Talk Before Sleep

by Elizabeth Berg

  L.D. is a football-player-sized woman I’ve never seen in anything but checked flannel shirts and bib overalls—even on hot summer days. Her only variation is in the caps she wears—John Deere for dress up, sports teams for everyday. She is fearless, plain and simple. Ruth once said about L.D. that she appears to walk through life with her mouth wide open, taking in everything in her path. “I mean, she’s a real life-eater,” Ruth said. And then, when I snorted, “I guess!” she hit me, saying, “She’s the best. You should get to know her. She has incredible wisdom. She watches things, and she notices things you’d pass right over.” Then, when I looked hurt, she added, “I mean, that anyone would pass over.”

  Ruth has friends she goes to bars to hear country -and-western music with, friends who invite her to chic little cocktail parties and openings, old college roommates who visit her for the weekend and play Scrabble. She rows on rivers, skis down mountains, sails on oceans, bikes down dirt roads for miles. Well, she used to. And anything she did, she had matching friends to do it with. Once, after she started chemotherapy, she called to tell me about a bike ride she’d taken. “We had to stop,” she said. “My hair was flying off my head and causing visibility problems.”

  “Was it?” I asked.

  “What,” she said, laughing, “causing visibility problems?”

  “No. Was it falling off?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what happens. Remember when they told us that would happen?”

  I remembered. But I thought she’d be standing over her bathroom sink, weeping. I should have known better. I should have known she’d be out on a bicycle, laughing.

  “Are you really okay?” I’d asked.

  “What do you mean? I mean, it doesn’t hurt.”

  I was silent.

  “It’ll grow back,” she said. “This wasn’t unexpected. Right?”

  I put my hand to my own hair, shaped a ponytail. “Yes,” I said. “Right.”

  I have a bunch of rocks on my kitchen windowsill that I collected for their beauty, for their silent perseverance. After I finished talking to Ruth, I went to look at them. Then I picked one up and squeezed it.

  L.D. is knocking at the door. You can tell because the apartment is reverberating with the sound of it. She lets herself into the hallway, comes into the bedroom, nods to me, and then to Ruth. “Get the fuck out of bed,” she says.

  “Can’t. I’m really tired, L.D.”

  L.D. nods, pulls out a small package from her pocket. “For you,” she says. Ruth opens it and finds pearl earrings, studs.

  “Put them on,” L.D. says, settling herself down on the floor beside Ruth’s bed.

  “Oh, they’re beautiful,” Ruth says. “Thank you, L.D.”

  “I thought they were, you know … you,” L.D. says, then turns to me fiercely. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “Uh-huh.”

  And they are. They glow prettily against Ruth’s earlobes. They are just the right size. I wonder what L.D. said when she bought them. Probably nothing. Probably she just pointed, and the clerk wrapped them up fast.

  “We ordered out some dinner,” Ruth tells L.D. “Can you stay?”

  “What’d you get?”

  “Lobster and french fries. Want some?”

  “It’s a start,” L.D. says. Then, stretching, she asks Ruth, “Have you been outside today?”

  Ruth shakes her head no.

  “Put your coat on,” L.D. says.

  “I’m not kidding, L.D., I’m tired,” Ruth says. “I don’t think I can do the steps.”

  “I’ll do them for you,” L.D. says. She stands up, swoops Ruth up off the bed, carries her to her closet. Ruth, laughing, pulls her coat off the hanger and wraps it around herself, and L.D. starts downstairs. “Don’t come,” L.D. says over her shoulder to me.

  “I’m not,” I say, though I suddenly ache to.

  “We need to talk,” L.D. says. “Nothing against you.”

  “I understand,” I say, and I do. It’s hard to be private with Ruth anymore; anyone can and does show up at any time. But L.D., in her usual way, mows over obstacles. She wants to be alone with Ruth. And so she will be.

