The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  It wasn’t until she got outside into the sunlight that she realized her socks didn’t match. At least one of them was navy and the other black. Only last week, she’d crossed her legs and realized she was wearing one kneesock and one ankle sock. It was not Alzheimer’s, causing this. It was not a senior moment. It was not menopause or perimenopause and it certainly was not PMS. PMS was years ago, and she remembered it now as rather charming, uniquely and daintily feminine, all ribbons and lace, though of course it was not. Rather, it was her coming home from the grocery store, slamming innocent cans down onto cupboard shelves, tearing into a party-size bag of Ripple chips and finishing half of it before she realized what she was doing, then bursting into tears because she was a fat pig. Ho. That was a laugh, thinking of herself as a fat pig when she weighed 126. Now she was a fat pig at 176. Recently, in a hotel room with an unfortunately positioned bathroom mirror, she’d seen herself sitting naked on the toilet and thought she looked just like Buddha.

  So, no, there was nothing to blame this forgetfulness on. Absentmindedness was…well, it was just her. In kindergarten, she’d once forgotten to wear underpants. When the children had spread their blankets out for nap time, Agnes had lain down, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and, when the breeze coming through the open window had blown her little blue dress up, revealing her nakedness and making Sister Theresa gasp and the girls giggle and the boys shout, when that had happened, she had meekly followed her teacher to the principal’s office, imagining her white soul stained by sin. The principal, frowning, had phoned her mother, who’d soon arrived at the school with a pair of underpants stuffed into a plastic bag, which was stuffed into a brown bag, which was stuffed into her purse, which was stuffed into a gently deteriorating large floral tote. “I’m so sorry,” she’d told the principal. And then, “Agnes, did you apologize to your principal?” “No,” Agnes had said, and her mother had said, “Well, apologize to your principal.”

  “I’m sorry I forgot my underpants,” Agnes had said, and something about it had struck her as funny, and she’d smiled.

  “Do you find this amusing?” Sister Mary Catherine had asked, but she had not been looking at Agnes when she said it. She had been looking at Agnes’s mother, who’d been looking at Agnes. “Apologize right,” Agnes’s mother had said, and so Agnes had said, “I’m sorry I forgot my underpants” with a deeply sorrowful face, achieved by imagining her kitten smashed under the front wheel of her father’s car. It was something she occasionally worried about.

  “All right, then,” Sister Mary Catherine had said, and Agnes’s mother had said stiffly, “I’ll see you at home, Agnes.” Agnes knew what that tone of voice meant. Sometimes it meant that her raven-haired doll, Veronica, would be put on the high shelf in Agnes’s mother’s bedroom closet. Sometimes it meant no Mickey Mouse Club. And sometimes it meant a spanking with her grandmother’s ivory hairbrush. Occasionally Agnes was allowed to pick her own punishment, and always she picked not watching The Mickey Mouse Club, even though she had a big crush on Jimmie. She’d had a crush on Jimmie for a long time, with his manly torso under his tight T-shirt. These days, she would go for Buffalo Bob, with his funky leather outfit and cozy paunch. “Buy me a drink, Buffalo Bob?” she might say. In heaven, perhaps, this could happen, she could sit on a barstool between Buffalo Bob and Elvis.

  Agnes believed in heaven, though she was too shy to tell anyone, especially her husband, Harold, who believed in nothing but believing in nothing. His favorite thing to say was “You believe that? What, are you nuts? You believe that?” She had stopped going to church on account of Harold, a difficult thing for her to do at first, but in the end she had not minded so much. She actually preferred celebrating the glory of God in other ways. Sometimes, aware of some transcendent moment disguised as ordinary life, she would whisper to herself, “Hallelujah.”

  But Agnes still liked believing in heaven, liked imagining a starry firmament as background at night, and clouds infused with pastel colors during the day. She liked imagining a sense of perfect contentment, as well as an ability to reach those still on earth, should one desire to do so. No harp music—who could bear to listen to harp music unless you were having high tea at the Palm Court? No, the music would be jazz, Diana Krall style. And endless trays of fried foods floating by, garnished with pink magnolias, with white peonies, with deep purple orchids slashed by lines of gold and freckled with black. A million house-trained puppies who stayed puppies, and children who never got older than five. That was heaven.

