The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  I am going to scream, Helen thinks, but then Enya says, “Dogs!” with such innocent triumph and joy that Helen can only stare into her lap, ashamed, and wait for it to be over. On and on it goes. And each time it is her turn she is silent. Until they get to “S.” Then she starts thinking, Well, for heaven’s sake. How bad can it be. It’s just a game, look how the grandchildren are enjoying it. And so when her turn comes around again and they are at “W,” she says, “Okay, I’ll do one. ‘W.’…All right, I am grateful for walking catfish.”

  “Huh?” Rolf says.

  “Because they are able to breathe out of water,” Helen tells him. “Isn’t that something? You’d never expect that, would you?”

  “…No,” Rolf says, and they go on playing the game. Helen watches her children, thinking, I am their mother, forevermore. Not Mona Massengill but a real flesh-and-blood screwup, like every other mother. A human being who rocked and raised her babies and worried and hoped and failed and often felt the fullness of her love pushing out against her ribs. What does she expect? That her children will one day come to her with a long list of things for which they finally want to thank her? No. They will not do that. Nor will they come to her with a long list of slights. She will hide her list and they will hide theirs. They will go on having holidays with Helen until she can no longer have them. Another few years, maybe, and then she will not be able to do holidays anymore and it will be someone else’s turn and then she will be the wrinkled old lady who comes shuffling in with her terrible toenails and baffled expression.

  When they have finished eating dinner and are ready to take a break before dessert, Helen asks Earl if he wouldn’t mind running an errand with her. She doesn’t want to drive; she has developed night blindness. “Of course,” Earl says and tells the kids, “We’ll be right back, Mom needs something.”

  She asks Earl to take her to the twenty-four-hour truck stop, and when she gets there she walks the aisles until she finds something: light-up pins for Christmas, little trees you pin on your coats and the lights flash on and off, on and off. She buys one for everyone, including Mona Massengill. “You’re just a stuffed animal,” she’ll whisper when she pins the tree on the elephant’s chest, and she’ll say it with superiority, and irony, and—it can’t be helped—a little bit of envy.

  On Christmas Eve, just before they are to leave for Elaine’s house for dinner and gift opening, Earl takes Helen by the hand and leads her upstairs. “What?” she says. “Where are we going?” A thought runs through her brain: He’s going to punish me. He’s going to bring me to the bedroom and say, “Stay here; I’m going without you.”

  Truth be told, Helen wouldn’t blame him. Her attitude, if one might call it that, has not improved. She remains caught in a sinking kind of despair. At Earl’s urging, she has made a doctor’s appointment, and he has said he will accompany her and afterward they will take in a movie and after that they will have dinner and after that they will go to another movie. “Why would you do all that?” Helen asked and he said, “I like movies.”

  But now he leads her into the guest room, then to the storage closet. He turns on the light, pulls her in behind him, then shuts the door tightly.

  “What are you doing?” she asks. “Earl?”

  “Shhhhh!”

  She starts to move past him, and he grabs her hand. “Helen, don’t. Just wait.”

  “For what?”

  He smiles at her. “Do you trust me?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Yes, I trust you, Earl. Do you need to bring me to a closet to ask me that?”

  He pulls her close to him and then turns off the closet light. “Sit down,” he whispers.

  “Where? I can’t see a blessed thing.” She is whispering now, too.

  “Just lower yourself down, it’s all right.”

  “Earl.”

  “Let me help you.” He guides her into a sitting position, and then they are both on the floor.

  “It’s so dark in here!” she says.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Earl?”

  “Shhhhhh!” He takes her hand between his own.

  Resigned, she draws in a breath and leans against him. They sit quietly, and after a while all the fretful questions banging like moths against her brain seem to fall away. Inside, there is only the cottony feeling of peace. “Thank you, Earl,” she says. And then, “Earl? I only got you a new pair of tan pants. That’s all I got you for Christmas. I’m sorry.”

  “I love tan pants. As you know. They’re exactly what I need. And that’s not all you got me. You also gave me this lovely light-up Christmas tree.”

