The Art of Mending

by Elizabeth Berg

  Anthony listened, biting at his lower lip. Then he stood up. “So what should I do? I’m sorry, I just don’t feel like talking to strangers, answering all these dumb questions about how do I like North Dakota, I ought to play basketball, I’m so tall, blah, blah, blah. But I’d like to . . . should I maybe throw away the used paper plates?” He laughed in his harsh teenage way, embarrassed.

  “I think that’s a perfect thing to do.”

  He came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder. “And . . . are you okay, Mom? You know, I just realized . . . It was your dad!”

  I smiled up at him. “I’m fine. You know what I’m mostly thinking? That I’m so lucky. To have had him, and to have you.”

  There, a hint of color in his face, his shoulders shifting off some discomfort. I wasn’t allowed to show him much affection anymore, no matter how oblique it might be. When he was in second grade, I was allowed to kiss him before he left for school only in the coat closet, door closed. By the time he got to third grade, I got in trouble for even thinking about kissing him. Yet there are still nights when I sit at the side of his bed before he goes to sleep and we talk for a long time—about nothing, really. He lies stretched out under the covers with his hands linked behind his head, smelling of shampoo, his bedside lamp giving him a halo. “O’Conner thinks he’s set for a basketball scholarship,” he’ll say. “Huh!” I’ll say. “A scholarship! That’s great.” And I’ll be thinking, You’ve become a man, right in front of my eyes. I can’t bear the thought that you’ll leave soon.

  “You want me to bring you anything?” Anthony asked. “Want a sandwich or something? Cookies?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  Just after he left the room, Caroline came in. She sat in my father’s chair, looked over at me, and sighed. “Well. That’s that.”

  “Yeah,” I said sadly.

  “I mean, now nobody will ever believe me.”

  “Oh, my God. You—” I stared at her.

  “What, Laura?”

  I shook my head, got up from my chair, and walked out.

  In the living room, I caught sight of Hannah sitting alone on the sofa, and I went to sit beside her, took her hand.

  “How’s Gracie?”

  “Fine. She said she misses me.”

  “Ah. That’s nice. It’s nice to be missed, huh?”

  “I miss Grandpa already. And I feel so sorry. Like for how I didn’t do stuff for him.”

  “He adored you. Do you know that?”

  A moment. Then she nodded.

  “You did a lot for him by just being you.”

  “No, I didn’t. I should have done way more things. Like every time we were leaving, he used to say, ‘Drop me a line, kiddo!’ And I hardly ever wrote him. Only about four or five times in my whole life!”

  “I guess none of us ever does all that we might have for one another. But I know this: You were a wonderful granddaughter, and you brought great joy to his life. When you were born and he came to see you, I had to practically pry you off him. He sat with you in that big ugly rocking recliner we used to have and talked to you and told you jokes and insisted that you understood every word he said. ‘She likes me best,’ he kept saying. I think it made Dad a little jealous.”

  Hannah smiled, looked up at me.

  “And when he said, ‘Drop me a line,’ what he meant was, Keep in touch. Which you certainly did.”

  “One time when I was six I called him when you weren’t even home.”

  “Did you? What did you talk about?”

  “Hamsters. I wanted one, and you wouldn’t get me one. He told me”—she covered her mouth, started to giggle—“I still remember, exactly. He said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want one of them; they eat their young. You don’t want to be watching mama hamster spreading mustard on her baby, do you?’ It was weird! Do they eat their young?”

  “I have heard they do, sometimes. See how wise I was not to let you have one?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. But anyway. I guess it’s good he died right away, right?”

  “Yes, for his sake.”

  “I wonder if he knew he was dying.”

  “I don’t know, honey.” I looked around the crowded room: men talking to men, women talking to women, mostly. “Don’t know.”

  “What will Grandma do now?”

  I looked over at my mother, standing next to Elaine Pinkers, the young woman who lives next door. My mother was talking animatedly. She could have been the perfect hostess except that she looked . . . puzzled.

