Durable Goods

by Elizabeth Berg

  I like swimming at night. The water, black and deeper looking. The lights making crossover rings on the waves. The diving board, glowing a pearl color, the sound of its springboard action carrying far. Not many people swim at night, and the lifeguards don’t use whistles. They just say, “Hey, off the rope,” in their normal voice.

  Diane is telling me to dive off the high board. “I can’t,” I say.

  “Yeah, you can,” she says. “It’s the same thing you do off the low board. It’s just higher.”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t do it.”

  “I can,” Cherylanne says. “I can take a running dive off it.”

  “I know you can,” I say.

  “Watch,” she says, and ascends the ladder to the high dive. She is barely visible in the dark. I hear her voice like it is its own thing. “First, a big breath in, to show yourself your confidence.” I hear her take in a breath. “Now,” she says, “a slow breath out.” I watch her carefully even though I am a little mad at her. She walks to the end of the board, pivots gracefully, walks three steps back, pivots again, puts her arms out straight before her. Her face is impassive, serious, I know. I see her take her steps, bounce up once, then dive down and slice nearly noiselessly into the water below.

  “Great dive!” Dickie says. Diane and I look at him. “What!” he says. “That was a great dive!”

  I fill up my cheeks with air, let it go, head for the ladder. Even this is hard for me. I don’t like heights. My breaths get shorter and shorter the higher I get. I feel lightheaded by the time I reach the diving board. I hold on to the rails, look down at my sister in the lamplight. The lifeguard is watching, too. I wave.

  “Do it!” Diane says.

  I look up into the night sky, the peaceful stars. There, that is higher. I walk out to the end of the board. There is no sound. They are all watching. I feel a slight tremor along the board, turn, and walk hastily back to hold onto the rail.

  “Awwww!” I hear Dickie say.

  Diane cups her hands around her mouth. “Do it!”

  Something occurs to me. “Why?” I ask.

  She puts her hands down, turns away, then looks back up at me, her hands on her hips. “If you do it, I’ll take you to see Dickie’s puppies.”

  “Do you have puppies, Dickie?” I call down.

  “Sure do,” he says. “Six of ’em. All little girls.”

  Well, there is no point in negotiating from this position. I start to come down. “No!” Diane says. “Dive off that board right now. You can do it, Katie.”

  “I just … I think I’ll come down first.”

  “Don’t,” Diane says. “Or you won’t do it. Just dive! Then we’ll go see the puppies. We’ll get them some ice cream at Dairy Queen.”

  Dairy Queen. Me, dressed in dry clothes, in a car, on the ground, finished with this. I walk halfway down the diving board, stop.

  “Okay. Take in your deeeeeep breath,” I hear Cherylanne say.

  “Quiet,” I say. “I know.”

  I walk to the end of the board, put my arms up over my head in the dive position, start to bend down.

  “It’s easier to take a running start,” Cherylanne says. “The first time’s the hardest.”

  “Quiet!” Diane tells her, and she is.

  There are different kinds of time in the world. When you get called on and you don’t know the answer and the teacher waits, that is one kind of time and it is like this. I straighten up, bend down halfway again. The water sparkles from the lights, waits. The puppies will be so cute. I close my eyes.

  I can’t do it. I come down the ladder. No one says anything. “Can I still see the puppies?” I ask.

  “No,” Diane says. “I told you. You have to dive.”

  “Let her see them,” Dickie says. “For Christ’s sake.”

  Diane turns to him, her voice deadly soft. “No.”

  Cherylanne takes my hand. “I’ll show you how,” she says.

  I let go. “In the daytime,” I say.

  “You won’t do it in the daytime, either, will you?” Diane asks. And then, almost forgiving, “Will you?”

  It happens. It comes to me. When I get up on Friday morning, I go to the bathroom and see the evidence. At first, I don’t believe it. I stand so that the light falls on my pajama bottoms better, and there it is. It looks a little like South America, the outline of the stain. I go to the mirror, check for other changes. Yes, a certain softening, a more knowing look.

