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“You know what this reminds me of?” Esther said.

“What?”

“Smoking cigarettes with you on your dad’s hammock.”

They laughed, then drifted back to quiet. The hammock squeaked softly as it rocked in the breeze. Flora felt she could fall asleep. The cigarette was making her stomach queasy, her muscles liquidy. Another teenage pleasure lost. The narrowing that was adulthood, the endless process of elimination. No, not that, not him, not here.

“This place is so great.” Esther crooked her neck to see the house and lawn. “You don’t need a roommate, do you? No, don’t worry—don’t look so scared, Flo. Like you need to live with a toddler. Though it might be good for you, to have company.” She leaned down and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette on the ground. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’m not sure this is right, and maybe it’s totally wrong, or totally obvious, but it seems like you’ve made yourself so alone, at the very moment when it would be good for you to have people around. Do you know what I mean?”

“I haven’t been so alone.”

Esther’s eyes opened and she tried to tilt toward Flora. “Do you mean Paul? Because I wasn’t sure I should say anything, but I have some … I’m a little wary of him.”

“When we first ran into each other on the bike path that day, I wondered if there’d been anything between you two.”

“Me and Paul? No, no, no. I’m a celibate monk these days. Since Lily. Really. One might say I learned my lesson. Maybe I’ll move to Belgium and make beer and train dogs and shit. I look good in brown. Anyway, no, I really don’t know him, Paul, that well, and he’s super smart and industrious—you know, the whole self-made-man thing—and he totally looks like that actor, but … I’m just not sure he’s a good person. That’s where I’m going with this. I don’t think he’s some great scoundrel, I don’t mean that. But he’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Alaska, and as much as he loves Darwin and all it represents, I think he hates it a little, too.”

“We have that in common,” Flora said, wanting, inexplicably, to defend him.

“No, not quite,” said Esther. “If you hate Darwin, it’s a kind of self-loathing. But to someone like Paul, who feels fundamentally an outsider, you are Darwin, Flora.”

“Not at all. I’ve always felt outside of things here, too. My dad might have been Darwin, but I’m not.”

“Then what’s going on here?” Esther raised her eyebrows at the house. “I mean, I can understand his bitterness in a lot of ways,” she went on. “Living in this town without being part of the college, it’s easy to feel superfluous, to feel alien. You say you feel outside of things, but you’re so gown, you can’t imagine being town. Your dad was mythic in these parts. I remember being in school with you, and teachers taking attendance on the first day, and asking you, all deferential, were you related to
President Dempsey
, and kind of, for like a second, hating you. Of course, it wasn’t about you, and, I mean, it was high school and I’m sure there were plenty of times when you hated me. And I’m not saying Paul hates you, and I know he went to Darwin, but what’s he still doing here? No one else he went to school with is here anymore. It’s almost like he’s trying to convince himself that was his life once upon a time, that he still belongs.

“I’m not trying to lecture you or tell you how to live your life, Flo,” Esther said, then, catching herself, added, “Well, I guess I am trying to, a little. But only because it seems like no one else is interfering and it seems like your life is kind of crying out for interference right now. And because I think you deserve better.”

There was that word again. “How can anyone claim to deserve anything?” Flora said. “Anyway, it’s moot. We’re not seeing each other anymore.”

“Now you tell me, after I’ve made my whole speech.”

“It was a compelling speech.”

“Hey, all those years on the debate team were not for nothing.”

“You were never on the debate team.”

Esther grinned. “I guess I come by it naturally, then.”

“Do you think you’ll ever leave Darwin?” Flora asked.

“Wow, you know how to hurt a girl, don’t you?” Esther paused. “I don’t even know if I want to leave. At a certain point you have to forgive your parents, right, and even yourself, for the way your life turned out. For me, it happened when I had Lily. All of a sudden I realized I wanted my life to be more like the life I knew growing up.”

“But you were miserable growing up,” Flora said. “I was there. I saw it.”

“I was miserable because I was expending so much energy trying to resist the world my parents were showing me. As soon as I stopped fighting them, I was shocked to find myself almost at peace.”

“Almost?”

“Well, yeah, I’m still me. Can’t exactly stop being that, can I? What about you? You staying?”

Flora’s cigarette had extinguished itself. She held out her hand. “I’ll throw these away,” she said.

Esther stood and pulled Flora up from the hammock, and they walked back to Esther’s car.

“You bought this car for a dollar, didn’t you?” Flora asked.

“Best dollar I ever spent.”

“Thanks, Esther, for coming to my rescue today. And for interfering. I really do appreciate it.”

“In case this is a real good-bye.” Esther wrapped her arms around Flora and gave her a real hug. “Be good, Flo.” And then Esther Moon drove away in her immortal ride, leaving behind a trail of Janis Joplin and thick exhaust.

