The Confession Club (ARC)

by Elizabeth Berg

  “And as for it being odd behavior,” said Leah, “you don’t know the half of it. When you get older, you do start acting old and funny. And wearing Poise pads.”

  Rosemary’s mouth hung open. If a woman could still look attractive with her mouth hanging open, Rosemary did. Then, “Oh, my God,” she said softly. And with tears trembling in her eyes, she said, “I don’t think I want to live anymore. If this is what’s going to start happening, maybe I’ve had enough.”

  There followed such a ruckus, such a loud consensus of outraged disapproval, that Rosemary folded her arms over herself, ashamed, and said no more.

  “You know, Rosemary, that wasn’t really much of a confession,” said Toots Monroe.

  Toots is stout and practical, a devotee of pastel-colored pants suits and jewel-eyed animal pins, and she’s ever cheerful. She’s forty-seven and looks a good five years younger—great skin, great blond hair that she wears in a long bob with side bangs. She is the newly elected president of the town council, and has about her an air of can-do. It’s comforting. It’s like being around a man who knows how to fix everything, only you don’t have to put up with a man. (Toots’s own often-voiced position on men is that they should be kept in closets and taken out only when needed, like a vacuum cleaner.) She is sometimes a little tone-deaf, but there is no one who doesn’t like Toots. She’d never do anything to hurt anyone on purpose, and if you need anything, she’s the one to ask.

  Toots told Rosemary, “A confession is when you talk about something you did wrong. Refusing to pay for something that didn’t taste good—well, putting the cookies back on the shelf—was not really a sin, it was just tacky.”

  Rosemary reached under her chair for her purse. “I have to go.”

  “No you don’t,” Joanie said. “You’re just mad. And embarrassed. Let’s talk this through.” And so they did. And then Leah offered a bona-fide confession, which was that she used to steal money from the collection basket. She would pretend she was putting something in, but she was taking something out.

  “That’s pretty bad,” said Karen Lungren, who was, after all, married to the minister over at Good Shepherd. But when Karen asked what kind of church and Leah said, “Catholic,” Karen said, “Oh, well, that’s okay then.”

  Karen is the youngest member of Confession Club, at thirty-five. She is an athletic and highly disciplined woman who is for the most part rather quiet and circumspect. She’s seemingly proper as can be, one of those to always fold her napkin into an exact square after she has finished using it. You feel she makes her bed right after she gets out of it. But every now and then she lets slip the f-bomb and then she apologizes profusely. And the group always forgives her, though they do always make her put a dollar in the Whoops! jar. (Whenever they get to twenty dollars, they give the money to the library to buy new books.)

  On the day of Rosemary’s confession, just as the women were getting ready to leave, Karen said, “You know, I’ve been thinking. I move that we open our confessions to things we’re generally ashamed of. Like, not necessarily a sin per se, but something that gets in there and just really bothers you.”

  “Well, exactly,” said Rosemary.

  “All right,” said Toots. “There is a motion on the floor to open up confession to plain shame. Do I have a second?”

  “I second the motion,” said Anne, wearily.

  “All for?” Toots asked. All the women raised their hands.

  “Opposed?” Toots asked, and Joanie said, “Toots. We all raised our hands!”

  “The motion has passed, and we are adjourned,” Toots said, and banged her spoon like a gavel.

  Oh, they knew they were mostly silly. They enjoyed being silly, because sometimes you just needed to take a load off. For Pete’s sake. You just needed a little levity, and you needed to be on the right side of the yellow light shining out from the dining room window, you needed to be in that pocket of place where you were unequivocally welcome and could at any time slip right out of your shoes.

  In the Nighttime

  Like most people, Iris Winters has nights when she can’t sleep. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, Iris knows better than to fight against it. She might be a little girl again, her mother standing at the bottom of the stairs and yelling up for Iris to get out of bed for school. No fighting against that, either, no matter what the reason. Iris’s mother was a no-nonsense blue-blood Brahmin whose advice on everything from a headache to heartache was always the same: Oh, you’ll be all right.

