how could she get there? Who would look after Willa? And what kind of resistance should Flannery expect from Charles to the prospect of her flying across the country for a gathering called Women Write the World? (‘Do they?’ she could imagine her husband challenging, with mock solemnity. ‘It’s a big world. That’s a lot to write.’)
Such were the dreary cogs that started turning in her mind, before another item stopped all the machinery cold. Then warm.
At the last name she saw on the list.
Moderating the proceedings . . .
There followed a name so vibrant to Flannery that it appeared to pulse in some foreign color on her screen, pomegranate red or a sleek jade green, not the black on gray of the others.
Professor Anne Arden.
A woman she once knew.
3
A hand touched her elbow. Flannery startled.
‘Hi!’
A short, busty figure whose shape was mauvely emphasized by clingy yoga clothes, her hair pulled back in a neon hair tie and her skin simultaneously freckled and tan, stood next to Flannery, panting slightly, though in an amiable way.
‘Flannery, right? How are you?’ She gestured to her own shoulder. ‘It’s Wendy – from the moms’ group.’ She grinned in encouragement, then added forgivingly, ‘It’s been a couple of years.’
‘Oh, right!’ Flannery returned the smile and pulled her laptop screen half down, modestly, as if it were a revealing garment, then tried to wipe from her face the heat brought on by Anne Arden’s name. ‘Gosh. How are you? How’s –’ Flannery felt a surge of satisfaction that she could retrieve the child’s name, though she wasn’t sure she could have picked him out of a toddler line-up – ‘Eli?’
‘He’s terrific. We’re at the Franklin School now, and we’re really loving it.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah. Where are you?’
‘We’re at Alpine.’ It was like the we of pregnancy: collective pronouns were how you referred to familial situations. Parenting, Flannery learned early, was spoken of as a team sport.
‘How do you like Alpine? We looked at it for Eli.’
‘Did you? It’s a nice school. You know . . .’ Flannery nodded. Willa’s education was a matter of essential interest to Flannery, whose love for her daughter was fierce and sustaining and for whom she would have lain down under a train, if it would help her, or married a man she shouldn’t have, or attended a weekly ‘moms’ group’ meeting in the early years. Still, she seemed suddenly empty of scholastic adjectives. ‘They’re good people.’
‘We were a little worried.’ Wendy winced awkwardly. ‘That it might not be academic enough.’
As if to make up for this remark, Wendy launched into an ostensibly modest account of an elaborate art project her first grader was hard at work on, which she eye-rollingly called crazy ambitious – that kind of maternal boast masquerading as complaint Flannery recognized. The assignment had something to do with Frida Kahlo, and self-portraits that included the children and their favorite animal. ‘Of course, Eli had to choose his tree frog, which is cute but incredibly hard to draw . . .’
Flannery yawned.
Widely, inadvertently. It was a genuine yawn, not staged, but the rudeness of it disturbed her and she immediately shook her head and laugh-apologized. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she said, making a vague excusatory gesture at the laptop, as if her boredom were due to the computer. Through no fault of the friendly Wendy, Flannery had found instantly exhausting this exchange about their children and their schools and their teachers and their classes. All Flannery wanted to do that minute was travel her willing memory back to the territory of her own former school, former teacher, former class. She wanted to focus on the invitation to visit her old university, and the chance to meet Professor Arden.
Her Anne.
‘Gosh, I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.’ Wendy’s smile was a little thinner, as she cast a slightly jealous glance at the machine. Flannery doubted whether Wendy had much idea of Flannery’s work, as one of the dislocating elements of the moms’ group had always been that its members were stripped of their previous clothing as lawyers, educators, designers, writers. They were all just moms. That Flannery had authored two books was of less import to her fellow moms than the fact that at the age of three Willa had liked to eat olives and mushrooms, which was thought to be extraordinary and precocious.
‘No, not at all,’ Flannery lied, but she did lift the laptop lid back up purposefully. Then, in that way of confessions made impulsively to near strangers, Flannery added, ‘I’ve just been asked to go to a writers’ conference on the East Coast next month. It would be really good to go, but I’m trying to figure out if I can manage it. You know. Spousal relations. Childcare . . .’
‘Getting away is hard, isn’t it?’ Wendy sympathized, and Flannery glimpsed the possibility that this well-adjusted-seeming mother might have yearnings and frustrations of her own.
‘It is,’ Flannery agreed. ‘Getting away is hard.’
4
Charles would object.
Flannery saw this from the first moment in Bean There, Done That, the knowledge hitting her almost simultaneously to her reading the email invitation.
Flannery’s husband – and that too seemed an improbable word to attach to herself, ‘husband’, something Flannery Jansen had never expected to have, or to hold – was an artist. Charles Marshall. His work was widely known, out in the world and close to home, too, where an installation of his enlivened a recently revamped terminal at the San Francisco airport. Charles Marshall (never Charlie or Chuck, unless you wanted to irritate him) was a big man: big appetites, and the girth that went with them; big creations, and big emotions, not all of them positive. When tall, broad, goateed Charles was in a benevolent mood, he was loud, funny, warm, and generous, a showman, a storyteller, a circus master. When he was angry, the windows rattled and the lights flickered, and small animals retreated to their warrens until the rage had spent itself, and the city’s workers had cleared the debris from the streets.
Charles Marshall did not, Flannery knew, think of himself as a man who would object to his wife’s traveling to the East Coast for a writers’ conference. An all women writers’ conference. Certainly not. How could he mind? He was an artist too, and progressive, a good husband and a doting father who would delight in having a few days on his own to take care of his sweet little muffin, his six-year-old daughter. He was not any sort of ogre. He was a good-natured, cooperative, supportive man.
‘That’s a bad time for me.’ Charles shook his head, though his words were somewhat garbled by a mouthful of spanakopita. Flannery had decided to run the travel idea by Charles right away, and, as a mood enhancer, she had cooked something interesting. Occasionally, Flannery took to kitchen consolations. Making spanakopita was a kind of inside joke (for a party of one), having had the Greek salad days of her college years so vividly in mind since that morning cafe correspondence. Willa asked for more water as she tried to make the fork do its work on the salty feta and filo dough. Charles swallowed, then repeated more clearly, ‘October’s going to
