Open House

by Elizabeth Berg

  Back in the kitchen, I take a sip from my coffee. It’s gone cold; a ring of congealed cream visible at the outside edge. Look how fast things turn. I dump the coffee out, then throw the cup in the trash. I never want to see that cup again. “David,” I say, very softly. Like a prayer. “David,” I say again, and lean against the wall to cry. It helps. It’s so funny, how it helps. Stress hormones get released when you cry, that’s why it works. It’s amazing how smart the body is. Though maybe we could do without loving. I think it’s overrated, and I think it’s too hard. You should only love your children; that is necessary, because otherwise you might kill them. But to love a man? It’s overrated, and it’s too hard and I will never, ever do it again.

  Well. What I will do now is make a list. There’s a lot to think about, so much to do. I’ll go outside, I’ll sit out there where it’s so much bigger, where there is no roof to fall in on your head and make you brain damaged, should you survive.

  AT THREE-THIRTY, I am sitting on the sofa in the family room, waiting for Travis. I’ve had a nap, I’m fine. Well, I’ve had a couple of naps. The waking-up part, that’s hard. What’s . . . ? Oh. Oh, yes.

  One thing I want to be sure of is that Travis does not blame himself in any way. I believe I should start with that. Out loud, I practice, “Travis, sweetie, I need to tell you some things that will be hard for you to hear.” Yes. Good. “But what I want you to understand, and to remember the whole time I’m talking, is this: all of this is about your father and me. This decision. It has nothing to do with you. You are such a good boy.” Yes.

  No. No. This is starting with a negative. It will scare him. Start with something positive. “Travis, as I’m sure you know, both your father and I love you very much.” No. That will scare him, too. Oh, what then? Guess what, Travis? Your father left us and now we get to have a whole new life! Do you want a dog? I was never the one who objected to pets, you know. Do you want a Newfoundland? I think they weigh about five hundred pounds, do you want one of them?

  The door opens and Travis comes in, sees me from the hallway. “Hi, Mom.” The last normal thing.

  “Oh. Hi! Hi, honey.”

  He regards me warily. “Are you . . . ?”

  “I’m fine!”

  He nods, heads toward the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting a snack. Do you want some pretzels?”

  “No, thanks.” I cross my legs, fold my hands on my lap. Uncross my legs.

  “Travis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you put your pretzels in a bowl, okay?”

  Silence.

  “Travis?”

  He comes into the room, holding the bag of pretzels. “What do I need a bowl for? The bag is fine, I always eat out of the bag.”

  “Well, it’s . . .” Inelegant, is what I want to say. I would like to say that, I have always liked that word. And I have to tell him that we need to make some changes here; things are going to change. But, “The bag is fine,” I say. And then, “Could you come here, please?”

  He walks over slowly, sits beside me, offers me the bag of pretzels.

  “No, thanks.”

  “They’re a little stale.”

  “Travis,” I begin.

  “I know. You’re getting a divorce.” He looks up at me, sighs.

  I sit back, smile.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, we just—”

  “I figured.”

  “. . . You figured.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  He puts his finger in his ear, experimentally, it seems. Twists it.

  “Travis?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why did you ‘figure’?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody gets divorced.”

  “Oh no. Not everyone. There are many, many happy marriages. I’m sure you’ll have one. But your father and I have decided that . . . yes, we want a divorce, and so we’re going to be living apart from one another. Starting . . . Well, actually starting last night.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s close by, he’s at a hotel in town, he called me this afternoon. And he’ll be calling you tonight, Travis, he told me to tell you he’d be calling you after dinner. And that he will be seeing you very soon.”

  “What time?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What time will he call?”

  “I don’t think he said that. I think he just said after dinner.”

  “Yeah, but what does that mean, what time does that mean?”

  “Um . . . Okay. It must . . . I think about seven, right around seven. All right?”

  “Why is he at a hotel?”

  Beats me. “He . . . Well, you know, honey, when people decide they aren’t going to be together any longer, they often need a little time apart, to think about things.”

  “But you’re getting divorced!”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ll be apart!”

  “Yes, but—there just sometimes has to be this—”

  “Whatever. I don’t care.”

  “Oh, Travis, I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugs, inspects his thumb, the wall. “It’s all right.” His right knee starts bouncing up and down and I have to stop myself from stopping it.

  When Travis was six, he fell off a jungle gym and hurt his arm. The X-ray technician kept telling him to hold his arm a certain way—it required a kind of twisting. Travis kept saying he couldn’t do it, and the impatient tech finally went into the room with him and made his arm go the way she wanted it to. “Now, keep it like that until I get the picture,” I heard her say. When Travis came out of the room, he had tears in his eyes, and when he saw me, he began crying. A little later, when the X-rays were hung, the doctor saw that there was a break right where the tech had been twisting. “That must have hurt,” the doctor said, “holding your arm that way.” Travis nodded gravely. He wasn’t crying anymore. He’d been given a lollipop and a sticker that said I just got an X-ray!

