Open House

by Elizabeth Berg

  Well, this is not sexy thinking. I should be doing sexy thinking. I dig through my drawer, pull out a red nightgown with a revealing top, a slit high up the side. I undress quickly, then pull the nightgown over my head and get into bed. I’m freezing. This damn nightgown is freezing! Why can’t I masturbate in flannel pajamas? Oh, but I can’t, I can’t do that, it would be like having sex with Mr. Rogers. This nightgown is sexy. I just need to wait a minute. I’ll warm up. I close my eyes, shiver, rub my hands up and down my arms. There, that’s better. And now I open my eyes, look down at my breasts.

  Well, there they are, old Mutt and Jeff. Flat as pancakes. I sit up, push them together with the sides of my arms. There. I pull the nightgown up, put my hand to myself, rub gently. Nothing. A fleeting thought of some recipe I saw yesterday in a supermarket cookbook, a casserole that actually looked good, it called for spinach, feta cheese, rice, and . . . lemon, was it lemon?

  No. No recipes. Well, what can I think about? Men. Of course, men! I envision a naked man. Not David. A new man, someone I don’t know. There he is, there’s his nice chest, his fine, muscular arms. Oh, but there’s that awful-looking equipment, just hanging there. It is awful looking, women’s bodies are so much prettier than men’s. That stuff men have, just out there. The veiny penis, throbbing away in midair as it rises to attention. And those wrinkled testicles, the way they loll about in the hand like warm water balloons. I mean, the very word “testicle” is disgusting. Clitoris. That’s a nice word. Sounds like a flower. Sounds like your aunt from England, visiting, with tins of butterscotch and yards of grosgrain ribbon.

  All right. Concentrate. No testicles. The new man, with a bathing suit on. A blue Speedo, turquoise blue. Nice eyes, nice chest, nice back. Wonderful hands. I close my eyes, rub some more. Nothing!

  I open my eyes, grimly pull down one side of my nightgown to stare at my naked breast, rub myself again. When I do, my breast shakes a little. It’s kind of amusing. And a little grotesque. Which is to say, not sexy.

  I lie back down, blow air out of my cheeks, put my hand to myself and rub hard. Harder. Nothing. The hell with it. I’ll put on my jeans, go downstairs, and see if I can find an episode of Father Knows Best.

  AT TEN O’CLOCK, I’m hungry. But I don’t want to eat alone. I dial King’s number. He answers on the first ring.

  “It’s me, Sam,” I say. “You’re home!”

  “Yeah, I just got in.”

  “Did you bring home leftovers?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did you bring home leftovers? You know, turkey?”

  A long silence and then, “No.” And then, “Oh! Right! It’s Thanksgiving!”

  “Well . . . yes. Didn’t you go eat dinner somewhere?”

  “Yeah. Taco Bell.”

  “Oh, King, I wish I’d known. I would have invited you to eat with me.”

  “It’s okay. I’m not comfortable eating dinner with a lot of people I don’t know. I usually don’t even realize it when holidays come around. I get caught up in something, and—”

  “It was only me. It would have been only me.”

  “Oh! Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Well, I thought for sure you’d gone to your parents’. Or somewhere.”

  “Do you have any leftovers?”

  “God, King. Come over, can you?”

  “Ten minutes,” he says, and then there is a dial tone. Which is the sweetest sound I have heard all day.

  18

  FRIDAY NIGHT, I AM BRUSHING MY TEETH BEFORE BED. ALL OF a sudden, I burst into tears. I have a sudden impulse to turn quickly around, to see who is doing this to me. But I’m doing it to myself, I guess. I try ignoring it, take a little walk down the hall with my toothbrush. Tears keep coming, and when I come back into the bathroom and lower my head to spit into the sink, they fall and mix in with the toothpaste. This seems wrong. Unholy. As though the least I could do for myself is to separate the pain from these mundane tasks.

  “Sit with your pain,” a woman once told me when I was still a student. “Learn from it. It will make you strong.” I don’t even remember what I was upset about at the time. I don’t think that will ever happen with this pain, I don’t think I’ll ever forget this. Some things make for a psychic limp, and this is one of them.