  Usually, Iris’s treatment for insomnia is simple enough: a cup of tea drunk at the kitchen table and a glancing around at the way things get transformed in the moonlight; the curtains seem made of fairy cloth. Other times, she reads or does a little cleaning, tossing out things like the absurdly tiny safety pins used for attaching price tags that Iris’s daytime mind tells her will come in handy for something. (You can take the thrifty New Englander out of New England …)

  Tonight, though, Iris sits in a bedroom chair with Homer, her cat, in her lap, looking at the empty street below, mindlessly twisting a strand of hair. She is plagued with ill-formed questions about where she is and why, with worries about how she will end up. Things about which she is unalterably sure in the daytime become slippery on nights like this; even the simple joy of teaching her baking classes in Mason, this tiny town she now calls home, disappears, and a cynical voice at the back of her brain snickers at the very idea. It is as though a lynchpin that holds her to her place on earth has been snatched away, and she is free-floating and full of doubt. In addition to that, a kind of longing she has experienced all her life bears down upon her. It is a longing not for something she can name, but for something she cannot.

  So what does Iris do? She grabs her notebook and plans another class. When Chocolate Met Peanut Butter. Suddenly, thunder rumbles, and rain begins drumming on the roof. She stops writing to look up. It is a primal response, Iris thinks, something humans will never lose, the way we look up when the rain comes. We’ve seen it before, but every time is different. It is as though we ask ourselves, What will happen this time?

  Man on the Run

  In the old place, John knew all the routines. That’s because in Chicago, John created all the routines. Late-morning breakfasts at the McDonald’s on State Street, where they’d let you be, an upstairs table by the window that the six of them squeezed around: Proud Mary, because she was proud of nothing; Fred Astaire, who couldn’t walk without tripping; Hairy, who was bald; Genius, who wasn’t one; Stretch, who was four feet eleven; and John, who would not tolerate nicknames, having endured quite enough of them growing up. When someone suggested he could at least use “Sarge” as a nickname to honor his service in Vietnam, John offered only a look.

  But yes, breakfast at Mickey D’s, sharing an assortment of whatever their pooled resources could get them. Then off to the library, where they could spread out. You could read the paper or magazines or books or screw around on the Internet. You could attend a lecture—on a dare, John had once attended one on opera, but you know what? It was kind of great. The guy giving the lecture had hands that shook. John could relate to him. The songs he played for them—arias—were so beautiful they twisted you up a bit. You could also take a free class, though only Hairy ever did that—one Christmas he made a gingerbread house that he shared with the rest of them after he’d eaten the roof and most of the gumdrops, in private.

  For people without a home, the library was Mercy Land. You could warm up or cool off. You could sit in a comfortable chair. You could clean up a bit, though you had to be careful about that. They didn’t like homeless people cleaning up in the bathroom. They didn’t like homeless people wrapped in layers of clothes like mummies, with boots made from garbage bags and duct tape; it scared the little kids. They also didn’t like homeless people who smelled, and if you smelled bad enough you would be quietly asked to leave. They’d give
you a list of places where you could shower, but what they maybe didn’t know is if you showered in such places, good luck.

  John grew up with a mother who insisted on his looking neat as a pin. They weren’t rich, not by a long shot; they weren’t even comfortable. But his mother made sure he was clean and his clothes were pressed, and she kept him healthy, too. He saw a doctor for regular checkups and for any illness, even if his parents didn’t. He went to the dentist twice a year—one Dr. Cornelius Standard, a man who helped maintain his business by handing out lollipops to kids at the end of every visit. And for all the complaints you could make about the U.S. Army, John did get good healthcare there. So when his life fell apart and he ended up on the street more often than not, he still kept clean. Oftentimes, he looked better than people he knew who did have homes. He would spend money on a laundromat, and he’d sweep up in a barbershop in exchange for a haircut and a shave. He took advantage of dental schools offering free services—free but for the gratitude you were expected to offer—and the results were nearly always pretty good. As for bathing, he had secrets he didn’t share with the others, who would have ruined things for him. For example, some hotels had swimming pools that could serve as a bathtub—early afternoons, those pools were almost always empty. You walked into those hotels like you knew what you were doing—that was key. Like you knew what you were doing and you were in a hurry and a bit perturbed, like everyone else. Sometimes you could steal things off a maid’s cart, but that was advanced.