  I watch from the bedroom window as L.D. carefully sets Ruth on her feet outside. There is a thin layer of snow on the ground already and L.D. is making a tiny snowman. I can only see Ruth’s back, but I believe she is smiling. Then L.D. is standing close to her, embracing her, and saying things in her ear. Ruth pats L.D.’s back and her hand looks even smaller than usual. Then L.D. turns her toward the door, smacks her butt, and they are on their way back upstairs.

  The bit of fresh air has colored Ruth’s face, and her eyes look the way they used to—ready for action, in on the joke. She was right to call L.D.

  Just as we settle Ruth back in her bed, we hear Sarah coming up the stairs. She calls out hello, goes into the kitchen. There is the sound of paper bags rustling, then soft swearing. All of Ruth’s friends are terrible—or wonderful, depending on how you look at it—swearers. I go into the kitchen, and find Sarah standing back from the kitchen table, hands on her hips. “Look at all those disgusting antennae sticking out,” she says. “I hate them. I should have had them beheaded.”

  “L.D.’s here,” I say.

  “Oh, okay,” she says. We call L.D. and she comes into the kitchen, takes a beer from the refrigerator, drinks it down, and then cheerfully begins to twist the heads off the lobsters. Sarah and I don’t watch. We set places on Ruth’s bedroom floor: lay a tablecloth down, put a vase of flowers in the center of it. Ruth won’t eat without them. Also, the dishes must not match. “Stupidest idea I ever heard of,” Ruth once told me. “Don’t you want to see something different when you look around the table? All chicken breasts, all on the same yellow plates. Ridiculous!”

  We use pottery dishes: plates, bowls, cups. The colors are pale blues, earthy browns, off-whites. There are leaf imprints, fragile paintings of weeds leaning into the wind, abstract smears of paint that seem to change meanings depending on your mood. Naturally, no two things are alike.

  L.D. appears, holding a tray full of decapitated lobsters. She sets them down, picks one up and cracks its back. “Where’s the broccoli?” she asks, looking over our spread. “She’s supposed to eat broccoli and carrots all the time. How the fuck can she get better eating french fries?”

  Sarah and I steal a look at each other. It is a careful thing, full of guilt. Only yesterday Sarah told Ruth she should start thinking about where she wants to be buried. I have suggested she might want to write something to be read at her funeral. Because no matter how often I’ve let hope rise up in me, I don’t really believe Ruth can make it. But L.D. rejects the notion of Ruth not overcoming all of this. She brings her Chinese herbs, books about miracles, crystals to wear around her neck, exotic broths. She insists that Ruth be outside for a time every day, to suck in great mouthfuls of air, to feel her feet on the earth, thus staking her claim to it. Who knows what the right way is? Every time I see L.D., I think of a story I read to Meggie when she was younger. It was based on a Chinese myth about how a hole in the sky got mended. I always got an image, reading that story, of a circle of black-haired women wearing beautiful red silk kimonos touched here and there with gold. They were sewing and smiling; humming soft, high songs to themselves. They held shiny silver needles, long and curved slightly upward, and they wove them delicately in and out of the air. What did they use for thread? Only their belief. And guess what? The sky held. Is holding still. Just look.

  It was Indian summer, late October. Ruth called and suggested we have a picnic. It was Saturday; both our husbands were home; none of us had plans. “Should we let everybody corne?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I smiled. “Maybe we’d have fun.”

  “Come on, I just want to go and find a beautiful place and relax.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come get you. What should I bring?”

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Wine, che
ese, bread, fruit, those cream-cheese brownies from the bakery. A blanket.”

  “Oh, fine. And what are you bringing?”

  “Really good gossip.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. As long as it’s fair.”

  I told my husband I was going out with Ruth and he said, “Good. Because I don’t want to do anything today. Stay gone a long time. Go to a fabric store—I’ll see you at dinner.”

