Perfect Reader (10 page)

They started slowly, hesitantly. Ears pressed tentatively to doors, hands shyly navigating the corners of a desk drawer. Ray and Madeleine were the control group, Flora’s parents the focus of the study. There were infinite variables. Everything from college major to hair color had to be factored in. They organized systems; they prepared—scientific discovery could lead to terrifying results.

They bought supplies in town at Gus Simonds’s shop: five spiral-ringed, college-ruled notebooks, two pads of graph paper (Georgia, convinced their study could one day be valuable, insisted upon charts and graphs, telling Flora with passion, “Cold, hard fact comes alive in its visual representation”), thumbtacks, four highlighters (pink, green, yellow, blue), a package of ballpoint pens, ten number-two pencils with superior erasers, and a battery-operated pencil sharpener. Georgia’s purple bedroom became their lab. With its considerable caged rodent population and all the encyclopedias, it felt like a lab. They pinned paper upon paper containing list upon list all over the yellow walls of her closet, for the sake of discretion. Each list had a heading, such as “Things They Fight About,” with a line down the middle of the page separating the data into two columns. Ray and Madeleine fought about compost and recycling (one category), politics, money, and the car (she hated it; he loved it). Flora’s parents fought about money, his interrupting her, his plagiarizing her good lines, her unhappiness, her coldness. It didn’t take a genius to interpret the findings: Georgia’s parents wanted to change things about each other; Flora’s parents wanted each other to be different people. And everyone fought about money.

“The more we learn, the more hopeless I feel,” she told Georgia.

“That’s the way it is,” Georgia said. “Understanding doesn’t bring happiness. Ask anyone at Darwin.”

“What does it bring?”

Georgia thought for a moment. “Understanding,” she said.

Georgia’s intellectual interest in the project soon waned. She didn’t like spying on her parents. She said she never found anything, but Flora could tell she wasn’t trying. Georgia would say encouragingly, “They had another fight this morning—over the compost,” but her words were hollow with eagerness. Flora made her go along, go further than she wanted. As in their games, hurling their small bodies from one height or another—stairs, tree branches, bedroom doors—as in running away from school, Flora pushed.

“If you don’t want to help me, that’s fine. I’ll do it myself,” Flora told her. But of course Georgia wanted to help. Georgia wouldn’t let her do it alone.

Once Flora started spying, she couldn’t stop. She stuck her hands into her mother’s shoes, wore her long dresses over her own clothing, and she was not careful to put them back as she’d found them. She opened her mother’s lipsticks just to smell them, to breathe in the strange chemical sweetness, the chalky smell of color. Looking through her mother’s things, Flora became her. They were united in her father’s rejection. She combed through her dresser in the afternoons—always the top drawer, the top drawer was the one with secrets. Pushing the panty hose, the underwear and the bras, the socks with holes and the socks without mates off to the side, Flora examined the delicate silk satchels that held her mother’s favorite jewelry—the cameo pin, the silver cuff bracelet, the jade ring—none of it from her father. She touched each thing as though it were a museum piece, and touching was illicit and punishable. It all held a mysterious power over her, like the items in her mother’s purse, which would be tossed into the backseat on long car trips to silence her when her boredom reached desperation.

Searching in the drawer, in a little box, she found something round and rubber, which she knew to be sexual in some way, but not quite how, and she wondered if it was a good sign that her mother still had it, whatever it was. Maybe things weren’t as final as they seemed. But she also found the white ghosts of pills in translucent bottles—“May cause drowsiness,” the label said. “Do not operate heavy machinery”—with the name of her mother’s analyst stamped across the top. Why was the analyst drugging her mother? Flora waited to be accused, waited for her mother to say, “I know what you’re doing,” but she never said anything.

In her father’s room, Flora was more tentative. She didn’t open drawers. She didn’t touch anything. She stood, she hovered, a forensic detective taking pains not to disturb a crime scene. She saw a phone number on a piece of paper on the table by the new phone with its new private line, and when she found it, she knew there was no need to look any further. She didn’t take the piece of paper, but carefully copied the seven digits into one of the spiral notebooks. She didn’t show it to Georgia.

