What We Keep

by Elizabeth Berg

  But then the toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, and someone walked down the hall. I heard my parents’ bedroom door close softly. Now they would talk awhile, they always did: the soft rise and fall of their voices had always sounded to me like a lullaby; I rocked slowly to it in my bed, sometimes. I listened intently, heard nothing; listened harder, heard nothing still. I watched the clock until ten minutes had passed, then pulled off my nightgown, snuck down the stairs, and went out into the night.

  Wayne stood up when he saw me coming, held out a hand, and I took it. We walked toward the woods, saying nothing. When we reached the tepee, Wayne went in and I followed.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  I nodded, felt my breath catch on a jag in my throat.

  “Do you want me to start, or do you want to?”

  I shrugged.

  He pulled me close to him, lowered his face toward mine. “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s better that way.”

  “I want to see.”

  “You’ll see,” he said. “Close your eyes.” And then, softer, “Close them.”

  I did. And I felt his breath on my face, then his mouth pressing down on mine. The effect of such absolute intimacy made me feel jerked from soft black into bright white, from my own backyard into someplace I’d never imagined. I felt as though I were drowning, unable to rise up from under his lips or his invisible spirit, which felt bigger than mine, and stronger. He ground his hips into me. It hurt, and I pulled away. “That’s enough!”

  He stood still. His breath came quick, as though he’d been running.

  “That’s all I want to do,” I said.

  He nodded, sat down.

  I sat beside him, stared straight ahead, breathed in once, twice. Then I pulled his face toward me again, closed my eyes, and found his mouth. This time, I relaxed; and I thought if I wanted to, I could die a good death this very moment, float up as my whole self in my red shorts and plaid shirt and bare feet, right into heaven. Wayne’s arms tightened around my waist; we lay down smoothly. I could smell the earth and feel it beneath me, too: other arms, in a way; just as welcome.

  We kissed again, then again; and then I heard the sound of someone walking, and froze. “Just keep still,” Wayne whispered. “They won’t see us. Keep quiet.”

  I did, but I kept my eyes open. And what I saw through the door of the tepee was my mother, standing in the backyard, dressed in her nightgown and slippers. She was talking softly, saying something I couldn’t make out. I looked for someone near her, but saw no one; it appeared she was talking to herself. She quieted, then held still, lifted her chin as though she were being addressed by someone above her. Then, unbelievably, she began flapping her arms like wings, and walking about in circles. I was horribly embarrassed. I turned to Wayne, who was quietly watching. “She’s never done this,” I whispered. “She has never done this.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know what she’s doing!”

  He shrugged. “She’s not doing anything. She’s just goofing around.”

  I looked back at her. She was still now, facing Jasmine’s house. And then she walked toward it, disappeared into the darkness.

  I cleared my throat, laughed a little. And then I lay down, covered my face with my hands. I felt Wayne leaning over me; he was trying to pry my hands off my face. “Ginny,” he said.

  “No!” I kept my face covered. I wanted to talk to Sharla. I needed my father.

  “Hey, Ginny,” Wayne said. “Look! Quick!”

  I pulled my hands off my face.

  “It’s me,” he said, smiling.

  I smiled back in spite of myself. “I know.”

  “Come on. Let’s go outside.” We went around in back of the tepee, sat on the ground.

  He picked a blade of grass, then pulled gently at it as though he were persuading it to stretch. “They just act crazy sometimes,” he said. “Mothers. It’s just that most people never see them acting that way—they do it alone. If you hadn’t been out here with me, you wouldn’t have seen it either.”

  “I’ll bet your mother never acts like that,” I said.

  “My mother …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” He laid the piece of grass across the palm of his hand, blew it away. Then, “Hey,” he said. “You want to see a magic trick?”

  “I don’t know. Sure.”

  “Give me something,” he said.

  I handed him a twig.

  “No,” he said. “Something that means something to you.”

  I looked down at the pearl ring on my hand, then up at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “That.”

