The scarves—black and gold and white and turquoise blue—were beautiful and expensive and had the lovely, faded smell of perfume not recently applied. I folded each one as I unpinned it, and placed it on the ledge behind the back seat with the closed-up diaper pins. Then I lifted Flora out and put her on the driveway next to Daisy. Together, both girls bent to examine the pretty shoes. As I reached back in for the scarves and the pins, I heard Daisy say, “Jewels.”
Flora’s mother was in the kitchen speaking French to the housekeeper, and when I handed her the scarves she shrugged and said, with a laugh,
“There’s no other way to keep her from rolling down the windows,” and then put the scarves on top of the refrigerator. She asked me to give Flora some crackers and a cup of milk—she’d eaten nothing for breakfast, she said-and then she and the housekeeper both left the room. I’d had no chance to introduce Daisy, but Flora’s mother had hardly seemed to notice her. I poured both girls some milk and put a plate of digestive biscuits on the table between them. Flora took only a sip of the milk and then slipped off her chair and climbed into my lap and wearily put her head on my chest. She was wearing another shapeless white dress, her white baby shoes, and white socks trimmed with lace. Her bare legs were dimpled and chubby and rosy pink, and I saw that Daisy was studying them, too, perhaps recalling, as I was, her old father’s thin white skin.
“Somebody wore herself out this morning,” I said, to Daisy and to Flora as well.
“Crying’s hard work, isn’t it?” And both girls agreed.
When her mother came into the kitchen again, she was wearing a beige dress and high heels and there was a white cardigan draped over her shoulders. Her dark hair was pulled back smoothly, giving more prominence, and power, to her long, determined nose. Her lipstick was freshly applied, more bright red.
“Listen,” she said, her eyes just momentarily falling, indifferently, on Daisy, “I need to go up to the city, I don’t know how long I’ll be. You keep coming, as always. Ana will be here. And the cook. Keep Flora out for as long as you can if the weather’s good. She sleeps better when she’s been out all day.” She turned to Ana as if we had all left the room.
“It’s going to be as hot as hell in
Manhattan
,” she said. Despite the curse word, she was smiling under her long nose, anticipating something delightful—perhaps what a fine time she would have in
Manhattan
while we were all back here trying to wear Flora out. I thought of my own summer visits to the city with my parents, the stifling streets, the gritty air, the hot smell of the subway blowing up from those heel-catching grates.
Women in short white gloves and sleeveless dresses, touching shoulders, sweating, waiting in crowds at corners for the light to change. And that moment of disorientation and fear when we left the Music Hall or the
“I must be out of my mind,” she said, turning away from us, clearly pleased with herself but still annoyed with Flora, because she did not give her a kiss goodbye, although Flora, weary from weeping, didn’t seem much to mind.
From the kitchen window, I saw her cross the driveway, Ana scurrying behind with a small valise that she stopped to put into the back seat of the car while Flora’s mother went on, through the side door of her husband’s workshop. I didn’t recall ever seeing her go in there, and she wasn’t inside for more than a few minutes when she came out again, her face harder and tighter than before, the white sweater buttoned at her throat and thrown over her shoulders like a little Superman cape of resolve and indignation. She gestured to Ana, and Ana quickly got into the car. Then she turned on her heels once again and came back into the house. I heard her shoes on the wooden floor, across the hallway, through the living room, back into the carpeted bedrooms, and then, a few minutes later, out again. I looked at Daisy, who was used to the permutations in the weather of a house with people in it. She shrugged and smiled. Then Flora’s mother once again appeared in the kitchen door.
“My scarves,” she said, and I pointed to the top of the refrigerator, where she had placed them. She reached up and took them down, sorted through them, and then chose the turquoise-and-white one, placing the others on the kitchen table right in front of me. I took the moment to introduce Daisy, and although she seemed hardly to hear, she did say, as she shook out the scarf, pausing to examine a small hole the diaper pin had made, “What a pretty dress. I had one just like it.” She then folded the scarf into a triangle and placed it over her hair, leaning her head back as she did, her eyes half closed. She tied it under her chin and then wrapped the ends around her neck and tied them again.
“You might also want to come by a little earlier while I’m gone,” she said.
“Eight or eight-thirty or so, to give Ana a hand.” I said that I would. She leaned down to look at her reflection in the side of the toaster. On my lap, Flora said, “Bye-bye, Mommy,” and Mommy said, “Bye-bye, dear.”
She straightened up. In the scarf she seemed very tall and very elegant, but homely, too, without her dark hair to soften the hard lines of her face and that gray, precise skin.
“If my husband tries to fuck you while I’m gone,” she said softly, “don’t be frightened. He’s an old man and he drinks. Chances are it will be brief.” She cupped her fingers to the back of Flora’s head, which put her hand right under my chin.
“You can always send him to Ana, if you want,” she said, and then bent down, the fragrant scarf right at my nose, and kissed Flora on the head, leaving lipstick and the scent of her face powder on the child’s pale scalp.
I sat for a few minutes after she had gone, waiting for the heat to leave my cheeks before I looked at Daisy. I had one arm around Flora, but my right hand was on the table and I was surprised to see that my fingers were trembling. I was embarrassed and angry and surprised—I would have thought the housekeeper was too old to be included in such talk, just as, a few minutes ago, I might have presumed I was too young and Flora’s mother too elegant to speak such a word. I heard the car pull out of the driveway, and then waited a few minutes more before I slowly raised my eyes to Daisy. She was looking at me with more expectation than caution, certainly with no fear. I wondered if she’d missed the word, or if she recognized its sound only when it was shouted in anger or used as an adjective, as her father tended to do. I blew some air through my lips and Daisy did the same: even if she didn’t know the word when used in its proper context, she knew a marital spat when she saw one, and she nodded a little, wisely, when I said, “Oh, what fools these mortals be.”
