Ordinary Life: Stories

by Elizabeth Berg

  “First of all,” Mavis says, feeling the heat of her indignation rise up in her neck, causing a sensation close to choking. “I have no idea in the wide, wide world why you would go and tell someone. Especially Harriet, who has such a big mouth.” Harriet volunteers at the hospital with Al. Mavis has never met her and never wants to. “I don’t see why this can’t just be between you and me,” Mavis continues. “It’s just between you and me—and not even very much you!”

  “I was scared, Mavis.”

  “Oh, you just couldn’t wait to tell Harriet.”

  “I’m telling you I was scared! This is not normal behavior!”

  She stands. “I’ll tell you what, Al. I think I would just like you to go now.”

  He looks up at her.

  “Yes. You just go on, now. I would like to be alone.”

  “Fine.” He takes the tray, goes out the door, and she locks it behind him.

  Two mornings later, Al comes to the door. “Mavis, you won’t believe who’s on the phone.”

  “I don’t care who’s on the phone. I don’t want to talk on the phone.” Though she and Al have made up—albeit with a door between them—she still does not want to talk on the phone. She and Al have come to an agreement. She will stay in the bathroom three more days, he will bring her whatever food and clothing she wants. Period.

  But now he knocks again, saying, “It’s the Chuck Lokenvitz show! You know? On channel thirty-seven?”

  She stares at the door.

  “Mavis?”

  “I heard you. Very funny, Al.”

  “I’m not kidding, Mavis. I am not kidding you.”

  “Why would Chuck Lokenvitz be calling me?”

  “Well, it’s not Chuck himself, honey. It’s a producer. That’s how they do it. But someone must have called the show about you.”

  “Oh, they did. And I wonder who that someone could be. I just wonder who.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “I know who it was. It was that damn Harriet.”

  “I suppose it might have been.”

  “You suppose!”

  “Mavis, they’re on the phone! The last guest that was on there went straight to Oprah!”

  She opens the door. “I told you a million times we should get a portable!” She comes out into the hall, which, after four days in the bathroom, seems immense. She takes a few steps, then stops.

  “Just take a message,” she tells Al, and goes back into the bathroom. She closes the door, feels the return of a kind of safety.

  “Take a message?” Al says.

  “Yes. Tell them I’ll be out in three days. I’ll call them back.”

  “Mavis,” Al says through the crack. “Mavis. It’s the Chuck Lokenvitz show!”

  “I don’t care a thing about it,” Mavis says, and sniffs. Where she has been, there is no Chuck Lokenvitz. Or Oprah Winfrey. There are her children, plumply young again, sitting in a busy circle in the sandbox and dressed in corduroy overalls and the tiny cardigan sweaters Eileen knit for them every Christmas. There is The Ed Sullivan Show on the little brown TV, all of the family watching, Ellie kneeling before Mavis so that she can have her hair put up in pink foam-rubber rollers. There is Eileen, sitting across from her at a booth in Woolworth’s, sharing a piece of strawberry pie.

  “Well, fine,” Al says. “I’ll just go tell the Chuck Lokenvitz show that you’re much too busy to talk to them.” And then, “You know I’m not kidding, right?”

  “Yes, I know, Al,” she says, and climbs back into the tub, unwraps her last candy bar. The hell with Chuck Lokenvitz.

  Mavis’s father was a mailman, delivered letters by horse cart at first. This is what she thinks about now, chewing the candy bar slowly, making it last. Her father changed into a baggy gray sweater and brown leather slippers every night when he came home, then sat at the kitchen table to listen to her and Eileen talk about school. He could sew better than their mother could, repaired all the girls’ rips. He could sing like an opera star. He died of a stroke when he was sitting at that same kitchen table. “Whew,” he’d said. “What a headache I’ve got all of a sudden.” And then he had neatly dropped dead, right before the astonished faces of Mavis, Eileen, and their mother. “For heaven’s sake, Arthur,” her mother had said at first. “Don’t do that.” And then, still holding her mixing spoon, she had bent over him and screamed, which neither of the girls had ever heard before. That was the worst part, that scream.

  Mavis puts down the Heath bar, wonders how she’ll die. That young rock singer, she choked on a ham sandwich. You just never know.