  So much can happen now.

  I know exactly what to do. I go to the linen closet and take a pad from the blue box. But I don’t have a belt. I knock softly on Diane’s door. No answer. I open it a little.

  I can smell her sleep. Her shade is down, her room quite dark, but I can make out her shape beneath the covers. “Diane?” I whisper.

  “What?”

  “Could you … I have to tell you something.”

  She pulls the covers from over her head, squints at the light coming into her room from the hallway. “What happened?”

  “I started.” The word takes up all the space in my mouth.

  “Started what?”

  I look down at my feet. “You know.”

  “You started your period?”

  “Shhh!” I’m not ready for him yet.

  She sits up, laughs. “Well, congratulations. That’s just when I started, right at twelve.” She nods her head, thinking. “Mom said it was a gift, can you imagine? She was such a sap, sometimes.”

  I don’t know. I think it’s a gift, too. It occurs to me that I am standing in my sister’s room on a Friday morning, able to have a baby. These are the same pajamas I went to bed in last night.

  “Do you have what you need?” Diane asks.

  “I need a belt, that’s all.”

  Diane gets up and takes a belt out of her underwear drawer. “Here. You should get your own, but you can borrow one of mine. Do you know where to get them?”

  “Yes.” Of course I know where to get them. Next to magazines and makeup, they are what I have looked at most. And now one will be mine, tossed carelessly in with my lady underwear.

  Diane gets back into bed, yawns. “You might not have it again for a while, you know. It can skip a few months before it starts coming regularly.”

  Well. All the more reason to pay attention. I walk carefully back into my room, on new feet. I get dressed, start to carry my pajama bottoms to the laundry hamper. But then I put them in my closet in an empty shoe box, and go over to tell Cherylanne.

  Cherylanne covers her mouth, squeals high. “You did it!” she says, and then her face collapses into pity. “Are you cramping real bad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does it hurt? You know, in your stomach?”

  I put my hand on myself. “No.”

  “Oh.” Her voice is sorry for me and pleased mixed together.

  “Why should I hurt?”

  “Well, it’s…. You know, generally, women have some pain. Not all women, of course. It’s your more feminine types that suffer most. I take Midol.”

  I send my mind down to my stomach to check around. Nothing. But I say, “Well, I mean, I thought you meant like hammer-on-the-head pain. I have pain! But it’s … not real bad.”

  Cherylanne moves her face close to mine. “Like somebody pushing down on you a little?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  She straightens. “Well, that’s it.”

  I have passed. Cherylanne tells me that a woman must treat herself in special ways on special days. I can’t go swimming or horseback riding, I know that, right? I should nap when possible, and drink weak tea. And always check to be sure you don’t need a girlfriend to walk close behind you when you come out of the classroom. “There was this girl once,” Cherylanne tells me in her delicious confiding tone, “and she was wearing a white skirt.” I lie on her bed, hold one of her stuffed animals close to me, listening, until we have to leave for school.

  He has a date. That night
when he comes home he calls Diane up from the laundry room, me down from my bedroom. “I’ll be going out with a lady this evening,” he says, “and I’m bringing her here first. I want you to behave.”

  I don’t know what to say. He might as well not be speaking English. I might as well be saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, I don’t understand” real slow, my face working to convey what my words can’t.

  Diane leans up against the wall. It is sadness pushing her, I know. “Who is this you’re going out with?” she asks.

  “Pardon me?” he says. The summer storm. The sudden sound of the thunder, the rolling of the black clouds.

  She straightens. “I just wanted to know her name. Please.”

  “Nancy Simon.”

  Diane nods. “Where did you meet her?”

  “When I am ready to tell you details about Miss Simon, you’ll know.”

  Diane nods again. I have some questions, too. I have a lot of questions, too. But never mind.

