Talk Before Sleep

by Elizabeth Berg

  “I wonder why he’s calling,” I say. “Do you think he knows?”

  Ruth comes into the kitchen, flushed and wide-eyed. “He’s coming over here,” she says. “I’ve got a fucking date!”

  “Who is this guy?” L.D. asks.

  Sarah stands up to give Ruth her chair. “Are you sure you feel okay to see him?”

  Ruth pushes a pile of insurance forms on the kitchen table out of the way, sits there. “This is the fourth day in a row I’ve felt absolutely fine,” she says. “God, Joel Fratto!”

  “What the hell kind of name is that?” L.D. asks.

  “He was so wonderful,” Ruth answers.

  “What about this party, Ruth?” L.D. wants to know. “Do you still want a party? I think we should talk about that.”

  “I still want everything,” Ruth says. “I just remembered. I still do. Where’s my wig? Where’s my boobs? Help me. I want to do my eyes, too.”

  L.D. is frowning, Sarah looks a little worried, Helen is beaming, and I’m confused. We’ve been talking codicils. We’ve been visiting graveyards. Now we’ve got to find Ruth’s mascara so she can get ready for a date.

  She goes into the bathroom to fill up the tub, and Helen and Sarah follow her, suggesting things they can do to help. Their sounds are soft and overlapping and full of a kind of subdued cheerfulness, like birds before they go to sleep. L.D. and I are sitting at the kitchen table, immobilized by irritation and astonishment respectively. L.D. tips her chair back on two legs, puts her hands behind her head. “Well. Maybe we should go buy her some protection. I saw some condoms in the drugstore the other day with fireworks on the box.” She moves a toothpick she’s been chewing on to the other side of her mouth, raises her eyebrows up and down.

  “Is this … real?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “What the hell difference does that make?”

  Once, a couple of years after Ruth had moved out, she went out of town to visit a friend, and I stayed in her apartment for a night. I told Joe it was to keep an eye on things, but I think he knew I wanted to try it on.

  At first, I loved it. I changed into one of Ruth’s beautiful silk robes, so smooth against my skin I could barely feel it. Then I turned the radio on to a classical station and made dinner for myself in her little blue-and-white kitchen—breast of chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, wild rice, green beans—all cooked in copper pans. For dessert I had a huge piece of apple pie with ice cream, eaten off a pottery plate. It was so pretty I had to keep picking it up to inspect it from all angles while I ate.

  Then I walked around looking at things. It was so calm, her apartment, so carefully thought out. I examined the artwork on the walls: watercolors of nasturtiums on a windowsill and one of a turtle, head raised expectantly and eyes revealing a kind of patient wisdom. On the bedroom wall was a large print that showed a group of women sleeping outside in a field, some of them with the tops of their dresses loosened to reveal their cleanly white breasts, their soft stomachs. Some of the women lay flat; some were on their sides, and their arms made pillows for themselves or hung relaxed at their sides, and their hands were idle and defenseless and beautiful. Looking at that print, you could feel the warmth of the pale-yellow sun on bare shoulders, you could smell the grass, you could know the exquisite relief of the passing breezes and the presence of other women who lay down with you. I knew that print was Ruth’s favorite, and it was mine, too. Once, when we were looking at it together, I said, “How can they do that? Don’t they have to go to the grocery store and get stuff for dinner?”

  “They feed each other,” Ruth said. “They don’t need a thing.”

  I turned on the television, then turned it off. I looked through the stack of tapes by the stereo: Mozart. George Strait. Glenn Gould and Glen Miller. The Rolling Stones. In the bathroom, I looked in the medicine chest and saw a neat line of aspirin and Tylenol and cough syrup. There was a box of invisible Band-Aids and a nail clipper and a prescription bottle half full of diuretics. What was that for, I wondered. Weight loss? Could she be so silly?

