Continued, Life A Love Story
Flo, Teresa, and Flash the cat are sitting on Flo’s front porch in the early evening on Saturday night. A boy maybe ten years old comes to the bottom of the stairs. “Knock, knock,” he says.
“Come in,” Flo says, and the boy climbs up onto the porch.
“I’m just seeing if you need some help with your garden,” he says. He hands Flo a flyer. The Wacky Weed Puller, he calls himself, and he charges ten cents apiece for the weeds. He takes PayPal because his dad helps him do that.
“That’s a good service,” Flo says. “How is it you learned about weeds?”
“Huh?”
“How do you know what to pull and what not to pull?”
“Oh!” the boy says. “Well, see, weeds are taller.”
“Okay,” Flo says. “I’ll keep you in mind. If you decide to diversify and sell chocolate bars, I’ll for sure buy one of those from you.”
“What kind of chocolate bars?”
“Hershey with almonds.”
The boy nods gravely. “Okay. Maybe.” He hops down the steps and goes over to the next house.
“He’ll think about those Hershey bars,” Flo says. “I’ll bet you he shows up tomorrow with a few and then I’ll need to buy them all.”
“You wouldn’t have to buy them all,” Teresa says.
“Oh, they freeze well.”
“You’re a generous spirit, Flo.”
The women sit quietly for a while, and then Teresa says, “I have been thinking about how someone like me is regarded. A spinster, you know. An old maid.”
Spinster! Flo thinks. Old maid! Oh, poor Teresa. She says, “I can’t imagine that anyone would think of you that way.”
Teresa shrugs. “I don’t mind. It’s what I am.” She smiles, but Flo doesn’t believe Teresa doesn’t mind.
“Teresa, tell me. Are you unhappy?”
“Isn’t everyone, sometimes?”
“I’m asking because of something you said. Are you unhappy about being alone?”
Teresa thinks for a moment. Then she says, “I resent the implication that a person has to be with another person to be happy.”
“But people do seem to need each other. Would you agree with that?”
Teresa leans back in her chair. “You know what, Flo? I was in McDonald’s the other day and there was a really old woman working there.
She was clearing tables and wiping them down.
And sometimes I wonder about what’s going to happen to me when I get too old to do what I do, and I saw that woman and I thought, Well, I could do that.
I wouldn’t mind that job, wiping down tables, seeing what the people ate, listening in on the conversations that are going on.
Plus I’d get a free lunch! I imagined where that woman might live; a small apartment, probably overheated, a nice chair to sit on, sliders onto a little balcony just loaded with plants, a lamp in the window. And—”
“Oh, Teresa,” Flo says, shaking her head.
“It’s not sad,” Teresa says. “I really wouldn’t mind it. A job where you see people all the time, and you don’t have to think too much. A job with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. No complications to think about when you get home. You live as you want to live.”
“What about friends?” Flo asks. “Don’t you think there’s some value in having friends, at least?”
Teresa looks over at her. “Aren’t we friends?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Flo says. “But wouldn’t you be happier coming home from your McDonald’s job to someone?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Teresa says, and at that moment she seems to Flo to look just like a little kid.
Flo says, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to push you into my way of thinking.”
“It’s okay. Sometimes I…” She turns to face Flo more directly. “When I was growing up, all my friends had the same ideals for the man they would like to marry. Rich, handsome, witty…you know. But all I ever wanted was a man who was true.”
Flo sighs. “Yes. But how do you ever know for sure?”
“Did you ever hear that saying, ‘You can never know the whole man, but you can know the true man’?” Teresa asks.
“Never did hear that. What’s it mean?” Flo shifts her position slightly. Her stomach hurts, but she doesn’t want to tell Teresa. She wants to know the answer to the question she asked.
Teresa picks up Flash and puts him in her lap.
She strokes the cat’s back, long, slow strokes, and he closes his eyes.
“I think it means you can never really get to the bottom of knowing a person,” Teresa says.
“There’s so much inside each of us. But you can get a strong sense of certain fundamental qualities.
You can come to a point of knowing enough.
I guess what I wanted was a man with a sense of integrity.
A willingness to share. And a kind of vulnerability. ”
“You talk like it’s too late.”
“It is too late.”
“Oh, Teresa, it is not.”
“It is!”
“You want to step outside and we’ll settle this thing?” Flo asks, and a cloud of tension dissipates.
Flash hops down from Teresa’s lap. He is wearing a little harness Teresa got for him that Flo thinks even he cannot escape. He has a leash on, too, and for some reason Flo finds this funny, and she laughs.
“What?” Teresa asks.
“A leash on a cat!”
“Laugh all you want to, it works,” Teresa says. “Flash feels all Born Free and I have the security of knowing that he’s not going to run off on me like every other man I’ve let into my life.”
“Is that true?” Flo asks. “Has every man you’ve let in your life run off?”
“Well, maybe I’ve chased them off.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Just beating them to the punch, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know that eventually they’ll realize…they’ll find out things about me that they don’t like.” She looks down into her lap.
“What things?”
“Just…things.”
“So, fear?” Flo says.
“No. Not really fear.”
“Discomfort with commitment?”
“No, I don’t think it’s that, either.”
“Maybe fear of happiness? I’ve met some people, seems like they think they don’t deserve happiness. I never did understand that. But is that you, Teresa?”
“My goodness, Flo! I’m going to have to get you a shingle to hang outside!”
