Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 9

There was no fall in California, and this had forever been a problem for Flannery. September was hardly a marker of anything, it just ran doggedly on from August and erupted erratically into stifling heatwaves that, when she was a child, people would call Indian summers. (Words were less worried over, then.) The Bay Area’s climate baffled even its natives by running cold then hot then cold again; not fickle like a lover so much as grandly indifferent to people’s comfort or convenience. Fleece-thick fog gave way at random hours to a sudden burning sun, and winterish layers had to be shed for bare skin to better tolerate the abrupt new warmth.

You might get used to it, but Flannery Jansen never had. She had grown up along the chaparral-covered and forested peninsula of the San Francisco Bay, so had a girlhood to adjust herself before she headed eastwards for university and adulthood. Now thirty-eight years old and the mother of a young child, Flannery had moved back to San Francisco, where the morning cold still bit her bones and she missed the sultry evenings of the east.

She should have acquired a feel for this weather and its patterns; an ease with its ambiguities, an indulgent shrug toward the sibling rivalry between fog and sun. Somehow, though, other difficulties distracted her, and Flannery found herself wrong-footed every summer and into autumn. Six years earlier she had been heavily pregnant in this season, and she had a weighty memory of waddling around in a sweat brought on by the October surprise of a ninety-degree day. Wearing black, and melting.

She had known a different cityscape once. Streets with leaf-shedding trees, faux-gothic buildings, celebrated libraries, and scholars of a hundred stripes and stars. A geography she associated with the opening of her mind and body, and the much philosophized problem between the two. A college campus where broad old elms and maples burst into color (not flames, or tears) every fall, showering Flannery and her fellows with beauty, and promises of the harsh but stimulating winter to come.

Flannery had loved that place, and she had especially loved the autumns there. It was a climate that communicated with her northern European blood and reminded the ancestors nestled within her of their dark, dense breads, their stark churches, their impending snowfalls. Since then fall rituals, even simple ones, the kind you keep without recourse to calendars, trusting the clock within, seemed sacred to Flannery – from the buying of new notebooks and pens for the start of school, to the putting away of summer’s vacation gear, and the sobriety of starting to learn again.

One September morning, Flannery left her home on Ashbury, a sloped, once hippied street in San Francisco. The fog clung cold, like an unshakeable regret, and Flannery found yet again that she had miscalculated. Rushing out the door to get her daughter to school, Flannery had donned only a light cotton top, leaving her chilled and exposed. She dropped off Willa – who waved back at her, happy and jacketed, from the sidewalk, because somehow as a mother you are smarter about your child’s clothing than you are about your own – then drove to a nearby coffee shop to warm up. Flannery took her laptop in to revivify herself with more caffeine, and the morning’s first hit of email.

As rituals go, opening email wasn’t much, but waiting for Flannery in the unfathomable pixels of her machine was a message from someone at that distant university, on the other side of the country, in New Haven. Yale. The same one she had attended as an undergraduate.

The note was an invitation. And Flannery, who had become heavy-blooded with an unnamed despondency these recent years, felt for the first time in a long while the quickening of her pulse, and a looking forward to something, a possibility in the future.