The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Helen!” Earl calls again, from the foot of the stairs.

  “The kids are here!”

  “I know,” she says, in a voice he can’t possibly hear. She had seen when the car pulled up, the rental car Melissa and her husband got because they thought their parents were too feeble to drive to Milwaukee and get them at the airport. Just because of that time she and Earl had gotten lost and ended up in Fond du Lac. One lousy time. Plus, all right, another time they had an accident, but it was not their fault, people had no manners on the freeway.

  “Hon?” Earl calls.

  “I know!”

  She hears him walk up a few of the creaky stairs—are they ever going to get those stairs fixed? Not that anyone would fix them properly. Someone would come and charge a fortune and say that they were fixed but they wouldn’t be. “Aren’t you coming down?” Earl asks.

  “Yes! I’m looking for something and then I’ll come down.” And don’t ask what I’m looking for, she thinks.

  “What are you looking for?” he asks.

  She sits back on her heels and sighs.

  “Helen?”

  “Are Michael and Elaine here, too?” she asks. Her older daughter, the one who deigned to stay in Wisconsin, though in Milwaukee, of course. House on the lake big enough for thirty people. Elaine is fifty-four years old. How could her daughter be so old? Coloring the gray in her hair and getting those shots in her face!

  “Yes, Elaine’s here.” Earl calls up. “Say…Helen?”

  She comes out of the closet and goes to the top of the stairs to look down at him. There he is, dressed in the shirt she told him not to wear, it is too small and it makes him look ridiculous. A black knit, for God’s sake. Who does he think he is, James Bond? A black knit, and he has also put on the tan pants she has told him a million times to throw away. There is a stain at the crotch plain as day, one little round circle and then two smaller ones, no mystery as to what that is. Throw those pants away, she keeps telling him and he keeps telling her, No, I like them.

  “What is it, Earl?”

  His smile fades—he’d been smiling at her, his holiday smile. “What are you doing up there?” he asks. He starts up the steps, and she holds up an arm, traffic cop style. “Don’t!”

  He looks up at her. Oh, fine. The hurt face.

  “It’s a surprise,” she says.

  “What’s a surprise?”

  “What I’m looking for, Earl. It’s a surprise. I’ll be right down. Just start the relish tray. Give them that. All you have to do is take off the plastic wrap. Can you manage that?”

  He turns around and heads back downstairs, shaking his head.

  “Oh, pooty pooty poo!” Helen says and returns to the storage closet.

  She sits down and leans against a large cardboard box, crosses her ankles and closes her eyes. She hears Melissa ask, “Where’s Mom?” and the low tones of Earl answering. And then Melissa says, “What’s she looking for?”

  What is it with these people? Don’t they have anything else to talk about? Has the art of conversation disappeared entirely? Well, yes. Yes, it has—Helen knows the answer to that question. It is the fault of television. Television and computers, where all anyone wants to do is keep everything passive and abstract and moronic unless it is about sex where there is nothing abstract at all and everyone is naked. She could teach those people a thing or two about what was really sexy and guess what? It has nothing to do with nakedness.

  Something rises up in her. A scary feeling. A thought that she cannot go downstairs. She cannot.

  “Mom?”

  Melissa.

  “Don’t come up here,” Helen calls.

  A pause, and then the stairs creak. “Don’t come up!” she says again. But there is her younger daughter before her. “Hi, honey,” Helen says. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Melissa crosses her arms. “What are you doing, Mom?”

  Helen stands, feeling one knee buckle briefly, and brushes off her behind. She’s wearing pants, an old gray wool pair, and a white blouse and a red cardigan sweater, an outfit she could just as easily wear to Sears to get a replacement gasket for the washing machine. She has given up on getting dressed up for family dinners: her silk dresses and double-strand pearl necklaces, her theme sweaters. They never get dressed up. “I’m looking for something,” Helen says. “I told your father to serve the relishes, is he serving the relishes?”

  “Yes, they’re out. We’re eating them.”

  “Well, then, that’s fine. That’s all. That’s all for now. Go and eat some more.”

  “Ma, do you…need some help?” And there it is, Melissa is looking at her strangely.

