What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [20]
This was the same line of reasoning she used on Sharla, more or less. Sharla hated piano even more than I hated ballet, and I didn’t blame her. At least I could stand at the side of the classroom, daydreaming, for much of the time I was in the dance studio. For an entire hour, Sharla had to sit right beside the infamous Mrs. Beatrice Eaton, whose horrible breath was not aided by the ancient peppermint candy she kept in a flowered tin in her man’s briefcase. She was a fat woman, proof positive that fat does not equal jolly, with a chin that looked like a small pocketbook. Her face was covered with an orangish powder that occasionally dropped in small flecks like glitter onto her black clothes. She had a red plastic ruler that she used for rapping Sharla’s knuckles when she made a mistake twice in a row. My mother had complained about this, had at one point told Mrs. Eaton that she would be fired if she continued to do it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Marion, it’s only a tap,” she told my mother. “Music is about discipline. Surely you know that.”
“Well, I’m sure it is,” my mother said, not sure at all—Sharla and I, eavesdropping in the kitchen, heard the doubt in her voice. But her uncertainty dropped away when she said, “However, in this house we don’t believe in striking children.”
“Well,” Mrs. Eaton said, in a half-swallowed way that suggested certain children could do with a strike. And then, “All right, I will try, Marion; but I must tell you it is not good practice to interfere with creative methodology. I can’t work well with parents hanging over me. Who knows what is being quashed in your daughter if you don’t let me draw on my own artistic resources—and Sharla’s.”
She had my mother there, and she knew it. My mother believed that creative talent lay huge but latent in us. One of her jobs, she felt, was to unleash it. Given the natural constraints of a very small town (Mrs. Eaton, for example, was the one and only piano teacher within a forty-mile radius), she was doing the best she could. Our abiding consolation was that on Culture Day we could also pick whatever dessert we wanted. Crêpes suzette, we once demanded, having heard about them somewhere, and my mother presented us that night with pancakes topped with cherry jelly and whipped cream. When we asked for baked Alaska, she served mounds of lightly browned meringue over a scoop of Neapolitan ice cream. We didn’t believe these dishes were authentic, but they were close enough. And we loved our mother for trying. And for just about everything else as well. That’s how it was, then.
When I got up one morning, I found a note from my mother on the kitchen table. “Next door,” it said. I knew which “next door” she meant. She would not be at Suzy Lindemeyer’s house; she didn’t really care for Mrs. Lindemeyer. My mother called her “Mrs. Five Operations” because her various surgeries were all Mrs. Lindemeyer ever wanted to talk about. Even to us. “My hysterectomy scar is about to drive me right out of my mind,” she had confided to us the week before, when we helped carry her groceries in. “Itchy? Lord, you have no idea!” And then, her eyes somewhat playful but mostly needy, “Would you like to see it?”
“No, ma’am,” Sharla said quickly and fled without her fifty cents.
“Maybe later,” I said. “We have to go now.”
I awakened Sharla and told her our mother was at Jasmine Johnson’s house. “Huh,” Sharla said sleepily. “Really?”
We ate Oreos for breakfast, followed by spaghetti left over from last night’s dinner, and the usual Coke floats. Then we headed for the backyard, garbed in our Indian dresses. “I’m going to make medicine from flowers today,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Sharla asked. And then, “Wipe that tomato sauce from the corner of your mouth. It looks like blood.”
“Maybe I just ate a dead animal,” I said. “Raw.”
“You are sick.”
“They did that!”
“Not hardly.”
“Yes they did, I read it.”
“They cooked, you idiot. They had fire.”
I said nothing, blinked.
“They had spits,” Sharla said.
“Oh yeah. Well, not cavemen,