What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  My mother was gone on my birthday. Sharla made me a Duncan Hines white cake with chocolate frosting; she did not know how to make caramel-flavored. My father presented me with gifts he and my mother had gotten earlier: two Nancy Drew books, a very sophisticated chemistry set that I’d wanted for a very long time, stationery featuring the floating trappings of the teenager: telephone, address book, nail polish, rollers, 45s. Sharla gave me a huge-size box of colored pencils and a sketch book. I opened everything with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, then stacked the gifts neatly at the side of the table. Later, I would stack them neatly at the bottom of my closet and drape a pillowcase over the pile.

  My father lay between our beds when we went to sleep that night, his arms a pillow behind his head. He kept his eyes closed while he talked. “There’s something wrong with your mother right now. But it’s temporary. It’s strictly temporary. But she’s so … upset right now, she just forgot it was your birthday, Ginny.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He opened his eyes, looked at me. “It happens, that people can get that upset. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Or that they’ll never be right again. It’s like … you know, a gallbladder operation or something. Remember when Grandma needed her gallbladder out and she was in the hospital? Remember how sick she looked, how she couldn’t do anything?”

  I nodded, squeezed the edge of my pillow. On a breezy day like we’d had today, my mother often would air the pillows, lay them across the windowsills, half in, half out.

  “Well,” my father said, “Grandma got better really fast, right? And she came home, and everything was fine. But the whole time she was in the hospital, she forgot about everything that was going on at home.”

  “Nothing was going on, though,” I said. Then at night, the pillows smelled so good. My mother called it God’s perfume, that’s what she said.

  “Well.” My father smiled. “You don’t know that nothing was going on.”

  “Not like a birthday or anything,” I said. And when my mother did the dishes, she took her wedding rings off and put them on the kitchen windowsill in a little bowl with pink roses on it, that’s all that bowl was for. Once, she let me wear the rings, instead of putting them in the bowl. When she had finished the dishes, I held my hand out, giving the rings back to her. “What have you got there?” she asked. I’d thought she was kidding. But she’d forgotten that she’d given them to me.

  “I don’t think Grandma missed a birthday,” my father said. “But I’m sure she missed some things.”

  “Nuh-uh,” I said. “She would have told me.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Mom is not in the hospital, Dad,” Sharla said. “She is with Jasmine. That is not a hospital.”

  “She is on a little trip with Jasmine,” my father said carefully. “But she is getting well just the same as if she were in a hospital.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Sharla muttered.

  My father sat up. “You really must try to understand, Sharla. Both of you. I know it’s hard. But you have to try. She’s your mother. She loves you very much, you two are the most important things in the world to her.”

  We neither of us said anything. But a shared doubt arched up between us.

  “We’ll have another birthday party for you when she comes home,” my father said. “Would you like that?”

  I shrugged. No.

  “I know she’ll feel just terrible when she realizes—”

  “She knows!” Sharla said. “She just doesn’t care! She’s not coming back, Dad! Why don’t you just admit it?!”

  My father went swiftly over to Sharla, put his arms around her. “Oh, honey, you’re wrong. You’re wrong! This just happens sometimes, people get overwhelmed, they need to get away, they just need … time! She’s coming back. She told me she’d come home in a few days, and she will, I know it.”

  He had Sharla’s head pressed against his chest, and he rocked her with short, jerky little movements. He didn’t know how to do it right, how to rock. He didn’t have the smooth, dancelike movements my mother did. He was stiff, fighting to keep from crying. His fists were balled, his mouth puckered and trembling.

  Sharla was not crying. Sharla’s eyes were wide open and unblinking, as cold and flat as a fish’s. Some knowledge was inside her that was too big for her; it moved other, familiar things out of the way, killed them. I looked away from both of them, out the window, then up into the black sky, asking a question I couldn’t find words for. It came to me that if an airplane flew over us, they would see only the lights coming from our house, the cozy squares of yellow that suggested warmth and safety.

  Sharla was right. Our mother did not come back in a few days, or in a few days more. Jasmine’s house sat empty; I saw the philodendron on her kitchen windowsill yellow, then wither and die. A light she left on in the bathroom eventually burned out. A few newspapers piled up on her doorstep; then delivery stopped.

  Our father had one phone call from our mother, on the day before she was due home. Sharla and I were sitting in the living room, where we had called our father in to watch the evening weather forecast—record highs for heat and humidity were being predicted again, and we all seemed to find the prospect grimly thrilling. When the phone rang, my father answered it reluctantly, but then his face changed. “Your mother,” he mouthed, and gestured for us to leave the room, to give him some privacy.

  We went as far as the kitchen table and sat there in silence, both of us waiting to talk to her, I was sure, though Sharla would never have admitted it. At one point I made the foolish error of going upstairs to comb my hair, and when I returned to the kitchen Sharla said, “What did you do that for? Do you think she can see you? Do you think she even cares?”

  “I didn’t do it for her,” I said. But of course I had.

