What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [21]
“Who do you think discovered fire? And we are not even doing cavemen.”
“Who cares?” I said, and headed into the woods. “The Indians did make medicine from flowers, for the heart, and that’s what I’m doing.” It occurred to me that I didn’t care if Sharla came with me or not. I straightened inside my own skin, taller.
At one in the afternoon, my mother had still not returned from Jasmine’s house. Sharla and I, irritable at not having any ideas for forbidden things to do, lay on the floor of our room, rubbing ice cubes over our foreheads, in the crooks of our elbows, behind our knees. It was ninety-seven degrees. Our shorts and sleeveless blouses stuck to us.
“Want to snoop in their dresser drawers?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Sharla?”
“What?” She could get so nasty when she got hot. You couldn’t say a word to her.
“Do you want to snoop?”
She looked at me, then away. “We just did it last week. Anyway, there’s nothing.”
It was true that we had not yet found anything great. The closest we came to something interesting was the time we found the photograph of a woman at the bottom of my father’s underwear drawer. She was beautiful—curly golden hair, big blue eyes, deep dimples. She wore a yellow collared sweater, open at the throat for as far down as the picture went. “Hi, Handsome!” was written at the corner. And then, “All my love to you, Heidi, June, 1941.” This horrified and intrigued us. We discussed it nightly, and then, a few days later, we began pestering our mother about her old boyfriends, hoping we could segue into my father’s old girlfriends. This did not happen. My mother, warming to the idea of letting us know she was at one time a pretty hot ticket, settled into a kitchen chair and gave us details we didn’t want to know about her relationship with Peter Barnes. He played quarterback on her high school football team. He made a path of violets down her front sidewalk for her to walk on out to his car when he took her to the senior prom. Gave her a purple orchid that night, too; his father was a rich man. My mother fingered the dust cloth on her lap as though it were her corsage, offered to her once again from dreamland.
“I was the class secretary,” she said softly. “Did I ever tell you girls that?”
“Did Dad know about Peter?” Sharla asked.
I nodded. Good work.
“Oh, no. That was before I met your father. I had one more boyfriend before I met your father and that was Frank Peabody. Best-tempered man I ever met. And the blackest hair.”
“PEABODY?” I asked, forgetting our mission. I could have been Ginny Peabody! Under the table, Sharla kicked me.
I kicked her back.
“What are you doing?” my mother asked. She lifted the tablecloth, peered beneath it.
Exasperated, Sharla said, “Mom. Did you ever meet any of Dad’s girlfriends?”
But it was too late, my mother was back in the unromantic present. “If you two want to fight, you can go right upstairs and do it. I do not want to be in the middle of it. In fact, since you have so much energy to waste, you can scour the bathroom sink and tub. Yes, you go on and do that—you can just help me with some of this housework. I’m pretty tired of doing so much of it myself.”
A moment of frustrated silence and then, “Sink!” Sharla muttered, calling for the easier of the two jobs.
I made sure she didn’t really win. I let her go first; then I shut the bathroom door, and let the tap run furiously as I sat on the edge of the tub and looked at Reader’s Digest. I liked the jokes and the true-life stories that made you cry a little. I understood the attraction to a certain type of grief.
After I read for a while, I turned off the water. The tub looked perfectly clean, as it always did. My mother came in to inspect Sharla’s and my work and nodded her approval. I had a moment of feeling guilty, but then reasoned that if the tub ever really did need cleaning, I would do it. There was no point in scrubbing away at something you couldn’t even see. I longed for streaks of mud, for soap stuck in a sticky puddle at the bottom of the tub, even for the sickening thrill