Early Spring 01 Broken Flower Read Free Page A

different from the living room, had a Victorian parlor settee, a Victorian gossip bench, and a Victorian swan fainting couch I loved to lie on when my grandmother was out and about and wouldn't see. The wood was mahogany and the material was a golden wheat brocade with a detached roll pillow.
All of her furniture, despite its age, looked brand new and there was always this terrible fear that either Ian or I would tear something or spill something on a piece and bring down the family fortune. Our own grand heritage and glory would be lost, for we were never to forget that this family once paraded through the Bethlehem community with great pomp and circumstance, our family crest flapping in the breeze.
There had often been overnight guests here and grand dinner parties during Grandmother Emma's Golden Age. She would describe them to us with an underlying bitter tone as if it was our fault she no longer had them. I knew she couldn't blame us for her not having guests anymore. There was still another guest bedroom downstairs and Daddy's old bedroom on her side, so there was plenty of room for someone to sleep here. She maintained a maid. Nancy, and a limousine driver named Felix, and a man named MacIntire whom everyone called Mac, to oversee the grounds. He lived just down the street, so it wasn't a question of extra work for her either. Money was certainly no problem, although I often heard my father complain that his mother held such a tight grip on the money faucet, there was barely a drip, drip, drip.
I didn't doubt that. Grandmother Emma was always criticizing my mother for being extravagant. I thought that was at least part of the reason she stopped going regularly to the beauty parlor and stopped buying herself new clothes. Like someone living on a fixed income, Grandmother Emma would complain' about the electric and the gas bills, too.
"If you would stay after your children and have them turn off lights when they are not necessary and close windows when we're heating the house, we wouldn't be throwing money out the window," she lectured. She threatened to fine us for every
unnecessary expense.
"They're not wasteful," my mother said in OUT defense. "Especially not Ian."
Grandmother Emma would only grunt at that. She couldn't argue about Ian doing anything illogical or unnecessary. If anything, he was looking after wasteful practices on her side of the house. He would venture over at least as far as the switch on the wall and deliberately turn off a hall light. If she
complained about having to navigate in the dark, he would say, "I didn't think it was necessary with so much natural light through the windows,
Grandmother. Perhaps you should fine yourself. "
Behind the hand she held over her mouth, my mother might smile at that. My grandmother would shoot a reprimanding look at Ian, who would stare back at her without so much as a twitch in his lips. He had two licorice black eves with tiny white specks and when he looked at someone so intensely, he didn't even blink. Mama was always telling him not to stare at people.
"It makes you look like an insect and not a little boy." she told him. Other boys his age might have been upset about that, but Ian looked pleased. I knew that sometimes he did deliberately imitate creatures so he could better understand them.
"What would it be like to only be able to crawl?" he asked me when I saw him doing it in his room. He'd walk about the house with his forearms pressed against himself so he resembled a praying mantis. Or he would wonder what it would be like to be a Venus flytrap and have to wait patiently for your meal to succumb to deception. He would sit with his mouth open for as long as he could stand it. He was studying carnivorous plants as well as insects. He was truly interested in everything.
Grandmother Emma was often disturbed about something he would do, especially when he stood ye1y still and flicked out his tongue like a snake.
After trying to reprimand him for staring at