Ordinary Life: Stories

by Elizabeth Berg

  When they went to the basement, the man saw a tiny safe built into the wall. “What’s in there?”

  “The truth is, I don’t know,” Kate said. “Nothing, I assume. It was put in by the people who lived here before us, and we’ve never been able to get it open.”

  He walked up closer to it. “This the combination on the index card here? Great idea, putting it right next to the safe.”

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t work anyway. That’s how it was when we moved here, and we’ve never changed it.”

  He tried the numbers. The safe stayed locked. He spun the dial around again, and the safe opened. “I don’t believe it!” Kate said. “How’d you do that?”

  “Backwards,” the man said. He reached in and pulled out a blue velvet sack. “Well, look here!” He turned the bag upside down and a diamond necklace fell into his hand. It looked like ones Kate saw in magazines and thought no one could possibly own. “Jane,” the man said sadly. “You lied to me.”

  “I swear I didn’t!” Kate said. “We really could never open it! If I knew that necklace was there, would I leave the combination beside it?”

  The man considered this as he moved the necklace about in his hand, watching it sparkle. “Absolutely dazzling, isn’t it? It almost seems alive.” He looked up at her. “Come here, Jane.” She swallowed, stood her ground. “Come here!” he said, “or I’ll goddamn shoot you, I don’t care what I said!” She walked up to him slowly. He put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead lightly, and then turned her around. He lay the necklace against her, then fastened it at the back. His fingers were so warm. She smelled soap. “Now: Happy Fortieth,” he said. She stood still, not breathing, until he took his hands away and spoke again. “Is that all you have to show me?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned her around and stared at her with a certain intimate weariness. “You sure?”

  The necklace was cold against her neck. It was also surprisingly heavy. “Yes, I … I’m sure.”

  He sighed, looked around the room. “You got an awful lot of Barbie dolls down here, Jane.”

  “I know. My daughter likes them.”

  “You shouldn’t buy her so much. You’ll spoil her.”

  “I suppose.”

  “So don’t you have any decent artwork? Some small oils?”

  “No.”

  “I’m disappointed in your taste, Jane.”

  “My apologies.”

  They walked upstairs. He took an apple from her fruit bowl on the kitchen table. Then he went to the door, turned, and handed her the pillowcase. “I changed my mind,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just changed my mind. So how about you don’t call the cops on me, all right, Jane?”

  She folded the top of the pillowcase down on itself, over and over. There was a lot of room. He hadn’t taken much. He was a terrible thief. “Yes, all right.”

  “Your neck is beautiful, Jane. Long, and elegant—like you came down from royalty or something.”

  “Thank you.”

  He showed her the gun again. “This can’t hurt you, Jane. It’s a starter’s pistol. I used it for a race today.”

  “Oh. Well, it looks very real. Very convincing.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t call the cops, Jane. I never did anything like this before. And I never will again. You know that, don’t you?”

  She looked down, didn’t say anything. Then she said, “You didn’t really know where I lived.”

  “Of course not. I just saw you go into the store, and got this … idea. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “My name’s Jane, too.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “You’re right. It’s Jonathan Hansen. I’m in the phone book—Girard Street. Look me up sometime, Jane. We’ll have lunch.” He smiled slightly, and left.

  She chain-locked her door and watched him walk down the sidewalk. He was eating the apple. Then she went to the phone book. There it was, at the top of the column, in clear black print.

  Jonathan, his mother had named him. And then what? Dreamlike, she dialed his number. A recording said, “Hello. I’m not here now. But please—leave a message.” His voice was so familiar. She shivered, hung up, and dialed the police. Then she thought, no. It’s not his voice that’s familiar. It’s the longing in it. She put her hand to the back of her neck, and followed the hard line of diamonds around to the base of her throat. When she heard the policeman identify himself, she hung up. She was quiet when she did it. She was absolutely noiseless.

  Today’s Special

  I used to think that the best thing to do when you had the blues was to sit in a warm bathtub, almost too hot, and slouch down far enough that the water level was just below your chin. That way, you could feel protected by the depth, and cleaned in a deeper than usual way by the rising steam. The problem with that method is you had to keep fooling with the faucet to keep the temperature just right, and that would break the healing spell. Now I think it’s better to go to a diner and eat a fried egg sandwich. You have to look around a bit to get the right diner and the right kind of sandwich. It’s not as easy a combination to find as you might think. Diners have opted for a lot of illegitimate foods, abandoning things that are real (serving, for example, instant mashed potatoes instead of the familiar real potato lumps that make us crazy with desire and nostalgia—oh, you have to be careful and look hard). Anyway, what you do is you find a good diner, and when you have the blues, you go and eat there. You can’t bring a journal, because then everybody notices you and they change what they do, assuming somehow that they are what you’re writing about, and that therefore they need to do a little behavioral tie-straightening. So you leave your journal at home. It’s good to bring a newspaper, though, so you can pretend you’re really not much interested in anything going on around you. Then people really open up.

