Open House

by Elizabeth Berg

  “With Linda?”

  “Yes!”

  “I think she’s sort of involved.”

  “I’d say so.” I stand, head for the kitchen. “Come on, I’ll help you clean up.”

  He follows me. “You don’t have to.”

  “No,” I say. “I want to. Really. I like washing dishes.”

  I wash and he wipes. For a long while, we don’t talk, just stand, hips nearly touching, quietly working. And then I draw in a breath, take my hands out of the dishwater and put them on King’s shoulders. And do not understand how he knows how to kiss like that.

  I reach around him and untuck his shirt, wonder if I really mean this. I pull away from him, look into his face. “Are you— Is this okay?”

  He nods.

  “Should we—?”

  He nods again, takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. There, he carefully folds down the blankets, fluffs the pillows. And then he starts to unbutton his shirt, but stops. “I don’t know . . . I mean, do I—?”

  “Yes.”

  He doesn’t move.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say. “Let’s just talk. But lying down.”

  His relief brightens the room. I lie beside him, stretched out on my side. He is on his back, his eyes closed. Now that we’ve decided to slow down, I’m dying to speed up. I put my head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest. He is more solid than I had imagined. I unbutton two buttons, wait, then rise up to look into his face. “Okay?”

  “Yes,” he says. And then we don’t talk anymore. And when I get home, I look at myself in the mirror to see if what I feel shows. What I see is the faint transfer of King’s mustache, and I wash it off with regret.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, Travis and I are watching TV when Edward comes home. He nods hello, hangs up his coat, then comes to sit on the sofa beside us. At the commercial, Travis goes into the kitchen, and Edward leans toward me. “What happened to you?” he whispers. And then, when I don’t answer, he leans back, arms crossed, smiling. “That’s what I thought.”

  “What?” I say. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Oh, please.”

  I stare at him. “Your teeth are going to get all dried out if you don’t stop smiling. And then your lips will stick to them, and you’ll look like a chimpanzee. Stop smiling!”

  “You’re not.”

  . . .

  AT MIDNIGHT, STILL awake, I call Rita.

  “We did it!” I say.

  Rita gasps. “Tell me everything. Everything. Wait! First I want to go get a glass of wine.”

  “Okay, I will, too.”

  I go quietly down to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of wine, and head back to my bedroom, closing both Travis’s and my door.

  I get under the covers, pick up the phone. “Are you there?”

  “Yes! Tell me everything!”

  “Okay.” I lie back against the pillows, take a sip of wine, wonder where to start. I see King’s face over me again, a tenderness there that made me separate into two selves, one who lay in a warm bed held by warm arms and another who looked down and nodded. He had run his hands over my breasts so gently, so tentatively. And then his mouth was on me and moving down, so slowly. And when finally he put himself inside me, he froze for a moment, his breath held, his eyes fixed on mine, and then there was no separation of anything. For the first time in my life, I had the sensation of simultaneous giving and taking so huge there was no room for anything else, anywhere. It was less sexual than sacred, close to what I think a good death might be. He had wept a little afterward, saying that he was afraid to believe it could ever happen like this, that he was so grateful that I was the one, that he was sorry he was weeping, he didn’t know why he was weeping, he felt terrific, he felt like running outside and lifting up cars. And I held his giant shaggy head on my chest and stroked his hair and said that was fine, I would be happy to help him, so long as the cars were small. And then we had done everything again. And then he had said he was sorry he still weighed so much, he would lose more, he hadn’t hurt me, had he? And I said no, he had not.

  “Rita?” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I don’t want to tell you. I mean, it was wonderful. I just don’t want to tell you the details. I feel like . . . it’s ours.”

  Silence. And then Rita says, “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you have your glass of wine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, hold it up, girl, and let’s have a toast.”

  35

  “WHY ARE YOU MAKING THINGS SO FANCY?” TRAVIS ASKS. “Who’s coming?”

  “Mom and Lydia.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you just do things regular, then?”

  “Because they’re fancy.”

