I spent a lot of time with you when you were a girl. And a fair amount when you got to the terrible teens and didn’thardly want to spend time with anyone, including yourself, it seemed. Even so, you would come to sit with me, and we would pass the time. You with your sparkle fingernail polish, perfectly applied, not all messy like when you were little. I would look over at you and think, She’s going to be a beautiful woman. And I would think, If she were mine, I would have named her Glory. I didn’t tell you that, although now I think maybe you would have liked to hear it. My, what we don’t say in our lifetimes. But there I go a-wandering again.
I got some old suits from the 1940s good as new. I’ve heard some young people like the vintage look so there you go. I got an old telephone in the basement makes aclick-click-clicksound when the rotary dial spins back from dialing, I wonder would your kids like that. I have a copy of that bookGone With the Windsomeone told me was worth money what with the way the author signed her name in it. I have tablecloths from the ’30s with nary a stain, they might work fine for a picnic. I don’t know of a much better thing than a perfect day and a hamper and a tree generous with shade. And of course your sweetheart there to share it all, sitting cross-legged on the blanket. I haven’t sat cross-legged for years, and I’m tempted to try it now but I know I can’t do it so why remind myself. Anyway, I might get stuck and no one here to unstickme.
I have some fountain pens that are true works of art, and I have some turquoise ink left, that was always my favorite. I have plenty of greeting cards in a drawer in the basement, right down there in the laundry room cupboard, some are real old but I believe there is a market for them or maybe your friendswould like to receive them. Nobody gets much mail anymore and a pretty Valentine from long ago might soften someone’s hard day, you never know. Oh and embroidered dishcloths and pillowcases and some picture frames might as well be reused. Some useful things, Ruthie. To me they are so useful.
Flo startles awake from where she has been resting on the sofa. Her breathing has gone all raggedy, and there’s a sharp pain in her back. This must be it. Is itit? She straightens her legs and arranges her hands over her chest but then that bothers her, how it’s like in a coffin, so she lets her arms rest plain at her sides. There is her watch on her wrist, ticking away. Here she is on the precipice, she thinks she’s on the precipice, ready for Judgment Day.
Outside, a horn honks. It’s like that Emily Dickinson poem she read in high school where the person is dying and she hears a fly buzz. Flo always thought that was a strange poem. But here she is, and she hears a horn honk, and it’s different now.
Judgment Day. Whenever Flo used to think of that, she always imagined God on a high stool at a high desk peering down over His bifocals. How many people did He see? So many people dying all the time, seems like the line would be awful long. Some people think God is very human, and if He is He would sure enough get a sore fanny sitting there that long. And the poor human being trembling before Him, wondering,What will the verdict be?If God really is human, wouldn’t He be able to see what makes a person do whatever they did and have mercy? What does make one person good and another person bad? Surely they’re not born that way. She thinks of a new life blinking in the light and some voice saying to that baby, still blue in its hands, “Now, you. You’ll be a murderer.” No. Surely it doesn’t work that way. Some unfortunate souls get poor soil and poor water. Coursethere’s the ones get poor soil and water and yet still they thrive, like those flowers grow up in the cracks in the sidewalk. Wouldn’t God know everything? Wouldn’t He take everything into account? And if He did, wouldn’t everyone go to heaven? Flo expects there’s room. For heaven’s sake, there’s George Washington up there with his wooden teeth and all, all, all the ones before him. And pets, it would be niceif—
Suddenly, her breathing goes regular and slow. There is no pain. She opens her eyes and crosses her ankles, waits for a moment, then sits up. Smooths down her hair in the back. Here she still is.You are here.She has to stop wasting time and finish that letter.
She goes into the kitchen and sits down at the table. That had been something, to think that she was going. She had not been afraid. She had been something else. Not comforted, but something close to that. Eased. Lifted. She remembers hearing about that one famous actress who was dying and she got up in the night and her husband came out and put his arms around her and she began to weep, saying, “I want to go home.” And he said you are home. “No,” she said. “I want to go home.”
Flo believes she understands her now.
But she is still inthishome, and after she works on her letter she is going to call Teresa and see can she come for lunch. “Pick up your favorite takeout,” she’ll tell her. “My treat.” Flo’s got fifty bucks in her purse, easy.
I got some things you might overlook that could prove useful to you. I keep clothespins in a cloth bag in the laundry room. Now, you might not want to use them for hanging wash, but they are good for other things, too. I clothespin letters together that I walk to the mailbox. They work just fine for closing up bags of chips and cookies. I even use them for bookmarks in my magazines. And you stuck some in the dirt one time to make a corral for your plastic horses, didn’t you love your palomino.
