What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  The week after our mother moved back, we met her at a restaurant downtown, at her request. It was a small Italian place, dimly lit, red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Our father dropped us off, and we found our mother at a corner table. She stood, embraced us briefly, then sat down, her face grim.

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

  “Nothing. What do you mean?”

  “You look mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  Silence.

  She picked up the menu, her voice high and pleasant. “So! What kind of pizza would you like?”

  “I want spaghetti and meatballs,” Sharla said.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to agree on a pizza. I can’t afford three entrées. I thought we could just share a pizza.”

  Sharla put down the menu. “I don’t care then, you pick. I don’t really like pizza.”

  My mother looked up, surprised. “Since when?”

  Sharla shrugged, turned her head away, studied the wall.

  My mother leaned back in her chair, sighed. Then she sat up and moved in close to Sharla, spoke quietly. “You know, I have had just about enough from you.”

  “What?” Sharla said. “What did I do?”

  “Your saying you don’t like pizza, for starters, that’s just deliberately—”

  “I DON’T like pizza!” Sharla yelled. The few other patrons turned to look at us, then away.

  “Don’t you raise your voice,” my mother said. “You show some respect for the other people trying to have a nice dinner here, if you can’t show respect to me.”

  “She really doesn’t like pizza anymore,” I said. “She said that last week.”

  “Shut up,” Sharla told me.

  I sat back in my chair, hurt. Then, “You shut up,” I said.

  My mother put her coat on, picked up her purse. “Suppose we just not do this,” she said. “Suppose you two just go home. I know you’d rather be there, anyway. I don’t have to do this. I do not have to do this. I have feelings, too. I have limits.”

  I looked at Sharla, incredulous at my mother’s behavior. Sharla was smiling, the smirk variety. But I saw that she was afraid.

  My mother called my father from the restaurant’s pay phone. He had just gotten home, but he came right back. When we got into the car, I saw him staring out the window at my mother with an expression full of only pity. He drove off in such a way as to make me think he was trying to be gentle. My mother got smaller in the distance, then disappeared.

  “I told you she was crazy,” Sharla said, when we were in bed that night, the lights out.

  “I think she just got mad.”

  “Why? Who would yell at their kids because they don’t like pizza anymore?”

  “She didn’t yell.”

  “Same thing,” Sharla said.

  I turned my pillow over, shut my eyes. Lately, when I went to sleep, I made a fist and laid it over my heart. I did this now, then bent down to suck at my knuckle.

  “What are you doing over there?” Sharla asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, do it quieter.”

  On Christmas Eve, our father pulled up in front of our mother’s house. I got out of the car and waited for Sharla, who did not budge. “Hurry up!” I said. “It’s cold!”

  She did not move.

  “Sharla?” my father said.

  She closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the seat.

  “Come on!” I said, and then watched, amazed, as she lay down on the seat and began sobbing.

  My father sat dumbstruck for a moment, then called to me to get back in the car. I climbed into the backseat, slammed the door behind me.

  I had never heard Sharla cry this way. It sounded like fake laughter. My father pulled the car closer to the curb, turned off the engine, put his hand on Sharla’s back.

  “Sharla? What is it?”

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice muffled and sounding as though she had a cold. “Please don’t make me go in there. I just can’t.”

  “Sharla, it’s Christmas Eve,” my father said. “She’s your mother.”

  She sat up, wiped furiously at her face. “You’re getting divorced!”

  “Yes, we are,” my father said carefully. “But she is still your mother. She will always be your mother.”

  “I don’t WANT her to be!” Sharla yelled. “I don’t want her anymore! Dad, you don’t know what it’s like to go and see her. She’s crazy now!”

  “She’s not crazy,” he said. “She’s different, that’s true. But she’s not crazy. And Sharla, you know she loves you very much.”

  “I can’t go in there.”

  We sat. The car began to get cold, and my father started the engine, turned the heater up full blast. I looked up to my mother’s windows and saw the outline of her standing there. I slumped down further in the backseat, looked away.

  Finally, my father said, “I’ll tell you what, Sharla. Just go and visit for a few hours; you don’t have to spend the night, all right?”

  She did not answer.

  “Can you just do that, honey?”

  “No!” she said, her voice breaking, and she sat up and held on to the lapels of my father’s coat, sobbing loudly again, begging him to take her home.

  He stroked her head, looked over into the backseat at me.

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t want to go back home?” he asked quietly.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go to Mom’s either.”

  “All right,” he sighed. “All right. Just let me go up and tell her. Let me talk to her.”

  I watched my father walk up the steps to the building and go in. I saw my mother leave the window to let him in.

  “I just can’t visit her anymore,” Sharla said.

  “I know.”

  “But you can, Ginny.”

  “I don’t want to, either.”