  A horn honks outside. Travis doesn’t move.

  “There’s Dad,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “Well . . . Are you ready?”

  “Yeah. Are you having that cake you made for dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it King’s recipe?”

  “Yes. I’ll save you some. Okay?”

  The horn honks again. “Go, honey. Don’t keep him waiting.”

  He lifts his duffel bag, shoulders it. “It’s more fun here.”

  How should I feel about this? I’m glad. I’m sad. But I’m glad. And I know that sometimes the cake will be sitting on David’s counter, too.

  I go to the door with Travis, kiss him good-bye, wave to David, hurry back to the kitchen.

  I have just put in the bread to warm when the doorbell rings, and then I hear my mother yoo-hooing her way down the hall. I kiss her, then Lydia, then lead them to the lavishly decorated dining-room table, where they exclaim softly over everything. Travis is right. It is fun here.

  WE ARE SITTING back in our chairs, satisfied, empty dessert plates before us. Lydia is talking about her oldest grandchild, who lives in Seattle and who visited her yesterday. “He’s almost forty, and do you know he still goes to see if I keep his little black plastic horse in my night stand? He left it at my house when he was just a little guy, maybe two or so, and I put it in my drawer to keep for him until the next time I saw him. But he liked that it was by my bed, and he told me to keep it there for him. Every time I’ve seen him since, he’s asked to see it. ‘Checking on the livestock,’ he calls it.”

  This makes sense to me. I once spent hours in Veronica’s basement, looking through scrapbooks. I found drawings that Louise and I had done over the years, and I actually counted, making sure Louise didn’t have more in there than I did. We were exactly even. I suppose you always want someone to prize things about you.

  I have a footlocker for Travis’s drawings, his schoolwork, art projects. Although he is hardly sentimental about it. He looked through it one day, then asked, “What do you keep all this junk for?”

  “You might want it someday,” I told him.

  “What for? It’s embarrassing!”

  “It won’t be when you’re forty.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I’ll be able to even see when I’m forty!”

  I stared at him, open-mouthed, and he left the room.

  “How’s married life, Lydia?” Veronica asks.

  “Oh, we’re very happy. Thomas is a wonderful man. I feel lucky to have found him, and I’m so glad to have taken the chance all over again. Not a single regret.”

  My mother smiles, looks down at her plate.

  “You were very happy in your marriage, too, weren’t you?” Lydia asks my mother.

  “We were. Sad to say, I think that’s a rare thing. I think most young people today are so focused on tomorrow they forget all about today. And I think they’re as afraid of happiness as they are of pain! Scared to say they care. Scared to take a chance. Scared to say they’re just as sentimental and full of human need as people always have been and always will be.”

  “It’s true,” Lydia says, stirri
ng her tea.

  They are leaning toward each other, nodding, in complete agreement. I suppose I’m one of the “young people” they’re referring to. One of those scaredy-cats. But I did admit to my own needs, to my own sentimentality. And look where it got me.

  “You know,” Veronica says, “I was over visiting a girlfriend the other day and her father was staying with her, this old geezer who used to be a farmer. Really nice old man. Blind now, but not a bit sorry for himself. He sat down with us and was telling us about life on the farm. Said he still dreamed about it, that in his dreams he could still see. Said he could ask for what he wanted to dream about, too, and oftentimes, it would happen.”

  “Really!” Lydia says. “I’d love to be able to do that!”

  “Well, me, too. You can imagine! I’d be with my husband every night! Anyway, this guy said that he’d asked his dreams to let him see his wife again, and sure enough, it happened. He saw a time after they were first married. They were out on the front porch, thinking of all they were going to do, just sitting on the wooden steps, holding hands, the sun going down, talking about how they’d have babies till the plumbing quit. He said the lilacs were out, and the smell was so sweet it could bring a dead man back to life. His wife let her hair out of its bun, shook it all loose. And she looked over and smiled at him, and he said, ‘Lord, she was so pretty and she was my wife.’ Well, my friend and I just couldn’t say a word, all choked up. Just seeing him, all those years ago, thinking life was longer than it is. But you know, he said that at least he knew right then that it was a good moment. Said mostly you don’t know, in this life, you don’t know when it’s happening. You look back later and say, Oh! Well now, that was a good time! But he said he knew it then. Said he knew it lots of times. He said, ‘Yes, sir. I’ve been blessed.’ ”

  “Well, that’s just how I feel,” Lydia says.

