Open House

by Elizabeth Berg

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Sam, that at some point you need to start thinking about what you want and going after it!”

  “I . . . We’re just friends, Rita.”

  “Fine. Call me later. I’m dying to know what his place looks like.”

  I hang up the phone, shrug off a feeling.

  The phone rings again. King.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “Something’s come up,” he says. “I’m sorry to call this late. But I have to move our dinner to another night.”

  “Oh! Okay.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  I hang up the phone. King’s new friend must have called. And why shouldn’t he nurture this new relationship? God knows a good one is hard to find.

  I go into the bathroom, take the rollers from my hair. Edward did a nice job—he gave me a very pretty color. I realize I’d really been looking forward to seeing what King thought. Well. Another time.

  The house is so quiet. Empty—Edward off for the weekend, Lavender out somewhere, too. I go downstairs, look in the refrigerator, put some water on to boil for a hot dog, then turn the burner off.

  AN HOUR LATER, I am lying in bed, staring at the wall. Downstairs, I can hear the television I’d tried watching, and then left on for the company of the voices. A commercial is blaring. Well, it’s all commercials, even the programs are commercials.

  I get up and go to the bathroom to look at my hair again. Awful. What was I thinking? I wet a washcloth, rub it on my hair to see if anything will come off. No.

  Back in the bedroom, I stand by the window, arms crossed, looking out. No one is on the street. No one is ever on the street. Everyone stays inside. I wonder what they’re all doing, if anyone is acting as lost as I am. What would happen if you could lift the roof—make for a real open house—and look inside? What would you see? Surely some of the behavior would be no odder than mine.

  Oh, why isn’t there a Community Center for People Who Need a Little Something? If people would only tell the truth about the way they felt, it would be busy all the time. There could be folding chairs arranged in groups, people sitting there saying, “I don’t know, I just wanted to come here for a while.”

  I look down at my arm, hold it up to the light to look closely at the flesh. The other day, my skin looked like crepe paper. It still does. It’s older, that’s all. These things keep happening, these changes that I notice all of a sudden. Yesterday I saw an ad in the newspaper about retirement planning, and I stared at the group of old people, apparently having the time of their lives, sitting around a small table where they were eating dinner. There were three women, one man, all smiling at each other. I tried to put myself in the picture, saw myself in my seventies, desperately flirting. I couldn’t imagine it. How will I ever retire? From what? But this is clearly the middle of my life. Next, I get old. My God. It occurs to me that I must have thought I would actually have a choice. “Next?” someone with a clipboard would yell. And then, “Okay! Sam Morrow. So, will it be your fifties next? Or would you like to do your thirties again?”

  Even the imperturbable King seems to have felt the ungentle pressures of middle age, though of his own variety. The other day he showed me a photograph he’d found of some famous astrophysicist, standing outside in what looked to be the Southwest. There were low, violet-colored hills in the distance. On the ground were bushy brown weeds, small rocks, and the imprints the man had made in the dusty soil. The sky overhead was blue and vast, solid-seeming. But a thick line of darkness lay across the foreground, night creeping in.

  There was a telescope nearby, aimed upward, graceful and vigilant and ready to reveal the mysteries. But the man ignored it. Instead, he directed his gaze into a baby carriage, where a tiny fist was raised, as though in greeting. The man had one hand on the carriage bar and one hand in his pocket; his feet were planted wide apart, and he was smiling. He looked as though he were at peace, grounded by the more common miracle. “I see this and I just wonder,” King said. “I mean, it made me wonder.”

  “Yes,” I said softly. Only yes. When what I’d wanted to say was, “What do you mean, though? Do you mean the human connection is stronger? Better?”

  I turn from the window, think about what I might do to console myself. It used to comfort me, as a little girl, to look at my mother’s jewelry, most of which had been passed down through Veronica’s family over many years. I used to try on the heavy gold bracelets, the pearl necklaces, the rings, all at once. I liked pinning the brooches in a line down my chest, the fabric of my shirt sagging from the weight.

