The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  He shrugged. “Sure. What do you need?”

  What did she need. “…Paper!”

  “Paper for what? What kind of paper?”

  “Oh…every kind. Copier. Fax.”

  “You just got fax paper. Last week when we were at OfficeMax, you—”

  “Listen, Harold,” she said, “this is my office. I am the boss. And if I say I need fax paper, I need fax paper. Now will you get it for me or not?”

  She snuck a look at her watch.

  “I’ll get it,” he said, sighing. “I’ll come back for you at five.”

  She watched Harold leave, then checked her e-mail to see if Jon had left a message saying he wasn’t coming. When she looked up again, another man was coming in the door. And it was Jon. It was. He was fifty-nine, and not nineteen, but it was he.

  Her heart moved up into her throat and blossomed. She spoke around it. “Mr. Vacquer?”

  He took off his elegant black coat, shook it. “Hey there. Sorry I’m late.” He wasn’t in such good shape. A paunch, the three-months-pregnant look.

  He came over to her desk, shook her hand. “How do you do?”

  Did he not recognize her? Well, of course not. He needed some context.

  “So!” Agnes said. “How about we talk a bit and then—”

  “Before we do that, I wonder if I could see some pictures.”

  “Of…”

  “The women. The blondes.”

  “Oh!” He would not be interested in the two blond women Agnes had on file. “Well, we don’t show anything to anyone until we’ve had an interview.” Her heart spoke quietly within her: Jon. Jon. Don’t you know me? Bette Midler sang mournfully in her brain, Don’t you remember you told me you loved me, baby? Agnes smiled. “If the interview goes well, you fill out an application.”

  “Oh. I see. Well, all right then, fire away.”

  She pushed her hair back from her face, that old gesture, did he remember? “Why don’t you start by telling me where you’re from.”

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Uh-huh.” She leaned forward. “I used to live in Oklahoma.”

  “Did you. Well, I lived there until ten years ago, then I moved here to Chicago.”

  Ten years he’d been here! She took in a deep breath. “Jon?”

  “Yes?”

  She stared into his still-beautiful eyes for a long moment.

  He shifted in his chair and said, “You know, I…” He stood up. “May I be honest with you? This doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place I had in mind. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you, it’s just—”

  “It’s quite all right,” she said. What? What was it? The wallpaper? The carpet? The furniture? Oh. Her.

  “I just always know right away if something will work or not,” he said, “and this…I think I need a larger agency. But I’m glad we were able to…I’m glad we didn’t waste each other’s time.”

  “Yes.” She stood, looked at the clock. There was time to call Lorraine and tell her never mind, tell her everything. There was time to take her things back to the stores before they closed.

  “Thanks anyway,” Jon said.

  “You bet.” He was almost out the door when she called his name again. He turned, politely impatient.

  “Could you hold on for just a minute?”

  He waited while she got her wallet. She took out her half of the dollar bill and crossed the room to hand it to him. He looked at it, then at her. “What’s this?” he asked.

  And she said, “Nothing.”

  He half smiled, and left.

  Agnes sat down at her desk and rearranged the pictures of her wildly imperfect family, her son, her daughter. And Harold. “Hallelujah,” she whispered. She got the clothes she’d worn to work out of the filing cabinet and went into the bathroom to change back into them. She left the jewelry on.

  She’d get a martini—Bombay Sapphire gin, extra dry, three blue-cheese-stuffed olives. She’d get a huge steak, French fries, sautéed mushrooms, and creamed spinach. A nice Cabernet. She’d get a rich chocolate dessert, complete with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. She weighed 176 pounds and her socks didn’t match, and she was going out with the man who really loved her. “Harold,” she might say. “I believe in heaven. Did I ever tell you?”

  THE PARTY

  There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had attracted more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic about talking—each of us needed to be careful not to take up too much airtime.

