The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  Trudy says, “Okay, well, let me call you back, I’ve got dinner guests, I love you, good-bye.”

  “You’re never free once you have children,” Joyce says after Trudy returns to the table, but there is a note of satisfaction in her voice, and Laura believes her friends are in agreement that there is a sweetness—a great solace, really—in having your children need you.

  “So,” Trudy says, “you went to Wal-Mart to meet the princess.”

  “Yes,” Joyce says. “And guess how we got to Wal-Mart?” She’s pretty excited, and so the answer is obvious.

  “Motorcycle!” Laura and Trudy say together, and Joyce squeals, “Yes, a big hog! With all this stuff on it!”

  “Did you sit on one of those high little back seats and wrap your arms around him and let the wind blow in your hair?” Laura asks.

  “Yes, no helmets, so Easy Rider, but listen to what happened: His toupee blew off!”

  Trudy spews beer out of her mouth, then, laughing, says, “Gee. I always wanted to do that. Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “So,” Joyce says, “he pulled over and retrieved his hair and shoved it in his jacket pocket and said, ‘I’ll put it on when we get there.’ And I thought, Okay, golden opportunity, and I said, ‘Roy? I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but I think you look way better without it.’ And he put his hand on top of his head, all shy, and said, ‘Really?’ and I told him yeah, I honestly think women prefer bald to toupee. He said yeah but the only way she’s seen me is with hair. I suggested, gently, that she probably knew it was a toupee, and he blushed and then I felt terrible and I said well, maybe she knows. He said he’d decide what to do when we got there, and when we did get there, sure enough, he put the damn thing on. Right out in the parking lot. And I straightened it for him, because the man does not know how to put on a hairpiece, and then we went into Wal-Mart. And I saw her right away.”

  “Uh-oh,” Laura says. “This sounds familiar.”

  “No,” Joyce says, “this time I was right. She was such a stereotype. She had fake blond hair all ratted up, a low-cut V-neck shirt, and blue eye shadow. Killer figure. Killer.

  Stomach flat as a pancake and a real nice butt.”

  “Yeah, well, how old?” Trudy asks.

  “About fifty, fifty-five.”

  “Damn,” Trudy says, and looks down at her stomach.

  “So Roy went over and talked to her, and she looked at me and waved and then she put the Closed sign on her register and came over. And I was thinking, Wait a minute, how can I talk about what a nice guy Roy is, I don’t even know him anymore. We went over to the little café and got coffee, and Roy and she took out cigarettes—she said she smokes there all the time even though you’re not supposed to. She leaned over and looked up at Roy when he lit her cigarette and then she French-inhaled.”

  “Oh, she likes him,” Trudy says.

  “Right, that’s what I thought,” Joyce says. “But then Roy said he was going to go pick up a few things, why didn’t we ladies just relax, and when he walked away, the woman, Cyndi was her name—as her necklace announced—anyway Cyndi said, ‘God Almighty, I wish that man would stop coming around.’ And I said all this stuff about how he really is just the sweetest guy. I told her about how we were friends so many years ago when he was a musician and played guitar in a rock band. Cyndi said, ‘He played guitar?’ and I said oh yes and I said he was really really good, which he wasn’t, but what the hell, and I told her about this one time when I was at his apartment and a whole bunch of beautiful girls came over looking for Roy—groupies. True story. That was the night I first slept with him. Of course I didn’t tell Madame Blue Eye Shadow that part. Cyndi said she once heard a musician say that he would rather be blind than deaf, and she always thought that was bullshit, but maybe it wasn’t. She looked over at Roy, hanging around in the candy aisle, acting like he wasn’t watching us, and she said, ‘Listen, he’s a nice guy, but…Can I be honest with you? I just could never go out with a guy that wears a rug.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t I let him know you’d prefer he not wear it, and then would you let him take you out to dinner? Just once?’” She looked at him, and it was the most unfortunate thing because he was bending over rifling through the candy on the lowest shelf and it was such an unflattering view. But then she blew out some smoke and kind of smiled and said, ‘Aw, hell, I’ll tell him to come over for dinner tonight. The only thing is, I got five kids. Three still at home and one of ’em’s retarded. Most men, they’re completely freaked out by that. Think he can handle it?’ And you know, I looked at her in a completely different way then, and I said yeah, I thought he could. For sure, I said, and I really believed it and I hoped it was true. She said, ‘How about a hot dog?’ I was full from lunch, but I said sure and reached for my wallet and she put her hand over mine—lord, ten-inch nails, I swear—and she said, ‘I get them free.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, and she said, ‘Yeup. I’ve worked here for a while, now, so…’

