Continued, Life A Love Story
She turns on the nightstand lamp, slides into her slippers, and creeps quietly down into the kitchen, though why she is being so quiet she has no idea.
She could do the Tarzan yell and nobody would know.
But it’s habit, to be quiet getting up in the night.
Same as she still sleeps on her side of the bed, and the same as she sometimes reaches over as if Terrence might be there.
One time she really thought he was there, but it was just how longing can take a shape sometimes.
She pulls on a cardigan she left on the back of a kitchen chair.
It’s an old gray one with leather buttons that belonged to her father, and she wonders if she should tell Ruthie about it—how whenever she puts it on she sees him beckoning to her to come sit on his lap and listen to the ballgame on the radio with him.
Maybe not. There’s so much else to tell her about, and Flo is beginning to feel that she’d better get moving and finish this letter.
For one quick second, she wonders if this whole enterprise isn’t futile, if all it will do is make Ruthie feel tired and overburdened.
But then she is right back to believing she should do it—she must do it.
Not only for Ruthie, but for herself. An autobiography in things, that’s what this letter is.
She starts to turn on the overhead, but her spirit is feeling too delicate for an overhead just yet. Instead, she makes coffee by the light of the moon.
She sits at the table with her hands folded as the coffee finishes perking, then pours some into her Mrs. Hen mug and goes out to sit on the front porch to watch the day crack open.
She once had a friend say that nothing good happens after dark.
“Nothing??” Flo had asked, teasing her; they were young then, and rambunctious with their husbands at night.
The friend—Connie was her name—waved her hand, and then she leaned forward and said something Flo has never forgotten.
She said, “I’m just talking about all the good stuff that happens in the day, the life all around you: bumblebees, and children off to school and people working at all kinds of things.
People going and coming, all day long, and I always wonder what all they’re doing.
” She looked at Flo then, with a kind of shyness Flo had not seen in her before, and she asked, “Do you do that, Flo, do you watch people like that?” Flo said, “I am too busy working to do that.” And then Connie kind of tucked herself back in and Flo felt ashamed.
People, when they tell you certain things, they want you to agree.
They want you at least to see what they mean, in your heart.
That was a time she had failed a friend.
Flo watches the sky turn pink, then apricot, then yellow, and finally blue.
She watches as the papers get flung onto porches and she listens to the sleepy birds commence their daily symphony.
She sees a man carrying a briefcase going out to his car: there is the muted thunk of the door closing, the stuttering sound of the engine starting, and the whine of reverse.
Whoever the man is drives past Flo and waves hello, and she waves back.
Terrence told her once about a language where there is no word for “hello.” Rather, people greet each other by saying, “You are here.” And the response is “Yes, I am.” And in another language Flo had heard about—in Africa, she thinks—people don’t say, on parting, “I’ll see you. ” They say, “Somehow.”
Flo doesn’t know why remembering this now brings tears to her eyes. Well, yes, she does. Somehow is a wish made without being able to know whether or not it can come true. It is determination in the face of uncertainty.
Down the block, a light goes on upstairs, then downstairs.
Flo sips at her coffee and she thinks, I ought to have followed the sun all my life: wake up when it rises, lie down when it sets.
It seems like such a good idea now, if not exactly practical.
Or doable, really. It’s just wishful thinking, an idea come too late.
Or an idea like people get all the time, ideas that do not come to fruition because people mostly return to their habits, good or bad.
But this day of noticing? This is for Connie. Rest her soul.