The Confession Club (ARC)

by Elizabeth Berg

  Later in the morning, Iris goes next door to Abby and Jason’s house. She is about to walk away, having both knocked and rung the doorbell without anyone answering. But then the door opens, and there is Abby before her, her purse on one shoulder, an overstuffed fabric bag on the other. “Oh!” she says. “Iris! Did you ring the bell? I’m sorry I didn’t hear you; I had headphones on, and then I just grabbed all my stuff to rush out the door. But how are you?” She looks at the plate Iris is holding. “And what is that delicious-looking thing?”

  “It’s some chocolate soufflé. I just wanted to share a piece with you guys—it’s awfully good.” Then, “And also, I … Well, Maddy and I both were just wondering …”

  Abby’s face changes.

  “I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” Iris says.

  “You’re not exactly intruding. It’s just that I wasn’t going to tell everyone yet. But I guess you know, then, huh? How’d you find out?”

  “It’s just that Link has been doing all these experiments, and—”

  Abby laughs. “Link and his experiments!”

  Tears spring to Iris’s eyes and she blinks them away.

  Abby reaches out to touch her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  Is she okay? Iris waves her hand. “Allergies.”

  Abby looks at her watch. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get over to the bookstore. Link and Jason are there, but there’s a lot to do. We’re having an author event later this afternoon. A woman named Pamela Mills who writes poetry for children, and helps them to write their own. She also did that great book Lucky Ducky, such a sweet story. Do you know it?”

  Iris shakes her head no.

  “Well, it’s about a duck who is lamenting the fact that he has nothing, and he comes to see that he has a lot. Not a very good synopsis, but it’s a truly meaningful story for both kids and adults. The illustrations are superb, and she does them, too. Watercolors. I think a lot of people will come to the event because of that book, even though she wrote it years ago. I hope I can convince them to buy the new one.”

  “That’s great, Iris. I know Maddy and Nola are coming. Can I help you carry your stuff out to the car?”

  Abby looks at her fabric bag. “This? Oh, no, I’m fine. But thanks.”

  Abby starts down the walk, then turns around to Iris, still standing on the porch. “Will you put that cake in my refrigerator? The door’s unlocked.”

  “I will!” Iris says.

  Abby waves gaily, and Iris waves like her hand has been transformed into an overcooked noodle.

  She goes into Abby’s house and puts the cake in the refrigerator. There’s a note anchored on the fridge door, next to a photo of Link lying in the grass in the backyard, reading, his dog, Hope, asleep beside him. DR. RICHARDS, MONDAY, 3 PM. BRING MEDS.

  Poor Abby. Here she goes again. Iris looks around the kitchen: the chairs pulled up neatly to the table, the yellow curtains open, a wooden bowl of bananas and oranges and avocados centered on the table, a jar of almonds, half full, off to the side.

  When Iris walks past the living room to let herself out, she sees books piled up here and there, invitingly. A collection of framed photos on an end table next to a white orchid. A pair of sneakers, the laces done up and lined up evenly, as though they are ready to take themselves out for a walk. A framed photo on the wall above the bookcase: the skyline of Chicago. A small oil painting on another wall of … what? She starts to move closer, then stops. She shouldn’t be snooping this way.

  Iris goes back home and finds her duck-shaped cookie cutters. She’ll get some sugar cookies baked and decorated in less than an hour. Yellow cookies. Black eyes. Orange bills. A blue ribbon tied around each neck.

  While the cookies are baking, she makes four ham sandwiches and puts them in a picnic basket. She adds the last of the cake, some bottles of iced tea and water, a container of leftover potato salad, another of coleslaw. Some cherry tomatoes. Two bananas, two oranges. In case he’s hungry. In case she is. She’ll drop the cookies off at the bookstore, then drive out to the farm with her hopeful little hamper.