  We were talking about kissing, and we spoke rapidly and excitedly and laughed loudly. This was T-shirt and jeans laughter, not cocktail dress laughter—it came from the belly, not the chest. It was size fourteen and not size two. When one of us made moves toward some wilting hors d’oeuvre, the rest would stall, so that nothing good said was missed by anyone.

  We seemed to like best telling about our first times. There was a glamorous blonde wearing huge diamond stud earrings who said she first kissed at age eleven, while playing spin the bottle on a hot Texas night. The rule was that, after the spin, the chosen couple would go into the kitchen, stand by the washing machine in the corner, and kiss. No tongues. The blonde modified the rule to include no lips, only cheeks. But a certain Paul Drummond was too fast for her that night, and he smacked a kiss right on her mouth. She said she’d intended to get angry but instead backed up in pleasant shock into the washer hard enough to make a noise that roused the supposedly supervising parent from sleep. The kissing stopped; the party broke up; and the blonde went home, where she stayed awake much of the night reenacting the scene in her mind, and telling herself that the sin was venial, venial, venial.

  A woman named Vicky said she spent years practice-kissing with her best friend, Mary Jo. “We would put a pillow between our faces, kneel down on my bed, rub each other’s backs, and kiss that pillow to death.” We all laughed some more, because we’d all kissed pillows, it seemed.

  One woman wearing a seductively cut black dress that now seemed beside the point ventured bravely that she and her best friend, Sherry, had dispensed with the pillow and gone at it lip to lip. You could tell from the ripple effect of lowered eyes that she wasn’t the only one. I thought of fourth grade and my friend Mary, whom I asked to be the wife so I could be the husband. I liked to be the husband—you got to say when about everything. While Mary dusted, I went to work. When I came home, we kissed hello for what became long enough that we decided we’d better start playing outside.

  There was a serious, shy-looking woman named Jane, who hadn’t said much of anything, and who, when she laughed, had actually put her hand up over her mouth. “Oh, honey,” I wanted to say to her, when I saw her do that. “Sweetheart, come here and let’s give you some tools.” She wore a dress with buttons that went high up on her neck, and each one was closed. I was pretty surprised to hear her say, “Oh well, kissing was one thing, but do you remember the first time you touched a dick?”

  Now we were all into high gear. We were beside ourselves in our eagerness to share our experiences. We drew closer.

  A roving rent-a-waiter dressed in tight black pants, a blindingly white shirt, and a black bow tie offered us little bundles of something from his tray. All of us, to a woman, took one. The waiter seemed very pleased. I waited for him to move on, then greedily spoke first: “I was forced. This guy called Telephone Pole Taylor, for the very reason you might suspect, pulled my hand down and held it there until I had touched it for five seconds. We counted together. I almost threw up. I was a serious virgin, and I damn near passed out at the thought that that kind of thing would someday…But after I got over the size, I became kind of intrigued by the texture.”

  Vicky’s eyes widened. “Yes! Like damp velvet, right?”

  Jane, standing next to me, sighed quietly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Men’s bodies are just not pretty
. That makes it difficult. I think women’s bodies are, though, and I’m not, you know…” We knew. She took a sip from her drink, leaned her head against the wall, frowned in a contemplative sort of way. “It turned out that penises weren’t so bad, really, although it did take me a long time to get used to that rising and falling routine. I mean, it was grotesque the first time I saw an erection. It was like a monster movie.”

  The gorgeous blonde spoke up. “I liked it! I thought it was so magical.” But then, as though protecting Jane, she added hastily, “But not beautiful of course.” We drank to that.

  “It’s the balls that get me,” Vicky said. “They’re like kiwi fruit gone bad.” We burst out laughing again. I think we felt that we were becoming dangerous, careening in our conversation, and we liked it. We were ready to reveal anything about ourselves. Almost imperceptibly, the circle tightened again.

  “I think it’s all a matter of cultural conditioning,” I said and was met with a friendly collective groan. “No, I mean it. If we’d been taught to go after a penis by a mother who winked at us when she talked about it, and if all the boys at those drive-in movies had covered their privates with both hands and moaned little protests into our ears, we’d have been wild to touch them. Instead, we pulled their hands down from our tits and up from their crotches.”

