What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  She looked up at him. “Why don’t you think of a place, Steven?”

  He stood there. Blinked. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Well, let’s see. Let’s see.” He sat down at the table with us, folded his hands before him. We waited. The cuckoo clock sounded, absurdly: it was seven o’clock. I found this sad, somehow; it seemed too early and too late both.

  My mother took the knife back from my father, cut into the cake. She smiled, lips tight. “Let’s just eat this, okay? I don’t need to go out. I feel better staying home when Ginny’s sick.” She cut one piece, then another, then another, one more; handed them out. The silence felt draped around us.

  Finally, “I’m better!” I said, to no one, apparently. Sharla sat still at the table, staring into space, then picked up her fork.

  We ate in silence. And then the cake was put in the refrigerator, the thirty-five having been clumsily changed into a thirty-six. My father used a fork to do it. He wasn’t careful enough; it didn’t really work.

  There was one awful year when my husband forgot my birthday. Usually, he would serve me breakfast in bed—that was always one of the best presents. But this year he said nothing about my birthday all day. I wasn’t worried. It was a Saturday, and I kept waiting, thinking he had a surprise party planned. The kids didn’t mention my birthday either, but that wasn’t unusual—they were only four and six. Sharla called that afternoon when Mark was at the hardware store. She asked what he had given me and I said nothing yet, that I thought he had some big surprise planned. Then I asked if she knew what it was. “No,” she said, and I could tell she wasn’t lying, and it was then that it began to occur to me that he had forgotten. I didn’t tell her that, though, nor did I tell my father and Georgia when they called a few minutes later. They, too, asked me what Mark had gotten me. This time I did not smile and say I thought he had something planned. This time I felt like punching them for asking.

  Mark remembered right before we went to bed. He felt terrible. He got dressed and went to an all-night grocery to get a card and a bouquet of flowers, and the next day he served me a spectacular breakfast in bed.

  But what happened on my mother’s birthday, that was different. It was completely different.

  The morning after the Tupperware party, I awakened feeling fine. I left Sharla sleeping and came into the kitchen to see my mother sitting at the kitchen table, a small book before her. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s a book of poetry. By Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Jasmine gave it to me for my birthday. That, and this.” She pointed to her neck, and I saw a thin gold chain, holding a locket.

  “That’s pretty. What’s inside?” I knew already: photos of me and Sharla. I couldn’t wait to see.

  “Nothing, yet.” My mother tightened her hand around the locket.

  “You can use my school picture,” I said. “Part of me would fit.”

  “Good,” she said. “Yes. I’ll do that.”

  I sat opposite her, looked at the book she had open to somewhere in the middle. “Why did Jasmine get you a poetry book?”

  She looked up. “I love poetry.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  She got up, went over to the refrigerator. “Do you want scrambled eggs?”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Something was.

  “Nothing.”

  A silence, thick and unrelenting. She stood waiting before the open refrigerator door, her back to me. “I’ll just have cereal,” I said, finally.

  The next morning, our father stayed home from work. “For nothing,” he said. “For fun.”

  He had never done this, and it astounded and delighted Sharla and me. It also frightened us. We looked at our mother for signs of life-threatening illness and found none. We looked at our father, at ourselves. All seemed well: skins were pink; eyes were clear; no one limped or coughed or moaned. All seemed well except that our father was staying home from work. It was like finding two yolks in an egg: a bonus, but an anomaly that made you a bit nervous.

  My mother seemed suspicious at first, then guardedly happy. We all sat in the living room in our pajamas, thinking about what we might do. My mother wanted to go on a picnic, but outside thick gray clouds moved restlessly about, as though the sky had been set for a slow boil. It looked like we were in for yet another day of storms.

  “It’ll clear up by noon,” she said. “I’ll make some potato salad.”

  She started potatoes cooking, then went up to dress. By the time she came down, the rain had started. Fat drops splattered against the window, drummed at the gutters; the wind whipped the branches of the bushes and pulled blossoms off the flowers in the garden. She stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, immobile.