  She is black-haired, Nancy, her hair pushed back hard and high and see-through. Beehive. She looks younger than my mother did. She wears deep-blue eye shadow and two silver bracelets and a black dress and heels. She sits at the kitchen table, smoking, smiling at me. There is a trench coat lying across her lap, tan, soiled at the cuffs. “So you’re twelve, huh?” she asks. There is a tiny dot of spit on the corner of her mouth. I rub my own mouth to tell her, but she doesn’t understand.

  “Yes. Almost thirteen.”

  She raises her too-black eyebrows, jets out a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Cherylanne and I used to play dirty lady, just like that. Cherylanne’s name was Mitzi, mine Titzi. We swung our crossed legs, twitched our bottoms on our pretend bar stools, drank ginger ale from Belle’s good glasses, smoked pencils. We smoked just like Nancy Simon does.

  “Almost thirteen,” Nancy says. “Well. Big girl!”

  There is a place just before they make fun of you. That is where Nancy is. I look down, think of a reason to leave.

  “Well,” I say, finally, “I have to do some homework. Very nice to meet you, thank you for coming.”

  She stands up, totters a bit on her high heels, reaches out to touch my shoulder. “Nice to meet you, too, honey.” I smell her perfume, unwelcome in my mother’s kitchen. Unwelcome in my mother’s house.

  “I hope to see you again,” she says. It is flirty, like I am the guy. Of course it is aimed for my father, who stands, arms crossed, at the other side of the kitchen. He doesn’t have anything army on.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well, have a nice time.”

  She looks at my father. Oh. I see. They already have.

  I go upstairs and knock on Diane’s door, open it. “Are they gone?” she asks. I nod. “What a bitch,” Diane says. She is seated before her dresser mirror, combing out her hair. “What a whore.”

  I shrug. “Are you going out?” I ask.

  She sighs. “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  She turns around, her eyes suddenly blank. She laughs, a small sound. “I don’t know.” She looks up at me. “I really don’t.”

  Later, when I am alone, I take out the shoe box. I stare at my pajama bottoms. What secrets lie in us. What perfection. I touch the dried blood. What told me to do this? What was the first step? Hormones, I know, but what are they? Can you see them? And if not, how do they know? When I asked these questions during our special hygiene class, the gym teacher told me to stop acting up. “That is not what we are talking about now,” she said. “Keep your mind focused. You have the same problem in basketball.” She was right. I am hardly ever focused. My mind is a slippery thing. Last time we played basketball, when the ball was thrown to me, I took off and ran with it like a football. It just made more sense to me at the moment.

  I fold up my pajama bottoms into a neat square. My mother gave them to me. They are too small, but I am running out of things she touched to put next to me. I slide under my bed, lay the pajamas across my chest, close my eyes. “I hate you,” I say. “Look what you are missing.”

  Her, on a half-circle kind of throne, little gold five-pointed stars floating around her head. She is wearing something blue that does not show the outline of her body. She glows. And she says back through healthy pink lips, “I miss you, too.”

  She used to tell me, when I went to bed at night, that I should hurry and fall asleep. That way, the fairies would come and paint stars on my ceiling faster. I wanted to see them. It irritated me that I had to be asleep before they came. But it did teach me one good thing: just stop looking, and the magic will come.

  I opened my eyes. “Where are you? Is that heaven?”

  Nothing.

  I slide out from under my bed, put my pajamas in the hamper. I stand by my window and look out at the dark parade ground. It has a fierce presence, even empty.

  Cherylanne is at the movies with Bill O’Connell. Diane is with Dickie. I have started my period and I am alone. I put a wide blue ribbon I saved from a birthday present into my hair. I climb into bed with a book. I lay my hand across my stomach, feel the outline of the belt. Just making sure. It’s always that way with the biggest things: they never feel real. You have to keep on checking them forever.

  He comes into my room later that night, turns on the light. He is holding my pajama bottoms in his hand.

  “Are these yours?”

  I swallow, nod. Diane does the laundry. Did she tell him?

  He looks around the room, sighs, then looks at me. “You know about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “School.”

