Ordinary Life: Stories

by Elizabeth Berg

  She hears the sound of her bird above her, looks up to see his underbelly. He is low in the branches, chatting happily, making his whistling noises. She gets up and reaches out to pet him one last time, but he flies high up into the tree. He looks like jewelry. “Good-bye, Lucky,” she says, and he chirps back in response to hearing his name. She picks up the cage and starts down the path. This is better than finding him dead on the bottom of the cage. It is better to get it over with now. She feels something land on her shoulder. It frightens her; she jumps, tries hurriedly to brush it away. But it is Lucky, squawking outrageously at her. He flies up to the top of her head to avoid her abusing hand. She holds her finger up to him, and when he sits on it, she puts him in front of her face. “Go!” she says, and flings him from her hand. But he circles around and comes back to sit on her shoulder. She begins walking. He’ll take off in a minute, as he always does, she thinks. But he doesn’t. He stays on her shoulder until she again puts him on her finger. She opens the cage door, holds him up to it, and he goes in. He gets a drink, hops over to his mirror, and kisses himself.

  Alice puts a piece of lettuce in Lucky’s seed cup when she gets home. He ignores it. She turns on the radio and goes to lie down on her bed. Her hand picks up the phone and dials the number. Her voice says she wants to come home, and his voice says he will come and get her. It will be easy to pack. One cage, holding everything, and lined with a weather report that, despite what it pretends, knows nothing for sure.

  Things We Used to Believe

  Martha is lying in the grass, top of head to top of head, with her best friend, Alan. They’d had it in mind to watch the clouds pass and get pleasantly dizzy, but the sky is vacant, only blue. Alan is forty-nine and Martha is thirty-eight. She thinks sometimes that she would like to marry him but she is already severely married. Sometimes it just happens that you meet people in the wrong order.

  They compensate in ways that will let them sleep nights: they discuss books over huge ice cream sundaes; they watch movies and hold hands in the dark under the camouflage created by the little pile of their jackets; they talk endlessly on the phone while they make dinners in their respective kitchens.

  Today Martha is feeling the way your skin feels when the weather is just right—when it’s not too hot, and not too cold, and there is no breeze whatsoever. It is a feeling of being inside something perfect, a feeling of very pleasant nothingness. “My mind feels like it’s in absolute neutral,” Martha tells Alan. He makes one of his deep, smooth sounds that implies agreement. Martha likes the sound, as she likes all the sounds that Alan makes. His voice comes out like silk or like velvet. The silk is usual, his old radio voice from the years that he was a disc jockey on a jazz radio show. The velvet is rare, and seductive, and irresistible, and it makes Martha nervous.

  They are quiet for a long time, listening to the bold, irregular sounds of daytime life. It is one of the things Martha likes most about Alan that she knows his stomach will pull to the sounds of tiny children playing just as hers will. She also likes the way he always has a few fresh wildflowers on his kitchen table, gathered on his daily walks, and she likes the discrete, high-class way he uses a fork to squeeze lemon onto his fish. She asked him once to show her how, and he did.

  Eventually, she breaks the friendly silence to say, “When I was a little girl, I thought that our appliances talked about us after we all went to bed. I thought they came into the kitchen and sat around talking about how they were treated.”

  Alan picks out a fat blade of grass and sucks on it as he contemplates what she has said. Then he says, “When I was a little boy, I thought Hawaii was off the coast of South Carolina. I was sure of it. I even lost money on a bet about it.”

  Martha smiles over at him. She thinks, I am so happy. She says, “I used to believe that after I’d gone to sleep at night, the blue fairy came into my room to paint stars on my ceiling. But if I woke up, everything would disappear. It was very frustrating.”

  Alan murmurs sympathetically. His voice is velvety now, and Martha feels punctured. She stirs a little, but says only, “I thought you could make yourself crazy by looking at your eyes really close up in the mirror.”

  “I thought that, too,” Alan says. He is getting a little excited. “I also used to scare myself by saying over and over again, ‘I am real. This is now.’ ”

  “Did you try to imagine eternity?” Martha asks. “Did you try and try to imagine it until it made you cry?”

  “Oh, sure,” Alan says, in a serious and comfortable way, as though everyone did that.

  Martha thinks of trying to have this conversation with her husband, Michael. If Martha told him something she used to believe, he might say, “Oh.” Maybe he would say, “Oh.” But probably he would look at her and say nothing. And if Martha asked, “Did you used to believe anything like that?” he would probably say, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” He would get irritated. And Martha would feel foolish for asking.

  Now, though, she says, “I thought noodles grew on trees,” and Alan laughs and says, “I thought bourbon tasted like warm root beer.”

  “I thought you made babies by rubbing palms together,” Martha says.

  “I love you,” he says.

