The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Well, Brian has a bit of a cholesterol problem.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since when?”

  Cassandra frowns. “Pardon?”

  “Well, I just…I just mean that, even if it’s a longstanding problem, we can take care of that. We can use low-cholesterol products and still make it taste good.” What cholesterol problem? He never had a cholesterol problem when she lived with him. She’ll fix that when they get back together. No more omelets, he used to love omelets. She feels a pressure in her bladder and realizes that she’s had to pee for a while—speaking of health concerns, she’s got to stop drinking so much coffee. “I wonder if I might use your bathroom,” she says.

  “Sure—right down the hall.”

  “The door on the left?” Laura asks, pointing. She should win an Academy Award.

  Cassandra nods. The phone rings, and she moves to answer it. “Hey, Sarah,” she says warmly, and Laura wonders what it would be like to be Cassandra’s friend.

  Laura goes into the bathroom, also completely changed but for the toilet and the sink. Even the floor tiles have been replaced—what was wrong with the floor tiles she chose? The wall colors? The towels? Although these towels are quite nice—much plusher. If you need that sort of thing.

  When she comes out of the bathroom, she hears Cassandra still on the phone, and so she tiptoes down the hall into Brian’s office. That at least has stayed the same—the bookshelves she picked out, the desk and easy chair, the lamp. And on his desk, mixed in with pictures of their boys and artful shots of Cassandra (overly artful, in Laura’s opinion), one picture of her remains. It is one Brian took not long after they met, and it is of her back as she is leaping over a low fence, her hair streaming out behind her. Laura remembers a night shortly after she’d told Brian she wanted a divorce and they were sitting in his office, he at the desk, she in the easy chair. Brian picked up that picture and stared at it, and Laura said, “I never understood why you liked that picture so much. You can’t even see me.” He smiled, bit at his lip, and then said, “It’s the truest image I have of you, Laura.” He set the picture gently down, then said, “What the hell, I think it’s a nice picture. The fog. The beach grass. And you were happy that day, you can tell even looking at your back. You still felt free.” It was true, everything he said. She hadn’t really wanted to get married; she’d felt trapped from the moment they got engaged; she’d even told him early on that she’d never be able to stick it out, and he’d said, “I know. I’m glad I get to have you for as long as I do.”

  Laura’s eyes fill, and now she remembers the last night she was in this house, when she and Brian sat out on the front steps in the dark holding hands, because no matter what they were still friends, they did love each other in this way, and they regretted all the pain. Brian was talking about Einstein, whom he idolized. He said that when the Nazis came to power, they wanted nothing more than to discredit one of Einstein’s theories. So they got together a whole bunch of scientists to debunk him, this big group of scientists. “But,” Brian said, “if Einstein were really wrong, they would have needed only one.” It was something like that, Laura can’t recall every word. What she does remember clearly is the way Brian sounded that night, telling her those things. How his tone was plain and simple, utterly lacking in bitterness or rancor. She thought then that he meant all the accusations she made against him in order to justify the divorce were also excessive and therefore false. And now, years later, she sees that her finger should have been pointed at one thing only: herself, a person who drove down her own street recklessly because it was her own.

  “Laura?” she hears from out in the hall.

  Well. No Academy Award for her after all. She doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Then Cassandra comes into the study and says, “I want you to know that he still loves you, in his way. I think he always will. But he’s with me now, and we’re happy. We really are. I adore him. We haven’t told your sons yet that we’re getting married. It will be a very quiet ceremony, and then…Well, we have some things planned with them.”

  Laura begins to cry, an ugly, hiccuping kind of crying, and she coughs against this awful display of emotion. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve never…”

  “I believe you,” Cassandra says. “And I won’t tell him. I really won’t. I think I understand.”

  What Laura wants to do is lash out angrily and say, No you don’t. You don’t know me. You don’t know me, you don’t deserve him, you have no business being in my house. It is my house! But every single one of those things is wrong. Here is a woman who loves Brian the way he always should have been loved, and in a small, undamaged corner of her heart, she is glad.

