Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [21]
That was the end of Cherylanne watching cartoons with me. It made me kind of sad, because I thought she still wanted to. There were these forces. They would grab her like canes grabbed cartoon dancers around the neck and pulled them off the stage. “This can be a very difficult time of life,” Cherylanne recently said. She was using her big lavender powder puff to perfume between her breasts. “Adolescence is studied by many famous people because it is so hard.” She sighed deeply, then noticed a chunk of mascara loose on one upper lash. She picked at it, holding her face perfect, until she got it.
Then she started in with some lipstick. She stretched her mouth open, talked funny through it while she smeared on a creamy layer of Rose Petal Pink. “There are pamphlets at the guidance counselor’s if you want to read them,” she said. She closed her mouth, rubbed her lips together, looked at me. “If you want to know what you’re in for when you’re my age, I mean.” And then, generous, “Some are right for you even now.” She smacked her lips together hard, checked the mirror, stopped a smile just short of itself.
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