When she dialed the number a few days later, her fingers shaking as they turned the rotary dial, a woman answered, and Flora said, “Who is this?”

And the woman said, “Who is this?”

And then Flora hung up.

7

Other People Are a Wall

F
LORA DECIDED SHE WOULD DRESS UP
to meet Paul Davies. So few opportunities to remove one’s sneakers presented themselves in Darwin; one had to act.

He had called a few days after their bizarre midnight encounter to apologize. “I shouldn’t have insisted we have that conversation in the middle of the night,” he said. “I’m trying to cut back on the coffee—it turns me into a bulldozer. I’m sorry about that.”

“Really?” Flora hated apologizing, had always hated it, but she liked being apologized to. Better to blame and forgive than to be blamed and repent.
Whose fault is it?
A question she often asked her parents, a refrain of childhood, but just as often they lacked a satisfactory answer—no one was officially to blame. “I’d been meaning to call back,” she lied. “I was on a cordless and the battery died and—”

“Why don’t you come in to the office and we can run through it all. You can ask the questions you didn’t get to ask.”

“I’m pretty sure you covered it.”

“I scared you off,” he said.

“No, you answered all my questions.”

“I can be an insensitive lawyerly prick sometimes. I really am sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”

It was a neat equation: The more the lawyer apologized, the more attractive he became.

“Your father was such a great guy. I’d hate for you to have this idea of me.”

“I don’t, truly. Absolutely no ideas.”

“Come by the office, I can show you some documents I have in your father’s file, and then I’ll buy you a drink to make it up to you.”

A drink? With her father’s lawyer? She had furniture to re arrange, fires to stoke, a house to colonize. Poems to not read. “It’s sweet of you to offer, but it’s not necessary. This is a no-fault state, isn’t it?”

“Even in a no-fault state, somebody has to pay. C’mon. Let me do this.”

Had her father shown him a picture of her? But no, this was about him—her father—not her. Not a date, but a duty. As with Mrs. J. and Gus, Flora was the beneficiary of generosity owed her father. She’d inherited, along with the house and the money and the words, the goodwill of these people. “I owe him,” Gus had said. Still, the word
documents
was alluring. What documents might be lingering in her father’s file?
Posthumous Me: The Complete User’s Manual? A Letter to My Dearest Flora-Girl?

She longed to wear the inappropriate-for-every-occasion dress, which had been wasting in the body bag, but she couldn’t. It was too much, or, more precisely, too little. She put on her green A-line skirt with the soft pink cardigan, the effect tulipesque, and out of step with the seasons, but not so much as to appear crazy. Or so she hoped.

Once, at the magazine, Flora had been asked to do a TV spot for a morning show on spring bulbs. At the studio, the producers had fitted her with a little earpiece, and as she spoke to the host about when exactly to plant different bulbs in the various hardiness zones and the most desirable soil conditions for doing so, a voice inside her head barked instructions: “Don’t pick up the narcissus!” it commanded. “Look at camera two! No, the other one!” and “Wrap it up! Ten seconds!” She’d felt deranged and scared and as though her words came to her five seconds slower than normal. But later, when she watched the tape, she was amazed to see how composed she looked, how fluidly her words seemed to come, how she appeared to be speaking into the right camera the whole time. She hoped the same was true now—that what was going on inside her mind remained invisible to other people. That things looked better from the outside.

To counter the pastel daintiness of her clothing—and to indulge herself—she strapped on the four-inch stilettos. In difficult social situations, it was good to be distracted by your footwear. Instead of thinking about what she and the lawyer might talk about, she could focus on the encroaching numbness in her left pinkie toe. Her plan was to walk into town, despite the discomfort. Flora had lived long enough in the city to regard driving the way other people did air travel—dangerous and best reserved for longer trips. But out on the sidewalk, so tall and fancy in her finery, she felt like a gangly flamingo, the subject of a nature documentary.
Look at the strange behavior of the displaced city girl!
Her legs were cold and skinny and vulnerable. And as she slowly made her way, a station wagon pulled alongside her.