  In the car on the way to the bookstore, she thinks of Abby, going on with her life in spite of everything. She recalls a time she was a young girl, lying on the floor of her grandmother’s living room with her cousin Timothy. The adults had gathered in the kitchen for coffee and conversation; she and Timothy were given paper for making drawings. Her cousin was drawing a fighter pilot, he said. The plane was in the middle of the page, and the rest of the page was full of bullets falling like rain. Iris didn’t have a good feeling about the pilot’s survival. Neither did Timothy, apparently; he told Iris, “This guy’s going down.”

  Iris studied the pilot’s round face, small-seeming inside his aviator’s cap. He was looking out the plane’s side window directly at his audience. Two black dots for eyes. A straight line for a nose. And a huge smile, many square teeth showing.

  “Why is he smiling?” Iris asked, and Timothy drew back from his drawing and surveyed it. “It makes him feel better,” he said.

  Iris then returned to her own drawing: A house with a fence and a garden and a vase of roses in the window. A bird on a tree limb right outside the house, singing. She remembers she drew the notes the bird was singing, too. Nothing left to chance in Iris’s world!

  Another memory, more recent, of a friend in Boston who died of ovarian cancer. A few days after her diagnosis, Iris took her out for a drink. “What can I do for you?” Iris asked. And Hannah said, “Treat me like before.”

  So. Okay. She’ll drop off the cookies, nothing but smiles for Abby. She’ll buy a copy of the duck book to have signed. There’ll be someone to give it to; there’s always someone to give something good to.

  The Gift of Rain

  John switches the long blade of sweetgrass from one side of his mouth to the other. Three red-winged blackbirds are lined up on a branch of the river birch above him and they suddenly rise up together and fly away. Gone to roost. Dusk has arrived, and is bringing out colors one by one, the way it always does. He looks up into the trees above him, lets his eyes rove slowly over the leaves. He lingers on a bouquet-like grouping, where the last bit of sun illuminates their edges. And then, sitting just above those leaves, he sees an owl. The bird is motionless but for the blinking of its round eyes. Such sorrow in those eyes, if you ask John. Such acceptance. The owl sits, and only sits. A Buddha.

  The gifts of the out-of-doors. Even on the streets of Chicago in bitter winter, he preferred being outside. The people he ran with, they all did. Most of the homeless did. Easier to have sex, should the occasion present itself, without worrying about some supervisor happening upon you. And outside could hold more: tents and gigantic cardboard boxes that began to feel like luxury accommodations, with their relative privacy and their walls decorated with images torn from magazines or with disintegrating photos. Outside could hold more bags full of belongings and food; it could also hold more despair and confusion and anger—such emotions needed room. If you felt things roiling up inside you, you weren’t trapped a foot away from someone else. You could move.

  But here, being outside is like being in a cathedral. He watches as a full moon materializes, a thin black cloud draped upon it like a celestial negiligee. Then he sits up, wraps his arms around his knees, and listens to the creek run.

  He would like to stay here. He can be outside and be safe, and he can also have board-and-brick shelter when he needs it. But he’s not sure he can stay. No one has bothered him yet, but he knows he’s been seen. By Iris, of course, but also by a group of young men who tramped across the backyard recently and saw him in the kitchen. It probably won’t be long until word spreads and someone shows up to kick him out, if not arrest him.

  He came out to lie by the creek late this afternoon after he’d restuffed his mattress with some of the ancient hay from the loft in the barn, still good-smelling, if
a bit dusty. He’d also worked on trying to repair the stairs in the house, or at least make them safer. He used a fine, weighty hammer he’d bought at the hardware store and a half-full box of nails he’d found at the dump. He used boards that were left at a curb where workmen were rebuilding a house; they had welcomed John to them. They had also agreed to letting him work for them for cash next week. A lucky day, that one.

  After repairing the stairs, John had tended to his garden: weeding, staking, burying eggshells and coffee grounds at the base of the tomato plants, turning the earth to aerate it and to bring up some worms for the birds.

