Gail Godwin - Flora

“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.”

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.

“I admire that woman,” Nonie said. “Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days. How many people do you know who can do that?”

On this Tuesday, Flora took it on herself to welcome Mrs. Jones to the house. “I’m Helen’s first cousin once removed. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Sometimes she was like my big sister and sometimes she was like a little mother. Did I meet you at the funeral reception, Mrs. Jones?”

“No, ma’am, I wasn’t able to make the reception.”

“Oh, please, call me Flora. And whatever I can do to help you, just let me know. I’m Helen’s caretaker for the summer while her father’s away, but I’ve got plenty of free time for housework.”

“Oh, my routine more or less runs me,” said Mrs. Jones. “I would get all turned around if someone was to try to help. I do the downstairs in the morning, and then if it’s warm like today I eat my lunch upstairs on the south porch, and in the afternoon I turn out the upstairs rooms.”

“Well,” said Flora, “in that case, I guess I’ll go up and work on some lesson plans. I start teaching school in the fall. I’m in the Willow Fanning room.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I do that room first, after I’ve swept the upstairs porches.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’ll make myself scarce. I have some shelf reorganizing I want to do in the kitchen. But I already went and stripped my bed for you.”

“That was thoughtful, but there was no need.”

I lurked about while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees and went over her life. I tried some more of my library book, but my own life seemed more urgent and mysterious than the girl researching someone else’s old house. I walked around our house, forcing myself to acknowledge more signs of decay, and fantasized that we would somehow come into money and make everything nice again. I heard my father forbidding me to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken legs of a child, and pictured Brian Beale’s ten-year-old legs withering this very minute beneath the covers of his hospital bed. I knew I should be writing a note to him in time for postman to take it away, but couldn’t make myself do it. I thought of Finn, with his pointy features and carrot crew cut, rushing over to the lonely old lady on his motorcycle whenever she remembered something she’d forgotten to order. He’d roar up in front of her modest little house that didn’t have a refrigerator and tell her it was no trouble “a- tall .” I prepared some interesting things I would say to him next time—if I could get them in before Flora interrupted and brought things down to her level.

I materialized when I heard Mrs. Jones starting on my grandmother’s room.

“I can still feel her in here,” said Mrs. Jones, holding her feather duster aloft in front of the blinds like a conductor raising his baton.

“I had this dream.” I got right to the point. “She told me she wanted me to move into this room. She said you would understand.”

Mrs. Jones clasped the duster to her breast. “She mentioned me?”

“She said, ‘Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural.’ Those were her exact words.”

“Dear me if that doesn’t sound just like her. The dead can speak to you anytime they like, whether you’re awake or asleep. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”

“She said I was to ask you to make up her room for me.”

“Did she say we should empty out drawers, or what?”

I considered a moment. “No, just make up the bed. I’ll go through her things myself.”

“That’s what I did with Rosemary’s things. I went through them a little at a time and let them bring her back.”

“You know, I think I am growing up,” I said.