  He pulls it from his pocket and turns it on, and now their faces are rhythmically presented to each other in carnival flashes of red and green. She laughs and he kisses her cheek and stands, then helps to pull her up.

  “Crepitus,” she says, of her complaining knees, and Earl says, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” and she laughs again.

  Downstairs, they put on their coats and go out into the night. It is icy, and Earl puts his hand under Helen’s elbow to steady her, though in truth it steadies them both.

  Once they are off the slick side roads and onto the freeway, Earl turns on the radio, where Christmas songs are playing. He sings along so softly Helen wonders if he knows he’s singing. The light-up pin he has put on his coat lapel turns off and on. Helen watches it, aware that, cheap as it is, it may stop working at any moment. But it goes off and on. Off, then on. Off. On.

  Eventually, she grows tired of watching it and turns her attention to what she can see from her window. It is a dark night, the new moon only a parenthesis in the sky. But the snow offers soft illumination, and every now and then there is the lovely asymmetry of a split-rail fence, or a family of rock-eyed snowmen, or the swift flight of some animal moving deeper into the woods, toward safety.

  FULL COUNT

  It is a hot morning in August 1960, and Janey’s family is driving from Texas to North Dakota. The trip has hardly begun—they’re just past the outskirts of the Army base where they live in a row house not far from the PX. Still, Janey leans over into the front seat to ask her mother if she can have a piece of pie. She knows exactly where it is. In the way back of the station wagon, next to her father’s suitcase, in a red food chest with a silver clasp, and she can very easily reach it. The pie is nestled on top, as it should be, being far more vulnerable than the roast beef and fried egg sandwiches, the apples and oranges, the bottles of RC Cola packed below.

  It’s a mince pie, Janey’s favorite. Usually they have mince pie only at Thanksgiving time, but Janey made a special request for this road trip and her mother said yes. There are starlike designs on the pie that her mother made using fork tines, and sugar is sprinkled liberally over the top and it has collected most heavily and caramelized near the edges of the perfectly crimped crust. Janey thinks the pie is a work of art. And she should know. Only twelve, she has already won prizes for her watercolors of her mother’s garden, for her pottery bowls imprinted with geranium leaves, for her charcoal drawing of her embattled Keds. “Shoes?” one of her classmates, Ben Green, asked. “You won an award for a picture of shoes? I don’t get it. So strange.” He says the word “strange” with that southern accent that hikes up a word in the middle and gives it an extra kick. “Striange.”

  Janey has been living in Texas for over two years now, and she supposes she has a southern accent, too. She can’t help it. It just happens that wherever her Army officer father is stationed, she picks up the accent. When they lived in Wisconsin (ages seven to ten), Janey said, “Okay, then” in that Wisconsin way, and also she said, “You betcha,” and when she hung up the phone she said, “Bye, now.” When they lived in Germany (ages three to six), she spoke more German than English. She still says Ja for yes.

  Last night, Janey came into the kitchen, the screen door banging behind her, and asked, “Are we fixin’ to eat?”

  Her mother turned to look at her and laughed.

  “Wha
t?” Janey said. “Idn’t it five-thirty yet?”

  “Oh my goodness,” her mother said, laughing louder, and turned back to the stove. She was dishing up potatoes. It was time to eat. So what was so funny? When Janey asked, her mother affected a southern accent to say, “Well, y’all have just gohn raht out ’n’ turned inda one of ’em. Mah lands.”

  Janey wasn’t sure what to do. First of all, “y’all” was the plural form of “you,” not the singular. She stood still, half smiling, and her mother sighed and came over and kissed the top of her head and told her to go wash up. “Don’t be so sensitive,” she told Janey. “It’s kind of sweet. Are we fixin’ to eat.”

  In the bathroom, Janey looked deep into her own eyes. She likes doing this, but she has to be careful not to look too long or she can go crazy. Mary Beth Croucher told her that, and it is true: if you look too long, all of a sudden it’s like you are floating and your brain goes cobwebby. But Janey likes to look because, when she does, she can see herself as a woman. She falls down the rabbit hole of her own eyes into a brighter future, where she is grown up and no longer oversensitive. There she is in a short-sleeved sweater and tight skirt, her hair in a French twist, pearl earrings firmly screwed on. Red lipstick and rouge. The woman Jane.

