What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Not at all. We’re very close.”

  “Huh,” she says, and I have the feeling she doesn’t believe me.

  “We really are,” I say. “I was close to my mother, too, until she screwed up so bad. And I was very close to my stepmother.” I see her suddenly: Georgia, sitting at the side of my bed, taking down the hem of a dress I refused to part with and talking to me about a teacher who’d sent me to the principal. She wasn’t mad at me; she was mad at the teacher. She had a call in to him.

  “I wonder if your daughters will change when they get older,” Martha says. “I hear when they hit the teen years, they can really—”

  “They’ll be fine,” I say. “I waited a long time to have kids. My first was born at thirty-five. I wanted to be absolutely sure I was ready. I wanted to spend the time I needed with them. I quit work when I had them; I’m devoted to them. They know that. They’ll be fine.” My voice has gotten louder in my defensiveness; the people ahead of me turn slightly around, then away.

  Martha blinks, nods slowly. “Well I hope they will be. I really do.” She heads back to her airplane suite. I know what she’s thinking: I’m too intense. My kids will end up totally neurotic. They’ll end up hating me. I know that’s what she’s thinking. But she’s wrong. My kids will end up knowing that they were the priority, that I did not sacrifice their well-being for the sake of some pipe dream, as my mother did. They will end up knowing they came first in my life, always. Of course I miss working. Of course I have days when I literally feel like pulling my hair out. But I stay home, so that my children know if they need me I’m there. I recognize the fact that the need is on my part, too. I see that.

  I stare at the man across the aisle from me, asleep with his mouth open, gently snoring. Then I smooth my skirt beneath me, take in a deep breath, reenter that summer day so many years ago when Mrs. O’Donnell moved away.

  It turned out I was wrong about our neighbor’s house being left absolutely empty. The curtains stayed. But they were open, and late in the afternoon, when the truck pulled away, Sharla and I looked through every window we could reach. Then we sat on Mrs. O’Donnell’s back steps, enjoying the mild disorientation of seeing our own yard from there. “She forgot her clothespins,” I told Sharla. They were lined up like mournful little soldiers on the gray rope line. I was feeling guilty, thinking we should have had a going-away party for her. But who, other than her cop nephew Leroy, could we have invited? And would that have constituted a party?

  Mrs. O’Donnell had called Sharla and me over just before she left, and had given each of us a present wrapped in wrinkled paper. It was left over from Christmas, and featured scenes of Santa Claus that I thought made him look drunk.

  We each got one earring of a pair. “This way, you’ll always keep in touch with each other,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “You’ll have to share, don’t you know?” We thanked her profusely and then Leroy came to drive her away. She was wearing a hat and gloves and new black shoes, and looked as dignified as I’d ever seen her. I felt terrible.

  “Old Mrs. O’Donnell,” I said now. “Poor thing.” I screwed my earring on. It had pearls and rhinestones. I thought it was pretty, though I also recall thinking that it didn’t really go with anything I had.

  “Maybe a window’s open and we could crawl in,” Sharla said, shoving her earring in her front pocket. She wasn’t interested in joining my little memorial service. She was interested in breaking and entering. It was the more appealing alternative; I took the earring off and started to put it in my front pocket, then switched to the back one—I had to be ever-alert to providing evidence for Sharla calling me a copycat.

  We went around to all the windows again, tried to open them, found them locked. Then, liking the absurdity of it, I went to the front door and knocked loudly, and the door fell open.

  I turned back to Sharla, openmouthed.

  “Shut it!” she told me, looking quickly around. Then, whispering, “We’ll come back at midnight.”