  “So I’ll just go now,” she tells Cassandra, and Cassandra says, “Thank you,” and Laura thinks, This is the part of the story Trudy and Joyce will like best, if I tell it right. I hope I can describe how elegant she was, saying this. How kind.

  On the way home, Laura drives past the Sumac Street bridge. She pulls over and parks, then walks down the little incline to where the homeless man sits. He sees her coming and looks up when she is standing beside him. “You wouldn’t happen to have seventy-five cents, would you?” he asks. He is blond and blue-eyed, perhaps mid-forties, his lashes surprisingly long and dark. He wears brown corduroy pants and a dirty gray sweatshirt and flip-flops, despite the chill still in the air.

  “I would happen to.” She opens her wallet and hands him a dollar.

  “I don’t have change.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “God bless you.”

  “You, too.” She stands there for a minute, then says,

  “Would you mind if I ask…How did you get here?”

  “Shelter’s too crowded.”

  “No, I mean…Did you ever work?”

  He glares at her. “Course I did.”

  “What did you used to do?”

  “That’s none of your goddamn business.”

  Laura nods. “Okay. Well, good luck to you.”

  “Wait a minute.” He looks down, then back up at her.

  “I’m sorry. Some things I don’t like to talk about. Don’t like to look back. This is now, that’s all. Got to keep walking.”

  “I understand.” She smiles, then says, “You know, I could bring you some lunch sometime. Would you like that?”

  He laughs. “Ain’t that a kick in the head.”

  “Really. I like to cook, and I’m always making too much and then throwing all kinds of things away.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe what some people throw away.”

  “Oh, yes I would.” She thinks of the mountains of food she’s wasted: casserole dishes of enchiladas with only two missing; a cake with barely a twelfth of it gone, salads full of carefully julienned vegetables tossed into the garbage on top of coffee grounds and eggshells. She thinks of things she’s seen her neighbors put at the edge of the curb: furniture, clothes, lamps, not a thing in the world wrong with any of it. Then she thinks of a time when she and Brian were getting ready to move from their first apartment. It was a move up, no doubt about it, but Laura had a great fondness for the old place; in some ways she was very sorry to leave it. Never mind the cramped kitchen, the crack in the living room wall, the stench of the downstairs neighbor’s cat box that drifted up to them; Laura had a sentimental attachment to the place. She lay in the bathtub that night on her stomach, letting the water drain out. Brian was in the bathroom with her, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. They’d been talking about moving, how they’d have room for so much more, and Laura suddenly began quacking like a duck—she’d moved from chickens to doing very good imitations of ducks. So she began quacking like a duck, and in between quacks, she kept saying, quite plaintively, really, “Let’s stay here, bud” (they called each other “bud” in those days). She said it a few times, “Let’s stay here, bud, quack, quack, quack.” And Brian was laughing, but in his eyes was a soft sadness, because h
e knew that, no matter how much she loved that place, she was going to have to go.

  “I’ll see you another time,” Laura tells the man, and he grunts and gives her a little wave. A meat-loaf sandwich on homemade white, that’s what he’ll get, Laura’s got his number. A meat-loaf sandwich and some homemade potato chips. Couple of peanut butter cookies from the recipe she found in Bon Appétit.

  On Friday evening, Laura shows up at Trudy’s with good wine, both red and white, and a bouquet of apricot-colored parrot tulips mixed with apricot-colored roses. She loves this particular arrangement and in fact often buys it for herself. On one occasion, she called a florist and had it sent to herself with a card signed, “Guess who?” She does something like this with fancy chocolates, too; she gets them gift-wrapped so that at home she can tear off the paper, then display the box with the top casually off-kilter, satin ribbon coiled beside it: Gift. She doesn’t really care for Godiva chocolates, but she will buy them for their artful designs and for the cunning little ornaments that come with them. And for their ridiculous price: she subscribes, however reluctantly, to the belief that if something costs that much, it must be good.