  “How’s Clayton?” Helen asks. “Is he feeling better?” Melissa’s husband.

  “Oh, my God, he’s fine now; his temperature has been normal for two days.”

  “What a relief, huh?” Helen does not now nor has she ever liked Clayton. Chews with his mouth open and doesn’t he just know the answer to everything, just ask him. Insisted that his son be named Rolf, his daughter Enya, never giving a second’s thought to Helen’s suggestion that his son would be regarded as a neo-Nazi and his daughter a New Age lightweight. Not that she put it quite so bluntly when informed of the name choices. She offered her opinion in Wisconsinese. She said, “…Oh?”

  “I brought some flowers,” Melissa says. “Where’s your pumpkin vase? That smiling pumpkin?”

  Helen sees that smirk. Don’t think she doesn’t. She tells Melissa, “Well, it’s the flowers, isn’t it? It’s not what holds them. Just put them in anything.”

  Melissa says in a voice not quite her own, “All right, Ma.” Then she heads back downstairs.

  Helen sighs and sits back down again. She hears the muted clatter of pots and pans. Someone’s in the kitchen. Earl, probably, though it could be Clayton, who could have been a famous chef, just ask him. Though Clayton did comment on the Susan Stamberg cranberry chutney last year. Commented favorably. He was the only one.

  And now here is the smell of turkey, always her favorite smell. So Earl has taken the bird out of the oven; it is time to make the gravy and put the side dishes into the oven, the green bean and mushroom soup casserole, the candied yams, the cloverleaf rolls that don’t taste anything like they used to even though the company insists it hasn’t changed a thing, Helen wrote to them asking what they were doing differently and they said nothing.

  Now the creak of the stairs again, and Elaine is standing before her, saying softly, “What’s wrong?”

  Helen tries to laugh. “What did Melissa tell you? Did Melissa tell you something?”

  “Is there something to tell?”

  Helen puts her hands over her face and begins to cry, and Elaine gasps. “Mom?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Helen says. “No.” She wipes at her eyes and smiles. “It’s nothing. I just need a minute. Go help Dad.”

  Elaine stoops down next to her mother. “What’s going on?” She looks around the closet. “Are you really looking for something? Or is it something else? Are you okay?”

  “So many questions!” Helen says.

  “But are you?”

  “Give me five minutes. That’s all. Please.”

  After Elaine has gone downstairs, Helen looks at the garment bags, at the out-of-season clothes in their dry cleaner shrouds, at the things she can’t decide what to do with and so leaves here year after year. More and more accumulating, all the time. Helen’s friend Winnie told her about a woman who went into every closet in her house and threw out everything she found except for four pair of pants, four blouses, her vacuum cleaner, and her scrapbooks. And she didn’t throw out the scrapbooks only because she thought she’d get in trouble with her children for not keeping them. She herself didn’t want to look at them anymore. They made her sad. She only wanted to think about the here and now. Not yesterday. And certainly not tomorrow.

  What’s in these boxes anyway? Helen can’t even imagine the contents of most of them. Sh
e slides one toward her and sees behind it a huge dust bunny. Is it a dust bunny? Helen moves closer to it, blows on it experimentally. Did it move? Her eyesight isn’t what it used to be. It could be a nest of some sort. Mice? Rats? Bats, do bats have nests?

  She comes quickly out of the closet, slams the door, and pauses for a moment—reflexively, really—to regard herself in the mirror over the dresser. Old woman. She is an old woman. She is aware suddenly of a crushing feeling, centered in her chest, centered right beneath her breastbone. A heart attack? Now she’ll have to go to the ER, where no one will speak English on a holiday, for sure.

  She sits nervously on the edge of the guest bed and puts her fingers to her pulse. It’s fine, so far as she can tell. If your heartbeat is okay, can you be having a heart attack? Well, now the pain has gone away, anyway. Just like that.

