The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [1]
Frannie has copper-colored eyes, winged brows, and short, springy hair that she obviously does no more to than wash into shape. She asks Florence to sit at the round maple table for tea. Everything about Frannie, from her clumsiness with the teacups to her delight with the muffins Florence has brought for housewarming, is inviting. There is a footstep, and Frannie glances up, then takes out another plate. “Hello!” says Philip, but before he sits down, he strides around the periphery of the room, stopping twice to admire the walls and floors, to look through the open door to the front porch, to smile and put his hands on his hips. Frannie says, “Philip still can’t believe we own the place. Last night I found him out on the front porch holding on to the gingerbread and staring at the stained glass.”
Philip sits at the table and leans toward Florence on his elbows. “Have you ever house-hunted? You wouldn’t believe what some people do to their houses. I went to one place that looked rather charming from the outside, you know, but inside they’d cut doorways where they shouldn’t have been and added on this room at the back, plastic paneling, spongy rug like fungus. It wasn’t a bad house, at one time. I went outside and threw up in a trash barrel.”
“Philip took house-hunting very seriously,” says Frannie.
“You see how people live.” He butters a muffin.
Philip, it turns out, was in high school with Florence’s brother. Philip tells them that no two strangers in the nation are separated by more than five intermediate acquaintances. When he finds out that Florence is a nurse, he asks her if she saves a life every day, and when Frannie mentions her job, directing foreign exchange programs and charter flights for the local university, he says, “Importing exotica, exporting domestica.” He obviously expects to fill air and space, and he is quite handsome, but it is Frannie that Florence can’t help looking at. She sits smiling over the conversation like a child over a jack-in-the-box, waiting to be surprised into laughter. She makes Florence long to say something hilarious.
Florence goes next door, thinking that she really shouldn’t be visiting again so soon. She has been there every day, sometimes twice, since they moved in two weeks ago. She brings a quarter pound of a new kind of tea, knowing that it is almost a bribe, and shouts a comical “YOO-hoo!” as she crosses the threshold. Frannie giggles from the side porch and responds in kind. The giggle is a tremendous relief to Florence, because she is ready to detect signs of boredom and exasperation in Frannie’s first glance at her. The giggle allays her fears, and she grins as she pulls out a maple chair beside the maple table once again, investing the moment with her fullest, most tangible pleasure at being liked. Philip isn’t there.
Florence talks about the hospital, where she is a nurse in pediatrics. Already, Frannie has learned the names of the doctors, secretaries, and other nurses, and her evident interest renders Florence almost eloquent. She talks about the medical student she had been seeing (too young) and the photographer she is seeing now (too self-absorbed). She talks about recipes and being on the Pill and having gained and lost thirty pounds in four months. Frannie’s questions and responses create such vivid images in her mind, and her smiles and rejoinders are so appropriate, that Florence grows ecstatic with conversation. She feels as though her words leap at Frannie before Frannie even finishes speaking. She follows Frannie around the house, talking. Frannie sweeps the floor, puts away