  I go to get my own jewelry box, sit on the bed with it, take out my wedding ring, try to put it back on. It won’t fit. I put it on my little finger, then take it off. Let it be.

  I put on my bracelets, all of them, all nine. Here is my double strand of pearls. Tenth anniversary. Ha, ha.

  I have quite a few necklaces, too, and I fasten one after another around my neck. Then I go downstairs to get the giant Hershey bar with almonds that I bought yesterday and then put in the freezer so I wouldn’t eat it. Well, I’ll eat it now. After I eat dinner. I’ll have cereal, I want to try some of the heavily sugared stuff I bought Travis, hoping it would make him want to stay with me all the time.

  I sit at the table, pour the multicolored cereal into a bowl, add milk. My arm is heavy and sparkling. I like it. Not lonely, not sad. I’m fine. And the cereal is good. I’m fine! I pour more in the bowl, have another spoonful, close my eyes to taste it better. But after this, what? I get up to take the candy bar out of the freezer so it can start defrosting. Then I check to see what else is in the refrigerator there might be a good movie on TV, there might be a good book around that I bought and never got around to reading, someone may call. Who? Who? and take a handful of raspberries from a little green carton and pop them in my mouth. Then, recalling that they are Edward’s and organic besides, I consider putting them back. But I can go to the grocery store and get some more to replace them! I eat a slice of cheese, a rolled-up slice of baloney. Then I sit down again to eat more cereal.

  Maybe I should microwave the candy bar; it will never defrost. I drink the milk from the cereal bowl, reach for a napkin to wipe my chin, look up, and see Lavender Blue standing before me.

  “Oh,” I say. “Hi.”

  “Yeah, hi,” she says. “I just got in.” Then, looking at my bejeweled chest and arms, “You look nice!”

  “Thank you. Would you like some cereal?”

  “No thanks.” She holds up a book, sighs. “Homework. Although there is absolutely no point in learning about this.” She goes downstairs, closes the door after her.

  I finish my cereal, put the candy bar back in the freezer, and head upstairs. I take off all the jewelry, put it away. Then I lie on top of my bed, the lights off. Resting before I go to sleep, I suppose. I wish I believed. I wish I could pray.

  I get out of bed and onto my knees, bow my head. Somewhere, a couple lie in bed together holding hands, and they will stay together until one of them dies. They will not hate each other over the breakfast table, they will give thanks for each other’s presence. Somewhere, that is true. This is my prayer.

  27

  KING AND I ARE HAVING DINNER IN HIS TINY APARTMENT. When he called me last night, he confessed he was ill last time we were going to do this, and he was too embarrassed to tell me. Something . . . gastrointestinal.

  “Was it—?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, quickly.

  King’s apartment is furnished with the kind of mismatched but comfortable things you can still find at the Salvation Army. A sofa, a chair, and a reading lamp in the living room. A braided rug. A stereo. A brass iron bed in the bedroom, a white bedspread, a dresser. An old-fashioned bathroom with a claw-footed tub. A kitchen cluttered with cooking tools, bursting with them. And a tiny wooden table, where we now sit.

  “I feel like my life is sort of out of control,” I say, “like I’m just not doing the right things. B
ut it’s odd, because I’m also beginning to feel better than I ever did. Happier, I mean.”

  “What’s wrong with what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know. Everything. I have such a strange job. And these roommates. My son thinks I’m nuts.”

  “That’s his job. He’s pubescent. He’d think you were nuts no matter what you were doing.”

  “Well, yes. But it’s more than that. I feel like I should be . . . more like other people.”

  “I never saw the percentage in that.”

  I nod, watch him take a drink of wine. His eyelashes are so black. Long.

  “How’s it going with . . . Laura?” I ask.

  “Linda?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “I guess it’s all right. I need to . . . Well, there’s a lot I want to know.”

  “And I’m sure you enjoy it, going out. Don’t you?”