  I loved summer so much. My mother was fixing fried potatoes for dinner; I could smell them from here. Our feet were bare and dusty. I had a puffy mosquito bite behind my knee, and itching it gave me a kind of pleasure that made me close my eyes and lift my chin, like a dog well-scratched. We were going to Dairy Queen for dessert: Sharla and I favored the coated cones, my mother got elegant little butterscotch sundaes, and my father wolfed down entire banana splits. Grasshoppers leaped up and crisscrossed before us every day; at night the cicadas sang and the sticky June bugs clung to the back screen door. Homework was as foreign as the red eye of Mars. Plans fell into your lap, opened as naturally and exotically as the lotus flower. You could follow an impromptu notion through to its natural end, which is exactly what you were supposed to do with such fine gifts.

  “Wake up!” I heard Sharla say. I’d been dreaming a good dream. It concerned a group of fairies who, sorority-like, lived in a castle together. They woke up together, bumped wings as they jostled one another for position at the bathroom sink—equipped with gold fixtures in the shape of swans’ heads. When we were younger, it had been the habit of our mother to tell us to go to sleep quickly; that way, the fairies would come sooner to paint stars on our ceiling. I liked believing this was true, and incorporated the notion enough that I often had dreams about those fairies. They were blonde, with the exception of one raven-haired fairy, my favorite, who wore only red and had the look of possible evil in her eyes. The fairies always wore the same thing, sparkly gossamer gowns that tied around their middles with gold ribbon in a crisscross arrangement impossible to duplicate—I had often tried. The only difference between the fairies’ gowns was in the color. There was a pale apricot, a bright yellow, a dusky purple, and many shades of blue. And red, of course, a red so deep it neared black in the small valleys of the folds. The gowns trailed off at the end as though someone had set about erasing them from the bottom up, but then had gotten distracted and gone away. You could not see shoes, or feet; only the disappearing edges of a fantasy.

  In my dream, I’d been given a large gold key to unlock the fairies’ closet door. It was a high, white cabinet, trimmed with gold. I opened the door, then stood before a line of their gowns, the sparkles winking at me. I could not believe my nearness. I had just reached out a hand to touch them when Sharla got through to me.

  “Let’s go!” she whispered harshly. “Why are you sleeping?”

  This seemed a dumb question. I didn’t answer it. Instead, I sat up and straightened my T-shirt and underpants as though I were preparing to leave for work, which I suppose I was.

  “You have to wear your robe,” Sharla said. She was wearing hers, and she handed me mine. It was a white quilted thing, with rhinestone buttons. It was just like Sharla’s, only smaller. We hated our robes. They were a gift from our grandmother, our mother’s mother, who always sent us clothes we hated. She did not understand us, we felt. And she would call us from her home in New York the day after we had received whatever she sent and we were expected to go on and on about it. “Did you notice the buttons?” she’d asked about the robe.

  “They’re very pretty,” I’d responded dutifully. Actually, I did like the buttons. But not there. I wanted to use them for something else. Eyes in a voodoo doll I intended to make, for example. I needed someone else’s hair for that, though. I was waiting to cut Sharla’s when she was sleeping, but the occasion hadn’t presented itself, because so far, when she was sleeping, I was sleeping, too. I was waiting for her to get sick.

  “Why do we have to wear robes?” I asked.

  “Because it’s someone else’s house, dummy.”

  “But it’s empty!”

  “Be quiet, or we’ll get caught.” She cupped her hands around my ear, whispered into it, “You can’t be in your underwear in someone else’s house. Just put your robe on. Let’s go.”

  I was hungry, I realized suddenly. I wanted to eat something before I went to work. But Sharla, walking before me with her back ramrod straight, wa
s going to be in no mood for dillydallying. Still, when we passed through the kitchen on the way to the front door, I opened a cupboard and grabbed the first thing I felt, which was a bag of marshmallows. A good choice, and a lucky one.

  The moon was full and bright white; you could have read by it. I stowed this information away; next time, we would do that, bring out books and read by the light of the moon. They would need to be the right books, of course. Ones about witches, say, or magazine love stories with plenty of kissing scenes. You could find them in the Ladies’ Home Journal, complete with illustrations. The women always had their red lips parted; the mens’ heads bowed low, moving toward the women in perpetuity. A wind was always blowing, so as to arrange the women’s hair in wild and irresistible styles.

