Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 26

Once, a long time before, Flannery had felt vulnerable in this way. She had loved deeply and she had lost, and though the experience broke and rearranged her (like a shattered and reset limb), it did not really surprise her. Woven deeply into this calm and melancholy woman was the conviction that all love ended in loss, that abandonment was the norm, that ecstasy was fleeting. It was the order of things.

A self-protective reflex came naturally to Flannery, and after Anne she always simply, somewhere in her, held back. It just made sense. Flannery could be, and was, kind and funny and attentive and hardworking and patient with those she loved; but she never offered that most private self to another person again. It was not worth the risk. She had learned that once, right at the start of adulthood.

If you asked her, Flannery would never have said she was scarred by her relationship with Anne. On the contrary. She had grown, learned, thrived, reveled. She had been touched and moved, and she had touched and moved Anne, too. It was Flannery’s early life’s greatest, if mostly interior, adventure, and next to it the colorful, wild, extraordinary year in Mexico with Adele seemed a movie set, an epic, as opposed to the sharp, true lyric that had been Anne. Though at acute points of self-reflection, Flannery understood that her determination to find her father was triggered by the way loving Anne had opened and changed her.

Now, she was with Charles. Flannery loved her husband, relished him, yes, but she would not say (if anyone asked her; luckily, no one did) that she had fallen headlong for the complicated man. Her passion was not on that order. Americans tended to shake their heads over countries with traditions of arranged marriages but Flannery wondered, once inside one herself and trying to adjust to the odd, boxy shape of it, how different their Western ritual was, really. Weren’t all marriages arrangements? It was like trying to fit your body into a rectangular wooden drawer, as Flannery was told by one of her mother’s friends she could do with her newborn infant if she didn’t want to ‘throw away good money on bassinets and such’.

Flannery managed it – marriage, that is, not cost-cutting measures for Willa, who slept happily in her raised, padded bassinet for the first six weeks of her life – with a combination of effort and determination. At points, she liked to hope, with grace. Flannery cooked dinners and prepared breakfasts, she attended to laundry and wrote holiday cards to their friends and buyers, she sought and gave back rubs in front of the TV; she organized cans in the pantry and towels in the cupboard and baby bottles, sanitized in boiling water, on the counter. She was competent with the new range of tasks, and kept a cheerful face toward it all, animated as she was by the shock of new life. Of new love.

In the gray flavorless hospital room where she recovered for the first few days, Charles reading or dozing in the corner chair, flowers and treats left by visitors bringing color to the place, Flannery held this warm, small life, wrapped in a nurse-folded blanket or pressed nakedly against her skin and nursing, her new eyes closed and her sweet hungry mouth learning how to feed – and she toppled helplessly into love with her. Willa, Flannery murmured to their girl, in the hospital; back at home, in the small bedroom upstairs where Flannery slept for the first months, near the bassinet, so she could rise at any hour to tend to the beloved creature. Willa, Willa. The name itself was a lullaby, easy to sing.

This tiny treasured child stirred something within Flannery that she had not known to expect. How blind, again, not to have foreseen this! What had she imagined about motherhood? Love, of course, exhaustion, responsibility – and joy, and pride. She had read of all that. Flannery had not suspected, though, that this altering passion for another person would have all the same symptoms as the other kind. Everything you saw reminded you of her; you thought about her all the time; the world’s other shades faded next to the implacable brightness of the one you loved. Her name was always on your tongue, the sound of her breath and her noises were tunes that played on a loop in your inner ear, her scents and textures were so familiar to your senses they were the fundamental atmosphere. You held her in your arms, even when you didn’t.

Now it was Willa. Once, it had been Anne.