Flora by Gail Godwin Page B

plans when there’s nothing to do?”
    “What did you do before?”
    “Before what ?”
    “Well, before I was here.”
    It was just amazing how she walked into these traps over and over again.
    “Before you were here I was at Rachel Huff’s and they had a pool. And before that, I was still in school. And before that … ” I paused before delivering my coup de grâce—“my grandmother was still here.”
    Flora seemed about to bestow her gift of tears, but then actually said something new. “You’ve had such a strange childhood. I keep forgetting. You were with her so much. She was like your best friend. Tell me what kind of things the two of you did together.”
    Now it was my turn to feel my eyes tear up. “We drove around, we went to movies, we went to her doctors, we shopped.”
    “How about when you were here in the house?”
    “We talked. Or she would go to her room and replenish herself and I would read or do homework. And then when she was rested we would talk some more.”
    “You didn’t go out to play?”
    “Around here there was nobody to play with.”
    “Well, don’t children have little imaginary friends?”
    “Did you have little imaginary friends?”
    “It was different with me, with us, I mean, when your mother was still living at home. We had to help out. Lisbeth got the worst of it because she was older. I told you how she had to take care of our grandmother—”
    “Yes, the bedpans. We don’t need to go into that again.”
    “Well, I’m just saying. There wasn’t time for us to have imaginary friends. And even with the big difference in our ages, we had each other.”
    “I’m going for a walk,” I said.
    “Want me to go with you?”
    “No. I’m going out to look for an imaginary friend.”
    “Well in that case,” Flora said, my sarcasm seeming to wash right over her, “I think I’ll sit on my porch and write some letters and work on my lesson plans. What a luxury, to have a porch right outside your bedroom.”

XI.
    Nobody until Flora had called my childhood strange. Even Annie Rickets had never implied that. And what right had Flora of all people, dumped in her infancy by a runaway mother, growing up in a house partly owned by the maid, to pronounce on what was strange? Every time she opened her mouth about the Alabama life she had shared with my mother, out came something I wished I hadn’t heard. If, according to Flora, my mother always got tired of her favorite clothes and her favorite things, what would have happened to me if she had lived? That is, if I had been among her favorite things. Which would have been worse? Never to have been a favorite or to become an ex-favorite, cut in half and passed on to someone left behind?
    As I crept down our treacherous driveway in my blue Keds, I tried not to feel terrible about hurting Mrs. Huff’s feelings. I also wished I could recall a time I had walked down this driveway with somebody other than Flora. Our two recent walks had somehow turned it into a Flora thing, displacing better walks, walks with Nonie to the mailbox, or possibly even further back, with my mother when I was two or three. Did mymother ever hope for any mail? For years Flora’s letters had lurked in our mailbox, her young, indiscreet letters that Nonie had destroyed after reading. Before that, Flora had probably written to my mother, saying how she missed her, splashing adolescent tears on the stationery. It was sickening to think of the younger Flora’s fat envelopes arriving year after year, biding their time until she had outlived both Lisbeth and Nonie. Now she was in our house, awaiting envelopes addressed to herself in our box, hanging her clothes in our closets, the awful truncated dress being the worst: the upper half of my mother cut away because Flora’s “bustline” was way too big. Lisbeth, in her few unsmiling photos, was wand-thin and had no bust to speak of, but now I worried which way I would go. Would I soon be pooching out in front