora over some childhood infraction, she’d grown to giantess proportions, and Flora had once thrown herself on the ground, feigning death, in order to avoid being killed—a sensible strategy, at which her mother had laughed and called her “my little Sarah Bernhardt.” It seemed impossible she would ever begin to shrink. She colored her hair an icy blond (graduating from Manic Panic purples when she graduated from the President’s House), but the Darwinian norm was a more natural fading. Her clothing was expensive and tailored, and, whenever possible, black. She was sitting at the back of the restaurant. Now, in restaurants, she had to sit with her back to the wall, gangsterlike, to avoid being bumped. Being bumped could ruin her whole evening, as could plates arriving at different times. Restaurants were land mines of disappointments and mix-ups. But it was Thanksgiving, and Flora’s father had died, and so she was to be excused for her lateness, mostly. The evening was yet to be ruined.

Flora apologized but did not explain. Her mother could hold a grudge, too, like a mafioso, her memory for wrongs—perceived or actual—done to her or Flora elephantine, and she would not approve of the return to the McNair-Wallach household.

They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a month—a long time for them. Her mother, a chronically bad sleeper, had dark circles around her eyes that looked in Darwin darker and deeper. Why was everyone getting so old? This was annoying. Flora didn’t have it in her at the moment to worry about the fact that her mother had stopped sleeping and would one day die. Still, Joan was a remarkable-looking woman, though she insisted looks had never been her thing. “I was never beautiful,” she’d told Flora when she was little. When Flora found pictures at her grandparents’ house, she’d felt betrayed: Why had her mother lied to her?

Joan Dempsey, who’d kept her ex-husband’s name because she thought he wouldn’t like it, had had many careers both pre-and post-Darwin, not roosting anywhere. Currently, she was working for a small nonprofit, doing investigations on prisoners’ rights in the United States. She read the newspaper meticulously, as though she were going to be tested on it the next day, cutting out articles and making rune-like notations on the clippings before stashing them away in her imposing filing cabinet. She’d been a freelance journalist for a few years, after the divorce, and that was when the newspaper habit had reached its zenith. As a child, Flora thought she, too, would read the paper that way once she became an adult, just like she thought she would start rising early, as her father did, as soon as she grew up, taking her parents’ behavior to be the norm and pinnacle of adulthood. Her parents were so thoroughly themselves, so definite.

Her mother was incensed about the state of the country. Incensed was one of her primary modes of being. She was incensed about recent court rulings systematically eroding
Roe v. Wade
. She was incensed about “Bible-thumpers” sprouting up all over the country in the guise of politicians, “like a plague of idiots.” She was incensed about statements the White House had made, casting evolution as a crackpot fringe theory supported only by extremists.

“Every day there’s some new denialist denying the existence of some atrocity—there never was a Holocaust, no Armenian genocide, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, there’s no such thing as global warming. Have you noticed this? If it doesn’t work for your agenda, say it never happened. Fantasy policy.”

“Right,” Flora said. She had not read about these international developments, or any developments in the outside world, and so sat silently as possible as her mother offered her commentary, not wanting to bring attention to her ignorance.

“Sure, we’d all like to live in a world where bad things never happen, but how do you take that next step of actually believing the whopper—denying history, denying science?”

How did she summon so much energy, such indignation in the presence of turkey so dry and cranberries so shocking as to be nearly fluorescent?

“Zealots,” her mother said. “Trying to bring the apocalypse down upon us.”

“Is that what this is?” A joke, and Flora smiled as she made it.

Her mother leaned in across the table. “Are you okay, Flo? You’re awfully quiet.”

“No, I’m fine,” Flora said, answering the question both ways.

“You must be missing Dad.”

“Really, Mom, I’m interested in what you’re saying.”

And her mother kept talking, telling her about the blog she had started—The Responsible Anarchist—from which she launched her secular leftist missives. It had attracted a healthy group of readers, some of them, admittedly, insane—who else was Googling the word
anarchist?
But what Flora was interested in, really, was the next stop on her itinerary. What would she say to Cynthia Reynolds? Would they talk about her father? Would they have anything to say?
Hungry, ambitious
. Madeleine’s words ran in a loop in her brain, tailing that other line,
We were very much in love
. Had her father liked that about Cynthia? Her hunger? Had he, too, become hungry and ambitious? Did that explain the sudden arrival of poetry?

Sitting at the little table for two in the dark dining room, facing her mother over the simulacrum of Thanksgiving dinner, Flora felt her life shrinking. The smallness of the table provided a good metaphor. No room for other people. Soon her life would cease to be a table; it wouldn’t even be a cocktail table. It would be a solitary chair, hard-backed and wooden, much like the chair she was sitting on now. She comforted herself that the waiters, college-aged and no doubt far from home, were having a worse Thanksgiving than she was.

“Tell me something, Flo,” her mother said. “Anything. But something, please.”

“There’s not much to tell. My life up here has been pretty quiet. You know how it is in Darwin.”

Her mother put her silverware down and waited.

“I had drinks with someone,” Flora said. “A lawyer in town. He was Dad’s lawyer, actually, a Darwin alum. That’s how we met. But it was nothing. I’m sure nothing will come of it.”

“Why are you so sure? You had a good time?”

“I don’t know. Sort of.”

“Flora, it’s okay to enjoy yourself. You should be nice to yourself.”