  “Travis, it’s not all right. I want you to know that Dad and I both know that. And we also want you to understand that this decision had nothing to do with you.” I just got taken off the hook for my parents’ divorce!

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. Why would it have to do with me?”

  “Well, that’s absolutely right, Travis. We both love you very much, and we will both continue to be your parents. It’s just that Dad and I can’t live together anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . .” Sometimes people, even when they really love each other, they kind of grow apart. And it becomes very hard to . . . “Because your father is a very, very selfish person who thinks only of himself. Always has, always will. He deserted me, Travis, just like that. I had no idea he was so unhappy. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what to do. I really hate him for this. I hate him!” I put my hand to my mouth, start to cry. “Oh, Travis, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m going upstairs to my room for a while.”

  “Wait. I—”

  “Mom, please?”

  “Yes, all right.” A weight attaches itself to my chest, sinks in. And in. Maybe it’s a heart attack. I hope it is.

  Travis walks quickly up the stairs. I hear his door close. I hold one of my hands with the other, stare out the window. Sit there. Sit. When I see the sun beginning to go down, I head up to his bedroom. On the pretense of asking what he’d like for dinner.

  Tomorrow morning I will call someone for help.

  To think that I asked David to let me be the one to tell Travis, and to let me be alone, telling him. I should have known better. I don’t blame David for leaving me, I would like to leave me, too. I would like to step into the body of a woman who does not get lost going around the block, who does not smell of garlic for three days after she eats it, who can make conversation with David’s clients at a restaurant rather than going in
to the ladies’ room to sit in the stall and find things in her purse to play with. David has never liked my mother, who is just plain foolish, or my best friend, Rita, who does not censor her thoughts enough to suit him. Gray hair is popping out all over my head, I have become intimately acquainted with cellulite, and just last week, I awakened to hear myself snoring. I want to leave, too. But I can’t.

  I go upstairs and knock on Travis’s door. There is a moment. Then he calls, “Come in,” and I can feel the relief clear to the edges of my scalp.

  2

  WHENEVER THE PHONE RINGS, I ANSWER IT AS IF THE rescuers have appeared in a helicopter above me and are lowering the rope. “Hello?” I say, meaning, Please. It is never the rescuers. It is a cheerful young girl wanting to know if I would like to contribute to the ballet. Not this year, I say. It is Monica Kaplan, asking if I’d like to contribute a dozen cupcakes for the bake sale coming up in October. I’ll bring a few dozen, I say. And now it is my mother.

  “Honey, you have got to get right back on the horse. I mean it. I don’t say you’re not hurting, God knows I know that, but you’ve got to get right out there and start dating. You’re still a young woman, forty-two is nothing—you’re an infant.”

  It is twelve noon. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of mail-order catalogues and an empty box of Godiva chocolates, which I now know are seriously overrated. Also with an empty Scotch glass, but I didn’t put much in there. Hardly anything. I pull the telephone away from my ear and lay it on my chest, breathe out a long sigh. I wish I hadn’t told my mother so soon. But I had to.

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Ma, I’m not ready to date. For God’s sake. I couldn’t care less about that. I just want to figure out how to keep Travis . . . safe.” I look at the Scotch glass, turn it upside down.

  “Well, he’s safe, Sam, he’s with his mother. Of course he’s safe! And despite what you may think, children are really very, very resilient. You’d be surprised. I can tell you with all certainty that what Travis wants right now is for you to go on with your life. That’s what will help him the most. He doesn’t want to see you mooning around, doing nothing. You haven’t cried in front of him, have you? For God’s sake, don’t cry in front of him, whatever you do. He’s taking his cues from you: if you’re happy, he’ll be happy. Think of it as your job to pick yourself up and get going again. Why, when your father died, I didn’t waste any time. I went right out and started meeting people.”

  “Meeting men, you mean.”

  “Well, yes. Of course. It’s the natural thing. Woman needs man and man needs woman, and that’s all there is to it, I don’t care what anybody says. For the homosexuals, of course, it’s a little different, but it’s still the same, anyway.”

  “. . . What?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. The point is, if a child sees his mother dating, it lets him know that she’s special. And then of course he feels special, too. I’m not making this up. Just think back to how you girls felt when I dated. You didn’t mind at all. You liked it.”

  I close my eyes, rub my forehead. Where to start? I remember distinctly sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner with my sister, Louise, a few months after our father died. We were having macaroni and cheese with hot dogs sliced into it. While we ate, our mother sat at the table with us, doing her nails. She had a date that evening, and her hair was in pin curls, covered with a bright yellow kerchief. She chewed ice cubes from a sweating aluminum tumbler while she painted each fingernail a thrilling red.

  She was going out to dinner. To a very nice restaurant, she said, that she’d heard all about. There was a live orchestra at that restaurant, men in tuxedos, and oh, the violins were supposed to be fantastic! There was a little lamp on the table that you turned on whenever you wanted the waiter to come. When they brought the check, they presented it along with a red rose for the lady—long-stemmed!

