What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [14]
I pull the window shade down a bit to block out some of the bright sun, see that we’re directly over the center of a huge lake. It’s so far down, that lake. I’ll bet it’s really deep. I think about the blackness of the deepest parts of the ocean, the sightless creatures that live there, and feel an internal slump of discouragement. I know those creatures don’t mind not seeing. But I mind for them. I want them to surface and see everything.
“I’m Jasmine Johnson,” our new neighbor said, when Sharla and I presented ourselves with the thermos of coffee. Her voice was low and melodic; it reminded me of Peggy Lee singing “Fever.” “Please call me Jasmine,” she added, smiling.
Jasmine! Her name was as exotic as her appearance—I visualized it written in gold, with ornate curlicues. When it came time to introduce myself, I used the formal “Virginia.” Sharla looked askance at me, but did not begin snorting and pointing at me, saying, “Nuh-uh, her name’s just Ginny!” which is what I’d feared. I was already embarrassed about the container the coffee was in; we’d used my plain lunch-box thermos because we couldn’t find the more elegant silver one we used on car trips. “I don’t see it anywhere,” my mother had said, her voice muffled because her head was stuck far inside one of the lower cabinets. Then, emerging and using her fingers to fluff back her mussed-up hair, “It’s too big anyway. She wouldn’t know what to do with all that coffee.”
“We could have some with her,” I’d said, and earned a sharp poke in the ribs from Sharla.
“You girls don’t drink coffee,” my mother had said, her lips a prim straight line. “Not until you are twenty-one.”
Well, not in front of her. But we drank coffee all right, every chance we got. Once, when our parents went out, we made and drank a whole pot. “Look how much it makes me pee!” Sharla had yelled in her hepped-up voice from behind the closed bathroom door. And I, waiting desperately for my own turn, had yelled back, “I know!”
Every night after supper, when we did the dishes, Sharla and I finished the coffee that was left in our parents’ cups. We fought silently over who got my mother’s—she used more sugar. We never simply added sugar ourselves; I think we believed it would be pressing our luck. Suppose one of our parents walked in when we were stirring? My father would sit us down at the kitchen table for one of his low-voiced lectures about age-appropriate activities and then impose some irritating punishment like early bedtimes for a week, mostly for the benefit of our mother. She tended to enlarge small crimes and to take them personally. After we’d misbehaved, she would sit in the living room in her small blue velvet chair, looking out the window and periodically shaking her head. The day she caught us chicken-calling a teacher we particularly disliked, she actually wept a little. “Mom!” Sharla had said, and my mother had waved her hand in pouty dismissal. “You have no idea what this suggests about your upbringing,” she told us. “No idea.” We were made to call and apologize, while my mother stood nearby, supervising. Sharla went first, as usual, leaving me to cast about for something to say that was not too close to her apology. In the end, however, I copied her exactly. “Sorry, we didn’t really mean anything by it,” I said.
“Oh, I know you didn’t,” Mrs. Mennafee said. “As I just told your sister, I used to make calls like that myself.” I had a thought to ask her to tell that to my mother, but instead I went with Sharla to sit for forty-five minutes in our bedroom, part two of our punishment. It wasn’t awful; I was in need of a nap anyway. We got out in time to watch The Mickey Mouse Club, a vast relief since I was in love with Jimmy. My only chance to get him was to communicate telepathically. I stared at his wavy, black-and-white image, saying over and over in my mind, “I love you; I am ready.” Sharla favored the goofy boys, with their too-big teeth; I knew a real man when I saw