The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [8]
“We can handle it, I think,” announces Helen from the porch. “We’re nearly finished.” She goes into the building.
“Helen’s terribly shy,” says Frannie, looking after her.
“You must be good friends with her to be moving in.”
“We met almost my first week on the job last fall. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known her since kindergarten, and sometimes I feel like we’ve just met.”
“Mmm.”
“Frannie! What about this?” Helen is holding an object up at the window screen. Frannie turns to squint at it.
“I better go. Bryan will be expecting his lunch,” Florence says.
Frannie smiles at her.
“Not that I’ll make it for him, I mean. I’m not his slave, of course. I just went to the store.”
Frannie continues to smile. “He’s a nice man.”
“I think we’re in love now.”
“You told me that last week.”
“Yes, right.” It is impossible to leave. At length, Florence simply turns away and runs down the street to the car. She imagines Frannie and Helen meeting in the doorway of the empty apartment, the same height, kissing.
Florence is drawn outside by the odors of cut grass and privet. Bryan should be coming soon to take her swimming. It is a glorious day, and Philip is snipping his hedge, his back to her, his progress slow and neat. The grass he has mown is already bagged and sitting on the curb. Before going back inside, Florence watches him for a minute. She hasn’t spoken to him since her spring antagonism. Now she fears that she has found out the secret of his marriage, and he would know by looking at her.
He sets down his shears and wipes his face in his shirt. When she turns to go inside, he calls to her, “What do you think, Florence, shall I trim it into birds and perfect spheres?”
“What is that called again?”
“Topiary. How’s the baby business?”
“Bouncing. How are you?”
“Sorry not to see you more often. And this is your slow season.”
“I haven’t been home much, I’ll admit.”
“Ah, love.” He speaks with only ordinary irony.
“I’ve been around enough to hear a lot of thumps and bangings across the way. Are you haunted over there?”
“Only by the spirit of remodeling. I took out the kitchen bar and put down new linoleum, and let’s see, put in some new windows and repainted a little.”
“My goodness!”
“Would you like to see it?”
He has also had a new sofa re-covered in a pattern of green leaves and lemons. The place is even more spacious now than before, if that is possible. Philip’s furniture, director’s chairs and yellow canvas deck chairs, recalls the ocean. His floors recall sandy beaches. Nothing recalls Frannie, and Florence feels suddenly calmer. He has brought his desk downstairs and set it up where he can survey his solitary realm. There is an air of satisfaction about the furnishings and their arrangement, as if they have spread themselves this way and that, unhindered. “I should have come over sooner,” Florence says, not remembering till then that she wasn’t invited to come over. Still, she feels that she has missed the transformation itself, and having missed it, she will never know what it was that has been transformed. “You know how nosy I am,” she adds.
But Philip has gone to the kitchen window. “Look over there. See that little building? I bought that at a farm sale for thirty dollars. It’s an old chicken house. Sound, though. I’m insulating it, and putting down a tile floor, then I’m going to install a Franklin stove and run lights out there and make it into my study. No phone, no nothing. Grapes growing all over it, a couple of easy chairs, a nice rug.”
“You’ve got all this space to yourself right here!”
He glances at her, amused that she hasn’t gotten the point, and shrugs. “The spirit of remodeling is pretty persistent, you know.”
“It’s so different from the way it was,” she says, because Philip’s cool realm oddly invites confidences in a way that Frannie’s hospitality did not, “and it’s not that I don’t like it. It’s refreshing. But I loved the rusty-red sofa, and all the chairs drawn up around the coffee table. That kitchen bar was so ugly—awful nineteen fifties modernizing