  Agnes had a daughter, Nancy, who was twenty-seven and hated her. Agnes knew this because, in the interest of personal integrity and owning one’s feelings, her daughter had called one night to tell her so. “I hate you now,” she’d said, “but my therapist says I might grow out of it. For the time being, though, it’s better if you just leave me alone.” Agnes also had a son, a thirty-year-old highly successful advertising executive who adored Agnes and who said, about his sister, “Aw, fuck Nancy, she’s a wreck.” “Andrew,” Agnes would say, offended by the language and the sentiment, “please.” “Ma, she’s a bitch,” he would say, “and you spend way too much time worrying about her. Forget about her. Let me send you to Paris, you want to take a little trip to Paris?” “No thank you, sweetheart,” Agnes always said. She didn’t like to travel. The pillows always smelled funny, and no matter what wondrous sight she was beholding, something at the base of her brain kept whispering, Home.

  Agnes was on her way to work. She’d recently started a dating service for people over fifty. So far it wasn’t doing too well, but she figured it would take off when people found out about it. “You believe that?” her husband had said. “What, are you nuts? You actually believe that?”

  “Yes, I believe that,” Agnes had said. “I know it. And when it does become successful, I’m not sharing any of the money with you. I’m going to spend it all on me. I’m going to spend it all on hats.” She knew this would get Harold’s goat. He hated her loving hats, particularly since she never wore one. She once spent an hour and a half looking in a hat store in New Orleans while Harold paced and fumed outside. Periodically, she would stick her head out and say, “Why don’t you go look somewhere else?” but he wouldn’t. He wanted to stay and get madder at her.

  Oh, he wasn’t all bad. He wasn’t! They’d had wonderful times in the past. They were fifty-eight now, the razzle-dazzle was gone; but there was something to be said for comfort, wasn’t there? Something to be said for saying to your partner, about something on your body, “What is that?” and having him take off his bifocals to have a good look for you, then offer blind reassurance. There was something to be said for someone waiting for you while you had your colonoscopy. For someone to be dismayed with you when your basement flooded, when your car acted up, when your old dog died, when your lipid level rose. It was good to have someone with whom to share, when you wanted only half of the remaining piece of strudel. Agnes was not unhappy. But she was a hopeless romantic, and she opened her dating service because she wanted people her age to fall in love and act foolish.

  After she walked the six blocks to her office, her only form of exercise, she sat at the desk to check her e-mail. Nothing. There was, however, a message on voice mail. A man named Jon Vacquer, calling to see if there were any women who were blond and blue-eyed and exceptionally fit and dying to meet him—he who was blond and blue-eyed and exceptionally fit. If he was the same Jon Vacquer, he was someone whom Agnes used to know.

  It couldn’t be. But it could be.

  Agnes sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and let her-self remember the first boy she’d ever loved. She’d just finished high school, and her family was moving away from Oklahoma, where they’d lived for a mere eighteen months—Agnes’s father was an IBMer, in the days when IBM stood for I Been Moved. Two days before she left, she’d met Jon Vacquer at a party. He was Beach Boy cool—shaggy blond hair, eyes that were a gorgeous green-blue, and don’t think he didn’t know it. Staggeringly handsome.
All the girls were crazy about him, and so Agnes made no move toward him. She was cute enough, in those days, but she was not an A. She was a good, solid B, and she knew what she should strive for and what she should not.