  “I do. But the whole thing is very new. I’ve never had much to do with women. There was that one time. But that . . .”

  “What happened, anyway?”

  He looks at me for a long time, considering something. Then he says, “Oh, well. It was a joke. Literally. I’d always been really shy, oversensitive—overweight, too, of course. I’d never tried to date, and then, all of a sudden in my first year of college, there’s this really gorgeous girl, after me. I couldn’t believe it. But she was pretty convincing. And we ended up in her dorm room one Sunday afternoon, and I—”

  I say nothing, wait.

  “We ended up in bed, and I was so . . .” He laughs. “Well, I got pretty emotional. I thought it meant . . . Well, I thought it was real, and I thought it meant everything. But it was a joke. The girl, Christy was her name, had made a bet with someone. She got a hundred dollars for sleeping with me.”

  “Oh, King. I’m so sorry.”

  “Somebody came in just after we finished and took a picture—they’d been standing outside the door the whole time. I guess they passed it all around.” He puts down his glass, leans back. “I never told anyone this before. I never thought I would. But it feels kind of good to tell you, Sam. Anyway, after that, I just gave up on ever . . . I let myself get completely taken up by what I was studying. Whatever that longing is, whatever it is that makes people want to be together, I made that need get met by what I learned. Everything is there, in science. Even human emotions, I mean. It’s as though they’re represented by certain universal laws. Remember when they found the naked stars—did you read about that?”

  I laugh. “No.”

  “You know what a naked star is?”

  I think for a minute. And then, I can’t help it, I say, “One that just got out of a meteor shower?”

  “Very funny. But what they are, are stars with most of their gaseous atmospheres stripped away. And you know why they’re revealed like that? Because of close encounters with other stars. I find something very human about that. Don’t you?”

  I nod. Smile.

  “I see that kind of thing all the time. It’s thrilling to me. And at the same time, there’s a kind of peace there, in that kind of contemplation, that you don’t get in relationships. At least, I don’t think you do.”

  “Why did you stop?” I ask.

  “Stop what?”

  “Working at it.”

  “Oh, I haven’t. Not at all.”

  “But you . . . you know, your job isn’t exactly astrophysics.”

  He sits back, looks at me. “Do you ever think about how hard it is to say something and have it be precise? Especially the things you care most about? You hear the words coming out of you and they are just not quite what you intended. You mean red, you’re thinking red, and then out of your mouth comes . . . chartreuse. And you want to take it back, but then the other person is saying, ‘Oh, chartreuse, I see,’ and it’s too late. It’s gone. I don’t know that in human relationships you ever find the true crossing from here to there. But in physics, it feels like you’re getting there.”

  “But—”

  He holds up a finger. “I don’t work in it because when I’m away from it in the specific, I’m better able to see it generally. Do you understand?”

  I think I do understand. But it’s too hard to say how. It’s an internal acknowledgment, a yearning kind of stepping forward that will not translate itself into any words that I know. He’s right, about the limitations of words. And so I say simply, “I do understand.”

  He looks at my plate. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes, thank you, it was delicious.” And it was. Rosemary chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, sweet peas. A chocolate cake he’d made. From scratch, of course. “Buttermilk’s the secret here,” he told me. “And you put a little coffee in the batter.”

  He takes our plates, puts them in the sink, runs water on them. I sit in my chair and watch him, his slow and careful movements, his obvious contentment. There is a low buzz to the overhead light, and the sound is comforting. I want to stand close behind him, lay my head in the shallow valley between his shoulder blades. Instead, I drink more wine.

  “Would you like to go into the living room?” he asks, when he has finished rinsing the dishes. A shy formality.

  “Yes.” He gets his wine, and I follow him into the living room.

  “Sit anywhere,” he says.

  I choose the chair, and he sits at the end of the sofa nearest it. “You know, the thing about the jobs I do . . . A lot of people think I’m lazy.”

  I say nothing. This had occurred to me.

