Flora by Gail Godwin

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 hadingested 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.
    If Nonie had listened to the program about the little girl, she would have enjoyed the scariness as much as anyone, but she would have seen into other aspects that were just as scary.
    “Don’t you wonder, Helen,” she might have mused, if she had been lying next to me, “what would have happened if the little girl had turned down the mannequins’ offer? After all, they didn’t force her, they didn’t just high-handedly turn her into one of themselves, did they? They gave her a choice and she chose to go back with them to a place where you can never get lost or feel abandoned again. Does such a place exist, do you think? And if it doesn’t exist, what options did she have other than to stop being human?”
    FLORA’S BOX OF clothes, sent by the ever-faithful Juliet Parker, arrived. As I watched her unpack her summer wardrobe withlittle yips of recognition, I felt she was filling our house with more inferior stuff from Alabama. When the garments were all laid out on her bed in the Willow Fanning room, I realized that I had already seen her most presentable things: the suit she was wearing when she stepped off the train, the blue dress she had worn at Nonie’s funeral, and even the few changes of clothes she had allowed herself in the luggage crammed with the Alabama foodstuffs so I would have “proper meals” for the first weekend.
    Then the contents of the box had to be ironed, with Flora’s commentaries.
    “This skirt came from an old dress of your mother’s, Helen. I loved that dress on her. She gave it to me when she got tired of it, she always got tired of her favorite things, but when I got old enough to wear it my bustline was way bigger than hers, so Juliet cut off the top and made it into a skirt. Now, this skirt I made myself. It isn’t very successful, but I think it will be fine just around the house, don’t you?”
    “Where else are we going to be but just around the house?”
    Though nobody was forcing me to hang around for Flora’s ironing and chattering, I felt a perverse compulsion to watch the room become adulterated with her belongings. I had always known this front upstairs room in its uninhabited state, kept bare of anyone’s personal clutter, except for that of the occasional overnight guest. Who knew what possessions had surrounded the perfidious Willow Fanning, what flimsy or “not very successful” garments had to be whisked away from what surfaces before my sixteen-year-old father could recline upon them and continue falling in love with a woman twice his age? Nonie’s stories of those last days of Anstruther’s Lodge had been grim narratives of denouement and summing up; there was no place in them for asides about what anybody wore.
    (“So there we all were, going on with our routines, in the summer of 1916. Your father was and always will be the age of the century. I was the