What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [16]
“What is?”
“They like New York City and gay Paree.”
“Did you hear what that moving man said? She has a mink coat!”
“I know!” Sharla said. “And she was soooooo casual about it, like oh yawn, how boring, fur coats.”
“Well, that is the sign of a truly rich person,” I said. “They are always casual about things like that.”
“How do you know? What do you know about rich people?”
“Never mind, I just know some things,” I said, with such authority that Sharla didn’t argue—I did read much more than she did. Instead, she said, “I wonder if she has a boyfriend.”
“Ho, not one. More like a million of them.”
Silence. I could see Sharla imagining such a thing. I imagined it as well, created in my mind a long line of men snaking down the sidewalk outside Jasmine’s house, all of them dressed in tuxedos, all with black hair slicked back wetly. They carried bouquets of flowers, fancy candy, black velvet boxes holding dazzling pieces of jewelry. They looked neither to the left nor to the right. They were selectively blind, focused only on their desire.
Sharla turned onto her side, pushed her hair back from her face, then over one eye. “If she takes the bedroom Mrs. O’Donnell used, we’ll be able to see it from the bathroom.”
“I know.”
“Want to go look and see if we can tell yet?”
We vied for position at the bathroom window, keeping our heads low. And suddenly there Jasmine was, standing with her back to us, showing the men where to put a huge dresser. It was placed opposite the brass bed.
“I think she has good taste,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“I wonder why she chose that house.”
“Beats me.”
Jasmine turned around then, looked out of her window right into ours, and we were caught. Sharla ducked down, but I stayed where I was, red-faced. Jasmine smiled, then waved. I waved back.
“Get down; get down!” Sharla whispered, between clenched teeth.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She sees us. She doesn’t care.”
From downstairs came the scent of butter melting. My mother was making something special.
“Girls?” she called up.
We went out into the hall, called down to answer her.
“Would you run over to Sullivan’s and get me some mushrooms? See if he has some fresh ones.”
It was Bella Vista chicken, then. Probably she’d make her Viennese torte cake, too, and ring the plate with fresh flowers before she served it. She only did things like this when company came. If she did it for our family, our father and Sharla made gentle fun of her. I actually liked my mother’s creativity in such matters, but did not want to admit it, in case Sharla and my father were right.
I imagined we’d be eating in the dining room, and when we came downstairs, I saw it was so. The heavy, cream-colored tablecloth already lay on the table, the one my parents got as a wedding gift. Their initials were monogrammed at one end, edges linked together. Normally, my mother put those initials at the hostess end, closest to the kitchen. Today, though, they were facing out. They were what you saw as soon as you entered the room.
A few rows ahead of me, I hear two children, a brother and sister, about eight or nine years old, talking. The girl says, “I love it when we get so high and we’re out of the world.”
“We’re not out of the world,” the boy says.
A long pause. Then the girl says, “Glen. Yes, we are. We are in the sky.”
“No, stupid,” Glen says. “When you are in outer space, you are out of the world.”
“So? Space is sky, isn’t it?”
Glen thinks. So do I.
I love listening to conversations between children. I often change seats on a bus or an airplane to be near them. Right after takeoff, I heard this same girl say, “When we get up real high, I’m going to open a window and see where we really are.” And Glen, pointing at the blocklike illustration on the flight-attendant call button, observed, “Boy. They don’t draw good.”
My idea of hell is to be stuck