Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“Well,” Mrs. Eaton said, in a half-swallowed way that suggested certain children could do with a strike. And then, “All right, I will try, Marion; but I must tell you it is not good practice to interfere with creative methodology. I can’t work well with parents hanging over me. Who knows what is being quashed in your daughter if you don’t let me draw on my own artistic resources—and Sharla’s.”
She had my mother there, and she knew it. My mother believed that creative talent lay huge but latent in us. One of her jobs, she felt, was to unleash it. Given the natural constraints of a very small town (Mrs. Eaton, for example, was the one and only piano teacher within a forty-mile radius), she was doing the best she could. Our abiding consolation was that on Culture Day we could also pick whatever dessert we wanted. Crêpes suzette, we once demanded, having heard about them somewhere, and my mother presented us that night with pancakes
topped with cherry jelly and whipped cream. When we asked for baked Alaska, she served mounds of lightly browned meringue over a scoop of Neapolitan ice cream. We didn’t believe these dishes were authentic, but they were close enough. And we loved our mother for trying. And for just about everything else as well. That’s how it was, then.
When I got up one morning, I found a note from my mother on the kitchen table. “Next door,” it said. I knew which “next door” she meant. She would not be at Suzy Lindemeyer’s house; she didn’t really care for Mrs. Lindemeyer. My mother called her “Mrs. Five Operations” because her various surgeries were all Mrs. Lindemeyer ever wanted to talk about. Even to us. “My hysterectomy scar is about to drive me right out of my mind,” she had confided to us the week before, when we helped carry her groceries in. “Itchy? Lord, you have no idea!” And then, her eyes somewhat playful but mostly needy, “Would you like to see it?”
“No, ma’am,” Sharla said quickly and fled without her fifty cents.
“Maybe later,” I said. “We have to go now.”
I awakened Sharla and told her our mother was at Jasmine Johnson’s house. “Huh,” Sharla said sleepily. “Really?”
We ate Oreos for breakfast, followed by spaghetti left over from last night’s dinner, and the usual Coke floats. Then we headed for the backyard, garbed in our Indian dresses. “I’m going to make medicine from flowers today,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Sharla asked. And then, “Wipe
that tomato sauce from the corner of your mouth. It looks like blood.”
“Maybe I just ate a dead animal,” I said. “Raw.”
“You are sick.”
“They did that!”
“Not hardly.”
“Yes they did, I read it.”
“They cooked, you idiot. They had fire.”
I said nothing, blinked.
“They had
spits,
” Sharla said.
“Oh yeah. Well, not cavemen, they didn’t.”
“Who do you think
discovered
fire? And we are not even doing cavemen.”
“Who cares?” I said, and headed into the woods. “The Indians did make medicine from flowers, for the heart, and that’s what I’m doing.” It occurred to me that I didn’t care if Sharla came with me or not. I straightened inside my own skin, taller.
At one in the afternoon, my mother had still not returned from Jasmine’s house. Sharla and I, irritable at not having any ideas for forbidden things to do, lay on the floor of our room, rubbing ice cubes over our foreheads, in the crooks of our elbows, behind our knees. It was ninety-seven degrees. Our shorts and sleeveless blouses stuck to us.
“Want to snoop in their dresser drawers?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Sharla?”
“What?
” She could get so nasty when she got hot. You couldn’t say a word to her.
“Do you want to
snoop?
”
She looked at me, then away. “We just did it last week. Anyway, there’s nothing.”
It was true that we had not yet found anything great. The closest we came to something interesting was the time we found the photograph of a woman at the bottom of my father’s underwear drawer. She was beautiful—curly golden hair, big blue eyes, deep dimples. She wore a yellow collared sweater, open at the throat for as far down as the picture went. “Hi, Handsome!” was written at the corner. And then, “All my love to you, Heidi, June, 1941.” This horrified and intrigued us. We discussed it nightly, and then, a few days later, we began pestering our mother about her old boyfriends, hoping we could segue into my father’s old girlfriends. This did not happen. My mother, warming to the idea of letting us know she was at one time a pretty hot ticket, settled into a kitchen chair and gave us details we didn’t want to know about her relationship with Peter Barnes. He played quarterback on her high school football team. He made a path of violets down her front sidewalk for her to walk on out to his car when he took her to the senior prom. Gave her a purple orchid that night, too; his father was a rich man. My mother fingered the dust cloth on her lap as though it were her corsage, offered to her once again from dreamland.
