Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“Thank you,” I said. “Did Sharla tell you this is my favorite?”
“No, I guessed. You’re a Milky Way type, don’t you think?”
I unwrapped the candy bar, shrugged. I was all of a sudden in a bad mood. I didn’t want to be so easy.
I liked Monroe’s department store. It was big, but not intimidating, and carried enough merchandise to always be interesting. It had wooden floors and high ceilings with intricate engravings, white on white. I used to lie on my back to admire the ceiling whenever my mother wasn’t looking, until the day I was stepped on by Mrs. Reginald Whalen, the principal’s wife, who apologized profusely to my mother for the dirty mark she left behind on my white blouse. I myself feared (and hoped) that my ribs had been broken, and felt around gingerly while my mother held me to her and nervously reassured Mrs. Whalen that no, a visit to the emergency room would not be necessary. Alas, I was not even bruised, and after my mother mildly chastised me for nearly tripping such an important person, we finished our shopping without incident.
Sharla liked the department stores in the big cities that we visited at Christmastime, but I felt mostly in the way there, out of place. I didn’t think a choice of fifteen or twenty winter coats was necessary; at Monroe’s, there might be a choice of three, which felt exactly right to me. And there were no mysterious bonging bells there, no glitzy counters staffed by impatient young women wearing
too much makeup. There were no escalators; if you wanted to go upstairs to the second or third floor, you simply walked. There were large departments for men’s clothing, women’s clothing, juniors, and children’s; and there were smaller sections for many other things. Cardboard rounds of satin ribbons were lined up on wooden dowels in the stationery department; soft linen handkerchiefs featuring pastel embroidery overlapped each other in glass display cases in Notions—the woman who usually worked in that department had a whispery voice like a librarian, and she sucked continually, though inoffensively, on hard candies. Nylon stockings were stacked high in their thin blue boxes along the side wall in Hosiery, and this department was always busy. Women waiting their turns chatted softly with each other, rested their pocketbooks on the counter, removed one foot from a high-heeled shoe to rub the top of the other. The jewelry department featured a small selection of watches, necklaces, and bracelets that, despite their sparkly allure, did not need to be locked up.
There was a fairly large hat department toward the front of the store, and this is where Jasmine headed first. She tried on every hat displayed, and encouraged us to do the same. Sharla did, but I stopped after three; the hats looked too silly on me and too perfect on Jasmine. I liked watching her in the mirror more than looking at myself. She lifted her chin, turned her head this way and that when she tried on one flamboyant offering. It had a huge white brim with a dip over one eye; I thought she would buy it, and she did. She offered to buy Sharla a hat as well, a small black cloche, but Sharla declined with a mixture of propriety and regret.
We went next to Intimates, and Jasmine disappeared into a dressing room with an armload of brassieres, panties, and slips. She had told Sharla and me to pick out something for ourselves, but we were uninspired to do anything but rifle through the nightgowns, looking to see if one might work for my mother’s birthday, which was exactly two weeks before my own. I did not want to give my mother a nightgown; I thought the idea lacked imagination. However, my offering last year had been licorice and a book of riddles, which I now saw differently.
“Girls,” Jasmine called, her head sticking out from her dressing room. “Could you get me another size in a slip? The one I have in here is way too big.”
I looked around for the sales clerk, but she was busy helping someone else with girdles. “What do you need?” I asked, coming up to the curtain.
“One minute, let me get this off,” Jasmine said, turning to remove the slip she had on. She did not close the curtain all the way back up, and I watched her standing there in a bra, panties, and nylons. She looked like the lingerie models in the Sears catalogue that I studied behind the closed bathroom door; but her figure was more spectacular, and disturbingly real. There was a small constellation of moles on one side of her back; her belly button was slightly elongated; the line of her tan stopped dramatically above soft-looking white breasts. She looked up, saw me watching, and smiled. I shut the curtain. When her hand came out holding the slip, I walked away quickly, blushing.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sharla asked.
“Nothing.” I handed the slip to her, told her to find a
smaller size and bring it to Jasmine, that I was going over to look at toys for a minute.