  Occasionally—often, even—a woman would take him home to her apartment and he’d shower there. “You get by on your looks, don’t you?” one woman asked him. She was a social worker, a nice person. He allowed as how he did get by that way. Sometimes.

  You weren’t supposed to sleep in the library, although many people did sleep there. If you slept too long or snored too loudly, or if you slept in a bathroom stall, you got kicked out. In the summer, it was no big deal: go out and find a place in a park. In winter, you tried hard to stay awake: Take little walks. Chat up a sympathetic librarian (though you had to be careful to notice when they’d had enough, when they leaned back, or shifted their gaze to over your shoulder, or said, “Okay, then, so …”). You could sit in a group with other homeless people and have a conversation, although most times those “conversations” were just bitching sessions about the red tape involved in getting anything you were entitled to from the government.

  When the library closed, there were some bars they could go to. Proud Mary always went in first: she was a remarkably pretty woman who also believed in keeping clean, so she parted the seas. The rest of them followed like connected cars on a train. Some of the bars they went to had free food: hardboiled eggs; cheese and crackers. If you didn’t take too much, you could have some with a beer that you could nurse for a good half hour.

  Now and then, John donned his custodian’s uniform, a brown cotton jumpsuit with MANNY embroidered on it that he found in someone’s trash. Before security tightened, he wore it into schools when they were having PTO meetings, and he would help clean up afterward—miraculously, no one the wiser. Only once, someone who was also cleaning said, “You new here?” and John nodded. That was the end of it. There were always cookies left over at PTO meetings, which he was always offered, and if the coffee they served was in one of those handy cardboard containers, he was allowed that, too.

  Sometimes he would go to funeral lunches held in the basement of churches, though in those instances he wore a dark, somber suit he bought for six dollars at Goodwill—an investment that paid off. A lot of good food was served after a funeral, much of it even homemade—the deceased’s favorite foods and whatnot. But sometimes grief made people eat a lot, grief and the realization that life really did come to an end. They’d go back to the food table again and again: I’m alive! But at one funeral, no one seemed much in the mood to eat, and he’d brought the group tin pans of salad and macaroni and cheese and lasagna, trays of roast beef and turkey sandwiches, all kinds of cupcakes, even plastic cutlery. (“You want to take this home?” the women who were dishing the stuff out told him. “Makes for an easier cleanup for us!” And then when John thanked them, they said, “Sure, sorry for your loss.”)

  It was hard to keep the food looking nice when it was shoved quickly into plastic bags, as he did that day, but most of the group didn’t mind. Everyone was long past being picky about such things, except for Genius. He was like a toddler, didn’t like different kinds of foods touching. And once, when someone offered to buy him lunch at a sandwich place, he said he was hoping for tacos from down the street. He got them, too; that was an earth angel he ran into that day. Most people you hit up for money to buy a meal ignored you. Sometimes when you said, “Spare change?” they’d say, “No thanks,” and smirk, and elbow the person they were walking with.

  It was usually midday when his group asked for money—nights were too crowded and funky. Genius and Stretch liked to stand on the ramps leading to and from the highway. People seemed to feel scared for you there, and were more likely to call you over and give you something. They told John that one guy who had staked out a place on the ramp brought his dog along, a little beagle mix, and he’d sit the dog on the concrete median, where he effectively begged for the man because the dog was so cute. Lots of people gave that guy money. Maybe they should get a dog, John’s group said, and John said no.

