Perfect Reader (2 page)

Instead, if you worked out the times, you’d find her in her apartment, inert before afternoon TV, watching an inspirational story about a woman who’d forgiven the man who viciously attacked her and left her for dead, claimed now even to love him, just as her father’s heart attacked him. The woman called the whole disaster
“a real
learning experience,” and whenever anyone called a disaster a learning experience, Flora wanted to stick her finger in her mouth and pretend to shoot her brains out. What did one learn from disaster? What worth learning anyway? Perhaps at the very moment of his attack Flora made her life-mocking gesture, or lifted her mug of lukewarm coffee to her lips, debating whether it was worth another sip. She’d called in sick to the magazine again that day, the second time in three weeks. But Flora wasn’t sick, just tired, rising from her bed at eleven-thirty, sleep-drunk. “If it’s not done by noon,” her father, who woke at dawn, had always said, “then to hell with it.”

She’d read about the parents of marines who died at war waiting to receive their son’s or daughter’s luggage, and when it finally arrived, rushing to unzip it, yearning for the scent of him or her, only to meet with the oily perfume of clean laundry, the heartbreak of erasure. It was marine policy to wash all clothes before returning them. Was that what she had done—returned to Darwin to smell her father’s smell? If so, Mrs. J. had, marine-like, washed the man right out of his house. Or had she? Flora remembered clasping her arms around his neck, long ago, in that other house in Darwin; he had just returned from playing tennis, and smelled sweetly of sweat, and of orange juice. But the only trace of citrus in the house today came from the toxic lemon of cleaning solvents, a faint note of tea leaves sneaking out from underneath. Or maybe the smell of tea was a hallucination, a wish gone haywire in the brain.

It was teatime, wasn’t it? Had she come up to Darwin to visit her father, he would have put the kettle on in anticipation of her arrival. A manic, cheerful, boiling whistle might have welcomed her as she walked through the door. There would be milk in the fridge, and he would have prepared the mugs with a thin layer of it, two teaspoons of sugar for him and three-quarters of one for her. He’d liked his tea sweet, the way she had as a child, but outgrew. He’d had a boyish love of sweets, his excitement at the prospect of a slice of cake uncommon in an adult. Had she come when he was alive, he would have made a plate of cookies—dark chocolate on shortbread biscuits, his favorites. Why had she not come to see him? Would he have lived longer if she had come?

The answering machine on the counter blinked the number 3 at her. Calls to her father; calls to the dead.
I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone right now—could he get back to you never? Actually, he’s deceased at the moment—would you like to leave a message?
Flora picked up the small white box and held it in the bowl of her hands. About the size of her father’s heart—this thought accosted her. When she allowed herself to consider what had happened to him, she felt like fainting—a dissonant ring in her ears, a clouding overcrowding her eyes, a sickening yanking of the crown of her head toward the ground. She yanked the cord out of the wall and threw the machine in the trash. She would regret that later. But then, she was in the regret business these days.

She had bought the machine for him years ago as a Christmas present. Exactly the wrong gift for him, but he had made himself a message, reluctantly asking callers he’d been lucky enough to miss to tell him who they were and what they wanted.

“You don’t have to use it,” she’d told him, seeing his good manners dueling it out with his lust for solitude, the two impulses equal and extreme.

“No, no,” he’d said. “It’ll be good for me. Important to keep oneself gently tethered to the outside world.”

But was that true? Maybe it was time to untether. To hell with good manners and the outside world.

Flora stood in the shadow-darkening kitchen, still in her coat, her hands against the smooth butcher block of her father’s counter. She felt winded, and brittle. Her fingers were twigs; they could be snapped off. Her nails were as thin as paper. If only they could have been left behind, too. She could have scattered a trail of fingers and toes and other breakable bits and pieces out the window of the cab, like Hansel and Gretel hoping against hope to find their way back home.

As a child, Flora hated to be told to go to bed; to be expected to sleep while others sucked more life from the day was the height of unfairness. Now she longed for someone to send her to sleep. Sleep, she would sleep. But where? She couldn’t sleep in the master bedroom, her father’s bed. There was a double bed in the little guest room on the ground floor, off the living room, but she couldn’t sleep in the guest room. She’d stay where she always stayed—if she stayed—in the room called “hers,” sleep in the narrow twin bed under the yellowing blanket that had once been new, and near perfect.

She left the body bag where it lay, and took herself up the narrow back stairs, her fatigue the fatigue of the old, stepping, leaning, pausing, up to the small, neat room of dresser, desk, and bed, all the surfaces bare and buffed and signless. The lone ornamental object, a palm-size silver clock, read five-twenty-five. She opened the closet. It, too, was bare but for one small box she’d left behind years before. Flora was not a keeper of notes exchanged in long-ago classrooms. Her childhood bedrooms—there were multiple—had not been preserved shrine-like, like those of some of her friends, friends with families like time capsules; you checked on them ten years later and nothing had changed.

She pulled her feet out of her sneakers and let her coat slip to the ground, and she climbed into the tightly tucked sheets of the bed with her fraying clothing still on. She pushed her fragile hands between the safety of her knees. It was a canopy bed, the bed she’d dreamt of as a little girl and one day gotten. The canopy had long since disappeared, and now it was just a large boxy metal frame, the blueprint of a tomb. She closed her eyes. The sharp, shrill blare of the telephone
(ring
wasn’t the right word, was it?) startled her. Flora did not like to answer its assault. She never had, but now even less. The phone rang, with no machine to interrupt it, on and on, and then stopped—almost violently, the sound vanishing, leaving behind the ghost of noise.

