The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “I’d be happy to hear it.”

  “In fact,” he says, “I have a radical idea. Let’s be the friends who only tell each other the truth, no matter what.” Rita says she likes the idea—she does!—and he goes on to tell her that he lives in a duplex on Dupont in South Minneapolis, that he has never been to Las Vegas or Paris, and that he was happily married for twenty-eight years, then widowed. He says, too, that when they had that turbulence—the worst he’s ever experienced—he got so frightened, he began to sweat profusely.

  “Bullets?” Rita asks, and he says no, just your basic salt water, and she laughs.

  “I really thought we might go down,” he says, “and I was thinking of writing a note to my children. But I didn’t know what to say, because I had too much to say. And then, after everything calmed down, I kept thinking about it, you know? What if I had only one sentence that I could say to my children? One sentence that tried to let them know everything I wanted to tell them. Something more than ‘I love you.’”

  “Interesting thing to contemplate,” Rita says.

  “What would you say to your child?”

  “Well, I have two, actually,” Rita says. “And no grandchildren on the way.”

  “Oh, you’ll love grandchildren,” Herman says. The cart has made its way to them, and he orders a scotch. Rita gets a beer. After he’s paid, Herman tells her, “I love a woman who likes beer,” and Rita says, “So do I.”

  “So what would your sentence be?” Herman asks.

  “Ummmm…You go first.”

  “All I could come up with was ‘You are the best part.’ Dopey, huh?”

  “I think it’s nice.”

  “Now you,” he says. “And remember, we’re the friends who tell the truth.”

  Rita takes a long swallow of beer. As soon as Herman suggested such a sentence, one had popped up in her brain as though coming out from behind a curtain where it had been waiting for a long time. She’s not sure she wants to share it. Still, she does. She says, “My sentence would be: ‘Please come to me for comfort.’”

  “Huh,” he says.

  She shrugs.

  “That’s…I mean, don’t they?”

  Rita looks at her watch. Plenty of time to tell him.

  Late Sunday morning, Rita awakens in her pitch-black Egyptian hotel room and opens the drapes. It is a child’s drawing of a day, the sky nearly navy, the clouds so puffy and well-defined, it seems they are there for the plucking. She is going to meet Herman at the buffet for breakfast, then they’re going to get in a little more gambling before they have to leave for the airport. They gambled last night, as they did on Friday night. Rita sticks with the slot machines, but Herman is game for anything, though he does not appear to be reckless—he seems to know when to cut his losses. Rita has lost fifty dollars thus far, no big deal in this city, but it is to her, as she expected to win immediately. She puts it to not having found the right slot machine, the one with cherries, in the middle of the row. She’ll find it today; she just knows it. And she’ll win. The victory will be all the sweeter, for having had to wait for it.

  After she showers, she puts on her lime green pantsuit and silk shell, and sprays herself liberally with perfume, Herman having told her how good she always smells. She applies her makeup with care and surprising accuracy, given the fact that there’s no magnifying mirror in the bathroom. Rita has taken note of the median age of the gamblers here; they really ought to put magnifying mirrors in the bathrooms. She packs her bags, regretting only a little the fact that she didn’t go to any of the shows after all; they were harder to get into than she’d thought; you really needed to call ahead. “Next time,” Herman told her, when they were at dinner last night. “Next time we’ll see Johnny Mathis and Jerry Seinfeld and Elton John and Bette Midler and Barry Manilow and Liberace.”

  “I don’t want to see Barry Manilow,” Rita said, and Herman said, “I don’t want to see Liberace,” and so she said okay, if they came out here again, she’d see Barry Manilow, even though he seemed to her the kind of performer who would pad himself, if Herman knew what she meant.

  “No,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” Rita said. “Remember John Denver?”

  Still Herman stared at her blankly.

  Rita leaned over and spoke quietly. “He put Kleenex in his crotch.”

  Herman looked down at his own crotch and then up at her. “Is there something wrong with that?” Then he said he knew what she’d been talking about all along and she punched him and he said not so hard, his padding might fall out. And then they ordered sinful desserts after what had been a sinful dinner: steak and lobster, potatoes au gratin, broccoli with hollandaise. Helping himself to the hollandaise, Herman had asked her if she knew CPR and she said she had just been going to ask him that very thing.