  She is getting there. Recently, boobs came. They are not pointy enough, they are more like fat pads, but they are still boobs and she has a bra with a sweet pink rose sewn onto it. Soon she will start her period and there will be no arguing then: she will be a woman because she will be able to have a baby. She doesn’t like to think too much about actually having a baby, it makes her a little ill, but the fact of being able to, that’s the thing.

  Last night, after Janey looked into her eyes just up to the point of going crazy, she washed her hands and dried them hastily on the towel. She did this to obey her mother; Janey herself thinks using towels is wasteful. Why not just wipe your hands on your clothes? It’s only water. Even after baths, Janey sits in the tub to air-dry. There’s only the tiniest residue of dampness on your bottom when you do that, and pajamas easily absorb it. And then the towels: pristine, unbothered.

  Next Janey went to sit at the table with her parents and eat dinner. It was then that she asked about the pie for their trip tomorrow. She saw a look pass between her parents; then her mother said, All right, yes, she would make a pie. Janey wasn’t sure what the look meant, and it was times like this that she longed for a sister with whom she could compare notes. If she were the older sister, she could be flip and ask, “What the hell was that look?” If she were the younger sister, she’d have to be more deferential, of course. She’d have to ask permission to come into the sister’s room, permission to sit on her bed, and then say, “Why did Mother and Father look at each other that way?” But Janey is an only child, and so she lay in bed that night and asked the question only of herself. Maybe because baking the pie would heat up the kitchen? Or it would be too messy to eat it in the car? Had she said “pie,” “pah”?

  But now, “Go ahead,” her mother says. “If you want pie, have some. If you’re that hungry.”

  Janey is not hungry. It has nothing to do with that. She reaches into the back and carefully opens the food chest, carefully cuts a piece of pie, carefully puts it on a small paper plate, carefully gets out a fork and a napkin. “Do y’all want any?” she asks.

  “No thanks,” they say together, and her mother is smiling that smile again.

  Janey looks out the window while she eats her pie. It tastes wonderful; her mother knows how to keep mince pie from being too sweet. She puts in apples and lemon juice. She puts in butter and salt. Janey rubs her tongue against the roof of her mouth to squeeze out all the flavor she can. She sits up straighter and puts her knees together. Good food makes her do that. Dogs do it, too, begging for a bite. They sit up very straight and still. Janey takes small bites, so that the pie lasts longer, so that it seems like there is more. She has heard you should chew at least seventeen times, but if you do that, all you’re doing is chewing spit. Janey has observed that she chews mostly four times and usually begins swallowing at three and a half.

  When Janey has finished her pie, she checks the rearview to see if her father is watching. As he is not, she licks the plate. She considers asking if she can have more. No. She’ll ask later. When they stop for gas. She throws her dirty dishes in the trash bag her mother has put on the floor of the backseat. Janey’s thirsty now, but to make up for asking for more pie later, she won’t ask for a drink now.

  She stretches out along the backseat and closes her eyes and thinks of her grandfather, called Bampo, from the first grandchild’s mispronunciation. She’d never tell her parents, but she loves him more than she loves them. He wears cardigan sweaters and suspenders. He makes gravy beyond compare, and he gives Janey mashed potato and gravy sandwiches and eats one right along with her so that she doesn’t look stupid. He slides his lower denture plate out with his tongue, then bites it back in like a snapping turtle. (When he first showed Janey this, she didn’t know his teeth were false, and she thought he was an awfully talented man.)

  When Bampo greets you, he shakes your hand really fast in a way that undulates your whole arm and says, “Howdohowdohowdo!” until you are helpless with laughter. You always laugh around Bampo, he makes everybody laugh. He talks to strangers and they talk back to him. He is the star of the whole extended family. Janey thinks sometimes it must be hard for her grandmother, but her grandmother is a good sport about it. She has her role. She stands in front of Bampo to be the first to welcome those who come to visit. She answers the phone and she makes the coffee and toast in the morning. She cleans the bird-cage and vacuums the rugs, she decorates the bathroom with fluffy pink toilet tank covers and toilet seat covers and rugs. There are also pink ruffled curtains, and a doll wearing a pink crocheted hat and a wide skirt that hides the extra toilet paper. The doll has a pink parasol, which Janey longs for, though she has no idea why—what would she do with such a thing? Her grandmother is the only one allowed to touch the porcelain poodles on the end table, a white poodle dog and two puppies, all linked together with fine gold chain. She sits at the kitchen table with her daughters and talks to them about how to manage husbands and children, and sometimes she reads their fortunes in tea leaves, oh, she can be vibrant in her usefulness.