“She’s falling asleep,” Daisy whispered, pointing at Flora in my lap, whose eyelids were indeed fluttering closed. I hoisted her to my shoulder and stood, pushing my chair back with the back of my knees. I told Daisy to go out to the porch to fetch the beach bag and then carried Flora to her bedroom.
I fully expected her to revive when I placed her on the changing table, but she only whined and cried and did not open her eyes, so when I was finished, I lifted her into her crib and covered her with a thin blanket. She smiled sleepily. She seemed grateful to be out of the fray. I wondered what had gone on in the village this morning, and whether it was her daughter’s tantrum or her husband’s familiarity (my parents’ word) with the maid that had sent Flora’s mother off to
On the wall above the crib were the three simple pencil sketches of Flora and her mother—sweet enough to be hung in a church. Good drawings, I thought. But in the living room I had just passed through there was also a large canvas of what seemed to me to be only smashed images, perhaps of a woman—an ear, a breast, some lips. And another, smaller painting that was simply color, and not even particularly pretty color, dark paints that had merely been dropped or spilled or smeared. I pulled the blanket up to Flora’s cheek.
It suddenly occurred to me that Ana was not too old and I was not too young, because he was both this baby’s father and an old, old man. Because he could draw sweet Madonnas and dismembered faces and pictures of nothing, nothing at all. I wondered if it took an act of will or just a long, long life to achieve this—to exceed or to outlive or simply to escape the limits of time and age, of what could or couldn’t be done, should or shouldn’t be done. To use no other criteria but your own, straight out of your head.
I turned away from the crib and saw Daisy coming along the narrow hallway that led from the living room, the beach bag over her arm. She seemed to be
favoring
her right leg as she walked. I put my finger to my lips and touched her on the small of her back to lead her out again, and as soon as we had passed through the front door I asked if she was getting a blister from her shoes. She said no, her foot was just asleep, but not without a bit of a flush rising to her cheeks.
“If they’re hurting you,” I said, “you might want to take them off for a while.” But she shook her head and handed me the beach bag and changed the subject by asking, “Now what are we supposed to do?”
“Sit and wait,” I said.
“Until she wakes up.” And seeing that was unsatisfactory, I offered, “We can read.” I moved two of the canvas chairs under Flora’s window and then told Daisy to go inside to pick out some books from the basket beside the desk. I took my own book from the beach bag and sat with it, pulling my legs up into the sway-bottomed chair, my paperback on my raised knees. And then I watched him from over the top of it as he left his studio and walked to the house. He climbed the three steps slowly, shuffling on the balls of his feet, his head down, not to avoid me, I think, but in a real failure to notice I was there. He went into the house and I listened.
I heard the rattle of an ice tray in the kitchen, and then, a few minutes later, he came through the door again with a new drink in his hand and said, as if we’d already spoken, “The little redhead inside says you’ll know where the Saint Joseph’s is kept.”
I put my book down, and my legs. I had some unformed and disconcerting image of old
St. Joseph
and the young Virgin Mary before I even managed to say, “I beg your pardon?”
He was smiling, about the eyes mostly, as if it had pleased him to discover a little redhead in his house, or to see me so puzzled.
“The children’s aspirin,” he said again.
“The
St. Joseph
’s children’s aspirin. The little girl inside said you would know where we keep it.”
“In Flora’s room,” I said.
“The shoebox in her closet.” And then, suddenly understanding his expectation, I stood and told him I’d get it. I met Daisy at the door, a pile of picture books in her arms. I told her I’d be back in a minute.
When I returned, he was in the other canvas chair and Daisy was on the porch floor, the books spread around her. I handed him the bottle and then had to step between her and him, over the books and his feet, between her shoulder and his knees, to get back to where I’d been sitting. I could feel the heat rise in my cheeks, and I put my book on my lap, afraid if I held it up I would see my fingers trembling again. I was only beginning to fully understand the full, rotten effect of Flora’s mother’s last-minute instructions for the babysitter.
I couldn’t look at his face. He placed his drink in the smoked-glass ashtray, then opened the bottle and handed it to Daisy.
“See if your clever little fingers can get that cotton out for me,” he said.
Solemnly, she took it from him, pulled the cotton out, and handed the bottle back. With her mouth open, she gazed up at him, the cotton ball still in her hand, and I reached down to relieve her of it. He shook a few of the aspirins into his palm and then, picking them off one by one, put them in his mouth and began to chew. I felt him looking at me as he did. I looked up.
Behind his thick glasses, his eyes still seemed to be on the verge of laughter. His white shock of hair might have stirred.
“Never get old,” he said. He was chewing all on one side.
“Or, better yet, never get old teeth.” He reached for his glass, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and swallowed. He returned the glass to the ashtray and shook a few more aspirins into his palm.
“Nothing better to remind you of your mortality than your teeth rotting in your gums.” He looked down at Daisy, lifted his brows.
“I really have no idea if these things will do any good,” he said, as if she alone would understand his dilemma.
“But they’re chewable, they’re orange-flavored.
They go directly to the source of the pain.” He shrugged.
“They can’t hurt, right?”
“They’re good,” Daisy offered.
“I love them.” And he gallantly held his palm out to her.
“Would you like one?”
She looked up at me.
“You’re not sick,” I said. But he moved his outstretched arm to knock me on my knee.