  “On the way home I told Roy to lose the rug, and he said okay. And I told him to let me know what happened, so he called the next day and said, ‘No go.’ And I said, ‘Aw, really? Why?’ And I was thinking, I’ll bet it was her kids after all, and I was feeling so bad for Cyndi. But what he said was, ‘She doesn’t like that I have four kids.’ Can you believe it?”

  “Oh, come on,” Trudy said, “that was just an excuse.”

  “I guess,” Joyce says. “But I told Roy I’d go out to dinner with him, and he suggested we start a book club and meet once a month to discuss our choices, and I said okay.”

  “So what are you reading first?” Laura asks.

  “Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry.”

  “His choice, I assume,” Trudy says.

  “Nope. Mine. His choice was Jane Eyre.”

  Trudy frowns. “Get out.”

  “I’m serious. He said he thought it might help him relate better to women.”

  “I always meant to read Lonesome Dove,” Laura says.

  “You can join,” Joyce tells her.

  “Can I?” Trudy asks, and Joyce says of course, first meeting is May eighth, seven o’clock, Chucky’s, they can all ride together and won’t it be nice for Roy’s ego to be surrounded by attractive women.

  “Well. What a nice story,” Laura says. “I love the ending. I’ve really been wanting to join a book club.”

  “And Joyce didn’t buy anything at Wal-Mart!” Trudy says. She pours herself a glass of beer. “Can I go next? Because my story is so different from yours.”

  Laura makes an expansive gesture—Be my guest.

  “Okay, so as you know, I called Don Christianson. But before I tell you about our lunch, I have to tell you about when I dated him. I was twenty-eight years old and thinking about marrying Jim, but I wasn’t quite sure. I signed up to take this adult education class in dream interpretation, and that’s when I met Don. He was really handsome, but he didn’t have much of a personality—real quiet, not at all witty, which Jim was, and I was very much attracted to witty guys. To mean guys, too, of course, which Jim also was.

  “Anyway, in the class, we were supposed to report our dreams every week, and then we would all talk about them. What was really interesting was that, after a while, you saw a pattern; people would dream about the same kinds of things over and over. It got so that you would have been able to tell who had had the dream without anyone identifying themselves. All of us were working out different things: my dreams showed I was obviously ambivalent about getting married, and Don was struggling with whether he should quit his job and pursue his art full-time. He kept dreaming of fish, and then he began to paint them.”

  “Say, he was exciting,” Joyce says.

  “No, but his paintings were absolutely magical,” Trudy says. “He brought them to class. They were watercolors of all these different kinds of fish, and I had never understood until then how very beautiful fish were. I told Don I wanted to buy the lesser amberjack from him—its colors were all these muted pastels:
apricot and blue and pink and silver—and he said he’d give it to me if I’d go out with him three times.”

  “Bold for a shy guy!” Laura says.

  “I know. And I really didn’t want to go out with him, but I wanted that painting. So I said okay. For the first date, he took me out to dinner to a really nice French place—I was way underdressed—and then, just as the sun was going down, he brought me to this tiny little park by the river which I had never seen. It was called Lucy Wilder National Park, and it had a lovely wrought-iron entrance with the name on it, and it was about the size of my living room. I mean, tiny, tiny park! With all these pretty flowers growing all over the place! I put a whole bunch of them in my hair, and they kept falling out, I remember Don said, ‘And the forecast tonight is for intermittent flowers.’ I told Don I’d never even heard of this park and yet I lived only a few blocks away, and I asked him how he’d found it. He said, oh, he just walked around and he found things. He found things, and interesting things happened to him all the time, I really should hang out with him, and I’d see.”

  “Sounds like a pretty cool guy,” Laura says. “What did you not like about him?”