  Martha is quiet for a moment, and then she rolls up onto her elbows to stare into his upside-down face. “I know,” she says, and then he puts his hand on the back of her neck and puts her lips down precisely onto his. You would not think it possible to kiss easily with upside-down faces, but he has done it with all the efficiency and rarity of a hummingbird at the throat of a flower. It is a sweet, sweet kiss, full of meaning, the way that first kisses are, and it is scary, too, because of the knowledge that when the kiss is over, they will need to talk about what to do next.

  Martha rises up from his face and lies back down. She thinks that her heart has moved up to be right beneath the skin on the surface of her chest, and that its wild rhythm must be visible. This is not true, of course, but she is revealed anyway, because of her breathlessness as she says unhappily, “Oh, Alan, what are we going to do?”

  “Leave your husband, and marry me,” he says.

  “Right,” Martha says. “Easy as pie.” The face of her young son has appeared, enlarged, and moved deep inside of her. She sees herself last night, lifting him from the bath and onto her lap, wrapping the towel and then her arms around him. That smell. That perfect weight. She sees him later, sleeping, his thumb fallen halfway out of his mouth. Then she sees herself climbing into bed with Michael. Bitterness rises up in her like nausea, the grass starts to irritate her skin at the point of access between her jeans and her sweatshirt. She looks at her watch in order to emphasize her attachment to the real world. In forty minutes, she will pick Billy up from nursery school. They will make a cake together for dinner.

  “Not as easy as pie,” Alan says gently. He has raised himself up to look at her, this time right side up. “Not easy at all. But possible.”

  Martha looks away and wonders again how it can be that she is with Michael. A fortune-teller who once read her tarot cards told her, looking up with a kind of amazement on her face, “You don’t feel married.”

  “You’re right,” Martha said. She stared hard at the fortune-teller, then defused the moment by looking down and pointing to another card, saying, “What does that one mean?”

  “It says you have a beautiful imagination,” the card reader said, and Martha said, “Ah.”

  Martha starts to sigh and ends up with a low growl of frustration. “Let’s not even get into this,” she says. “You know I can’t leave. I can’t.” And then, again, “I can’t.”

  Crows caw in the distance. Someone honks a car horn three times. They are impatient. They mean business. Martha gets up onto her knees and pushes grass off herself. “Let’s go,” she says. “Let’s go somewhere.”

  Alan lies still, doesn’t move. “Nope. I’m not done.”

  Martha is wary, distressed, but here is all he says: “I used to think
whenever the radio played a song, the performer was right there at the station. I thought the bands were just all lined up, waiting for their turns. I wondered how they could break down and set up so quickly.”

  Martha says, “I thought cats had no eyelids. I also thought the sexiest thing in the world to do was to put on a pair of high heels and dangle a cigarette from your lips, in front of a mirror. I did it quite a lot when I was nine.”

  They get up, and she sees that his sneakers are huge. She understands that there is much about him that is unfamiliar to her. They start walking toward the lake. They walk to keep from the bedroom, where things would only get more difficult.

  “Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,” Martha says, avoiding all the lines on the sidewalk. Alan jumps up high and lands directly on one. Martha gasps, covers her mouth. “You are bad,” she says.

  He stares straight at her, his love surrounding him like an aura. “So are you,” he says.

  “So am I,” she agrees.

  Caretaking

  I am five years old, lying outside on a blanket. The sun is springtime warm, there is a delicate breeze, and the combination is an opiate. I want to suck my thumb, though I have been told lately that I must not. But it is all that is missing to make the moment flawless, and so, with my head turned away from the house, I raise my arm up slowly to slide my thumb home. Ah. It tastes properly salty, and the cool smoothness of its surface is perfection. I sigh out my nose. I rub my tongue against the familiar bump of my thumbs knuckle, deeply content. I am almost given over into sleep when I hear my mother’s voice coming from the second-story bedroom window. “Uh-uh!” she calls. “Don’t suck your thumb!” It is a gentle, singsong reprimand. I am humiliated into wide-awakeness, and decide to abandon the blanket for something else, a place that suggests no carnal transgressions. But first I must know how my mother knew—how did she know I was sucking my thumb? I stand up to ask her. She is still leaning on her elbows out the window, admiring the day. She is wearing her housecleaning kerchief, and she looks beautiful. She has naturally curly black hair, and always when she wears her kerchief a few strands of it escape and misbehave engagingly around her face. She wears red lipstick and no other makeup, and when she smiles she reveals two deep dimples that I envy so much that when I think of them I feel a little ill. I have tried to make some for myself, to no avail. I have corkscrewed my index fingers into the hated plain pads at the sides of my face at regular intervals during the day. I have taped marbles into them at night. No dimples yet. I trust that when I am older a reliable dimple-inducing method will come to me. For now, I put my hand on my hip and shade my eyes from the sun to yell up at my mother, “How did you know?”

  She smiles down at me with her terrible dimples. “What?” Her voice seems borne by the breeze, carries far, stays alive for a long time—it is just that kind of day, perfect for thumb sucking. Angered by a new surge of desire, I ask again, irritably, “How did you know?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, a pixie told me.”