“Should I?” That had been one of her father’s lines. One of his stupider lines.

“I worry about you, sweetheart. You know that. Throwing yourself into Darwin, this precipitous move on the heels of your father’s death. I’m not sure what to make of it all. You’ve given up your job. You won’t speak to any of your friends.”

“What was so great about my job anyway? Telling people that for a more fulfilling existence they ought to buy cork flooring and use organic household sprays? How could I have walked away from all that? And yes, I’ve spoken to people, or I will soon. But I don’t want to get into this with you right now, Mom. It’s Thanksgiving, remember?”

“I thought you liked your job.”

“I was lucky they hadn’t fired me yet. I was a terrible employee, totally unreliable. I was looking for a way out.”

“Have you thought about volunteering somewhere, while you’re up here?”

“Have I thought about volunteering somewhere?” Flora repeated.

“It might be good for you to have something to focus on. Something outside yourself,” her mother added. “To provide some structure.”

“How wonderfully helpful, Mom. How sage.” Joan’s own father had died when she was at the vulnerable age of forty-six, and it had undone her. She knew nothing of Flora’s life. Never had known, never would know.

“Don’t get cross. I’m not allowed to tell you what I think?”

“I’m a little tired,” Flora said.

A wedge of gelatinous pumpkin pie arrived, quivering on a single plate. They watched it quiver.

“Have some dessert,” her mother coaxed.

“No thank you.”

“I suggest that you volunteer somewhere, and it derails the whole evening? Am I allowed to be a participant in a conversation about your life? To offer my opinion? Or maybe it’s safer for you to provide me with a script ahead of time, so that way, if and when you decide to tell me anything, you won’t find my reactions so disappointing.”

“Please, don’t act like I’m being unreasonable. You may recall my father died a few weeks ago.”

“Hey, slow down, okay? You’ve had a hell of a month, Flo. A terrible, difficult few weeks. I just want you to make the best decisions for yourself, not the ones you feel like you have to make for whatever reason. And maybe you’re getting mad at me now because you have your own hesitations about being back here.”

“That is so classic. I’m getting mad at you because of myself. Right. It has nothing to do with you and your behavior. Nothing at all. You’re perfect. It’s all me.”

“No, c’mon, that’s not fair. I know I’m deficient in all sorts of ways.” Her mother’s voice was cracking. It always came as a surprise how easily she cried—the impossible fragility within the toughness. “I really do want what’s best for you, Flo, though it’s hard to tell what that is these days. But of course I want to help you. Whatever you need, or want, just let me know.”

Flora liked it better when her mother was being unreasonable. She was not going to feel sorry for her; that wasn’t her job. “Fine, I’ll let you know,” she said.

There was a silence. “I’m sorry I didn’t say the right thing,” her mother said.

“You know what, Mom? You can save that kind of apology. Really, no thanks.”

“Flora, I’m trying.”

It was true: Her mother was trying. She’d risen to the dispiriting occasion with the yeast of animated conversation, filled the emptiness of the holiday with the sound of her opinions. She had canceled plans to spend the day with her sisters to be with Flora in Darwin instead. Maybe things would be better if her mother tried a little less. Flora wished for the millionth time her mother had someone else in her life to worry over and be wounded by. Or did she wish it? Her father had found that for himself, and it, too, presented problems. Here she was, waiting for the moment she could sneak away from her mother for a tryst with her father’s girlfriend. She hadn’t been so secretive since she was a teenager.
I’m me, and you’re you
. Secrets were one way to test the boundary, to assert your own impenetrable selfhood. She was regressing, moving backward, growing down, like tree roots, and not up, like normal people her age who had boyfriends they lived with, or husbands even, and assistants at work, or fieldwork in Mongolia, and read the paper daily, and never slept till noon, and no longer lied to their parents.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Flora said. “I’m rotten company right now.”

“No, you’re not. Difficult and infuriating, but not rotten.” Her mother took her hand. “I know I told you I wouldn’t sleep in that house, but I will if you’d like me to.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Flora said quickly, queasy with the guilt and irritation that come from lying. “I’m just going to fall into bed.” She did not say “into Dad’s bed.”

Her mother signed the bill and they walked together out to the parking lot.

“Come back to the city with me,” she said. “Tomorrow. For a few days. Take a break from all this, from your father, from Darwin.”

“I can’t,” Flora said. “Not right now. I’m not sure why, but I can’t.”

Her mother put her hands on either side of Flora’s face. It was a fond gesture, but the expression that accompanied it was critical, her eyes heavy-lidded and harsh. “You can’t live his life for him, Flo. You know that. You can’t rewrite the past, redo Darwin.”

Flora heard the premonition of a yell.
You never could fucking understand, could you?
Tears pooled in her eyes, but she did not storm away, shouting over her shoulder as she might have done a month before. Both her parents were—or had been—yellers, and Flora, who came by it naturally, could yell, too. With a good yell, there came that sudden release, narcotic but short-lived. What followed was hangover-like, your body depleted, your mood stiff, achy, and repentant. No more yelling. Let it be the end of that. Be done with something. She wiped her cheeks dry with the back of her hand.

“Mom,” she said, returning the gesture of hands on face, “good night.”

And she hugged her, and thanked her for coming, and she kissed her on the cheek, and climbed right into her father’s station wagon and pulled away.

The dead left you alone, but it was the living who filled you up with loneliness.