  There were several boxes of bubble bath on a shelf over the tub, and I picked one up to use, but found it empty. All of the others were too, all but one, which I suddenly felt I couldn’t use. It was an illusion of riches, all those boxes. I couldn’t take from her when in truth she had so little. I made my luxury be the hotness of the water, the depth of it.

  When I had finished bathing, I went back into her bedroom and stood in the center of the room for a while, looking out the window, watching the clouds move across a full moon. There was the faint sound of someone on the phone next door, and nothing else. It was distressingly quiet in that apartment. Even the music I’d put on the radio seemed unable to penetrate a kind of bubble that had formed around me.

  I opened Ruth’s top dresser drawer. I felt guilty looking in it, but I suddenly needed to know something, though I didn’t know what. Ruth’s socks were rolled up and organized according to color. She had underpants stacked up in two piles, one pair directly on top of the other. There was a stack of the tiny cotton T-shirts she wore, folded precisely into fours. I thought, why are these like this? Who has time to do this? And then I realized that what I was seeing was not an obsessive kind of neatness, but loneliness. I got dressed, dried and put away the dishes I’d washed after dinner, and then I went home.

  Later that night, I lay beside Joe as he watched the news. We didn’t talk. But I knew everything had changed. I believe he knew, too.

  Not long afterward, on a bright spring day when Ruth and I were sitting out on her balcony, she said, “I’ve been living here for two years now.” Then, rather suddenly, “I want to go home.”

  “You want to go home?” I asked. “Is that what you said?”

  She nodded, staring straight ahead.

  “To Eric, you mean?”

  “Well, to Michael mostly, I think is what it is. You know, I miss making him breakfast, giving him snacks after school. I’m beside myself when he’s sick. Last time he had the flu, I called him a million times. I kept waking him up.”

  “Maybe he should live with you.”

  “I can’t afford a big enough place. And anyway, it’s more than that. I want … I miss the routine of three people, you know? Do you know how pathetic it is to do laundry for one? I used to think laundromats were interesting, even romantic. But now I think they’re only filthy.”

  “Well,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. Michael will be going to college next year. And think of what Eric was like, really. Do you want that again?”

  “He was good when I was sick. I never told you that. He brought me little flowers on my bed tray. And I … he wasn’t the only one at fault.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “I want to go home,” she said again, her voice simultaneously determined and beaten. “I don’t like living alone. I needed to live alone to find that out. Funny, huh?” She stood, walked over to the edge of her balcony and I had a crazy thought that she might jump.

  “Maybe you should talk to Eric,” I said. “Tell him.”

  “I did.” She leaned far over the balcony, and I started to get up, then stopped. “I put on some makeup and some great underwear and I went to see him and said I was sorry, that I thought I’d made a huge mistake and I wanted to try again. I said I understood a lot about what went wrong, that I thought we could fix it. I said we could learn to give each other happiness, that I’d come back next weekend, how about that, and I told him what I wanted to make for dinner that night. I even said we could go out and buy some new sheets together, to get ready, you know.”

  “Well,” I sighed. “I’ll miss this place. It’s so pretty. I love to come here.”

  She straightened up, turned around to face me. “Oh, I’m not going back. He has a girlfriend. The paralegal he’s been dating. He said they’re ‘informally engaged.’”

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  “Nope.”

  “Does Michael know?”

&
nbsp; “Not yet. When they tell him, it’ll be formal. They were thinking they’d wait till this summer, when Michael graduates. Then he can have time to think about things, spend some time with both of them together. He can get to know her real well, so they can be pals.” She sat down in her chair, leaned back and closed her eyes, pointed her chin toward the sun. “I think she’s about twelve years old. Gonna start her period any day now.”

  “My God,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “Me neither. Obviously.”

  I sighed hugely, then asked, “Well, what’s her stupid name?”

  Ruth opened her eyes, turned to look at me. “Jani. With ani.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “That’s what I said.” Ruth smiled. “And you know what Eric said? He said, ‘I won’t tolerate your insulting her.’”