  The ring had been my mother’s when she was a child, and her mother’s before that. I loved it, and since I’d been given it, I’d never taken it off; I feared misplacing it. But I handed it to Wayne, then covered the newly naked spot with my other fingers, protecting it.

  Wayne pulled a small box from his pocket, put the ring inside it. Then he shook it, and I could hear the ring moving about. He opened the box, showed me the ring lying there.

  “Okay?” he said.

  I nodded.

  He closed the box again, began moving it slowly about. “The earth is a strange and wondrous place,” he said. “Think of all you can’t understand. I mean, even … look up at the sky.”

  I looked at the box. I wanted the ring back.

  “No,” he said. “Trust me. Look up at the sky.”

  I looked up.

  “How did those stars get there?” he asked.

  “God.”

  He laughed. “Who’s God?”

  I couldn’t believe he had said this. I feared, momentarily, for his life: lightning. A small flood. A boy heart attack, Wayne lying on his stomach, his hands reaching out uselessly, his face purplish blue. I said loudly, “What do you mean who’s God, God is God.” I waited; nothing happened. Well. I had saved us.

  I looked again at the box. Wayne shook it and I heard the reassuring rattle of the ring. “Sometimes you see something that isn’t there,” he said. “And sometimes …” He put his hand over the lid of the box. “You don’t see something that is there.” He opened the box. It was empty.

  I burst into tears, surprising myself. “Give it back!”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “don’t cry!”

  “I’m not crying.”

  A moment. I snuffled, wiped at my nose with the back of my hand. “I’m not!”

  “You want your ring back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. All right.” He passed his hand slowly back over the box. “I am calling on all my powers,” he said, “to brrrriiiing back the rrriiiing.”

  He opened the box, and there the ring was. I snatched it up, put it back on my finger, touched it once, twice. Then I asked, “Is this the same one?”

  He nodded, lay down, closed his eyes.

  I looked carefully. The ring was indeed the same one—there was the bent prong that my mother had said we needed to get fixed.

  Now I was glad I’d kissed him; he was amazing; I wanted to kiss him again.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “Magic.”

  “No, really. How did you do it?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Ginny. It’s the magician’s code. But I can tell you I did it when you weren’t paying attention. That’s the first thing you learn, to distract the audience. Have them look away. Patter.”

  “What’s patter?”

  “It’s all the things you say. You know, you just talk, and people get distracted, they don’t see what’s happening right in front of them.”

  “It seems too easy.”

  “It is easy. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because people want to be fooled.”

  I thought about this. I supposed it was true.

  I lay down beside him, moved my hand to be closer to his, then closed my eyes, willing hi
m to pick up that hand and hold it. I liked everything about this nearness to a boy, liked the foreign, lemony smell of him, the pitch of his voice, the comb lines in his hair, the blunt cut of his fingernails. Being with him, I was doing so many things I had never done before. I felt a jangly nervousness, as though I were at the starting block of a race going somewhere I knew absolutely nothing about. And yet I also felt at peace. Sure of something.

  Wayne looked over at me. “Ginny? I need to tell you something. I want to. Jasmine? She’s my mother.”

  I opened my eyes, stared at him. A clock inside me stopped ticking.

  “Her real name is Carol MacAvoy.”

  “Nuh-huh,” I said. People want to be fooled.

  “Yes. It is. But you can’t tell anyone. She’s hiding from my father. He’s … It’s better if she’s not with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he … won’t let her do things. She has to stay in the house. And … Well, I’ve seen him hit her.”

  “He hits her?”

  Wayne nodded.

  “You’re just kidding, right? You’re fooling me.”

  “I’m not. He doesn’t do it all the time. Just sometimes.”

  “He hits her?” I couldn’t imagine this. Like a boxer? Like a spanking? I envisioned my mother standing in her apron in the middle of her kitchen, her hand to her reddened cheek, her eyes wide and full of tears. But when I tried to imagine my father hitting her, I couldn’t. He would cry, too, should he ever do such a thing.