  Outside Mrs. O’Donnell’s door I felt a sudden rush of fear. “What if someone else is in there?” I asked. The door had been left open. For many hours. And though the moon was bright, the inside of the house was dark enough for misdeeds.

  “Who would be in there?” Sharla asked, in the tired voice she reserved for telling me I was a moron. However, I noticed her hand stayed still on the doorknob.

  “A hobo,” I said, and nearly saw him then, toothless and leering, sitting in a corner of Mrs. O’Donnell’s poor, empty bedroom. His handkerchief was off its stick and lay open before him; he was unpacked, claiming the space as his own. He had BO. And in the slatted light that came through Mrs. O’Donnell’s left-behind venetian blinds, you could see a knife clenched in his hairy fist. I imagined the Swiss army variety like our father’s, only not as nice. Rusty. In the habit of opening windpipes rather than bottles of grape soda.

  “There are no hobos in Clear Falls,” Sharla said.

  “How do you know?”

  “What is the matter with you? Don’t you want to do this?”

  “Yes!” Maybe not.

  “There is no one in there. It is an empty house that we get to explore for as long as we want.” She squinted at me. “What’s under your arm?”

  “Marshmallows.”

  At first, she looked as though she might yell at me again; but then she held out her hand. I gave her one; then, as she did not take her hand back, two more. She shoved them in her mouth, then opened the door. And there it was, the exact smell of Mrs. O’Donnell. A warm smell, like ironing, mixed with something like old orange peels. “Shhh!” Sharla said, closing the door behind me. She stood perfectly still, her head cocked, listening.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

  I had gotten to her. She was making sure there wasn’t a hobo. My pride made me smile; I ate another marshmallow. We were a team, equal in importance, never mind the age difference.

  Sharla turned to glare at me; apparently I was making noise eating.

  “No one’s here,” I said loudly, in my marshmallow-thickened voice. “Tut-tut, chicken-butt.”

  And then I led the way, I did, across the empty living room and into the center of the tiny dining room.

  “This was the dining room,” I said solemnly.

  “I know that.”

  “You weren’t ever in here.”

  “I was, too.”

  “When?”

  “Once when you were sick; I borrowed some soup from her. Mom sent me. She gave me a can of tomato soup.”

  “I ate it?” I thought of Mrs. O’Donnell’s bumpy knuckles reaching in her cupboard for soup to give to me, shivered a little in regretful repulsion. It occurred to me that she would never make soup again. I wondered what she had done with the food left in her house on moving day. Maybe she’d given it to Leroy. Or set it out in her metal trash can, which now waited at the curb looking a bit splendid—such was the power of the moonlight.

  “Let’s go look in her bedroom,” Sharla said.

  I was going to say that nothing was there, but it wasn’t true. There was something there; there was something everywhere. There was a spirit in the house, a sad sense of someone newly gone. Each room had its own small, untold lament. The dining room missed its lace tablecloth and the turkey dinners Mrs. O’Donnell had served when her husband was alive. The kitchen tap dripped, looking for macaroni to rinse. The air in the bedroom would be rich with the leftovers from Mrs. O’Donnell’s dreams and her middle-of-the-night wakenings, those times when she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, her thin hair wild about her glasses-less face, the ticking of her bedside clock suddenly loud. I was sure she’d sat like that. I was sure everyone did that, once they got old.

  We climbed the stairs, walked down the hall past the bathroom, and Sharla pushed open the door to the empty square that had been Mrs. O’Donnell’s bedroom. I was right; the air here was charged. I felt the hairs on my arms lift; an invisible finger zipped up my spine. I looked at Sharla, wanting to ask if she felt all this, too, but her face was closed, impassive. She wasn’t colliding with memories of a life lived and now gone; she was simply looking around. The closet door was half open; the white curtains at the window hung still as stone. There were little white balls hanging from the edges of the curtains. “Look,” I told Sharla. “The surrey with the fringe on top.”