  I had a friend once who was so filled with sadness it seemed to come pouring out of her at every opportunity. Say the event was no more than hearing about some animal dying, somebody’s pet. She’d take information like that very seriously; and it was hard for her to be here. In spite of her own burden of pain, though, or perhaps because of it, she felt compelled to help others. She wanted a lighter load all around. And I wanted to help her. But I didn’t know how. Now the diner seems to me to be the thing I might have presented her. For there we all are, confessing our need for complex carbohydrates, unabashedly feeling some improvement in our spirits (even if they weren’t that bad) after some pancakes and syrup. Real pancakes with real syrup, I should say.

  There’s a diner three blocks from my house whose only serious errors are the wrong kind of dishware (too light) and the wrong kind of potatoes (instant). I asked the waitress there once why they didn’t use real potatoes, since everything else was so legitimate. She looked up from her pad to ask me if I had ever peeled a whole sack of potatoes. I allowed as how I hadn’t. “Well,” she said, “there you are.” She readjusted her pencil and her gum while I noticed with disappointment that she no longer wore her hair net either.

  However, there are booths at the diner, and the necessary gold speckles in the Formica, which is only slightly yellowed, and then in only certain lights, like forty-year-old teeth. The booth seats are red leatherette, with just a couple of discrete tears, in only one bench. There’s a counter, too, with stools that spin around completely when a kid’s sitting on them, or turn only modestly with an adult’s repressed mentality in charge. Salt and pepper are in glass containers as they ought to be. Sugar is in the tall holder with the trapdoor that lets you pour to your heart’s content and doesn’t make you feel guilty or wasteful the way opening more than one sugar packet might. Ketchup and mustard show up on your table when the waitress thinks it’s appropriate for them to show up, which is almost always. You can get meat loaf, sliced exactly the right thickness, wit
h brown gravy that really isn’t from a can. You get peas and (instant) mashed potatoes and two slices of white bread with that. I get milk in a white-blue plastic glass, too. Most other adults I see there opt for the coffee, maintaining some secret tradition and addiction.

  Well, you order whatever you want. It might be the meat loaf or it might be a Greek ensemble—a salad with feta cheese, lemon rice soup, baklava. It might be chicken croquettes with their suspicious yellow gravy. It doesn’t matter too much—it’s all fine. The point is that you don’t see people there all dressed up and pulling out American Express Gold Cards. You see them in their natural states. Oh, there might be the secretaries all a little overdressed and poignantly hopeful, with their bangle bracelets and nail polish and perfect hosiery. They make out like this is strictly a temporary stop. But they give themselves away with what they order. We all do in the diner. “Give me some of that, uh, American chop suey,” we say, meaning, “Take me home to an older kitchen, a less complicated time, a presence that offered silent acceptance.” People talk in the most casual and unaffected of ways. We share the weather like a present marked “For all of you.” “Isn’t it nice?” we ask one another. Someone will almost always come through as a bit more knowledgeable than all the others, with a long-range forecast, and it’s almost always someone who’s been nursing a cup of coffee for a good forty minutes.

  It makes me feel well cared for, this sharing of information. And I am captured by the more personal conversations because of their easy simplicity, their honesty. Gossip isn’t sharp or malicious—it’s necessary, human reporting, and we listen with ears far more sympathetic than critical.

  And then, of course, it’s the orderliness and the predictability that make me feel better too. There’s a cop that’s always at the diner around eleven. He eats an early lunch as counterpoint to my late breakfast. We never speak, but we know who the other is. I wouldn’t mind if he did speak to me. For his part, he’d never give me a ticket.

  I like the toned-down rattle of dishes, the way the world takes on a less hysterical cast and seems more washed and ironed. I even like the way people smoke here, though I am an adamant non-smoker in other situations. All I need to do is eat the meat loaf and to see that others do more or less the same, and I lose the blues. One, two, three.

  So here is where I’d bring my friend, if I could reach her. “Look,” I’d say. “Look around here and see: doesn’t this show you that it’s only the small things that we love the best, that make the real difference? Nothing big ever replaces the sight of the winter boots all lined up, or the sound of the click of the front doors locked against the darkness each night. Consider cooling pies. The impossibly small size of your own child’s shoe. The briefest look in your direction from a particular set of eyes at the moment your heart needs it most. Isn’t it those small things that add the necessary shape and meaning to our lives? And don’t we miss seeing them if we look too hard for big things?” Oh, I’d bring her here if I could, all right, and order for her myself. Cheeseburger and a malted. Fries on the side. Coleslaw, and pie at the end. “I don’t know what could possibly work any better than this,” I’d tell her. “You try this, and see.”

  As it is, I go alone. I sit at a booth for four anyway, with my newspaper for company. Nobody there seems to make a thing of it. It’s because somewhere under our breaths, we’re all singing the same song. And although it’s only us sharing the same notes in the same way, some ethereal harmony is created, as magical and as reliable as the first star of evening.

  Author’s Note

  The stories in this collection were written over a long period of time. “Today’s Special” is one of the very first pieces of fiction I wrote, and it came about because I was thinking of a friend who had severe problems with depression and who often threatened suicide. Once, sitting at a booth in my favorite diner, I thought, What if she does kill herself? I thought of how I would feel, then, sitting there with her gone; I thought of how glimpses of various lives at a diner could have suggested reasons for her not to have done that.

