Gail Godwin - Flora

“Well, surely you are.” Mrs. Jones had laid aside her duster and started on the bed, as though being guided by Nonie.

“No, I mean I’m understanding things this summer that I couldn’t understand even this past winter.”

“Like what, dear?”

“Well, like Rosemary’s diphtheria and my mother’s parents in the flu epidemic, all in the same year. Before, I just couldn’t get my mind around it. Your seven-year-old daughter and those people from such a long time ago. It was the same year, 1918, but I just couldn’t see how they could all fit into that same time period.”

“That’s the thing about the dead,” observed Mrs. Jones happily, lifting up the mattress pad and giving it a vigorous shake. “They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

She let me help make up the bed. “It’s the right thing that you should have this room,” she said. “You’re the lady of the house now.”

“But I’m not going to tell Flora about the dream.” Here I had to remind myself that Nonie had considered the whole truth too much even for Mrs. Jones. Even I had almost forgotten that Nonie’s voice in the garage told me to say the instructions came to me in a dream.

“Well, that’s up to you, dear.”

“Flora is very—” I hovered between wanting to betray and wanting to appear loyal. “I’m not sure she’d be able to understand. I’m just going to tell her moving in here was something I decided to do and leave it at that.”

“Well, like I said,” Mrs. Jones reiterated, “you’re the lady of the house now.”

AT SUPPER Ilet Flora go on about all she’d accomplished while Mrs. Jones had been cleaning the house. In the morning she’d answered Juliet Parker’s letter and walked it down to the box just in time for the mailman, which made me feel guilty because I hadn’t written my note to Brian. Then she’d worked up some fifth-grade geography lesson plans and created a behavior chart for her class: “You know: neatness, courtesy, self-control, so they’ll know what I expect from them.”

In the afternoon she had reorganized the cupboard shelves and the refrigerator. “I kept thinking how that nice delivery boy said so many people still don’t have them and I felt positively luxurious.”

“His name is Finn.”

“Is that his first name or his last?”

“He just said Finn. He was in the war until his lung collapsed, so he’s not exactly a boy anymore.”

“You two really had a conversation, didn’t you? I heard you talking a lot with Mrs. Jones, too. You miss your friends, don’t you, honey?”

“Mrs. Jones was helping me move into my grandmother’s room.”

“Oh, well, goodness, that’s a change.” I could see she was taken aback.

“It’s something I decided to do,” I said. I quoted the voice in the garage: “It was her place and now it will be my place.”

“It certainly is a nice big room,” said Flora, “if you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”

“I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”

I COULD HARDLYwait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could repair the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”

“You’d have to cut down years of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.

Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off, listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the town. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.

“Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it.”

In the final scene the mother comes back to the store with the police next morning. And in the children’s department, she sees a group of child mannequins and one of them resembles her daughter so much she goes into hysterics. But the police and the manager soothe her and assure her they will find her little girl before the day is over.

“Look at my arms,” said Flora, rubbing them up and down. “They’ve got goose bumps. Oh, honey, I hope this won’t give you bad dreams.”

The program made my heart long for Nonie. There were things about it to discuss that she would be so good at. But I would have to wait until bedtime to figure out what those things were.

The way my days registered seemed to change after I moved into Nonie’s room. Events stopped marching forward in a straight, unselective procession and began clustering themselves into bunches, according to mood and subject matter. There were the things Flora said and did that slowly compiled a picture of what I could expect from her. There were my retreats into the sanctuary of my new room, where I seemed to merge with Nonie and came out thinking and speaking more like her. Was this shift in perceptions something my memory has imposed? Well, what is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?

The shift may have begun that morning, when I told Mrs. Jones I was growing up because I could now understand how her little Rosemary and my mother’s parents could have died in the same year.

Lying in Nonie’s high, roomy bed, freshly made up for my occupancy, I felt it was inviting me to stretch my legs and arms into its extra adult space and to observe life from a larger field of vision.

I was still thinking about the radio program. Flora had ingested the story at its obvious level of horror and gone to bed triumphantly caressing her goose bumps and worrying that the story would give me bad dreams. For Flora, the little girl had been turned into a mannequin, the mother saw the resemblance and went to pieces, but the policemen talked her around to believing the child was still out there in the real world and that was the end of the scary program. But there were scarier levels of the story that could exist within the bounds of the everyday world. That’s what Nonie was good at: digging down to those levels. Though she was a skeptic and had nourished such leanings in me, she was a skeptic with great regard for the suggestive powers of the imagination. That is why she could tolerate Mrs. Jones’s respect for the supernatural and allow me to listen to the stories about little dead Rosemary and the uncle once I had assured her that I did not take the ghosts literally.