“I was the class secretary,” she said softly. “Did I ever tell you girls that?”
“Did Dad know about Peter?” Sharla asked.
I nodded. Good work.
“Oh, no. That was before I met your father. I had one more boyfriend before I met your father and that was
Frank Peabody. Best-tempered man I ever met. And the blackest hair.”
“PEABODY?” I asked, forgetting our mission. I could have been Ginny Peabody! Under the table, Sharla kicked me.
I kicked her back.
“What are you
doing?
” my mother asked. She lifted the tablecloth, peered beneath it.
Exasperated, Sharla said, “Mom. Did you ever meet any of Dad’s girlfriends?”
But it was too late, my mother was back in the unromantic present. “If you two want to fight, you can go right upstairs and do it. I do not want to be in the middle of it. In fact, since you have so much energy to waste, you can scour the bathroom sink and tub. Yes, you go on and do that—you can just help me with some of this housework. I’m pretty tired of doing so much of it myself.”
A moment of frustrated silence and then, “Sink!” Sharla muttered, calling for the easier of the two jobs.
I made sure she didn’t really win. I let her go first; then I shut the bathroom door, and let the tap run furiously as I sat on the edge of the tub and looked at
Reader’s Digest
. I liked the jokes and the true-life stories that made you cry a little. I understood the attraction to a certain type of grief.
After I read for a while, I turned off the water. The tub looked perfectly clean, as it always did. My mother came in to inspect Sharla’s and my work and nodded her approval. I had a moment of feeling guilty, but then reasoned that if the tub ever really did need cleaning, I would do it. There was no point in scrubbing away at something you couldn’t even see. I longed for streaks of
mud, for soap stuck in a sticky puddle at the bottom of the tub, even for the sickening thrill of blood, courtesy of my mother’s injuring herself while shaving her legs. I wanted the satisfaction of seeing something change before my eyes, not the humdrum necessity of maintaining the status quo.
Now, boredom settling around me like dusk, I rose and went to our bedroom window, lifted my blouse to let the fan blow on me. Nothing doing outside, either. Not even a breeze. “Well, that’s it, I’m going to get her,” I said.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because. She probably doesn’t want to get interrupted. Just like when she goes to coffee klatch.” Coffee klatch was the weekly gathering of the neighborhood ladies on the block, held in a different kitchen each week. I was excited about it being in our house until I heard what the women talked about: Detergent. Children. Their husbands’ jobs. The coupons they exchanged with each other. No secrets were revealed; no one even laughed. Frankly, I saw no point in those meetings, except for perhaps the food. Mrs. Gooch brought a blueberry coffee cake to our house that was outstanding—Sharla and I fought over the buttery crumbs. The good thing about coffee klatch was that it lasted only an hour, and therefore we were not driven to feelings of desperation. But this!
“She’s been there all
day!
” I told Sharla.
“Oh, stop whining. You don’t know how long she’s been there.”
“More than two hours. Way more than that.”
“That’s not all day.”
“Well, I’m going.”
“Wait,” Sharla said. “I’m coming.”
Just as we were about to knock, Jasmine’s door opened, and my mother came out, smiling. “Oh,” she said. “Are you up?”
“It’s
late,
” I said.
“What time is it?”
“Almost
two.
”
Jasmine appeared behind my mother. “It’s one-fifteen,” she said, looking at her watch. “Well. What are you two doing today?”
“Nothing,” I said, moodily.
“I was just going over to Monroe’s,” Jasmine said. “Would you like to come?”
I looked at Sharla, who was nodding, then at my mother.
“You can go,” she said.
The day had just flipped. A ride in Jasmine’s red-and-white Chevy convertible to an air-conditioned store. Possibly a stop for an A&W on the way home; I’d never met anyone yet who didn’t like A&W, and I intended to suggest it in an irresistibly casual way.
“You want to come, Marion?” Jasmine asked.
“No, thanks,” my mother said. “It’s much later than I thought. I’ve got to think about what to make for dinner.”
“Oh, just have sandwiches,” Jasmine said. “They don’t take long to make.”