  Many of the stories I write deal with the difficulties of marriage. Many touch on the seemingly irreconcilable differences between men and women. But “Ordinary Life: A Love Story” makes the strong point that it can be worth it to work at a relationship.

  Marriages are not the only relationships that are looked at in these stories. “What Stays” is about a mother and daughter; “The Matchmaker” deals with the friendship of a young girl and an older woman; “One Time at Christmas, in My Sister’s Bathroom” shows a woman coming to an understanding of her difficult father; and “Regrets Only” features a married woman’s romantic feelings for her gay best friend.

  I want to say a little about the story “Martin’s Letter to Nan.” In 1996, I published a novel called The Pull of the Moon. It’s about a fifty-year-old woman named Nan who is dealing with issues brought about by menopause and aging. She takes off suddenly for a trip by herself. She leaves a note for her husband, Martin, saying that she’ll be back, but she doesn’t know when. The Pull of the Moon alternates between letters to Martin and journal entries that Nan makes on her journey. It is a story of self-discovery and self-acceptance, and it seems to have struck a chord in a lot of readers. At virtually every reading I do, when it comes time for questions and comments from the audience, at least one person will mention that novel. Women say they keep it by their bedside. Many say it is their favorite. Some say they read parts of it aloud to their husbands, and one said that it saved her marriage. But the most common question I get is, “What was Martin’s response?” “Martin’s Letter to Nan” answers that question. Writing the story aroused my wrath at men, but it also made me sympathetic to them. My “significant other” read it with a cigar in his hand, and after he finished reading it, he looked up and said, “This is terrific. You should read this aloud.” Perhaps I shall.

  I love these stories the way I love my novels, which is rather how I love my children. My children are not perfect, but they are perfect. These stories are not perfect either, but they are the best I could do to portray certain life events, to illuminate certain ways of thinking, to illustrate the way we can get from here to there, to document some interesting insights. More than anything, they are meant to celebrate the extraordinary moments and events that make up ordinary life.

  ORDINARY LIFE

  A Reader’s Guide

  ELIZABETH BERG

  A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH BERG

  Michelle Huneven lives in California and is the author of Round Rock and Jamesland.

  Michelle Huneven: Elizabeth, you say in your author’s note that these stories span a long period of time. How long? You also say that “Today’s Special” was the first story you wrote, but which is the most recent?

  Elizabeth Berg: The stories span about fifteen years. The most recent story is “Martin’s Letter to Nan.”

  MH: What makes a short story a short story to you (as opposed to, say, a sketch, or a novel, or a memoir)? How do you conceive of a story? For example, Sue Miller says that, for her, a short story is made of two disparate elements that connect in an unexpected way. Other people— the epiphanists—say a short story tells of a moment after which life will never be the same. How would you sum up your idea of what makes a short story?

  EB: I guess the most succinct way to say it is that the short story is a photo; the novel is a whole album. What stories “are,” as well as what happens in them, depends on both the photographer (the writer) and the subject. I write a mix of types.

  MH: Do you have a story all mapped out before you write, or do you improvise as you go along? What has happened in one of these stories that most surprised you?

  EB: I don’t really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don’t know how I write. But I’ll do the best I can.

  Ideas come from life: what happens in mine, what I see happening in others’, mixed with a great deal of imagination. I might see a person in a groce
ry store and build a whole character and life out of what’s in her basket. I might read a newspaper story about a guy on a bus and build a family for him. I might get a phone call from an old boyfriend and it might raise a lot of “what if” questions that become material. I might watch people in a bar, overhear a piece of a conversation. Material is all around, all the time. Pots are boiling on four burners. The only thing I have to do is feel in the mood to cook, which I usually do. Once I get a vague idea, I let the story write itself. When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both—I never know what’s going to happen. “Take This Quiz” surprised me for its solemnity—I thought it was going to be a funny story. “The Thief” surprised me for its thoughtfulness and its sense of complicity.

  MH: These are stories about ordinary life as led by fairly ordinary people—that is to say your stories aren’t peopled with movie stars or aristocrats or geniuses or insane people. Is this an aesthetic choice? If so, why?

  EB: It’s not so much an aesthetic choice as a personal preference: I find “ordinary” people more interesting.

  MH: In certain still life paintings, simple common objects—a knife, a bowl of fruit, a loaf of bread, or a tea pot—are painted with such care and heart that they seem infused with life, with their own humble importance, even with spirit. It seems to me that through your straightforward, careful language you are after a similar effect in your writing—a kind of sacralization of the everyday—is this true?

  EB: That is exactly it.

  MH: Which is your most beloved story, and why? If they alternate, which is your favorite story today and what does it alternate with?

  EB: In this collection, my favorite is the title story. I love the characters and the epiphany. In addition to that, any story that lets me talk about the ’40s is a good one for me. A close second is “Martin’s Letter to Nan,” which was really fun to write.