What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [19]
Sharla picked a handful of grass, smelled it, flung it out before her. It spread apart like low fireworks. She sighed.
“Man. You are really stupid.”
“Why?”
“That’s how men are when they really feel something; they don’t say one word.”
I considered this. My father did grow silent at times of great emotion. Once, when I was narrowly missed by a speeding car in a movie parking lot, my mother yanked me out of harm’s way, burst into tears, and began talking a mile a minute about how I had to watch out, how some people had no business having a license, how close that was, how awful it would have been.… My father picked me up and held me. I saw him close his eyes, heard him breathe in deep, smelled his Old Spice. That was all.
“But you don’t think Mom likes her?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I don’t know.”
“I think she does.”
“Why do you care so much if Mom likes her?”
“Well, they’re neighbors,” I said, though that wasn’t it, that wasn’t why I was interested in them liking each other. I wanted free access to Jasmine Johnson. I didn’t want anyone asking me about going over there, or, worse, disallowing it.
A vein of lightning lit the sky spectacularly; there was a split-second sensation of someone turning on a too-bright overhead light. Sharla and I held our breath and counted. It took only two seconds for the thunder to follow. I felt the first fat raindrop land directly in the center of my forehead.
“Here it comes,” Sharla said.
“I know,” I answered.
When we got inside, we found our mother standing in the kitchen.
“All right, how long have you been sneaking out like this?” she asked, her voice quiet but shaking.
We didn’t answer, either of us.
“Go to your room,” she said, and we did.
I felt bad. I hated seeing her react with such sad calm to something she was really upset about. And I wondered why everything she felt, she felt so hard.
The next day was Thursday, Culture Day. This is what my mother called it. Monday was Vocabulary Day, when each member of the family was obliged to bring a new word to the dinner table; Tuesday was Current Events Day, and you better have had a look at the headlines. Wednesday was Correspondence Day, and we sat with our mother at the dining-room table after dinner to write our grandparents and whomever else we might choose (we chose no one else, ever). Friday was International Day, when my mother presented us with such things as Mexican enchiladas, Italian spaghetti, or, her weakest entry to date, store-bought French bread. As far as I could tell, the only difference between it and our regular bread was the shape, plus the cartoon drawing on the bag of a man wearing a beret and a pencil-thin mustache.
But Thursday was Culture Day. Sharla took piano lessons; I went to ballet class at Yvette’s Studio for the Dance. Though I enjoyed looking at ballerinas, I hated studying ballet. It was the crowns the ballerinas wore that I lusted after, the ride in the elaborately decorated sleigh I saw when we watched The Nutcracker on television. I had no desire to train my body to do difficult things requiring grace and precision. I was the worst in class, so awful I wasn’t even made fun of. My instructor, a painfully thin, soft-spoken woman who wore cardigan sweaters with fraying sleeves over her hopeful little tutus, tried valiantly to teach me the most basic things, but it was no good. I could not remember sequences of steps, and I was amazingly clumsy. It seemed ridiculous to me to clomp around holding my arms up over my head, fingers arranged into what was supposed to be graceful asymmetry but in fact resembled rigor mortis. I felt like an elephant in a wading pool.
“Well,” Yvette would say each week in her sweet French accent, “I can see zat you ‘ave maybe impouv.” We both knew she was lying. I saw sadness in her large brown eyes; I wasn’t sure for whom. Over and over, I had tried to explain to my mother that I was no good at dance, that I did not enjoy it. “You’re not there to enjoy it,” she always said. And when I would ask her what I was there for, she would say, “Never