What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [15]
Jasmine bent to accept the thermos of coffee from Sharla, and I smelled her perfume. I found it extraordinary that someone would wear perfume in the middle of the day, and on moving day besides. Once, in Monroe’s department store, I’d seen a small container of Chanel No. 5 that was called “purse size,” but I’d thought it was a kind of joke. Who would carry perfume in their purse? Here was someone who would.
“Come on in,” Jasmine said, and we followed her into the house. There were boxes everywhere, but she went without hesitation to one in the dining room, stripped the tape from it, reached in and pulled out one cup, then two more. She spaced them evenly on top of a smaller box, sat on the floor beside it, and then looked up at us expectantly.
“We don’t drink coffee,” I said, and was elbowed again.
“No?” Her black eyebrows were raised into pretty arches.
“We do sometimes,” Sharla said. “When it’s a special occasion.”
“Well, this certainly qualifies,” Jasmine said, and filled each cup. Then, holding hers up, “Here’s to new beginnings.”
We sat on either side of her at our cardboard table, and lifted our cups to tap against one another. They were fancy flowered things, the kind of dishes my mother used at Thanksgiving and Christmas and would not let us carry unless it was one at a time. But Jasmine handled them as casually as though they were plastic bathroom cups. I noticed Sharla’s little finger was lifted ever so slightly; I did the same.
“So,” Sharla said. “Do you have any kids?”
Jasmine shook her head. “No, I’m not married.”
My eyes widened.
“You mean you’re going to live here all alone?” Sharla asked. My question exactly, though it would have taken a while for me to get around to asking it.
Jasmine smiled. “Well, I won’t be lonely. I’ll have you two for friends, right?”
“Right,” I said quickly.
“Miss?” one of the movers called. “Coats. Where do you want them?”
“Which ones?” Jasmine asked.
The man read the writing on the box. “‘Winter,’ it says. ‘Minks.’ And … looks like … ‘P. lamb’?”
“Oh, right,” she said. “In the basement, I guess.”
Minks? Minks???? The things I had to talk to Sharla about were beginning to make my teeth ache. She felt the same; I could see it in the wildness of her eyes. As soon as Jasmine agreed to come to our house that night for dinner, we fled to our bedroom—this after we told our mother that the guest list numbered one, due to the fact that the new neighbor was not married. “Is that right?” my mother said. She cleared her throat, stared past us. Then she headed for her cookbook shelf.
Sharla flopped on her bed, put her pillow over her stomach. I lay down, too, stuck my hand inside the waistband of my shorts, sighed in happy anticipation of the juicy talk we were about to have.
“Quit!” Sharla said suddenly, nastily.
“What?”
“Get your hand out of your pants, you retard.”
“I don’t have my hand in my pants.”
She stared hard at the vicinity in question, shook her head rapidly from side to side to emphasize the fact that she was staring hard. It looked like her eyeballs were jiggling. I laughed.
She sat up, angry. “You think that’s funny? To pick at your butt?”
“I’m not!” I said, angry myself now. “My shorts are too tight! I just put my hand here to relax my waist!”
“Well, that’s not how it looks.” Sharla lay back down, stared at the ceiling. “It looks like a retard. I hope you don’t do that in school.”
“I’m sure.”
We waited together for silence to restore our moods. Finally, “I dreamed I was a bachelor in my Maidenform bra,” I ventured.
Sharla raised one leg into the air, turned her ankle this way and that. She kept threatening to get an ankle bracelet, even though my mother disallowed them, calling them cheap-looking. “Bachelorette,” she said. “Huh. We have never had one of those on this street.”
“Ha!” I said. “We have never had one in this neighborhood. Probably not in this whole town!”
“How do you know?”
“Name one time you ever heard of one.”
Sharla thought. “There could be one in the town,” she said finally. She began picking