What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  She would not turn around.

  “You’re just a party pooper!” I called after her. And then I attempted to spin both hoops at the same time, but failed. I stepped out of them to follow Sharla.

  “Someone has ravaged our lands,” Sharla said. “We must have a war dance.” Sharla was excellent at war dances. My job was to watch her, to sit cross-legged at the circle of rocks we called a campfire, and make rhythmic, singing sounds, while Sharla twirled and whirled, bent down low and raised up high, calling for power from heaven and earth.

  When we ate dinner the next Monday night, my vocabulary word was “sanguine.” “He has a sanguine disposition,” I told the table. “He thinks everything will always be fine.”

  “Well … all right,” my father said, and then turned expectantly toward Sharla.

  “Seductive,” she said. “She is very seductive.”

  No one spoke. I knew the word Sharla had chosen wasn’t far in the dictionary from the one I had picked. She sometimes deliberated for a long time before choosing her word, but tonight she had merely flipped a few pages away, closed her eyes, and pointed.

  “I don’t get what it means,” I said now, spearing a green bean.

  “She is seductive,” Sharla said. “She tries to be sexy like Brigitte Bardot. You know. Va-va-va-voom!”

  “That’s fine,” my mother said. “We understand.”

  “Or,” Sharla persisted. “She is seductive; she tries to capture things.”

  “Enough,” my father said, and looked over his fork at my mother, who looked away.

  After dinner, while Sharla and I did the dishes, we heard my mother talking to my father in the living room. “How would you define happiness?” she asked him.

  Sharla and I looked at each other.

  “… What are you talking about?” my father said.

  “It’s just a question, Steven.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean … well, I guess I mean just what I said! You know? How would you define happiness? What is it? Is it real? And if it is, what brings it to you? Is it something in you or outside of you? Does anyone have it all the time, or are there just moments of happiness for anyone? Is contentment the same as happiness?”

  Silence. And then my father said, “Good Lord. What have you been reading, Marion?”

  She sighed. “Steven, I just wanted to … oh, forget it. All right? Forget it.”

  Silence again, and then the television came on. I snuck out into the hall to peek into the living room. I wanted to make sure they were sitting beside each other on the sofa, that my mother had not retreated to her knitting chair, where she went when she was angry. Her needles flew then, clicked brightly, speaking a language only she could understand.

  She was on the sofa beside my father. And his arm was around her, his usual loose claim. But while he was watching The Rifleman, she was watching her hands in her lap. They didn’t move. I couldn’t imagine what she was seeing.

  “They’re okay,” I told Sharla doubtfully, when I came back into the kitchen.

  “I know,” she said irritably, and in her anger was the same fear I felt.

  Sharla and I slept in our beds that night. It felt odd, not being outside on our quilt first. At one point, I woke up, full of resentment at my mother for having discovered us and taken away this simple pleasure. “Sharla?” I whispered.

  She was sleeping. I looked at our clock. Two-ten.

  “Sharla!”

  “What?”

  “Want to sneak out?”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “They said not to, we’ll get in trouble.”

  “They won’t catch us, they’re asleep.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re always asleep by now. They’re always asleep a long time ago.”

  Sharla turned on her side, away from me. “You check. If they’re sound asleep, maybe.”

  I got out of bed. I’d go to the bathroom first. If the flushing toilet didn’t wake them, our creeping downstairs surely wouldn’t. I wanted to do something more tonight. I wanted to take a walk somewhere we’d never been.

  I turned on the bathroom light and there was my mother, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Her feet were bare, her nightgown pulled up over her knees. She looked at me, squinting in the light, said nothing.

  “Mom! What are you doing?” I said. I was angry; she’d scared me.

  “Well, I …” She seemed a bit angry herself. Her cheeks were pink, her breathing rapid. “As you can see, I’m sitting here.”

  “How come?”