  But this Jon. He stood in the corner of the room and a crowd gathered around him. He was smoking Lark cigarettes and telling jokes and everyone was laughing. Then he said something cruel, Agnes can never remember what, but she spoke up; she reprimanded him. That was the start of their romance. She’d reprimanded him, and so he noticed her, and they began to talk and…what? Why did they fall so hard in love? Probably it was because Agnes was moving. It was so tragically romantic, how little time they had. She snuck out of the house for the first time in her life to meet him in the middle of the night; he visited her three times in Minnesota, where she was in college, and on the third visit she lost her virginity to him. It was a small motel room where it happened. It had hurt—she couldn’t stop trembling. He’d kept saying, “Are you all right?” and she’d kept saying, “Keep going.” Afterward, she had sat in an orange plastic armchair with her robe tied tightly around her tiny waist (though at the time she had called it enormous) and she had crossed her legs and tossed back her hair and said, “Well. I’m glad that’s over.” And he had come to kneel beside her and he had kissed one of her kneecaps and then the other, and he had said, “I love you, you are a very odd girl, and I love you so much,” and he’d had tears in his beautiful, beautiful eyes. And then, two months later, he’d gotten a girl pregnant and he had called to tell Agnes that he had to marry that girl, and then he had never called her again.

  Agnes had spent every night for a month sitting on a rock at the edge of the Mississippi River, trying to remember that the world was vast and had very little to do with Jon Vacquer. But mostly what she thought about was how pure a love they’d had, and how his stupid mistake would cause both of them to suffer forevermore. And she thought about how he had been the first. In the usual fashion, his mark on her heart was permanent. In the usual fashion, he became the standard by which she measured every other man.

  And now, forty years later, here was this name and this voice, which just might be his own. She listened to the message again. Yes. Yes? Yes, maybe so.

  She called the number back, and he picked up on the first ring. She identified herself using her married name, Agnes Miller, the owner of 50 + 50. “Ah!” he said. “Yes, I called you!”

  “So you did.”

  “Do you have anyone of that description?”

  Agnes did not. “Yes, I do,” she said. “There are several women in whom you may be interested. But first I’d like a little information about you.”

  “Retired, rich, divorced, handsome, and healthy. And bored.”

  “Bored” was the man’s word for lonely, that much Agnes had learned.

  “Would you be willing to come in today and fill out an application?” she asked.

  “Well…maybe online, can I do it online?”

  “We’d need to meet you in person.” Agnes had no partners; she worked alone, but she thought the pronoun “we” offered a certain sense of legitimacy. “It’s a guarantee to our clients that we meet with every person we keep on file. Frankly, Mr. Vacquer, we don’t take just anyone—we strive for a certain quality. You’d have to come in for an interview. Have you time today?” Her toes curled inside her shoes at this last. My God. What if it were the same Jon Vacquer? She would see him! And he would see her. Uh-oh. The socks. And the rest of her outfit…Well, she didn’t care about nice clothes—she preferred to spend money on antiques. And on cheese.

  “I might be able to come in,” he said. “Can you hold on for a moment?”

  “Certainly.”

  She looked out the window, thought about the gift he’d given her that she still had. Part of a dollar bill—he’d torn it in half the last time he’d seen her, asked her to keep it forever. “You’ll have half and I’ll have half. It’s light. You can always carry it with you.”

  “All right,” she’d said. He was like that. An English major who liked lousy poets, what could you do. A boy creating his own Rosebud, she supposed. But then he’d said something else. He’d said, fiercely, “No matter what happens, I’ll keep on loving you. Always, for the rest of my life.”

  He must have known, she realized later. He might have been awaiting pregnancy test results—or even known them. He had kissed her that last time so soulfully and sweetly; her heart had fluttered and sighed, then locked permanently on the position of him. And then she had never seen him again.

  She heard him pick up the phone. “How’s four?”

  She was supposed to get a temporary crown at four o’clock. “That will be fine,” she said. “Do you know where we are?”

  “I think so. I’ll be there.”

  Agnes hung up the phone and looked at the clock. Six more hours.

  “Not too poofy,” she told her hairdresser. “Don’t make me look like Loretta Lynn. Make me look like Emmylou Harris.”

  It was three-fifteen, and Agnes was getting the last touches to her coiffure. She had long hair, inappropriate for a woman her age, she knew that, but it was beautiful hair, still thick, and the gray was silver—it shone in the sunlight.

  “It’s not too poofy,” Lorraine said. “You look fine. You look good. Oh, God, I’m so excited for you!”

