‘He’s terrific. We’re at the Franklin School now, and we’re really loving it.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah. Where are you?’
‘We’re at Alpine.’ It was like the we of pregnancy: collective pronouns were how you referred to familial situations. Parenting, Flannery learned early, was spoken of as a team sport.
‘How do you like Alpine? We looked at it for Eli.’
‘Did you? It’s a nice school. You know . . .’ Flannery nodded. Willa’s education was a matter of essential interest to Flannery, whose love for her daughter was fierce and sustaining and for whom she would have lain down under a train, if it would help her, or married a man she shouldn’t have, or attended a weekly ‘moms’ group’ meeting in the early years. Still, she seemed suddenly empty of scholastic adjectives. ‘They’re good people.’
‘We were a little worried.’ Wendy winced awkwardly. ‘That it might not be academic enough.’
As if to make up for this remark, Wendy launched into an ostensibly modest account of an elaborate art project her first grader was hard at work on, which she eye-rollingly called crazy ambitious – that kind of maternal boast masquerading as complaint Flannery recognized. The assignment had something to do with Frida Kahlo, and self-portraits that included the children and their favorite animal. ‘Of course, Eli had to choose his tree frog, which is cute but incredibly hard to draw . . .’
Flannery yawned.
Widely, inadvertently. It was a genuine yawn, not staged, but the rudeness of it disturbed her and she immediately shook her head and laugh-apologized. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she said, making a vague excusatory gesture at the laptop, as if her boredom were due to the computer. Through no fault of the friendly Wendy, Flannery had found instantly exhausting this exchange about their children and their schools and their teachers and their classes. All Flannery wanted to do that minute was travel her willing memory back to the territory of her own former school, former teacher, former class. She wanted to focus on the invitation to visit her old university, and the chance to meet Professor Arden.
Her Anne.
‘Gosh, I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.’ Wendy’s smile was a little thinner, as she cast a slightly jealous glance at the machine. Flannery doubted whether Wendy had much idea of Flannery’s work, as one of the dislocating elements of the moms’ group had always been that its members were stripped of their previous clothing as lawyers, educators, designers, writers. They were all just moms. That Flannery had authored two books was of less import to her fellow moms than the fact that at the age of three Willa had liked to eat olives and mushrooms, which was thought to be extraordinary and precocious.
‘No, not at all,’ Flannery lied, but she did lift the laptop lid back up purposefully. Then, in that way of confessions made impulsively to near strangers, Flannery added, ‘I’ve just been asked to go to a writers’ conference on the East Coast next month. It would be really good to go, but I’m trying to figure out if I can manage it. You know. Spousal relations. Childcare . . .’
‘Getting away is hard, isn’t it?’ Wendy sympathized, and Flannery glimpsed the possibility that this well-adjusted-seeming mother might have yearnings and frustrations of her own.
‘It is,’ Flannery agreed. ‘Getting away is hard.’
4
Charles would object.
Flannery saw this from the first moment in Bean There, Done That, the knowledge hitting her almost simultaneously to her reading the email invitation.
Flannery’s husband – and that too seemed an improbable word to attach to herself, ‘husband’, something Flannery Jansen had never expected to have, or to hold – was an artist. Charles Marshall. His work was widely known, out in the world and close to home, too, where an installation of his enlivened a recently revamped terminal at the San Francisco airport. Charles Marshall (never Charlie or Chuck, unless you wanted to irritate him) was a big man: big appetites, and the girth that went with them; big creations, and big emotions, not all of them positive. When tall, broad, goateed Charles was in a benevolent mood, he was loud, funny, warm, and generous, a showman, a storyteller, a circus master. When he was angry, the windows rattled and the lights flickered, and small animals retreated to their warrens until the rage had spent itself, and the city’s workers had cleared the debris from the streets.
Charles Marshall did not, Flannery knew, think of himself as a man who would object to his wife’s traveling to the East Coast for a writers’ conference. An all women writers’ conference. Certainly not. How could he mind? He was an artist too, and progressive, a good husband and a doting father who would delight in having a few days on his own to take care of his sweet little muffin, his six-year-old daughter. He was not any sort of ogre. He was a good-natured, cooperative, supportive man.
‘That’s a bad time for me.’ Charles shook his head, though his words were somewhat garbled by a mouthful of spanakopita. Flannery had decided to run the travel idea by Charles right away, and, as a mood enhancer, she had cooked something interesting. Occasionally, Flannery took to kitchen consolations. Making spanakopita was a kind of inside joke (for a party of one), having had the Greek salad days of her college years so vividly in mind since that morning cafe correspondence. Willa asked for more water as she tried to make the fork do its work on the salty feta and filo dough. Charles swallowed, then repeated more clearly, ‘October’s going to be a bad time.’
More than usual? Flannery wondered, as she got up to refill her daughter’s water glass. Charles could sit still through half a dozen such requests without apparently hearing them. ‘Why?’ Flannery asked levelly.
‘One.’ Charles stuck a blunt thumb up in front of him, like a maverick politician. ‘I’ve got to finish that piece that’s going to Detroit. They want it by Thanksgiving, and the woman I’m dealing with there is a pain in the ass. Two.’ Up went the index finger, and he tilted his hand, making an L. ‘That kid Lowell, Michael’s son, is coming to start “helping” me in the studio in a few weeks, but you know what that means, there are bound to be fuck-ups at the beginning. He’ll probably set the place on fire or gouge someone’s eye out. Three . . .’
But Flannery chose not to look at her husband’s middle finger as it prepared to help him enumerate a third difficulty. Instead, she half turned in her chair to face her daughter across the table, and smiled with a seizure of love into that dear, concentrating, squirrel-cheeked face.
5
Flannery was thirty when she met Charles Marshall at an opening in San Francisco. It was a milling around, wine-drinking, opinion-scattering affair set on several floors of Geary Street galleries – neon acrylic smears hanging in one room, surreal porcelain masks displayed in another – that her roommate had taken Flannery to in order to force her out of a motionless glummery.
‘Come on, Jansen.’ Susan Kim had known Flannery since they were in their late, matriculating teens, and had been drawn to each other because they both sensed something tough and fibrous in the other under the mass of freshman mush. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’
Flannery had gone so far already, these recent years; she was not sure she could go a single step further.
She had left home at seventeen, flown over many flyover states to attend a famous and foreign university. Once there, she had waded far and wide and deep into love. (The furthest she had ever gone. Her Anne.) After graduating, she had gotten a job in publishing and moved to New York, in order to prove to a woman she was no longer even in touch with that she could take on that never-sleeping city. A couple of years later she made the decision to adventure