Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“Oh, say,
I
could use that,” my father said. He reached across the table to take the airplane from Sharla, then asked my mother, “You don’t mind?”
“Take it, Steven,” she said. Then she sat quietly looking out the window at the storm, which continued to worsen.
When lunch was ready, we assembled ourselves on a quilt before the fireplace. No one talked. We listened instead to the natural symphony of wind and rain, to the reverberation of thunder so loud it seemed it might crack the earth.
By five o’clock that evening, we had lost our electrical power. It seemed to me that this was a real opportunity for a good time, though I was short on specific ideas. But my mother took a flashlight and started upstairs. She said she was going to read for a while, then go to sleep.
“But it’s still
day!
” I said.
“I’m tired.” She did not turn around to tell me this. I turned angrily to Sharla and my father, who were watching her go up the steps; and in their faces I saw that they each thought it was their fault, too. So I said nothing. Instead, I silently shared the burden.
Sharla and I stayed up until ten, playing Monopoly with our father. The lights had come back on at nine-thirty, for which I was a little sorry. I’d liked seeing the dice roll into shadowy corners of the game board, liked moving my marker with the flashlight ahead of it as though it were a car.
“Are you ever going to play hooky again?” Sharla asked my father.
He took his turn, landed on Chance, pulled a card. “I might,” he said. “I’m full of surprises.” And then, to me, the banker, “Fifty bucks, please.” He showed me the tax rebate card that entitled him to it.
“You’re
not full of surprises.” I laughed, handed him the money.
“What do you mean?” He seemed offended.
“Nothing. Just … You don’t do surprising things. You’re … regular.” My father’s routine was unalterable. I could recite the specifics of it to anyone. Every workday morning, he kissed my mother lightly on the lips, kissed the top of Sharla’s and my heads; then sang out, “I’ll see
you at six!” as he was walking out the door. He pulled the car out of the driveway, tooted the horn three times, then proceeded down the street with his hands on the wheel at the ten and two o’clock position. At six in the evening, he did the same thing in reverse: three toots of the horn, a calling out of “I’m home!” as he came in the door, three kisses.
He had a weekend routine, too. And I knew what flavor ice cream he would order when we went out, how and when he wore his slippers, what television shows he never missed, what he would say to his parents when they called. If I asked for a dollar, he’d give me two, admonishing me not to lose them. When he buttered his pancakes, he would cut the pat into four tiny squares before he spread it.
But, “Believe me,” he said now, “I can be just as surprising as the next guy.”
I thought it was so cute, this lie—it made for a soft spot in my stomach. For him, a man whose habits were so utterly predictable, to say he was full of surprises! I wondered if he actually believed it.
After we went to bed, Sharla and I were talking about what teacher I might get my first year in junior high when our mother came into our room, stood just in the doorway. At first I thought we were in trouble for waking her up. But then she only said softly, “Good-night.”
“You slept
all day!
” Now that I knew she was not angry at us, I had the luxury of being angry at her.
“Are you sick?” Sharla asked.
This had not occurred to me.
“No, I’m not sick.” She walked over to sit at the foot of my bed, began playing with the thinning tufts on my spread. Then, looking up, she said, “I think I’ve raised you so wrong.”
I held still, the breath inside me feeling like a swallowed balloon.
“What’d
I
do?” I asked, finally.
I could feel Sharla smirking, basking in some unearned victory until my mother said, “No, I mean both of you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I did something wrong. I did everything wrong, and I’m sorry.” To my horror, she began weeping, her shaking hands covering her face. I had two simultaneous impulses: to embrace her and to shove her.
“Where’s Dad?” Sharla asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
My mother waved her hand in dismissal. “Oh—him. Don’t … This is not …” She stood up. “I’m sorry, girls.” She kissed my cheek, then Sharla’s. “I’m sorry.” And then she was gone.
“Dad?” Sharla called softly. And then louder, “Dad?”
He came into the room. His face was drawn, softened by sadness. “Yes?”
“What’s wrong with Mom?” Sharla asked. “What’s the matter with her?”