  As it happened, our mother did not ask to speak to either of us. After a long, low-voiced conversation, our father called Sharla and me back into the living room and reported only that our mother would be taking longer than she’d thought to come home. He stared out the window, immobile but for the giveaway movements of his breathing. I watched the hung-up phone, wondering if, wherever she was, my mother was doing the same. Sharla sighed, sank into the sofa, studied her nails with cool blue anger.

  Finally, “When will she be back, then?” I asked my father.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t she say, at all?”

  “She said she didn’t know.”

  “Well.… Can we write to her?” It occurred to me that this would be better than talking to her on the phone, anyway. What I needed from my mother was private. She knew that, too. That was why she hadn’t asked to speak to me. “Dad? Can we write to her?” I asked again.

  He turned around slowly, looked at me as though he were considering the miracle of my being, as though I were standing there with a message that could save his life. I mean that the look on his face was one of extreme hope and desperation mixed, and I wanted it to be directed anywhere but at me. I had an impulse to wave my hands, to stamp my foot, and snap my fingers in his face. But then something lifted; he straightened to his full height and moved back into himself.

  “Yes, you can write to her,” he said. “Of course you can. I just don’t know yet where to mail anything. She’s … traveling around. Deciding where she’d like to stay for a while. But you go ahead and write. She’ll like your letters, whenever she gets them. Even if she reads them when she gets home, she’ll like them.”

  “Well, I’m not writing her,” Sharla said. “I hate her. She’s crazy.”

  “Sharla!” my father said sharply. But when she answered “What?” he did not say anything more. He put his hand to Sharla’s cheek, swallowed so hugely we all heard it. And then he walked away, went into the kitchen to make dinner.

  We were eating much later these days—seven o’clock, even eight. Our father would come home from work and cook in his good clothes, his white shirtsl
eeves rolled up to his elbows, a dishcloth tucked into the waistband of his pants. Tonight we were having steak again. Steak, baked potatoes, canned tomatoes, canned green beans, and very little conversation around our small table, that’s what we would be having. Sometimes he stopped at the bakery for dessert: half a cake. Butter cookies in the shape of leaves, in pastel colors of greens, yellows, and pinks. Sometimes Mrs. Five Operations would stop by with a pie, but it was only so she could gawk; eventually, we stopped answering the door when she came. Other neighbors seemed not to know what to do; they waved from their driveways, smiled tight smiles, and that was all. My father kept a pad by the phone on which to write down messages for my mother; by the time she had been gone for a week, they decreased dramatically. I stopped attending dance school; Sharla told the piano teacher not to come anymore.

  We did not go anywhere, Sharla and I. We were ashamed to be seen. We spent days when my father was at work sitting in the backyard making daisy chains; pulling up fat blades of grass and sucking at their whitened ends; lying on the old quilt and charting the progress of the indifferent clouds across the sky. And we talked. By tacit agreement, we did not talk about our mother. We had become interested in ancient Egypt, and we talked mostly about that. We also looked in the woods for dead squirrels. We were going to try to preserve them, to mummify them. I believe we were both relieved not to find any. At night, we watched television with our father, or lay in bed to read books we found in the living-room bookcase: Reader’s Digest condensations, mostly.

  One day a couple of weeks after our mother left, I went into the house to make Sharla’s and my lunch. It was my turn; I was going to make peanut-butter-and-fluff-marshmallow sandwiches and cut them into sliver-thin pieces. I took out the supplies, began making the sandwiches, and then stopped. I’d heard something upstairs, a woman’s voice, I was sure of it. “Mom?” I said. A rich silence, the air around me pleated with possibilities.

  I started upstairs. My chest was tight with anticipation; I pressed my fist against my sternum. I walked slowly down the hall toward my mother’s bedroom, stopped just outside her open door. There were her bottles of perfume, grouped like gossiping friends on her dresser. There was the silver hairbrush her grandmother had given her, the framed photographs of Sharla and me, dusty now. I went over to her closet, yanked the door wide open. If she was in there, I would yell at her. I would not show her any respect. I would hit her, too, as hard as I could.

  There was nothing but her clothes and the faint, faint smell of powder. I pushed my way to the back of the closet, moved some high heels out of the way, and sat down. I took in a huge, shuddering breath. Directly before me hung her green knit dress, my favorite. I squeezed the hem of it in my hand, and began to weep. I cried from deep in my belly for a long time, wiped the tears from my face with her knit dress, then her flowered one, then her brown skirt, then her matching cardigan sweater. And then I went downstairs and made the sandwiches and brought them outside.

  “Well, it took you long enough,” Sharla said. We had a rule that the one making lunch was entitled to absolute privacy, so that no culinary inspiration would be compromised. “Why did you cut them into so many pieces?” she asked. “This is weird. You can’t even eat it.” She did, though; she put together a few slices and crammed them in her mouth.

  “You’re supposed to eat them one by one,” I said. “It’s more delicate. You taste it more.”

  Sharla looked closely at me. “Were you crying?”

  I shook my head.

  “Were you?”

  “No.”

  “Because she’s not worth it, you know. She’s an ass-a-hole-a.”