  I knew what Sharla was feeling: the pull to a mother versus the great discomfort of spending time with a stranger who asked too much of you. Sharla said our mother was beginning to act desperate, that when she thought of her, she saw a creature with large, watery eyes, trembling lips, and claws for hands. I knew what she meant, though my image of my mother was tempered by some measure of compassion: I could see how much she hurt. But I could not give her what she wanted. Not the things she named, such as living with her at least part-time; not the things she did not name that were the things she wanted most, such as a move back inside me to the lit place she used to occupy. That place was gone.

  In a few minutes, our father came back out of the building and got into the car. His face was a mix of sorrow and mild determination. “I wonder if you could just—”

  Sharla put her hand on his arm. “Could we please go home, Dad? You said we could go home.”

  He waited a long moment, then drove slowly away from the curb. I looked back up at the window. She was not there.

  “She could come to the house and see you, how about that?” my father asked.

  “No,” Sharla said quickly.

  I agreed with her. The house was our safe place, our father’s place. She had come back only once, to supervise the two moving men who loaded her things onto the truck with Jasmine’s. She had pointed to her closet, to the china cabinet holding the incomplete set of dishes she’d gotten from her mother, to her sewing basket and knitting supplies, to a Queen Anne chair that had belonged to her grandmother. She did not take much, really. But it seemed to me that the house echoed for some time after she left, then fell deeply silent until just recently, when sounds of a normal life had begun there again.

  When we got home, our father gave us each the presents our mother had given him to give to us. The packages were identically shaped, large and flat; paintings, I’d guessed. I had no desire to open mine; nor, I suspected, did Sharla. We put them under the tree with the presents we had waiting there, from our father and Georgia—Georgia had already given us Advent cale
ndars, which we had hung over our beds. Then our father made us cocoa with marshmallows and sat us at the kitchen table.

  “I want you to tell me what’s so hard for you when you see your mother,” he said. “Maybe we can work some things out.”

  “Did she feel bad?” I asked. It came out too bright and eager; I hadn’t meant to sound that way.

  “She … yes, it hurt her a lot that you wouldn’t come in. She’s trying, you know.”

  “She’s trying too hard,” Sharla said. “It makes you feel weird.”

  “She’s having kind of a bad time right now,” our father said.

  “She left,” Sharla said. “For no reason.”

  No one said anything else for a long time. And then my father said, “I believe she thinks she has reasons.”

  “Dad,” Sharla said. “Please, can we just not see her for a while? I need some time away from her.”

  We hadn’t seen her very often, only a few visits to her house and the time at the restaurant. But I knew what Sharla meant. Whenever we saw our mother, something always happened that made us uncomfortable. One night, Jasmine had shown up, seeming to surprise my mother. “Oh!” she’d said, after she opened the door. “Jasmine! But … well, the girls are here.”

  “Oh, God,” Jasmine said. Then their voices got too low for us to hear. And then Jasmine came into the little kitchen.

  I’d forgotten how darkly beautiful she was, how exotic looking.

  “How are you?” she’d asked us, kissing our cheeks. Her perfume was spicy, overpowering.

  “Fine,” Sharla said, staring down at her plate.

  “I wish you’d come and visit me sometime,” Jasmine said.

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to give you the address,” she said. But she left a few minutes later without doing so.

  “We get together quite a bit,” my mother said, sitting down at the table after Jasmine had left. “We do things, you know, movies …”

  “Dad got a raise,” Sharla said.

  “Did he?”

  “Yup.” She loaded up a fork with macaroni and cheese, talked through it. “A big one.” She put more in her mouth, then said, “Ishn’t that good?”

  I watched my mother watching her. “Sharla,” she said finally, and I knew what she meant: Don’t talk with your mouth full.

  “What?” Sharla said.

  My mother looked away, said nothing more. I felt sorry for her for a moment; then the softness in my stomach turned to a hard knot of contempt.

  When I was out jogging last week, I saw a woman walking a dog. Only it was the classic case of the dog walking her. The woman was laughing a bit, taking giant strides in an effort to keep up, but she was clearly embarrassed. The dog strained at the leash; the woman’s arm looked practically pulled out of the socket. I wanted to go over there and jerk that leash out of the woman’s hands, smack the dog’s butt with it. “Don’t let him do that!” I wanted to say. “Why are you letting him do that?”

  I was a bit surprised by my strong reaction: for one thing, it was none of my business. But I think my response was tied up with things like what I just remembered, that feeling of contempt you have for someone you see is not in control when you want them to be.

  It’s funny how, oftentimes, the people you love the most are given the least margin for error. Funny, too, the places where the anger ends up surfacing.

  Later on that Christmas Eve when Sharla and I left without seeing her, our mother called us. She asked that Sharla and I each get on an extension. Then she asked if we had opened our presents.

  “No,” Sharla said, and I followed quickly with, “We’re waiting for tomorrow.”

  “I kind of wanted to be there when you opened them,” my mother said.

  Neither Sharla nor I said anything. Georgia was coming on Christmas Day. We had plans.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t feel you were able to come up,” she continued. “I’m not blaming you—it’s been awkward. You know, we’re all just going to have to go through this time of transition. It’s hard. I’m sure all of us have said or done things we wish we hadn’t. But we’ll get through this. I want you both to know I love you very much. Nothing you can do will ever change that. We’ll get through this.”