  But Bampo is the star, and he loves Janey the best of all his grandchildren. He lets her sit on his lap no matter what, even if he’s listening to baseball on his transistor radio; he loves his baseball and will not suffer interruptions during a game. Janey does not love baseball except when she’s with him. Then, she listens to the game, too. She likes when the announcer says, “Annnnd it’s three and two, full count.” Janey likes a full count, because then something is forced to happen—the guy’s safe or he’s not.

  There are other reasons Janey knows she’s her grandfather’s favorite. If she gets a cut or a scrape, he’s the one to put on a Band-Aid. If she’s dizzy after a ride at the state fair, he’ll sit things out with her on a bench with his arm around her for as long as it takes. Once, he burned a tick off her head with a lighted cigarette. He put the cigarette to the tick’s butt, and the thing backed right out. When she drives somewhere with him, he lets her turn the steering wheel. He sent her a bottle of Friendship Garden perfume for her tenth birthday, when no one else thought to give her perfume, which she loves. He knows her secret, and keeps it.

  Janey often has night terrors, where she wakes up from a sound sleep with her heart racing and her breathing all but impossible. The idea of her own death seems to assume wretched form, and it sits on her chest, pries open her eyes, and mashes foreheads with her. The walls close in and the ceiling lowers. Darkness deepens. She does not hear but feels the words:

  YOU WILL BE NO MORE.

  Sometimes it lasts only a minute or so, and she falls back asleep. Other times, it lasts longer. When it used to happen, she would cry and whisper, “Please.” But last time her family came to North Dakota, Janey an
d her grandfather were for some reason alone in his house, and she told him about it. She said, “Sometimes I wake up at night, and I’m so scared of dying.” She laughed a little, embarrassed.

  Bampo said, “Oh, that’s an awful thing. What do you do about it?”

  “Nothing.” She swallowed hugely.

  “You don’t tell your parents?”

  “I can’t.” She looked down. “I don’t want to.”

  She expected that he would argue against this, tell her she should awaken them so that they might comfort her. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Well, next time it happens, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go very quietly into the kitchen and turn on the light and sit at the table and eat an orange. Will you do that for me?”

  She nodded solemnly. She thought it could work. She could see herself at the kitchen table in her pajamas, swinging her legs, peeling an orange, the scent rising up for the cure. She could hear the low hum of the overhead light burning steady and bright, chasing away the shadows and illuminating the cheerful Mixmaster, the long line of her mother’s cookbooks on the counter.

  And indeed Bampo’s suggestion did work. When Janey awakens now with that particular kind of panic, she goes each time to the kitchen and turns on a light. Once they were out of oranges, but an apple did the trick. It wasn’t the fruit anyway, Janey had decided. It was the getting up.

  So, yes, her grandfather treasures her: she holds it in the teacup of her heart. But there are other good things in North Dakota. Janey has cousins there whom she really likes; they are like brothers and sisters. Her parents always stay with her grandparents, and Janey stays with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jim. They have five children, three boys and two girls—her parents’ siblings all have large families, her family is an anomaly; she doesn’t know why.

  Janey spends time with the girl cousins who are her age, but she also spends time with the boys, and she prefers this, it seems a privilege; boys do not otherwise seem to like her. They seem, in fact, to like her less and less. Boys and girls from her school go roller-skating together and then to Boogie’s for hamburgers, or they meet at the movies, and sit together. But then they just go their separate ways right afterward, and their eyes seem empty of the near memory of one another, so Janey doesn’t think she’s missing all that much. She believes she’ll catch up soon. She hopes so.