What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [26]
When my mother returned home from trying on Jasmine’s hat, she was flushed and happy. Through the open kitchen window I heard her humming with the radio. “Catch a Falling Star” was playing. I liked that song, too, liked the notion of having a pocketful of starlight. I hoped for such a thing, in fact. I believed at the time that stars were five-pointed objects you could hold in your hand, a sort of fancier version of the tinfoil variety. I was ignorant of heat and size and the most astounding fact of all, that some stars I saw were not really there at all. I counted on someday finding a falling star and I had resolved not to share it with Sharla, no matter how convincing her arguments might be. She could look at it as it lay on my bed; that was all.
“Hula hoops are stupid,” Sharla finally said, after failing yet again to keep hers up. She threw it down, headed for the woods.
“Nuh-uh,” I said, walking jerkily, following her, my hula hoop going around my waist in a way that felt like a sloppy embrace. “They’re fun.”
“Well, something is wrong with mine,” Sharla said. “It doesn’t work.”
I put my hot-pink hula hoop down, picked up her lime-green one, started spinning it. “It works,” I called out. “Hey, Sharla, look! It works!”
She would not turn around.
“You’re just a party pooper!” I called after her. And then I attempted to spin both hoops at the same time, but failed. I stepped out of them to follow Sharla.
“Someone has ravaged our lands,” Sharla said. “We must have a war dance.” Sharla was excellent at war dances. My job was to watch her, to sit cross-legged at the circle of rocks we called a campfire, and make rhythmic, singing sounds, while Sharla twirled and whirled, bent down low and raised up high, calling for power from heaven and earth.
When we ate dinner the next Monday night, my vocabulary word was “sanguine.” “He has a sanguine disposition,” I told the table. “He thinks everything will always be fine.”
“Well … all right,” my father said, and then turned expectantly toward Sharla.
“Seductive,” she said. “She is very seductive.”
No one spoke. I knew the word Sharla had chosen wasn’t far in the dictionary from the one I had picked. She sometimes deliberated for a long time before choosing her word, but tonight she had merely flipped a few pages away, closed her eyes, and pointed.
“I don’t get what it means,” I said now, spearing a green bean.
“She is seductive,” Sharla said. “She tries to be sexy like Brigitte Bardot. You know. Va-va-va-voom!”
“That’s fine,” my mother said. “We understand.”
“Or,” Sharla persisted. “She is seductive; she tries to capture things.”
“Enough,” my father said, and looked over his fork at my mother, who looked away.
After dinner, while Sharla and I did the dishes, we heard my mother talking to my father in the living room. “How would you define happiness?” she asked him.
Sharla and I looked at each other.
“… What are you talking about?” my father said.
“It’s just a question, Steven.”
“Well, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean … well, I guess I mean just what I said! You know? How would you define happiness? What is it? Is it real? And if it is, what brings it to you? Is it something in you or outside of you? Does anyone have it all the time, or are there just moments of happiness for anyone? Is contentment the same as happiness?”
Silence. And then my father said, “Good Lord. What have you been reading, Marion?”
She sighed. “Steven, I just wanted to … oh, forget it. All right? Forget it.”
Silence again, and then the television came on. I snuck out into the hall to peek into the living room. I wanted to make sure they were sitting beside each other on the sofa, that my mother had not retreated to her knitting chair, where she went when she was angry. Her needles flew then, clicked brightly, speaking a language only she could understand.
She was on the sofa beside my father. And his arm was