On the day they moved to Darwin, Flora’s mother went shopping. She bought a rough-wooled cardigan and a white bumpy bedspread. She bought them, not liking them, because it’s easier to focus on disliking small, specific things than your life in general. The pattern of the sweater imitated panes of stained glass—cool and dark—and it went for many years unworn. Finally, she passed it off to a friend, or a garbage can. The bedspread did find use, in Flora’s parents’ bedroom, one of the few rooms in the institutional house whose furnishings fell under her mother’s jurisdiction, and she kept it until the day she and Flora left the house ten months later, when she burned it in one of the living room fireplaces, though it was nearly summer, and hot, and she had to cut it up into small pieces first to do so.

The movers were huge, the largest men Flora, who was eight, had ever seen. One made a muscle and let her hang from it, swinging her around. Another pulled her braids and told her how in grade school he’d once cut off a girl’s pigtails,
snip, snip
, while she sat in front of him in class. He seemed to still find it funny, but from then on, for a long while, Flora feared that at any moment someone might sneak behind her and snip her braids sheer off.

A job had brought them there, to Darwin, to the house. Her father had liked his job in the city, but how could he turn down an offer like that—to
be president?
The president of Darwin College.

“He always goes where he’s asked,” Flora’s mother told her.

But then, she never said “Don’t.” In his new contract with Darwin, he’d arranged to teach his Hardy seminar every spring in addition to his administrative duties, so he felt he really wasn’t giving anything up. “It’s the best of both worlds,” he said.

“You have two?” her mother observed. “I’ve got zip.”

In memory, Flora saw that first house in Darwin—the big house—as though under a magnifying glass. The red Formica counters in the kitchen, the scratchy gray industrial rug on the third floor and along the back staircase, the teal-and-brown paisley wallpaper in her bedroom, which she knew to be ugly but loved anyway—all the materials enlarged and vivid, as though directly in front of her nose. She saw the redbrick facade of the house that way, so close she could almost feel its grainy roughness pressing against her palm. They called it “the house,” not “home,” the way, after the divorce, her father called her mother “your mom,” never just “Mom.” The fact that it was a house, a freestanding house, was in itself remarkable. Coming from the city, they found internal staircases the height of luxury; upstairs meant rich. For a long time after Flora left the house, every dream she had was set inside it, no matter what the subject, or who the cast of characters, as though her unconscious couldn’t afford a change of scenery. The setting of dreams, it was dreamlike, like something in a story someone else had told her.

The President’s House. A borrowed mansion. The house came with the job, and left with it, too. Darwin owned it, and furnished it, and repainted it when it needed repainting, and scheduled parties to be held in it. And they lived there—Flora, and her mother, and her father. They lived in a house that was like a hotel. It employed a support staff—a full-time housekeeper and a cleaning woman and two gardeners to manicure the elaborate grounds, and a crew of waiters and waitresses who worked the parties. There were two formal guest rooms, the blue room and the gold room (which was really yellow), each with its own bathroom, where trustees of the college and their wives stayed several times a year. Each guest room had two twin poster beds, as though it were out of the fifties, and sometimes Flora and Georgia slept in one of them, for a little variety. There were two velvet-swaddled living rooms that stood back to back, ignoring each other, one with a baby-grand piano, and each with a fireplace, and a library with walls of bookshelves filled with books that weren’t theirs, that were really nobody’s, and there was a veranda—not a porch, a veranda—painted moss green and populated with white wicker furniture, and in the dining room, there was a table so long, it seemed impractical, made for sitting on, not at, long enough for Flora and Georgia to cartwheel across.

Flora first met Georgia at her father’s inauguration, an event she resented deeply because she was required to wear a stiff, scratchy dress. Beyond the discomfort, the dress was hideous: a busy mauveish brown print, with deeper mauve-brown ribbons edging the sleeves and girthing her middle, gouging her flesh and making her fidget. The worst kind of little-girl dress. Her mother had picked it out, saying, “This is the first time in your whole life I’ve told you what you had to wear.”

“Maybe if you’d done it before, you’d be better at it,” Flora told her.

There was a small triumph in the matter of footwear: She could wear her black patent-leather shoes, which she wore as often as possible.

“They don’t go with the dress,” her mother pointed out.

“Thank God,” Flora said.

But it seemed a bad omen: Darwin meant itchy, ugly dresses; Darwin meant you didn’t get to choose.

The night before, she’d fallen asleep to the sound of her father’s slow, thoughtful footsteps pacing the long hall outside her bedroom door. This was how he wrote his speeches, in his head, walking back and forth, back and forth, like words on a page, and only going to his typewriter when the thing was composed and whole. His footsteps paused now and then, and she could imagine him looking off into the air around him, poised in place by an idea. He did this in conversation; if they were walking down the street together and he came to a good point in his story, he would stop and stand still, and Flora would stop, too, to listen, both of them recognizing that some stories needed one’s full attention, that some words deserved stillness.

At the inauguration, he led a parade of the faculty and trustees to the tinny music of the brass band, the ominous melodies of momentous occasions—not “Pomp and Circumstance,” but its first or second cousin. “Pompous Circumstance” was how Flora had heard the name as a very little girl, and it had become the family’s term for these events. Those in the processional wore their long robes with their richly colored velvet hoods—the costume getting fancier as the degree got harder. The plan had been to process into the quad, but the day went wet and gray, so the world of Darwin assembled instead inside the old gymnasium with its shiny, squeaky wooden floors and its smell of sneakers. Her father gave his long speech. Her mother smiled and shook hands and laughed and nodded, but you could see the strain in her eyes—you could always see things in her eyes, like when she had been crying, or when she’d had too much to drink. Flora tried to read her eyes like a barometer, to see what was on the horizon, what was coming her way.