“Flora Dempsey! Do you need a lift?” It was Janet Rosen, the director of admissions. She’d thought it was her, heard she was back in town.

Flora leaned down and called into the open passenger window, “I’m fine, thanks. Not going far. Nice to see you.”

Was she going to a party? No, no, just felt like dressing up a little. Anyway, it was great to see her out, and doing so well.

Was that what heels in Darwin meant? Doing well?

Paul’s office was on the third floor of a three-story building in town, directly above the office of the shrink her parents had sent her to when they were splitting up, Dr. Berry. Flora hoped she wouldn’t run into her, but one ran into everyone in Darwin eventually, and Flora, as they all insisted on telling her, looked just as she had as a young girl and was instantly recognizable—long, straight dirty-blond hair (though no longer worn in two braids, Laura Ingalls–style), long-toothed, long-bodied, skinny, and wolfish, with narrow features and light eyes. “Modiglianiesque,” Cynthia had said. Like her father.

Her outfit, at the lawyer’s half-open door, was ridiculous. She was desperate; she was a fool. She felt like a hick, a rube. The only thing missing was the French twist and the hair spray. She was trying too hard. She was deranged. But it was too late to turn around and run away, as she’d had to buzz from downstairs to get in. He knew she was there. There was nothing to do but push the door open and reveal her ridiculousness.

The office was empty and impersonal and ugly, with big naked windows too low on the walls, looking out onto the common, a view she remembered from her sessions with Dr. Berry. What furniture there was was bloated, and clearly secondhand: a swollen desk, a bruised metal filing cabinet, three unmatched leather chairs. On the desk, the incongruity of a complicated violet orchid. Unimaginable that the lawyer had bought the flower for himself.

“Nice orchid,” she said, not knowing what else to observe.

He looked up. “A thank-you gift,” he said. “Though I think I’m killing it.”

When he stood to shake her hand, he proved himself not at all the lawyer of her mind: no khakis, no loafers, no starchy monogrammed shirt. Instead, a soft gray flannel, worn corduroys, and serious-looking hiking boots. Overplaying the whole country lawyer thing perhaps, but this, she saw, was part of why her father had chosen Paul. He would have liked the lack of overt lawyerliness; the woodsy aesthetic would have appealed to him. Her immediate impression was: too tall for Darwin. Most men in Darwin were short and runty, their wives towering over them imperiously. Her mother had noticed it first. And almost everyone in town had asthma. Something in the water, maybe—something growth stunting and lung shrinking. Though her father had been tall. She liked the lawyer’s nose. A good, prominent nose, bony and a little crooked. The nose saved him from the rest of his features, which were attempting to make him adorable. Thanks to the nose, he looked smart. Why was it that beaky noses made people look smarter? Was it one of those myths, like the big hand/big penis myth—if that was even a myth? As her mind raced and landed on the word
penis
, Flora felt like a bystander—a guilty bystander-observing the erratic behavior of another person. What did people do in public under normal circumstances? How was it, again, one communicated with another human being?

“What’s a guy like you doing in a town like Darwin?” she said by way of introduction. No, that wasn’t right. It sounded like a line in a Humphrey Bogart movie, a line involving a cigarette and a match, something that no one would utter in real life, and certainly not post-1955. But then Paul’s nut brown eyes lit up when she said it. A
Bambi boy—
Flora’s mother’s term: “You always like those smudgy-eyed Bambi boys.”

“It’s not so bad here, is it?” Paul asked, smiling. He had one dimple, but again, the cuteness was redeemed by the odd placement, high on his left cheek.

“Pretty bad,” she said. “I almost had to wear my Orphan Annie wig coming here—I was afraid of running into my old shrink.” Jesus, really? Mentioning the shrink in the first minute of conversation? She mistrusted strangers who spoke intimately of their therapists or their treatments, who disclosed too much too soon. Cynthia’s words—“We were very much in love”—flashed across her brain. Had the days alone in her father’s house made her into one of those people? Being alone, it was difficult to judge your own mood. Other people were a wall you could bounce yourself off of and see how you came back.

