Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [3]
“What are you up to tonight?” he asks.
I shrug. “Maybe the movies.”
“Uh huh.” He is tossing his keys from hand to hand. There is a square piece of gold hanging from them. It has his initials: D.M. Dickie Mac, that’s his name. Once I heard Diane say, “D.M. Know what that stands for? Damn man.”
She was leaning back against the door when she said that, her face turned partly away from him. She had taken his keys, wouldn’t give them back.
“Come on, Diane,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Give me my keys.”
“What’ll you give me?” she asked, her eyebrows raised like a teacher’s.
She knows everything, Diane. She knows how to do everything.
After Dickie drives away with Diane, I ask Cherylanne to come over. I say to inspect me good, and never tell. I think there is something wrong. I undress, and she looks me over. “Turn to the side,” she says. And then, sighing, “Hold in your stomach. Good Lord, if you’re going to be a girl, you want to learn some things.” She regards me silently, and my heart sinks lower and lower until she shrugs and says, “Well, I’d say you have breast buds. I mean, you can tell they’re getting ready to come out.”
“Thank you,” I say. My relief loosens up my insides back to normal.
She lies down on my bed, spreads herself out like a starfish. “You can come over for dinner if you want,” she says. “We’re fixing to eat. My mom made chili.”
Cherylanne’s mother is named Belle. She’s lived in the same town in Texas her whole life. She uses bacon in her chili, and a lot of salt. I once watched her put the salt in, shaking and shaking the round silver container for about fifteen minutes, I swear. That chili is good, though. You always want more.
Belle was good friends with my mother. Near the end, my mother called her one day and said, “Oh, please, Belle. Take her for a while. For God’s sake. She keeps … playing her flutophone … for me.” Those days, my mother always sounded like she was saying a poem. She couldn’t do a whole sentence; it took too much air. So she would say pieces like that. Sometimes, even if you felt bad she was dying, you’d want to yell, “What! Just say it!” Even if you were loving her so much, your fists clenched and your heart feeling like it had a tight peel around it, you would get mad like that.
I had to go over to Cherylanne’s house until my dad came home. My mother didn’t know I’d heard her on the phone. She just told me Cherylanne wanted me to come over. I played crazy eights with my head stuck down. I’d thought my music might help the pain.
Belle is not a friend to my father. She doesn’t much speak to him. She likes me, though. When I eat there she serves me first, and sends me home with leftovers. Plus, she won’t let Bubba, Cherylanne’s sixteen-year-old brother, tease me; and she lets him do anything else in the wide world he feels like. There’s nothing about Bubba that Bubba doesn’t like. He rolls his T-shirt sleeves high up, looks at himself in every mirror everywhere, even the toaster, with one eyebrow up a little. His brain must be near worn out with making up compliments for him to give himself.
Cherylanne hates Bubba. She says he is an uncivilized being that no woman will ever love, that he does not know the first thing about elegant living. Once he hit her in the stomach and knocked the air out of her and their mother didn’t do a thing about it. Cherylanne says her stomach is permanently bruised and that she could get cancer when she grows up on account of Bubba. “This I will never forgive,” she said the night he did it. I felt bad for her, that her stomach got ruined so young in life. She was crying a little; I could see the tears trapped in her lashes. “Oh, Lord,” she said suddenly, closing her eyes and leaning her head back, “please don’t give me cancer of the stomach. I have a lot