  “What?”

  “The curtains,” I said. “The surrey with the fringe on top.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  I ate a marshmallow, weighed the fairness of her remark.

  Right.

  “She slept so many nights here,” I said.

  “I know.” Sharla’s voice was quiet and mournful. Now I was on the right track.

  “She was so nice,” I sighed. Salt to the wound, an occasional specialty of mine.

  “Not really,” Sharla said, her reverie broken.

  “Uh-huh!”

  “Oh, you’re just saying that because she’s gone.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Uh-huh!”

  “Be quiet,” I said. “The cops will come, and you’re only in your robe.”

  Sharla went toward the bathroom; I started to follow, then went my own way, into the spare bedroom. Pink curtains here, ruffled edges. An outline on the floor of where the braided rug used to be, I remembered it. I felt Sharla come in behind me.

  “What was this?” she asked.

  “The guest room. There was a little bed, right here; it was brown wood, with a pink bedspread. And a plant was on the bedside stand, I think it was a sweet-potato plant. Or … I don’t know, maybe an African violet.”

  How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything. Mrs. O’Donnell’s face would be a blur, surrounded by her perm. And then the memory of the perm itself … gone? The trajectory of this line of thought was making me nervous. I told myself the plant had definitely been an African violet; I made myself see the fuzzy white on the leaves, the slight tilt of them toward the sun. I saw one shy purple blossom bent toward the earth it lived in.

  Sharla leaned against the wall. “The guest room, huh? She never had any guests.”

  “I know.”

  A troubled silence.

  Then, “Want another marshmallow?” I asked.

  “How can you eat at a time like this?”

  “She would want us to,” I said, though I was not at all sure of this.

  I left the guest room, went downstairs, and sat in the middle of the living-room floor. You could sit anywhere now; nothing was in the way of anything. I rather liked that.

  Sharla came down soon afterward. We finished the marshmallows, then lay on the floor head to head, limbs stretched out like snow angels. “How would you decorate this room if it was your house?” Sharla asked.

  My house? My house? All of it—a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a back-porch stoop, a front door with a mail slot?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Me neither.”

  We sighed, exactly together, it seemed to me, and this was deeply comforting. I had a thought to take Sharla’s hand, but I knew she’d fro
wn and lightly slap me away. We were deeply connected, Sharla and I, but very different. I was a cuddler; Sharla looked at an embrace as imprisonment. I could not touch her except to brush her hair, she liked that. In fact, she would pay me to do it. She would give me a Betty and Veronica comic book, or perhaps use of her charm bracelet for half an hour, though I had to wash and dry it before returning it to her. “You have a habit of being sticky,” she told me. And then, when shame filled my face, “It’s nothing bad; it’s just messy.”

  Eventually, we rose and toured Mrs. O’Donnell’s empty house one more time—wordlessly agreeing to exclude the basement. Then we left, pulling the door shut behind us. We slept out in the yard for a while, then went in. Again, we hadn’t been missed. It was becoming boring, getting away with so much. Soon, we would need to up the ante.

  * * *

  When I awakened the next morning, I was seized by the fear that we had left fingerprints behind, unique lines of us captured in marshmallow dust. I thought we should sneak back in and get rid of the evidence. But it was too late. Outside my bedroom window I saw that another moving van had pulled up. And standing beside it was the raven-haired fairy of my dreams, only you could see her feet. They were wearing the highest heels I’d ever seen. Under the fullest skirt. Which was red, but softened by large white polka dots. Her short-sleeved sweater was all red, though, as was a scarf she had tied around her neck. Her belt was black patent leather, cinched tightly around her tiny waist.

  Sharla was already up by the time I came downstairs, standing watching at the living-room window, eating a bowl of Cheerios and sliced peaches. “Look who’s moving in,” she said, her mouth full. And then she said something unintelligible.