  From under the bed comes a bedraggled Gertrude, her coat full of knots. It makes you feel a little ill to pet her now, all those bumps and lumps reminding you of tumors; even if they are only clumps of hair, they remind you of tumors. You can’t brush her anymore; she won’t have it. She bites you if you try to groom her, gentle Gertrude, the cat who used to act like a dog, following people around from room to room. Now she hides, comes out only to try to eat or use her litter box, and it’s getting harder for her to do either. And those baby-faced vets, last time Helen brought Gertrude to them for her stupid shots, which she probably didn’t even need anymore, “You might want to consider putting her down.” All they wanted was money. If they weren’t telling you to murder your pets, they were telling you to torture them. Give cats anesthesia so they could have their teeth brushed. They were animals! What next, nose jobs? Put Gertrude down! Maybe she isn’t the same, but she still has her place in their family, yes she does! Helen gently picks up the cat and lays her in her lap. “You’re just fine,” she says. “Aren’t you?” She strokes a small triangle at the top of the cat’s head where there are no lumps. “My beauty,” she says.

  A burst of laughter from downstairs. Helen stands and pulls down on her sweater, checks to see that her blouse is tucked in, rubs her lips together to even out her lipstick, assuming that she’s remembered to put it on. A few nights ago, she had a dream that she was outside in her ratty bathrobe and pajamas, lost. Asking directions of the strangers she met on the street, explaining that she couldn’t be far, she had walked, so she couldn’t be too far, she kind of recognized things, she was just a little disoriented. And the people looking at her so strangely. In the dream, she held a spatula, egg yolk dried at the edge in a thin yellow line.

  She really must go downstairs. But what can she bring to justify her having been up here for so long? She can’t go down empty-handed—if she does, she’ll have to say she couldn’t find “it” and they’ll all want to know what “it” is. No, she has to bring something along with her.

  She goes back into the closet and opens the box closest to the door. On top, a pink elephant, an old stuffed animal that her daughter Elaine used to keep on her bed when she was a little girl and had named Mona Massengill. Mona wore pop-bead pearls around her neck and various outfits—clothes that Elaine had outgrown. Elaine wrapped scarves around Mona’s head; earrings dangled from her elephant ears. Sometimes, when Helen was tucking Elaine in at night, she asked what Mona had done that day. The answers varied but were really the same, because what Mona had always done was be a perfect mother. More specifically, Mona had let her children do what Helen disallowed. So Elaine might have said, in answer to Helen’s question, “Today Mona drove her children to school in a solid gold limousine.” This because Helen made her children walk the four blocks to school. Or “Today Mona and her kids went swimming at the country club.” Or “Today Mona gave her daughters fashion outfits because she doesn’t think they’re expensive at all and also she let them play with Barbies because she knows it will not hurt them.”

  Helen hates this elephant, actually. She is not pleased to find her lying at the top of the box in all her weird stuffed-animal self-righteousness. It is in Helen’s power to throw her away—no one would know. If they found out, Helen could claim mildew. Instead, she brings the elephant downstairs. No one is in the dining room yet, and she seats Mona at the head of the table and ties a napkin around her neck. Let her finally be seen as the idiotic thing she always was.

  And now here they all come, filing into the dining room, calling out “Hello!” to her as though she is some invited guest and they are welcoming her to her own table. And then Elaine sees Mona Massengill. “What’s this?” she asks, and Helen says, “That’s what I was looking for. That’s the surprise. You remember her?”

  A tick-tock of silence, and then Elaine moves over to gently touch the elephant, and she says, “Oh, yes,” with a kind of longing that makes Helen’s back teeth ache.

  “It was just a joke!” Helen says. Elaine picks Mona up and sits her in the extra chair in the corner of the dining room. Helen has a mind to pick the elephant up by its trunk and swing it around her head, lasso style.

  But here is ten-year-old Rolf, pulling at Melissa’s skirt and saying, “Can we eat now?” Six-year-old Enya, wide-eyed in her little brown dress, her thumb in her mouth. Helen rushes over to kiss their soft cheeks and say, “There’s my grandchildren!” and then everyone begins talking and they all take their places. Well, everyone but Earl and Helen, of course. The waitstaff. Earl goes into the kitchen. Helen stands at the table for a moment, looking around at all the faces. Who are these people?

  “Hey, Mom,” says Clayton, though Helen is not his mom and never will be. “Where are the gifts?”