But Paul seemed unfazed. “Dr. Berry?” he said. “She’s hilarious. I love that woman.”

“Hilarious. That’s not exactly how I remember her.”

“It probably depends on the context.” He gestured to one of the dwarfing chairs, and Flora sat. “Anyway, it’s really nice to meet you. I was a huge fan of your dad. He was such a great guy.”

“Really? What makes you say that?”

He looked at her as though he hadn’t heard.

“What in particular? Because, don’t people always say that? When someone dies? Without meaning anything?” The editing function in her brain had short-circuited. “I mean, yes, he was great. I think so. But why do you?”

“Let’s see.” Paul tapped his fingertips together, reasoning with a temperamental child. “He was a natural storyteller, your dad. Everything with him was an opportunity for an anecdote. What an incredible memory. In class and in conversation, he was the best free-associator I’ve ever met, making these effortless connections to some yarn about Byron or Winston Churchill or being at Yale in the sixties.”

Some yarn?
Who said
yarn?
“Yes. What else?”

“We all loved him, all his students loved him because he was brilliant—he taught me to read poetry in a whole new way, he taught me to
love
poetry—and because he always let class out ten minutes early.”

“That sounds right. What else?”

“He was an original. I used to see him walking with Larks around town all the time—no leash, of course—and once I heard him tell Gus Simonds that when they played catch, your dad could just say, ‘That’s quite enough of that,’ and the dog would pick up the ball and head toward home.”

“That’s true,” Flora said. “He used to say the dog had a vocabulary of over one hundred words.” She looked out the window. It was nearly dark. It was chronic sundown in November in Darwin. Her father had a good throwing arm; he could throw a tennis ball to Larks clear across the common. But there were no dogs playing catch with their owners tonight. Just one solitary student in a woolly hat, sitting in the cold near dark, a guitar on his lap. Darwin was a folk-song-singing kind of town. Flora had sung them all at her elementary school, and with Georgia, lying on the floor in the big house. “The Sloop John B.” That was a sad one. “I feel so broke up, I want to go home.” They were all sad, but that one was really sad.

“Is there anything I can do for you today, Flora?” Paul asked. He said her name gently, and she remembered how it had felt as a teenager when some boy she had a crush on would say her name for the first time—how intimate it felt, how strangely flattering.

“You mentioned some documents?”

He handed her a file and pointed to key clauses, but it was nothing of interest, no manual or idiot’s guide to death. Tax returns, a copy of the deed to the house. Grown-up papers. Boring and terrifying. Something about the chair in his name at the college; something about his pension; something about royalties from his first book, on Victorian poetry, which was still used in courses. Small print punctuated by the scrawl of her father’s signature. It was warm in the lawyer’s office, ugly but comfortable, and she looked through the papers slowly. He watched her patiently.

“I’m not sure what to make of any of this,” she admitted.

“It’s overwhelming,” he said.

“Yes.” She felt the sudden heat of tears.

“Nothing has to be decided today.”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Ready for that drink?”

Paul suggested they walk over to the Beagle Inn, the only hotel in town. It presided over the north end of the common, across from his office. Flora had been there for weddings, and, toward the end of her parents’ marriage, for depressing, silent family dinners, but never for drinks, never as an adult. It had been named, of course, for Darwin’s boat. Such nomenclature was not unique to that establishment. Businesses throughout the town had embraced the Darwinian theme—Galapagos Islands (selling kitchen supplies), Charles’s (a bar frequented by underage college students), Evolutions (a salon), Finch’s Books, and, of course, the health-food store, Natural Selections.

“This place never changes,” she said.

Paul pointed out a few things that had changed. A wine bar, trying to look urban with menacing metallics. A new coffee shop, which he swore sold delicious pastries baked with local wheat and butter. A store devoted to recycled and reclaimed objects—picture frames made from old mantels, bowls made from paper clips.