  In the lobby of the hotel, Rita sees Herman standing by a statue of a sphinx, waiting for her. He hasn’t spotted her, so she is free to take full appraisal of him. He is handsome, but in an unself-conscious way that she likes very much. He is manly, but sensitive. He is financially stable, but not rich. Last night, he had asked if he might kiss her good night. She said she wasn’t sure; she would hate to ruin what seemed like it was going to be a beautiful friendship.

  Herman said, “My seven-year-old granddaughter says it’s okay to kiss someone if they’re rich.” And when Rita asked if he were rich, he looked into her eyes and said, “Right now I am,” so what could she do, she kissed him. But first she said, “I have to warn you, I’m way out of practice.” He leaned over and very gently put his lips to hers and she grabbed the back of his head and pressed him hard into her and kissed him but good. And he stepped back and said, “Wow. If this is you out of practice, I’d love to see you when you’re not.”

  Rita licked her forefinger, put it on her rump, and made a sizzling sound, and they both laughed. Then Rita made her face get as serious as three Manhattans would allow, and she said, “I’m not kidding.” And Herman said, “I’ll bet you’re not.” He looked at his watch and winced. “Breakfast at noon?” he said, and she said, “Thank you.”

  He started to walk down the hall, then turned around to say, “Oh. One last thing I need to tell you the truth about. That French I spoke at the airport? I memorized that off some postcard. I don’t even know what it means. I don’t speak French.”

  “Well,” she said, laughing, “I know. I do speak it.”

  He put his hands in his pockets, embarrassed. Then he said, “Will you go to Paris with me sometime?”

  She nodded. Nodded again. Then once more.

  And now, the next day, free from the influence of alcohol, she looks at him and says yes all over again. Then she calls his name, and there is such gladness in his eyes as he walks toward her. Oh, Herman, she thinks, and then, just for the briefest moment, Oh, Ben. It is a sweet moment, though, only a step away from hearing Ben say, “Have a ball, kiddo.”

  “Here it is!” Rita says. She is standing in front of the slot machine she was destined to find. They are at Bellagio, the machine is in the middle of the row, there are cherries painted on it, and Rita has five quarters and about ten minutes left.

  Herman pulls up a stool and sits down beside Rita. She takes in a deep breath, and deposits the first quarter. Nothing. The second. Nothing. After she puts the last quarter in, she hits. Coins come rushing out, and Rita puts her big cup beneath the mouth of the machine and yells to Herman to go get another cup and she begins jumping up and down and then the coins abruptly stop. Rita looks into the cup, then up at Herman.

  “Well, how much?” he asks.

  She counts the quarters and tells him: seven dollars and seventy-five cents. “Seven dollars!” she says. “What can I do with that?”

  “Why don’t you call your children with it, and tell them your sentence?”

  “Oh, for—” Rita says. But then she thinks of Howard Bernstein telling her, “You’ll win big,” and wonders if he meant something besides money.
“Can you still do that?” she asks Herman. “Are there still pay phones?”

  “Of course,” Herman says, and they go off in search of one, the coins rattling in the cup.

  It isn’t until they get to the airport that they find a pay phone. It is in a dark corner, in a part of the building that it seems time has forgotten. It ought to be in black and white; that’s the feeling. Rita will call Alice’s number; she happens to know that Randy will be there, too; once a month the siblings and their spouses get together for Sunday dinner. She has sent Herman away to wait for her at the gate—this is private.

  She deposits over half of the quarters for the first three minutes, and when Alice answers, she tells her daughter where she is, and then says, “Honey? I don’t have much time, but I wonder if you’d put Randy on with you. I want to say something to both of you.” Her heart is hammering inside her.

  “Is something wrong?” Alice asks, alarmed.

  “No, no,” Rita says. “I just want to say something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.”

  When Randy comes on the line, Rita says, “Okay, I just…I would like to say something to both of you, this one thing. Just one sentence. I would like to say, Come to me for comfort.”

