What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  After I read for a while, I turned off the water. The tub looked perfectly clean, as it always did. My mother came in to inspect Sharla’s and my work and nodded her approval. I had a moment of feeling guilty, but then reasoned that if the tub ever really did need cleaning, I would do it. There was no point in scrubbing away at something you couldn’t even see. I longed for streaks of mud, for soap stuck in a sticky puddle at the bottom of the tub, even for the sickening thrill of blood, courtesy of my mother’s injuring herself while shaving her legs. I wanted the satisfaction of seeing something change before my eyes, not the humdrum necessity of maintaining the status quo.

  Now, boredom settling around me like dusk, I rose and went to our bedroom window, lifted my blouse to let the fan blow on me. Nothing doing outside, either. Not even a breeze. “Well, that’s it, I’m going to get her,” I said.

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. She probably doesn’t want to get interrupted. Just like when she goes to coffee klatch.” Coffee klatch was the weekly gathering of the neighborhood ladies on the block, held in a different kitchen each week. I was excited about it being in our house until I heard what the women talked about: Detergent. Children. Their husbands’ jobs. The coupons they exchanged with each other. No secrets were revealed; no one even laughed. Frankly, I saw no point in those meetings, except for perhaps the food. Mrs. Gooch brought a blueberry coffee cake to our house that was outstanding—Sharla and I fought over the buttery crumbs. The good thing about coffee klatch was that it lasted only an hour, and therefore we were not driven to feelings of desperation. But this!

  “She’s been there all day!” I told Sharla.

  “Oh, stop whining. You don’t know how long she’s been there.”

  “More than two hours. Way more than that.”

  “That’s not all day.”

  “Well, I’m going.”

  “Wait,” Sharla said. “I’m coming.”

  Just as we were about to knock, Jasmine’s door opened, and my mother came out, smiling. “Oh,” she said. “Are you up?”

  “It’s late,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost two.”

  Jasmine appeared behind my mother. “It’s one-fifteen,” she said, looking at her watch. “Well. What are you two doing today?”

  “Nothing,” I said, moodily.

  “I was just going over to Monroe’s,” Jasmine said. “Would you like to come?”

  I looked at Sharla, who was nodding, then at my mother.

  “You can go,” she said.

  The day had just flipped. A ride in Jasmine’s red-and-white Chevy convertible to an air-conditioned store. Possibly a stop for an A&W on the way home; I’d never met anyone yet who didn’t like A&W, and I intended to suggest it in an irresistibly casual way.

  “You want to come, Marion?” Jasmine asked.

  “No, thanks,” my mother said. “It’s much later than I thought. I’ve got to think about what to make for dinner.”

  “Oh, just have sandwiches,” Jasmine said. “They don’t take long to make.”

  Boy, I thought. She doesn’t know my mother. She had to make a big dinner every night, even in the summer. But I waited with some uneasiness until I heard my mother sigh and say that very thing.

  Now, sitting here on this airplane, I stare at the seat pocket in front of me. There are the magazines I bought for the trip. Bon Appétit. Gourmet. Cooks Illustrated. And The Atlantic Monthly, of course, proving that I am nothing like her.

  “Hot, huh?” Jasmine asked, as we backed slowly out of her driveway. I was watching her in the rearview mirror. She had on black wraparound sunglasses that were serious about their job—you couldn’t see her eyes at all. She wore a silky leopard-print scarf over her hair and tied at the back of her neck, a sleeveless black dress and black sandals that were barely there—the straps seemed thin as rubber bands. Gold bangle bracelets clicked brightly on her arm. Sharla got to hold her black straw purse and I could tell she was pretending it was her own.