“Oh, I know. I guess some might say I’m a busybody. I’m sorry if I offended you. Let’s us change the subject.”
“No, we don’t have to do that. It’s just that some things are kind of embarrassing to admit. I don’t think I’m ever going to have the kind of relationship you’re talking about. Things just don’t work out for me. But I really like talking to you, Flo. You seem like someone I might say anything to.”
“You’re right.”
A weighty silence descends, and then Teresa speaks quietly. “I used to think a lot about suicide.”
Flo cups a hand to one ear. “About…?”
“Suicide.”
Flo sits up straighter in her chair. “Oh, my.”
“I’m not like that anymore,” Teresa says.
“But you say you used to be?” Flo can hardly stand it. She wants to run over and embrace Teresa, to shake her, but she knows better than to do that. Let the woman talk.
Teresa sighs. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but when I was a freshman in college—this would be more than thirty years ago—I had a relationship fall apart.
I’d been so sure of us. But he just abruptly broke up with me and I couldn’t seem to get over it.
My whole worldview changed. One night when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, I got a bunch of aspirin and thought I’d…
But then”—she looks over at Flo and laughs—“this will make it sound like I wasn’t really serious.
What I ended up doing was buying a pizza and eating the whole thing.
And after that, things started to get better.
Never underestimate the power of pepperoni.
“I think it’s just that from the time I was a little girl, I was oversensitive to everything—I felt everything too much.
By the time I was a teenager, I was sure I knew what life was all about and I figured it would only get worse.
Then when I met what I thought was my true love, everything changed.
The possibilities! The…union of us! The protection, the joy that the idea of all that brought!
But then it fell apart, so easily, and I thought, Well, there you go. So much for trusting in love.
“But I feel now that it’s beautiful to be alive. I’ve felt that way for a long time. I’m okay alone! I’m at peace with it. But that’s enough about me. Tell me how you’re doing. What have you been thinking about?”
What Flo wants to say is that she’s been sitting here listening to Teresa and thinking that she is such a fine person, so deserving of so much more.
But Teresa has signaled that she’s had enough of talking about herself, at least for now, and so Flo turns the attention to herself.
She says, “Well, I’ve been thinking I ought to pick out something nice to be laid out in. ”
“Oh?”
Flo straightens her glasses on her face and looks over at Teresa.
“My friend Pris once invited me to her independent living place.
Her name is Priscilla, but we all called her Pris from an early age because she was a prissy kind, always walking around with her nose in the air, stepping over mud puddles with a look of horror on her face, washing her hands rather than licking the frosting off them like the rest of us did.
“When I visited her last, we had a plateful of shortbread cookies with our coffee, and she told me she’d been thinking about what she would like to be laid out in, and she wasn’t even sick!
But there comes a time. She said, ‘You know, I’ve got this turquoise negligee William gave me years ago.
I only wore it but two or three times and it didn’t stay on long, if you know what I mean.
It was transparent, and when you put on the matching robe it was still transparent.
’ She winked at me and said, ‘We liked that in those days, didn’t we?
But anyway,’ she said, ‘I was thinking, What if there is a heaven and you can arrive all young again and dressed in whatever you want? I would like to meet him dressed in that negligee he gave me. Do you think that’s sinful?
’ I told her, ‘No, I do not.’ I said, ‘In fact, you’re giving me ideas for when my time comes.
’ Though I never did own such a thing as a negligee.
It was not something Terrence and I could afford, a garment meant to dangle over someone; we were more practical.
My nighties had lace and flowers, but that is not the same thing at all as what Pris was talking about.
“She took me into her bedroom, and in her dresser was that negligee, still wrapped in perfumed tissue, and it was like a cloud of a thing, a beautiful turquoise cloud, seemed like it had been spun by fairies.”
Now the pain Flo is feeling increases. She shifts on her chair and pretends it is only so she can look out at the yard better.
She stares straight ahead but continues with her story.
“Pris asked if I would like for her to model it and then we laughed; she was only kidding, of course. But she wanted to be wearing it in case she transformed into that young Pris, and oh goodness, what a sultry young woman she was. Men turning their heads to watch her walk by, and sometimes it seemed like they might could have walked right into a brick wall. A beautiful woman.”
The women sit quietly, and then Flo says, “What I want is to be buried in my travel suit, which I wore only once but always supposed I might use again. I felt as beautiful in it as I spect Priscilla felt in her negligee. I wore it on the one and only airplane ride Terrence and I ever took. He won an award from work and we went clean out to San Francisco, California, for a fancy vacation. Oh, that was something, and the plane ride out there was as good as anything we saw. When those propellers started turning, I felt like Ingrid Bergman in that hat she wore in Casablanca.”
A sharp pain now, and Flo says, “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
She goes to the bathroom and stands there, and the pain subsides. Huh. Well, she’s always had a rather delicate digestive system. Not like some others who seem like they can eat anything. Terrence, for example, who could probably have salted an earwig, eaten it, and called it delicious.
Why don’t you try to find someone? she wants to ask Teresa, which means, Don’t you see you?
But maybe Teresa can’t see herself. Maybe no one can see themselves, really.
Flo has heard about true mirrors, which show people the reverse image of what they usually see in mirrors: they let people see themselves as other people see them.
But maybe other people are the real—and better—true mirrors.
There must be a way she can help Teresa. Someone she could ask some questions of. Wait a minute! Why not a librarian? They know everything. And they don’t make you feel foolish, no matter what you ask.