  Trudy shrugs. “I just didn’t like him. Who knows why? Sometimes you just don’t like someone even when you should. You can’t force these things.”

  “It’s pheromones,” Joyce says. “You have to like their smell. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

  “Anyway,” Trudy says. “On the second date, when he took me to an art gallery, I all of a sudden got really annoyed. I thought, I don’t need you to show me art. I started being really nasty to him. He would say something about a painting, and I’d say nothing back. He asked at one point if I’d like to go sailing with him for our third date, and I said no, I hated boats, but the truth is I love to be on a sailboat; it’s one of the most peaceful things in the world to me. I just kept getting nastier and nastier, and finally I decided it wasn’t worth it to go out with him again, the hell with the painting, the hell with fish. So I told him, I said, Look, it’s pretty clear this is not working for me, so let’s just cut bait now, ha, ha. And he got all sad and put his hands in his pockets and nodded and said, Okay, that’s okay, he understood, thanks anyway for going out with him the two times I did. There was another couple in the gallery, and they were giving me the stink eye something fierce—of course I deserved it. And I just wanted out of there, so I said I’d get myself home, I was thinking I’d take the bus. He took my hand and said, ‘I’m sorry this didn’t work out,’ and I snatched it back and said, ‘Yeah, have a nice life.’”

  “Boy, you really were terrible to him,” Joyce says.

  “I know,” Trudy says. “I know. And then, listen to this, I turned on my heel and started to strut out of there and I fell down. I don’t know what happened, I think the floor was really slick or something, but I fell down and broke my ankle! It hurt like hell and I started crying. And Don picked me up and carried me out of there and hailed a cab because it was faster than walking to his car, and he told the driver to go to the nearest ER. He waited for me to get seen, and the whole time, I was bitching about how much it hurt and how I didn’t have any insurance and I didn’t have any money. Not a word about ‘Thank you, Don.’ When they called me into the treatment room, he asked if I wanted him to come in with me, and I said, ‘No, I do not.’ Then when I came out, he was gone. The nurse at the reception desk said he’d left a note for me. I still have that note. He had paid the bill for me, and his note said, Think of this as something one friend does for another. Repay me as you can, and you can start by taking care of yourself in every way.”

  “Are you kidding?” Joyce asks.

  Trudy shakes her head. Tears tremble in her eyes. “And I never paid him back one cent. I dropped out of the dream class, and I never saw him again. And I was sitting around one day and I thought, I’m going to find Don Christianson and apologize to him and pay him back the money. I remember the amount exactly, it was two hundred dollars and eleven cents. So I called a few numbers and found him, and he was such a sweetheart, still; just so warm, and he said of course he’d like to see me, in fact he had something for me.”

  “The fish painting,” Laura says.

  “No,” Trudy says, “it wasn’t that. That’s what I thought it was going to be, too, but it wasn’t that.”

  “Is he married?” Joyce asks.

  “Yes.”

  “So was it his wife he had for you? Did he want to show you the beautiful and kind person he ended up marrying who is a much better human being than you?”

  “Thank you,” Trudy says.

  “Well, I mean, I’m just looking at this from his point of view. How sweet vengeance would be for him.”

  “I met him at Paisano’s, over on the East Side,” Trudy says. “And his wife didn’t come, but his kids did. Two beautiful adult children, a boy and a girl, wonderfully good-looking, and obviously they just loved their dad to death. But it was more than that. They were very solicitous of him, and all of the sudden I thought, Oh, God, he’s sick. He didn’t look sick, except that he was quite thin, but then he was thin all those years ago, too. But he ate almost nothing, and finally he revealed that he had stomach cancer, and it wasn’t going too well. His kids just sat there when he told me this, being quiet and supportive—I mean, you could feel their love, and a kind of pride they had in him. I was wondering what he’d told them about me. I don’t think he said anything bad; they were awfully nice to me. Anyway, he said the treatment hadn’t helped and he was terminal now, just kind of trying to enjoy his last days, and he was so glad I’d called. He asked his children to get the car, told me he was sorry but he really had to go home now—I think he was starting to hurt. ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I said, ‘thank you for coming,’ and I reached for the check and he tried to take it from me and I said, ‘Don’t you dare, I still owe you for that hospital bill.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and imagine how much it is now, what with all the interest.’ And then he said he hoped I hadn’t felt bad about him paying that bill, he’d had a really good job, it had been no problem for him to pay it.”