  I go downstairs into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, close it. Go into the family room, turn on the television, turn it off. I go over to the bookshelf to see what movies are there. A lot of Christmas movies. A lot of Disney for Travis. And there, the home movies. Videos of David and Travis and me. I reach for one of those tapes, then put it back on the shelf. And then I take it back out and put it on, wrap up in a quilt, and watch it. Once, I laugh aloud at Travis as an eight-month-old, crawling along the kitchen floor, a bagel in his hand. “Oh, look at that face!” I say aloud. To no one. Well, to David. Well, to no one.

  19

  RITA IS SITTING ON THE KITCHEN TABLE, HER STOCKINGED feet on a kitchen chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “I see a bunch of good ads in here! Kind of makes me want to start dating, myself.” She is looking through a fat booklet of personals we found in an ice-cream store. I’d told her not to bother; there wouldn’t be anything good in them. It’s so sad, a whole book of people advertising themselves like used cars. And yet I’ve begun reading them, more and more often.

  It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m melting butter for popcorn. Then we’re going to watch a dirty movie Rita ordered from the back pages of a woman’s magazine. Satin Nights, it’s called, for God’s sake. Rita had said she couldn’t resist it—“It’s made by women for women,” she said, “so there won’t be any of that Mount Vesuvius stuff the boys love so much.” She’d saved it to watch with me. Tonight, King is coming for dinner.

  “Here’s another good one,” Rita says.

  “Read it to me.”

  “Okay, listen to this: ‘I am forty-five years old, very goodlooking, fit, financially secure, interested in someone who can share my joy at Bach and blue jays. I love ballroom dancing, cooking gourmet meals, live theater, rides into the country, antiquing, and honest conversation. Let’s be careful with each other, start slow and see where we end up.’ ” She looks up. “I mean, it’s a little dippy, but . . . nice. Let’s see what else is here.”

  I watch Rita scanning the column, yanking absentmindedly at the collar of her sweatshirt. I’m so glad she’s here. She makes me remember who I am, that I am. I’ve laughed more these last couple days than I have in the last year. It is healing, laughter.

  “I really like this one,” Rita says. “Listen: ‘Are you feeling strange about even reading this? I certainly feel strange writing it. But I’m looking for a sincere partner, someone who understands trust and commitment and sensitivity to another’s feelings. Looks and age unimportant; soul matters.’ ”

  “Give me that,” I say, snatching the booklet away from Rita. I read the ad, stop chewing the popcorn I shoved in my mouth. “Amazing!” I turn the page, read a few more. “Wow, there are some good ones in here!” I turn back to see where the ads start. I’ll read them all. Finally, I find the bold-faced heading at the beginning of the listings. “Oh,” I say, and pass the booklet back to Rita.

  She squints at the headline. “MEN SEEKING MEN. Oh. No wonder. Well, let’s see what the other ones say, the MEN SEEKING WOMEN.”

  I pour the butter over the popcorn, mix it with my hands, wince at a hot spot. “I’ll tell you what they say. They say, ‘I’m an ordinary asshole looking for an extraordinary woman to be mean to. Must be beautiful and willing to pick up after me.’ ”

  “Yeah.” Rita sighs. “You’re probably right.” She closes the booklet, pushes it aside. “So forget about men. You don’t need them. Start a garden.”

  “It’s too cold.”

  “Well, send away for catalogues. Start planning one. Just don’t go to a therapist, whatever you do.”

  I sit at the table, put the bowl of popcorn between us. “You sound like my mot
her. Why not?”

  “Oh, I know, everybody goes. But I’m telling you, it’s a waste unless you’re really nuts. You’re better off using the money for something else. Every week, spend a hundred bucks on yourself another way. I know one woman who quit therapy and started doing that. One week she bought a hundred dollars’ worth of magazines and brought them to the emergency room ofa hospital—she’d been there once and all they had was Business Week, you know, Popular Mechanics. And then another week she bought a hundred dollars’ worth of lipstick.”

