Durable Goods

by Elizabeth Berg

  Also by Elizabeth Berg

  THE ART OF MENDING

  SAY WHEN

  TRUE TO FORM

  NEVER CHANGE

  ORDINARY LIFE

  OPEN HOUSE

  ESCAPING INTO THE OPEN: THE ART OF WRITING TRUE

  UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG

  WHAT WE KEEP

  JOY SCHOOL

  THE PULL OF THE MOON

  RANGE OF MOTION

  TALK BEFORE SLEEP

  FAMILY TRADITIONS

  THE YEAR OF PLEASURES

  WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE

  THE HANDMAID AND THE CARPENTER

  DREAM WHEN YOU’RE FEELING BLUE

  “Elizabeth Berg is one of those rare souls who can play with truths as if swinging across the void from one trapeze to another.”

  –Joan Gould, author of Spirals

  “Lyrical… a tender, smart, and perfectly constructed little novel, suffused with humor and admiration for youth’s great capacity for love and instinct for truth.”

  –Booklist

  “Sensitive… unsentimental… a novel of quiet, understated strength … Berg’s genius lies in her characterization.”

  –Book Page

  “Hope and sorrow mingle in this finely observed, compassionate book.”

  –Kirkus Reviews

  “This beautifully told tale grips the reader from page one and does not let go.”

  –Library Journal

  Praise for Durable Goods

  “A rich coming-of-age novel. Katie’s fresh yet wise voice evokes that tender passage from being a girl to being a grown-up.”

  –The New York Times Book Review

  “Wrenching… delicately nuanced… Berg handles the elements with sensitivity rather than sentimentality.”

  –Chicago Tribune

  “A gem with never a false moment… Durable Goods renders a pitch-perfect image of one girl’s adolescence…. On this small canvas Berg works miracles.”

  –New Woman

  “Painfully vivid and refreshingly candid… a sensitively told story of love, loss, and growth… It has a message worth heeding.”

  –Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “A little gem of a book.”

  –RICHARD BAUSCH, author of In the Night Season

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Durable Goods

  A Conversation with Elizabeth Berg

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOR MY REAL FATHER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  An acknowledgment page is a terrifying thing, because you are sure to forget someone you should have remembered. Nonetheless:

  I want to thank Howard, Julie, and Jennifer for being my family and I want to thank Phyllis Uppman Florin for being my best friend. They give me the love that keeps the engine running.

  I also want to thank these people for their support of me as a fiction writer: Sally Brady and the Wednesday morning group, Andre Dubus and the Thursday nighters, Mike Curtis, Jessica Treadway, Eileen Jordan, Stephanie Von Hirschberg, JoAnn Serling, Elizabeth Crow, Keith Bellows, Fay Sciarra, Nina the Tarot card reader, my agent Lisa Bankoff, and my editor, Rate Medina. They make me laugh, keep me inspired, buy me great meals, listen to my obsessing, and make me know that I am really lucky.

  Most importantly, I want to thank you, the reader. I have always wanted to be in your hands. Let’s go.

  Well, I have broken the toilet. I flushed, the water rose, then rose higher, too much. I stared at it, told it, “No!” slammed the lid down, then raised it back up again. Water still rising. Water still rising. I put the lid down, turned out the light, tiptoed out of the bathroom, across the hall, and into my bedroom, where I slid under my bed.

  Now I hear the water hitting the bathroom floor. It goes on and on. Niagara Falls, where the honey-mooners go and do what they do. There is the heavy tread of his footsteps coming rapidly up the stairs. I hear him turn on the bathroom light and swear softly to himself. “Katie!” he yells. He comes into my room. I stop breathing. “Katherine!” I am stone. I am off the planet, a star, lovely and unnamed. He goes into my sister’s room. “What the hell did you do to the toilet?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” she says. “I’m doing my homework! Katie probably did it!”

  “She’s not even here,” he says.

  “She is, too.”