  Jasmine was like a deluxe, 3-D paper doll; she had clothes and accessories for every occasion. It was a pleasure to live next door to her, to see what she would be wearing each day. So far some of the things we had liked best were turquoise capri pants, bright yellow short shorts, gold earrings in the shape of seashells, and a two-piece navy-blue suit trimmed with white piping. We were dying to see her pajamas, but she closed her bedroom curtains at night before she undressed. Shortly after moving in, she had stretched out in a chaise longue in her backyard in a white bikini. I had never seen one outside of the Life magazine issue highlighting the French Riviera. Even my mother looked out the window for that outfit. For a while no one said anything; then my mother said, “Well, for heaven’s sake, she’s already tan, isn’t she?” And then, sighing, “Hasn’t she found a job yet?”

  Jasmine signaled for a left. “What do you say we take a spin on the highway first? We’ll open her up and cool off a little.”

  I settled happily into a corner of the backseat. I had an idea of how I would look with my hair blowing straight out, sitting in a convertible. Older.

  Soon we were on the highway in the passing lane, and I saw the red needle of the speedometer trembling at the ninety-miles-an-hour mark. When I heard the wail of the siren behind us, I turned around to see a black-and-white police car far away, but closing in. “Uh-oh,” I said. When I turned back I saw Jasmine looking into the rearview mirror and smiling. She reached over and put a hand on Sharla’s knee, yelled, “Hold on!” and sped up.

  I couldn’t believe it. I laughed out loud, but I was very much afraid. It might be Leroy, for one thing; and then, even if Jasmine got away from him, he would know where to come—with the top down, he would have seen Sharla and me clearly. He would knock on our door, ask our mother where we were, and she would start wringing her hands. After we were standing straight before him, he would say something like, “Enjoy your little ride this afternoon? Care to tell me who the driver was?”

  “Tell him!” my mother would say, her voice a mix of outrage and anguish. And then, “Oh, my goodness! It was Jasmine Johnson, wasn’t it?” Actually, that would be fine; then she would be the tattletale.

  Jasmine was in the right-hand lane now, going even faster. And then we were on an exit ramp, headed down a side street, then another and another. Finally she pulled into a Henny Penny, screeched to a halt, and turned off the ignition. The police car was nowhere in sight. “Everybody all right?” she asked.

  Well. Sharla and I looked at each other. Sharla was still holding on to the door handle. I’d neglected to do that, and had slid from one end of the long backseat to the other.

  “You okay?” Jasmine asked again.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sharla said. I nodded.

  Jasmine looked into the mirror, adjusted her scarf and her glasses. “I hate when they do that,” she said. “Chase you around like you’re a common criminal.” She pressed her lips together, touched lightly at a corner of her mouth. Then she turned back to me, lowered her sunglasses. “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So … shall we continue? Monroe’s?”

  I nodded.

  She turned to my sister. “Sharla?”

  “What?”

  “Monroe’s?”

  “Okay.”

  Her voice was small. It came to me that she wasn’t so old.

  Jasmine took her purse from Sharla, pulled out a package of Lucky Strikes. “Damn,” she said. “Only one left. I’m going to run in the store for a second. You want to come?”

  I shook my head; I wasn’t sure I trusted my knees yet. But Sharla went with her and when they came out she was eating a Baby Ruth. I was annoyed until Jasmine handed a Milky Way to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Did Sharla tell you this is my favorite?”

  “No, I guessed. You’r
e a Milky Way type, don’t you think?”

  I unwrapped the candy bar, shrugged. I was all of a sudden in a bad mood. I didn’t want to be so easy.

  I liked Monroe’s department store. It was big, but not intimidating, and carried enough merchandise to always be interesting. It had wooden floors and high ceilings with intricate engravings, white on white. I used to lie on my back to admire the ceiling whenever my mother wasn’t looking, until the day I was stepped on by Mrs. Reginald Whalen, the principal’s wife, who apologized profusely to my mother for the dirty mark she left behind on my white blouse. I myself feared (and hoped) that my ribs had been broken, and felt around gingerly while my mother held me to her and nervously reassured Mrs. Whalen that no, a visit to the emergency room would not be necessary. Alas, I was not even bruised, and after my mother mildly chastised me for nearly tripping such an important person, we finished our shopping without incident.