  “But why would he hit her?”

  “Oh, he just has this really bad temper, I don’t know. He’s a very powerful man. Very wealthy. Very powerful. And she just one day ran away, took a bunch of money and left. But she always tells me where she is; she tells one of her friends who tells me. She moves a lot. She won’t be here longer than six months or so.”

  “How long ago did she leave?” I looked closely at him, checking his face for pain. But it was smooth and impassive, plain as a bar of soap.

  “Two years now, a little over.”

  “Does your father know you’re with her?”

  “No.” He smiled. “No, he certainly does not.”

  “How did you get here without him finding out?”

  “Oh … Magic.”

  “No, how?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ve told you too much already, I shouldn’t have said all this. Please don’t tell, Ginny. You could really get us in trouble.” Now he was not impassive. Now I could see the fear in his face. It made me want to build a house for him, just his size, then stand outside looking in the window at him sitting in his own chair by his own little fireplace. “There,” I would tell him. “You see? You’re fine.”

  Something occurred to me. “Why don’t you just live with your mother?”

  “Ginny. If I did that … Look, I can’t live with her. And you can’t tell anyone what I just said. Not even Sharla. Please.”

  I sat up, stared straight ahead.

  “Ginny?”

  “I won’t,” I said. And I knew I wouldn’t.

  “Okay,” he said. “Forget about all that, all right? Just forget I told you. Let’s do something else. Let’s get married now. We’ll change our names. We’ll give ourselves new ones. Mine will be … Buffalo Bill Cody.”

  “I’ll be Ave Maria,” I said. “Ave Maria Cody.”

  “Good,” Wayne said. “That’s nice.”

  I had once wanted to name a doll Ave Maria, for the undulant beauty of the syllables. Sharla said I could not, that it didn’t make sense. I wasn’t sure what sense “Sharla” or “Ginny” made, but I changed the doll’s name to Nancy; then promptly hated it and finally beheaded it, stuffed it in the garbage amid potato peelings and broccoli stalks. It felt good to resurrect an idea I once thought was valuable, to have it so easily accepted by someone.

  Wayne stood, then pulled me up beside him, and put his arms around me. “Before all the stars in the heavens, I take you, Ave Maria, for my wife.”

  I was silent for a long time. Then I said, “Before all the trees in the forest, I take you, Buffalo Bill, for my husband.” We kissed. Newly.

  “Want to sleep out here with me all night?” he asked.

  I didn’t know. But now that we were married, I no longer had a choice, did I? I went into the tepee and lay down. Wayne lay next to me, one arm around me. I felt uncomfortable, but I was afraid to move. He was my husband now. This was how we slept. I could tell when Wayne fell asleep: his breathing grew deep and even; and though he remained next to me, I could feel him move away. I felt lonely and my hip hurt from lying on my side so long against the hard ground. I thought of Sharla, loose-limbed and relaxed, her mouth open slightly, dreaming deeply in the bedroom we had shared since I was born. I could feel the gauzy pull of sleep, but I could not relax into it. I was worried about getting caught. I was worried about where my mother was. I wanted a drink of water. I wanted to know that if I had to go to the bathroom, I could. But I stayed in the teepee until the light started to break, waking Wayne up; then we snuck back into our houses.

  Sharla’s arm hung over the bed, her bracelet showing. I covered it with her sheet, then lay down on my own bed, heavy with secrets.

  I awakened with a thin line of pain across my forehead and at the top of my eyes. Sharla was lying on her made bed, reading American Girl. “Well, finally!” she said, when she saw me sit up.

  “What time is it?” My voice was thick, lazy.

  “It’s not even morning anymore. I already had lunch.”

  I scratched my knee, yawned. “What did you have?”

  “Pinwheel cookies and some Fritos.”

  I stopped scratching. “Where’s Mom?”

  “At the grocery store. She has the Tupperware party tonight. Even though it’s her birthday.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “We need to make her a card. And this morning Dad gave us money to buy something—we have to do that this afternoon, Ginny.”

