What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  It was a little unsettling not to have my mother there with us; the table was unbalanced. There was not a child and a parent on each side, as we were used to. Our father sat on my side, and though I was grateful for this, I felt bad for Sharla, who seemed deserted. It was also too quiet. My mother was the one who always initiated conversation, and then did what she needed to keep it going. A silent table was the sign of a lazy hostess, she always said. I felt obliged to substitute for her. I turned to my father, cleared my throat, and asked, “Do you like your job?”

  “Do I like my job?” my father said. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Sharla asked.

  He looked at her. “I mean … Well, I guess I don’t really see the sense in thinking about things like whether I like my job. I like the people I work with. I like the view from my office window. But I don’t think about whether I like the job itself.”

  “I’ll bet everybody else knows if they like their job!” I said, although I had no idea.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You just do it, that’s all. You have to do it. You do it so you can buy Dairy Queen.”

  I smiled.

  “Right?”

  “Yup,” I said. And then, “But what do you do at your job?”

  “Talks on the phone and goes to meetings,” Sharla said quickly. She had once gone to work for a morning with my father. I had been so ill with a summer cold my mother feared pneumonia; and at the last minute one weekday morning, she decided to take me to the doctor. My father took Sharla with him to work. She never let me forget it.

  “Talks on the phone about what?” I persisted. “What does he talk about?”

  “Insurance,” my father said.

  I was starting to get angry. “Yes, but what about insurance? Like, someone calls and they say … well, what do they say?”

  “How about a horse bite?” my father said, moving his hand toward me.

  I sighed, pulled my leg away from him.

  “Well, then, how about walking on your head?”

  “No!” I could just see myself in front of all the Dairy Queen customers as my father turned me upside down and held me by my ankles. He hadn’t done this in years, but you never knew. “No,” I said again.

  “Well, it’ll have to be a horse bite, then.” He reached out and squeezed just above my knee. I howled in agonized pleasure.

  On the way home, my father told Sharla and me he was giving us a raise in our allowance. He was going to up us to a dollar a week.

  “I think I should get more,” Sharla said.

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m older.”

  “Do you do more work?”

  She stayed quiet.

  “No, she does not,” I said.

  “Yes, I do!”

  “Nuh-uh, you do less.”

  “Keep it up and I’ll give you both a pay cut instead of a raise,” my father said. Sharla and I stopped talking, but I felt her fingers pinching my thigh. I did nothing back. I was driving. I was thirty-five years old and behind the wheel of a car like Jasmine’s. I owned a cheetah and sold perfume at a fancy store. My husband was a millionaire and a veterinarian, which was convenient, considering the cheetah.

  When we got home, my father went into the living room, bent down, and kissed my mother’s forehead. She was lying on the sofa, eyes closed. But when she felt his touch she reached up and put her hand on his shoulder.

  He stood, turned toward us. “Want to go get something for me?” he asked. “Both of you?”

  We nodded, dumb with shame and hope. He was going to kiss her. On the lips. That’s how they did it, they always found a way for us not to see. Of course we did see anyway, sometimes. It paid to practice the stealth of Indians.

  “Go in my top dresser drawer and you’ll find a little brown envelope. Bring it down here, please.”

  We headed upstairs, taking our time, as we knew we were supposed to do.

  I went to the right side of the dresser, Sharla to the left. I found nothing but handkerchiefs in the top drawer, and so I pulled open the drawer below it. There were many socks, all folded neatly and organized by color, but again no envelope. I rooted around a little, felt something, pulled it out, and gasped. Rubbers. The same yellow kind Jasmine had. I stuffed them back in among the socks, then stood staring down.

  “Shut that!” Sharla said. She had opened the T-shirt drawer on the opposite side of the dresser, and now she pulled out the little brown envelope that lay on top. “This is what he meant!” she said. “It’s right here where he said it was! What are you digging around for?”

  “Did you see what I saw?” I asked.

  She looked away, closed the T-shirt drawer. “You were looking in the wrong place.”

  “Yes, but did you—”

  “Shut up!” She leaned over, slammed the sock drawer shut.

  I could have reported her. We weren’t allowed to say that. I think she knew I wouldn’t say anything, though.

  When we came back downstairs, my father was in his chair with the newspaper, my mother sitting up with a magazine. But it was clear they’d been kissing, all right; his lips were stained pink, and both of them had messy hair. My father pulled two silver dollars out of the brown envelope and gave one to Sharla and one to me. Then, smiling, he gave one to my mother. “Thank you!” she said. She looked as pleased as we were. I knew she would put the money in her “bank”—she kept a mayonnaise jar in the laundry room and filled it with change she found in the sofa. Periodically, she would convert it into paper money and then store that in an old purse she kept in her closet. She said she was saving for new carpeting.

  Later that night, we played Monopoly and I won, because everybody underestimates the value of Baltic and Mediterranean. It was no fun beating my parents, because they wanted me to win. But wiping out Sharla’s funds, that was satisfying. Sometimes when she lost she would cry. Not tonight though. Tonight she forced a yawn and said she was tired of playing, anyway; thank God the game was over.

