Home Safe

by Elizabeth Berg

  She is almost asleep when she hears Tessa coming up the creaky stairs, moving slowly, on tiptoe, across the room lit only by the Christmas tree her mother has put up for them. Eleanor always does this, puts a tabletop tree on a card table in the corner, with little gifts for them beneath it.

  “I'm awake,” Helen says.

  Tessa comes over to sit on the bed, her face a shadowy study of red and green. “Grandpa's lost weight,” she whispers. “Did you notice?”

  “I don't think he eats that much anymore,” Helen whispers back, in an effort to reassure her daughter. She, too, had noticed the way her father's pants hung low on his hips, how his wrist-watch was hiked up far on his arm, and she thinks it has more to do with illness than appetite. A little over a year ago, her father was discovered to have a worrisome “spot” on his hip bone. Considering his age, the decision was made to just watch it. She wonders now if that spot has grown, or if some other problem has materialized. When there's an opportunity, she'll ask her mother about it.

  Tessa slips off her shoes and gets into bed with her clothes on. She pulls the covers up and closes her eyes. “Good night,” she says, yawning.

  Helen lies still, thinking, Don't. She is twenty-seven years old. She reminds herself of the List of C's, her personal laundry list for self-improvement: Don't control, don't criticize, don't complain. It seems she does all three all day long. But she's aware of it! She acknowledges it! Doesn't that count for something? She closes her eyes to sleep. So what if her daughter wants to sleep in her clothes? It's cold up here! Did she not herself sometimes sleep in her clothes when she was that age? Well, no, actually, at Tessa's age Helen was married and raising her child, and she slept in matching pajama tops and bottoms every night. But her daughter is not her! She is her own person, entitled to have her own individual life!

  But did she even wash up and brush her teeth?

  Helen raises herself carefully on one elbow and leans across the pillow divide to peer into Tessa's face. Is that mascara under her daughter's eye or a shadow caused by her lashes? She leans closer, squinting, her upper lip hiked high, which always happens when she tries to see better; it's a very unattractive habit—she has been told she looks like a rat when she does it. Tessa's eyes spring open. “Mom! What are you doing?”

  “Shhhh! You need to wash your face and brush your teeth!” Helen whispers. “And you need to change into pajamas! What is the matter with you, falling into bed like a—”

  “I did wash my face and brush my teeth!”

  “Well … Put on your pajamas!”

  “I forgot them!” Tessa's eyes are wide, furious, but then she suddenly starts laughing, and Helen does, too.

  “Go and ask Grandma to give you something to sleep in.”

  “I'm fine,” Tessa says. “I don't want to bother them. I think they're asleep. I'll ask tomorrow.”

  “Want me to go down and get you something?”

  “No. I'm all right.”

  “I could sneak—”

  “Mom. Mom.”

  Helen settles herself on her side of the bed, folds her hands over her stomach, and begins taking idle inventory of the events of the day. She hears a plane passing by overhead and wonders who's on it, wonders what gifts are being carried in the suitcases, what hopes and grudges are being carried in people's hearts.

  Tessa yawns, then says, “You know what I was thinking about tonight? I was thinking about the Box. Do you still have it?”

  She means the empty box Dan gave her for a Christmas present when she was pregnant with Tessa. It was lavishly wrapped, beautiful to look at, and Helen saved it for last. It was light, and Helen thought there must have been jewelry in there, though there had been no telltale rattle when she shook it. They couldn't really afford for Dan to buy her jewelry at that point, they had agreed he would not, but Helen hoped anyway that a ring or a bracelet was in there, something outrageously expensive that she could wear for one day and then return, if she had to. But when she opened the box, it was empty. She looked up at Dan, her face full of confusion.

  “Wait,” he said, and came to crouch beside her chair.

  “This isn't funny,” she wailed, and pressed her hand conspicuously against the side of her huge belly: Look at all I'm doing for you!