  Once, when Mavis was out on a walk with Al, they’d seen an old man being pushed in a wheelchair by his young attendant. The man was so old, the blanket across his knees and his thick coat unable to hide his terrible thinness. The attendant was young and strong, his teeth white, and his smile fine and friendly. He’d nodded at Mavis and Al as they passed, and Mavis had taken Al’s arm. “Al,” she’d said, “if I ever end up in a wheelchair, will you push me outside? No matter how I look? I mean, look at that old man, it must make him feel better that he’s outside, and that out here, nothing much has changed.”

  Al had stopped to pick a yellow wildflower. “Look at how pretty,” he’d said.

  “Will you, Al?”

  “What, take you outside in a wheelchair? Sure.”

  “Okay,” she’d said. “Don’t forget.”

  He’d put the flower behind her ear, tenderly.

  The moon comes out from behind a cloud, and the light pushes in through the bathroom window. Mavis turns on her side, away from it. She’d been thinking about Jonathan, about when he’d first learned to sit and was outside on the newly mowed lawn, blinking in the sun. The breeze was lifting up pieces of his baby hair, rearranging it on his perfect, round head. He’d picked up a blade of grass and put it in his mouth, and Mavis had leaped up from her lawn chair to take it away from him. Eileen, who’d been sunbathing with her—sunbathing and painting her toenails and eating ice cubes out of tall glass tumblers with her—had said, “Relax! A little grass won’t hurt him.” And years later, again, “Relax! A little grass won’t hurt him,” about the other kind. She was right, of course. Jonathan was fine. All the children were just fine, happy and healthy. Mavis opens her eyes wide. My God. It’s true. They’re all fine. She sighs deeply, closes her eyes.

  Poochie died when she was very old, Mavis is thinking. Fourteen? Sixteen? But poor little Sassy, she was hardly over puppyhood.

  Mavis is lying on the bathroom floor, doing leg lifts and trying to remember all the pets they’ve had. She’s been getting leg cramps, and she thinks maybe exercise will help. Maybe it’s good she’s got only one more day. She heaves her legs up in the air again, remembers that once the kids brought home a dying baby rabbit they’d found under a bush. They’d begged Mavis to save it. She’d tried warm milk with an eyedropper and a heating pad, but the rabbit was too far gone. She gave the kids a fancy candy box she had been saving, told them they could bury the rabbit in it. They’d padded the box, still fragrant from chocolate, with toilet paper, then carefully laid the rabbit on top. Jonathan had wanted to tie the box shut, but Mavis had argued against it, saying it would spoil the look, and besides, the rabbit wasn’t going anywhere. They’d dug a shallow hole in the backyard near the tomato plants, and she and the children had held hands around the burial site to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Then, at three-year-old Ellie’s request, they sang “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” Ben was wearing his cowboy hat, and his holster was twisted around so that his jeweled revolver hung off his backside, an undignified sight at a funeral. Mavis remembers that she had wanted to adjust it, but didn’t. She herself, after all, had been wearing the white apron with the big ruffles. A roast beef had been in the oven, she remembers that. She’d said, “I’m going to say a few words, kids, and then I’ve got to get back in there and finish dinner.” Yes. She’d said exactly that. And the phone had been ringing when she came back in
the house. My God, she remembers that, too. She’d washed her hands before she answered it. She can’t remember who it was, though.

  Mavis tries a sit-up, abandons it, returns to leg lifts.

  They’d had seven parakeets. No, eight. Eight!

  “You used to call them hoo-hoos,” Mavis remembers Eileen saying. Eileen was in the hospital, one day after the surgery that took her breasts.

  “Oh, I never did, either,” Mavis said.

  “You did too!” Eileen had raised herself up on one elbow, leaned toward Mavis to speak in a low voice. “You were five years old and we were in the bathtub together. And you were looking down at your chest, at your little boobs, pointing at them, and you said, ‘This is my hoo-hoos.’ And I started laughing, and you said, ‘Well, what do you call them?’ and I told you, ‘Breasts.’ ” She’d taken a drink of water, then rearranged herself carefully against the pillows.

  “Wait,” Mavis said. “I do remember. Yes. You said it like this, real snotty: ‘They are called breasts. B-r-e-a-s-t-s.’ ” And then she and Eileen had both started crying, Mavis a little harder than Eileen.

  “You are not your breasts, you know,” Mavis had said, reaching for Eileen’s hand. “You’re still you.”

  “I know,” Eileen had said, her voice so small.