  Jane put her empty glass on the floor. “I think men and women are just hopelessly different. It’s a wonder we get along at all. Sometimes the smallest things can bring out the biggest things. I had a horrible fight with my husband last night, and you know what started it?” We were all listening hard, and we didn’t notice the approach of Jane’s husband from across the room. But Jane did. She stopped talking and stared at him: in her eyes, it was as though a shade had been pulled.

  He stood at the edge of our circle, a little wary. “What’s going on over here?”

  There was a beat; no one answered. And then Jane said, “Oh, you know. Just girl talk.” I think we were all miffed by her response, but no one challenged it.

  Her husband looked at his watch. “It’s time to go.”

  Jane didn’t budge. “I’d like to stay for a while.”

  “Oh?” He put his hands in his pockets. “All right. That’s fine.” He didn’t move. Another beat. Silence all around. Then two of us simultaneously moved toward the food table. Someone else walked off toward the bathroom. Vicky waved to a man across the room and started over to him. Our group fell apart in a sad, slow-motion sort of way, as when petals leave a blossom past its prime. And then I heard Jane say, “I guess it is late.”

  I listened to her say good-bye to the people around her. I was dragging a piece of pita bread through the leftover hummus tracks at the bottom of a pottery bowl. I was hoping the potter had used no lead. I was wondering what my children were doing.

  I thought about what I had to do the next day as I finished my drink. Then I looked around for my husband. He was in the living room discussing the Middle East conflict with a short, mildly overweight, balding man. I imagined the man in the front seat of a car at a drive-in, thirty years ago. I gave him hair, but otherwise I didn’t change him much.

  I sat in a chair close by and heard my husband say emphatically that Israel fought only defensive wars. I fiddled with the hem of my skirt and wondered what it was Jane and her husband had fought about. Several possibilities occurred to me. I heard the short man ask my husband what he did for a living. Sports would be next. I turned my head away from them and permitted myself a yawn.

  I thought, Here is how I feel about men: I am angry at them for the way they sling their advantage about—inter rupting, taking over, forcing endings, pretending to not understand what equality between the sexes necessitates, thus ensuring that they are always and forever the ones who say when. But I feel sorry for them, too.

  I remembered a red-eye flight I was on recently. At about four A.M., I fell into one of those poor-quality sleeps. I woke up about twenty minutes later and took a stroll down the aisle. The plane was packed with businessmen, and they all lay sleeping, their briefcases at their feet like obedient dogs. They had blankets with the airline’s imprint over them, but the too-small covers had slid to one side or the other, revealing gaps between buttons on the dress shirts, revealing fists slightly clenched. They looked so sweet then, so honest and vulnerable. I felt a great love toward all of them, and smiled warmly into each sleeping face.

  OVER THE HILL AND INTO THE WOODS

  Seventy-five-year-old Helen Donnelly is kneeling beside a box in the upstairs storage closet, hiding from her children. Not that she would admit that. No, she tells herself she is searching for the Thanksgiving platter that used to belong to her grandmother. It was dropped last year by Helen’s daughter Melissa, and it broke into so many pieces there was no hope of gluing the thing back together, even to hold the lightweight, sentimental baubles Helen provides her family as gifts every holiday. “Now, this is just for fun,” she always says, her hands kneading each other, as they open them. “Nothing serious, just a joke.” As though they needed to be told that wind-up chattering teeth that walked on little plastic feet were anything but that.

  One year, when she was cleaning up after Christmas dinner, Helen found two of the gifts thrown into the trash. Whoever was responsible hadn’t even bothered to wait until they got home. The Santa magnets had cost only eighty-nine cents each, and all right, Santa’s red lips were painted rather wildly off the mark, as though he had been given a quick kiss in passing, but still. It wasn’t the cost. Hadn’t she thought about them? Hadn’t she spent the time and the effort? Don’t bother, her husband, Earl, had told her. Nobody wants those gifts, sweetheart, don’t waste your time. They want them, she’d said. You don’t know. Some of them want them. And when he’d asked, more curious than confrontational, who wanted them, she’d said, Never mind. Tightened her lips and picked a toast crumb off her lap. Just forget it, she’d said.

