Little House on the Prairie, or The Waltons,’ she told Adele on the phone one day when Charles was at the studio. ‘I should be out collecting eggs from the henhouse.’ She and her former co-traveler, who lived in Chicago, had a friendly telephone relationship now.
Adele was quiet for a minute, then said, ‘Well, you always said you used to love those shows.’
‘They’re so cheesy,’ Flannery agreed. ‘But I really did.’
For Flannery, the house was expansive after the years of apartment living, and gradually she came to feel it was less of a movie set and more her actual home. On the main floor, raised above the sloping ground level, was a broad bay window that looked out over the row of painted Victorians facing, and in the window was a long, electric-blue couch that became one of her favorite comforts.
‘My first wife, Miriam, wanted us to have a baby,’ Charles informed Flannery one sleepy May afternoon, when they lounged together on that couch. ‘We were way too young. It would have been a disaster.’ Flannery’s legs stretched across Charles’s lap, her puffy feet encased by his ample hands. ‘Then there was this very athletic woman I dated, Rebecca. She wanted to us to have a kid together, too – I’ve told you about her?’
Flannery shook her head. And you don’t have to now, she added silently, but she had learned the futility of trying to stop Charles when he had a story to tell. He fondled his beard affectionately as he recalled these waystations in his life, temporarily pausing in his attentions toward Flannery’s swollen ankles.
‘She was an amazon, black hair, very into yoga, before anyone else had heard of yoga except for hippies. I mean, before there were spandex outlets on every corner. Bec was amazingly flexible.’ The memory caused Charles to pause. ‘Anyway. She thought she was pregnant briefly, then miscarried. She bled, heavily. It was alarming.’ Flannery felt a sharp pang of sympathy for this remote, unknown woman who had lost her potential child. ‘And after that she went into this crazy pregnancy overdrive – she had to get pregnant, we had to have a kid together, it was a sign from the universe . . .’ He shook his head, and sighed. ‘I wouldn’t do it. Not like that, under that kind of pressure. It was the wrong time.’ Flannery marveled at how certain he had been, and how the cold clarity of his thinking had not, she guessed, felt to him like coldness.
‘Not until you, Beauty,’ Charles said. His brown intelligent eyes returned to her. He had made their own story one of predestination, inevitability; which made it very close to being, actually, planned. It was up to Flannery to hold on to the small kernel of truth that it had not been. ‘And the Peppercorn, of course,’ the future father added, touching Flannery’s swelling belly. ‘Peppercorn’ had been Charles’s name for the creature growing within Flannery since she had early on found a chart that illustrated fetal growth by food items: peppercorn at week five, blueberry at seven, kumquat at ten. At week twelve, Flannery encouraged Charles to change his nickname to Passion Fruit, but it hadn’t caught on. ‘I was waiting for the two of you.’
‘We’re flattered,’ Charles’s third wife joked, placing her hands over the bump, too. She was still astonished by what was happening beneath it. ‘Flattered.’
At the word flattered a flirtatious joke Flannery and Anne used to share surfaced suddenly in Flannery’s memory. ‘Flannery will get you nowhere’, Anne used to say to her with mock sternness, standing half clothed, her deep red hair giving the white walls a fiery glow, as if the apartment were a den of delicious iniquity; Anne said the phrase with a slight admonishing shake of the head when she felt their affair was taking too much valuable time away from her efforts to work on her doctoral thesis or prepare for the job market. ‘Oh, on the contrary,’ the eighteen-year-old Flannery would reply, with the verbal swagger love makes possible, ‘Flannery will get you everywhere.’
She smiled inadvertently at the recollection. Charles, caught up in his own reflections, did not notice, and Flannery chose not to share the memory with him. Past romances: was it always a good idea to discuss them? Not necessarily. Sometime Flannery might tell Charles about Anne (if he proved interested). But not now. For the moment that long-gone passion could stay deep within Flannery, not far from the little Passion Fruit herself – who jumped or kicked slightly just then, the first of many occasions on which the growing girl would seek to weigh in on her parents’ spoken and unspoken conversations.
15
Before the child’s arrival there was an eruption – not in itself significant, and certainly not as bad as others that followed, but it gave Flannery a preview of scenes that would one day mar her future, like ruptures in a canvas.
It was the day of Flannery’s last class. She bade farewell on a fog-shrouded morning to a group of mid-twenty-year-olds of varying talents, including the multiply pierced boy who had written a smutty but smart piece about a blond art teacher named Eudora, whom, Flannery realized only after she had graded and returned it, was probably based on herself. (Wise, yet foolish: there it was again.) Most of the young adults had shuffled out of class with muttered expressions of thanks, and Flannery was sitting at the formica desk gathering up her papers. She felt sick, as always, and fat, and brainless – she had been reading an early Iris Murdoch novel a colleague had pressed on her, which obscurely contributed to her sense of imprisonment. Had Flannery ever written, actually? Had there been any point to it, if she had?
A tall, freckled student with the awkward long neck of a giraffe approached her, his bulky gray backpack giving him an ominous stoop. Flannery looked up at him and felt a sentimental pang – her last student. Pregnancy made her sappy, all the time.
‘Hi, Ms. Jansen,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something? Before you go?’
Flannery hoped it was a simple question, answerable in a few minutes. She could stretch to so little at this point. She just wanted to lie down. ‘Sure,’ she encouraged him, faintly.
‘What’s it like to have a book on the bestseller list?’
‘What’s it like?’ The question disarmed her, though she knew that A Visit to Don Lennart was largely the reason people signed up for her class. She stared into the young man’s face. He had bright, eager eyes, a smattering of color on either cheek, rubbery lips slightly open with curiosity. He had written, she thought she recalled, an oddly affecting piece about a barber.
‘It’s . . .’ she started, her muddied mind searching for the right adjective, because she wanted neither to mislead nor condescend to her student. Surreal? (Too easy.) Fun? (Only somewhat true, and lazy.) Unexpected? (Accurate, but it didn’t tell you anything.) ‘It’s . . . um . . .’
A slap on the door. It swung wide open.
‘Flannery! There you are. Jesus. Come on, we’ve got to go.’
Flannery and the freckled student startled. ‘Sorry,’ Flannery said, her face flushing, but she stood up. Was this really happening in her classroom? Being ordered out like a dawdling child?
‘No problem,’ the boy shrugged. ‘I just –’
‘I need you to come now.’ Charles snatched Flannery’s jacket from the back of the chair, and made an impatient sweeping gesture to get his wife out of the room. ‘I’m not even legally parked. I don’t want those fuckers to give me a ticket.’
Charles glared at the young man, as if he represented the parking authority. Flannery apologized again to her student but allowed herself to be ushered out so that as little as possible of this would be witnessed by someone else.
‘It’s disorienting,’ Flannery