  On her last night, Mavis puts the magazines in the garbage. She didn’t read too much after all. She’s written nothing other than the beginning of the letter to Eileen. She sits on the floor, back against the wall, drinks the last Orangina. She doesn’t think she ever wants another one. When she comes out tomorrow and she and Al are sitting eating dinner, what can she tell him? How can she explain?

  Al. Once, angry at him, she vowed to make a list of everything he did wrong. When it was long enough, she’d confront him. “Forty minutes late for dinner with not a word of apology,” she’d written. “Spent our movie money on cigars.” And then, when she was looking for a place in their desk to hide her list, she’d come across Al’s will. “I am married to …, ” the will had said, and there was a blank for him to fill in. “Mavis Elaine McPherson,” he had written, in black penmanship far more careful than his usual. And she had regretted herself, had ripped the list up and flushed it down the toilet. Down this very toilet.

  She stands, yawns, stretches. Well. What she wanted in here, she got. Uninterrupted time, to let thought lead to thought. She has enjoyed a rich kind of daytime dreaming that could only have come with the profound relaxation she has known here, she’s sure of that. Something inside her has strengthened, too, though even now she cannot say exactly what it is.

  She puts the empty bottle of Orangina in the case, stands to take off her dress and pull her nightgown over her head. She bends over the sink to wash, then looks up at herself in the mirror. Small drops of water cling to her face, and they seem beautiful to her. She dries off with the new pink towel Al brought her yesterday, thinking she’d appreciate a pretty one. “I am seventy-nine years old,” she says, into the towel. And then, into the mirror, “And I have done everything right. And so did you, Eileen.”

  She turns out the light and starts for the tub, but then stops, goes instead out the door, down the hall, and into the bedroom. She can’t see him at first, but feels his sleeping presence. She goes to her side of the bed, lifts the covers to slide in quietly beside him. She is thinking that all of life is accidental: the pink smudge of dawn, the depth of the oceans, the turning of the earth; everything, because everything that started everything was an accident, wasn’t it? That’s what they said. And so, one’s own small life. What could you make of it? Who knew whom you would be born to, befriend, live out your life with? Those were accidents too, weren’t they? Completely arbitrary things, barely noticed, most often. And yet.

  She moves closer to Al, turns onto her side to put her arm around his wide middle. Couldn’t there be just a bit of a grand plan, she wonders, maybe just a touch here and there; couldn’t there be some benevolent intention that graced some lives?

  “That’s you, right, Mavis?” Al asks sleepily.

  She closes her eyes, answers yes.

  Departure from Normal

  Every morning, Alice sits at the tiny kitchen table in her new apartment and reads the newspaper. She doesn’t just glance at the front page like she used to. Now she has time, and she reads every single word. She is amazed at what she has been missing. There is accidental poetry, absurdist theater. Violence and comedy are separated by advertisements featuring women wearing brassieres and work skirts.

  Alice saves the weather report for last, because she likes it best. She is intrigued by the “climate data,” the obsessive care with which someone analyzes what happened last year compared with this year. She reads that today the departure from normal is +4 degrees. The departure this year is +277. She is unsure what the meaning of all this is, but in some way the larger number thrills her.

  There are bold predictions in the weather forecast, no hemming and hawing: High today 80–85. Period. She likes that. There are childlike drawings of pointy-rayed suns and voluptuous clouds. There is a column of temperature listings for cities she’s never seen. She reads that it is ninety in New Orleans and smells chicory; she reads seventy-four in San Francisco and sees wild-haired women hanging out laundry, the sheets fragrant and unwieldy and yanking at the lines. It is raining in Paris today: baguette wrappers wilt and soften with the humidity; taxis splash onto pants legs and leather shoes.

  Alice likes to tell her story this way: First I got cancer. Then I got depressed. Then I got divorced. Then my parakeet got cancer. Then I got really depressed.

  Alice has taken time off from work because she has had a recurrence, and she needs to decide what to do about it. She can try something experimental if she wants to. “Well. I’m very sorry,” her doctors say. “Jesus,” her friends say. Or, “Oh, Alice,” they say. It has been so long since things were like they used to be. When a bad diagnosis comes, it is never how you think it will be, she tells people. It’s the suddenness that’s the problem. It is you, seasoning the pasta sauce and singing along with the radio. And then the phone rings and your doctor tells you he’s gotten back some test results and can you come in to discuss them. Wait, you think. My rings still fit. My jeans. I just ate breakfast. I am thirty-six years old. In the middle, you see. The earth rotates while you speak, unmindful of the fact that you have just begun a quilt. You hang up the phone and start to learn.

