Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“No, stupid,” Glen says. “When you are in outer
space
, you are out of the world.”
“So? Space is sky, isn’t it?”
Glen thinks. So do I.
I love listening to conversations between children. I often change seats on a bus or an airplane to be near them. Right after takeoff, I heard this same girl say, “When we get up real high, I’m going to open a window and see where we
really
are.” And Glen, pointing at the blocklike illustration on the flight-attendant call button, observed, “Boy. They don’t
draw
good.”
My idea of hell is to be stuck on a long flight in front of loud-talking businessmen holding an impromptu airmeeting, each trying to outdo the other using the mind-numbing vocabulary of the profit-oriented. “Why must you
talk
about this?” I always want to ask them. “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter at all?” Of course it does
matter; it just doesn’t matter to me. I married a man who teaches English at a small college. We are not rich, but when my husband talks to me about his job, my eyes don’t glaze over.
I wonder now what my mother must have felt when my father talked about his work—he was a small businessman. She never had that glazed-eye expression, but she never offered much in the way of response, either: a smile, perhaps. A light touch to the back of his collar before she rose from the table for more green beans.
She was different from other mothers, in many ways. On the plus side, her artistic abilities made her able to assist wonderfully well with certain kinds of homework. She helped me with colored pencil drawings of wild-flowers, and birds, and maps; and she made perfect finishing touches to a papier-mâché human heart that I entered in a science fair. Once she helped me too much with an art project I was given to do over a long weekend when I was in fifth grade. It was a watercolor of a Mexican woman making bread that ended up on permanent display in the entryway of our school. It must have been obvious that it was not really my work, but the teacher loved the painting so much she did nothing but give me an A+ for it, and then make arrangements for it to be seen by everyone who walked into the school. My name was in small print at the corner of the painting. The art teacher’s name was put below the painting, in print significantly larger.
The woman in that painting was wearing a long, faded blue dress, belted by a red and yellow woven tie. Her feet were bare against large, uneven tiles. She wore fat braids tied with fraying pieces of string. There were many
lovely things about that painting: young as I was, I appreciated the quality of light, the richness in the colors. But what was most intriguing was the woman’s face. You could not really see it; her gaze was directed down into the wooden bread bowl and slightly away. Yet somehow you knew exactly what that face looked like. You knew because of the slump of the shoulders, the resignation in the hands that worked at less than they were capable of. My mother could do that, render a strong feeling with a few strokes of a Number 2 pencil. It was a gift that always surprised people; it made us proud.
On the negative side, you often had the feeling that something dark and uneasy was going on with my mother; but she would not acknowledge it, nor allow anyone else to. After Jasmine moved in, that internal storm grew fiercer and fiercer in my mother, eventually leading her to make a decision that must have felt inevitable, if astoundingly painful. I wonder how much of that pain she predicted, and how much of it was a black surprise. I didn’t much care, then, about the pain there was for her in leaving. Even now, if the truth be told, I am mainly just curious.
O
n the night Jasmine first came to our house for dinner, the doorbell rang promptly at six o’clock. I opened it to see her standing there, holding a bottle of wine. A thin strand of lavender ribbon tied blue flowers onto the neck of the bottle. Those flowers grew all over Mrs. O’Donnell’s backyard, though now it occurred to me that it was Jasmine’s yard. I couldn’t remember Mrs. O’Donnell ever picking them, though.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “What lovely flowers. Shall I put them in water?” These were exact lines from a movie I’d recently seen. I loved how well they worked for me now
“Pardon?”
“The flowers. Want them in water?”
She looked at them. “Oh! Oh no, they’re just for decoration.”
“Well.” I shrugged. It seemed a sin to use flowers that way, to pick them and then just let them die. Of course a greater sin would be to communicate my disapproval of anything a guest did.
But Jasmine guessed my thoughts. “Unless you’d
like
to save them,” she said. “It might be nice, actually.”