  “I don’t know what Grandma will do. We’ll have to see.” Condo, I was thinking. Don’t all widows move to condos and make container gardens on their balconies? Go out to lunch with friends and bring home leftovers that they eat for dinner? I’d have to come back and help her move at some point. And I’d tell Steve he had to help—no bowing out of this one.

  “Aunt Caroline was crying in the bathroom,” Hannah said.

  “Was she?”

  “Uh-huh. I came in by accident, and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub crying real hard.”

  “Well, I suppose we’ll all be doing some of that. But it’s okay to cry, right?”

  “Right. Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t take this wrong, okay? But when will we be going home?”

  “Don’t take this wrong. But as soon as we possibly can.”

  AFTER EVERYONE LEFT AND MY MOTHER WENT TO BED, Pete and I took our walk. At a school playground a few blocks away, we sat on a bench holding hands, saying nothing. When I started to cry, he pulled me closer, kissed the top of my head. “I’m so sorry.”

  I nodded, gulped back sobs.

  “You want to stay for a while? I can take the kids home, and you could stay and help her figure out what she’s going to do.”

  “I want to go home, though.”

  “Well, that’s what we’ll do, then.”

  “But you’re right, I should stay. And not just to help Mom. I need to help Caroline. She’s—oh, Pete, she told me the most awful things.”

  I repeated everything Caroline had said and waited for his reaction. It was not what I had expected. He simply nodded. “Sounds like you do need to be here for a while.”

  “But . . . don’t you find this incredible?”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “I’m trying to, but I don’t know. I can’t imagine that these things went on in the house I lived in. That neither Steve nor I knew anything about it. I know my mother’s odd about some things. And she’s narcissistic—although any woman as beautiful as she was has that problem, it seems to me. But I can’t imagine her doing such things.”

  “Okay.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He looked at me, said nothing.

  “What do you mean, ‘Okay’?”

  “I guess I mean the truth could be either or in between. And that I know this is bad, but it’s not as shocking to me as it is to you.” He turned toward me. “You know, I never told you this; I never wanted to. But maybe I should.”

  I waited, then finally said, “What?”

  “I just . . . I don’t want it to change the way you feel about my family.”

  “What, Pete?”

  He leaned back against the bench. “You know why I hate swearing so much?”

  “No. Why do you?”

  “Because when we were really young, my father used to . . . when my brother and I did something wrong, Subby used to take us out to the garage and yank our pants down and beat the hell out of us. And the whole time he did it, he’d be swearing; it was the only time I ever heard him swear. He did this for a few years, and then he stopped. He just stopped. I don’t know why. I don’t know if he came to his senses or got in trouble or got some help or what happened. He just stopped.”

  “Wait. What about that story you told me once? When he pretended to hit you?”

  “That’s true. That was after.”

  “So when he hit you those othe
r times, your mother knew?”

  “She knew.”

  “Well, this is just . . . I’m astonished! It doesn’t fit with them.”

  “It doesn’t fit with what you know. Knew.”

  I swallowed hard, said nothing. But then, “You know, Pete, my dad just died. Why did you tell me that? I don’t have room for anything else. Why did you tell me that?”

  He put his arms around me, spoke softly into my ear. “Because something is not everything. You know? And because nobody knows what goes on in other families, because families lie about themselves to other people. Not only to other people but to one another. And to themselves.”

  I pulled away from him. “We don’t! Our family doesn’t!”

  “Well. Maybe to a lesser degree.”

  “What do you mean! What do we lie about in our family?”

  “All right. I want to say two things. Three things. One, we don’t any of us always say what we really feel, do we? Not Hannah, not Anthony, not you or me. And aren’t we lying to each other in that way?

  “Two, we’re not finished with one another as a family, and I hope we never will be. But things will come up. We will disappoint each other, we might—things will come up, that’s all. People living with people makes for conflict. The truth is, we’re not such a peaceful species. But the good part about conflict is that if you get through it you’re stronger.

  “Now. Three. Your dad did just die. And I want to help you. I want to make things easier for you. So let’s talk about how to do that. And Laura? Sweetheart? I love you.”