  “Yeah, she probably got two whole tubes.”

  “No, she went to CVS. She got a whole bunch. She said she tried this bright coral color, which she never would have done otherwise, and it looked fabulous on her, that’s all she wears now. She also did this really neat thing: she got four hundred quarters and left them by those machines where you can get gum balls, and rings—you know, those little prizes. And she just left the quarters there with a sign that said, TAKE ONE.”

  “Well, that was dumb. Someone probably just came along and took all the money.”

  “No! That’s what was so therapeutic about it. She stood around for a long time, watching little kids take just one quarter, then leave the rest. Can you imagine? She said it changed her whole worldview, restored her faith in humanity.”

  “Well, I hadn’t even thought about going to a therapist. But now, seeing that you’re so violently opposed to it, I’m thinking maybe I ought to try it.”

  “Let’s watch the movie,” Rita says.

  I grab the bowl of popcorn, follow her into the family room, watch her bend slightly to slide the cassette into the VCR, then pull back to see better. We’ve both put off getting bifocals. “Not till the vision police come,” she always says.

  It’s so good to see Rita’s sneakers tossed into the corner, her coat hanging in the closet, to know that I can rifle through her purse and ask questions about anything I find. And Rita can look through my purse, too, and my own life will suddenly seem more interesting to me. “That’s Travis last summer,” I’ll say, when Rita comes to his picture in my wallet, and then I’ll look at my son over Rita’s shoulder, really noticing his T-shirt, really seeing him as the age he is, rather than the usual mix of every age he ever was, mother-vision. No wonder he becomes so exasperated with me. He’ll be standing before me in man-sized shoes, arguing rightly to stay up later, and I will look straight into his eleven-year-old face and see him camped out on his potty chair, reading Goodnight Moon upside down.

  “This thing isn’t going in,” Rita says, pushing at the tape in the slot. And then, as it slides in smoothly, “Oh. Never mind. There it goes.” She turns around, grins. “Now I know how the guy feels.”

  “Gross,” I say, through a mouthful of popcorn.

  “Just trying to get you in the mood for the movie.” Rita goes to the window to pull the curtains. The late afternoon sun lights up the edges of her bad perm. It really is a bad perm, reminiscent of the fifties’ do-it-yourself variety that left your hair looking like you’d had an accident with electricity; Rita said she was thinking about suing the beauty parlor. She’s put on weight; her hair looks terrible; but she’s still beautiful, still sexy, too.

  Now Rita falls into David’s recliner, leans back into the full recline position, and presses the remote. “Fasten your seat belt,” she says.

  The movie opens with a scene of a woman in a garden. Soft-focus blossoms blow in a gentle breeze. The camera focuses on them for so long Rita and I finally look at each other and start laughing.

  “Is that Mozart?” I ask.

  Rita nods, clearly disgusted.

  “Fast-forward it,” I say, and Rita does. A scene starts where a man dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt is unbuttoning the white blouse of the heroine. “Stop!” I say, and Rita looks at me. “I know.”

  And then we stare straight ahead, eating popcorn, licking salt and butter from our fingers, watching scenes of one kind of nature alternate with another. When the man and woman are taking turns moaning, working tastefully toward the inevitable conclusion, I hear a knock at the door, then see it slowly opening.

  “Quick, quick!” I tell Rita.

  She presses a button, the movie disappears, a football game comes on, and King appears in the family room.

  “Hi,” he says. “Am I early?” And then, seeing the screen, “Oh. You’re watching the Patriots?”

  “Who?” I ask.

  AFTER DINNER, the three of us are sitting in the family room again. Travis is upstairs talking on the phone, something he does a lot of lately. I suppose soon I’ll have to get him his own line. His own voice mail.

  We’re talking about David, about why I married him. “Oh, she just did everything too soon,” Rita says. “She panicked, and said yes to the first guy that asked her because she was afraid no one better would come along.”

