We Are All Welcome Here

by Elizabeth Berg

  “I’m coming!” Over her shoulder, she told Dell, “So don’t forget. Eight o’clock, tomorrow night. Green Street, about nine blocks from here, the white house with the ramp.”

  Dell followed us to the door as we were leaving, and when he saw Shooter lying outside, he said, “Is that y’all’s dog?”

  “He’s mine,” Suralee said.

  “He wouldn’t have anything to do with me before. Mind if I try to pet him again?”

  “I don’t mind. But he will.”

  “Just a quick try,” Dell said. “I like a challenge.”

  “Your funeral,” Suralee said.

  Dell followed us outside. Shooter stood at attention when he saw Suralee, his tail wagging. But when Dell stepped toward him, his tail stopped and the hair between his shoulders stood up. “It’s okay,” Dell said, and Shooter growled low in his throat.

  Dell stood still, his hand outstretched. “I’ll let you come to me, then. Now, let’s talk about this, man to man. You don’t have to put on a show for me. You know you’re curious, so why don’t you just come on over and have a little sniff?” The dog stood staring, head lowered.

  “He won’t,” Suralee said. But he did. After the briefest hesitation, Shooter walked up to Dell. He wouldn’t allow him to pet him—he ducked when Dell tried—but he sniffed Dell’s hand thoroughly. Then he attached himself to Suralee’s side.

  “I have never seen him do that,” Suralee said. “Not one time.”

  I poked her in the ribs—Let’s GO.

  On the way home I told Suralee, “My mom says if a man likes kids and dogs, he’s a good man.”

  Suralee said, “My father liked dogs and kids. So much for that theory, I guess.” She picked up a stone and flung it into a field we were passing, watched it land without comment, then resumed walking. “Hey. Guess what. Tomorrow night is a full moon.” She affected an English accent. “‘The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.’”

  “Who said that?” I asked, and she gave her usual response: anonymous.

  “The moon…brings all things magical,” I said in my own English accent, then added shyly, “I said that.”

  “I thought so,” Suralee said, smiling. She touched my hand. “But it’s nice. We’ll put it in the play.”

  “The night can be measured,” I said, with no accent at all.

  Suralee stopped walking. “Who said that?”

  “My mother. It’s true. There’s a beginning and an end to the night. Because of the sphere shape. You measure from where you can see stars to where you no longer can. It’s about the size of the Pacific Ocean.” Suralee stared at me. “It’s true!”

  “How does she know?”

  I shrugged. “She read it somewhere.”

  People brought my mother books from the library or from yard or estate sales, and she read them all. She would have someone fold her hands over her vent hose and then pad them with a towel. The book would rest on this padding, and my mother would hold a pencil in her mouth and use the eraser end to turn pages. She read a lot of mysteries and biographies, but mostly she loved science books.

  Suralee pulled at her bottom lip, thinking. It was a characteristic I admired and emulated, just as I imitated the way she watched movies: from the corner of her eye, with her head turned slightly away from the screen. Finally, “We might could use that, too,” Suralee said.

  We walked the rest of the way home in silence, past houses that grew increasingly less cared for, past a field full of butterflies and grasshoppers and sharp-edged weeds sticking out of orange-colored dirt. We walked past two bare-chested little twin girls swinging on a gate, their mother yelling through the window for them to stop that. We walked alongside drooping phone wires held up by poles that had ads stapled on them: a lost cat, a church-group concert, an offer to make money by making phone calls from home. Suralee took a tab with a phone number from an ad promising a weight loss of ten pounds in a week. “You don’t need to lose weight,” I said.

  Suralee said, “It’s not for me.”

  It was for her mother, then. Suralee didn’t often speak to or of her mother directly. She had other ways.

  “You want to go to Glenwood before we go home?” I asked. Sometimes Suralee and I walked up to the cemetery and lay on the graves. We liked to pretend we were letting dead people speak through us. “I was a hardworking man with a talent for whittling,” Suralee might say from her grave. “I died in childbirth on a Saturday morning,” I might say from mine. I preferred the darker dramas.