  “Let’s have a picnic anyway,” my father said.

  My mother looked at him.

  “Inside, I mean.”

  “Inside?”

  “How about in the living room?” He was dressed in his Saturday clothes: khaki pants, a plaid, short-sleeved shirt open two buttons at the throat. His hands were in his pockets, as though seeking protection behind that thin fabric; he looked to me like a boy asking for his allowance early.

  “I don’t know about having a picnic inside,” my mother said. “What would be the point?”

  “Fun!” I said.

  She nodded. Did not smile. Although her mouth moved slightly, as if she were trying to.

  While she finished making lunch, the rest of us sat at the kitchen table, keeping her company. Sharla and I had a stack of magazines. We were “doing houses,” as we called it, cutting out things to put in our piles. If you saw a dress you liked, you put that in there and it was yours, hanging in the closet of your dreams. If you cut out a Cadillac convertible, it was parked in whatever garage you imagined (and Sharla once imagined a garage with a swimming pool in it). Today, I dropped a white cake with cherry-fluff frosting in my pile, then added a hat and coat ensemble, then an entire kitchen. Sharla was concentrating on furniture; thus far, she had a nubby green tweed sofa, a Sylvania television, and a club chair. My father watched us for a while, then took a magazine for himself and began cutting things out. He told us he was going to make a collage. We stopped our own work to watch him: he taped a pair of brown wing tips inside a DeSoto, taped a roast onto a Frigidaire dryer. He found a white picket fence and taped a woman behind it; next to that, he put the face of a fair-haired child looking out of a window.

  My mother finished with the ham sandwiches and came over to watch my father, hands on her hips. Then she, too, sat down and began leafing through magazines. She cut out a pair of red high heels. Next she cut out the picture of a small bird, and, with great care, cut his wings off. These she affixed to the heel of the shoes. She stared at her creation, then sat back, her arms crossed.

  “What have you got there, Marion?” my father asked.

  My mother smiled, shrugged.

  “Where are those shoes going?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wherever it is, it’s fast,” my father said.

  “Hey, Mom,” Sharla said. She held up a picture of an airplane. “Want this?”

  “Oh, say, I could use that,” my father said. He reached across the table to take the airplane from Sharla, then asked my mother, “You don’t mind?”

  “Take it, Steven,” she said. Then she sat quietly looking out the window at the storm, which continued to worsen.

  When lunch was ready, we assembled ourselves on a quilt before the fireplace. No one talked. We listened instead to the natural symphony of wind and rain, to the reverberation of thunder so loud it seemed it might crack the earth.

  By five o’clock that evening, we had lost our electrical power. It seemed to me that this was a real opportunity for a good time, though I was short on specific ideas. But my mother took a flashlight and started upstairs. She said she was going to read for a while,
then go to sleep.

  “But it’s still day!” I said.

  “I’m tired.” She did not turn around to tell me this. I turned angrily to Sharla and my father, who were watching her go up the steps; and in their faces I saw that they each thought it was their fault, too. So I said nothing. Instead, I silently shared the burden.

  Sharla and I stayed up until ten, playing Monopoly with our father. The lights had come back on at nine-thirty, for which I was a little sorry. I’d liked seeing the dice roll into shadowy corners of the game board, liked moving my marker with the flashlight ahead of it as though it were a car.

  “Are you ever going to play hooky again?” Sharla asked my father.

  He took his turn, landed on Chance, pulled a card. “I might,” he said. “I’m full of surprises.” And then, to me, the banker, “Fifty bucks, please.” He showed me the tax rebate card that entitled him to it.

  “You’re not full of surprises.” I laughed, handed him the money.

  “What do you mean?” He seemed offended.

