What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [12]
“What?”
“The curtains,” I said. “The surrey with the fringe on top.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
I ate a marshmallow, weighed the fairness of her remark.
Right.
“She slept so many nights here,” I said.
“I know.” Sharla’s voice was quiet and mournful. Now I was on the right track.
“She was so nice,” I sighed. Salt to the wound, an occasional specialty of mine.
“Not really,” Sharla said, her reverie broken.
“Uh-huh!”
“Oh, you’re just saying that because she’s gone.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh!”
“Be quiet,” I said. “The cops will come, and you’re only in your robe.”
Sharla went toward the bathroom; I started to follow, then went my own way, into the spare bedroom. Pink curtains here, ruffled edges. An outline on the floor of where the braided rug used to be, I remembered it. I felt Sharla come in behind me.
“What was this?” she asked.
“The guest room. There was a little bed, right here; it was brown wood, with a pink bedspread. And a plant was on the bedside stand, I think it was a sweet-potato plant. Or … I don’t know, maybe an African violet.”
How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything. Mrs. O’Donnell’s face would be a blur, surrounded by her perm. And then the memory of the perm itself … gone? The trajectory of this line of thought was making me nervous. I told myself the plant had definitely been an African violet; I made myself see the fuzzy white on the leaves, the slight tilt of them toward the sun. I saw one shy purple blossom bent toward the earth it lived in.
Sharla leaned against the wall. “The guest room, huh? She never had any guests.”
“I know.”
A troubled silence.
Then, “Want another marshmallow?” I asked.
“How can you eat at a time like this?”
“She would want us to,” I said, though I was not at all sure of this.
I left the guest room, went downstairs, and sat in the middle of the living-room floor. You could sit anywhere now; nothing was in the way of anything. I rather liked that.
Sharla came down soon afterward. We finished the marshmallows, then lay on the floor head to head, limbs stretched out like snow angels. “How would you decorate this room if it was your house?” Sharla asked.
My house? My house? All of it—a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a back-porch stoop, a front door with a mail slot?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Me neither.”
We sighed, exactly together, it seemed to me, and this was deeply comforting. I had a thought to take Sharla’s hand, but I knew she’d frown and lightly slap me away. We were deeply connected, Sharla and I, but very different. I was a cuddler; Sharla looked at an embrace as imprisonment. I could not touch her except to brush her hair, she liked that. In fact, she would pay me to do it. She would give me a Betty and Veronica comic book, or perhaps use of her charm bracelet for half an hour, though I had to wash and dry it before returning it to her. “You have a habit of being sticky,” she told me. And then, when shame filled my face, “It’s nothing bad; it’s just messy.”
Eventually, we rose and toured Mrs. O’Donnell’s empty house one more time—wordlessly agreeing to exclude the basement. Then we left, pulling the door shut behind us. We slept out in the yard for a while, then went in. Again, we hadn’t been missed. It was becoming boring, getting away with so much. Soon, we would need to up the ante.
* * *
When I awakened the next morning, I was seized by the fear that we had left fingerprints behind, unique lines of us captured in marshmallow dust. I thought we should sneak back in and get rid of the evidence. But it was too late. Outside my bedroom window I saw that another moving van had pulled up. And standing beside it was the raven-haired fairy of my dreams, only you could see her feet. They were wearing the highest heels I’d ever seen. Under the fullest skirt. Which was red, but softened by large