  “Not today,” Suralee said. “Too much to do.” She was right. For the amount of money we’d be charging, this needed to be a good play.

  Peacie had sugar cookies for us when we got home. The butter was going to go rancid, she said; that was the reason and the only reason. She piled them high on a plate and set them on the kitchen table. “What you don’t finish, you wrap up. Ants getting to be the size of elephants around here.”

  In the living room, my mother sat with her best friend, Brenda, who’d been the witness at my mother’s wedding. She and my mother talked frequently on the phone and visited as often as they could, but it was only about three times a year, now that Brenda had moved to Nashville. Every now and then Brenda would surprise my mother and just show up, and then they’d laugh and talk for hours—about men, about hairdos, about children, about old times. Brenda was a terrific dancer, as my mother used to be. Sometimes they watched American Bandstand together, and Brenda would dance in front of my mother. I used to worry it would make my mother sad, but it didn’t seem to. She would nod, keeping time, and Brenda would shake her hips and shimmy and twirl. One day she’d grabbed Peacie as a partner, and I’d been stunned to see that snarly woman’s fancy footwork. I stood at the doorway, watching, and when Peacie was finished dancing, she came to stand before me, all wild-eyed and out of breath. “I guess you done had your eyes opened,” she said.

  I nodded, not looking at her.

  “Didn’t know I could dance. You surprised.”

  Again I’d nodded.

  “That’s the Jesus truth. It’s a wide, wide world. Sooner you lift up your gaze from your own self, sooner you know that.”

  “Peacie,” my mother had said. “Let her be.”

  It was one of the few times my mother interfered on my behalf, and I’d been grateful. “Come over here and light me a cigarette,” she’d said. I’d snuck a little inhale, and my mother had smiled. But then she’d said, “Don’t get started with something you won’t be able to do without.”

  Now Brenda was showing my mother something in a hairstyle magazine. “See? You really should let it get long again, Paige.”

  “It’s too hard to manage,” my mother said. “But I do like that style.” She saw me then and asked, “Oh, good. Is Brooks coming?”

  “After dinner.”

  She nodded, worried-looking. “It’s gotten worse. I don’t know if he can fix it this time.”

  “He’s bringing you a milk shake, and he said how about a TV date.”

  I mumbled this last, and my mother said, “How about a what?”

  “A TV date,” I said.

  My mother and Brenda exchanged glances, and then my mother said slowly, “I guess that would be all right.” Again they exchanged glances.

  Suralee came into the living room. “Hey, Mrs. Dunn,” she said. “Hey, Brenda.” Brenda allowed no one to call her by her last name. She said it reminded her of being a “Mrs.,” something she’d just as soon forget. “Goddamn men,” she said. “Only thing they’re good for is nothing.” But she didn’t mean it. She wanted another man. She talked about it all the time.

  “How’s your mom?” my mother asked Suralee.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Well, you tell her again that if she ever wants to visit, just come on by. Anytime.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

  Noreen would not visit, I knew. She was afraid to visit my mother. She
had said so the first time my mother had invited her, though not in those words. But I knew. It made me sad; my mother needed friends to come to the house and see her in the way that Brenda did. Apart from sunbathing, she never went out. I was hopeful that Noreen would change her mind. Ironically, she needed friends more than my mother did.

  “Can I go over to Suralee’s?” I asked.

  “Be back by dinner,” my mother said, and turned back to the hairstyle magazine. “Pull the sides of my hair back like that and let me see,” she told Brenda.

  I started out of the room, then turned around and spoke quickly. “Oh, and can we have a play in the backyard tomorrow night with refreshments? Just a play?”

  My mother, distracted, said yes, all right. I looked quickly at Suralee, then away. Outside, we’d celebrate our small victory.

  When we passed through the kitchen on the way out the back door, Peacie put her hand on her hip and looked from one of us to the other. “What y’all up to?” she asked. “I know for certain you up to something.”