I looked down, picked at my thumb. I felt as though my bed were an island, surrounded by a roiling sea. I feared for the rest of my family, but I was fine. I was. I was fine.
I lay down, closed my eyes. “If you want to talk,” I said, “go downstairs. I’m going to sleep.”
I heard Sharla and my father leave, and I opened my
eyes, lay still and straight in my bed. I could not hear them. I tried, but I could not hear a word.
I turned over, away from the door, raised my arm up to lay my hand flat on the wall as high as I could reach; relished the slight pain caused by the excessive pull of my muscle. Then I received my own arm back to my own self. I wrapped it in the sheet, I kissed it at the wrist, and at the elbow, and then I rocked it.
Then, against my will, I remembered my father coming home from work a few days earlier, walking with gentle fatigue into the kitchen where my mother was making dinner. He’d kissed her, then stood close to her, watching her, watching. He’d turned his hat around and around in his hands, nervously, absentmindedly. My mother had snatched the hat away from him, and the gesture was sudden and violent enough that it had caused her to lose her balance. She’d caught herself against the counter, then handed the hat back to him. “For God’s sake, Steven,” she’d said.
“Stop
it.”
I awakened to the sounds of an argument. My mother was shouting, crying. My father was shouting back. I got out of bed, went into the hall and found Sharla there, sitting at the top of the stairs.
“What are they
doing
?” I asked.
“Shhh!” She patted the floor next to her, and I sat down.
“Even if it
weren’t
true, there’s other things,” my mother said. “There’s so much more. You have no idea, Steven. You have no idea! You live your neat life in the way that you want to, you decide everything, you never stop to think about me! As a person, I mean! I’m just … your wife. Like your shoes!”
“Marion, I have no idea what you’re talking about! When did this
happen
? What’s the
matter
with you? You’ve never been like this. Never!”
“I
have
been!” she yelled. “I
have
been and
have
been and
have
been!”
“Marion.” My father’s voice was quiet now.
“No!” she yelled.
A long silence. The grandfather clocked chimed the half hour, then the cuckoo. The wind moved the bushes next to the house and I heard their scratching sound. It used to scare me, that sound. Now it comforted me.
“What do you need?” my father asked, finally. “What should I do?”
Muffled sounds of sobbing.
“Marion. Are you … are you having a nervous breakdown?”
She stopped weeping. It seemed as loud as screeching brakes, this sudden quiet.
I heard a chair slide slowly across the floor. “Steven, I am thirty-six years old. I used to tell everyone that by the time I was thirty-five, I would … Well, whatever it was I was going to do, it would be done by then. I would have
done
it. But that time has come and gone, and I’ve done nothing. I am nothing.”
“Oh, Marion, don’t say that. How can you say that? You’re a wife and a mother.”
“That is NOTHING!” She yelled this so loud her voice broke, like a boy’s when it was changing over into a man’s.
I felt a curious combination of anger and pain, a small tornado of emotion twisting up from my stomach into my throat. I took in a breath, gritted my teeth, stood. I
was going down there. I was going to present the fact of myself for her reconsideration.
“Don’t!” Sharla whispered, and grabbed my arm. She stared straight ahead, unblinking, immobile. Her face was empty of any emotion that I could read.
I jerked away, started downstairs, stopped halfway when I heard my mother say, “I never even
wanted
children! I just
did
it! You had to
do
it, you
had
to do it!”
I leaned against the wall, opened my mouth, closed it.
“But
I
wanted to … oh Steven, you just don’t know. I’m not like—”
“Marion, I want you to stop this right now. I want you to lower your voice. You’ll wake them up. For God’s sake!”
I started back upstairs, slowly, slowly. I had two knees, two feet. This is what I thought of. I had two hands, two eyes, two ears. There was a hammer and anvil in the middle ear, I had two of those.
“I don’t care if I wake them up,” my mother said, but her voice was low now, contrite.
My father sighed. “Do you … Would it help to go away? Maybe visit your parents, or … just get away?”