  Agnes had told Lorraine the whole story, such intimacy necessary for maintaining the proper hairdresser-client relationship. And Lorraine had told Agnes about the boy she’d lost her virginity to—a preacher’s son with breath so bad it could peel off wallpaper. “But a good kisser nonetheless,” Lorraine had said. “And I wanted to do it with him because I thought then it wouldn’t be a sin. The one I really wanted to sleep with was a kid who came to school on a motorcycle every day. Big greaser. But oh, those eyes.”

  “Oh yeah?” Agnes said. “Well, you should come and see this guy’s eyes. If it’s the same guy. In fact, you should come in and pretend to be a client—he’s looking for a woman like you.”

  Lorraine did fit the bill—blond, fit, over fifty but not so that you could prove it: she used every piece of equipment in the gym with extreme intention.

  “I’m married!” Lorraine said.

  And Agnes said, “So am I,” and so Lorraine said, all right, she would come, she’d wander in about four-thirty.

  “Make it five,” Agnes said. And then, standing up and handing her plastic cape to Lorraine, she said, “Don’t look too good.”

  Lorraine stepped back, cocked her head, and looked Agnes over. “You look great,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

  Agnes looked at herself in the mirror. She did look kind of great. Considering. She’d been to Max Mara for a new black suit. She’d been to Tiffany for a gold necklace and a matching bracelet. At Ralph Lauren she’d found a pair of stunning black heels and a V-neck silk blouse, a wonderful eggshell color, so elegant, only a sliver of it would show. Tomorrow it would all go back. She felt a little bad about that, but that’s what they got for being so expensive. She’d been to a makeup counter for the application of a good twelve products, none of which she had purchased, and she’d gotten an elegant little bottle of Chanel No. 5, which was what she’d been wearing when she met him, and which he’d said he loved. A girl could always use a little Chanel—she’d hold on to that. Or maybe she’d send it to her daughter, with a note on some sweet piece of stationery: Nancy, sweetheart, enjoy this—pretend it’s not from me.

  At three-thirty, Agnes returned the two calls that had come in while she was gone. Two women, all fired up about her service, how wonderful that she was exclusively for more mature people, when could they come in and fill out an application. Business was picking up.

  At quarter of four, she brushed her teeth again in the little lavatory at the back of her office, careful not to disturb the lipstick the makeup artist had put on her, which had cost thirty-five dollars a tube, no thank you. She straightened a few strands of hair that didn’t need straight
ening. She took down the hanger with the clothes she’d worn in that morning, brought them to the filing cabinet, and shoved them in. What if he asked to use the lav and saw those clothes? Then she went back to the mirror and smiled and said, “Hello, I’m Agnes Miller.” How did she look saying this, she wondered. Well, how did the she she was now look, compared with the she she was then. Answer? She couldn’t imagine.

  At five of four, the door opened and a man walked in. Her husband. He walked in.

  “Harold!” Agnes said.

  He turned from closing the door. “Agnes. Hey! You look nice.”

  She fingered the necklace. “Yes, well…just trying this out. I think I’ll probably return it.”

  “It’s great. Keep it.”

  “Well, it’s…you know, it’s very expensive.”

  “Keep it. I’ll buy it for you.”

  “Well…thank you, Harold. We’ll see. But…sweetheart? What are you doing here?”

  He smiled, sheepish. “I don’t know. I left work early. I thought maybe I’d take you out to dinner.”

  “You did? Well, I’d love to, but it’s…” She looked at her watch. “It’s only four.” Four! Her stomach tensed; she could feel the prickle of perspiration starting under her arms.

  “I thought you could knock off early, too. I thought we’d take a walk down Michigan Avenue while it was still light, and maybe then we could head over to Gene and Georgetti’s—get there early, get a good table.”

  “Well…I would love to do that, but I have some work to do first. Maybe you could go do some things and I could meet you on Michigan, right by the Wrigley Building, right in front.”

  He sat down in one of the chairs along the wall. “Just go ahead and finish up. I’ll read the paper—I never got around to it this morning.”

  She should never have gotten that subscription for the office. It was two minutes after. “Harold? Would you mind running a couple of errands for me?”