Durable Goods

by Elizabeth Berg

  After breakfast, I go over to Cherylanne’s. It is ten-thirty. My father and Diane are still sleeping. It’s good when this happens. I like to run the day for a while.

  No one answers when I call out. I stand for a while in the living room, then move into the kitchen, pretending I live there. I open the refrigerator door, sit at the kitchen table. It doesn’t work. The smell is not right. Your own house always has the right smell to you, the one that quiets a nervous place, no matter what. I hook my feet around the rungs of the chair, look around, then hear the low sweet sound of voices being carried on the air outside. Belle and Cherylanne. I get up and look into the backyard. Belle is hanging out sheets. She carries them, huge and fragrant, in a creaking wicker basket, clothespins in a faded striped bag. When the sheets are on the clothesline, they make an inviting U shape. I always want to lie in that damp bed, be rocked by the wind and look up at the clouds.

  I used to stay near my mother when she hung out clothes. I made people out of the straight wooden clothespins, the ones with rounded heads. I didn’t like the spring-type ones, which could surprise you with their meanness. I took the round ones, wrapped them in Kleenex for clothes, and made families: two parents, many children, clipped all in a row on the edge of the basket high above the other clothespins, which lay naked and unchosen below them. I used to help peg things on the line. I liked the slight resistance you felt, the satisfying muffled squeak of wood anchoring cloth. And I liked the clothespins’ dependability. Say you used them to hang out some towels and then forgot about them: you could come back in three days and there they would be, just as you’d left them, still holding something up, even though days had passed and it had been dark, even though you had sat at the table eating your second dessert, with those clothespins a million miles from your mind. They kept on working until you said they were done.

  Our laundry goes in a dryer now. He doesn’t like hanging out clothes. Sometimes it catches up to me in a rush, all that has changed.

  Cherylanne is lying on a beach towel near Belle, sunning herself. She has an alarm clock beside her—timed, I know, to go off every twenty minutes to remind her to flip over—and a fat new magazine wrapped around itself to hold its place. I want to know what she and Belle are saying but I can’t quite hear. Whatever it is, it is a warm and friendly thing. I have known it. My mother and I, walking to the grocery store together: I had a sunburn and was wearing my mother’s Mexican kind of blouse with the stretchy neckline pulled down like a gypsy, to spare my blistered shoulders. You could see fluid move inside the blisters like little oceans if you touched them. I carried an umbrella to shade myself. I felt glamorous, like someone a little bit famous. My mother told me about when she had to get glasses, when she was my age. “Oh, they were so ugly,” she said. “Not like the cute ones they have now. They looked just like Coke bottle bottoms, and the frames were ugly gray metal. All the kids made fun of me.”

  “Even your brother and sister?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Especially them.”

  “What did you do?”

  She stared ahead, remembering, “Well, I cried, of course. And I hardly ever wore them. I tried to get by without them.”

  “Oh.” I took her hand, held it for a while, turned the wedding ring on it around and around. Then I said, “I think you look pretty in glasses.”

  “Thank you,” she said, but she was out of the moment and on to her list. “Baked potatoes or mashed tonight?” She stopped walking, leaned close to me. “Or scalloped?” she asked, a little excited. “How would you like that?” It was a whole thing for her, rich and satisfying, planning what we would eat each night. She worked to make things match. She clipped recipes constantly, filed them in scented envelopes, used them like friends.

  I come out the back door and wave to Belle. “Hey, Katie,” she says, and Cherylanne sits up, squints at me.

  “Oh, good,” she says. “Put some on my back, will you?” She holds up the Coppertone bottle. I squeeze some in my hands, rub it on in the way I know she likes. You aren’t supposed to get it on her swimsuit straps. “Want to lie out with me?” she asks.