  The dish shattered spectacularly, dropped as it was on the new Italian tile kitchen floor. She knew she shouldn’t have gotten that floor. Italian tile! When it came from Beloit! There was not a thing in the world wrong with her old linoleum floor. But there was Marjorie Beauman over for lunch one day, talking about how there was a sale, talking about how tile could make over a whole room, that you could even get heated tiles! “Think of it,” Marjorie said, her voice low and very nearly sexual, “you come out in the middle of the coldest winter night and you think you’re in Daytona Beach!” And Helen fell for it, even though she would rather be in her little Wisconsin town than Daytona Beach any day, summer or winter.

  So yes, Helen knows very well that Grandma Ute’s platter is gone, thrown out in the trash last year with the unwanted food left on the plates (so much cranberry sauce, after she’d gone to the trouble to make the garlic-cranberry chutney that that Susan Stamberg had raved about on NPR). For the first time, the giblets and the neck of the turkey had been in the trash, too, because the cat, Gertrude, had walked away from them, no longer able to enjoy such pleasures.

  When Melissa had dropped that platter, Helen had gotten so angry she’d begun to shake. Appalled by her outsize reaction, she’d run to the bathroom to sit on the edge of the tub, where she’d folded and refolded a hand towel embroidered with a lovely Thanksgiving cornucopia—not that anyone had noticed—and tried to calm her breathing. And Melissa, outside the bathroom door, “Mom? You’re not crying, are you? Mom? It’s just a platter, I’ll get you another one!” That had just made Helen madder. Get her another one! Another one that Grandmother Ute had washed with care in her old farmer’s sink and then dried with one of her flour sack dish towels? A platter she’d bought from Goldmann’s the first year she was in this country, had paid for on layaway with money she saved every week from her housecleaning job? Yes, Melissa would just run over to Fifth Avenue and buy Helen a platter exactly like that, sure she would. Put it on her platinum card, and FedEx it to her.

  Melissa has no appreciation for her great-grandmother. No appreci
ation for family history. Unless it is a person of color, perhaps. Or a person of persecution, then the history matters. And Melissa had shown no sign of remorse when she broke the platter, either. Even if she did think she could replace it, shouldn’t she have felt bad for having broken it? Was it really so bad to feel bad? Helen thinks more people should feel bad for more things. There should be a kind of revolution to bring guilt back into the mainstream. More guilt, more feelings of worthlessness. All this self-esteem crap was making for a society of selfish people who were careless with everything but themselves. It was making for a bunch of people who felt entitled to speak their minds when no one wanted to hear their opinions, people who paraded their sexuality and politics before the whole wide world when no one cared, couldn’t they see that no one cared? Helen is not prejudiced, no she isn’t, but there’s a time and a place, really, there is a time and a place and why do those gay people have to tie up traffic that way with their endless marches? Oh, not just the gays, of course. All of them. The formerly disenfranchised who now can’t get enough of the spotlight. Just go home, she wants to say to every single one of them. The environmentalists. The vegans and animal rights activists. The transsexuals and the transvestites and evangelicals. The AIDS activists and the antiwar people. The prochoicers and the anti-choicers. The Hare Krishnas snaking along the sidewalks, stinking up the place with their incense. Just go home and shut up. As for the homeless, to whom she used to hand dollar bills and smile at all soft-eyed? Now she wants to grab them by the shoulders and shake them, shouting, “Oh, God bless yourself. Get a job!”

  She hears Earl calling her from downstairs, and pretends not to hear him. Sometimes if she ignores him he gives up, not having been that much interested in her responding anyway. If he’s calling her to see some golfer on TV. If he needs some help on his crossword, not that Helen is any good at crosswords, anymore. These days, words fly right out of her brain.