Summary:
"Flexion" begins with a short retrospective account of how the town absorbed and spread the news of Frank's accident. The narration assumes the collective voice of the town and demonstrates to the reader how people told the story of Frank's accident. In this way, the reader first learns about Frank's accident. The section ends by demonstrating how the people of their town refer to Frank's wife as "the quiet one" (2). Then, in a new section, the story shifts to a narrower third-person perspective as Kennedy renders the moment Frank's wife finds him trapped in his overturned tractor as she returns home from grocery shopping.
Frank's wife sprints over to the tractor. Frank can barely get words out. He tells her to turn the tractor off, which she does, and then she runs back to the house to call an ambulance. By the time emergency services are on the phone, it's been almost ten minutes since she's discovered him, and she has no idea how long he was lying there before she arrived.
The accident was the talk of the town, and a major point of discussion is the irony of how Frank incurred his worst injuries from the safety bar in the tractor. It crushed his pelvis, and now he may be permanently paralyzed. The town talks about how Frank is a workaholic, and this accident will prevent him from working his farm and surely make him even more miserable than he usually is towards others. The reader quickly gets the sense that Frank is a willing outsider and a known curmudgeon.
As for Frank's wife, identified only as Mrs. Slovak, the accident casts an unusual light upon her. She's used to being disregarded in both public and private spheres. She's quiet and doesn't have many opportunities to engage with their neighbors, while Frank himself actively avoids and alienates his neighbors. After Frank's accident, people in town start talking to his wife, trying to take care of her in a neighborly way by offering their support, bringing her jams and casseroles, and keeping their farm operating smoothly. Without being asked, some other farmers tow the tractor out of the road and bring it to be repaired, and someone even takes their lambs to market. Frank's wife thinks about when they lost a baby, and how Frank made her keep it to herself. She thinks about how she had to go through that loss entirely alone, forbidden to share it with anyone.
While Frank is in the hospital, barely clinging to life, he contracts pneumonia. His wife begins to accept that Frank will not survive his injuries, and she thinks about how life will carry on without him. She imagines the funeral, serving the donated casseroles back to the people kind enough to prepare them. She considers life after Frank, and is secretly, and somewhat guiltily, delighted at the prospect of a new start. It's clear that Frank is emotionally and verbally abusive to her, and after his accident, she realizes that life under his thumb has been a miserable existence. She imagines telling people that Frank wouldn't have wanted to live this way, unable to take care of himself.
But Frank survives the pneumonia, and his grasp on life becomes more firm with each passing day. The doctors start to sound optimistic, and Frank's wife feels robbed of her newly imagined independence. She's forty-five years old, and upon reflecting at Frank's bedside, she realizes that forty-five is young enough for a fresh start. But if Frank survives, her life will be devoted to the thankless task of being a caretaker for someone who will never admit he needs care. Nonetheless, against all odds, Frank makes it through.
While Frank miraculously recovers in the hospital, their neighbor Pete, a plumber, renovates their bathroom and installs an accessible shower and toilet. Bob Wilkes installs a ramp to the front door. They charge nothing for the labor and equipment. When Frank returns home, he's shocked. At first, he's upset that his wife allowed all this costly work to be done without his permission. She tells him that it was all done for free. Frank regards the compassion and generosity of his neighbors with disdain. He clearly doesn't want to feel like he owes anybody anything, and he now finds himself feeling deeply indebted and unable to satisfy that debt. Regardless of how he feels about it, Frank's wife points out that without the help of their neighbors, they simply wouldn't be able to survive, financially. Once he's settled back into their house, she presents Frank with a list of names and phone numbers of people he needs to call and thank. At first, he refuses, but understanding the shift in their power dynamic, she doesn't back down. She holds a hand mirror in front of Frank's face and tells him to "take a good look" and make the calls (13).
Though Frank continues to resist help and tries to maintain his oppressive, domineering role in his marriage, he ultimately fails to uphold the guise of invulnerability in the face of such acute bouts of pain and helplessness. The story ends in an intimate scene between Frank and his wife. Frank breaks down in reluctant tears from pain. His wife hesitates to reach for his hand. Internally, she relates her hesitation to the lack of control Frank has over his limbs after the accident. Kennedy compares Frank's wife's momentary inability to lift her hand to take Frank's hand to Frank's paralysis; ultimately, she does grasp his hand, and is surprised to feel his hand squeezing hers back.
Analysis
As the first story to appear in the collection, "Flexion" establishes an important thematic precedent for Like a House on Fire. "Flexion" is a story about power dynamics, caregiving, and accepting care. It is about the limits of marital commitment and how obligation shapes identity. In the character of Mrs. Slovak, also known as "Frank's wife" and "the quiet one," Kennedy has rendered a person who feels trapped inside of a loveless marriage. But not only is the marriage loveless, it is muffling. Before Frank's accident, her life was ruled by his brute negativity and misanthropy; but at least before the accident, she had the luxury of her privacy. She could walk on eggshells around him, avoiding him when possible. He worked the farm, and she made the home. But after Frank's accident, their separate spheres collide and irreversibly combine, and there is no avoiding one another.
Kennedy's "Flexion" is a clear descendent of Kate Chopin's 1894 short story, "The Story of an Hour," in which a woman named Mrs. Mallard is informed that her husband, Brently Mallard, was killed in a train wreck. The news is obviously distressing, and yet, as the idea of her husband's death sinks in, Mrs. Mallard realizes what widowhood means for her: freedom of body and soul. When Brently walks through the front door at the end of the very short story, the whiplash of going from imagining a life unfettered by the institution of marriage to suddenly realizing her husband is, in fact, still alive, gives her a fatal heart attack. Kennedy takes the tragic irony of Chopin's situation and pushes further into it. Kennedy's story doesn't halt when Mrs. Slovak realizes Frank is going to survive. Instead, it continues to ask how Mrs. Slovak will survive, and how the couple will survive together. Kennedy's story interrogates the idea of spousal duties and obligations.
Formally, "Flexion" is an interesting study in perspective. The story remains predominantly in the close-third perspective on Mrs. Slovak, occasionally switching to an almost choral perspective of the townspeople. Through this zoomed-out, more omniscient third-person, Kennedy is able to convey how the Slovaks are perceived by their neighbors. By staying close to Mrs. Slovak's mind, the reader sees her private conflict, and how she cannot share her shame and alienation from society with anyone. She wishes Frank had died, but he didn't. He survived, and he functions well enough to make them ineligible for government assistance, but not well enough that Mrs. Slovak won't have to become his full-time caretaker. Despite the fact that she is the protagonist, Kennedy never names her independently of Frank. She is either "Frank's wife" or "Mrs. Slovak." Either name shackles her to Frank, who is given a first name. This again recalls Chopin's story: though Chopin's Mrs. Mallard is named by her sister in dialogue, we are nonetheless introduced to her by her marital title, Mrs. Mallard, and her husband is granted a first name from the beginning. Only after he is presumed dead do we learn that Mrs. Mallard's name is Louise.
By denying Mrs. Slovak a name independent of her husband's, Kennedy ends on an ambiguous note. Despite the seemingly tender conclusion in which Frank squeezes his wife's hands, this story is far from optimistic, and Mrs. Slovak remains oppressed. Instead of suggesting that everything will be okay, "Flexion" ends on a note that suggests that through unprecedented pain and hardship and self-examination, there is a slim possibility of salvation for the Slovaks. Perhaps, by the continued, undeserved grace of his wife, and perhaps with the help of humility which he's never before exhibited, they can work things out.