  She rose, squeezed past me. “Not everything I do is your business.” She looked at herself in the mirror, pushed the sides of her hair back. Then she left.

  I stood for a moment, stunned. Why was she behaving this way? I hadn’t done anything, had I? No. I flushed the toilet, turned the faucet on and off, and went back to the bedroom.

  Sharla was asleep again, and I didn’t wake her. I lay in bed for a while, then went to see if Jasmine’s bedroom light was on. No. And yet I believed I could feel her wakefulness.

  I wonder now if my mother didn’t owe it to me to say something at that point. To say something about what she must have been thinking. Or feeling. Or planning.

  I had a friend who got leukemia and for the longest time would not tell her seven-and nine-year-old sons. In the interest of protecting them, she tried to pretend that her frequent doctor’s visits were outings with friends, shopping trips, appointments with the dentist. At the point when she was losing all her hair and she finally had to tell them, they said they had thought she was tired of them. This is a woman who sat immobilized at the kitchen table holding her older son’s pajamas on the day he first went to nursery school, willing him to be safe on the bus, in the classroom, on the monkey bars, at snack time.

  If there is a fault I, too, have as a parent, it is over-protectiveness, I know. But I’ll tell you this: my children know they can depend on me to tell them the truth. If ever something started happening in me the way it did in my mother, I’d tell my children. I’d tell them something.

  One morning I awakened to the sound of thunder and pelting rain. I pulled the sheet up higher, then reached for the bedspread to cover me. It felt good to wake up chilly after so many hot nights. I saw that the fan had been turned off and the window closed; I shut my eyes to feel better the head-to-toe pleasure of having been cared for in my sleep. The thunder came again, a sound so loud it made the whole house seem to shake.

  “Sharla?” I said.

  No response. She couldn’t be sleeping! I called her name again; again I heard no response. I got out of bed, peered down at her. I noticed no give-away eye movements, no secret smile, only the no-access blankness of a face deep in sleep.

  I stretched, put on socks and my robe and headed downstairs for breakfast. I wanted French toast; I was visualizing a fat pat of butter melting over two perfect slices, warmed syrup being poured over that.

  My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, poring over her “house folder,” as she called it. In this she kept magazine photographs of furniture she could not afford, swatches of fabric she could never use, and layouts for gardens both small and grand, though we never had a garden. The file also held graph paper for planning furniture rearrangements; and this was a passion my mother realized. She made scaled-down paper cutouts representing every piece of furniture we had, taped the edges for durability, and moved them around on the graph paper until she was satisfied; then she duplicated her efforts for real. You never knew when she would strike. You would come home from school and find her standing in the middle of a new living room, her finger to her chin, musing, making sure she was really done.

  I was astounded at how my mother was able to move furniture alone—sometimes I’d find the heavy sofa on the other side of the room, the china cabinet in the dining room reoriented in order to maximize the afternoon light falling onto the cut-crystal
glasses.

  “Who helped you?” I would ask every time; and every time she would shrug and say, “No one.” I often imagined her in a phone booth, changing into some Superwoman costume in order to achieve such things, but she wore only a cleaning kerchief and dungarees (neatly belted, of course, with a nicely ironed blouse tucked into them). I would try out the new arrangement: lie on the sofa, read in a chair, turn on the television in its new place. I liked feeling as though I’d moved without having had to go anywhere; it gave me a safe thrill. Sharla and my father complained that it made them feel mixed up, that there was no reason to do such things; there was never anything wrong with the way things were.

  My mother compromised by never changing around anything upstairs—the placement of things in her and my father’s bedroom, especially, was sacrosanct. I once used my mother’s hairbrush when I was in her room talking to her as she folded laundry on the bed. When I put the brush down on the left side of her dresser, she actually stopped what she was doing to come over and move it to the right. It was not cruel in any way, or even particularly admonitory; it was just that up here, things stayed. There was a pleasurable aspect to that, I supposed, but it confused me, too. Why, in that room only, did there have to be such a sense of change as sin?