  “Nothing,” we sang out together.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Suralee said. “You’re not even concentrating!”

  We were in Suralee’s tiny bedroom, sprawled across her pink chenille bedspread, trying to write the play, and I was coming up with exactly nothing. “It’s…I’m worried about something,” I said.

  Suralee turned on her back and sighed. “What?”

  I picked up her autograph hound, empty of signatures but for my own. I stroked its ears and sighed. “I think Brooks is trying to be my mother’s boyfriend.”

  “Ew,” Suralee said. “What do you mean?”

  “He acts goofy around her. He touches her sometimes.”

  Suralee’s eyes widened. “Where?”

  “When they’re watching TV.”

  “No, I mean where does he touch her?”

  “On her hand. And once he put his arm around her. I saw them.”

  “Did he ever kiss her?”

  “No!”

  “How do you know?”

  I thought about this. It seemed to me that it would be a terrible betrayal, for my mother to do something I didn’t know about. Her life was of necessity unnaturally open to me, and I suppose I believed that as it was my duty to bear constant witness to it, it was also my privilege.

  “I’ll bet he does kiss her,” Suralee said, lying back on the bed and tucking her blouse up into the bottom of her bra. “I’ll bet he frenches her. I’m sure he does.”

  “I’m sure he does not! I guess I know my own mother better than you!”

  “Whoa!” Suralee said. “Touchy!”

  I got off her bed and went to stand in front of her vanity table, looked at myself in the mirror. I picked up a new bottle of nail polish. Cutex. “Slightly Peach.” I’d wanted that shade, too. I turned to Suralee, holding the bottle of polish up. “Can I?”

  She pooched out her lips, sulking, considering. Finally, she said, “Yeah. Want me to do you?”

  I came to the edge of the bed and sat down, not looking at her.

  “Why are you all mad?” Suralee asked. “Just ’cause I talked about your mom kissing?”

  “Can we put on a record?”

  Suralee opened her record box, which was decorated with floating notes. “‘Blue Velvet’?”

  “Okay.”

  She put the record on and then came back to sit beside me. She shook the bottle of polish, and I spread my hands out flat on the bed. Suralee bent her head over them and started painting my thumb with slow, careful strokes. “You know, your mom is really pretty, and she’s still young. Don’t you think she—?”

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Oh, all right.” Suralee continued with my nails, then said, “We’d better talk about the plot for the play.”

  “The one where the mom gets killed in a car accident?” I asked.

  Suralee frowned, considering. “No. Too sad. We’ll have a lot of people there.”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “Just more than usual. How about the one with the crazy saleslady?”

  “No,” Suralee said, then raised her head quickly at the sound of her door opening.

  “Hey, girls.” Noreen stood before us in her stocking feet with her sad eyes and her faded lipstick. “What are y’all doing?”

  Suralee wouldn’t answer, I knew; she would never answer obvious questions any more than my mother would.

  “Painting nails,” I said. “‘Slightly Peach.’”

  “Oh, that’s a nice one,” she said. “I just bought her that. I like it so much I might use it myself sometime.”

  “Do you want to come to our play tomorrow night?” I asked. “It’s only twenty-five cents.” Suralee stiffened, but I didn’t care. I was going to invite everyone. The more people, the more money. I would invite Riley Coombs and LaRue. Peacie, of course, I had to invite Peacie, and if I had to invite Peacie, Suralee had to invite her mother.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Noreen said. She turned her head away, scratched at the base of her neck, then moved her fingers up to the top of her scalp, scratching mightily. She did this often, attended to herself as a monkey might, oblivious to whoever was before her. Once, I’d seen her sniff under her arms. She picked at her toes when she watched TV.

  “A new man will be there,” Suralee said in a singsong voice. “And he’s handsome as all get-out. He looks like Elvis.”