  Sharla liked the department stores in the big cities that we visited at Christmastime, but I felt mostly in the way there, out of place. I didn’t think a choice of fifteen or twenty winter coats was necessary; at Monroe’s, there might be a choice of three, which felt exactly right to me. And there were no mysterious bonging bells there, no glitzy counters staffed by impatient young women wearing too much makeup. There were no escalators; if you wanted to go upstairs to the second or third floor, you simply walked. There were large departments for men’s clothing, women’s clothing, juniors, and children’s; and there were smaller sections for many other things. Cardboard rounds of satin ribbons were lined up on wooden dowels in the stationery department; soft linen handkerchiefs featuring pastel embroidery overlapped each other in glass display cases in Notions—the woman who usually worked in that department had a whispery voice like a librarian, and she sucked continually, though inoffensively, on hard candies. Nylon stockings were stacked high in their thin blue boxes along the side wall in Hosiery, and this department was always busy. Women waiting their turns chatted softly with each other, rested their pocketbooks on the counter, removed one foot from a high-heeled shoe to rub the top of the other. The jewelry department featured a small selection of watches, necklaces, and bracelets that, despite their sparkly allure, did not need to be locked up.

  There was a fairly large hat department toward the front of the store, and this is where Jasmine headed first. She tried on every hat displayed, and encouraged us to do the same. Sharla did, but I stopped after three; the hats looked too silly on me and too perfect on Jasmine. I liked watching her in the mirror more than looking at myself. She lifted her chin, turned her head this way and that when she tried on one flamboyant offering. It had a huge white brim with a dip over one eye; I thought she would buy it, and she did. She offered to buy Sharla a hat as well, a small black cloche, but Sharla declined with a mixture of propriety and regret.

  We went next to Intimates, and Jasmine disappeared into a dressing room with an armload of brassieres, panties, and slips. She had told Sharla and me to pick out something for ourselves, but we were uninspired to do anything but rifle through the nightgowns, looking to see if one might work for my mother’s birthday, which was exactly two weeks before my own. I did not want to give my mother a nightgown; I thought the idea lacked imagination. However, my offering last year had been licorice and a book of riddles, which I now saw differently.

  “Girls,” Jasmine called, her head sticking out from her dressing room. “Could you get me another size in a slip? The one I have in here is way too big.”

  I looked around for the sales clerk, but she was busy helping someone else with girdles. “What do you need?” I asked, coming up to the curtain.

  “One minute, let me get this off,” Jasmine said, turning to remove the slip she had on. She did not close the curtain all the way back up, and I watched her standing there in a bra, panties, and nylons. She looked like the lingerie models in the Sears catalogue that I studied behind the closed bathroom door; but her figure was more spectacular, and disturbingly real. There was a small constellation of moles on one side of her back; her belly button was slightly elongated; the line of her tan stopped dramatically above soft-looking white breasts. She looked up, saw me watching, and smiled. I shut the curtain. When her hand came out holding the slip, I walked away quickly, blushing.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sharla asked.

  “Nothing.” I handed the slip to her, told her to find a smaller size and bring it to Jasmine, that I was going over to look at toys for a minute.

  “Well, hurry up,” Sharla said, but it wasn’t really me she was talking to. And it wasn’t really toys I was going over to consider.

  Jasmine bought hula hoops for Sharla and me; Monroe’s had just gotten them in. And after we got home, Sharla and I spent a long time in the backyard learning how to use them. I was surprised to find that I was at last better at something than Sharla—and so was she. I got the hoop going around my waist almost right away, but Sharla’s kept falling down. After a short while, I could walk around with it spinning evenly, while Sharla had abandoned her waist and was trying to twirl the hoop on her arm. I thought this might be even harder; but Sharla was frustrated and in no mood for tips from me.