  My mother looks at me and I nod. I know that despite everything she lost, she feels the same way. And wants me to, as well.

  I see us, suddenly, as though from above, three women sitting around a dining-room table, our mother’s hands folded in our laps, our lipstick faded from our mouths. All around us clocks ticking, stars shining. They used to be my age, and I will soon be theirs. They have never forgotten the reason to love.

  I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

  I look at my watch, start to speak. “Go,” my mother says.

  36

  NO ONE ANSWERS WHEN I KNOCK AT HIS DOOR. I TRY IT, FIND it open, and put my head in. “King?” And then, louder, “King?”

  “Sam?” I hear back, faintly. “Wait just a second. I’m in the bathtub.”

  I take off my coat and my boots, undress as I walk down the hall, enter the bathroom naked. He is standing on the bath mat, a towel wrapped around him. “Oh. Hello,” he says. “Wow. Nice outfit.”

  “Get back in the bathtub,” I say. And when he does, I climb in, too. I lean against his chest, watch water cascade over the side. “Oops,” I say lazily. It’s pretty, the sight of the brief little waterfall.

  “Is the water too hot?” King asks.

  “No, this is just how I like it.”

  He picks up the soap, and I watch his big hands in front of me, lathering up, then rubbing across my breasts, my stomach. “King?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think you could love me?”

  His hands stop moving. “You mean . . . now?”

  “No, I meant . . . generally.”

  He sighs, and for a moment I feel as though my insides are shrinking, folding in on themselves. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s too soon. But then I hear him say, “Oh, Sam. What else would I do with you but love you forever?”

  I sit so still I can hear him breathing, and he is breathing very quietly. I think of a conversation I had with Edward recently. I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was standing over me, trying out some fancy hairdo. He was saying how similar King and I were, that it was no wonder we liked each other so much. “I mean, you were both running around with your helmets on backward,” he said, “living lives that were totally oblivious. Thank God you met each other so you could wake up!”

  “I wasn’t oblivious,” I said, and Edward said, “Oh, come on, can’t you see the difference in yourself?”

  “Well,” I said. “I know how to change a furnace filter now, if that’s what you mean. I can unstick a garbage disposal.”

  “Oh, I think it’s a bit more than that,” he said.

  So it is.

  I lean in closer to King, close my eyes, and suddenly I am a little girl again, sitting on the grass outside my house one hot summer day, resting after a solitary game of hopscotch. There are Johnny-jump-ups growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk; the clouds are circus animals; there is lemonade in the refrigerator; my shorts are a fine, faded red. My father is due home at any moment, and I like to watch him get out of the car and take long strides toward me, his face full of loving intention. I run to him, and he lifts me up. And then, together, we go inside, toward whatever else might follow. We are full of faith, blessed by it. I remember, now.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ELIZABETH BERG’S novels Durable Goods and Joy School were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year. Talk Before Sleep was an ABBY finalist and a New York Times bestseller. The Pull of the Moon, Range of Motion, What We Keep, and Until the Real Thing Comes Along were national bestsellers. In 1997, Berg won the NEBA award in fiction. She lives in Massachusetts.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH BERG

  Until the Real Thing Comes Along

  What We Keep

  Joy School

  The Pull of the Moon

  Range of Motion

  Talk Before Sleep

  Durable Goods

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it are inventions of the author and do not depict any real persons or events.

  Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Berg

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Berg, Elizabeth.

  Open house: a novel / Elizabeth Berg.

  p. cm.

  I. Divorced women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E6996 064 2000

  813'.54—dc21 99-54258

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  eISBN: 978-0-375-50587-4

  v3.0