  He was both kidding and not, assuming a man’s usual position of benign inscrutability. We had minor tiffs almost every weekend, because I wanted to go places and he wanted to relax. It was a common enough domestic problem, but it was beginning to feel like more than that to me. I’d told Ruth that sometimes I thought Joe hated me, too, that in fact on my darker days I thought all husbands hated all wives, that it was a natural part of any marriage that lasted more than two weeks.

  “It’s not just husbands and wives,” she’d said. “Men just can’t like women. Even if they wanted to like us—which they don’t—they’re too jealous. They want to be like us, and they can’t be. And they know they need us more than we need them, and it drives them crazy. Much of this, of course, is subconscious.” Then, looking at me, “It’s true!”

  “Oh, let’s just get an apartment together and be roommates,” I’d said.

  “Do you want to?” she asked quickly.

  I laughed, embarrassed. “No, I … was joking.”

  “Ah,” she’d said. “I see.”

  Eric answered the door when I came to get Ruth. He invited me into the living room, then called up the stairs that I was there. “Going out for a picnic, huh?” he asked.

  I nodded. He was a powerful man, in the bad sense of the word. He made my hands feel huge, made my voice disappear.

  “I guess I just don’t much like picnics,” he said.

  I felt a momentary twinge of annoyance—had she asked him first?

  Ruth came downstairs, smiled at me, then turned to Eric. “We’ll be back,” she said. Her voice chilled me. There was nothing dramatic you could point to—it wasn’t cruel, or sarcastic, or on the edge of anything. But there was a tension you could feel—not only in her voice, but in the space between the two of them. It was nearly unbearable.

  When we got into my car, I said, “Jesus, it’s thick between the two of you.”

  “What is?”

  “The tension, my God, Ruth.”

  She lowered the visor to look in the little mirror there. “Something’s in my eye,” she said. “It hurts like hell.”

  “You want me to wait?”

  “No,” she said, looking back at the house. “Go.”

  We found a place by the river. The leaves were heartbreaking—too beautiful. I collected a pile while Ruth laid out the blanket and our food. Then I brought them back, stacked them neatly beside me and put a rock on top of them.

  “What are you going to do with those?” Ruth asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I do this every year, collect some. I just want them.”

  “It’s outrageous, isn’t it?” Ruth asked.

  “What?”

  “Fall. It’s outrageous! I really belong in California, but I stay in Wisconsin for the leaves. I mean, don’t you just want to stand in the middle of all this and scream, ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute!’”

  I lay down on the blanket, sighed. “Yes. Exactly. I take walks with Meggie and I keep saying ‘Look at that! Look at that!” And she rolls her eyes and says, “I know, Mom.’ She’s so young, and she’s already a cynic. But I can’t help it. I want to make sure she sees! All I do is embarrass her. She and Joe both think I’m too emotional. They think I’m sort of crazy.”

  “Show me,” Ruth said. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  I handed her the pile of leaves and watched as she looked at them. She held them up to the light, turning them this way and that, nodding. “This is a wonderful collection,” she said. “You got the best ones here.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and something inside of me stopped looking down.

  “You’re welcome.” She picked up the bottle of wine, pulled the cork. “Want some?”

  I held my cup out. And as I drank, I thought about the kind of internal relaxation, the wide relief you feel when someone says, “I know,” and you believe them. I’d never had a friend like Ruth. I was shy; I had trouble trusting people; and I’d always spent most all of my time alone. I liked the immediate and easy intimacy that Ruth and I shared, the way we seemed to see so many things alike. I thought about how good it was to know I’d finally found a friend I would have for the rest of my life. We’d already decided that when our husbands kicked, we’d open a nursing home for hip women. “No rocking chairs,” Ruth had said. “No fucking bingo.”

  When we were through eating, we lay head to head under the canopy of trees to watch the drifting leaves, the acrobatic squirrels, to listen to the rushing sounds of the river. We were quiet for a long time, half asleep, and then Ruth said, “I met my first lover in the art class I teach.”

  I said nothing at first, then asked, tentatively, “He was your student?”

