Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey Page B

was only Joan who wondered if she could bear to sit in the same room with him. She bought a floor-length shimmering blue dress that made her blue-gray eyes shine like icy water. She had never looked more beautiful, though she complained it had been a mistake, it wasn’t her, she felt like an imposter.
    “Maybe it’s okay if it’s not you,” Flora said. “That way you can pretend you’re someone else when you have to meet the president. Someone who likes him more.”
    “I’m getting tired of being someone else,” her mother said.
    Mrs. J. came and stayed with Flora and made her beef stew and they played gin rummy on the red Formica of the kitchen counter and drank soda, and Flora didn’t miss her parents at all. Mrs. J. told her stories. The previous president of Darwin had killed himself. Not in the house, but after. He’d been a good man, Mrs. J. said, but he’d had a hard time of it.
    “Some people are too good for this world,” she said—a chastening dictum that seemed to rewrite the universe, and Flora’s place in it.
    Her parents had probably not told Flora this on purpose. It would be a story she would cling to, or one that clung to her. A story she knew without them knowing, that she knew in spite of them. Some people were too good for this world, and some people weren’t.
    A few weeks after the trip, a photograph arrived in the mail. It was of Joan Dempsey shaking hands with the president in the receiving line, signed to her across the bottom, “With kind regards,” from him.
    “What am I supposed to do with this? Frame it and hang it on my wall?”
    “I’ll keep it,” Flora said.
    But instead, her mother signed it, too, across the top, “With kind regards, Joan Dempsey,” and she mailed it right back to the White House.
    It was embarrassing, like when her mother made a scene in a restaurant about the food not being warm or the plates arriving at different times. But it was also exciting. It was exciting when people misbehaved. Flora’s father, though, wasn’t excited.
    “What an infantile thing to do,” he accused. “Was it really necessary?”
    “When did you become such a coward?” her mother said, her voice as icy as her eyes.

5

    Rearrangements
    T HE LIVING ROOM FURNITURE in her father’s house was all wrong. When you entered the room, you were met with the back of the couch, rudely blocking your path. The best spot for reading—the faded gold armchair with its supplicant ottoman—was lampless. And the round wooden coffee table was simply too big for the space, an oversize hamburger bun in the center of the room. Flora pushed the couch out of the way and dragged the bun out of the room and into the kitchen. It was heavy, like dragging a fat corpse by the arms. She tried not to scuff the floors as she dragged, the attempt more theoretical than practical—moving furniture alone, there was no way not to scuff.
    Now, if she moved the couch ninety degrees to the right, it would block the windows and the old door to the street. Ninety degrees to the left and it would block the fireplace. The only choice was to move the couch to its exact opposite position in the room, so it could look at where it once stood and face the world that had existed only behind it. Was it loneliness that created this compulsion to animate? Post-divorce, her mother had taken to furniture rearrangement as if it were a useful hobby, as she’d picked up other hobbies over the years, like hair dying, or clipping newspaper articles. On many days, returning from school to the small house they shared, Flora found that the living room and the dining room had switched places. A week later, they might have switched again. After months of this, she’d pretended not to notice; though carrying her dinner plate out from the kitchen, she would often find herself in the wrong room.
    But she’d inherited the trait, the furniture-rearranging gene passed down from mother to daughter, along with the crooked row of bottom