  After Alice reads the paper, she uses the weather report to line the bottom of the bird’s cage. The bird is named Lucky. He is green and yellow, with tiny violet patches on his face. The violet looks the way blush does on women who can’t see anymore—it is too dark, too low, ridiculous and endearing. He doesn’t know he has cancer.

  “You’re going free today,” Alice tells him. “It’s going to be a beautiful day.” The bird cocks his head, ruffles his feathers, and raises his wing, exposing his malignancy to her. It looks like a piece of cereal stuck onto him, she thinks. It looks like something she could just pluck off. She tried, once, when she saw it for the first time. It wouldn’t come off, and the bird bit her. So she took him to the vet and the vet said it was cancer. Then he said, “Well, most birds live only six years. This one is seven.” “Uh-huh,” Alice said. She took the bird home, put a sheet around part of his cage, fed him a potato chip. She put him beside her while she lay on the sofa and looked at a magazine. She played the radio for him. Later, she let him fly around the house for hours, didn’t push him off when he rode on her glasses.

  Now she stands still, staring, fascinated by the bird’s tumor. She has never seen her own. Is this the way her breast looked on the inside? The phone rings and she stands listening to it for a while. She picks it up, hangs up, and then leaves it off the hook. She finishes cleaning the cage, puts the bird in the sun, goes to shower.

  She turns her back to the mirror to disrobe. She has never really looked. Before she was divorced, her husband looked. He looked right away, in fact, behaved
remarkably, tried to kiss her where she never wanted to be kissed again. She had actually screamed in her humiliation, a startled kind of half cry, the kind of noise she made when she was badly frightened in a dream. She blushed then, wept, said it was too soon. He gave her time, he made excuses for her when it was past time. He brought home presents, silly and extravagant, he begged her to talk to him. She said, early on, “I don’t get this. I can’t make sense of this. I don’t know what to do.” And then she stopped talking. He seemed like a trick to her: staying the same and getting smaller; holding her tight and disappearing. “What do you want?” her friends would ask. “My God, Alice, what else can he possibly do?”

  “I don’t want anything,” she said. But that was a lie. What she wanted was to be alone. And she told him that until he agreed and let her be alone. He still called sometimes, months after they were formally divorced he still said he was her husband.

  Now Alice dresses in a sweatshirt and blue jeans. She remembers to comb her hair. Then she puts the birdcage in the passenger seat of her car and drives to the park. “Are you my buddy?” she asks Lucky as she drives. “Are you my friend?” He is silent, listening to her. “You and me, Lucky,” she says. “We got the big one.”

  She sees no one when she pulls into the park. It is a workday, a school day, and too late for lunch. Everything is right. She walks along a jogging path, the cage clanging into her leg, the bird’s water sloshing from side to side. When she is deep into the woods, she sits on a rock and puts the cage beside her, watches the bird for a while. He is excited, hops constantly from one perch to the other. “You’re outside,” she tells him, and rubs her finger along the bars of the cage. The bird can say words. He says his own name and, Alice believes, hers too. He whistles and makes soft, comforting sounds. But his wing doesn’t lie flush against him anymore. And he has stopped eating almost entirely.

  She opens the cage door. The bird hesitates, then hops closer. Alice speaks softly to him, holds her finger out to him. “Come on,” she says. “You can go.” Finally the bird steps onto her finger, and Alice pulls him out of the cage. He flies off immediately, lands on the branch of a nearby bush, chews excitedly at the leaves. Alice closes the cage door, puts her arms around herself, feels her eyes fill, her throat tighten. She watches for a while, as the bird flies from the bush to a tree and back again. He seems content to stay in the same area. Alice has imagined this scene so many times, and each time when she opened the door the bird flew immediately out of sight. And she was strong; she didn’t cry. But now the bird stays near her and she isn’t strong. She wants everything back from before—her old bird and her old self and her old life—and she feels the longing as an aching pressure that moves into her chest and steals her breathing. She lies down on the path, closes her eyes, and then opens them again to a piece of grass directly before her. It is arched delicately, weaving slightly in the wind. Ballet. As a child, she had loved this, lying in the grass and watching things close up. She saw bugs in alarming new ways; she saw canyons in pebbles. She liked especially the sudden reorientation that came with seeing her own hand again. Now she weeps softly, lets herself start to think about what she should do, wishes that a hand would open the door for her, because she is so tired.