  Well, I don’t. I find it boring, suntanning in the backyard. It’s strictly for tanning emergencies. The only sounds you hear are airplanes droning, army men calling out army things, the cars going by in the distance. Ants can crawl on you whenever they want. When you lie on your back, you get a wet itch all along the middle of it; and when you turn over, you get it on your stomach. I like lying out at the pool, the sound of water keeping you cool even if you aren’t in it.

  “Let’s go swimming,” I say.

  She looks at her watch. “Can’t. I have an afternoon date.”

  I have never heard of such a thing. “What for?”

  “I’m going bowling.”

  “With who?”

  “Bill O’Connell.”

  “Again?”

  “We haven’t been bowling.”

  “I know, but you just saw him last night.”

  Cherylanne looks at her mother, then at me. In a low voice, she says, “I know that.”

  Belle anchors the last towel on the line, pulls the empty basket up to rest on her hip. “You can help me bake,” she says. “I’ve got to make a cake today.”

  I shrug. “Okay.” I like helping Belle. Even when I’d never broken an egg before, she just went ahead and let me do it.

  “I might mess up,” I had warned her, the shame already curled low in the bottom of my belly.

  “Try it,” she said. Her voice was as comfortable as a quilt. I held my breath, cracked the shell against the side of the bowl. The yolk smashed; pieces of shell fell into the bowl with it. I was so sorry, and feeling scared to look up, and all she did was give me a clean bowl and another egg. “Try again,” she said, and walked away. She started humming. Country western was what she really liked.

  “But I messed up,” I said.

  She stopped singing, came to stand by me. “Do you like scrambled eggs?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, you didn’t hardly mess up, then.”

  I had to keep my smile tight, so much was in me. And that wasn’t all. Next she said, “You know, if you didn’t like scrambled eggs, you still wouldn’t have messed up. You’re just learning, Katie. That’s all. You go ahead and mess up all you want. Hell, I got a million eggs. They’re on sale over to Piggly Wiggly.”

  I didn’t do anything else wrong. I figured I might not. I’d been taught tenderly, and that’s how a lesson stays. I can separate eggs now, one-handed. It’s all Belle’s. It’s so easy to go the other way. One of the reasons I have trouble with math is that the teacher punishes you for being wrong. When you miss too much, he draws a circle on the blackboard just above the level of your nose, and then tells you to put your nose in it. Naturally you have to be on tiptoe to do it. He has you stay there till your leg muscles feel shaky. He divided our class up the third week of school into smart, middle, and dumb groups. All that trouble I have with numbers this year, that’s all Mr. Hornman’s.

  So I will help Belle today. When I am done, I will try to think of a way to thank her. You have to give back. Last time, I gave her a new tin of chili powder with gold Christmas ribbon wrapped around it. Later, I lied to my father when he was looking for it. That was the secret part of my gift. He would have gotten mad if he knew Belle was teaching me things. “Something special about Belle?” he would ask. “Something better?” He’d done things like that before. And of course there were no answers to those questions. None that you could say.

  We make chocolate cake, and I give Belle a tea ball. It was my mother’s. There isn’t much chance of him missing that. My mother used to talk on the phone and dunk that tea ball. I liked to use the phone after her, the receiver still warm, the smell of her tea breath on the mouthpiece. I wished I had someone to talk to on the telephone like she did. “Oh, uh huh,” she would say, and wait a long time. “Yes!” she would say, nodding as though the person on the phone were
there before her. It was exciting. When I was little, I would get on her lap and look through her apron pockets while she was on the phone. I found Kleenex and safety pins, mostly, but sometimes something good: an earring. A shiny dime. Tickets from somewhere she’d been. She saved them all, proof of something.

  I am lying on the living room rug, staring at the radio, at the thin red line that finds the station. The radio is a big black rectangle with a long antenna, kept here on the floor, next to my father’s chair. It is always tuned to his station. I turn it on, hear the loud sound of the baseball announcers. They get so excited. I used to wonder if they were being hit, their surprised “Oh!”s sounding just like it. “Oh! Would you look at that! OH!” But they were just watching the game, telling how it was to see it. I turn the dial, get some fancy piano music. I listen with my eyes closed. This kind of music draws pictures in my head, takes me places, acts out whole stories. Diane doesn’t like it; she always makes me change the station. But when I grow up I will play it loud in my own house, open the windows wide.