  They ate at Taco Bell. Subway. The Portillo’s on Clark Street. Certain diners had cheap soup and you could ask for extra crackers. People coming from restaurants might give you their doggie bags. And sometimes a do-gooder would take you into a restaurant they were going into and buy you a meal and then sit with you while you ate. The danger there was they could pepper you with questions, try to get you to go to this social-service place or that, try to find out exactly why you weren’t working, just generally be in your business. Occasionally they wanted to buy drugs and figured you’d know how and where. And that maybe, given that you’d just eaten courtesy of them, you’d buy the drugs for them. One time, some guy who said he was a famous writer took Proud Mary to a fancy restaurant on Michigan Avenue after he bought her an entire outfit—a red top, white pants, sandals, a purse, even silver hoop earrings and a bracelet—at Nordstrom’s. He’d made her miserable with his oozing empathy and penetrating gaze. Halfway through the meal, she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, changed back into the street clothes she’d stuffed into her bag, and cut out. She left all the things the guy had bought her in the bathroom. Everyone approved but Hairy, who wouldn’t let up on her and kept saying, “You prolly could have sold them things back to Nordstrom’s, Mary!”

  All in all, it wasn’t worth it to accept gifts that were too big. Eat with your friends or alone. Or don’t eat. They all got used to that. One day, bonanza; the next day your gut ached from hunger. “Can your stomach try to eat itself?” Genius asked once. It didn’t seem like an entirely unreasonable question.

  Now John is in a new place. He got restless and hit the road. He left without saying a word and hitched as far as this little town called Mason, in Missouri, where he saw an abandoned farmhouse from the road. He asked the trucker to let him off, and he’s been staying here for a week now. Best place he’s ever found. The house is far off the road and mostly obscured by overgrown lilac bushes in full bloom. Birds are everywhere, singing their hearts out every morning, including a bachelor mockingbird, who courts the ladies with his playlist of imitative calls.

  Best of all, John can bathe in the creek that runs behind the house. Oh, it’s cold when you sit in it, but you are out soon enough, and he has a blanket he could wrap up in to dry off. He washes his clothes in the creek after he washes himself, and lays his wrung-out shirts and dungarees on the fence to dry in the fresh air and sunshine. Deluxe.

  Last evening, just before the sun went down, John lay in the grass and watched a gaggle of geese in a wobbly chevron honking their way across a blood-red sky, cloud
s like puffs of smoke, and it was the prettiest thing he’d seen since his group in Chicago went to the Art Institute on free day and John settled in before Monet’s haystacks.

  Behind the house is a barn where the sweet-sour scent of livestock still lingers, and behind that, fenced-in fields where wildflowers have taken over: beardtongue, tickseed, prairie clover, button snakeroot. It’s good to see untended things thriving.

  When John was in his old life and married for the little while he was, he and his wife would talk sometimes about what was happening to the environment. Laura was such a sensitive soul; she would weep in despair, and John would shrug and tell her everything would be fine. Not for people, but for the earth. It would all come back. They wouldn’t be here, but the earth would come back, green shoots curling out of ruin, nature insisting upon itself. He found that comforting. She did not.

  He thinks about her less than he used to, but he still thinks about her a lot. When it snows, he thinks of how she liked the snow. When he sees baskets of apples at farmers’ markets, he thinks of her pies. When he sees a woman whose hair is that shiny brown, when he sees a woman singing to herself, when he sees striped socks or a woman deeply engrossed in a book or bent to speak to a child, he thinks of her. He tries to forget why she left him, but of course he will never forget that. Or forgive himself for it.

  He came to Mason with some money; he’s got just under a hundred bucks from a run of good days he had back in Chicago. A couple of days into his stay here, he walked into town and bought some tools and a can opener at Smith’s Hardware, and he bought some seeds and tomato starter plants, too. He had to—those seed packets with their beautiful images of food, the tomato plants nearly straining to bust out of their tiny containers, and him being on a farm with all that land.

  They were nice people at the hardware store, as relaxed and easy as their name. After he was done there, he went to the barbershop, then ate breakfast at Polly’s Henhouse. They gave him the eye a little at Polly’s, but he sat respectfully at the counter for his English muffin and black coffee. He didn’t pocket any jam or butter, though he had planned to. But some black-haired waitress named Monica seemed to have eyes in the back of her head. Nice enough, real nice, in fact, but eyes in the back of her head, one of those don’t-piss-me-off types. The prices were reasonable, and the food was good. He’d mind his manners so he could come back. Salisbury steak was on the menu. Thanksgiving sandwiches. Chicken croquettes in yellow gravy.