  “Wait,” he said again, and kissed her temple, the top of her head. Then he sat back on his heels to look up at her. “You know why I gave you an empty box? Because I was thinking, what does she really, really need, what does she not have? And I thought of all these things, these … things, you know? And then I thought about us, and I thought about the baby on the way, and I decided that we have the most complete, the happiest life I could ever imagine. That if we never got another thing, we would be rich beyond measure. I wanted to give you an empty box to say that.” He shrugged. “I guess it didn't come out so well.” And Helen kissed him and said that it had come out fine, and he was right.

  The Box had become an annual tradition, each year going to a different member of their little family. And although the Box itself became softer and more misshapen with every year, it was always the most beautifully wrapped gift under the tree. The person who received it was supposed to talk about what was “in” the Box—what intangible gifts were presently in his or her life; but that rarely worked. It seemed hard for people to say out loud the things that were most important to them, unless it was in retrospect.

  “I still have the Box,” Helen says. “It's in the basement with the Christmas decorations.” She smiles at Tessa. “I'm sorry I didn't decorate this year.”

  “I don't mind. I understand.”

  “I know, you said; but I'm sorry anyway.”

  “There's only one thing I wanted you to bring out.”

  “The Box?”

  “Yes. I wanted to get it. Because … Well, because I wanted to keep up the tradition. And also … I don't know, I look at the way some mothers and daughters are with each other, and I just wanted a chance to say …” She sighs hugely. “We're basically good, right?”

  Helen smiles. “Right.

  “Tessa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is this the martini talking?”

  “Well, of course. But it's me, too.”

  Within a couple of minutes, Tessa's breathing changes and she is asleep.

  Helen turns onto her side, suddenly wide awake. She is also hungry. Downstairs are the cookies. Maybe she'll have a few and then sit for a while by the Christmas tree in the living room. She likes to sit across the room from it and look at it without her contacts; she likes that soft-focus effect, like Doris Day looking at Rock Hudson in those old movies. Also, despite her years, she still likes to see what presents are marked for her and shake them, guessing at the contents. It took Helen a long time to disavow Santa Claus, and she remembers distinctly the day she finally said she did not believe in him. She was eight years old, and sitting on her back porch steps with her best friend, Cindy McClure, on a hot summer day, and she sighed and said, “Okay, there's no Santa Claus.”

  “I know,” Cindy said mournfully.

  And then Helen grabbed her friend, grabbed both of her arms, and said, “But there is an Easter bunny.” When she saw doubt in Cindy's face, she said, “Why would anyone make up something like that?”

  “I guess,” Cindy said, and for Helen, the day was saved.

  She tiptoes downstairs, goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of milk, puts some cookies on a plate, and heads into the living room. There she sees her mother, dozing in a chair. She moves beside her, touches her mother's hand, and Eleanor wakes up.

  “Hey,” Helen says, softly. “Waiting for Santy?”

  “I was having trouble sleeping,” her mother says.

  “Me, too.” Helen sits at her mother's feet and offers up her plate. “Want a cookie?”

  “No, I've had enough. They were delicious, thank you for making them for us. How are you, darling? Hard time of year for you?”

  Helen shrugs. “Every time
of year is hard without him.”

  “It will get better, you'll see.”

  Helen eats her cookies, staring at the tree. “Where's my ornament?” she asks. She means the reindeer she made in kindergarten, out of clothespins.

  “He's on there,” her mother says.

  “Where?”

  “One side or the other. I remember clipping him on.”

  “I didn't see him.”

  “Well, he's there.”

  Helen won't humiliate herself further by going over to look. But she will look tomorrow, when no one's watching. Funny how the littlest things can have such importance. The older some things get, the more precious.

  “Mom? How's Dad?” She keeps her voice neutral. She wants to communicate the fact that whatever it is, she can take it.

  “Well, we saw Dr. Burns the other day.”