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” my mother said.

  “I’m not.”

  My mother sighed.

  “I’m not! If I had said, ‘God, I’m happy the game is over,’ that would have been taking His name in vain. But I was just thanking Him.”

  My mother stared at her. Then, “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Fine. So long as you know the difference.”

  After we went to bed, Sharla and I didn’t talk about what I’d found in my father’s drawer. Neither of us spoke at all. I thought perhaps each of us was waiting for the other to bring it up. Instead, we both fell asleep. In the early morning light, I lay awake, wondering if I’d only dreamed it. When finally I heard the rustling sounds of Sharla waking up, I asked, “Did you see what I found in Dad’s drawer last night?”

  “So what? Everybody has them who does sex.”

  “You knew they were there? You’ve seen them before?”

  “No. But everybody has them.”

  I wasn’t so sure. But I let it go in the way that you decide you don’t really want something you can’t reach.

  I look at my watch. Halfway to San Francisco. I wonder how Sharla will look. Last time we met, I hadn’t seen her in six months, and I was surprised by a new short-short hairdo she had. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me about it. “Didn’t I,” she said. “I was sure I had. Wait—I did! You said you were thinking of doing it yourself!”

  “I did not!” I said. “I would never do that!” And then, quickly, “Not that it doesn’t look good on you.” It did look good on her, from certain angles. But on the whole, I thought it made her look older. Of course, we are older. This is something that is always sneaking up and shocking me. Sharla said recently that she could tell how much older she was getting not by how many wrinkles she had, but how many regrets.

  “That’s a pretty grim way of
thinking,” I said, when she told me.

  “It’s true, though, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I don’t really have that many regrets. I really like my life. I like the choices I’ve made.”

  “Oh come on,” she said. “Don’t you regret not going to Woodstock now more than ever?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I should have gone to Tahiti for the winter with Dennis Erickson that one time, too. I really should have. He bought me a ticket and everything.”

  “We should have done a lot more dangerous things.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And we also should have … I don’t know. I guess as I get older I feel more … generous in my heart. You know?”

  I said nothing.

  “Ginny?” she said gently, and I knew exactly where she was headed.

  “I think some things are too hard to forgive,” I said. “And I think some things don’t deserve to be forgiven.” I felt as though I were saying something I’d said so many times that the words had lost their meaning entirely. And yet I also felt I meant them.

  I wonder now—chilly thought—if some of Sharla’s longing to forgive, to come to terms, has to do with the fact that she knew even then that she was going to get seriously ill.

  I look at my watch again.

  My mother said she found the measure of time interesting. Another lie. I’m sure she found it terrifying.

  The next Correspondence Day, there was no watching Walt Disney World until our letters were complete. I sat at the dining-room table jiggling my heel, chewing at the side of my thumb, staring wide-eyed into space. I had absolutely nothing to tell my grandparents, even though this was my week to write to my father’s parents, who were easier to write to because they were less critical than my mother’s parents. I’d selected the pale-blue stationery and black fountain pen, opened with the standard, “Hi! How are you???” but nothing further had come to me. It had been my practice to describe meals we’d eaten during the past week, but I was growing tired of that, mainly because the menus lately did not vary enough to make for good copy. I’d told my grandparents about Jasmine moving in, and there was nothing new to say about that, either—at least to them. I’d said I was looking forward to school in the last letter I’d sent them, though this was very much untrue.

  There were certain things about school that I enjoyed: buying supplies, sniffing newly mimeographed papers, writing on the blackboard, staring into the teachers’ lounge when I passed by it. I liked blowing straw wrappers across cafeteria tables. I also enjoyed sharpening pencils and watching movies in classrooms with the shades pulled down. Other than that, I hated it. I thought school was an unhealthy thing for a growing child, what with the way it demanded shoes on hot days, and wearing dresses, and sitting still at a wooden desk for hours at a time. With the exception of science, I did not find any of my subjects particularly relevant, and I stared out the windows in every classroom with a sense of desperation that often made me feel like crying. I could only bear to look at the teachers if there was something interesting about their outfit or hairdo or face, and there rarely was. On the day my English teacher, Mr. Purdy, cut himself shaving and wore an intriguing arrangement of tiny Band-Aids, I watched him for the length of the entire class. I knew some kids loved their teachers, and I couldn’t begin to understand why; to me, they were only tall cellmates.

  Still, I did well enough in school, earning mostly Bs and the occasional A. This was largely because I did homework with an intense kind of concentration that I did not display inside the walls of Foster Elementary. I liked doing homework because Sharla liked doing it—we would lie on our beds after school with books and papers scattered all around us. I would watch the precise way Sharla turned the pages of her textbook, and I would imitate her, down to turning exactly when she did. You licked your finger delicately before turning a page, then lifted it from the bottom right-hand corner. It was important to turn the page slowly and then smooth the center of the book with the flat of your hand. I read my pages so that I would have something to do until it was time to turn them again. Sharla read much more slowly than I; therefore I often read a page twice, or even three times. She never noticed my turning pages exactly when she did; I thought this was a very pleasant miracle.