  Once, when I was listening to his radio, my father came home. I sat up fast. You weren’t supposed to play his radio without asking. But he wasn’t mad. He sat down and asked me did I know how a radio worked. I told him that when I was little, I thought there were real people in there, swaying before their microphones. There were tiny girl singers in formais, little men in tuxedos, their eyebrows wrinkled from singing like Eddie Fisher. And there were little instruments: saxophones you could fit into matchboxes, pianos no wider than a quarter.

  He interrupted me. “You know better than that now, though, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “So how do radios work?”

  “Well, I … I think there are tubes.”

  “Yes?”

  “And some electricity.”

  “Yes?”

  “You have to plug it in.”

  He laughed. And then he told me how radios worked. I watched his mouth move, and his eyes, so close to me now, but different than usual. I was trying so hard to listen that I couldn’t. There was a bad hole in my brain. And so when he finished and asked me did I understand, I had to disappoint him. His face lost something. I could feel him pulling back in, like a turtle. I remember thinking that so much about him was unfair. And that starting right then, there was clean space inside me that let me know it was not all my fault. It’s like looking at the pictures of those artists who paint with millions of dots. You stand close for so long and see nothing. You stand back one time and say, Oh.

  Diane comes in, stops when she sees me. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Music.”

  She leans over to turn it off. “I hate that music! It’s for funerals.”

  I move to turn it back on, stop. Later.

  Dickie comes in the door, stops there.

  “Come on in,” I say. “He’s gone.”

  “Where?” Diane asks.

  I shrug. Diane looks at me, then at Dickie. “Come on,” she says. “You can come with us.”

  The air has gotten rare. I stand up, pull down my shirt, tighten my ponytail. “Where we going?”

  “To Dickie’s house. I’ll show you the puppies.” She turns to him. “All right?”

  He spreads his hands wide. “Okay with me.”

  I heard about someone the radio called up. They won something and they weren’t even listening. Sometimes all it takes is to be there. I have never even seen Dickie’s house. Of course, I have always wanted to. And I am going there right now, invited like a guest. Any jealous feelings I had about Cherylanne’s being on a date go down like water in the last suck of the drain.

  It is pale green, Dickie’s house, and it has dark-green shutters. This surprises me: I thought only grandparents had shutters. The lawn is patchy—bald here and tufted there—like a crazy-man haircut. There is a bush with flowers nearly given up on it, light-pink things with their heads hanging down.

  Dickie pulls out his keys and opens the front door, waves us in. Diane goes first, confidently, and I follow. I am suddenly shy, and wish I had stayed home.

  The living room has a gold rug, a black leather chair, a pole lamp, and a sofa that looks like anybody’s. There is an empty bag of Fritos by the chair, and a newspaper, unopened. There is nothing on the walls, no curtains.

  “Want a beer?” Dickie asks me, and winks.

  I smile, look down, and then hear the faint urgent sounds of puppies. “Is that them?” I ask. “The puppies?”

  “They’re in the kitchen,” Dickie says. “Come see.”

  Diane has stretched out on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, closed her eyes. “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ve seen them a million times.”

  They are in the corner, in a cardboard box lined with a once-pink blanket. They are in their own made jumble, paws over heads over rumps, tails sticking out every which way. When they see Dickie, they leap up on wobbly legs, push forward toward him. He kneels down, holds his hand out to them. “I swear they think I’m their father,” he says. He pats each head, and I am amazed to see their tails wag. Their eyes are shiny-new, and their coats, when I touch them, too soft for this world. I sit down on the floor beside them, sigh, smile. “They’re so cute,” I say. This is not it. What I mean is more. I want them. All of them.