  “But I want . . . time. That’s why I walk dogs. I don’t want to keep on moving up the ladder, trading in one car for another. I want to be appreciative of all that’s here, in a normal life. I want to keep finding out about the things I see around me.” He leans forward, looks at me intently. “How do birds know how to fly south?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Yeah, most people don’t. Why don’t you know?”

  “Well, I just . . . I guess I just take some things for granted.”

  “But, Sam, listen to this: They have internal compasses, sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field. They calibrate them by sunlight and by the stars. Think of that! Next time you see a bird fly by, think of that! They’re everywhere, Sam, these wonders. Do you remember the last time you really wanted to know everything?”

  The answer comes to me like a movie in my head. I am flatchested and pigtailed, bending over the edge of a lake and watching the lacelike line of froth advance and recede, trying to determine what makes the water green. The sun is warm on my back. I am entirely unself-conscious—my body is a sack of flesh and bones whose function is to take me where I want to go. On my dresser at home, I have rocks and various kinds of leaves, a jar with a cocoon inside that I inspect a thousand times a day. I am obsessed with discovering things, as though I’ve been let out of the hatch of a spaceship and told to come back with a full report. For some time, I have nourished a fantasy that a small group of very wise people dressed in close-fitting silver will show up in the middle of my geography class, saying, “We’ve come for Samantha.” And I believe I will rise and follow them, leaving behind forever the lunchbox I am embarrassed about because Veronica always buys the wrong one.

  “I do remember when I felt like that,” I say. “I was young. A little girl. But strong! I was so busy. And then I woke up one morning feeling clumsy and worried to death about which shade of lipstick to wear. And then I woke up the next morning and I was married. And then in labor. And then I had the job of caring for a family, which satisfied me—which is a sin now—but which satisfied me because it seemed to be about everything.”

  “You were happily walking dogs, so to speak.”

  “Yes. Yes.” I think for a moment, then say, “So . . . you aren’t expecting anything, are you?”

  “I’m just watching the show,” he says. “I think it’s so good. I don’t know why people walk out on it in all the ways they do.”

  I kick my shoes off, pull my feet up unde
r me. “Einstein didn’t wear socks.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s all I know about physics.”

  “That’s almost enough.”

  “Oh, God, King. You always make me feel so . . . Like I’m fine.”

  “That’s because you are, Sam. How come you don’t know that?”

  I am embarrassed by a sudden rush of tears. I wipe them quickly away, then laugh at myself. “Oh, jeez, look at this.”

  “Maybe we should go out,” he says gently. “Want to see a movie?”

  I nod. I felt it too, a sense that if we took one step further in this direction, we would fall off a cliff together. And I don’t know, I still feel made of glass.

  28

  “CONSTRUCTION?” I SAY. “YOU’RE KIDDING!”

  “No, I’m not,” Stacy, the woman at the employment agency, tells me. “They’re desperate, and I can’t find anyone else. It’s easy work, the guy says; he says anyone can do it. And it pays well.”

  “But I don’t know anything about construction!”

  “You don’t have to. He’ll show you what you need to do. You just put on some old clothes, bring some gloves, and he’ll take care of the rest. You want the job?”

  “Well . . . Yes.”

  Stacy tells me the address of the job site, and I go upstairs to change. Bib overalls. A flannel shirt. A ponytail. My hiking boots. All of a sudden, I feel cool.

  MARK QUINTON IS killer handsome. The kind of guy who should be posing for calendar pictures for women’s fantasies. He’s up on a ladder wearing work boots, jeans, a tool belt, and a white T-shirt with Quinton Construction Company written beneath a picture of a circular saw. He looks down at me when I come into the room, smiles. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here from the agency. Sam Morrow?”

  “You’re Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were a man.”

  “No, I . . . It’s Samantha. Did you need a man?”

  “No, it doesn’t make any difference. Glad to have you.” He climbs down from the ladder, comes over to shake my hand. “My partner is sick today, and I’m way behind on this job.”