  “Fuck him.”

  “I suggested that,” Ruth said. “He declined. He feels nothing for me anymore. Before, even when he was terrible to me, at least there was … something. Even if it was only anger. Now there’s this sort of … I don’t know, impatient tolerance. I think he only talks to me at all because of Michael.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You’ve been through so much lately. You got told you have cancer; they stole your breasts, you went through chemotherapy and radiation therapy…. Don’t you think your wanting to go home is just a move toward some false sense of security?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you didn’t get cancer till you left him. You want to be back there because that was the place where you didn’t have it. You just want to feel safe.”

  She stared at me. “What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. You know, in spite of everything you’ve gone through, I still envy you.”

  “Well, isn’t that ironic?” she said, and I saw her suddenly in my chair at the dinner table, bathing Meggie, making love to Joe.

  “I liked it better when you didn’t need men,” I told her.

  She sighed. “I can’t keep living out your fantasies for you forever. I’m tired. I wish I’d never left. You know, I write all the time in my journal about being home. I try to re-create scenes of my life back there just so I don’t forget, and so I can have them again, just the ordinary stuff, just the regular routine I had, morning coffee in my blue cup, the ten-thirty mail, looking at Michael asleep every night before I went to bed. Smells in that house, even—the hallway always smelled like ironed clothes, remember? The living-room floor dipped in certain places, but you could only feel it in the summer, when your feet were bare. I remember the exact order of the canned soup in the cupboard, and then I think, well, it’s probably been changed now, and that terrifies me. I want to go home. I just want to go home. Can’t you understand that?” Her eyes filled, and she pushed the heels of her hands into them, then bent over, bowed by the kind of grief that will not let you stand straight.

  I didn’t say anything. I got out of my chair to put my arms around her, because I’d been so wrong about her, because I knew as well as she did that she’d never be able to go home again, and I was so sorry.

  Things got worse. Ruth stopped going out. She wouldn’t let me come over, would only talk to me on the phone. And then one night she called while I was eating dinner. I sat on the steps in the hall with the kitchen phone cord stretched taut and heard her say, “I have some pills here, Ann.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She breathed out heavily.

  “Ruth?”

  “I don’t want to be alive anymore. I don’t, Ann. I’m miserable. I don’t see anything changing. I don’t have any hope. I want to stop. But I don’t want Michael to know I did this. Help me figure something out.”

  “I’m coming over there,” I said, and heard Meggie say, “Where’s Mommy going? We’re eating!”

  “Don’t come,” Ruth said.

  I went. I packed a bag for her, told her she was not safe alone and I was taking her to a hospital. They admitted her to the psych unit, and I left her sitting at the edge of a narrow bed, her hands folded on her lap.

  For a week, I wasn’t allowed to even talk to her. Then, when they told me I could visit, I went to the hospital and found her outside the main door, waiting for me. “I get to go out,” she said. “Yahoo. Let’s go get ice cream.”

  We went to a Friendly’s and ordered gigantic sundaes. Her eyes were no longer flat; she’d moved back inside herself.

  “They want me to go to AA meetings,” she told me. “Can you believe that?”

  I said nothing.

  “I mean, I know I drink too much.”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you think I drink too much?”

  I meant to say, gently, that yes, she did, but what I did instead was to start crying, embarrassing myself. I thought it was because when I’d looked up to answer her, I’d seen the plastic hospital bracelet on her wrist, with its mean metal clasp, with its smeared and indifferent THOMAS, RUTH, but it wasn’t that. It was that I loved her and realized at that moment that if she hadn’t called me, I might have lost her. This I muttered, more or less, between the hands I held over my face.

  “Hey,” she said, moving out of her side of the booth to come and sit with me. “Hey. You’re supposed to be taking care of me. You’re supposed to be making sure I don’t do crazy-person stuff. Stop crying.”

