Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“But maybe also we
could
all die, right?”
I see the older couple across from me look at each other, smile ruefully.
Finally, “It’s theoretically possible; yes,” the father says.
“Told you,” Glen says.
“Why don’t we get another Coke?” his sister asks. “We can have all the Cokes we want, they have to give them to you whenever you ask.”
Over Glen’s seat, the call button goes on. Give me a Coke; I could be ready to die over here.
O
ne night after dinner my father asked who wanted to go to Dairy Queen. This was a silly question; all of us always wanted to go to Dairy Queen. But not on this night. On this night, my mother said, “Why don’t you all go ahead? I’m not much in the mood for ice cream.” We all stared at her. “Well, I’m
sorry,
” she said. “I just … I don’t feel quite right.”
“Is it—?” my father began, but she interrupted him, her hand over his, saying, “It’s nothing, I’m sure. I just feel a little off. You go ahead, I’ll stay here and watch television. I’ll be fine.” She stood up and began clearing the dishes.
“That’s our job,” I said. “We do that. You shouldn’t do it if you’re sick, anyway.”
“I can clear the table,” she said. “I just don’t feel like eating ice cream.”
“We’ll bring you back a sundae; you can keep it in the freezer,” my father said.
“That would be nice. Thank you.” She smiled at him.
Something that had started tightening in my chest now relaxed. I went to change shorts; I wanted to wear the loosest waistband I had.
After we were out of sight of the house, my father
pulled the car over. “Who wants to help drive?” he asked.
“I do!” both Sharla and I said. I loved it when we got to do this, and it was rare. You had to be in the car with just my father—my mother wouldn’t permit us to “drive;” and we were hardly ever in the car without her. What happened was, whoever was “helping” sat by my father and steered. He would take his hands off the wheel completely, saying, “I trust you, go ahead.” And then, “I
trust
you, I trust you now. Okay. Okay.” Finally he would shout
“OKAY!
THANK YOU!” and grab the wheel away from you, just in the nick of time, it seemed to me. After a moment during which he quietly regained his composure, he would say, “Good job. You did just fine.”
My father let Sharla help first, saying I could have a turn on the way home. “Age has its privileges,” he told me.
I said nothing, sat sulking by the window. I
knew
age had its privileges; I was witness to that fact practically every day of my life, courtesy of Sharla. But soon I lost myself looking in other people’s windows. I liked pretending I lived in every house we passed. But I liked even better coming back to the knowledge that I lived where I did. I was happy; I knew this.
At Dairy Queen, we found one of the tiny picnic tables empty and claimed it. We sat eating our cones and watching the lines of people stepping up to the window and walking away with their prizes. I liked best seeing what the fat people got.
One very tall man came away from the window with a chili dog, which I had always wanted to try; but we never went to Dairy Queen for dinner. Occasionally it occurred
to me to request a chili dog instead of ice cream, but that would have felt uncomfortable, improper. Dairy Queen was for ice cream and dessert, that was all. It was a rule in our family, and therefore law in the world.
It was a little unsettling not to have my mother there with us; the table was unbalanced. There was not a child and a parent on each side, as we were used to. Our father sat on my side, and though I was grateful for this, I felt bad for Sharla, who seemed deserted. It was also too quiet. My mother was the one who always initiated conversation, and then did what she needed to keep it going. A silent table was the sign of a lazy hostess, she always said. I felt obliged to substitute for her. I turned to my father, cleared my throat, and asked, “Do you like your job?”
“Do I like my
job?
” my father said. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Sharla asked.
He looked at her. “I mean … Well, I guess I don’t really see the sense in thinking about things like whether I like my job. I like the people I work with. I like the view from my office window. But I don’t think about whether I like the job itself.”
“I’ll bet everybody else knows if they like their job!” I said, although I had no idea.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You just do it, that’s all. You have to do it. You do it so you can buy Dairy Queen.”
I smiled.
“Right?”
“Yup,” I said. And then, “But what do you
do
at your job?”
“Talks on the phone and goes to meetings,” Sharla said quickly. She had once gone to work for a morning with my father. I had been so ill with a summer cold my mother feared pneumonia; and at the last minute one weekday morning, she decided to take me to the doctor. My father took Sharla with him to work. She never let me forget it.