  Helen turns to face her, hoping for quick reassurance. But what Eleanor does is to put her hand to her daughter's cheek, tenderly, and Helen knows.

  “Did they say when?”

  “Oh, honey. You know they never tell you that anymore. I know they don't want to get sued, or take away hope, but sometimes I wish they would say. People might want to know. They might need to.”

  Helen nods. Indeed they might.

  fourteen

  HENRY BORMAN CLEARS HIS THROAT AND LOOKS CAUTIOUSLY over at Helen. He has just finished reading his page answering the question Who are you? He lives about two miles from the library, and his piece described his apartment in the assisted care center, the lamp he always kept lit in the window. It talked about how World War II had made him the man he is, how the fortitude he learned at an early age sustained him today. He said he walked outside every day, and when he finished reading he told the group proudly that he had walked there today. When one of the women shuddered, thinking, no doubt, of the cold wind blowing that day, he told them he was a member of the Polar Bear Club and only three years ago stopped jumping into the icy waters of Lake Michigan on January 1. After the group had commented on his work—all positive comments, Helen was grateful to see, all gentle—he said he'd wondered if he should have put the Polar Bear Club in his piece, and all agreed it would have been an interesting addition. Helen told him he might want to write a whole piece devoted to that experience, and he nodded, saying, “It would make quite a story.”

  Henry has the largest ears Helen has ever seen. He can't straighten up all the way; he walks as though he's just started to pick something up off the floor, and when he wants to look up, he must turn his head sideways. He warned Helen that his hearing aids act up now and then; but if they ever started to squeal, why, he'd just take them out—he's gotten pretty good at lip-reading. “Go ahead and test me!” he told her. “Just move your lips, and say something. Go ahead!”

  Helen looked around at the other class members, all of whom seemed intensely interested in this impromptu experiment. “I'm very impressed,” she mouthed, and Henry shouted back, “‘I'm very impressed!’ Right? Am I right?”

  She nodded, and Henry beamed.

  The other members are as different from Henry—and from each other—as they can be; this is indeed a remarkable mix of personalities. Donetta Johnson, the day-care worker who lives in the West Side ghetto, has yet to take her tan cloth coat off; she sits staring down at the table. When Helen asked the class to go around the table and briefly introduce themselves, Donetta barely looked up. Her voice is low and soft, and there is a richness to it that makes Helen think she could be a great singer. Donetta read about growing up in Alabama, the house crowded with friends and relatives, food always being kept warm on the stove. She came to Chicago for better wages, but in my head, I'm still home, standing on the front porch, watching my friends come to call. I'm going to finish my work here, and then I'm going home.

  Ella Parsons sits up so close to the table it cuts into her mid-section. She's in her early twenties, a pretty, moderately overweight girl whose white blouse buttons gap widely, revealing the man's T-shirt she wears beneath. She has on a voluminous blue skirt with a wide black belt, and winter boots with their metal clasps undone. A headband meant to prevent a massive bunch of red curls from falling in her face keeps sliding forward, and each time she moves it back, she slaps the top of her head, hard. Helen believes the strong smell of perfume in the room is coming from her. She herself doesn't mind it; it's a pleasant scent.

  Ella read about the old-age home where she worked assisting the occupational therapist. I'm the happy girl, that's me! I help them so they don't get bored and sad. If you don't help them they will cry for their family and sometimes for their mom even though their mom is dead a long time ago. Mother, Mother, they always say it like that it is never Mom. Mother. She described the apartment where she lived, her yellow curtains, her pink bedspread. She said she could play poker and her favorite food was pizza with green olives and hamburger. Also, she had a heart murmur. When the group commented positively on her work, Ella sat smiling and squirming and finally shouted out, “Wow!”

  Hector Rivera is an inordinately cheerful, short man who appears to be in his forties, and he's wonderfully well dressed. He began taking notes almost as soon as Helen said hello. She can't imagine what he's writing, but then decides it's not her business anyway. His piece focused exclusively on his job delivering television news, and Helen decides that it will be her mission to get him to write about something else.