  Oh, my heart, aching and loud.

  He comes out into the hall, yells my name again. I close my eyes. “She’s not here!” he says. “So don’t tell me she did it! You did it! And by God, you’ll clean it up!”

  “I didn’t do it!” she yells, and I hear him slap her, and I know that next he will drag her by the arm and point to the mess on the bathroom floor. That’s what I was avoiding. That’s why I am under the bed. I hear Diane start crying, hear her go downstairs for the mop and bucket, like he told her to do. I open my eyes, breathe. The next time I go to the PX I will buy Diane a Sugar Daddy. I look up at the springs in my mattress. Uniform and sensible. Close together in straight lines. Spiraling gracefully upward.

  We live in Texas on an army base, next to a parade ground. Every morning when I wake up I hear a drill sergeant yelling pieces of songs to the straight lines of men marching, marching, all stepping onto their left foot at the same time, all dressed exactly alike, all staring straight ahead and yell-singing back to him. Many of them have terrible complexions. They sound like yelping puppies when they sing, and I feel sorry for them in the same way I feel sorry for puppies: their pink bellies, the way they do not know what will happen to them. The faces on those men do not react; they only obey. It doesn’t matter that the heat is awesome, that it rises up in shimmering waves like a live thing; it doesn’t matter that later, when those men touch their car door handles, their fingers will burn or that their feet will sink slightly in the sun-softened asphalt of the parking lot. On the marching field, there are no trees. The men’s skin will turn pink, then red, but they will not react. Once I saw a man collapse from the heat, fall neatly out of line, and lie still. None of the other men came to make a circle of concern around him. They just kept on marching, and in a while an army green truck pulled up next to the field and two men got out with a matching stretcher.

  My best friend, Cherylanne, and I play with the heat. We take off our shoes and, at high noon, walk on blacktop. The one who gets farthest, wins. Also, we make sun tea; and occasionally we try to fry eggs on the sidewalk. They don’t cook through. The white becomes solid at the edges only. We call Riff, the dog who lives down the block and is always loose, to come and eat the eggs from the sidewalk. He does a pretty good job, wagging his tail to beat the band the whole time. Then we hose the sidewalk off. And then we hose each other off, stun ourselves with the sudden cold.

  Cherylanne is fourteen, and she is pretty. I am twelve and I am not, although Cherylanne said this is the awkward stage and I could just as likely get better. We watch.

  Our houses are connected in a row of other houses, six units all in a brick rectangle. Cherylanne lives right next door to me. When we sit out on our front porches, we can nearly lean over and touch. Our fathers’ names and ranks are posted outside our doors, above our mailboxes. We have look-alike bushes in the front and the back.

  Before we moved to Texas, my father came home with cowboy hats for all of us. “This is not a joke,” he said. “You’ll have to wear these down there. It’s some serious heat.” My mother was alive then and he put a hat on her first. It was white. He stepped back, regarded her while she held statue-still. Then he smiled and so did she. He never hit my mother. She was the place where
he put his tenderness. And I knew she loved him in a way that was huge, but also that she was afraid of him. Otherwise, she would not have laughed when she was being most serious with him. And she would have stopped him sometimes, like when he lunged up at us at the dinner table. Once, Diane was eating corn when he hit the back of her head, and the corn all fell out of her mouth. At first, I thought it was her teeth. I saw my mother clench her napkin, raise her fist the slightest bit, then lower it. I could feel an invisible part of her reach out to touch Diane, then come to hold me, too.

  Diane has a boyfriend. Sometimes when they are down in the basement listening to records I hear her giggle and whisper, “Why don’t you act right?” This sets my imagination aflame.