  I took his hand, stared out at the jungle gym, the boxes-within-boxes pattern of it. Because of the angle. If you looked at it one way, you didn’t see them. If you looked another way, you did. “I love you too,” I said. The words seemed so small, a cardboard shield.

  We sat without talking for a long time, and then I said, “I want to go home tomorrow and get some things. I want my work. Then I’ll come back here and sort this all out.”

  MAGGIE ONCE TOLD ME ABOUT A FRIEND OF HERS who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “She only went to the doctor because she was having diarrhea,” Maggie said. “She thought it was from a trip she’d taken to Mexico. The doctor told her she had about six months to live, at the outside. She said at first it was like she was lying under a pile of bricks. For about a week, all she did was lie on the sofa and cry. But then she got up and got going again. About a month before she died, she told me that something really good had come of this diagnosis: It had forced a reconciliation between her and a daughter with whom she’d not spoken in years. She said if it hadn’t been for the cancer, she might have died without ever saying anything she needed so much to say, without ever saying anything true. I told her, ‘But you can’t be saying it was worth it, to have gotten this!’ And she said yes, that was what she was saying. I said, ‘Well, I have to tell you, I find that hard to believe. Surely there’s a way other than catastrophe to learn to speak the truth.’ And she said, ‘Maybe there is. But I would never have found it. In the end, what does it matter how you find the thing you need most? Or even when? Just so long as you find it, and you can die in peace.’ ” Maggie looked over at me, her eyes full of tears. “But it does matter when,” she said, and I said I knew. And then Maggie suddenly reached over to hug me so fiercely it hurt. “We’re so lucky,” she said, and I nodded into her shoulder. “It’s kind of scary to be so lucky,” she said, and I nodded again. I knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes being lucky is only waiting for a fall.

  14

  IT WAS SUCH A DIFFERENT CAR RIDE, GOING BACK. NO fighting in the backseat. Only a respectful silence, occasionally punctuated by a neutral observation or a request to have the radio tuned to another station. I looked out the window and thought about the three of us siblings lined up on my parents’ bed that morning, being offered various things of my father’s by my mother, she in her bright, brittle way pulling open his drawers, rummaging through his closet. Her eyes shining with tears that she clearly wanted not to acknowledge. I’d taken only his hankies, his initials embroidered in navy blue in one corner. Steve had taken his watch and his cuff links—Steve is the only man I know who still wears cuff links—and his stamp collection. Caroline took a photo of him that was taken just before he married my mother. He stood beside an old jalopy, his foot up on the bumper, smiling broadly. Everything else that my mother had offered—his sweaters, his pipes, a bathrobe he’d never worn—we had refused. I think it was just too early. None of us kids had been ready to put the kind of seal on his death that taking his things would do.

  Whereas Steve and Caroline had tiptoed around each other, not speaking, not even looking at each other, she and I had restored an uneasy truce before I left; I told her I would return within the week, and that I’d call her as soon as I arrived back at my mother’s house. Now, only a few miles from home, I regretted having made that promise. I felt I needed more time to reclaim my own life.

  When we pulled into the driveway, I saw Maggie out in her yard, two houses down. She waved, smiling, then walked over to us. “How was it?” she asked as I got out of the car. Then, her smile disappearing, she said, “Oh. Jeez. Bad trip, huh?”

  Pete and the kids greeted Maggie and then headed into the house, leaving us alone. “My dad died,” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment, trying to understand. “Just . . . now? While you were there?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, my God.” She hugged me, then stepped back to search my face. “I’m so sorry. Doug said you’d called. But I didn’t have your number to call you back.”

  “I wasn’t calling about that. That was before he even . . . I was calling about something else.” I looked at our house and saw Pete passing in front of the living room window. He’d be checking everything out, making sure nothing had happened in our absence. The kids were undoubtedly ensconced in their rooms, reconnecting to their real selves as opposed to the hampered individuals they became when they were constantly in the presence of parents and relatives. Anthony lite, my son called himself in such situations.