  On the rainy morning I found my mother staring at her magazine pictures, I thought it might be another redecorating day. Hard to say for sure, though; the cleaning kerchief was nowhere in sight—my mother was still in her robe. This surprised me; it was almost eleven.

  I sat at the table across from her. “What are you doing?”

  She looked up. “What?”

  I pointed to the pictures. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh,” she said, closing the folder, “nothing, really. Looking. Dreaming.”

  “Dreaming of what?”

  “Oh, of how I’d really like things.” She smiled, raised her eyebrows. “You know, I wish—”

  “Can I have some French toast?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to interrupt, but I was hungry; and I was afraid if she started telling me what she’d really like, breakfast would be delayed for a good long while.

  Her smile changed, and she rose to open the refrigerator. When she was beating the milk into the eggs, I said, “So … what do you wish?”

  “Never mind.” Her voice was quiet, flat. She didn’t look up. She served me perfectly browned French toast, kissed the top of my head, then went upstairs to dress. I ate alone, stared out the window at the rain. I saw that Sharla’s and my latest tepee, made out of branches tied together with twine, had collapsed. There’d be no repairing anything today, though. Today would be an indoor day: Parcheesi. Monopoly, the money limp and folding over in our hands from the humidity. Store, with Sharla hogging the role of cashier. Crazy 8s, Go Fish, War. Dishes would pile up in the sink from our frequent snacks, eating being the favorite recreation of the trapped. Already I was thinking of S’mores, of how I might convince my mother that they were fine to have before lunch. Or for lunch, for that matter.

  Sharla came to the table when I had just finished eating. “What did you have?” she asked.

  “French toast. It was good. There’s more; it’s on the plate by the stove.”

  “I don’t want French toast. I hate French toast.”

  “You do not.”

  “Do so.”

  “No you do not. You ate it last week!”

  “So? You can change what you like.”

  My mother entered the kitchen. “If you girls want to fight,” she said, “go outside.” There was a thinness in her voice that I had never heard before, a tautness.

  “It’s raining,” Sharla said.

  “I could not care less.”

  Sharla and I looked at each other, silently agreeing to abandon our fighting for the sake of this much more interesting turn of events.

  “We would catch pneumonia,” Sharla said.

  My mother wet the dishrag, began wiping off the counter. “I suppose you could.”

  “We could die,” I said playfully.

  She looked up at me, shrugged. “There are worse things.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. The blank passivity in her face reminded me of watching Sharla sleep. Then she looked down at the counter, wiped and wiped in circles, at nothing.

  “Mom?” She was scaring me; I wanted to grab the dishrag away from her and throw it on the floor. I wanted to kick her.

  She stopped wiping, looked wearily up at me. “Oh, Ginny, what?” There. She was back. Somewhat. At least she was looking at me. “What do you want?”

  “Well, I want pancakes,” Sharla said.

  “You don’t want French toast?” my mother asked.

  “I hate French toast.”

  “Fine.” She dumped the leftover French toast in the garbage, cracked an egg against the side of a bowl for pancakes. In my mind, the sound rivaled the thunder. No one spoke. We watched our mother make pancakes, but cautiously, the way the hunter parts the grass to observe the wild beast.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sharla asked, after our mother had set pancakes in front of her and once again left the room.

  I shrugged.

  She took a big swallow of orange juice, then said, “I know what’s wrong.”

  “So why did you ask me?”

  “I wanted to see if you knew, too.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Maybe you don’t.” Sharla cut her pancakes into neat squares. She always cut her food this way, and it annoyed and fascinated me both. I rested my chin on my folded arms, watching her.

  “Stop,” Sharla said.

  “What?”

  “Stop watching me.”

  “I’m not watching you, I’m watching your fork.”

  “Well, stop.”

  She loaded up a fork with pancake squares, shoved them into her mouth, then spoke around them. “She misses Jasmine,” she said.