  I lie naked on my bed in the afternoons when no one is home. I find a place in the sun, where the light is good, and look to see if anything is happening. Nothing is ever happening. “You should see some hair coming in by now,” Cherylanne tells me. She has her period. She has everything. Nothing is happening to me. “If you want to know how it feels to have breasts, put some socks in your sister’s bra and wear it around some,” Cherylanne said. I did it. It felt fine. I put on one of Diane’s sweaters, too, then felt myself in a line from my throat clear to my hips. I tied a scarf around my neck, put on Diane’s reddest lipstick, stared into the mirror. “Why don’t you—” I stopped, put some Evening in Paris behind my ears. Then, “Why don’t you act right?” I said. I smiled, showing no teeth. Mysterious. “Why don’t you just act right, Dickie?” That is his name. Dickie.

  After an hour or so, I come out from under my bed. Diane is back in her room. She is not crying anymore. I think my father is probably in the living room, watching television.

  I move down the stairs, holding on to the wall to steady my steps. I can hear the television. Bonanza. Good. I go past the living room, out through the kitchen and the back door. Then I come in through the front and bang the screen door so he’ll be sure to hear it. I go into the living room, stand before him. Not in the way of the television. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Cherylanne’s.”

  He adjusts the toothpick in his mouth. “Did you finish your homework?”

  “We didn’t have any.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “All right.”

  When I am halfway up the stairs, he says, “Come here, and you can take my boots off for me.”

  I sit on the floor before him, unlace his combat boots. My father is important in the army, a colonel. Men on the street salute our car. Sometimes it was only my mother and me, but they didn’t know. They stopped, stood up serious straight, and saluted us while we drove past, giggling.

  I like unlacing his boots. I only have to remember not to make a face at how his feet smell when I get done and take the boots off. They are to be lined up by his chair. Left boot to my right. Right boot to my left. Sometimes I say this to myself when I am showering.

  Diane opens her door as I am going into my bedroom. She stands mute, which is worse than anything she could say.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You broke the toilet and I had to clean up.” Her arms are crossed over her chest. The charms on her bracelet hang still.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  She slams her door. I knock on it. “Get lost,” she says.

  I consider this. Then I knock again. Nothing. “I don’t know anything about this,” I say through the door. “I went to the bathroom, okay, and then I went to Cherylanne’s. I didn’t know the toilet broke.”

  She opens her door. Maybe she’ll let me in. She has pictures of Elvis Presley taped to her mirror. She has a fuzzy pink rug on the floor, many bottles of perfume on a lacy metal tray, a huge stuffed tiger on her bed that Dickie won for her at a fair. But she doesn’t let me in. She says, “You were under your bed, you little liar.”

  I swallow, blink. She shuts her door again. I go into my bedroom and write her a note saying I’m sorry. I sign it and slide it under her door.

  Well, I lied about no homework and so I must do my math by flashlight under my covers. The long division makes me cry. First, I put down six, and that’s too much. Then I put down five, and that’s too little. Then I put down six, and that’s too much. I erase and erase, make holes in the paper.

  Dickie is waiting for Diane. He is standing out in the street beside his truck. That’s how perfect he is, he drives a truck. I watch him from the window for a while, then come out to tell him Diane’s almost ready. “Okay,” he says. “Thanks.” He smiles at me, revealing his dimples. One thing I love is dimples. I have tried to make them for myself by taping plum seeds to my cheeks as I sleep at night, by corkscrewing my fingers into my face during the day as often as I can remember. So far, nothing.

  Dickie has on a clean white T-shirt and blue jeans, and black cowboy boots. He has green eyes and very black hair, wet-combed carefully into a perfect ducktail. He smokes. When he smiles at me, I smile back, then laugh a little. It just happens, like when you drop a plate loud in front of the whole restaurant. Giggle, giggle, giggle, like a dope. I hate myself.

  “What are you up to tonight?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Maybe the movies.”

  “Uh huh.” He is tossing his keys from hand to hand. There is a square piece of gold hanging from them. It has his initials: D.M. Dickie Mac, that’s his name. Once I heard Diane say, “D.M. Know what that stands for? Damn man.”

