Durable Goods

by Elizabeth Berg

  Me, taking a bean, being so bold. Saying, “Okay, all right,” and then leaving a room full of lies that could burn you if they took another form.

  Cherylanne surfaces like a seal in the blue water. She stays in the spot where she came up, treading water, pushing her hair off her face, squinting in the sun. “How was that one?” she asks.

  I hadn’t been watching. “Ten,” I say. “Perfect.”

  “I thought so!” she yells and then swims to the side of the pool, pulls herself up the ladder, swaying her butt back and forth, her happiness dance.

  I see the lifeguard Cherylanne has a crush on come out of the changing room. He will take a dip before he mounts the chair; he always does. When Cherylanne comes over to me, I point in his direction. “Look who’s here.”

  She pales slightly, sets her mouth for duty. “Let’s go.”

  The lifeguard is in the shallow end of the pool, splashing water on his muscles. The woman he is talking to is wearing a black suit made strictly for a grown-up. She has a puffed-out blond hairdo, draw-on eyebrows, and spiky black lashes. She has kept on her dangly silver earrings and a bracelet. It’s a cinch that woman will not be swimming one stroke. She moves her hands through the water gently, her fingers ballet posed. Then she leans over slightly, revealing her big bosom, looks up to smile at Cherylanne’s man, and he smiles right back at her. I have told Cherylanne she should forget about this lifeguard. Obviously he is too old for her, way in his twenties. But Cherylanne likes older men, ever since she read some story a couple years ago about what she called a May-December romance. “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “You know,” she said. “She is May, and he is December.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  But I know now, and I know, too, that my job is to splash the competition to make her makeup run, to make her hair flatten against her cheeks. I slide into the pool, take a deep breath, swim underwater until I am nearly beside the lifeguard and the woman. Then I surface and swim close by them, kicking violently.

  “Hey!” The lifeguard jumps back, pulls his sunglasses off his face. The woman giggles, holds her hands up before her as though they were a shield. Cherylanne smiles at me from the edge of the pool, nods. But nothing happens. The lifeguard resumes his conversation with the woman, stands even closer to her. He does not stand back in horror as we’d hoped, then swim over to Cherylanne to say, “Ah. A natural type. Not afraid to get her hair wet, and a good back diver to boot.” Cherylanne’s smile fades.

  I swim over to her, spread my arms out along the side of the pool. “Didn’t work,” I say. I let my legs rise up, kick them slowly under the water. My cuts are all healed.

  Cherylanne is still watching her competitor. “I hate her,” she says. “She’s so trashy. She probably paid ten cents for that bathing suit.”

  I look across the pool and see that Paul Arnold has stretched his towel and himself out beside the girl in polka dots. He is tuning her transistor radio. I turn to Cherylanne. “Let’s go. We are about all struck out here.”

  We are at the snack bar, eating french fries covered with enough catsup to be camouflage. Cherylanne sighs, pokes at one fry with another.

  “What?” I say.

  “I am so tired of only waiting,” she says. Here is why we are friends. Sometimes she says something and I know so much what she means I could have said it myself, and at the same exact time, too.

  I reach out to touch her arm. “I know.”

  Her eyes widen and she sits up. I think for a moment I have cured her. But then she says, “Your dad’s coming.”

  I turn around and see him crossing the room toward me, covering the distance quickly with his long strides. He is a tall man. But that’s not what people say about him. They say he is big. I am confused by the urgent look on his face. I think for a moment that he is coming again to tell me my mother has died. But it is not that: he is upset about something else. When he reaches our table, I wave, say, “Hi.”

  “Where’s your sister?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Sometimes on Saturdays she goes shopping.”

  He looks away, considering this, then back at me. “What are you doing here?”

  I point to the french fries. “Eating.”

  He stares at the towel wrapped around me, the plastic sandals on my feet. “Get home.”

  Cherylanne has not moved. She has barely looked up. “I have to go,” I tell her. She nods.

  I walk ahead of my father. I believe this is happening because I am dressed wrong. But I’m not sure. I try to walk straight, not too fast, not too slow. When we are outside and no one is in sight, he takes my arm and turns me around. “Just what do you think you’re doing in that snack bar?”

  Well, I have answered one way already. He needs something else. “Cherylanne was hungry.”

  “Hungry for what?”

  “French fries, obviously.”

  There it is, his hand across my face, the familiar sting. “Don’t get smart!”

  I stare up into his eyes. They are only blue, like a movie star’s. And yet.

  “And get that look off your face!”

  Now comes the part where I must rearrange my face so that a definite change can be seen. But the change must be in the right direction. If you do it wrong, he gets madder. I make myself blank, all on the inside, all on the outside. Wrong. He hits me again, harder. But it is only on my arm this time. And we are almost home.

  I am sent to my room, where I am glad to go. He told me he knows french fries are not why I went to the snack bar. And I am sitting at my desk wondering what it is I don’t know about myself when I hear the screen door bang shut. Diane is home. And then I hear him start in with her.

  I open my top drawer quietly, lift up some things to find the poem I am working on. It is about the beauty of dusk, about the peace of people going to sleep. I like to believe that there are no time zones, that all of us could at the exact same moment crawl under our blankets and close our tired eyes.