  “Who does?”

  “Mom!”

  “Where’s Jasmine?”

  “She’s out of town. She went to Mobile, Alabama.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I just know she went. Because I wanted to go visit her yesterday and Mom said, ‘She just left,’ and it was all sad-like.”

  “How long’s she gone for?”

  “A week. Six more days.”

  I considered this. Then, “Want to snoop over there?” I asked. We had a key to Jasmine’s house. She and my mother had exchanged keys only a few days after Jasmine moved in.

  Sharla did not answer. I took this as a good sign.

  “Tonight, midnight?” I asked, and again she did not answer.

  Well, then. Plans cast in stone.

  * * *

  When I went upstairs to dress, I saw my parents’ bedroom door open. The bedside lamp was on; the sky had darkened considerably. I saw the rain pounding sideways at the window, as if seeking furious entry. My mother was lying on her unmade bed. She was on her back, one arm resting across her closed eyes. Her ankles were crossed neatly, shoes lined up at the side of the bed.

  “Mom?” I whispered.

  “Yes?” She did not take her arm away or open her eyes.

  “Are you sick?”

  Now she did open her eyes. Then she sat up and stared at me for some time before she answered.

  “Yes,” she finally said, softly. And then, louder, “Yes. I have … a headache.”

  “Want us to do anything?”

  “Don’t fight.”

  “Okay.” I closed her door, then went back into Sharla’s and my bedroom. I made both our beds, put our dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, wadded up a bunch of toilet tissue to dust the furniture and along the window ledge. I was sorry for everything, because I didn’t know what specifically to be sorry for. But I felt the weight of regret spread wide across my chest. This always happened when my mother got sick. I was sorry, I was sorry, I was sorry.

  I’ve talked some with other mothers a
bout what we learned from our own. Here’s something I learned: I never make my children think any illness I have has anything to do with them. I never do that. Never. I mean, for God’s sake.

  At midnight, Sharla and I crossed quietly through our damp backyard and over into Jasmine’s. We crept around the side of her house opposite our own and then Sharla unlocked the heavy front door. I was having a little trouble waking up, which disappointed me; I’d wanted to feel nervous, or at least guilty. But the truth is, we had seen every room in Jasmine’s house; there was nothing for us to discover unless we went rifling through her private belongings, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Sharla was, though; she went directly to Jasmine’s bedroom and opened a large dresser drawer. The beam of my flashlight focused on pastel-colored, silky things. I saw a number of straps, a lot of lace. This whole drawer was underwear?

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Anything,” Sharla said; and then, turning accusingly toward me, she added, “This was your stupid idea.”

  “Nuh-uh, I didn’t say to do this part.” I looked more closely at the contents of the drawer. Yes, all underwear; there was the slip she’d gotten at Monroe’s. I wondered whether anything was hidden beneath the underwear; I myself once drew a picture of a naked woman with huge breasts and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer. I removed it after only a few hours, though—tore it into many pieces and flushed it down the toilet.

  “We shouldn’t look in her personal stuff,” I said, hoping Sharla would ignore me.

  She took the flashlight from me and shone it into my face; I held up my hand, squinted at her through my fingers. “What do you want to do,” she asked, in her most irritating big-sister voice, “get a drink of water out of her kitchen sink or something? Go pee in her toilet?”

  I said nothing, waiting for what I thought was misplaced anger to dissipate. Then I said, “We could try on her fur coats. I know exactly where they are.”

  “Big deal, so do I. Anyway, she’d let us do that anytime we wanted.”

  True. Jasmine was open and generous, more so than anyone we’d ever met. You had to be careful about saying you liked something she had; she’d up and give it to you. And then you’d get in trouble with our mother; so far, I’d had to return two scarves, a pair of pearl earrings, and the current issue of The Saturday Evening Post, although my mother said that when the new issue came out, I could have that old one.