  “We can talk later,” Maggie said. “You need to go in?”

  “Actually, I think I need to go out. Can you?”

  “Let me just go and tell Doug, and then I’ll meet you back here. I’ll pick you up. Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, alcohol or sugar?”

  “Salty alcohol.”

  “Goldie’s?” we said together, because of their famous nachos and margaritas. And laughed. It was so good to laugh. I felt as though I too were reentering my legitimate self.

  I went into the house to tell Pete I was going out with Maggie, and he told me there was a message on the machine. My mother. Saying that she’d like to come and stay with us for a while. She wanted to fly in the next day.

  “No,” I said.

  “No? Well, what are you going to tell her?”

  “I’m going to tell her no.”

  “Laura.”

  “I said I’d go there!”

  “She wants to come here. Do you really—”

  “I’m going out with Maggie. I’ll call her when I come back.” I looked at the pile of mail and newspapers on the kitchen table. Even this seemed insurmountable. “I just need to go out for a while, Pete.”

  I went upstairs to tell Hannah I was leaving. She was sitting on her bed, talking on the phone. “Hold on,” she said, and looked at me expectantly.

  “I’m going out for a bit with Maggie. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Can I go out for dinner and shopping for school clothes with Gracie?”

  I’d forgotten all about school. It started in three days. “Yes, that would be great, in fact. Dad will give you some money. But remember—”

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t spend too much on one thing. And get things that mix and match.”

  “That’s right.”

  Next I went to Anthony’s door, knocked. Nothing. I knocked
again, heard him say, “Come in.”

  He was on his bed, Sports Illustrated lying across his belly.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m going out, okay? Dad will take care of dinner.”

  “Yeah, okay.” It was defensive, the way he said this.

  “Something wrong, Anthony?”

  “No!”

  I moved over to his bed, sat beside him. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, I just . . . I heard you in the kitchen, with Dad. About Grandma.”

  I tried to remember exactly what I’d said, how I’d said it. “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know, I just think it’s kind of screwed up that you don’t want her to come here. It’s probably pretty hard for her to be in that house. Like, everywhere she looks, she sees Grandpa. Maybe she just needs to get away.”

  “Well, Anthony.”

  He waited.

  “It’s just that there are a lot of things . . . I mean, I said I’d go there and help her.”

  “But maybe she—”

  “You know what, sweetheart? Maggie’s waiting for me. I’ll talk to you about this later. I appreciate that you’re concerned for Grandma. I do. But I—”

  “Go!” he said. “Who’s stopping you?” He returned to his magazine. I stood there for a moment, then headed downstairs. What was in my head were Pete’s words: We don’t any of us always say what we really feel, do we? It occurred to me to go back upstairs and tell Anthony the truth. But I didn’t know it yet.

  GOLDIE’S WAS NOMINALLY HALF BAR, half restaurant. But you could sit at the bar and have everything on the dinner menu, and you could sit in the restaurant for drinks only. Frank, the owner, was an easygoing guy; everything was okay with him. He had a mixed menu, everything from enchiladas to tandoori chicken to pecan-crusted catfish. Normally, you have to be wary of restaurants like that because, when they don’t specialize in anything, nothing is good. But at Goldie’s, everything was delicious. Frank once explained to me that his wife, Goldie, who died suddenly at age thirty-three, “never met a cuisine she couldn’t conquer.” Dinner at their house had always been an adventure; Frank never knew what he’d be coming home to, and he liked that. He’d been a stockbroker before she died; afterward, he decided to open a restaurant in her honor. He knew nothing about the business except that people out to eat were looking for variety and a really good meal, and that was exactly what he provided. He was sixty-one now, a good-looking man with thick gray hair and a stunning physique—he worked out every day to compensate for what he drank every night. I suppose Frank is an alcoholic, but he’s an elegant and a sympathetic one. He started drinking seriously only after Goldie died; she’d been everything to him. They never had children, so Frank has fashioned a family out of his customers. He makes it his business to know—at least by name—anyone who comes in more than once.