Gail Godwin - Flora

All Sunday afternoon Flora kept watching me mournfully as though another member of my family had died and she was expecting me to fall to pieces any minute. “Let me know if I can do anything, honey,” she kept saying.

“Don’t you have anything you need to do?” I was finally driven to ask.

She looked hurt, then recovered herself and said she had been hoping to use her time off to prepare sample lesson plans for whichever job came through. She had interviewed for three: one for sixth grade and two for fifth.

“Then why don’t you go and do that?” I said.

But as I prowled around downstairs after getting rid of Flora, I felt the house ignoring my existence. I kicked open the kitchen screen door, noticing for the first time that the bottom board, where my foot always landed, had split.

I decided to walk completely around the house and force it to acknowledge me. The day was still under that stubborn haze that withholds either rain or sunshine.

When was the last time I had walked all the way around this house? It seemed that for years we had climbed into our cars and gone somewhere and come back and gone into the house. When was the last time anyone had walked around this house? This made me think of Brian, who might never be able to walk around his house again. Other thoughts came. I pushed them away until all that was left was the forlorn scene I was walking through. Everywhere things were falling apart. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, an unattached downspout swinging tipsily out from a roof gutter. The former “front lawn” had become a weedy slope ending in unkempt woods, where two broken old trees had collapsed against each other and were rotting together. Did I really remember a lawn green and smooth enough for me to roll down, over and over again? Who had been with me? A woman dressed to go somewhere else, looking off into the distance. There was discontent in the air. Was it mine, or hers, or just the day in general? Was I remembering my mother or was my memory as unreliable as my father’s memory of my grandfather’s shortcut to town? It seemed hard to believe that when the Recoverers took their constitutionals on this lawn they could have looked out through healthy, upright trees and seen the mountains. Yet a charming recovering drunk, Starling Peake, had painted a small canvas that hung on our living room wall, testifying to this lost view. “Poor Starling,” Nonie would say. “He let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.”

What had my mother seen when my father brought her to Old One Thousand for the first time? “It must be wonderful to live in a house like this”: those were her first words to my grandmother. Could the house have disintegrated that much in twelve years, or had my mother been being polite, or had she been more worried about the impression she made and not really noticing what was in front of her? Or had it seemed like a grand house, compared to what she had been used to? The way Flora talked, the Alabama house seemed far from grand.

At last I reached the garage, where yesterday, from the window of my room, I had spotted the unsightly new weeds blocking the entrance. Now, as I wrenched open the garage doors, I imagined those weeds shrieking as I crushed them flat. With a heavy sigh I climbed into the driver’s seat of Nonie’s car and laid my face down on the steering wheel. The dull heat pressed in. Spit trickled out of my mouth onto the hot leather. I began to feel funny, but something told me that I would have to endure it if I wanted anything to change. I had never fainted before, but Nonie had often described what it felt like. Then I must have lost consciousness for a second or two. The next thing I knew, I was sliding down from the seat and leaving the car.

That’s right, darling. Now close the garage doors. You’ll come back later when it’s cooler and shear those nasty old weeds flat to the ground with the kitchen scissors. We can’t fix everything at once, but this will be a gesture in the right direction. And I want you to move into my room. It was my place and now it will be yours. When Mrs. Jones comes on Tuesday, ask her to prepare the room for you. Tell her I came to you in a dream and said to do this. Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural. Remember how provoked I was when I found out she was telling you those stories about her little dead daughter, Rosemary, and that uncle who kept speaking to her through a crow. But then you and I had a little talk, you couldn’t have been more than five at the time, and you said, “Don’t worry, Nonie, I don’t believe in her ghosts, but I do like the stories.” And I said, “All right, then, as long as you know the difference.”

When I told Flora at supper that I was going outside to cut down some weeds with the kitchen scissors, she merely asked did I want her to help.

“No thanks, I need to do it by myself.” I was sitting at the head of the dining room table, Flora having insisted it was my rightful place when my father was not here.

“Okay, honey.” She got up and started clearing the dishes, and that was that.

I felt as though I’d gotten away with something. Every other person in my life at that time, adult or child, would have made some remark about my intention or the impracticality of the scissors, but not this literal-minded cousin. In all the years since, I have come across few people who can keep their personalities out of your business. I haven’t been one of those exceptions myself. Someone I once wanted badly told me at the end of his patience with me, “I have yet to find a person willing to let me do what I have to do without making clever comments or saying what I ought to do.”

I say Flora was literal-minded. Was that it? Was she inclined to take things at face value because she was prosaic, unimaginative, lacking in cunning? I recall her being all of those things at various times. Once when I was mad at her, I called her simple-minded, and she bowed her head modestly, as if I had paid her a compliment, and said, “I expect I am.” Later that summer I told someone Flora was simpleminded, but he said he thought I must mean simple-hearted.

Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? Was she single-hearted (not an attribute you hear mentioned much anymore, as in that old dismissal prayer that exhorts us to go forth “with gladness and singleness of heart”), or was she a member of that even rarer species, the pure in heart? I am still making up my mind.

It was getting dark when I sheared through the last clump of weeds in front of the garage door. My fingers ached from gripping the scissors. The weeds had been more resistant than expected. They had squashed easily, but were tough to cut. Every time I made another trip to the woods to dump their remains, I could hear them jeering, “We’ll be back, little girl, twice as many of us: we’ll be growing over your grave.”

Flora was listening to the radio in the kitchen and making a list of the groceries we were going to order tomorrow.

“Helen, sit down a minute and tell me what kinds of meals Mrs. Anstruther fixed for you.”

“Oh, just normal everyday things.”

“Such as?”

I was still outside with my slain weeds. And hovering just beyond them was a hospital door I wanted to keep closed. Behind it was Brian, transformed into a cripple because of my selfishness.

“What did she make for breakfast, for instance?”

“Oh, cream of wheat, oatmeal. French toast if we weren’t in a hurry.”

“No eggs?”

“French toast has egg in it.”

“But I mean—”

“And I had hard-boiled eggs in my school lunches.” Nonie always put in an extra egg for Brian. He enjoyed having to peel them. Nonie worried he didn’t get enough food in its whole state. His mother cut off the crusts on his school sandwiches, and carved smiley faces into his radishes.