  Our mother tried to date at least three times a week. She marked her calendar with red Xs and names, keeping a desperate tally. Tonight was Wolfgang Mueller (“Wolfie,” she called him), a wholesale meat man who had the unfortunate habit of spitting a bit when he talked. He was a very tall man, with black eyebrows that seemed intent on escaping his face—they grew straight out a good half-inch. “You could land an airplane there!” Louise said, the first time we met him. The hot dogs we were eating were a gift from him, presented to our mother the last time they went out. “For you, my Veronica,” he’d said, bowing slightly and handing her the meat, wrapped in white butcher’s paper and tied with red-and-white striped string. “Und here, you zee,” he said, pointing proudly, “I hef made the schtring so as to look like a little mouze. Here we hef little ears, here is das body, und here, the tail! You zee?”

  “Oh, Wolfie!” my mother had said. And then she had shown Louise and me the package, saying, “Look. Can you see the mouse Wolfie made for you?” I stared in vain, and Louise left the room. “Next he’ll show up here in lederhosen,” she told me later.

  I was ten then, young enough to believe that hot dogs mixed with macaroni was fine dining, and to be thoroughly captivated by the idea of dating—if not by the men you had to spend time with in order to do it. As I saw it, the men were pretty much beside the point; it was the getting ready part that mattered.

  On a day when she had a date, my mother pored through magazines to find the style most appropriate for that evening, then washed and set her hair. About an hour before pick-up time, she took a lengthy bubble bath. She emerged in a warm cloud of fragrance, then sat at her dressing table, rolled up her robe sleeves, and went to work. I would sit on her bed playing with Betsy McCall paper dolls and watching my mother style her hair in one updo or another, bobby pins clamped between her teeth. Next she applied foundation in smooth, upward strokes to her face and neck, even to the back of her neck. She put a dot of rouge on each cheek, then rubbed it in for a quick blossoming of color—that was my favorite part. She applied her mascara carefully, her mouth open; then darkened her eyebrows. Next lipstick, laid on thickly, blotted on a tissue. She screwed on sparkly earrings, turned her head left and right. She would anoint herself with My Sin, and then slip into a dress that came from a plastic protector.

  “How do I look?” she would always ask, turning on her tiptoes like the ballerina on my jewelry box. And I would always answer—truthfully—beautiful. I was sad when she was ready to go—the delicious sounds of clicking bottles and rustling fabrics would be gone, her rich scent would fade, and I would be left with Louise, whose idea of being a good baby-sitter was to let me do things for her.

  I did not yet agree with Louise that our mother was absolutely mortifying—at least not all of the time. I did not agree that we should run away to New Jersey to live with our father’s relatives, all of whom were much more dignified than our mother. I was still tucked in at night, still wanted, at that time, to have my mother stay and stay beside me.

  Louise, on the other hand, was fourteen, newly free of needing primal comfort and therefore deeply scornful of it; she spent most of her time locked in her room. Perhaps more than anything, Louise hated our mother’s going out with men she called the goons. She was so obvious about it, Louise told me; she was so eager to take up with anyone who came along. And it pained me too, it did. Louise and I had adored our father, a good-looking and gentle man who died with open-eyed surprise from a heart attack at forty-one. But we said nothing to our mother.

  But now, finally, I do. “No, in fact we hated your dating. It didn’t make us feel better at all.”

  “Oh, of course it did,” my mother says. I know the gesture that will accompany this remark: Veronica will reach up to the right side of her face and adjust a few pieces of the red hair curled there. Emphatically. I used to wonder why there weren’t fingerprintsized dents all along the side of her face.

  I stretch the phone cord out to dump the candy box in the trash. “Listen, I appreciate your concern, I really do, but I don’t want advice just yet, okay? For one thing, it’s
a different situation entirely. David isn’t dead.”

  My mother sniffs. “As far as I’m concerned, he is.”

  “You know, Ma, I only called to see if you could stay with Travis for a while this afternoon, maybe make him dinner if I’m not back in time. Could you do that, do you think?”

  “Of course I can. I have a pedicure at one-thirty; I’ll be able to get there long before he’s home from school.”

  “All right. So I’ll see you when I get home. Sometime around . . . I don’t know. Sometime.”

  “Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where are you going, honey? You sound a little . . . You’re not going to a therapist, are you? They’re crazier than the rest of us, really they are. I knew a woman—well, actually, you might remember her, Louise Castlebaum? Always trying to show off her legs, which, in my opinion, were not so worthy of showing off, but anyway, she went to a therapist—a full-blown psychiatrist!—and—”

  “Ma! I’m not going to a therapist! I’m going . . .” Nuts. “I’m going shopping.”

  “Well, now. That’s better! That’s a very good thing to do! Just forget about things, indulge yourself a little!” Then, her tone shifting, “And what should I say if David calls? Should I say you’re out with someone else?”

  They should keep a permanent chair empty for my mother in some sixth-grade classroom. Stencil her name on it. She’d be so comfortable there.

  “David is not going to call,” I tell her.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because, if you must know, he told me very clearly that he wanted us to have a week of no communication before we talked any more. At all. About anything. He is talking to Travis, but not to me.”

  “Oh. I see.”