  She was leaning back against the door when she said that, her face turned partly away from him. She had taken his keys, wouldn’t give them back.

  “Come on, Diane,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Give me my keys.”

  “What’ll you give me?” she asked, her eyebrows raised like a teacher’s.

  She knows everything, Diane. She knows how to do everything.

  After Dickie drives away with Diane, I ask Cherylanne to come over. I say to inspect me good, and never tell. I think there is something wrong. I undress, and she looks me over. “Turn to the side,” she says. And then, sighing, “Hold in your stomach. Good Lord, if you’re going to be a girl, you want to learn some things.” She regards me silently, and my heart sinks lower and lower until she shrugs and says, “Well, I’d say you have breast buds. I mean, you can tell they’re getting ready to come out.”

  “Thank you,” I say. My relief loosens up my insides back to normal.

  She lies down on my bed, spreads herself out like a starfish. “You can come over for dinner if you want,” she says. “We’re fixing to eat. My mom made chili.”

  Cherylanne’s mother is named Belle. She’s lived in the same town in Texas her whole life. She uses bacon in her chili, and a lot of salt. I once watched her put the salt in, shaking and shaking the round silver container for about fifteen minutes, I swear. That chili is good, though. You always want more.

  Belle was good friends with my mother. Near the end, my mother called her one day and said, “Oh, please, Belle. Take her for a while. For God’s sake. She keeps … playing her flutophone … for me.” Those days, my mother always sounded like she was saying a poem. She couldn’t do a whole sentence; it took too much air. So she would say pieces like that. Sometimes, even if you felt bad she was dying, you’d want to yell, “What! Just say it!” Even if you were loving her so much, your fists clenched and your heart feeling like it had a tight peel around it, you would get mad like that.

  I had to go over to Cherylanne’s house until my dad came home. My mother didn’t know I’d heard her on the phone. She just told me Cherylanne wanted me to come over. I played crazy eights with my head stuck down. I’d thought my music might help the pain.

  Belle is not a friend to my father. She doesn’t much speak to him. She likes me, though. When I eat there she serves me first, and sends me home with leftovers. Plus, she won’t let Bubba, Cherylanne’s sixteen-year-old brother, tease me; and she lets him do anything else in the wide world he feels like. There’s nothing about Bubba that Bubba doesn’t like. He ro
lls his T-shirt sleeves high up, looks at himself in every mirror everywhere, even the toaster, with one eyebrow up a little. His brain must be near worn out with making up compliments for him to give himself.

  Cherylanne hates Bubba. She says he is an uncivilized being that no woman will ever love, that he does not know the first thing about elegant living. Once he hit her in the stomach and knocked the air out of her and their mother didn’t do a thing about it. Cherylanne says her stomach is permanently bruised and that she could get cancer when she grows up on account of Bubba. “This I will never forgive,” she said the night he did it. I felt bad for her, that her stomach got ruined so young in life. She was crying a little; I could see the tears trapped in her lashes. “Oh, Lord,” she said suddenly, closing her eyes and leaning her head back, “please don’t give me cancer of the stomach. I have a lot of living to do. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I answered, humbled as always by the thought that He might actually hear.

  I am in bed when I hear Diane come home. My father is waiting. I hear him start to yell. She is late, I guess. No. It’s not that. It’s her outfit. He follows her up the stairs. “All in black,” he says. “What the hell is that? A rebel or something? Are you a rebel?” She doesn’t answer. I hear her door shut quietly, but then he opens it. “I asked you a question!”

  “No,” she says low. “I am not a rebel.”

  “You will not wear all black.”

  Nothing. I know she is standing there, looking at him straight on.

  “Is that clear?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Black is what whores wear!”

  “You should know,” Diane says, unbelievably.

  I hear furniture scrape across her floor. He pushes her sometimes before he hits her. I put the pillow over my head. I live on a farm, alone, with many animals. The sky overhead is flat and deep blue. No clouds.