“Talks on the phone about what?” I persisted. “What does he talk about?”
“Insurance,” my father said.
I was starting to get angry. “Yes, but what
about
insurance? Like, someone calls and they say … well, what
do
they say?”
“How about a horse bite?” my father said, moving his hand toward me.
I sighed, pulled my leg away from him.
“Well, then, how about walking on your head?”
“No!” I could just see myself in front of all the Dairy Queen customers as my father turned me upside down and held me by my ankles. He hadn’t done this in years, but you never knew. “No,” I said again.
“Well, it’ll have to be a horse bite, then.” He reached out and squeezed just above my knee. I howled in agonized pleasure.
On the way home, my father told Sharla and me he was giving us a raise in our allowance. He was going to up us to a dollar a week.
“I think I should get more,” Sharla said.
“Why is that?”
“I’m older.”
“Do you do more work?”
She stayed quiet.
“No, she does not,” I said.
“Yes, I
do!
”
“Nuh-uh, you do
less.
”
“Keep it up and I’ll give you both a pay cut instead of a raise,” my father said. Sharla and I stopped talking, but I felt her fingers pinching my thigh. I did nothing back. I was driving. I was thirty-five years old and behind the wheel of a car like Jasmine’s. I owned a cheetah and sold perfume at a fancy store. My husband was a millionaire and a veterinarian, which was convenient, considering the cheetah.
When we got home, my father went into the living room, bent down, and kissed my mother’s forehead. She was lying on the sofa, eyes closed. But when she felt his touch she reached up and put her hand on his shoulder.
He stood, turned toward us. “Want to go get something for me?” he asked. “Both of you?”
We nodded, dumb with shame and hope. He was going to kiss her. On the lips. That’s how they did it, they always found a way for us not to see. Of course we did see anyway, sometimes. It paid to practice the stealth of Indians.
“Go in my top dresser drawer and you’ll find a little brown envelope. Bring it down here, please.”
We headed upstairs, taking our time, as we knew we were supposed to do.
I went to the right side of the dresser, Sharla to the left. I found nothing but handkerchiefs in the top drawer, and so I pulled open the drawer below it. There were many socks, all folded neatly and organized by color, but again
no envelope. I rooted around a little, felt something, pulled it out, and gasped. Rubbers. The same yellow kind Jasmine had. I stuffed them back in among the socks, then stood staring down.
“Shut that!” Sharla said. She had opened the T-shirt drawer on the opposite side of the dresser, and now she pulled out the little brown envelope that lay on top.
“This
is what he meant!” she said. “It’s right here where he said it was! What are you digging around for?”
“Did you see what I saw?” I asked.
She looked away, closed the T-shirt drawer. “You were looking in the wrong place.”
“Yes, but did you—”
“Shut up!” She leaned over, slammed the sock drawer shut.
I could have reported her. We weren’t allowed to say that. I think she knew I wouldn’t say anything, though.
When we came back downstairs, my father was in his chair with the newspaper, my mother sitting up with a magazine. But it was clear they’d been kissing, all right; his lips were stained pink, and both of them had messy hair. My father pulled two silver dollars out of the brown envelope and gave one to Sharla and one to me. Then, smiling, he gave one to my mother.
“Thank
you!” she said. She looked as pleased as we were. I knew she would put the money in her “bank”—she kept a mayonnaise jar in the laundry room and filled it with change she found in the sofa. Periodically, she would convert it into paper money and then store that in an old purse she kept in her closet. She said she was saving for new carpeting.
Later that night, we played Monopoly and I won, because everybody underestimates the value of Baltic and
Mediterranean. It was no fun beating my parents, because they wanted me to win. But wiping out Sharla’s funds, that was satisfying. Sometimes when she lost she would cry. Not tonight though. Tonight she forced a yawn and said she was tired of playing, anyway; thank God the game was over.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” my mother said.
“I’m not.”
My mother sighed.
“I’m
not!
If I had said, ‘God, I’m happy the game is over,’
that
would have been taking His name in vain. But I was just thanking Him.”
