Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey

Author:Maggie Pouncey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fathers - Death, Poets, Psychological fiction, Critics, Fathers, General, Fiction - General, Literary, Psychological, Fathers and daughters, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Young women, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307378743
Publisher: PANTHEON
Published: 2010-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

12

Institutional Life

CHRISTMAS MORNING BEGAN WITH SEX. Better, longer the second time around, though less stunning. Flora liked having sex with Paul, but she would have preferred to do it in the afternoon or evening, or at least after she’d had her coffee. She felt incompatible with most men she’d been with for this reason—morning sex. She caught herself missing the sex of her girlhood, which had occurred later in the day. There was something about high school sex. Not skill, of course. And really, she was romanticizing it. She was always doing that, getting the past wrong. But as sex became more competent, more expected, even more pleasurable, it seemed a little less exciting, less dangerous. Gone was the sense of being bad. Where the titillating fear of getting caught? No wonder academics loved adultery (along with the rest of the planet). It saved them from the suffocating appropriateness of the rest of their lives. Growing up, it became harder and harder to feel illicit. So what, you fucked. Big deal, you smoked. Okay, you went on the occasional bender. You were an adult. You knew what you were doing. You used condoms. You understood the risks. You repented with brain-pummeling hangovers.

Flora had decided not to celebrate Christmas. Her mother, who’d grown up just Jewish enough to be deprived of the holiday, had never been very good at it, and didn’t seem to mind when Flora announced after the memorial that she would not be observing it this year. The Christmases they shared in the little house had been the most desultory occasions, deliberately gloomy—such gloom could not be arrived at by accident. Two sad presents under the tree, and later, no tree at all. So much trouble. All those dried pine needles. “I’m better at daily life,” her mother had offered as an explanation. But her father had excelled at Christmas. He’d loved it with an unabashed glee found more often in people under the age of ten. He used pillowcases for stockings, stuffing them with thoughtful curiosities—a clear plastic stapler where you could watch the interstices at work, a pocket-size kaleidoscope, a hand-carved wooden spoon with a coiled serpent tail for a handle. His cards were watercolors he’d made, with captions running across the top: “Flora-Girl at Work,” “Where Is My Flora-Girl?” The first of a small Flora behind a giant desk, the second showing a sad mouse on the phone, looking patiently out a kitchen window. He’d drawn himself as an importuning mouse, rendering her and, before her, her mother as cats. Flora still had a yellowing card he’d made her mother when she was newly pregnant. It showed a round-bellied Rapunzel-like cat, her tail trailing out a window, the humble mouse on the ground, hat in hand. The caption read “From the Mouse Who Loved the Puce So Much He Gave Her Exactly What She Wanted.”

Flora had spent Christmas Eve at Paul’s apartment so she would not wake on the morning itself in her father’s bed.

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