I guess this is probably a foolish thing to tell you about. But I’m not going to cross it all out and have you wonder what I had said. You’d probably think it was something real exciting or embarrassing when it is just me saying how much I like clothespins. I feel that way about buttons, too. These odd little loves that we have and seldom tell other people about. And yet in some ways don’t they make the world go round.
Flo is sitting on the front porch waiting to have lunch with Teresa, who just called to say she’d be ten minutes late; the line at Uggabooga’s had been long. Teresa said she had gotten Thanksgiving sandwiches; she hoped that was okay. “Those are my favorite,” Flo had told her, just as she’d told Teresa that Uggabooga’s was her favorite restaurant. It got its name from the owner, whose nickname came from the time he was just a little toddler and his parents called him that just to make him laugh. Next thing you know his friends called him that, all the way up to college. His wife calls him Boog.
Across the street, in the house where two little girls live, Flo sees the front porch screen door bang open, and the smaller girl, who is maybe five years old, comes stomping out with a roller bag made for kids: a teddy bear on wheels with a zipper in his belly. “And I amnevercomingback!” the girl says, over her shoulder. “Ihateyou!”
The girl bumps her suitcase down the steps, then sits on the bottom one, thinking. She looks up the street, then down. She scratches her arm, inspecting the sky, where storm clouds have lowered, and now here comes a long and low rumble of thunder, sounding almost like a dog’s growl. The girl rises and walks slowly to the end of the walkway, then turns around and goes back inside. Quickly.
Well, then.
Flo imagines the girl standing in the hallway, defeated, her mother coming down the stairs. She hopes for forgiveness all around.
When Flo was a little girl, she was very taken with her next-door neighbors, who were childless, and who always had time for Flo. They liked to teach Flo things. The woman taught Flo how to whisk egg whites into meringue, and how to crank the handle of the ice cream maker. The husband taught her how to read baseball scores in the newspaper and how to pitch a horseshoe. Flo could come over to their house whenever she wanted, and she didn’t even have to knock. She used to sit in the parlor, straight-backed in a big horsehair chair, and regard the light coming through the lace curtains. She would pretend she was someone very important who had stopped by to visit, and in her experience important people shared interesting news of one kind or another. One time she told them, “I ate some dog biscuits today.”
“What did you dothatfor?” the Mrs. asked.
Flo said, “I just wanted to taste them and also I was playing dog.”
“Well, that sounds perfectly reasonable,” the Mr. said.
Such an old, old memory, but Flo can feel again the rough texture of the chair beneath her, and she remembers how that room always smelled like toast to her. She supposed she was to those neighbors what Ruthie was to her, a pretend daughter, a nice fill-in for a wide hurt.
When Flo decided to run away, at age seven, she’d wanted to find a family like that one to live with all the time. It couldn’t be her next-door neighbors; she had to be farther away than that so her parents could never find her. She used a shoebox for a suitcase and put in a pair of underwear, a nightgown, her toothbrush and hairbrush, and some caramels twisted up in wax paper. Her book of fairy tales wouldn’tfit, so she carried it separately. She went out into the field behind her house and found a big rock and sat on it to consider things. A horny toad sat motionless, having a beady-eyed look at her, and she thought about trying to catch him. She liked to look at horny toads close up; they reminded her of when dinosaurs roamed, and she liked too the way their necks looked like old men’s necks, all stretched and tough and wrinkly. But she didn’t try to catch him. She stared at her feet for a while and then she got up and went home.
Here comes Teresa, pulling up to the curb. Flo can hardly wait to dig intoher.Why, it’s been like a good old-fashioned soap opera, seeing what has happened with Teresa and speculating about whatmighthappen. Flo thinks that being curious about things is one of the pulls that makes people want to keep on moving forward, and she’s grateful to Teresa for her very ownDays of Our Lives.
I’ll tell you true, Ruthie, this is a crowded house. Long about in my mid-seventies, I saw it was happening that my things were beginning to own me rather than the other way around. So many things! Seems like a lot of people begin at some point to get concerned about that, mostly women, as they are the more responsible of the species, let’s put the cards on the table, it’s usually the women doing most of the organizing and caretaking and the decision-making. Lord, sometimes it seemed like men belonged to a cub scout troop where we women were ever the den mothers.