  I am outside sitting on the porch, waiting for Cherylanne. We are going to the movies, and whenever we do she makes a big fuss over herself, takes forever getting ready. Anyone could be there: The lifeguard. Rock Hudson. A talent scout looking for someone exactly like Cherylanne, driving all around the world in his white Cadillac car until he finds just her. You might as well be prepared, is how Cherylanne feels. She’ll take a double shower, wear her Tigress perfume from the bottle with the fake-fur top.

  The sun is setting; I can feel the concrete beneath me losing its heat. The door opens, bangs into me slightly, and Diane comes out. Her face is still red from crying. He’s been gone for hours, but she has not left her room until now. She sits beside me, doesn’t look at me. “I hate him,” she says.

  I stare straight ahead, peel thin strips from a fat blade of grass I am holding. “I got it, too.”

  “What for?”

  “I was at the snack bar eating french fries.”

  “So?”

  “I was in my bathing suit.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that why?”

  She looks at my chest. “I don’t know. What did he say?”

  “He said I didn’t go there for french fries.”

  She nods. “Oh. That.”

  “What?”

  “He thinks you’re going there for boys.”

  “What boys?”

  “Don’t boys come to the snack bar?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Well, that’s it. He thinks you’re looking for boys.”

  I am actually a little flattered.

  Diane smiles. “He started that shit with me when I was the same age.” She looks at me carefully, then away.

  “Hey, Diane,” I say. “Remember when we used to pull down our pants to look at our butts in the mirror, to see his handprints, see whose was darker?”

  She leans back on her elbows, stares up into the sky. “Yeah.”

  “That was funny, wasn’t it?”

&n
bsp; “No. None of this is funny.” She sits up. “It’s not right, Katie. He’s not supposed to hit us like that. I’m going to tell someone, I swear. I’m going to get him into trouble.”

  “Don’t.” It comes out before I think it. I laugh, surprised. But then, again, I say, “Don’t. I don’t think you should.”

  Diane puts her head down into her lap, her arms around her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I see Riff coming around the corner. He looks like he’s just gotten up from a nap, walking stiffly, his hair standing up a little on one side of his head. He takes a few steps, sniffs at the ground, takes a few more. Then he sees us, gets a glad-dog look in his eye, and gallops over. I pet him, but Diane keeps her head down, busy with her private sorrow. Riff noses her elbow, and she puts out a hand to push him away. “Don’t.” Her voice is muffled, new sounding. Riff sits down, his face leaning forward, his ears on full alert. Then he gets up to walk behind her and investigate, sniffing carefully. And then, unbelievably, he lifts his leg against her.

  Diane straightens immediately, her mouth a perfect O. Then she is up on her feet, yelling, “Riff! Jesus! Goddamn it!” She holds the back of her blouse away from her with two reluctant fingers, stares crazy-eyed at Riff, who, in his mournful confusion, has sat firmly down and now watches her, stonelike, waiting to hear what to do for forgiveness.

  Diane turns around in a small anguished circle, trying to inspect herself. “Jesus, Riff! You pissed right on me! Oh, God, it’s warm!” Riff blinks at her, his whole heart in his eyes. He wags his tail one-half time. And then, despite herself, Diane starts to laugh, and so do I. “You shithead!” she says, and Riff barks happily.

  The woman who lives next door, Ruth Conway, comes out holding a cleaning rag. Belle says she dusts her refrigerator coils. “What in the world?” she says. “Whose mouth is that I hear?”

  Diane stops dead. Ruth Conway is a grown-up tattletale. “That dog peed on me,” she says, pointing.

  “Who, Riff?” His tail thumps: once, twice.

  “Yeah, Riff.”

  Mrs. Conway frowns. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Diane shows her the back of her blouse, the huge wet circle. Mrs. Conway leans forward to look, wrinkles her nose, steps back. “Well,” she says. “I hardly think it’s something to talk that way about!”

  Diane takes in a breath, pauses. “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Conway nods, lets her screen door gently bang shut, returns to her cleaning. “What an asshole,” Diane whispers.

  Cherylanne comes out of her house, walks over to us. Her powder-blue purse matches her outfit. She reeks of Tigress. “Let’s go,” she says. “We’ll be late!”

  As it happens, Cherylanne is right tonight: there is someone there she likes almost as much as the lifeguard. He is a sophomore, famous for his looks, and, according to rumors, recently broken up with his equally famous girlfriend. When the lights go down, he is still sitting alone. “I can’t believe this,” Cherylanne whispers. And then, “Do you mind?”

  “No,” I say. “Go.”

  And she does. She walks down the aisle as though she has just arrived, her purse swinging at her side. She slides into the seat behind him. Then she taps him on the shoulder, gives a flutter-fingered wave when he turns around. They talk a little and then she gets up and moves beside him. She gives me a hidden signal, a victory sign. I am dismissed. I watch the movie for a while, but it is only about handsome men riding around in chariots trying to put one another’s eyes out. I leave.