  He was weary, then, and he’d lain in the tall weeds, listening to the breeze making card-ruffling sounds in the leaves of the tree above him. He’d fallen asleep, and for the first time in a long time, he’d awakened from a bad dream. Vietnam, again, the long fingers of that awful time still able to reach out and grab him: Men wearing necklaces made of ears they’d severed from dead VC. The SOP corralling of frightened old men in the villages they burned, their thin beards trembling, their legs trembling, their hands. The young mothers holding babies, crying, the mothers of those young mothers dead-eyed, resigned to their fate. They had done nothing. Didn’t matter.

  He might have yelled or screamed in the dream—he doesn’t know. Proud Mary told him once that he always cried out in his sleep. He doesn’t think he always did; but what does he know?

  Poor Mary. He wonders about her. He worries about her. But he can’t go back to her, even in memory. Move on. It’s the only thing he does well.

  Although it must be allowed that his skills as a handyman are improving. At the dump, he found a book called Chix Can Fix. Title notwithstanding, he brought it home and studied it. Some of the things in there he already knew: drywall repair, removing a P trap, adjusting a strike plate; many, he did not. He put an ad up on a grocery store bulletin board for small fix-it jobs. Lo and behold, the next day, he got called by one Ollie Futters. He put in a new flapper in her toilet, fixed a jammed garbage disposal, and replaced a rotting board on the front porch. He has a date to paint the porch next week. White, except for the ceiling, which Ollie wants painted robin’s-egg blue. She’s got to be near ninety, living all alone, but doing just fine. Just as John was leaving, her ride came to pick her up for her weekly trip to Save More. The driver was named Tiny Dawson and it appeared he pretty much had the cab market sewn up in Mason. He gave John a ride to the grocery store so that his hitch back to the farm would be shorter, after making sure it was okay with Ollie. (“For heaven’s sake, do you even have to ask?” was her reply. And then, “What’s the difference if one more is along? Put him in the back and let me ride up front! Stuff another one in, if you want, I don’t care.”)

  Tiny was a really nice guy, and his wife, Monica, owns Polly’s Henhouse. John knows her, that fair-complexioned, black-haired woman with the sweet expression who is not about to take crap from anyone. He heard Tiny tell the old lady that Monica was in her last trimester now, and doing fine. That put him in mind of things he didn’t want to think about ever again.

  On the same bulletin board where John posted his notice, he saw an ad for a dog-walking service looking for help. He could handle that, but there’d be forms to fill out, his history dug into. He doesn’t want to deal with any of that ever again. He collects no Social Security. He renews minutes on cheap phones whenever he has enough cash.

  He gets up, stretches, and starts back toward the house. He’s got some beans, some brown bread, a tomato, a Snickers bar. Just as he’s going in the back door, he hears a car pulling into the driveway. He walks around front, and sees Iris stepping from her car, carrying a picnic basket. “Are you hungry?” she asks.

  He hasn’t called her since that glorious day. He hasn’t returned her calls. He’s been afraid to. But here she is. Not afraid of his afraid.

  He thinks of his mother as she lay dying, also unafraid. John was fifteen years old, sitting on the floor beside her bed. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. And so he simply sat, listening to her breathe, listening to the things she occasionally whispered to him when she rose to consciousness. “I’m all right, son, don’t you worry,” she said.

  “I know where I’m going.” She said that a lot, and usually she smiled when she said it.“Be a kind man,” she told him, many times. That and “Have hope.”

  Hope, he thought. He wondered what kind of hopes his mother had in marrying the man who backed her into the corners, away from the windows, to slap her. Who dragged her from her bed one night and threw her out into the snow in her nightgown. Locked the door and laughed. Then let her in and lay on top of her on the living room floor, eight-year-old John sitting at the top of the stairs, his fist in his mouth, his chest heaving. It was after that incident that his mother finally got the wherewithal to throw his father out. But then they were poorer than ever, and John’s mother had to work two jobs. He kept the house key in his lunchbox and told no one that he returned from school to an empty house where he spent such long hours alone.

  One of the last things his mother said to him was “Take risks, Johnny. Taking risks is just unmasking hope, you know. Things don’t always work out in this world. But they do often enough.” With no small effort, she raised herself up on one elbow. “’Tis how I got you, by taking a risk. And it was worth it, so it was.”