“Well, hurry up,” Sharla said, but it wasn’t really me she was talking to. And it wasn’t really toys I was going over to consider.
Jasmine bought hula hoops for Sharla and me; Monroe’s had just gotten them in. And after we got home, Sharla and I spent a long time in the backyard learning how to use them. I was surprised to find that I was at last better at something than Sharla—and so was she. I got the hoop going around my waist almost right away, but Sharla’s kept falling down. After a short while, I could walk around with it spinning evenly, while Sharla had abandoned her waist and was trying to twirl the hoop on her arm. I thought this might be even harder; but Sharla was frustrated and in no mood for tips from me.
Gypsy, Jasmine’s German shepherd, lay nearby. I took a break to allow Sharla time to catch up, and stretched out close beside the dog. I liked watching the slick black sides of her mouth move back and forth with her panting. Occasionally, a fly would hover around her and she would snap at it. I liked that, too. And if you scratched in the right place, her back leg would react wildly, while her dog face remained utterly impassive. I very much wanted a dog, but my mother would not permit it. Not a dog, not a cat; only a parakeet, which she said she could keep track of. I knew what she meant. A parakeet couldn’t mess up the house. It was the one thing I truly hated about my mother, her devotion to an orderly house. I couldn’t imagine why it meant so much
to her. It seemed to me that she could risk a little messiness in her life in order to gain real pleasure. But she always said, “You let one thing slip, and it all goes.”
Once, I called my mother outside to watch Gypsy as she ate potato chips, but my mother was not persuaded to my point of view. “She’s drooling,” my mother said, and I said, “No, listen to the
crunch!
” She listened dutifully, then smiled blankly and went back inside.
Jasmine had called my mother over to show off her purchases when we returned from shopping, and though my mother protested that she was in the middle of making dinner and couldn’t leave, she went anyway. At one point, I saw through Jasmine’s dining-room window that my mother was wearing the new white hat. I stopped twirling my hula hoop. “Look,” I told Sharla. I pointed to the window.
Sharla looked, then turned away, scowling.
“She
doesn’t wear hats like that,” she said. I supposed I agreed, but I kept watching my mother until she took the hat off and laid it on the table before her. She had looked beautiful in it. And starkly unlike herself. Watching her, I’d felt the way that babies seemed to feel regarding themselves in a mirror: ah! Look! Something lovable, and familiar, and intriguing. But entirely separate.
I
take out my credit card, use the plane phone to call home. No one answers, and I don’t leave a message. I just wanted anyone who was there to know I was there, too, in a way. Only a phone call away. Even in the air. Oftentimes I sense a polite impatience when I am on a rare trip and I call my daughters. But I have to let them know something.
A couple of years ago my husband and I took a brief trip to Canada. When I called home for the third time one day, my husband exploded. “Why must you do this?” he asked. “What do you think
happened
? They’re fine!”
“I know that!” I said. “I just want them to know we’re thinking of them.”
“They’re
fine,
” he said again, and I sniffed, looked out the hotel window, and sulked for a few minutes. I knew I was overdoing it, yet I felt compelled to make those calls. It had to do with the way parents say they’ll never repeat the mistakes their own parents made. It had to do with my offering my daughters what I so needed and was denied. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t be grateful. How could they not be grateful when surely they could see that I was only trying to love them, to give them what I knew they needed—whether they knew it or not?
And now some wave of feeling comes over me that I don’t recognize. Nausea? I sit still for a moment, then rise quickly and head back to the lavatory, which thankfully is free. Inside, I kneel before the stainless-steel toilet, hold back my hair, and wait. Nothing. I wash my face, rinse out my mouth, and stare at myself in the dimly lit mirror. I don’t look sick. I don’t feel sick anymore, either. I shrug, head back to my seat, settle in, and continue with my memories the way I might keep on with a book.