A short, high-pitched bark came from the house. There was Larks, at the kitchen window. His body convulsed into ecstasies of happiness and impatience when Flora looked up at him. The one he was waiting for was her.

Weeks before Flora’s father left the President’s House to move into his farmhouse and his new life, the old college gymnasium, where years back on a rainy summer day his inauguration had been held, burned to the ground.

It was a Tuesday, in the middle of the night, when he got the call—the last Darwin crisis he’d be called upon to manage, or at least observe. He went down the long hall and woke Flora, who would soon be starting high school and was old enough to be left alone. But he did not want her to wake in the dark house and find him gone.

“We’re all okay, my love,” he said. “But come, something’s happened.”

She slipped into her clothing from the day before and walked with her father outside and through the rhododendron bushes to the street. She was surprised the sirens hadn’t woken her—their road was thick with the red and white and blue of fire trucks and police cars and ambulances—or the smell, or, as they got closer, the dazzling blaze that lit up the sky with an ominous orange halo, or the muggy heat of the night, which seemed as though it, too, had come from the fire. The gym was halfway between her parents’ two houses, and the geometry of Darwin’s latest calamity seemed to her symbolic. She wished her mother could be there to see it, knew how much she would like watching Darwin burning, even if it was the wrong part.

The police had set up a barricade, but Flora and her father were ushered through. The building could not be saved. Electrical failure of one kind or another. That close, each sense threatened to drown out every other sense—the thick smog of incineration that clung to their skin, and the sighing, popping roar and moaning heaves of falling wooden beams, and the billow of smoke signaling high into the sky. It was like old oil paintings Flora had seen of war—of ships burning at sea, or Houses of Parliament, brilliant as torches.

There had been no one inside—they were as good as certain—and as the paramedics stood uselessly by, leaning into their unfolded stretchers, watching the fire and the hopeless, shimmering sprays of water from the fire hoses, Flora thought of that other night of sirens, when Georgia had fallen and time froze. And her father, maybe thinking of the same thing, held her hand, or maybe he was thinking of how it all began, when the job and the world were new and his marriage was still whole and his daughter was still safe. And they stood beside each other, and there was nothing anyone could do but stand, speechless and amazed—until the morning, when they could begin to rebuild.

22

The Responsible Anarchist

F
LORA WOKE
to the sound of someone in the kitchen below. Where was Larks? Couldn’t he bark a little? Or was it someone he knew? Cynthia? Had she brought Officer Daniels back to finish the job of bringing Flora to justice? Or Mrs. J.? It wasn’t her day, was it? Flora put on her father’s old gray terry-cloth robe, her housecoat, and went downstairs.

“You don’t lock the door?” It was her mother. Looking in the cabinets. And Larks, fearless watchdog, frantically wagging his tail at her.

“I did at first, but then I guess I stopped. Hi, Mom. You don’t knock? Or call?”

“Oh, I called. Does your phone even work? It rings and rings like some banal modern Hades. I started to feel I’d go insane if I heard another ring. So, here I am.”

“Here you are.” She went to give her mother a hug. They withdrew and inspected each other.

“Nice robe,” her mother said. “I see Darwin hasn’t made you into an early riser. I need a mug. Let’s make coffee.”

Flora measured the grounds, lit the stove, her movements in the kitchen effortless now. No more burned hands—she’d replaced the copper kettle. She was better at life in Darwin, life in her father’s house. Scary, that. A dangerous improvement—mastering someone else’s life. Carpenter’s assignment had been to write an imitation of a poem, but Flora had done him one better. She’d imitated a poet. “I was up late,” she told her mother. “What time is it anyway? Did you leave the city at dawn?”

“Couldn’t sleep? Up with those poems of your dad’s you’ve been squirreling away up here?”

“You heard. Who told you?”

“The only one who
didn’t
tell me, Flo, was you. Darwin has been buzzing.”

“Really?”

“And not just Darwin. The blogs have been turned on to the story. They’re in sadistic ecstasies. Just the kind of literary scandal they love, one with a clear villain.”

“The blogs? And I’m the villain, I suppose?”

“See for yourself. You’re an Internet sensation.” Her mother had printed out pages and pages of postings. On the message boards, Flora was “jealous”; she was “batty and misanthropic”; she was “like a Freudian case study,” and “father-obsessed.” Descriptions not necessarily inaccurate, but a bit personal, coming, as they did, from people she’d never met, many as anonymous as the
Witness
Deep Throat had been. The ones whose user names sounded like men called her “crazy.” The ones she guessed were women called her “selfish.” Why were men so quick to call women crazy? And what was so bad about selfishness? In regards to one’s parents, it seemed fairly standard. Flora had friends still barely able to ask their parents, “How are you?” As if not convinced there was a
you
there. She recognized Paul’s friend the Apostle, Jim, the editor; he, too, had weighed in: The title of his post was “Goneril or Regan?” Someone calling herself LitCritChic was the lone pro-Flora voice amid the vitriol, though even her tolerance was qualified: “Hey, U all R haters. The girl’s father just died. Give her a minute.”