  “What gifts?”

  “You know.” He winks at her.

  “There are no gifts this year,” she says. “You don’t any of you like them, and I’m not getting them anymore.”

  A general AWWWWWW!

  Well, they are making fun of her, of course. She smiles and goes into the kitchen to help Earl serve the whole ungrateful lot of them.

  Earl is at the stove, a dish towel tucked into his trousers, stirring the gravy. Helen sits down at the kitchen table and sighs.

  “What’s the matter, love?” He comes over with a tablespoon of gravy. “Here. Taste.”

  She waves him away. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “Come on; everything’s getting cold. I need you to taste it.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t need me at all. No one does except Gertrude.”

  He looks at her, astonished. “Is that it?”

  Helen rests her chin on her hand and looks out the window.

  “Helen?”

  “What.”

  “Is that what’s been bothering you? You think no one needs you?”

  She drops her hand and stares accusingly at him. “No.” It sounds like a question, the way she says it.

  “So…” He is floundering. He loves her.

  “It’s…” Her mouth goes dry. “You know, Earl, it’s like you live your life opening doors. One after the other. You open a door onto a hallway, which leads to another door, which leads to another hallway. But then one day you open a door and it’s to a closet. It doesn’t go anywhere. And it’s dark in there.”

  “Boo,” Earl says.

  “…What?”

  “I say, ‘Boo!’ I’m right in that closet with you.”

  “No you’re not, Earl. In that closet, everyone is alone.” Her eyes fill with tears.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Earl bends to kiss her forehead, careful not to spill the gravy. “You’re just a human being. Now, taste. Tell me if it needs more salt.”

  She tastes the gravy and nods. “Good. It’s really good, Earl. Just right.”

  He turns off the flame with a flourish. “Okay, then. Let’s eat!”

  She starts to stand but then sinks back into the chair. Earl comes over and takes her face in his hands. They smell good, his hands. Like turkey and gravy and bread. And Lifebuoy. “Helen,” he says. “What do you want? Do you want me to send them all home?”


  She sniffs. “Yes.”

  A moment and then, “Really?” Earl asks.

  “Yes. Well, not you. I’ll do it. I’ll tell them I don’t feel well. I don’t feel well, Earl.”

  He straightens his too-tight top, removes the dish towel from around his waist. “All right. If that’s what you want. I’ll go with you.”

  “Let me say it, though.” She reaches for his hand, and together they go into the dining room.

  Helen clears her throat and taps a fork against the side of a water glass. “May I have your attention?”

  They all turn to face her. She hesitates, then says, “You know, Earl worked very hard on this lovely dinner. He won’t talk about how hard he worked. But he did. All his life. I wonder if any of you know how—”

  “Helen,” Earl says.

  “No!” she says. “I think they should know!” She looks around the table. All of them silent and staring.

  “Okay, then,” she says. “So, thank you, Earl, and let’s eat.”

  “Mom?” Clayton says. “Before we do? In our family, we used to do the alphabet of thanks as a way of saying grace. You go really fast, just say anything when it comes to your turn.”

  “I don’t want to,” Helen says, and Clayton says, “Well, see? That’s okay. That’s the thing. You can say ‘pass,’ if you can’t think of something.”

  “I don’t want to say ‘pass.’ I don’t want to say anything.”

  “And that’s okay, too,” Clayton says. “So! I am grateful for apples in the fall.” He looks at his son. “Rolfie? Can you say something you’re grateful for that starts with a ‘B’? Buh-buh-buh…What starts with a ‘B’ that you’re grateful for, sweetheart?”

  Rolf stares at him.

  “‘I am grateful for …buh…buh…’” Clayton says, and Helen wonders if she can possibly keep herself from leaping over the table to pummel him.

  “Butterflies?” whispers Rolf.

  “Good!” says Clayton. “Good job!” He looks expectantly at Melissa, seated next to him.

  “I’m grateful for climbing stock prices,” Melissa says, and everyone but Helen laughs. Melissa looks over at Enya and says, “What are you happy about that starts with a ‘D’? Duh…Duh…”