  Gypsy, Jasmine’s German shepherd, lay nearby. I took a break to allow Sharla time to catch up, and stretched out close beside the dog. I liked watching the slick black sides of her mouth move back and forth with her panting. Occasionally, a fly would hover around her and she would snap at it. I liked that, too. And if you scratched in the right place, her back leg would react wildly, while her dog face remained utterly impassive. I very much wanted a dog, but my mother would not permit it. Not a dog, not a cat; only a parakeet, which she said she could keep track of. I knew what she meant. A parakeet couldn’t mess up the house. It was the one thing I truly hated about my mother, her devotion to an orderly house. I couldn’t imagine why it meant so much to her. It seemed to me that she could risk a little messiness in her life in order to gain real pleasure. But she always said, “You let one thing slip, and it all goes.”

  Once, I called my mother outside to watch Gypsy as she ate potato chips, but my mother was not persuaded to my point of view. “She’s drooling,” my mother said, and I said, “No, listen to the crunch!” She listened dutifully, then smiled blankly and went back inside.

  Jasmine had called my mother over to show off her purchases when we returned from shopping, and though my mother protested that she was in the middle of making dinner and couldn’t leave, she went anyway. At one point, I saw through Jasmine’s dining-room window that my mother was wearing the new white hat. I stopped twirling my hula hoop. “Look,” I told Sharla. I pointed to the window.

  Sharla looked, then turned away, scowling. “She doesn’t wear hats like that,” she said. I supposed I agreed, but I kept watching my mother until she took the hat off and laid it on the table before her. She had looked beautiful in it. And starkly unlike herself. Watching her, I’d felt the way that babies seemed to feel regarding themselves in a mirror: ah! Look! Something lovable, and familiar, and intriguing. But entirely separate.

  I take out my credit card, use the plane phone to call home. No one answers, and I don’t leave a message. I just wanted anyone who was there to know I was there, too, in a way. Only a phone call away. Even in the air. Oftentimes I sense a polite impatience when I am on a rare trip and I call my daughters. But I have to let them know something.

  A couple of years ago my husband and I took a brief trip to Canada. When I called home for the third time one day, my husband exploded. “Why must you do this?” he asked. “What do you think happened? They’re fine!”

  “I know that!” I said. “I just want them to know we’re thinking of them.”

  “They’re fine,” he said again, and I sniffed, looked out the hotel window, and sulked for a few minutes. I knew I was overdoing it, yet I felt compelled to make those calls. It had to do with the way parents say they’ll never repeat the mistakes their own parents made. It had to
do with my offering my daughters what I so needed and was denied. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t be grateful. How could they not be grateful when surely they could see that I was only trying to love them, to give them what I knew they needed—whether they knew it or not?

  And now some wave of feeling comes over me that I don’t recognize. Nausea? I sit still for a moment, then rise quickly and head back to the lavatory, which thankfully is free. Inside, I kneel before the stainless-steel toilet, hold back my hair, and wait. Nothing. I wash my face, rinse out my mouth, and stare at myself in the dimly lit mirror. I don’t look sick. I don’t feel sick anymore, either. I shrug, head back to my seat, settle in, and continue with my memories the way I might keep on with a book.

  When my mother returned home from trying on Jasmine’s hat, she was flushed and happy. Through the open kitchen window I heard her humming with the radio. “Catch a Falling Star” was playing. I liked that song, too, liked the notion of having a pocketful of starlight. I hoped for such a thing, in fact. I believed at the time that stars were five-pointed objects you could hold in your hand, a sort of fancier version of the tinfoil variety. I was ignorant of heat and size and the most astounding fact of all, that some stars I saw were not really there at all. I counted on someday finding a falling star and I had resolved not to share it with Sharla, no matter how convincing her arguments might be. She could look at it as it lay on my bed; that was all.

  “Hula hoops are stupid,” Sharla finally said, after failing yet again to keep hers up. She threw it down, headed for the woods.

  “Nuh-uh,” I said, walking jerkily, following her, my hula hoop going around my waist in a way that felt like a sloppy embrace. “They’re fun.”

  “Well, something is wrong with mine,” Sharla said. “It doesn’t work.”

  I put my hot-pink hula hoop down, picked up her lime-green one, started spinning it. “It works,” I called out. “Hey, Sharla, look! It works!”