Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox

Author:Paula Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Florida

I did not regret saying goodbye to my grandmother. I was going with my parents to Florida, to a house owned, and infrequently used, by a friend of my mother’s. It was an hour or so south of Jacksonville. I would be where I wanted to be at last, I supposed.

I stared at my mother, who drove holding a cigarette in one hand. Smoke and her dark hair blew toward me in the small backseat of the roadster. The top was down. The car had been bought, my father said, with movie money.

My heart was hardened toward my grandmother. I blamed her for taking me from Uncle Elwood. There were days when I forgave her nothing. Then even her walk irritated me. She had foot trouble, bunions and corns. I disliked the way she tottered about. She often said, “I know many t’ings,” and I greeted my father’s imitation of her words with more merriment than I felt, as though she could see and hear me laughing at her.

Once, she had kept me from visiting a friend in the evening. She clutched her breast as I went to the door, crying weakly, “¡Ay, mi corazón!” as though she were having a heart attack. I reluctantly gave in, though I was unable to believe her expression of suffering genuine. The idea that she was suffering, because of her anxiousness about what might happen to me, never crossed my mind.

Sometimes she tried to amuse me with stories; I was cold and refused to smile. Some days I would forget my resentment, released from the sullen sour feeling that troubled my own heart, until animosity toward her would overcome me again.

My parents took turns driving, she expertly, he clumsily. We stopped at a diner, where I ate, uneasily, two fried egg sandwiches. Elsie watched me, forming, I was sure, conclusions about my character.

South of East Jacksonville, we turned off the highway onto a sand road. It ended in a heavily wooded area where there was a scattering of homes on the banks of the broad St. John’s River. Close to a bluff stood a large, shambling, yellow-painted house inhabited by an elderly Scottish woman named Lesser, the housekeeper. She maintained an expression of bland benevolence on her face throughout the confusion of the weeks that followed, and I began to attribute it entirely to the physical configuration of her features.

The high-ceilinged rooms were large and barely furnished. Below the bluff a gray wharf on crooked posts stood in the river. Everywhere I looked were floating patches of hyacinths in whose tangled roots—I learned later—water moccasins liked to shelter.

First times were events: the first time I had been on a car trip with my parents, the first time we’d been in a diner, the first time we had eaten supper together in the dining room of the yellow house, served by Mrs. Lesser.

My mother’s silence emphasized my father’s volubility. Nervousness pitched his voice higher than ever before. One night I spoke hesitantly of George Bernard Shaw, one of whose plays I had read recently to please my father.

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