A long silence. And then, “Maybe it would.”
I saw that Sharla was no longer at the top of the stairs. I went into our bedroom, saw her shadowy C-shape lying in bed, turned away from the door. I got into her bed with her, turned on my side, rested my hand on top of her head. When I used to suck my thumb, I would often hold on to a piece of Sharla’s hair, twist it around my fingers. I did this now, lifted a few silky strands of her hair, wound them gently around my pointer. She didn’t say a word, just moved over to give me more room. I put
my thumb in my mouth, then pulled it out and wiped it on my T-shirt. Then I moved closer to Sharla. We stayed like that.
I
f Sharla is really, really ill, I’m going to bring her home with me. No one will take care of her like I can. I know that. She knows that, too. No one is closer to her—not her husband, not her children, not our father.
Sometimes I wish so hard that my own daughters would be closer to each other. But it doesn’t seem to be happening. They will occasionally work side by side on some project, but they don’t look up and exchange things in a glance. They don’t seek each other out as playmates or as counsel to each other, at least not yet. A friend of mine once said that she believes it takes some awful adversity to get family members really close—otherwise they only affectionately tolerate each other. She said, “It’s kind of like you need Outward Bound at the kitchen table. I mean, every time I find sibs who are really close, it’s because they survived something hard together. Don’t you find that to be true?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it.” Not quite true. Not true at all, actually. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I think there may be some truth in what my friend is saying. For example, I know the exact moment that Sharla and I moved into a
much closer relationship. It was that night when I lay silently beside her, listening to the sad noise of our parents coming apart.
M
y mother was gone on my birthday. Sharla made me a Duncan Hines white cake with chocolate frosting; she did not know how to make caramel-flavored. My father presented me with gifts he and my mother had gotten earlier: two Nancy Drew books, a very sophisticated chemistry set that I’d wanted for a very long time, stationery featuring the floating trappings of the teenager: telephone, address book, nail polish, rollers, 45s. Sharla gave me a huge-size box of colored pencils and a sketch book. I opened everything with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, then stacked the gifts neatly at the side of the table. Later, I would stack them neatly at the bottom of my closet and drape a pillowcase over the pile.
My father lay between our beds when we went to sleep that night, his arms a pillow behind his head. He kept his eyes closed while he talked. “There’s something wrong with your mother right now. But it’s temporary. It’s strictly temporary. But she’s so … upset right now, she just forgot it was your birthday, Ginny.”
“Oh,” I said.
He opened his eyes, looked at me. “It happens, that people can get that upset. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Or that they’ll never be right again. It’s like … you
know, a gallbladder operation or something. Remember when Grandma needed her gallbladder out and she was in the hospital? Remember how sick she looked, how she couldn’t do anything?”
I nodded, squeezed the edge of my pillow. On a breezy day like we’d had today, my mother often would air the pillows, lay them across the windowsills, half in, half out.
“Well,” my father said, “Grandma got better really fast, right? And she came home, and everything was fine. But the whole time she was in the hospital, she forgot about everything that was going on at home.”
“Nothing was going on, though,” I said. Then at night, the pillows smelled so good. My mother called it God’s perfume, that’s what she said.
“Well.” My father smiled. “You don’t know that nothing was going on.”
“Not like a birthday or anything,” I said. And when my mother did the dishes, she took her wedding rings off and put them on the kitchen windowsill in a little bowl with pink roses on it, that’s all that bowl was for. Once, she let me wear the rings, instead of putting them in the bowl. When she had finished the dishes, I held my hand out, giving the rings back to her. “What have you got there?” she asked. I’d thought she was kidding. But she’d forgotten that she’d given them to me.
“I don’t think Grandma missed a
birthday,
” my father said. “But I’m sure she missed some things.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “She would have told me.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Mom is not in the hospital, Dad,” Sharla said. “She is with Jasmine. That is not a hospital.”
“She is on a little trip with Jasmine,” my father said
carefully. “But she is getting well just the same as if she were in a hospital.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about
that,
” Sharla muttered.