  A twenty-eight-year-old man named Jeff Daley (“No relation to the mayors!” he'd quickly told Helen) had arrived early, and he and Helen had talked a bit about books before the class started. Jeff told her he had floor-to-ceiling shelves in both his bedroom and his living room, and that he was one of those people who couldn't stand book jackets—the first thing he did when he got a book was to throw the jacket away. When Helen had asked why, he said, “It feels like advertising. I only want the story.” He said he taught at the Apple store on Michigan Avenue but mainly aspired to be a writer—he wrote longhand, using vintage fountain pens. He showed her one he had in his pocket, a deep yellow color, striped with black. When Helen admired it, he offered it to her, and she gently refused. “I have a million of them,” he said. “Pretend we're old friends; go ahead and take it.” Still she declined, but when he held it out to her and said, “I got it for a dollar at an estate sale,” she smiled and put it in her purse. He is magazine handsome: tall, with wavy brown hair and beautiful blue eyes, and Ella Parsons has not taken her eyes off him since she came in.

  One of the group members, Billy Armstrong, makes Helen uncomfortable. He's the twenty-year-old mechanic, and to Helen's way of thinking, he looks like a murderer. He has eyes so dark they seem black, very black hair, and extremely white skin marked by acne scars. He wears torn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the hood up. Knee bouncing, he read about how he was born a writer and now it was time to go ahead and get published. He claimed the world was full of books not worth the paper they were printed on. Ella's comment on his work was “You use lots of swears.”

  Cookie Evans is a blond-haired, middle-aged insurance worker dressed in a gray business suit and a pale pink blouse. She is the kind of person … Well, Helen hates to say it, it seems unkind, but it's true—She's the kind of person you could have a conversation with for a good fifteen minutes, turn around, and realize you couldn't remember a thing about her. It is Cookie's turn to read now.

  Helen straightens herself in her chair and prepares to take notes on what she will hear. Thus far, she has opened the discussion after every person's reading, but she is relieved that her students have no inhibitions about making their opinions known. She's very much interested in these people, even the murderer. Already, she has fantasized her little group onstage doing their graduation reading, their friends and families proud. Also she has fantasized her group doing far better than Saundra Weller's.

  Helen looks at her watch: just enough time for Cookie Evans to read, but almost no time for the group to offer comments; it will be a challenge to learn how to b
udget time here. Cookie pulls her chair closer to the table and begins:

  When I was maybe four years old, I told my father I wanted to die. He pulled me onto his lap and turned me hard to face him. He said, “Why would you say a thing like that?”

  I was surprised that he was surprised. I told him what I thought he should already know: your sins just got bigger, the bigger you got. It would be better to die early and then you could more easily get into heaven. I have no idea how he answered me. I'm not sure that he did. I only remember that I felt thrilled to be on his lap, to have his face so close to me, to have his coffee cup before me as though I were the one drinking from it. And then I was back on the floor again, left to my own devices. I went to my playroom and got out my kaleidoscope. I lay on my back and looked through it at all the fractured beauty. I turned the wheel slowly. Each thing I saw was so lovely I wanted to keep it, but then I would turn the wheel and there, more beauty, it would never stop. I bent my knees and my dress rode up. It didn't matter. There was no one to see me. I had no friends. I had no visitors. It was a lonely life, but I didn't realize it. It was all I knew: a father who rarely spoke, a mother who disapproved of me, and a dog who lay panting on the floor beside me and occasionally let me stick my finger in his mouth to feel his moving tongue. I didn't think it was sad to want to die. I thought it was practical. I am forty-one years old now, and it seems time to admit that I have been sad all my life. There has not been one occasion of joy in my life that was not overshadowed by sorrow. Also not one day has gone by that I have not turned the wheel of this kaleidoscope or that, and gasped. My name is Claudia.