But this sorting-out business. It didn’t seem like any of us ever got too far, seemed like almost always things simply got left to the children. I once thought, I’m going to hire someone to help me and she doesn’t even have to help me. She can just stand by me and make some nice comments on things every now and then and encourage me to toss the things I just don’t need anymore nor have I needed them for a long time. But what if my imaginary helper and I agreed that I do NOT need these skeins of yarn I’ve had for nigh onto sixty years and then it turns out you would have loved them?
I had another idea once for getting rid of things, which was to put a table out on my sidewalk with a sign: FREE IF YOU LOVE IT AND WILL TAKE CARE OF IT. Like everything on the table was a kitten when in fact it might be a screen to prevent splatters when you fry things, or a half-slip I never didwear, or a pencil sharpener, who can’t use a pencil sharpener if they don’t have one? I like the old-fashioned wall-mounted kind we used to have in school. I got to be the pencil-sharpener emptier and I looked upon it as quite an honor. Each day I would march to the trash can by the teacher’s desk and empty that pencil sharpener of its fragrant shavings, they smelled like lead and cedar and to this day I love that smell.
So many things. I got some love letters in a cardboard box from Terrence. We always agreed, Terrence and I, that whoever outlasted the other would destroy those letters. I guess we thought we might be embarrassed by the content but let me tell you something, we were embarrassed by things like this: “I not only love you, I need you.” Now what is embarrassing about that when nowadays people get on those computers and you can see them stark naked. And you don’t even know them, nor they you, they are just parading around naked, Look at me, look at me. I heard they show everything and sometimes they do a lot more than just parade around. I don’t like to think of people doing that. I guess I’m more modest than that. I used to fuss if my bra strap showed and whoever I was with didn’t tell me. Same as food on your face, you know, you might be embarrassed if someone tells you that you got a big blob of mayonnaise at the corner of your mouth, but then you are grateful no one else will see it. I used to know a man a few years back, he was even older than I, and he wore his t-shirts inside out. I one time said, Say did you know your t-shirt is inside out? I said it soft, I didn’t want to embarrass him. He said yes he did know. Oh, I said, and I pondered his flat response. Then I said, Why? He said I don’t like seams. I said, Well, you know people might think you wore it inside out by accident,and he stopped walking and turned to look me full in the face to say, I never did care about WHAT people thought of me. I never did feel like I owed all these EXPLANATIONS other people feel they need to offer all the time. Well, you are free, then, I said, with a little spark of admiration, and he said, Yes I am. And listen to this, Ruthie, didn’t I see some teenaged boys a few days later got THEIR t-shirts turned inside out like it was a fashion statement, which I guess to them it was. Oh, those boys were riding along fast down the middle of the street, and one would commence to punch another one, and soon they were all punching and laughing, seemed like their heads were full of fun. And I’ll bet they were thinking they would live forever, don’t we all think that. Why, I’m almost thinking that now, even, that even though death sure enough has his Florence Greene assignment, he will pass me by and I will have some more time for my new friends and for me and Champ just setting out on the porch, I do love that dog.
I might have had a dog after Terrence died. Although getting a dog in old age reminds me of my friend Mary Curtin who had to go to the hospital right quick with a heart attack. I got to see her just before she died and she was so concerned about her dog and who would feed him that night. I knew her dog, Woodson was his name, he was one of those black and white dogs had what looked like freckles on his nose and a saddle patch on his back. I said I would feed him and I would keep him too but I didn’t. I found someone else to do it. I still feel bad about that, but I couldn’t face what if I took him and then I had to leave him, too.
About a week after I brought him home, I was out walking him, and I passed by a young family the next block over. Theywere on their lawn, the children playing croquet, a lovely game you hardly ever see played anymore, but the children came up to admire him and I all of a sudden got an idea and I asked would they like to have him, he was old but he was right healthy, nothing wrong with him, and he ate just plain old regular dog food. Those children’s eyes grew wide as hibiscus blossoms and they started yelling about how this lady is giving this dog away, can we have him, can we pleeeeeeease???? The parents came over and gave old Woodson the once-over and said, Well why not. I handed them the leash and I walked away. I did look back once and that dog had his back to me and was wagging his tail something fierce so I thought, Okay then. He will have a better home. I lied to my friend Mary Curtin, but he will have a better home. I got back to my house and picked up the dishes I had used to feed Woodson and I cleaned them out and I felt the little burn of tears that wanted to come but I would not let them. I kept thinking, He has a better home, and I knew it was true, yet my sorrow made me feel like something had come along and scooped something out of me. I guess it was that special love you can have for animals and I knew it wasn’t coming back anytime soon and indeed it never did come back at all.