  Silence. “Please,” she adds.

  “What do you mean, Ma?” Randy asks. She can practically hear him scratching his head.

  “I mean…Well, I just want to offer you that. I always wanted to offer you that and it seems I never did. Or I did, but you didn’t know I did.”

  “Mom,” Alice says. “We knew that.”

  “It’s just that your dad was always the one to…He did everything, and I think it must have seemed to you that I didn’t care or something. But I always did.”

  “We knew that!” Alice says. “Mom!”

  “I know what she means,” Randy says. “He did always do everything before Ma had the chance. And remember that time we were both calling for her, I think it was a Saturday morning, and Dad came in and told us, ‘Shhhh! We don’t wake Mommy up! ’ Remember?”

  “No,” Alice says.

  “Well, I do, and I remember it made a big impression on me.”

  “Obviously,” Alice says. She’s miffed that she can’t remember something Randy does, Rita knows. Alice is proud of her usually infallible recall.

  A recorded voice asks for more money and Rita puts in more quarters. Alice says, “Are you on a pay phone?” and Rita says yes and they all for some reason start laughing and Rita thinks of how good it is to be in a family where certain things are shared, where there are common genes that make you all laugh about being on a pay phone.

  Randy says, “Mom, I think we thought of Dad as being both of you, you know? But we never doubted that you were there for us. Then or now.”

  Alice starts to sing: “You were always on our minds…”

  “Uh-oh, gotta go,” Randy says, but then he says, “Seriously, Mom, you were.”

  “You know what?” Alice says. “I can think of a million times you offered me comfort as a child. I’m going to make a list for you for your next birthday, would you like that?”

  Rita presses her fingers to her mouth and nods; then, realizing what she is doing, blurts out, “Yes! Yes, I would love that, Alice.”

  “You in on this, Randy?” Alice asks.

  “I…I’ll do something equivalent,” he says. And then,

  “Hey, how are you anyway, Mom? How was Las Vegas?”

  Again a voice asks for more money, and Rita puts in the little she has left. “It was wonderful,” she says. “And next I’m going to Paris!”

  “Good for you!” Alice says, and Randy says, “It’s about time you started living it up! Hey, eat some snails there. Eww.”

  “What a coincidence, that’s what we’re having for dinner,” Alice says, and then the connection is lost. Rita looks at her watch. She needs to go to the gate. She’ll call her kids back later. For now, she wants to hold what they’ve told her inside herself; she wants to unwrap it more.

  At the gate, she sits down in the seat Herman has saved for her. “How’d it go?” he asks, and she nods, tearful.

  “Told you,” he says.

  She turns to face him fully. “If I go to Paris with you, will you eat snails with me?”

  “Well, of course I’ll eat snails with you!” A beat and then, “Are they good?”

  “I don’t know!” She laughs. Leans back in her seat. Crosses her legs and e-x-h-a-l-e-s.

  As a surprise, Herman has upgraded them to first class. Rita sits in the wide seat and slips off her shoes. “Ahhh,” she says.

  “I only put us up here because there are fewer people to witness my cowardice if we encounter any turbulence,” he says. “If we start bucking around the sky again and I start weeping, remind me I’m a man, will you?”

  But it is Rita who becomes misty-eyed on the ride home. It is not because of any turbulence; rather, it is because of a series of thoughts she has as she stares out the window at the land far below. From this vantage point, it always seem to her that the earth is being offered up by a benevolent force that understands nothing belongs to anyone unless it belongs to everyone. She presses her forehead against the glass. There is the sky, there are the clouds, there is the red setting sun, there are the fields plowed with such touching precision. She glances over at Herman, who, in sleep, looks boyish, and she resists the urge to pick up his hand and kiss it.

  She thinks about being with him in Paris and sees them at an outdoor café just down the street from Notre-Dame, eating croissants after a night of very sweet—and also, my goodness, surprising!—intimacy. She is wearing a well-cut dress, beneath which is a bejeweled garter belt (here she begins to giggle and must put her hand to her mouth and stop, lest she awaken Herman), but yes, a garter belt and black silk stockings, French black silk stockings, a miracle of near-weightlessness in the hand, an elegant statement on a woman’s leg, and, as they are in enlightened Paris, an even more elegant statement for being on an older woman’s leg. She thinks about what Herman’s duplex might look like, if they might have goulash there one winter night and sit on the sofa watching old movies and holding hands. It is so possible, it seems as if it has already happened.