  I sat immobile, trying to make sense of the feel of the sun on my back. Finally, I said softly, “Yeah.”

  “She’s a whore, too.”

  “She’s a fuck,” I said, and Sharla’s eyes widened. Then she laughed loudly, and so did I.

  “Fucker,” Sharla said. “She’s a fucker and a penis and a vagina. And a shit.” We laughed again. It hurt a bit, this reckless laughing; I enjoyed the ache of pain in my stomach. Finally, I sat up, wiped my eyes, and finished my sandwich. Then I went in the house and made another one and ate it. And then one more.

  One night at dinner when my older daughter was around ten years old, she ate four servings of strawberry shortcake. I didn’t say anything when she did it, or immediately afterward. But when I went into her room to say goodnight, I sat on her bed and asked if there was anything bothering her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Okay.” I kissed her forehead. Then I said, “You can tell me anything. You know that, right?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “With me? Nothing!”

  “Well, why do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

  I busied myself straightening her bedspread. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought … well, I noticed you had a lot of dessert. Much more than you usually have. And I do that when I’m upset; when something’s bothering me, I eat a lot.”

  “I just like strawberry shortcake!”

  “Okay.”

  “God, Mom!”

  “Okay, I’m sorry!”

  She looked at me for a while, then said, “I’m your daughter, not you.”

  “I know.”

  She raised one eyebrow, something she’s been able to do from the time she was a very little girl. “You keep forgetting,” she said.

  “I suppose.” I smiled. Actually, the problem was that I keep remembering.

  The Saturday before school started, my father called Sharla and me into his bedroom. He had just awakened—his hair was mussed, his face looked charcoal-smudged with whiskers. “I thought we’d go out for some clothes and supplies today,” he said. “For school.” A smile. Fake.

  “We don’t get supplies until after school starts,” I said. “The teachers have to tell us what to buy.” I hated his not knowing this. I hated his not being fully dressed and competently serving us breakfast before he broached this topic. The way he was doing it was not how it was done. On the day you went shopping for school, you were served breakfast and the shopping plans were laid—where to go, where to go first. After the dishes were done, you were on your way. With your mother. Your mother drove, your mother waited outside the changing rooms while you put together skirts and sweaters, your mother bought your underwear—not your father. I didn’t want to be seen with my father, shopping for school clothes. It was dumb. And so I said, “I don’t need anything.”

  “Me neither,” Sharla said.

  My father blinked, gently rubbed his knee. “But you must need something.”

  “We don’t,” Sharla said.

  “We got enough last year,” I added.

  “It still fits?”

  I had no idea. But “Yes,” I said. “It still fits. We’re fine.”

  You went shopping with your mother and then she helped you put everything away and then she went and made dinner while you did whatever you wanted and then your father came home and after dinner your mother showed him what you’d gotten. I knew how to do what I needed to live my life. I didn’t want to confuse things by doing them another way. It would only be wrong.

  Still, my father tried once more to get us to go shopping. After breakfast he said, “You must at least need some pencils and paper.”

  “Not the first day,” we answered together. It was true. Sort of.

  “A lunch box?” he asked.

  We rolled our eyes, both of us, and he nodded, relieved, in a way.

  On the first day of school, I got my period. That was something, telling him rather than my mother. Asking him to get what I needed. That, perhaps more than anything, showed me how different things really were now. Say you walked into your own familiar house and the floor gave away beneath your feet. That would be close to what I felt. And tried to pretend I was not feeling. I mean, I just kept trying to walk where
there was nothing to walk on. We all did.

  * * *

  On the third of November, we came home from school and found our mother sitting in our bedroom. I came into the room first, and I nearly screamed when I saw her. I did not, at first, quite recognize her. She had cut her hair into a feathered, caplike do, and she wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, something I’d never seen her in before. A red scarf was tied in her hair; the tails hung down past her collarbone.

  “You scared me,” I said.

  She held out her arms, smiled.

  “You scared me,” I said again.

  I heard Sharla on the steps, then felt her presence behind me. “What are you …” she started, and then simply turned and went back downstairs.

  My mother lowered her arms, sat quietly.

  “No,” I said.

  “What?”

  “No!”

  “‘No,’ what, Ginny? Come here, for God’s sake.” She patted the bed beside her.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  She waited a long moment. Then, “I don’t know. At work, I expect. Isn’t he at work?”

  “He quit,” I said. I loved this lie; it was better than a square of Hershey’s chocolate melting in my mouth.

  She looked at me, said nothing. And then, “No, he did not,” she said.

  “Uh-huh, he did so. He has a new job.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Administrator,” I said.

  “Administrator! Where? Of what?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How come you didn’t say you were coming? Where have you been?”

  “Come here,” she said gently, and, hating myself, I went and let her hold me.

  We sat in silence for a long while. I breathed in the familiar flesh smell of her, watched the shadows of leaves move in the small square of sunlight that came through the window and landed on her knee. At one point, I traced around the outline of that square, gently, wanting her not to move.