  Silence. I remember thinking, we’re through it. You’re the only one who’s having trouble.

  “Could you maybe open your presents now, so I could at least hear you doing it?”

  “I’ll get them,” I said quickly, before Sharla could refuse. I brought Sharla’s gift to her in the living room, took mine back to the kitchen.

  “We can open them together,” I said, and started unwrapping my gift, then stopped, listening to see if I could hear Sharla doing the same. She was; I could hear the rustling sounds.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Sharla said quietly. “It’s pretty.”

  I finished opening my gift. It was a painting of a mother sitting in a rocker holding a baby. The room was furnished ordinarily: a crib, a night table with a softly glowing lamp, a yellow, fringed rug. But where the walls should have been were thin, white clouds against a black night sky, pinpoints of stars were everywhere.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Do you like it?”

  My throat ached. I nodded, then croaked, “Yes.” I was so sorry we hadn’t gone up to her apartment. It was Christmas Eve; she was all alone. Nor had we gotten her a present—every time our father offered to take us to get her something, we’d told him we were going to do it ourselves.

  “I’ll bring you your present tomorrow night,” I said. Something would be open. Or I’d make something.

  “I’ll bring mine, too,” Sharla said. I heard some reluctant sorrow in her voice as well.

  Our mother said nothing for a while, breathed into the phone. Then, “Well, you know, I won’t be home tomorrow night. Remember how you were going to have breakfast with me and then go right home? So I … well, I have train tickets for a trip to New York City early tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to stay in a hotel and see all the sights! I’ll bring you back something. What would you like?”

  “Who are you going with?” Sharla asked.

  But we knew. And in that instant—and I felt it happen to both of us at the same time, as though Sharla and I shared a heart and a brain and a soul—at that instant, we let go of something.

  “Jasmine and I are going together,” my mother said. “But if you girls would like to have breakfast with me—”

  “Have fun,” Sharla said, and hung up.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, and it seemed so odd to be saying that over the phone, to my mother.

  “Ginny?” she said, and I hung up.

  I went into the living room, saw Sharla sitting with a canvas in her lap. Her painting was of a bird wearing high heels, pearls, and an apron, sitting chained to a tree with tiny pot holders for leaves. The sun in the sky was blue.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. I wondered if he’d heard any of the conversation.

  “In the basement. He’s finishing building something. I think it’s a bookcase for us, a fancy one.”

  “Did you peek?”

  She smiled.

  “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  I looked at the painting in her lap. “That’s nice, too,” I tried; but my voice betrayed me.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Sharla said. And then, looking up at me, “Jasmine and Mom are girlfriends, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “No. I mean, lesbos. Lesbians.”

  I stepped back.

  “They are,” Sharla said.

  “No, they are not.”

  She snorted. “I knew I couldn’t tell you.”

  My mind felt crowded with images that wanted in. Somewhere inside, I pulled a curtain. Not yet. Not yet.

  I put the painting behind my dresser; Sharla put hers in her closet. We celebrated Christmas with my father and Georgia, who, at the end of J
anuary, became his fiancée.

  In February, my mother moved back to Santa Fe. We did not see her on the day she left, nor in the weeks before. Our visits to her had fizzled and died. No one fought hard enough to keep them alive. Sharla had told our father about her suspicions regarding Jasmine and our mother. “What did he say?” I asked, and Sharla said, “Nothing. He must have known.”

  We got letters, but not with the frequency we had at first. And once when she called, when I came into the kitchen to have my time alone with her, I simply let the phone rest on the counter. I stared at it while I made a braid in my hair, then unbraided it. I picked some dirt from beneath my fingernails, counted slowly to twenty-five. Then I hung the phone up. She did not call back.

  Time passed. Time passed. My father was happy. Georgia was easy, sunny. I grew to love her in a way that was not compensatory. It amazed me, how easily that happened.

  Sharla and I did not write to our mother; we did not call, despite gentle urging from both our father and Georgia. First, we would not; then, it seemed, we could not.

  Eventually, we got only postcards from our mother giving us her new addresses. Sometimes we saved them. Sometimes we did not. She eventually settled in California.

  And then, so many years after that time of enormous change and loss, so many years later, Sharla called me to say, “Well, I got some news today.” And before the week was out, I was on a plane to see her and a mother I’d not laid eyes on for thirty-five years.

  And here I am.

  The walk to baggage claim seems to take forever. I see the two children I enjoyed listening to on the plane with their father way ahead of me, Martha a bit behind me. I slow down, wait for her.

  “So. How was your ride?” I ask.

  “Well, except for the part when I thought we were all going to die …”

  “Yeah.” I smile.

  “You know, I wanted to tell you,” Martha begins. But then she says, “Oh, never mind. Just … good luck.”

  “What? What were you going to say?”