  No one is home. I make a mayonnaise sandwich. For dessert I have sweetened condensed milk on graham crackers. Then I go outside and lie in the backyard, look up at the stars. I hear the back door open, and sit up quickly.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you’re doing something.”

  “I’m … I was looking at the stars.”

  “Uh huh.” He walks over, lies down heavily beside me, looks up into the sky. “Do you know the names of any of the constellations?”

  “Of course.” Careful. “I learned them in school.” Safe. I show him the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion.

  “Some of the light you see,” he says, “is from stars that no longer exist.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you like that?” He is so satisfied, like he made it up.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  He looks over at me. “You don’t, huh? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It makes me sad. Like when we move and right before we go I make a new friend and then I can never know them.”

  “Well.” A hard edge. His disapproval. He doesn’t like to hear complaining about the way we move so much. We are not allowed to cry when we drive away—or at any other time, either—about any place we leave behind. Sometimes it aches so hard, the thought of all you can’t have anymore, your desk the third in the third row, the place where you buy licorice, the familiarity of the freckles on your friends’ faces, the smell of your own good bedroom. You will have to be the new girl again, the one always having to learn things. But you cannot cry about it in front of him. You have to hold it in, hold it in, stare out the car windows at the cows in the fields and the endless telephone poles and the hopeful buildings in the small towns you pass through and you have to hold it in. Later, in the luxury of aloneness, you can call back the sadness to let it out. But sometimes it has gone somewhere. You have not lost it, just the ability to get rid of it by crying. It will be part of you now, steal up on you at unexpected moments. You will be watching your team play baseball, yelling for them, and all of a sudden feel a jag in your throat. You will be reading, lying on your side on one elbow, and you will have to stop and lie flat and stare into space for a while. That is how that sadness is, insisting on a place in you, but never quite cooperating.

  “I like that there are comets,” I say to my father. “And I like the planets, especially Saturn.”

  “The rings, huh?” he asks, and I am so pleased that he knows. We lie still for a while. The grass is blue-green in the dark, rich smelling. I wish suddenly that I could have a horse standing nearby eating that grass, making the satisfying sounds that horses do. I rip some grass up with my hand, a little imitation.

  “Do you like horses, Dad?” I ask.

  “I guess.”

  “Do you think we could ever get one?”

  He shrugs. “Oh, who knows?” It’s not mean, how he says it. It is low and easy, from a rare place.

  Once, shortly after my mother died, he was being this way; and he asked me to sing for him. I told him I would if he wouldn’t look. So he lay on his bed with his handkerchief over his face while I sat on the chair and sang “Beautiful Dreamer.” When I was through I sat quietly, waiting for him to say something. But he didn’t. I saw the small rise and fall of the handkerchief as he breathed. When, finally, I got up to leave, he said, “Katie.”

  “Yes?”

  He pulled the handkerchief off his face. “That was good.” There were tears in the corners of his eyes. They caught the light of the sun, sinking in the sky outside his window.

  I could hardly stand it. I said, “Thank you,” and fled. I’d heard it, too: my mother singing, out of my mouth.

  “Dad?” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did Mom die from? What happened to her?”

  “Cancer. You know that.”

  “I know. But what happened exactly that made her die?”

  There is a long silence. Then he clears his throat and says, “I am not prepared to talk about that now.”

  “But you will be sometime?”

  “Go to bed, Katie.”

  I go to my room, and he stays outside. I watch him from my window, lying on his back, his arms under his head, looking up into the sky as though he is searching. I look up, too, and find the same thing: everything, written in a language we just don’t understand. My mother sitting at the kitchen table, an unt
ouched cup of coffee before her, her head in her hands. “I don’t know,” she is saying softly. “I just don’t know.”

  Bubba has found Cherylanne’s and my secret basket. Some time ago, we strung a rope between our two hall windows, over the porch roof that connects our houses to each other. We send messages back and forth in an old Easter basket, yellow and green and still smelling faintly of chocolate. We have long yellow yarn pulls on either side of the basket.

  “What the hell do you need that for?” Diane asked when she found out we had built it.

  “Messages,” I told her, and truly I expected her to understand.

  “You can’t hardly breathe in one of these houses without someone next door hearing you,” Diane said.

  “That’s why we need it,” I said. This was not strictly true. The last message I sent Cherylanne had said, “What are you having for dinner tonight?”

  Diane had frowned. We’d been doing the dishes. I liked to watch the way she plunged the soapy rag into the glasses, wiped around and around on the plates until they squeaked, squeezed hard against the messy tongs of the forks so that they came out clean and shiny. I couldn’t wait to be the washer: so much variety, control of the bubbles. For now, I had to be the wiper. “Put this message in your basket,” Diane had said. And then she sang softly in her flirty voice, “I hear the cotton woods whispering above.” I sang back sincerely, “Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love.” Diane was always Tammy; I was always the chorus. You can expect that when you are the wiper.

  But now Cherylanne’s brother has found our basket and is wearing it around on his head. He has tied the yellow yarn pulls into a bow under his chin. “Don’t you love my new chapeau?” he asks Cherylanne. And then, “Man, you act like a five-year-old!” He has a barklike laugh, cruel and stupid sounding.