W
hen my mother returned home from trying on Jasmine’s hat, she was flushed and happy. Through the open kitchen window I heard her humming with the radio. “Catch a Falling Star” was playing. I liked that song, too, liked the notion of having a pocketful of starlight. I hoped for such a thing, in fact. I believed at the time that stars were five-pointed objects you could hold in your hand, a sort of fancier version of the tinfoil variety. I was ignorant of heat and size and the most astounding fact of all, that some stars I saw were not really there at all. I counted on someday finding a falling star and I had resolved not to share it with Sharla, no matter how convincing her arguments might be. She could
look
at it as it lay on my bed; that was all.
“Hula hoops are stupid,” Sharla finally said, after failing yet again to keep hers up. She threw it down, headed for the woods.
“Nuh-uh,” I said, walking jerkily, following her, my hula hoop going around my waist in a way that felt like a sloppy embrace. “They’re
fun.
”
“Well, something is wrong with mine,” Sharla said. “It doesn’t work.”
I put my hot-pink hula hoop down, picked up her
lime-green one, started spinning it. “It works,” I called out. “Hey, Sharla, look! It works!”
She would not turn around.
“You’re just a party pooper!” I called after her. And then I attempted to spin both hoops at the same time, but failed. I stepped out of them to follow Sharla.
“Someone has ravaged our lands,” Sharla said. “We must have a war dance.” Sharla was excellent at war dances. My job was to watch her, to sit cross-legged at the circle of rocks we called a campfire, and make rhythmic, singing sounds, while Sharla twirled and whirled, bent down low and raised up high, calling for power from heaven and earth.
When we ate dinner the next Monday night, my vocabulary word was “sanguine.” “He has a sanguine disposition,” I told the table. “He thinks everything will always be fine.”
“Well … all right,” my father said, and then turned expectantly toward Sharla.
“Seductive,” she said. “She is very seductive.”
No one spoke. I knew the word Sharla had chosen wasn’t far in the dictionary from the one I had picked. She sometimes deliberated for a long time before choosing her word, but tonight she had merely flipped a few pages away, closed her eyes, and pointed.
“I don’t get what it means,” I said now, spearing a green bean.
“She is seductive,” Sharla said. “She tries to be sexy like Brigitte Bardot. You know. Va-va-va-voom!”
“That’s fine,” my mother said. “We understand.”
“Or,” Sharla persisted. “She is seductive; she tries to
capture
things.”
“Enough,” my father said, and looked over his fork at my mother, who looked away.
After dinner, while Sharla and I did the dishes, we heard my mother talking to my father in the living room. “How would you define happiness?” she asked him.
Sharla and I looked at each other.
“… What are you talking about?” my father said.
“It’s just a question, Steven.”
“Well, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean … well, I guess I mean just what I said! You know? How would you define happiness? What
is
it? Is it real? And if it is, what brings it to you? Is it something in you or outside of you? Does anyone have it all the time, or are there just moments of happiness for anyone? Is contentment the same as happiness?”
Silence. And then my father said, “Good Lord. What have you been reading, Marion?”
She sighed. “Steven, I just wanted to … oh, forget it. All right? Forget it.”
Silence again, and then the television came on. I snuck out into the hall to peek into the living room. I wanted to make sure they were sitting beside each other on the sofa, that my mother had not retreated to her knitting chair, where she went when she was angry. Her needles flew then, clicked brightly, speaking a language only she could understand.
She was on the sofa beside my father. And his arm was around her, his usual loose claim. But while he was watching
The Rifleman
, she was watching her hands in
her lap. They didn’t move. I couldn’t imagine what she was seeing.
“They’re okay,” I told Sharla doubtfully, when I came back into the kitchen.
“I know,” she said irritably, and in her anger was the same fear I felt.
Sharla and I slept in our beds that night. It felt odd, not being outside on our quilt first. At one point, I woke up, full of resentment at my mother for having discovered us and taken away this simple pleasure. “Sharla?” I whispered.
She was sleeping. I looked at our clock. Two-ten.
“Sharla!”
“What?
”
“Want to sneak out?”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“They said not to, we’ll get in trouble.”
“They won’t catch us, they’re asleep.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re always asleep by now. They’re always asleep a long time ago.”