“I have an aspirin bottle. We can use that.” I’d stashed an empty bottle of orange-flavored children’s aspirin in
my nightstand drawer, because my mother said we weren’t going to use it anymore, we’d gotten old enough for adult aspirin. I’d wanted the comfort of the smell nearby, just in case. “Please come in,” I told Jasmine.
She had changed out of her red outfit and into a blue one—a simple dress, deep pockets cut on the diagonal, cuffed short sleeves with white buttons at the ends, a white cardigan sweater over her shoulders. Her shoes were still high heels, I was happy to see. Blue ones. I hadn’t known they made those. Her hair was up in a fat French twist. She wore pearl earrings.
“Mom!” I called. “Our guest is here!”
My mother came into the room. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear the bell. I had the radio on, and what with the banging of all the pots and pans …” She held her hand out. “I’m Marion Eastman.”
“Jasmine Johnson.” She shook my mother’s hand, smiled at her in a way I thought suggested some kind of familiarity. They might have been old friends who thought they had forgotten about each other, but no! now they were meeting again and they remembered everything. They remembered every thing. I saw that my mother was nervous, and this was interesting to me. I’d seen her nervous around men, but never around another woman.
I
lean my head back against the airplane seat, stare at the ceiling. In pulling forth these memories from so long ago, I see how much I actually saw then. And how much I denied seeing. It’s a curious thing how that works, how elaborately and unconsciously careful we are to protect our most delicate parts. Instinctively, the spider spins the web; just as automatically, the human shields the heart.
People always told me I was perceptive. From the time I started school, teachers would mention it on my report cards, on papers I wrote. For a while, I considered using what I was told was a talent to become a psychologist, even a psychiatrist. But I didn’t want to learn any more about human nature than I knew already. If I am completely honest, which I am trying very hard to be right now, I would say that it was not just that I decided my career would be my children. Rather it occurs to me that I did not pursue any profession having to do with psychology because if I understood more about how people work, how they are, I might understand my mother. And I did not want to understand my mother. If I understood her, I might have to forgive her. And at some critical time I became very much invested in not forgiving her—we all did. It became an underpinning in our reduced family, a
need, even; just as there seems to be a terrible need for family feuds to continue. In a way, it is as if your refusal to forgive is too much a part of you for you to lose it. Who would you be without it? Not yourself. Lost, somehow. Think of how people tend to pick the same chair to sit in over and over again. We are always trying to make sure we know where we are. Though we may long for adventure, we also cherish the familiar. We just do.
T
he night after Jasmine came to dinner, Sharla and I lay on our quilt outside. Overhead, the sky was thick with clouds that were black and roiling. We were waiting for the lightning to come and scare us a little; then we’d go inside. So far, there had only been the low rumble of thunder, a sound more like a complaint than a threat. We were sharing the last piece of torte; the nearly empty plate lay exactly between us.
“Do you think Mom likes Jasmine?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I scooped some whipped cream onto my finger. “Does Dad?”
“Yeah!
”
“How do you know?”
“How could you not know?” Sharla picked up the plate, licked it. Well, that was that; the torte was gone for sure now. Sharla’s tongue was long and lizardlike; she could touch her nose with it.
“He liked her, all right; his eyeballs were practically bugging out of his head.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. She was disgusting, Sharla.
“Uh
-huh.
”
“He did not hardly even talk to her.”
Sharla picked a handful of grass, smelled it, flung it out before her. It spread apart like low fireworks. She sighed.
“Man. You are really stupid.”
“Why?”
“That’s how men are when they really feel something; they don’t say one word.”
I considered this. My father did grow silent at times of great emotion. Once, when I was narrowly missed by a speeding car in a movie parking lot, my mother yanked me out of harm’s way, burst into tears, and began talking a mile a minute about how I had to watch
out
, how some people had no
bus
iness having a license, how
close
that was, how
awful
it would have been.… My father picked me up and held me. I saw him close his eyes, heard him breathe in deep, smelled his Old Spice. That was all.
“But you don’t think Mom likes her?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I don’t know.”
“I think she does.”
“Why do you care so much if Mom likes her?”