  “Nothing. Just … You don’t do surprising things. You’re … regular.” My father’s routine was unalterable. I could recite the specifics of it to anyone. Every workday morning, he kissed my mother lightly on the lips, kissed the top of Sharla’s and my heads; then sang out, “I’ll see you at six!” as he was walking out the door. He pulled the car out of the driveway, tooted the horn three times, then proceeded down the street with his hands on the wheel at the ten and two o’clock position. At six in the evening, he did the same thing in reverse: three toots of the horn, a calling out of “I’m home!” as he came in the door, three kisses.

  He had a weekend routine, too. And I knew what flavor ice cream he would order when we went out, how and when he wore his slippers, what television shows he never missed, what he would say to his parents when they called. If I asked for a dollar, he’d give me two, admonishing me not to lose them. When he buttered his pancakes, he would cut the pat into four tiny squares before he spread it.

  But, “Believe me,” he said now, “I can be just as surprising as the next guy.”

  I thought it was so cute, this lie—it made for a soft spot in my stomach. For him, a man whose habits were so utterly predictable, to say he was full of surprises! I wondered if he actually believed it.

  After we went to bed, Sharla and I were talking about what teacher I might get my first year in junior high when our mother came into our room, stood just in the doorway. At first I thought we were in trouble for waking her up. But then she only said softly, “Good-night.”

  “You slept all day!” Now that I knew she was not angry at us, I had the luxury of being angry at her.

  “Are you sick?” Sharla asked.

  This had not occurred to me.

  “No, I’m not sick.” She walked over to sit at the foot of my bed, began playing with the thinning tufts on my spread. Then, looking up, she said, “I think I’ve raised you so wrong.”

  I held still, the breath inside me feeling like a swallowed balloon.

  “What’d I do?” I asked, finally.

  I could feel Sharla smirking, basking in some unearned victory until my mother said, “No, I mean both of you. You didn’t do anything wrong. I did something wrong. I did everything wrong, and I’m sorry.” To my horror, she began weeping, her shaking hands covering her face. I had two simultaneous impulses: to embrace her and to shove her.

  “Where’s Dad?” Sharla asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  My mother waved her hand in dismissal. “Oh—him. Don’t … This is not …” She stood up. “I’m sorry, girls.” She kissed my cheek, then Sharla’s. “I’m sorry.” And then she was gone.

  “Dad?” Sharla called softly. And then louder, “Dad?”

  He came into the room. His face was drawn, softened by sadness. “Yes?”

  “What’s wrong with Mom?” Sharla asked. “What’s the matter with her?”

  I looked down, picked at my thumb. I felt as though my bed were an island, surrounded by a roiling sea. I feared for the rest of my family, but I was fine. I was. I was fine.

  I lay down, closed my eyes. “If you want to talk,” I said, “go downstairs. I’m going to sleep.”

  I heard Sharla and my father leave, and I opened my eyes, lay still and straight in my bed. I could not hear them. I tried, but I could not hear a word.

  I turned over, away from the door, raised my arm up to lay my hand flat on the wall as high as I could reach; relished the slight pain caused by the excessive pull of my muscle. Then I received my own arm back to my own self. I wrapped it in the sheet, I kissed it at the wrist, and at the elbow, and then I rocked it.

  Then, against my will, I remembered my father coming home from work a few days earlier, walking with gentle fatigue into the kitchen where my mother was making dinner. He’d kissed her, then stood close to her, watching her, watching. He’d turned his hat around and around in his hands, nervously, absentmindedly. My mother had snatched the hat away from him, and the gesture was sudden and violent enough that it had caused her to lose her balance. She’d caught herself against the counter, then handed the hat back to him. “For God’s sake, Steven,” she’d said. “Stop it.”

  I awakened to the sounds of an argument. My mother was shouting, crying. My father was shouting back. I got out of bed, went into the hall and found Sharla there, sitting at the top of the stairs.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  “Shhh!” She patted the floor next to her, and I sat down.

  “Even if it weren’t true, there’s other things,” my mother said. “There’s so much more. You have no idea, Steven. You have no idea! You live your neat life in the way that you want to, you decide everything, you never stop to think about me! As a person, I mean! I’m just … your wife. Like your shoes!”

