Flora by Gail Godwin

playing jacks.”
    “Let me speak to her.”
    After she had imparted the information he wanted (the lake, the hospital, the little girl, Father McFall says we’ll have to take it a step at a time with Brian), she was reduced to monosyllabic yips in response to my father’s instructions. Then she passed the receiver back to me.
    “Okay, Helen, here’s the deal,” he said curtly. “You’re staying on top of that mountain. I’ve been where I forbid you to go. Are you listening to me?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “As of right now you’re quarantined. Worse things than having to stay at home can happen to little girls. Like iron lungs, or death, or shriveled legs. I was luckier than most with the leg.At sixteen I had my full growth. You are only ten—okay, going on eleven—and I forbid you to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken limbs of a child. Flora has her orders, and I depend on you to help her carry them out. Do I make myself clear?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Flora went straight to pieces after talking to my father. She was indulging in the kind of panic adults were supposed to hide so as not to worry children. She stumbled around blindly, tripping over our abandoned jacks, wailing a litany of her many failings, which I tried not to hear word for word because it was too upsetting: she should never have taken this job, she was not good enough, smart enough, she could never fulfill my father’s expectations, she should never have agreed to take care of me.
    How could I put her together again? What would Nonie do? First she would make you sit down. She would say something soothing and reasonable, though always retaining her edge of authority, and convince you that the crisis, whatever it was, could be managed. I told Flora we should go sit on the sofa in the living room so she could relay my father’s instructions while they were still fresh in her mind. He had said he depended on me to help her carry them out, but to do that I was going to need a list of what we were supposed to do and not do. While everything was still fresh in her mind.
    We sank together onto the faded yellow silk cushions that held so many associations of “talks” it was like sitting down on my past, and I coaxed my father’s injunctions out of Flora. We were not to go into the shops, not even the ones in our immediate neighborhood, or take the bus to town to go to the movies or to any place where people gathered, not even to church.I was not to go to my friends’ houses or have them to mine, and I was not to visit Brian in the hospital.
    “We might as well curl up and die!” I would have screamed if there had been a guaranteed adult there to talk me down. But Flora was the one who needed to be talked down, and it was gratifying to see the influence I could wield on a person twice my age. My father had gone overboard because of his own history, I explained, but he would come around, she would see, next time he called he would loosen the restrictions; meantime we had to keep him calm so he could do his job and bring home some much needed funds at the end of the summer. As she could see from the state of the place, we could use some repair money. The pay was fabulous at Oak Ridge, especially when it was someone valuable like my father who was used to keeping order and knew about blueprints and building things. I told her if he chose to work there year-round he’d get double his salary as high school principal. And then, saving my clincher for last—or so I thought—I revealed to her that my father himself had been a victim of polio.
    At this Flora perked up. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Anstruther wrote about it in the letters. Suddenly she had the two of them to care for, the doctor with his stroke and her son with polio and everyone else running out on them. But she rose to it, your grandmother did. She cooked the meals and cared for her dying husband and massaged Harry’s legs. Your mother called your father’s limp endearing in the note she sent with