Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [23]
So I will help Belle today. When I am done, I will try to think of a way to thank her. You have to give back. Last time, I gave her a new tin of chili powder with gold Christmas ribbon wrapped around it. Later, I lied to my father when he was looking for it. That was the secret part of my gift. He would have gotten mad if he knew Belle was teaching me things. “Something special about Belle?” he would ask. “Something better?” He’d done things like that before. And of course there were no answers to those questions. None that you could say.
We make chocolate cake, and I give Belle a tea ball. It was my mother’s. There isn’t much chance of him missing that. My mother used to talk on the phone and dunk that tea ball. I liked to use the phone after her, the receiver still warm, the smell of her tea breath on the mouthpiece. I wished I had someone to talk to on the telephone like she did. “Oh, uh huh,” she would say, and wait a long time. “Yes!” she would say, nodding as though the person on the phone were there before her. It was exciting. When I was little, I would get on her lap and look through her apron pockets while she was on the phone. I found Kleenex and safety pins, mostly, but sometimes something good: an earring. A shiny dime. Tickets from somewhere she’d been. She saved them all, proof of something.
I am lying on the living room rug, staring at the radio, at the thin red line that finds the station. The radio is a big black rectangle with a long antenna, kept here on the floor, next to my father’s chair. It is always tuned to his station. I turn it on, hear the loud sound of the baseball announcers. They get so excited. I used to wonder if they were being hit, their surprised “Oh!”s sounding just like it. “Oh! Would you look at that! OH!” But they were just watching the game, telling how it was to see it. I turn the dial, get some fancy piano music. I listen with my eyes closed. This kind of music draws pictures in my head, takes me places, acts out whole stories. Diane doesn’t like it; she always makes me change the station. But when I grow up I will play it loud in my own house, open the windows wide.
Once, when I was listening to his radio, my father came home. I sat up fast. You weren’t supposed to play his radio without asking. But he wasn’t mad. He sat down and asked me did I know how a radio worked. I told him that when I was little, I thought there were real people in there, swaying before their microphones. There were tiny girl singers in formais, little men in tuxedos, their eyebrows wrinkled from singing like Eddie Fisher. And there were little instruments: saxophones you could fit into matchboxes, pianos no wider than a quarter.
He interrupted me. “You know better than that now, though, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“So how do radios work?”
“Well, I … I think there are tubes.”
“Yes?”
“And some electricity.”
“Yes?”
“You have to plug it in.”
He laughed. And then he told me how radios worked. I watched his mouth move, and his eyes, so close to me now, but different than usual. I was trying so hard to listen that I couldn’t. There was a bad hole in my brain. And so when he finished and asked me did I understand, I had to disappoint him. His face lost something. I could feel him pulling back in, like a turtle. I remember thinking that so much about him was unfair. And that starting right then, there was clean space inside me that let me know it was not all my fault. It’s like looking at the pictures of those artists who paint with millions of dots. You stand close for so long and see nothing. You stand back one time and say, Oh.
Diane comes in, stops when she sees me. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Music.”
She leans over to turn it off. “I hate that music! It’s for funerals.