“Well, they’re neighbors,” I said, though that wasn’t it, that wasn’t why I was interested in them liking each other. I wanted free access to Jasmine Johnson. I didn’t want anyone asking me about going over there, or, worse, disallowing it.
A vein of lightning lit the sky spectacularly; there was a split-second sensation of someone turning on a too-bright overhead light. Sharla and I held our breath and counted. It took only two seconds for the thunder to follow. I felt the first fat raindrop land directly in the center of my forehead.
“Here it comes,” Sharla said.
“I know,” I answered.
When we got inside, we found our mother standing in the kitchen.
“All right, how long have you been sneaking out like this?” she asked, her voice quiet but shaking.
We didn’t answer, either of us.
“Go to your room,” she said, and we did.
I felt bad. I hated seeing her react with such sad calm to something she was really upset about. And I wondered why everything she felt, she felt so hard.
The next day was Thursday, Culture Day. This is what my mother called it. Monday was Vocabulary Day, when each member of the family was obliged to bring a new word to the dinner table; Tuesday was Current Events Day, and you better have had a look at the headlines. Wednesday was Correspondence Day, and we sat with our mother at the dining-room table after dinner to write our grandparents and whomever else we might choose (we chose no one else, ever). Friday was International Day, when my mother presented us with such things as Mexican enchiladas, Italian spaghetti, or, her weakest entry to date, store-bought French bread. As far as I could tell, the only difference between it and our regular bread was the shape, plus the cartoon drawing on the bag of a man wearing a beret and a pencil-thin mustache.
But Thursday was Culture Day. Sharla took piano lessons; I went to ballet class at Yvette’s Studio for the Dance. Though I enjoyed looking at ballerinas, I hated studying ballet. It was the crowns the ballerinas wore that I lusted after, the ride in the elaborately decorated sleigh I saw when we watched
The Nutcracker
on television.
I had no desire to train my body to do difficult things requiring grace and precision. I was the worst in class, so awful I wasn’t even made fun of. My instructor, a painfully thin, soft-spoken woman who wore cardigan sweaters with fraying sleeves over her hopeful little tutus, tried valiantly to teach me the most basic things, but it was no good. I could not remember sequences of steps, and I was amazingly clumsy. It seemed ridiculous to me to clomp around holding my arms up over my head, fingers arranged into what was supposed to be graceful asymmetry but in fact resembled rigor mortis. I felt like an elephant in a wading pool.
“Well,” Yvette would say each week in her sweet French accent, “I can see zat you ‘ave maybe impouv.” We both knew she was lying. I saw sadness in her large brown eyes; I wasn’t sure for whom. Over and over, I had tried to explain to my mother that I was no good at dance, that I did not enjoy it. “You’re not there to enjoy it,” she always said. And when I would ask her what I was there for, she would say, “Never mind. Later on, you’ll be glad I made you go.”
This was the same line of reasoning she used on Sharla, more or less. Sharla hated piano even more than I hated ballet, and I didn’t blame her. At least I could stand at the side of the classroom, daydreaming, for much of the time I was in the dance studio. For an entire hour, Sharla had to sit right beside the infamous Mrs. Beatrice Eaton, whose horrible breath was not aided by the ancient peppermint candy she kept in a flowered tin in her man’s briefcase. She was a fat woman, proof positive that fat does not equal jolly, with a chin that looked like a small pocketbook. Her face was covered with an
orangish powder that occasionally dropped in small flecks like glitter onto her black clothes. She had a red plastic ruler that she used for rapping Sharla’s knuckles when she made a mistake twice in a row. My mother had complained about this, had at one point told Mrs. Eaton that she would be fired if she continued to do it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Marion, it’s only a
tap,
” she told my mother. “Music is about discipline. Surely you
know
that.”
“Well, I’m sure it is,” my mother said, not sure at all—Sharla and I, eavesdropping in the kitchen, heard the doubt in her voice. But her uncertainty dropped away when she said, “However, in this house we don’t believe in striking children.”