  I would actually prefer it if Rita didn’t broadcast things like this, but one of the things I like most about Rita is her honesty—you just have to take the bad with the good.

  “But I’m the one who asked him,” I say.

  Rita halts her wineglass midway to her mouth. “Really?”

  “Well, I mean, we’d talked about it. I was the one to sort of . . . you know, formally say it.”

  “Wow!” Rita says. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, so what?” I say. “What’s the big deal? We’d talked about it.”

  “You know, King,” Rita says, “I had to stand by and watch her ruin her life. She was so damn stubborn, shining that ring in my face. I tried to tell her.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I say. “I wish you had.”

  “I did try, right at first. I don’t think you even heard me. And then I just gave up. Watched you . . . descend.”

  “Well, I’m on the rise again.” Saying this, I wonder if I believe it. Maybe I do.

  “She didn’t even sleep with anybody else. She didn’t—”

  “I did, too.” I say. “I slept with nine guys before David.”

  Rita shakes her head. “Can you imagine, King? In the early seventies? Nine guys?”

  “I don’t think nine is so bad,” I tell Rita. “How many did you sleep with?”

  “Oh, boy. I think I’d need a calculator. Let’s see.” She sits back, remembering. “It had to be . . . oh, I’d say . . . fifty or so.”

  “God!” I say.

  “That was normal! Don’t you think, King? For a woman? I mean, guys did it even more. For a guy, a hundred and fifty was probably normal. How many women did you sleep with in the early seventies? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “In the early seventies?” King asks. “One. One time.”

  “Oh,” Rita says. “Well. But you’re . . . you must be a few years younger than we are. So . . . you know, in the late seventies. In the late seventies how many women did you sleep with?”

  “None.”

  We are all quiet, and then King says, “None in the eighties and none in the nineties, either.”

  “You mean . . . Are you . . .?” I ask.

  “I’m not gay.”

  “One time?” Rita asks, and I have a nearly irresistible impulse to slap her. “Wow! You’re practically a virgin!”

  King shrugs.

  “Rita . . .” I say.

  “I don’t mind,” he says.

  A profound silence descends. Finally, King says, “So. Rita. Where exactly in Mill Valley do you live?”

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!” Rita says, after King leaves and we are in the kitchen washing out the wineglasses. “Have you ever met a guy who hasn’t done it a million times? I mean, I know they must be around, but—”

  “I think you embarrassed him,” I say.

  “I didn’t embarrass him. He said he didn’t mind.”

  “Maybe he was just being polite.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “How do you know? You don’t even know him.”

  I rinse out the last glass, start scouring the sink. Ri
ta sits at the table, watching me. “Well, sorry,” she says. “Although I don’t know why I’m apologizing to you.”

  “I don’t, either. He’s the one you should apologize to.”

  “But I don’t think he was offended, Sam! He was fine with it. You’re the one who’s all worked up. Why?”

  “Well, maybe it’s on his behalf, okay? I mean, he should have been offended. You acted like he was a freak or something!”

  “No, I didn’t! I acted like it was a really unusual thing. Which it is!”

  I wipe off the dishwasher door, rinse out the sponge, wipe off the counter. How many days does she have left here?

  “You’re so mad!” Rita says.

  “No, I’m not!”

  “You are! What in the hell are you so mad about?”

  I stop cleaning, straighten, look at her. “I don’t know.”

  A long moment passes. Then Rita says gently, “I mean, come on. Don’t you just want to do it with him? You know, teach him some things? ‘Yeah, honey; right there.’ ”

  Something breaks and I laugh, resume wiping the counter, then move to the stove. “No.”

  “Really?”

  “No! I mean, who needs all that . . . ineptitude?”

  Rita shakes her head. “Boy, I would. It would make me feel really powerful.”

  “Well, you’ve got five more days here,” I say. “Maybe you’ll score.” I scrub at a stain on the stove that never comes off. And I know it.

  20

  MONDAY MORNING, THE BREAKFAST TABLE IS FULL. LYDIA AND Rita sit having blueberry pancakes with Travis while I make more at the stove.