What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [30]
I’ve talked some with other mothers about what we learned from our own. Here’s something I learned: I never make my children think any illness I have has anything to do with them. I never do that. Never. I mean, for God’s sake.
At midnight, Sharla and I crossed quietly through our damp backyard and over into Jasmine’s. We crept around the side of her house opposite our own and then Sharla unlocked the heavy front door. I was having a little trouble waking up, which disappointed me; I’d wanted to feel nervous, or at least guilty. But the truth is, we had seen every room in Jasmine’s house; there was nothing for us to discover unless we went rifling through her private belongings, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Sharla was, though; she went directly to Jasmine’s bedroom and opened a large dresser drawer. The beam of my flashlight focused on pastel-colored, silky things. I saw a number of straps, a lot of lace. This whole drawer was underwear?
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Anything,” Sharla said; and then, turning accusingly toward me, she added, “This was your stupid idea.”
“Nuh-uh, I didn’t say to do this part.” I looked more closely at the contents of the drawer. Yes, all underwear; there was the slip she’d gotten at Monroe’s. I wondered whether anything was hidden beneath the underwear; I myself once drew a picture of a naked woman with huge breasts and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer. I removed it after only a few hours, though—tore it into many pieces and flushed it down the toilet.
“We shouldn’t look in her personal stuff,” I said, hoping Sharla would ignore me.
She took the flashlight from me and shone it into my face; I held up my hand, squinted at her through my fingers. “What do you want to do,” she asked, in her most irritating big-sister voice, “get a drink of water out of her kitchen sink or something? Go pee in her toilet?”
I said nothing, waiting for what I thought was misplaced anger to dissipate. Then I said, “We could try on her fur coats. I know exactly where they are.”
“Big deal, so do I. Anyway, she’d let us do that anytime we wanted.”
True. Jasmine was open and generous, more so than anyone we’d ever met. You had to be careful about saying you liked something she had; she’d up and give it to you. And then you’d get in trouble with our mother; so far, I’d had to return two scarves, a pair of pearl earrings, and the current issue of The Saturday Evening Post, although my mother said that when the new issue came out, I could have that old one.
Sharla pulled out a picture frame from the underwear drawer, shone the flashlight on it. It was a photograph of a boy, a teenager. He was brown-haired, blue-eyed, and very handsome, sitting on the steps of a huge porch and smiling. The fingers of his hands were loosely linked between his knees, his feet were bare. He wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Beside him, a cat lay sleeping.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Sharla shoved the picture back into the drawer, opened another. Behind a stack of neatly folded nightgowns, she found something that made her gasp. She pulled out a yellow cellophane package, a small square.
“What is it?” I asked. Ah. I was awake. I felt as though shards of sleep were dropping around me like eggshell around a hatching bird.
“Don’t look!” She started to shove the thing back into the drawer.
I grabbed it from her, held it up to have a look. “A balloon?”
“It is not a balloon.” Sharla took the thing from me, put it back in the drawer. “Let’s go downstairs. I’ll tell you what it is.”
Sharla instructed me to sit on one end of the sofa, and she sat on the other. “Now,” she said, hands folded in her lap, legs crossed. She was speaking in the voice she used for playing teacher. I regretted the fact that she was not wearing a pair of high heels; everything worked better then. She leaned toward me, spoke quietly. “What exactly do you