A sound choice, withdrawing from the world—untethering, not answering—given the world’s meanness. That meanness made more so by the advent of the blog.

“It feels so intimate,” Flora said. “Why be mean to someone you don’t know?”

“You think we should reserve it for our family members, do you?” Joan said, sly, smiling. “But it’s true. The blogs have changed things. A few years ago, all this would have stayed safely within the walls of Darwin—it would have been a very contained frenzy of petty meanness. But the blogosphere loves petty meanness, however local. Anyway, I spent the whole drive crafting my defense,” she went on. “I’ll post it as soon as we go over it. Do you have high speed?”

“No, no speed. What do you mean? Where are you going to post it?”

“To my blog, Flora. Don’t you remember I told you about it over Thanksgiving? But it would help if I knew something about the poems. Are they awful? Utter doggerel?” Her mother opened the refrigerator and stared inside. “This house is nicer than I remembered,” she said.

Flora shooed her away. “Sit. I’ll do it.”

Her mother closed the fridge and leaned against the counter. “My central point is this: Why is virtue always on the side of publication? Hemingway’s family, for instance, might have saved him considerable posthumous humiliation if they’d only shown some restraint, as you are doing now.”

“You do realize this is my life, Mom, not just a blog entry?”

“Don’t lecture me, Flora. I’m here to help you. I’m on your side.”

“Right.”

“You really are an ungrateful little child,” her mother said. “Who raised you?”

Flora laughed. Her mother had a genius for the fond insult. “They’re not awful, the poems,” Flora told her. “Not doggerel.” She poured the coffee and handed her mother a mug. “Some are excellent.”

“What’s wrong with them, then? What are they about?”

Flora stirred a spoon around. “You don’t want to know,” she said.

“I do. I’m asking.”

“You say that, but you might feel differently if you read them.”

“Not a flattering portrait?”

“Distinctly not. Which is why I never told you. One of the reasons.”

“It’s hard to imagine anything he could say that would wound me at this point,” her mother said.

“We both know that’s not true.”

“Even from the dead he jousts.”

“Writers,” Flora said.

“It was our anniversary last week. I’m used to not celebrating it with him, of course. I’ve even gotten used to not acknowledging it to him. But it is strange to have him gone so completely. It was sometimes nice to know he was here.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Mom,” Flora said.

“Good. Me, too.”

“But I thought you said it would be too weird to be in this house.”

“Be fair—I retracted that, remember? But it is weird. When did your father become such a bourgeois? I think this refrigerator costs more than my car. In our marriage, he made me feel like I was the one who cared too much about money because I tried to put some limit on spending, but it was he who cared, who wanted more. More money, more prestige. Moving us here to Darwin all those years ago for an administrative job that never suited him. What else could that have been about?”

“Mom, please, for the love of God. Let it go.”

“Let it go? Me? That’s rich, coming from you. Who really lets anything go? No, we store it all away in our greedy, pack-rat-like souls. We don’t let go, we hoard.”

“A charming philosophy,” Flora said. “The soul as chipmunk. I think you may be the anti-Buddha.”

“This culture of forgiveness, of acceptance, of living in the present—who needs it? Isn’t the very thing that makes us human the fact that we need not live only in the present? That we straddle time with our minds? That we hold on? If there were one word I could strike from the English language, it would be
closure
. What bullshit.”

“Just one word to permanently excise and you’d choose
closure?”

“You put it that way and it’s hard to say. So many egregious coinages these days. Nouns shamelessly converted to verbs. But I don’t actually consider those words. I liked how you talked about that in the eulogy—about Daddy knowing all the words.” At the word
Daddy
, Flora’s eyes stung. When was the last time she’d heard her mother refer to her father so sweetly? “We used to play this game—your dad and I. I would randomly select a word from the dictionary, and he would have to define it. He always could. No one could ever say a word against his vocabulary. His personality, yes. But his vocabulary was impeccable.” She paused. “Yes, I think for words to delete, I’d choose
closure
, and for phrases, ‘pushing the envelope.’ Something about that expression makes me want to gag, I don’t know why. It’s repulsive.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Flora said. “But I know what you mean. ‘Very unique’ has a similar gag-reflex effect on me—as though there were degrees of uniqueness.”

“Yes. Kind of like ‘very dead.’”

“Exactly. ‘Extremely dead.’”