Boy, I thought. She doesn’t know my mother. She had to make a big dinner every night, even in the summer. But
I waited with some uneasiness until I heard my mother sigh and say that very thing.
Now, sitting here on this airplane, I stare at the seat pocket in front of me. There are the magazines I bought for the trip.
Bon Appétit. Gourmet. Cooks Illustrated
. And
The Atlantic Monthly
, of course, proving that I am nothing like her.
“Hot, huh?” Jasmine asked, as we backed slowly out of her driveway. I was watching her in the rearview mirror. She had on black wraparound sunglasses that were serious about their job—you couldn’t see her eyes at all. She wore a silky leopard-print scarf over her hair and tied at the back of her neck, a sleeveless black dress and black sandals that were barely there—the straps seemed thin as rubber bands. Gold bangle bracelets clicked brightly on her arm. Sharla got to hold her black straw purse and I could tell she was pretending it was her own.
Jasmine was like a deluxe, 3-D paper doll; she had clothes and accessories for every occasion. It was a pleasure to live next door to her, to see what she would be wearing each day. So far some of the things we had liked best were turquoise capri pants, bright yellow short shorts, gold earrings in the shape of seashells, and a two-piece navy-blue suit trimmed with white piping. We were dying to see her pajamas, but she closed her bedroom curtains at night before she undressed. Shortly after moving in, she had stretched out in a chaise longue in her backyard in a white bikini. I had never seen one outside of the
Life
magazine issue highlighting the French Riviera. Even my mother looked out the window for that outfit. For a while no one said anything; then my mother
said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, she’s
already
tan, isn’t she?” And then, sighing, “Hasn’t she found a job yet?”
Jasmine signaled for a left. “What do you say we take a spin on the highway first? We’ll open her up and cool off a little.”
I settled happily into a corner of the backseat. I had an idea of how I would look with my hair blowing straight out, sitting in a convertible. Older.
Soon we were on the highway in the passing lane, and I saw the red needle of the speedometer trembling at the ninety-miles-an-hour mark. When I heard the wail of the siren behind us, I turned around to see a black-and-white police car far away, but closing in. “Uh-oh,” I said. When I turned back I saw Jasmine looking into the rearview mirror and smiling. She reached over and put a hand on Sharla’s knee, yelled, “Hold on!” and sped up.
I couldn’t believe it. I laughed out loud, but I was very much afraid. It might be Leroy, for one thing; and then, even if Jasmine got away from him, he would know where to come—with the top down, he would have seen Sharla and me clearly. He would knock on our door, ask our mother where we were, and she would start wringing her hands. After we were standing straight before him, he would say something like, “Enjoy your little ride this afternoon? Care to tell me who the driver was?”
“Tell him!” my mother would say, her voice a mix of outrage and anguish. And then, “Oh, my goodness! It was Jasmine Johnson, wasn’t it?” Actually, that would be fine; then she would be the tattletale.
Jasmine was in the right-hand lane now, going even faster. And then we were on an exit ramp, headed down a side street, then another and another. Finally she pulled
into a Henny Penny, screeched to a halt, and turned off the ignition. The police car was nowhere in sight. “Everybody all right?” she asked.
Well. Sharla and I looked at each other. Sharla was still holding on to the door handle. I’d neglected to do that, and had slid from one end of the long backseat to the other.
“You okay?” Jasmine asked again.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sharla said. I nodded.
Jasmine looked into the mirror, adjusted her scarf and her glasses. “I hate when they do that,” she said. “Chase you around like you’re a common criminal.” She pressed her lips together, touched lightly at a corner of her mouth. Then she turned back to me, lowered her sunglasses. “What’s the matter, honey?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, ma’am.”
“So … shall we continue? Monroe’s?”
I nodded.
She turned to my sister. “Sharla?”
“What?”
“Monroe’s?”
“Okay.”
Her voice was small. It came to me that she wasn’t so old.
Jasmine took her purse from Sharla, pulled out a package of Lucky Strikes. “Damn,” she said. “Only one left. I’m going to run in the store for a second. You want to come?”
I shook my head; I wasn’t sure I trusted my knees yet. But Sharla went with her and when they came out she
was eating a Baby Ruth. I was annoyed until Jasmine handed a Milky Way to me.