  Last Christmas, Laura sprayed a big box of Godiva chocolates with shellac so they would last longer, and then she went and scared away the five-year-old girl who lives down the street and used to come and visit her sometimes. “Don’t eat those!” she yelled, when Dory reached for a chocolate. The little girl jerked back her hand and said, “I wasn’t. I was only looking.” And then she got all round-eyed and began to hold herself. “Would you like to use the bathroom?” Laura asked gently, and Dory whispered, “No, I want to go home.” She hasn’t been back to visit since.

  Trudy opens the door laughing hard, and behind her, down the hall, Laura can see Joyce, also laughing, bent over with laughter, in fact.

  Laura steps in, feeling awkward the way you can when you enter a room with people laughing like that. There is a perfumy scent of Indian spices in the air; Laura feels she’s nearly levitating. “Wow, something smells good,” she says.

  “Chicken tikka masala,” Trudy says proudly, and accepts the flowers. “Oh, these are lovely. Thank you.” She wipes a tear from laughter off her cheek, then says, “Come on back to the kitchen. Joyce was just starting to tell about her lunch date, but I told her she had to wait until we were all here. What she told so far was funny, though.”

  “Well, now we are all here,” Joyce says, “and I want to go first.”

  “Wait until we’re sitting down,” Trudy says. She takes off her apron, and the women help her carry dishes of food over to the dining room table. In addition to the chicken, there is saag paneer, lamb biryani, samosas, and naan. There is an ice bucket on the table holding Kingfisher beer.

  “Did you make all this?” Laura asks, and Trudy says,

  “Not the beer.”

  “Ha, ha,” Laura says, drily.

  “Not the beer or the chicken. Or the rice. Or the samosas or the spinach.” She points to the table. “Sit anywhere. Dig in.”

  “Did you make the naan?” Joyce asks and Trudy looks at the bread as though considering. Then she says, “Oh. No. But I did make the dessert. We’re having mango pudding. I found the recipe in the newspaper. It’s full of cream. I can’t wait.”

  “Didn’t you say this was going to be all vegetarian?” Laura asks, and Trudy says, “Huh. Did I? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything anymore, and I’m getting panicked about it, so that makes me remember even less. You know what happened last night? I woke up from a sound sleep thinking, What does ‘fulcrum’ mean?”

  Laura feels her palms grow damp. Wait. What does it mean, exactly?

  “Come on,” Joyce says. “Plate up, ladies; I want to tell my story.” She looks around the table, making sure her friends have served themselves, and then begins. “Okay. So on Sunday morning, I called Roy Schnickleman, remember? Looked like James Dean only with real black hair, drove a motorcycle, a physique made for tight T-shirts, remember?”

  Laura and Trudy nod and grunt, their mouths full.

  “Well, he remembered me right away, and he was laughing, and he just sounded so happy to hear from me.”

  “Is he married?” Trudy asks, and Joyce says, “No, no, but I’ll get to that. Just listen. I told him I had to be in Indiana not far from him—I didn’t want to say he was the only reason I was coming. No point in going that far. I said I was going to be there that afternoon and how about lunch. He said fine, and then he asked if I was married. I said no, I’m divorced, and he said, Yeah, so am I, and there was this kind of sad, awkward silence, and then he got all hyped up again about how glad he was to hear from me and gave me the address for this restaurant called Chucky’s, and I agreed to meet him there at noon. I told him I’d wear a yellow blouse and a black skirt, and he said fine, he would, too.”

  “Playful spirit,” Laura says, and reaches for another samosa. She could eat the whole pile, she loves these things. She’s glad Trudy didn’t cook; the homemade samosas she’s tasted are never as good as a restaurant’s. Somehow they get too Americanized. The Velveeta factor, Brian used to say.

  “So I got to the restaurant,” Joyce says, and Trudy interrupts her, saying, “Wait a minute. How did you prepare?”

  “What do you mean?” Joyce asks.

  “I mean, how did you do your makeup?”

  “Oh. Well, it was subtle.”

  “Did you use the expensive stuff?”

  “Of course I used the expensive stuff. Chanel.”

  “Jewelry?” Trudy asks.

  “Diamond studs, a gold bangle bracelet.”