  Dickie stands up. “Yeah, they’re cute. But another week and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with them.”

  I stop petting them. “Can’t you sell them?”

  He laughs.

  “Or give them away?”

  “Maybe some,” he says and goes to the refrigerator, takes out a Lone Star. “Beer?” he asks again.

  And I do an amazing thing. I say, “Yes, please.”

  Dickie laughs.

  “Can I?” I say.

  “Hey, Diane,” he calls. “Should we get your sister drunk?”

  Diane comes into the kitchen, leans against the wall, looks at me. “What the hell,” she says. “You want a beer?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “So have a beer,” she says. Her voice is not her own. She is in her own movie.

  Dickie opens a bottle of beer, hands it to me. I take a sip, nod. “It’s good.” It is not, though; it’s bitter. But I like it anyway.

  “I’ll have one,” Diane says, sitting down at the table, and when Dickie gives it to her, I see this is old for her.

  I take another swallow, watch the puppies. “Do you think we can have one, Diane?”

  “No.”

  I pet one head, another rump, feel along the side of yet another leg. “Why not?”

  “Oh,” she sighs, tips her chair back on two legs. “It would be too much work, something like that. I don’t know. He wouldn’t want a dog.”

  “What if we just came home with one? He’d see how cute she is. He might like her.”

  “Try it,” Dickie says. “They need another week, then take your pick.”

  “Shut up, Dickie,” Diane says, but it is a warm thing, not what it seems.

  He comes over to her, picks her up like she is nothing. “Come here,” he says, and starts carrying her off. She is laughing, relaxed. I hear their voices disappear down the hall.

  I drink more beer. The puppies are sleepy, arranging themselves like toys. I wonder where their mother is.

  I hear low talk from Dickie and Diane. They have closed a door behind them. I actually don’t mind. It is nice, sitting in a new place by myself. By the time I finish the beer, I am making plans. I have this confidence, like a good new outfit I’m wearing on the inside.

  I can have a puppy. I can have a boyfriend. I can have a good husband, live in a house with him. I go into the living room, think how I’d decorate it. Well, curtains, for one thing; it is only civilized. And something baking in the oven, to make smells you can almost hold. Some plants. Some pictures we would pick out together: “Do you like that one?” “Well, of course, if you do, dear.” Yes, and an ashtray for guests who smoke, and a candy
dish, all with wrapped-up toffees.

  In the mornings I would have my friends over. There would be a big blue plate of doughnuts, powdered sugar and whatever else they wanted, and we would talk about what we were going to do that day. “Well, he is taking me somewhere tonight, but I sure don’t know where,” I would say, and my friends would rustle a bit, excited and glad for me to have a romantic husband. Millions of times I would tell them it wasn’t always so easy for me. “Oh!” They’d wave their hands. “You are just so lucky! You have always been so lucky!”

  “Well,” I would say, “I know it seems so.”

  I would vacuum with a new loud cleaner, wash clothes and hang them out on my own rope lines. I would be a mother to beautiful children I would fold into my skirts and keep safe. At night we would all watch our favorite TV shows and if someone wanted to talk, well fine let them.

  I sit in the black chair, close my eyes. This makes me dizzy, so I open them again. I hear someone coming down the hall and I stand up. Diane comes into the room, smiles at me. “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  She leans closer. “Did you drink that whole beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit!” She starts to laugh.

  “Shit!” I say, too. It’s easy as pie.

  I start to march around the room. “I shit, you shit, he shits,” I say. Then, confidentially, “Conjugation.”

  “My God, Dickie,” Diane says, “look what you did.”

  “Oh, no, Diane,” I say. “This is me talking.”

  Dickie comes into the living room, tucking in his shirt. Then he pulls a comb out of his pocket, pulls it expertly through his hair. He looks at me for a minute, then smiles. “Hell, she’s shit-faced.”