  “I’m so happy you didn’t do it,” I said. “I want you to always be here. You’re my best friend. I never had one. Not like you.”

  “Will you stop crying?” she said. “Listen to me. I’ll tell you a story. There’s a guy in with me there, we play pool. He has big tattoos, but I kind of like him. I like him. He writes me poems, and there are no grammatical errors. Last night, he painted my toenails for me. Red.”

  I stopped crying. “Really?”

  She nodded. “Don’t get too excited. You have to do therapy shit all day. It’s enough to drive you crazy, in case you’re not already. Yesterday, we had to put our chairs in a circle and we all were given colored scarfs, and we had to fling them into the air in front of us while we said, ‘I’m throwing my guilt away! I’m throwing my guilt away!’”

  “God,” I said, sniffing away the last of my emotional squall. “Well, when do you get to come home?”

  “After I go to a couple of AA meetings, for one thing. Can you imagine? I have to go!”

  “So go.”

  “Oh, it’s a bunch of crap. A bunch of people sitting around in church basements, wearing polyester and drinking bad coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Smoking their brains out because they can’t drink. And praying or something. I’ve heard about those things. They’re not for me.”

  “Go anyway.”

  She sighed. “I will.”

  “Want me to come with you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We can go get drunk afterward.”

  “Go alone,” I said. “I can see you need to go alone.”

  And she said, “I know. I will.”

  She did go, several times, and soon after that she came home. Three days after that, Eric married Jani with an i. I stayed with Ruth that whole day and night. We made a devil’s food cake for breakfast and then we went and bought kites and found a park to fly them in and then we went to a movie and then we went out for a lobster dinner and then we went to another movie. After she got home, we played some Billie Holiday and it was only then that she cried for a while. I asked if she wanted to call the happy couple on their wedding night, see how Eric was making out with his premature ejaculation problem, and she said no, she thought half the reason she was crying was that she was relieved it was over.

  She began rowing on the lake in the early morning for exercise, and lifting hand weights to rock and roll at night. She was going to concerts and plays with various men and movies with me, and she was saving money so that in a year she could buy a condo where Michael could stay with her when he was home from school. Then one day she came back from a foll
ow-up chest X ray and called me on the phone and said, “Guess what? There’s something on my lungs.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. I was sitting at the kitchen table, doodling on a grocery list. “It’s probably just a shadow.” I stopped doodling, held still, waiting, until I heard her say, “Yeah. Probably.”

  Of course it was not a shadow. It was cancer, back and smiling. I lay in bed that night, weeping on Joe’s chest. “Oh, it’s so scary,” I said. “I keep thinking, every time she breathes in, she must wonder, Is this making it worse? Am I hurting anything, moving these lungs in and out like this?”

  Joe was pushing my hair back away from my forehead over and over, aching in his own way and for his own reasons. When Ruth had come over for the first time after her double mastectomy, he’d put down his sandwich, risen up from the kitchen table, kissed her, and told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.

  “Well, Joe” she’d said, looking over his shoulder at my face, tight with pride. And then she’d put her arms around him and hugged him tight, then tighter, and then tighter still until he grunted in pain.

  “This is a strong woman, here,” she’d said. “Don’t mess with me. Now that my tits aren’t in the way, I can aim better.”

  “I thought she was cured,” Joe said.

  “I did, too,” I said. “She did, too.”

  Silence, and then Joe said, “Who’s with her, now? Who’s holding her?”

  I opened my eyes wide, stopped crying.

  She had part of one lung removed. I brought her a huge bouquet, purple and blue for healing, white because she loved white, and no carnations because she hated them. I gave her chest tube a name, Charles, because she was afraid of it. I held her hand when they pulled it. “Now,” she said, after they’d put a dressing on. “Back to business. I’m really tired of these constant interruptions.” She said something like that after she found out it was in her bones, too. Then, when it was in her brain, she quit saying it. When the work gets too hard, you stop talking about it. You just try to do it.