  “All right.” He starts to leave the room, then turns back. “You soak bloody things in cold water. I guess they didn’t tell you that, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “All right.” He turns out the light. I hear his steps going downstairs.

  Here is the thing: other ways are unfamiliar and, in a way, they only hurt. A month ago, when his father died, he burst into my room, stood still for a moment, then said, “Your grandpa died.”

  “Oh,” I said. My grandfather held himself unto himself. I never sat on his lap. He never smiled. When I saw him, he would ask how old I was, and I would tell him; and he would shake his head, as though he were a little angry. That would be our conversation. He would lean forward onto his cane, groan a little, adjust his upper half, then settle back into himself, staring straight ahead. I didn’t love that grandfather. And the fact of his dying made no difference to me. But I knew I needed to react and so I made myself cry. I put my hands over my face and thought of a book I’d read recently where the dog died. I was sitting at my desk and my father came over to me, pressed my head into his stomach. I cried for him until he was finished with something deep and private inside. Then he left my room. I felt a terrible relief. I stood up and shivered, like I was shaking things off me.

  It is better when he doesn’t touch. We are used to it. Mostly when he offers you a kindness, you only feel bad, wondering how to hold yourself, how to be now. And wondering, too, about the other times.

  In the morning, I forget for a minute about my miracle. But then, when I go into the bathroom, I remember and suck in air, happy-quick. I run back to bed, lie still with my eyes closed. I can get pregnant. I can have something its own self, and yet part of me, growing inside. Cells of all kinds, serious and dividing. Hair sprouting underwater. Fingers, and fingernails coming. An ear on each side of a new head, eyelids, moving legs and arms. This is too much! Why can I be pregnant already? At some time it must have made sense. At some time you were not in junior high at this age, but ready to be making your own dinner and rocking your babies to sleep.

  I get up, pour cereal into a bowl, turn on the television to a low volume. I like Saturday-morning television: the drama of Fury and Sky King; the jerk-back kind of watching you do when the Three Stooges are on. I also like Popeye, though why Olive Oyl chooses him over Bluto
I do not understand. Those misshapen arms. Never mind that after some spinach they can become helpful things, like mallets. The rest of the time you have to look at them, and the tattoos do not help one bit. Bluto is better looking. His character is a little rough, but I believe that in the long run Olive would be better off with him.

  Once I told some GIs that Cherylanne and I watched Popeye. We were at the PX looking at records and they asked us which ones were the most popular. I said we didn’t know. “Don’t you watch American Bandstand?” one of them asked. He was grinning, flirting a little.

  “We like Popeye better,” I said.

  Cherylanne gasped slightly, then stormed out of the record area into Young Juniors. “Don’t you ever tell anyone that again!”

  “Why not? We do like Popeye better.”

  I saw her face change around with the beginnings of a few answers to me, but she didn’t pick any. She just walked away, left me fingering some pleated skirts. I didn’t understand how those skirts were made, how they kept those permanent dents. I looked at them for a while, on the outside and on the inside, stretched them in and out like an accordion, and then I went home.

  That was the end of Cherylanne watching cartoons with me. It made me kind of sad, because I thought she still wanted to. There were these forces. They would grab her like canes grabbed cartoon dancers around the neck and pulled them off the stage. “This can be a very difficult time of life,” Cherylanne recently said. She was using her big lavender powder puff to perfume between her breasts. “Adolescence is studied by many famous people because it is so hard.” She sighed deeply, then noticed a chunk of mascara loose on one upper lash. She picked at it, holding her face perfect, until she got it.

  Then she started in with some lipstick. She stretched her mouth open, talked funny through it while she smeared on a creamy layer of Rose Petal Pink. “There are pamphlets at the guidance counselor’s if you want to read them,” she said. She closed her mouth, rubbed her lips together, looked at me. “If you want to know what you’re in for when you’re my age, I mean.” And then, generous, “Some are right for you even now.” She smacked her lips together hard, checked the mirror, stopped a smile just short of itself.