The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [4]
Some weeks pass. Florence is very curious. She brings a new boyfriend to Frannie’s apartment. When he, in his comradely, once-married, matter-of-fact way, asks Frannie if she thinks she will go back to Philip, Florence sits very still and holds her breath. Frannie shakes her head without a thought. They do not pursue the subject. It is almost as if the question is dull to them, or as if they both know the ins and outs of it so well that they needn’t go on. Florence bites her lip at her own curiosity, and her admiration for Bryan, both his experience and his directness, increases. The next day she asks Frannie what she thinks of Bryan, and watches her closely to detect envy in her approval. There is none.
In Sears, they pass a display of ribbed, sleeveless undershirts and baggy shorts. “Philip just loves those,” says Frannie.
Such an elderly style seems so incongruous with Philip’s natural elegance that Florence guffaws. “No, really!” says Frannie. “The whole family wears that stuff, and Philip’s mother irons all their shorts!” After this exchange, Florence feels oddly more hostile toward Philip, which is why, when she sees him on the street a few days later, and he smiles and pauses for a chat, she walks right past him.
Florence spends many evenings with Frannie. She takes the bus and often arrives panting and slapping in a flurry of snow, as if on an adventure. She stays the night on the living room floor. “I wish you’d visit me!” she asserts. “I could sneak you in and out under cover of darkness.” Frannie never comes, though, and it is just as well. Nothing about Florence’s carefully arranged, thoughtfully acquired apartment is as hospitable as Frannie’s temporary rooms.
They make popcorn and crack beers, then turn out the lights and position their chairs before the bay window. Cars and semis rush past on the main thoroughfare nearby, and they make plans to jog, to swim, to learn to cook Middle Eastern food. Florence talks about Bryan. Most of her remarks are open-ended, so that Frannie can simply fall into telling all about it if she wants to. She doesn’t, even when Florence says, “If you ever want to talk about what happened, you can trust me completely. You know that, don’t you?” Frannie always nods.
Florence can hardly help speculating, especially at home, alone in her own kitchen, staring out at Philip’s stained-glass windows. The thumps and sawings that occasionally sound from his house seem to her not the mysteries of the moment, but those of the past autumn, when she was so often inside, but never saw what was going on.
She picks at the burned kernels in the bottom of the popcorn bowl. “You know what one of the mothers said to me today? They’d done Lamaze, I guess, she and her husband, and she said that when the pains got bad, he climbed up onto the labor table and held her head in his arms. She looked me full in the face and asked, ‘How can my marriage not be perfect from now on? We were splendid together!’
“Philip and I lost a baby.” Frannie tips the beer can back and catches the last drops with her tongue. Florence runs one of the kernels around and around the buttery bowl. This is the moment. What Florence wishes to know is the story of their mundaneness: what was said over breakfast, and in what tone, what looks were exchanged, what noises Frannie could not help listening to when she was tending her own affairs, who would be the first to break a silence. “I was prediabetic without knowing it. She went full term, but when we got to the hospital they said she had died in labor, then knocked me out.” Frannie speaks calmly, expecting Florence’s expertise to fill in the details, which, regrettably, it does.
“They should have suspected.” She is professionally disapproving.
“The doctor was an ass. It was a long time ago. Almost eight years.”
Needless to say, it was tragic, devastating, but how so? Florence sips her beer and glances