  “Okay.” I hated buying birthday presents with Sharla; I wanted to give my own ideas, free and clear. But this was the way we always did it—our father would give us ten dollars, and we had to agree on something, usually from Monroe’s. Last year, in addition to the usual pastel stationery and two embroidered hankies, we had gotten her a limp silk-flower corsage. I’d thought it useless, but in fact my mother often wore it. This year I thought we should get her a magazine subscription of her own to Good Housekeeping. Mrs. O’Donnell used to give her her old copies; now my mother’s supply had been cut off. But I needed to find a way to have Sharla think it was her idea.

  “Only two weeks till your birthday,” Sharla said.

  “I know.”

  “I got you your present already.”

  “You did? When?”

  “The other day. You didn’t know.”

  I stayed silent, thinking. I had always made it my business to know when people bought my presents.

  “You don’t pay as much attention as you used to,” Sharla said, as though she’d heard my thoughts.

  “Yes, I do.” My head throbbed. I lay back down.

  “I mean to me, you don’t pay as much attention to me.”

  “Sharla?”

  “What.”

  “Am I hot?”

  “How should I know?”

  “No, I mean … I feel like I have a fever.”

  She came to sit beside me, put her hand to my forehead. “You’re just tired,” she said. “You were out the whole night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I woke up a lot. You were never here.”

  Suddenly I remembered my mother, outside in her nightgown. “Sharla, did you see what Mom did last night?”

  “When?”

  “Last night, out in the backyard, when I was out with Wayne.”

  “What do you mean? She wasn’t outside. She was sleeping before you ever went out there.”

  “No, she came out, and she was walking around flapping her arms
and acting crazy.”

  “What are you talking about? She didn’t do that. You dreamed it.”

  “I saw her, Sharla! Wayne did, too. Ask him!”

  “Well, that would be pretty hard to do, since he left this morning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged, returned to her magazine. “A car came and picked him up. I saw. He got in with a suitcase. He’s gone.”

  I stood up, then sat back down on my bed. Something inside me felt pulled in two directions, being slowly ripped. “He didn’t say anything about leaving. He didn’t tell me.”

  Sharla picked up a peach pit she’d put at the side of her bed, sucked on it with noisy satisfaction. “Well, he’s gone.”

  But I loved him, I wanted to say. Of course I did not say it. The words were too big for my mouth. Everything I had felt—and learned—about Wayne was too big for me, and I knew it. So although the suddenness of his departure made for a caved-in feeling, I also felt a kind of buoyancy of spirit, a return to the safety of the self I knew. I felt the kind of relief you experience when you yank your gaze away from staring too long at something, becoming hypnotized by it; becoming, in fact, nearly lost to it.

  Later that day, I went into the teepee to think about things. I saw a rock just inside the entrance, holding down a piece of paper. Ginny, it said. I have to go. You know why. You know everything. Don’t forget anything. At the bottom of the note were two parallel lines within a circle, identical to those we’d drawn in the dirt. I pressed the note to my chest, then against my forehead. I cried a little. Then I brought the note inside and put it away in my secret box. I knew I would never see Wayne again. That note was the only proof I had of having learned something essential: how to be properly loved.

  The plane tilts suddenly to the left, then rights itself. Why? I imagine the captain taking his hands off the wheel to stretch, then saying, “Whoops!” But no one else is reacting, at least as far as I can tell.

  I close my eyes, rub my temples, think again of Wayne. I wonder what he looks like now. I wonder if he ever thinks of me and our little ceremony. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t mean something to him, that incredible exchange. I hope it did; it certainly meant a lot to me. I’ve tried to explain how it felt to a few people, but it always gets reduced to a that-summer-at-the-lake story, and that’s not what it was. I don’t know quite how I could have believed in so much so soon, how I could have taken such chances. Well, he was a compelling character. Charismatic—Jasmine’s son, after all. If he hadn’t so abruptly left, I wonder what else I might have done with him.