  I knew Suralee’s attempt to persuade her mother to come was her natural contrariness—if her mother had said she wanted to come, Suralee would have tried to talk her out of it. But I hoped Noreen would come. I had a certain compassion for Suralee’s mother, the way she did for mine. If Noreen came, she could feast her eyes on a real man, rather than the sad specimens she sometimes went out with: bald or fat or poorly complexioned men who honked for her at the curb and took her to cheap places for dinner and then somewhere to have sex, according to Suralee. “Your mother told you that?” I’d asked, horrified, when Suralee had shared this information, and she had looked pityingly at me.

  “Do you do the laundry in your house?” she’d asked, and I’d said no, Peacie did. “Well,” Suralee said. “I do it in this house. And if you do the laundry, you know.”

  “Know what?” I’d asked. “What do you mean?”

  She’d said never mind, another time.

  “What new man are you talking about?” Noreen asked, and Suralee looked coyly down at my pinky, where she was carefully applying a second coat of nail polish. It looked good.

  “If you come, you’ll see,” Suralee said.

  Her mother laughed. “All right, I’ll come. What’s the play about?”

  “It’s a secret,” Suralee said, and told her mother to get out and shut the door behind her, we had work to do. Then, while I waved my hands in the air for my nails to dry, Suralee changed the record and we talked about possibilities for characters until we finally had two we both liked. “Will LaRue come?” Suralee asked.

  I said I thought he would.

  “Do you think he’d be willing to read a few lines, just a few, at the very end?” she asked.

  I told her yes.

  “Good,” she said. “I have an idea for him. Okay, that’s the cast. Now we need to finalize the plot, and get our lines memorized.” She handed me a tablet and a pencil. “I’ll act the whole play out; you write everything down.”

  I held the pencil just so, and felt inside myself the swell of pride I enjoyed only with Suralee.

  At five-thirty, Noreen, wearing a stained pink silk robe, brought us in bean-and-bacon soup, peanut-butter crackers, and cut-up apples on a TV tray. Folded paper napkins, I noticed, decorated with pink roses. Wasteful. “Why don’t you call home and tell your people you’ll be eating here?” Noreen asked. It was odd, how she referred to Peacie and my mother that way. She didn’t approve of either of them for reasons I felt but did not understand.

  “Would you?” Suralee asked her. “We’re busy.”

  “I don’t
think I should,” Noreen said.

  Suralee looked up at her. “Mom. We’re busy in here.”

  Her mother gently closed the door. “She’ll do it,” Suralee said, and she was so confident I believed her.

  When I arrived home at nine-thirty, my mother was furious.

  “Where were you?” she asked, her voice even lower than usual. She was seated at the kitchen table; behind her, Mrs. Gruder dried the dishes with elaborate care, then noiselessly put them into the cupboard.

  “Where’s Brooks?” I asked. She wouldn’t do much if he was there.

  “Brooks has gone home. Answer me. Where were you?”

  “What?!” I said. “I was at Suralee’s!”

  “And how exactly was I supposed to know you were there?”

  “Mrs. Halloway called you!”

  “Mrs. Halloway did not call me.”

  I sat at the table opposite her. “Well, that’s not my fault. She was supposed to!”

  “It was your fault,” my mother said. “You are responsible for you. If someone says they’re going to do something for you, it’s up to you to make sure they do it. I was worried about you. I had no idea where you were!”

  “Well, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to figure it out.”

  “Give me your finger,” my mother said.

  I stared at her.

  “Give me your finger!”

  I put my left pointer up to her mouth, and she bit me. I drew in a quick breath but did not cry out.

  “Is the skin broken?” she asked.

  I looked. “No.”

  “Go wash it out anyway.”

  Mrs. Gruder, her face hanging low in sorrow, moved to help me, and my mother said, “Eleanor, don’t help her. Let her do it herself.”

  Mrs. Gruder watched me as I washed my hands. I knew that she was in awe of the power my mother held over me. Suralee, too. More than once, Suralee had said, “Why do you just let her bite you like that? Why do you put your finger there? What’s she going to do if you just walk away?”