My mother stared at her. Then, “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Fine. So long as you know the difference.”
After we went to bed, Sharla and I didn’t talk about what I’d found in my father’s drawer. Neither of us spoke at all. I thought perhaps each of us was waiting for the other to bring it up. Instead, we both fell asleep. In the early morning light, I lay awake, wondering if I’d only dreamed it. When finally I heard the rustling sounds of Sharla waking up, I asked, “Did you see what I found in Dad’s drawer last night?”
“So what? Everybody has them who does sex.”
“You knew they were there? You’ve seen them before?”
“No. But everybody has them.”
I wasn’t so sure. But I let it go in the way that you decide you don’t really want something you can’t reach.
I
look at my watch. Halfway to San Francisco. I wonder how Sharla will look. Last time we met, I hadn’t seen her in six months, and I was surprised by a new short-short hairdo she had. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me about it. “Didn’t I,” she said. “I was sure I had. Wait—I did! You said you were thinking of doing it yourself!”
“I did not!” I said. “I would never do that!” And then, quickly, “Not that it doesn’t look good on you.” It did look good on her, from certain angles. But on the whole, I thought it made her look older. Of course, we
are
older. This is something that is always sneaking up and shocking me. Sharla said recently that she could tell how much older she was getting not by how many wrinkles she had, but how many regrets.
“That’s
a pretty grim way of thinking,” I said, when she told me.
“It’s true, though, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t really have that many regrets. I really like my life. I like the choices I’ve made.”
“Oh come on,” she said. “Don’t you regret not going to Woodstock now more than ever?”
“Well,
yeah
, that’s true. Yeah. I should have gone to Tahiti for the winter with Dennis Erickson that one time,
too. I really should have. He bought me a ticket and everything.”
“We should have done a lot more dangerous things.”
“I suppose.”
“And we also should have … I don’t know. I guess as I get older I feel more … generous in my heart. You know?”
I said nothing.
“Ginny?” she said gently, and I knew exactly where she was headed.
“I think some things are too hard to forgive,” I said. “And I think some things don’t deserve to be forgiven.” I felt as though I were saying something I’d said so many times that the words had lost their meaning entirely. And yet I also felt I meant them.
I wonder now—chilly thought—if some of Sharla’s longing to forgive, to come to terms, has to do with the fact that she knew even then that she was going to get seriously ill.
I look at my watch again.
My mother said she found the measure of time interesting. Another lie. I’m sure she found it terrifying.
T
he next Correspondence Day, there was no watching
Walt Disney World
until our letters were complete. I sat at the dining-room table jiggling my heel, chewing at the side of my thumb, staring wide-eyed into space. I had absolutely nothing to tell my grandparents, even though this was my week to write to my father’s parents, who were easier to write to because they were less critical than my mother’s parents. I’d selected the pale-blue stationery and black fountain pen, opened with the standard, “Hi! How are you???” but nothing further had come to me. It had been my practice to describe meals we’d eaten during the past week, but I was growing tired of that, mainly because the menus lately did not vary enough to make for good copy. I’d told my grandparents about Jasmine moving in, and there was nothing new to say about that, either—at least to them. I’d said I was looking forward to school in the last letter I’d sent them, though this was very much untrue.
There were certain things about school that I enjoyed: buying supplies, sniffing newly mimeographed papers, writing on the blackboard, staring into the teachers’ lounge when I passed by it. I liked blowing straw wrappers across cafeteria tables. I also enjoyed sharpening pencils and watching movies in classrooms with the
shades pulled down. Other than that, I hated it. I thought school was an unhealthy thing for a growing child, what with the way it demanded shoes on hot days, and wearing dresses, and sitting still at a wooden desk for hours at a time. With the exception of science, I did not find any of my subjects particularly relevant, and I stared out the windows in every classroom with a sense of desperation that often made me feel like crying. I could only bear to look at the teachers if there was something interesting about their outfit or hairdo or face, and there rarely was. On the day my English teacher, Mr. Purdy, cut himself shaving and wore an intriguing arrangement of tiny Band-Aids, I watched him for the length of the entire class. I knew some kids loved their teachers, and I couldn’t begin to understand why; to me, they were only tall cellmates.