Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [8]
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He flipped through a few pages, then looked down at me. “You want this?”
“I don’t know. I guess. Okay.”
“Come on, then,” he said, and he bought it for me. The only thing better would have been if he’d said, “Give me your magazine, Cherylanne. I’ll take care of that, too.” But that would have been too much. I have a bad habit of doing that, wanting too much. Once I kissed a horny toad to see if he’d change into a prince. I thought all I had to do was believe hard enough. I kissed him where his lips would have been if he’d had any. Then I watched him carefully. No blinding flash. No small, seizure-like tremors to show he was ready to turn. No glimmer of humanness coming to his round, yellow eyes. He stayed a horny toad through and through. Still, looking at him close up like that let me see his holiness. I rubbed his tough underbelly and he cut loose on my hand. Scared, I guess. I dropped him too hard and he ran away.
But my father did buy me that book, for no reason. I know it happened, because I still have it. And always at Christmas, he buys everything we put on our lists. Except not my mother’s. On her list she would put “Stationery. Bath oil. Gloves.” He would buy her negligees, filmy things the color of butter or twilight. He would buy her cashmere sweaters, ropes of pearls. She would hold them up and say, “How beautiful. Oh, how lovely,” and then put them away. I never did see her wear any of those things. I was allowed to look at them, spread them across her wide bed in different arrangements when my father wasn’t home. I couldn’t put anything on, though.
He did it this past year, too, the first Christmas without my mother. That part stayed the saune. He bought so much for Diane and me and watched us open everything, and it made me so ashamed, that bigger and bigger pile of presents. “Oh, thank you,” we always say after we open each one, and he nods, not saying a word. He’s sorry, that’s all. Sometimes he tells you he is sorry about the way he is. And then, you can’t help it, you feel sorry for him. My mother in her apron, breaking off the ends of the green beans, then putting them into the colander: “You must understand that he doesn’t always know what he is doing. He doesn’t mean it.” Her forgiving hands along either side of my face, her close and still look into my eyes. “You must understand this, all right?”
Me, taking a bean, being so bold. Saying, “Okay, all right,” and then leaving a room full of lies that could burn you if they took another form.
Cherylanne surfaces like a seal in the blue water. She stays in the spot where she came up, treading water, pushing her hair off her face, squinting in the sun. “How was that one?” she asks.
I hadn’t been watching. “Ten,” I say. “Perfect.”
“I thought so!” she yells and then swims to the side of the pool, pulls herself up the ladder, swaying her butt back and forth, her happiness dance.
I see the lifeguard Cherylanne has a crush on come out of the changing room. He will take a dip before he mounts the chair; he always does. When Cherylanne comes over to me, I point in his direction. “Look who’s here.”
She pales slightly, sets her mouth for duty. “Let’s go.”
The lifeguard is in the shallow end of the pool, splashing water on his muscles. The woman he is talking to is wearing a black suit made strictly for a grown-up. She has a puffed-out blond hairdo, draw-on eyebrows, and spiky black lashes. She has kept on her dangly silver earrings and a bracelet. It’s a cinch that woman will not be swimming one stroke. She moves her hands through the water gently, her fingers ballet posed. Then