They fell together into ripples of helpless laughter. They both laughed silently when they laughed hard. They laughed and they sank down to the floor and sat, leaning against the cabinets and each other. Funny how laughter made you weak-kneed, like tears. Every time their eyes met, they were set off again, silently shaking, their eyes watering, trying to catch their breath. When they stopped laughing, they sat there on the floor awhile, depleted, Flora resting against her mother’s arm, her mother’s arm resting against Flora’s bony knee where it poked out from her oversize robe.

They were silent. It was a long silence. Not an uncomfortable one. Her father had talked of learning to like silence, getting better at silence, in the classroom, and elsewhere. Learning to see silence as a manifestation of thought, and not boredom, or indifference. He’d said that one thing about living long was becoming a better teacher. No longer needing to perform, not needing to fill the halls with bombast. Less talking, more listening. More asking.

“Do you believe in self-knowledge, Mom?” Flora said finally. “Unequivocally, I mean? Do you think it does one good? You must, right, after all the analysis?”

“What do you think, self-delusion is better?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Look at all the successful, high-functioning people so blissfully bereft of self-awareness.”

“Like who? Who are all these successful dolts?”

“Celebrities, politicians—our president. Never a glimmer of doubt, no curiosity.”

“I wouldn’t cite them as role models. Are you hoping to become president, Flora?”

“All those bloggers so quick to condemn me—are they really such perfect children to their own parents?”

“Of course not. Much easier to be a critic than a perfect child, or a perfect anything, in my experience.”

“What about Dad? Do you think he knew himself?”

“He knew. He was too smart not to. Though often it felt like he didn’t. But then this shard of self-awareness would pierce his face, and you knew he knew everything.”

“Violent image.”

“A brutal business. Not for sissies. What about you, Flo? Pierced by any shards of self-awareness lately?”

“People talk about the death of a child as the worst thing that can happen,” Flora said. “And it is. It is the worst thing. But the death of a parent is a loss of self. A loss of history. Who else really remembers your childhood but your parents? It’s like you said about the divorce, that it was as if your history had been erased—you put away the youthful pictures because there beside you in the frame was a husband no longer yours, a self no longer yours.”

“One thing I remember about you and Georgia from that year,” Joan said quietly. “Heartbreaking little-girl knees. Those heartbreaking little-girl legs. Seeing you two walking somewhere together. Never just walking. Skipping, almost running.”

The phone began to ring. They ignored it.

“I still remember, Flora. Why don’t you let me do some remembering for you? Aren’t you due for a sabbatical?”

Flora told her mother of what she’d learned of Georgia, living and working in Mongolia, with her middle-aged husband, how she would one day soon be a professor. She told her about Ray and Madeleine, how they saw one another now and then.

Her mother surprised her by saying, “That’s a nice thing that’s come out of all this, isn’t it?”

The phone rang again. This time, Joan got up to answer it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s not available.” “She has nothing to say on that matter,” she said a few minutes later. “Please stop calling.” And still later: “Wrong number, I’m afraid.” And when the intrepid reporters from
The Darwin Witness
dropped by, she handled them, too—giving them her business card, appealing to their young journalistic egos, convincing them to let her come to their office to use the computer so she could post her defense of Flora to the world on her blog, The Responsible Anarchist.

With her mother gone, the house fell quiet. Flora remembered her aloneness; other people reminded you of that. Without them, it was easy to forget. She read through the printouts again. Was it really she they described, or was it the Joyce heir, the Ted Hughes sister, the Tolkien spawn? She had lived up to the name of Literary Executioner; she had entered the big leagues, joined the ranks of the real crazies. “Goneril or Regan?” A bit much, no? Was he, the Apostle, the Cordelia of sons? Flora thought of Paul going to find his father at the pub, driving him home, helping him to bed in the dark, undressing him, removing his shoes one by one, as his dad had no doubt done for him decades back. Was what she was being asked to do for her father so difficult, so unfair?

The phone rang, and when it stopped, Flora removed it from its cradle. The house was under siege. Even Larks seemed edgy, running between windows, sniffing under doors. She called him upstairs, where it was safer. Clothes might be appropriate for this day. She dressed in her old room, the now closet. She walked down the hall and stripped the sheets from the unmade bed. She fetched clean ones from the linen closet. The freshly made bed looked as it had the day she arrived in Darwin months ago—crisp, hotel-like, as if no one really lived there. She went down to the basement and threw the linens and the robe in the wash. Her mother spoke of the domestic as a trap: A woman could emerge from her household fog and find she’d accomplished nothing but a lifetime of washing and pressing. But Flora found refuge in the domestic, refuge and solace—the tasks so clear and discrete, progress so easily noted. She was a good housewife—a single, orphaned housewife. She had married her dead father. Shared his bed, embraced his community, befriended his dog, taken up his interests. The results of these nuptials had been more or less predictable.