  Joyce wipes a tear off her face, then laughs at herself.

  “Oh, get ready, there’s more,” Trudy says. “He said, ‘I told you I had something for you.’ And of course I was wondering where he had hidden the fish painting. But he reached in his wallet and pulled out a pressed flower. It was one that had fallen from my hair that day in the park. He put it in my hand and said, ‘It would mean a lot to me if you’d take care of this.’”

  “Oh, God,” Laura says, and now there are tears in her eyes, too.

  “What did you do with it?” Joyce asks, and Laura hopes Trudy didn’t throw it out.

  “It’s being framed,” Trudy says. “I found the most exquisite framing for it, and it will be ready on Monday. I’m going to keep it by my bed to remind me to…Well, to remind me to be careful. You know?” She swallows. “So. That was my date.”

  “Will you see him again?” Joyce asks in a blubbery voice, and Trudy says softly, “I don’t see how.”

  Joyce says, “I had this math teacher in junior high who really believed in me at a time when everyone else just called me stupid. And I was so cruel to her. I used to call her at home and hang up on her. I wrote a story that ridiculed her and published it in the school newspaper. I changed her name from O’Brien to O’Reilly, but of course everyone knew who I meant. She offered to stay after school to help me with algebra and I stood her up three times before she stopped offering. Why are we so cruel sometimes?”

  “You should call her and apologize,” Trudy says.

  “She’s dead.”

  Trudy picks up her glass and stares into it. “You know what? I think the reason we’re cruel sometimes is that we’re afraid we’re going to like something.”

  “That might be true,” Laura says. “I think there is a lot of fear in cruelty. You were ambivalent about marrying Jim; you were probably afraid of falling in love with Don, and so yo
u made sure you didn’t.”

  It is quiet at the table, but for sniffing sounds from Joyce. And then Trudy clears her throat loudly and says, “So. Laura. Did you have a date with the homeless man?”

  “We’re engaged!” Laura says, and then, “No, but I did go to see him, actually.” She tells her friends the story about the homeless man in as humorous a way as she can, omitting entirely the part about her ex and Cassandra, and soon they are all laughing again. Laura excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

  In the little powder room, she sits on the lid of the toilet and looks around. Trudy has a magazine rack holding mostly home décor magazines but also a copy of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. Laura would like to meet Nora Ephron. She has the idea, like so many other women, she supposes, that they would just hit it off, she would pick Nora up at her New York condo and they’d run down to the local deli and order blintzes and talk and talk and laugh and laugh. She would like to meet Anne Tyler and Alice Munro. She would like to meet Joni Mitchell, too, even though she admires her so much she’s afraid of her, and of course Laura wants to meet and befriend Oprah. She would like to be another friend that Oprah could trust; the woman needs more than just Gayle.

  Trudy has a little framed picture on the wall opposite the toilet, a cartoon picture cut out of the newspaper. It is a red spaceship surrounded by the black heavens of outer space, and there is one star that shines more brightly than the rest. It is this star the ship is moving toward. Someone in the spaceship is telling someone else to just trust him; so long as they steer toward that star, they’re fine, they won’t get lost. What the speaker doesn’t see is that, off to the side, en route to that star, there is a huge space monster waiting, mouth wide open, teeth long and sharp.

  Laura has a picture in her powder room as well, a miniature oil she and Brian splurged on one day when they were visiting Boston and went into a Newbury Street art gallery. The painting features a violin and sheet music resting on a table, and Laura can never look at it without marveling at how tiny everything is: the pegs on the violin, the dotted eighth notes on the staff. How could anyone have such a sure and steady hand? The painting had cost a lot of money at a time when she and Brian didn’t have much. They’d gone to get a cup of coffee before they bought it, they always used to do that, get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts before they made any major decision. They’d had their coffee and then gone back for the painting, and Brian had said, “Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, Happy Valentine’s Day, and Happy Mother’s Day for the next three years,” and Laura had said, “I know,” and she had been very happy.