  “Did you wear your Spanx?” Laura asks.

  Joyce looks down at her plate. “No.”

  “No?” Trudy says.

  “No, because I…Because I thought, What the hell, what if…?”

  “True,” Trudy says. “Not the kind of thing you want a guy to tear off you.”

  “They need to put lace on those things,” Laura says, around a mouthful of biryani.

  “Even then,” Joyce says. “But anyway, I walked into this restaurant—terminally family, but kind of cute—and right away I spotted him, sitting there in his yellow shirt, reading the newspaper. I spotted him right away. I walked up to the table and said, ‘My God, Roy Schnickleman!’ and I leaned over to kiss his cheek, and the man pulled back from me, a little alarmed, and I saw that it wasn’t Roy at all.”

  “That’s the part we were laughing about,” Trudy says.

  “Now you’re all caught up.” She cracks open another beer, and Laura does, too. Then Joyce does.

  “Finally I saw the real Roy. He was sitting at a corner table, and he was quite a bit heavier and he was wearing a toupee, I could tell from across the room.”

  “Oh, God,” Laura says. Bald is bad enough, but a girl can work with that. Memories of Telly Savalas and all. But a rug. Dead end.

  “He leaped up and grabbed my hand and went to kiss my cheek, and we ended up bumping heads. But it was sweet, you know. It was cute.

  “Then we start talking, and it wasn’t awkward at all, we just blabbed and blabbed and blabbed. I was watching his face, and I saw it kind of go back and forth from how he was to how he is. It was weird. His eyes are still beautiful. Everything else, well…I could see that he thought I was still attractive, and at one point I got this image of us making love all those years ago. I remembered the first time we did it, I accidentally snorted when we were humping away, and then I was just so embarrassed. Neither of us said a word, we just kept at it, but then he started snorting with every thrust, just to make me feel better, you know.”

  The women laugh, and Trudy begins rhythmically snorting.

  “Yes, like that,” Joyce says, “but you know, it was great, it broke the tension, and we had a lovely afternoon.”

  “It was daytime when you did it?” Trudy asks.

  “Well, yes. Yes, it was daytime, we used to do it in the daytime all the time in those days. Remember when our bo
dies looked good in daytime?”

  “Oh yeah,” Trudy says.

  “It was daytime, and we had Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway on the stereo, and I think we made love four or five times in a row.” She stares into space, sighs deeply.

  “But anyway, Roy said he had a big crush on this woman, and he was having a hard time working up the courage to ask her out.”

  “At this age?” Laura asks, and Trudy says, “Oh, come on, Laura. Some things never change.”

  “I asked if there was anything I could do to help,” Joyce says, “and he was just so grateful. He said she was a cashier at Wal-Mart and she was working right now, we could go and see her and I could maybe tell her what a good guy he is. I said sure, what the heck, I needed some things anyway.”

  “Never shop at Wal-Mart; they’re unfair to their workers,” Trudy says, and Joyce says, “Oh, stop. It was a social emergency. I had to buy something; it wouldn’t be polite to meet her at her store and then not buy something.”

  “That’s not true,” Trudy says. “Do you think that’s true, Laura?”

  Laura finishes chewing her naan, then says, “I guess it depends on how the woman feels about Wal-Mart.”

  “When you’ve finished your discussion on microeconomics, let me know,” Joyce says.

  “Not microeconomics, ethics,” Trudy says.

  “Isn’t it more etiquette than ethics?” Laura asks.

  Joyce sighs loudly, and Laura says, “Sorry. Go on.”

  “Thank you,” Joyce says.

  The phone rings, and Trudy says, “Forget it, forget it, let the machine get it, keep talking,” but then they hear that it’s Trudy’s daughter so she has to take it. Laura and Joyce hear her say, “Is everything all right?” Laura’s mother-in-law used to say that; each and every time she called, the first thing she said was, “Is everything gall right?” As though there were a liaison between the “g” of “everything” and the “a” of “all.” She was a very nice woman, Rose Goldstein, Laura liked her almost as much as her own mother.