  “Marion, I have no idea what you’re talking about! When did this happen? What’s the matter with you? You’ve never been like this. Never!”

  “I have been!” she yelled. “I have been and have been and have been!”

  “Marion.” My father’s voice was quiet now.

  “No!” she yelled.

  A long silence. The grandfather clocked chimed the half hour, then the cuckoo. The wind moved the bushes next to the house and I heard their scratching sound. It used to scare me, that sound. Now it comforted me.

  “What do you need?” my father asked, finally. “What should I do?”

  Muffled sounds of sobbing.

  “Marion. Are you … are you having a nervous breakdown?”

  She stopped weeping. It seemed as loud as screeching brakes, this sudden quiet.

  I heard a chair slide slowly across the floor. “Steven, I am thirty-six years old. I used to tell everyone that by the time I was thirty-five, I would … Well, whatever it was I was going to do, it would be done by then. I would have done it. But that time has come and gone, and I’ve done nothing. I am nothing.”

  “Oh, Marion, don’t say that. How can you say that? You’re a wife and a mother.”

  “That is NOTHING!” She yelled this so loud her voice broke, like a boy’s when it was changing over into a man’s.

  I felt a curious combination of anger and pain, a small tornado of emotion twisting up from my stomach into my throat. I took in a breath, gritted my teeth, stood. I was going down there. I was going to present the fact of myself for her reconsideration.

  “Don’t!” Sharla whispered, and grabbed my arm. She stared straight ahead, unblinking, immobile. Her face was empty of any emotion that I could read.

  I jerked away, started downstairs, stopped halfway when I heard my mother say, “I never even wanted children! I just did it! You had to do it, you had to do it!”

  I leaned against the wall, opened my mouth, closed it.

  “But I wanted to … oh Steven, you just don’t know. I’m not like—”

  “Marion, I want you to stop this right now. I want you to lower your voice. You’ll wake them up. For God�
�s sake!”

  I started back upstairs, slowly, slowly. I had two knees, two feet. This is what I thought of. I had two hands, two eyes, two ears. There was a hammer and anvil in the middle ear, I had two of those.

  “I don’t care if I wake them up,” my mother said, but her voice was low now, contrite.

  My father sighed. “Do you … Would it help to go away? Maybe visit your parents, or … just get away?”

  A long silence. And then, “Maybe it would.”

  I saw that Sharla was no longer at the top of the stairs. I went into our bedroom, saw her shadowy C-shape lying in bed, turned away from the door. I got into her bed with her, turned on my side, rested my hand on top of her head. When I used to suck my thumb, I would often hold on to a piece of Sharla’s hair, twist it around my fingers. I did this now, lifted a few silky strands of her hair, wound them gently around my pointer. She didn’t say a word, just moved over to give me more room. I put my thumb in my mouth, then pulled it out and wiped it on my T-shirt. Then I moved closer to Sharla. We stayed like that.

  If Sharla is really, really ill, I’m going to bring her home with me. No one will take care of her like I can. I know that. She knows that, too. No one is closer to her—not her husband, not her children, not our father.

  Sometimes I wish so hard that my own daughters would be closer to each other. But it doesn’t seem to be happening. They will occasionally work side by side on some project, but they don’t look up and exchange things in a glance. They don’t seek each other out as playmates or as counsel to each other, at least not yet. A friend of mine once said that she believes it takes some awful adversity to get family members really close—otherwise they only affectionately tolerate each other. She said, “It’s kind of like you need Outward Bound at the kitchen table. I mean, every time I find sibs who are really close, it’s because they survived something hard together. Don’t you find that to be true?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it.” Not quite true. Not true at all, actually. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I think there may be some truth in what my friend is saying. For example, I know the exact moment that Sharla and I moved into a much closer relationship. It was that night when I lay silently beside her, listening to the sad noise of our parents coming apart.