  She thinks of her children, comforting her on the phone, when she had called to ask to comfort them, and then she thinks of a diorama she saw at a natural history museum not long ago: a cavewoman holding a baby and the hand of a toddler, the father with a club over his shoulder heading off for his job of finding food. Rita stared at that scene, remembering the perfect weight of a baby, the feel of a toddler’s hand in her own, and wished time could hold still, so that she might have relished a little longer the sweetness of loving small children mixed with that fierce, unequivocal protectiveness. But time does not hold still, and Rita thinks now that it’s a blessing, she thinks that what it means is that your life is free to make or unmake every day. And then she thinks of a time she cut open a red pepper and stood studying the hundreds of seeds there, thinking that before her was the potential for creating many more red peppers—for free!—but what she was going to do was throw all the seeds away. It made her feel bad, it made her feel she was neglecting some essential message; but then she decided she was just premenstrual. That’s how long ago this incident happened, but she remembers the moment vividly. The red flesh of the pepper, the tiny white seeds, here you are. She looks again at Herman, bathed in the pink light of dusk, a nice light for people their age, and smiles. Then she thinks of the people in her retirement center and sees them for the generous and good-hearted people that they are: love makes you love. She will tell her next-door neighbor Elsie that she met a man, and Elsie will be so happy for her she’ll probably bake one of her sour-cherry coffee cakes to celebrate.

  Rita closes her eyes and gently rests her head against Herman’s shoulder. She thinks of Oscar Wilde’s purported last words: Either that wallpaper goes, or I do. For her part, she hopes she might say, “Would you mind lifting the shade a bit?
I want to see more.”

  P.S.

  Dear Ruthie,

  Surprise, it is me, Flo, again. Here’s why. When your mother asked me to send you my apple pie recipe she asked would I tell you one other thing and I plumb forgot about it until after I mailed the first letter. I came home from my walk to the mailbox and I set down on the porch to rest a spell and then I like to smacked my forehead. So what I’m going to do is send this little note separate as a kind of P.S. Do you know I didn’t know what P.S. stood for for the longest time. My husband told me when I was in my thirties. I was so embarrassed that I hadn’t known, but he said, oh hell, lots of us don’t know lots of things. Most of us don’t. What’s rare is to admit it. That was the thing about Terrence, you’d be feeling bad about this thing or that and whisht! he’d come along and hike up your spirits like a saggy pair of drawers. I sure do miss him.

  But anyway what your mother asked was, Do you think you can tell Ruthie how to have a dinner party without being such a nervous wreck? She said you get so nervous you never enjoy your own parties and that often times just before your guests arrive you feel like you’re going to throw up. I said the obvious thing. I said, Well, then why does she give dinner parties? And your mother said you had to sometimes, to pay back the people who had you over. She said I used to seem so relaxed when I had dinner parties. Which I was. But only because of two things that happened early on, which I am going to share with you as soon as I change into my nightgown and robe, I see the sun is setting sooner than I thought it would and I have a new routine now that I no longer have my little Frankie to walk at night, which is that I change into my nightwear at dusk. It’s a comfort to me to go to sleep when the sun does and get up with him, too. It’s like I have a roommate and it cuts into the loneliness I sometimes feel and you know loneliness is always worse at night, the way you walk past a window and there is your own face reflected back big as the harvest moon.

  Okay. Back now with my pen full of ink and my warmest nightgown and coziest slippers. Well I see I have leaked a little ink but I will let it go and hope you excuse me. You don’t see people using fountain pens very often anymore but to my way of thinking they are really the only way to write. I like the wet when it first comes out, I feel like I’m building something out of the raw material of India ink that dries into words and it is just one of those little accomplishments that, there, you need to stand back and wipe your hands on the dishtowel and feel proud.