What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [25]
Gypsy, Jasmine’s German shepherd, lay nearby. I took a break to allow Sharla time to catch up, and stretched out close beside the dog. I liked watching the slick black sides of her mouth move back and forth with her panting. Occasionally, a fly would hover around her and she would snap at it. I liked that, too. And if you scratched in the right place, her back leg would react wildly, while her dog face remained utterly impassive. I very much wanted a dog, but my mother would not permit it. Not a dog, not a cat; only a parakeet, which she said she could keep track of. I knew what she meant. A parakeet couldn’t mess up the house. It was the one thing I truly hated about my mother, her devotion to an orderly house. I couldn’t imagine why it meant so much to her. It seemed to me that she could risk a little messiness in her life in order to gain real pleasure. But she always said, “You let one thing slip, and it all goes.”
Once, I called my mother outside to watch Gypsy as she ate potato chips, but my mother was not persuaded to my point of view. “She’s drooling,” my mother said, and I said, “No, listen to the crunch!” She listened dutifully, then smiled blankly and went back inside.
Jasmine had called my mother over to show off her purchases when we returned from shopping, and though my mother protested that she was in the middle of making dinner and couldn’t leave, she went anyway. At one point, I saw through Jasmine’s dining-room window that my mother was wearing the new white hat. I stopped twirling my hula hoop. “Look,” I told Sharla. I pointed to the window.
Sharla looked, then turned away, scowling. “She doesn’t wear hats like that,” she said. I supposed I agreed, but I kept watching my mother until she took the hat off and laid it on the table before her. She had looked beautiful in it. And starkly unlike herself. Watching her, I’d felt the way that babies seemed to feel regarding themselves in a mirror: ah! Look! Something lovable, and familiar, and intriguing. But entirely separate.
I take out my credit card, use the plane phone to call home. No one answers, and I don’t leave a message. I just wanted anyone who was there to know I was there, too, in a way. Only a phone call away. Even in the air. Oftentimes I sense a polite impatience when I am on a rare trip and I call my daughters. But I have to let them know something.
A couple of years ago my husband and I took a brief trip to Canada. When I called home for the third time one day, my husband exploded. “Why must you do this?” he asked. “What do you think happened? They’re fine!”
“I know that!” I said. “I just want them to know we’re thinking of them.”
“They’re fine,” he said again, and I sniffed, looked out the hotel window, and sulked for a few minutes. I knew I was overdoing it, yet I felt compelled to make those calls. It had to do with the way parents say they’ll never repeat the mistakes their own parents made. It had to do with my offering my daughters what I so needed and was denied. I couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t be grateful. How could they not be grateful when surely they could see that I was only trying to love them, to give them what I knew they needed—whether they knew it or not?
And now some wave of feeling comes over me that I don’t recognize. Nausea? I sit still for a moment, then rise quickly and head back to the lavatory, which thankfully is free. Inside, I kneel before the stainless-steel toilet, hold back my hair, and wait. Nothing. I wash my face, rinse out my mouth, and stare at myself in the dimly