  “Seriously, I’ve got a lot of food in here,” Iris says. “Want some?”

  He comes back into the present like a man falling from the sky. He stares at Iris. “Yes,” he says.

  A woman in a white summer dress, a scarf in her long hair. Little pearl earrings like orbs of moon.

  As she walks toward him, fat raindrops start to fall, and there is a sudden smell of rust in the air. Startled, they both look up at the sky.

  “You always bring the rain, Iris. Are you a witch, then?”

  “Sometimes,” she says. And then, touching his arm, “It’s nice to see you. I’ve missed you.”

  A woman in a white summer dress, a scarf in her hair, curls damp at her temples. A woman smelling like flowers and like sun and now like rain, too. A woman whose skin might as well be made of velvet, whose heart seems open and unfettered.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he tells her, and his voice is very quiet. He clears his throat and speaks louder. “I’ve missed you but I was afraid to ask you to come. But here you are.” He shakes his head slowly, as if in wonder. “Thank you.”

  John has always been able to attract women. From the time he was a boy, he’s been complimented on his looks. He is still a good-looking man, he knows. And he knows he has a certain charm. He has used it often enough, for a specific kind of comfort. But this woman Iris has made her way into a different place inside him.

  A buddy he knew in ’Nam, Tim Glasser, was hospitalized not long after they both got home. Colon cancer. The night before his surgery, John went to visit Tim, who had a wife and a four-month-old baby. He told John, “I never was as scared in Vietnam as I am now.” John had nodded. He was still with Laura, then, and their new baby, and the thought of ever losing them was paralyzing. Tim’s treatment was successful, and on the day he was discharged, John went to pick him up. Before they left the room, the men wept in each other’s arms. A couple of months later, Laura took the baby and left. Restraining order, the whole nine yards. One time too many, which is to say three times, he’d awakened in the middle of the night and tried to strangle his wife, thinking she was VC. After the second time, Laura told him he had to go for counseling. He went once, then never went back. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say those things and he couldn’t hear those things. Not yet. Not yet, he kept telling her. And so one morning he came downstairs to a note on the kitchen table, and to the utter and complete silence of these new bombs falling all around him.

  But now he holds out his hand to Iris, and she takes it and follows him around back. Before they reach the door, she sli
ps in the mud that has already formed, and falls flat on her behind. “Oh, jeez,” she says, laughing. He sits on the earth beside her and, while the thunder rumbles low in the distance, pulls her to him and kisses her again and again.

  They have finished eating the oranges, and the peels lie in fragrant, loose circles on Iris’s belly. She is lying flat on John’s bed, and he is on his side, resting his head on one hand and looking down at her. The evening has gone lazy and expansive. They’ve talked about many things, including his time in Vietnam: the absurdity of the mission; the constant fear that was abated only by something worse, a sudden lack of caring anymore what happened to anyone, including himself; the treatment of the vets who came home to an ungrateful nation, especially contrasted with the applause and special benefits service people experienced these days. Now he says, “I don’t believe it’s ever going to be anything people can really understand unless they were there. But for some of us, there’s no escape. For some of us …” He shrugs. “Some of us came to Vietnam with nothing to grab on to when the shit came down. You know what I’m saying?”

  She nods. He’d told her quite a bit about his growing-up years, too.

  “Ever since I came home, I haven’t been able to quite make sense of things the way I used to. I haven’t had any desire to sort of incorporate myself into the lives I see being lived around me. I don’t … agree. I don’t have the same values. I don’t have the same wants and needs as most of the people I see around me. I don’t care about what they care about. I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.

  “Despite the way I was raised, I believed for a long time that people were fundamentally good. That life might be hard but it was full of promise and reward. My mother gave me that. With her, I felt like I was hiding in a corner with her protecting me with one arm and with the other pointing to a place beyond where we were now, where it was good. Where things were possible. After she died, I still believed in that promise. After I went to ’Nam, I didn’t believe it anymore.” He grows quiet, a bitter flame reignited; he’s sure she can hear it in his voice. She lies still beside him.