  “Yes. He had intense blue eyes, and he sat in the back so he could act up. That alone made him nearly irresistible. He also painted differently from anything I’d ever seen. He said he’d had no experience, but I don’t know … Anyway, there was this terrific attraction that neither of us did anything about until the last day of class.”

  “How tasteful of you.”

  “Well, I don’t know if anything would have happened then, either,” she said. “It was just that we were standing in the parking lot after class, and I just all of a sudden … I said, Oh, God, I’m just crazy about you,’ and threw my arms around him and kissed him for about an hour and a half. My purse got stuck between us, and we were both trying to act like it wasn’t there. He was kind of upset at first, he knew I was married and everything, but then he said something like, ‘Oh, I’ve thought about this so many times, do you know how much I’ve wanted to …’ and he flung my purse to the ground and grabbed my ass and kissed me again and it was all so tempestuous and wonderful.”

  I felt a starring in my stomach. “So did you … go back to his place?”

  She sighed. “No. We didn’t know what to do. It was weird. We exchanged phone numbers, and then we waited a while. I think he called me a few times, I called him, and then we met for lunch and then we went back to his place. I stayed until I had to go home for Michael.”

  “Wasn’t it hard?” I asked. “I mean, to shift gears like that?”

  “Yeah, it was really hard. I felt terrible, giving Michael a snack on his little dinosaur plate, looking at his schoolwork. His teacher had given him a sticker on one of his papers and I thought, What would she think? And the worst part was that night Eric wanted to make love.”

  “Did you?”

  “More or less. I mean, I’m sure nothing seemed different to him. For it me, it was awful. But after the first he, it gets so much easier. It’s disappointing, in a way, how easy it is.”

  “Are you still seeing him?” I asked.

  Ruth sat up, shook her hair back over her shoulders. “Nah. He was three guys ago.” She looked at me. “Is this terrible? It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s just that at some point I made a conscious decision that I was not going to be without passion in my life. I need it like water. And I’m not really promiscuous, honest.”

  I smiled.

  “I’m not!”

  “I believe you!”

  She looked my face up and down. “Did you ever think about having an affair?”

  “I guess everybody does,” I said.

  “No, not everybody does.”

  “Well, I have.”

  “Why haven’t you done it?”

  “Well, God, think of it. Think of all that could happen if you got caught.”

  “If the only reason you’re not doing it is because you think yo
u’ll get caught, you might as well do it,” Ruth said. She bit into an apple, stopped chewing to say, “Really.”

  “That’s not the only reason I don’t do it,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “What are the other reasons?”

  I said nothing.

  “You won’t get caught,” she said. “I can promise you that. I’ve been doing this for six years, Ann. It doesn’t take much intelligence to not get caught. Although, at first, you really wish you would.” She looked down to trace a design in the dirt. “You have this idea that maybe it could help.” She looked up, smiled bitterly, then smoothed her hand over her drawing to erase it.

  We are finished eating. Laid out on Ruth’s floor are the remains of our meal. There are broccoli stalks, courtesy of L.D., who went out and got that as well as the makings for hollandaise sauce. There are ravaged orange-red lobster shells lying in a steep pile, and gigantic bowls with sticky pools of leftover ice cream at the bottom. L.D. ate an amount that could most kindly be called inspirational and now, satisfied, leans against the wall picking her teeth with a matchbook cover. Sarah, long legs silkily crossed, is sitting in a chair by Ruth’s bed, idly flipping through a magazine. I am stretched out on the bed beside Ruth, my jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, even my bra unhooked. “I’m sick,” I groan.

  L.D. snorts. “What a wimp.”

  “I’m not a wimp!”

  “Yes, you are,” Ruth says.

  Sarah puts down the magazine, looks at her watch, stands up and stretches. “I’ve got to go,” she sighs. She leans over to kiss Ruth. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She nods to L.D.; then, as she is pulling on her coat, asks, “What does L.D. stand for, anyway? I never heard you say.”