  My mother, who was not daydreaming like I was, licked an envelope, stamped it, and put it on the bottom of her little pile. Then she capped her pen and pushed her chair back from the table.

  “Are you done already?” I asked.

  “We’ve been here for over forty minutes.”

  “Who’d you write to?” Sharla asked. My mother corresponded with a number of relatives as well as friends she’d had since high school. It was always interesting to hear her talk about what she’d written; often, of course, her news featured us.

  “Oh, Sandy Wertheimer,” she said. “And Mom and Dad, of course. I told them about your recitals coming up. And the forts you’ve been building—my goodness, they’re wonderful. Did either of you mention them?”

  “Who else?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Who else did you write to? You have three envelopes.”

  She pulled her pile toward her, smiled. “Such a busybody. Who are you writing to?”

  I sighed. “Grandma and Grandpa. They’re the only ones I ever write to. There isn’t anybody else to write to.”

  “Well, finish up,” she said. “Then I’ll walk these to the corner and mail them.” This was something my mother had started doing recently. She used to clothespin letters outside for our mailman to take the next day, but lately she’d started going to the mailbox, three blocks away, at night. My father had initially offered to go with her, but she refused, saying she liked the “thinking time.” “What do you think about?” he’d asked, and she’d said, “Oh, this and that; you know.”

  “Recipes, I’ll bet,” my father had said the first night she went out without him. He was standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, watching her walk away.

  “What about recipes?” I’d asked. Sharla and I were right beside him. “Nothing,” he’d said. “I was just … nothing.”

  My mother stood. “I’m going to go get my sweater. I’ll be down in a little while to get your letters.”

  The promise of imminent release spurred me into action. I quickly wrote a paragraph about the last four dinners I could remember, describing in some detail the delicate suspension of fruit cocktail in the cherry Jell-O that had served as a salad last night. I liked Jasmine’s idea of a salad much better: one afternoon I’d found her sitting down to a Caesar salad for lunch. I’d never heard of that, and I told her so.

  “Really?” she’d said. And then she’d shown me how she had rubbed the cut edge of a clove of garlic over the inside of the big wooden bowl that was on her table. She described for me all the ingredients that went into the dressing as though she were reciting a love poem to someone in the dark. She picked up a large narrow leaf of lettuce, pale green, which she ate with her fingers; then she sucked them off. She shared the salad with me, encouraged me to eat it the same way. I did, though it embarrassed me. But it was delicious, the residue of that dressing licked from my own salty flesh.

  My mother came back to the table, sat down to wait. I ended my letter with a wish that my grandparents would come and visit for a long time—mainly so that then I would not have to write to them. I licked the envelope, stamped it, and handed it to my mother. I could hardly wait to live in my own house, where I would never write one letter to anyone, ever.

  “Sharla?” my mother said. “Are you finished?”

  Sharla folded her letter—two pages, front and back!— put it in an envelope, and handed it to my mother. I hated the teacher’s-pet look on her face, I hated it when she got this way. She folded her hands and rested them on top of the table. Below it, I assumed her feet were lined up exactly even with each other.

  “What did you write about?” I asked. Four pages!
/>   “What I want for Christmas.”

  “It’s August!”

  “So?”

  “Isn’t that cheating?” I asked my mother.

  “It’s fine.” She smiled at Sharla. “I assume, however, that you talked about other things, as well. Such as Grandma and Grandpa, I assume you asked about them.”

  Sharla nodded gravely.

  My mother nodded, too. Then, “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  “You cheated,” I told Sharla, as soon as I heard the door close behind my mother.

  “I did not.”

  “Huh. Anybody can write about what they want for Christmas.”

  “You’re just mad because you didn’t think of it.”

  This was true. Therefore I changed the subject. “Who else did Mom write to?” It had occurred to me that the letter she would not show me had something to do with my birthday. It wasn’t far away, and I was beginning to think everything that happened, more or less, had something to do with it. I had yet to make a formal list of things that I wanted, but my mother might be sending away for some wonderful surprise. Last time she had done that, I’d gotten a monogrammed towel set, which I loved so much I wouldn’t use it.

  “She wrote to Jasmine,” Sharla said, and yawned, stretching her arms up high over her head. “I saw when she addressed the envelope.”

  “Why? She lives next door!”

  Sharla shrugged. “She’s not here now. Maybe Mom had something to tell her.”

  “She’ll be back in a couple days!”

  “I know.” She stood. “I’m going to make a cake for Dad. Want to help?”

  I stood, too, pushed my chair in. “Yeah. For Mom and Dad, you mean.”

  “No. Just for Dad.”

  I stopped, stared at her. “Why not Mom, too?”

  “Do you want to help or not?”

  “Yeah. Dibs on the frosting part.”

  “Half. You can frost the bottom half.”

  “Can I break the egg?” I asked, when we were in the kitchen.

  Sharla opened the refrigerator, handed me an egg. We worked in silence. I wanted to ask Sharla something, but I didn’t know what. When our mother came back, she asked what we were doing, and Sharla told her. “Ah,” she said. “How nice! It’s for … nothing, then?”