  I look around uneasily. I don’t see any trace of her. “How did she know?”

  My mother has remembered her work, and she is pulling back into the house. “She watches you,” she tells me, and disappears.

  I sit on my blanket, disgruntled. I wonder if this pixie also knows what I am thinking. Oh, it can’t be.

  Last week when I came to see my mother, she was wearing a housecleaning kerchief as in the old days, covering her now silver hair. Her dress was buttoned one button off, and she was wearing only one slipper. I found the other one on top of the stove. My stomach lurched. “Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, “why is your slipper here?”

  She stared at it blankly. “Why, I don’t know.” A robin came into the tree near the kitchen window where we stood. My mother saw him and said, “Oh, look. Look at his fat orange breast.”

  We sat at the little kitchen table with the embroidered tablecloth and I asked what she’d had for breakfast. She traced a blue daisy with her fingertip and began to cry. “I don’t remember. Ask your father.” My father died four years ago. On his last day, he was fixing a stuck wheel on my son’s bicycle. He clutched his chest, my mother later told me, looking quite surprised. Then he stared at her, sitting in her lawn chair a few feet away from him, and, with a look of extreme clarity and love, neatly died. She dropped the peas she’d been shelling onto the ground and never let anyone pick them up. For a whole year after my father’s death, you could still find some, if you looked carefully enough.

  Now, I said what I’d imagined saying for nearly a year. I said, “Mom, I’m worried about your living here alone. I think you need other people around.”

  She gasped. “Oh, no. I don’t want to go to a nursing home. There are some things worse than dying, and that’s one of them.” She began to cry in earnest then, and clutched my hand with both of hers. “Oh, please,” she said, shaking her head and squeezing my hand so hard it hurt.

  Over her badly buttoned dress she was wearing a blue print apron featuring various types of kitchen paraphernalia. Spatulas, knives, wall clocks, and mixing bowls floated dreamlike across her bosom, down her back. She reached into the pocket for a wadded-up Kleenex. I wished hard for the first time in my life for a brother or a sister—this was too hard for one person. I went over to her and held her against me, and she stopped crying. We were both still, waiting. “Mom,” I said finally, to the delicate part on the top of her silver head. “Please just come home with me tonight. Stay over. Joey would love to see you—he got his first high school report card yesterday. We’ll have a nice dinner.”

  She twisted her wedding ring on her hand, and I hoped she wouldn’t say again to ask my father. She didn’t. She stood up and said she would get her purse and overnight bag. She seemed full of dignity and pleasant anticipation now—we might have been going to the opera. “Would you help me with my coat?” she asked when she reappeared in the kitchen. I said that I would, but asked if she would like to take her apron off first. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, looking down at herself and laughing. “Holy buckets.”

  I am seven, riding in the backseat of the car while we take a trip across country. It is summer, and it feels as though we will all be free of obligation forever. We drive until we are distracted by something, and then we stop. We eat in restaurants with place mats that are maps, with stars for cities. They tell us where we are, and we trace on them where we think we’ll go, though we are never definite. My father is irresponsible when it comes to filling up—it is my mother who always notices that we are almost out of gas. “Holy buckets, Fred,” she says. “Find a gas station, will you?” And we do, always just in time, and then while my father does the manly thing and stands by the car to chat with the attendant, my mother and I go to “freshen up,” as she calls it. In the almost airless, tiled bathroom, we deliberate in front of the vending machines. I am allowed one thing. Sometimes it is an Ace comb in a black plastic holder. In the finest places, there are things like tiny dolls in baskets, or twin Scottie dogs on a gold chain. I am also fond of little tubes of toothpaste.

  When I am tired, I stretch out on the backseat to stare at the constant blue sky through the rear window. Sometimes I hear my father ask my mother to rub his shoulders and neck, which embarrasses me. I hear them talk adult talk, tell stories with endings I don’t understand. Sometimes I pretend I am asleep and hope that they will talk about me, and often they do. They tell each other tales of various achievements of mine, or they express admiration for what they insist are my good looks, or they recount things I’ve said that they found amusing. I must be careful not to smile with them.

  I like the monotonous drone of the tires on the pavement, the containment in one small space of everything I need in my life. I will be safe forever—I can tell by the simple sight of the back of my parents’ heads. They are up: alert, careful, and making the right decisions. I can stare into the sky until I sleep for real, worryless.

  When we arrived at m
y house, my mother saw Joey first. He was coming down the sidewalk from school. “Well, that’s Joey, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Sure is.” I called to him to help me unload groceries.

  Joey greeted his grandmother hesitantly. He was uncomfortable around my mother lately because he found her newly unreliable. At thirteen, his fear of embarrassment was acute, and he knew that at any given moment my mother might do something to make him quite uncomfortable—astounded, even. “She’s wacked out now,” he’d recently said, petulantly, and I had angrily sent him to his room. Later, I sat on his bed and apologized. “I feel bad for her,” I’d said. “It makes me really angry to hear you talk about her that way.”