What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [44]
“Okay.” I would be so gentle.
“Should we do our nails after that?”
“Sure!”
“Use that red if you want to,” my mother called after us as we headed up the stairs. “It’s in the medicine chest.”
This stopped both Sharla and me in our tracks. Not long ago, we had brought home a bright red polish from Woolworth’s. “Well. It’s very pretty, but I don’t think quite yet,” my mother had said, and she had taken the polish away to “save” for us. (She was also “saving” a strapless bra a friend of Sharla’s had given her, as well as a paperback book called Real Treasure, which I’d brought home from the drugstore. The cover featured a bare-chested pirate standing next to a busty woman in lovely distress.)
“When can we have red?” I’d asked.
“When you are eighteen,” she’d answered, her standard response.
Suddenly, things were different.
Sharla and I moved quickly up the stairs, before she changed her mind.
The flight attendant asks if I would like something to drink. Sure, about six more scotches. Instead, I ask for coffee, then stare out the window as I drink it. Far below me, I can see some birds flying in a raggedy formation. One of them looks different from the others, though from this distance I can’t really tell for sure.
I used to fantasize that I’d be outside some day and see our parakeet, Lucky, flying illegally in some V-shaped squadron. I figured I’d hold up my finger, call his name, and he’d joyfully alight. Then I’d bring him home and give him a fancy bird treat.
It was soon after I’d met Wayne that Lucky had escaped. My mother had brought the cage into the backyard—to clean it, she said—and somehow he got out. We’d had the bird for five years, and we felt terrible, Sharla and I, and even Wayne—he’d helped us look for Lucky for hours. My mother said she felt bad, too, but I remember thinking there was something false in her saying so. At the time, I thought it was just that she didn’t really care about pets. Now, sitting here and looking out the window into this vast sky, I realize something. She must have let him go. It would have fit, for her to have done something like that about that time. Of course she let him go.
As it happened, Jasmine did not go to the movie with us. Just before our turn at the ticket window, she said suddenly, “You know what? I think I’ll just drop you guys off. You don’t need me.”
“Don’t you want to see this?” I asked. It was Ben Hur. I couldn’t imagine her walking away from this movie, just like that. Charlton Heston was in it!
“I’ll see it some other time,” she said. “Maybe your mother and I will go.”
“She goes to the movies with my father,” Sharla said, and my indignant heart leaped up in confirmation. They probably would have come tonight, in fact, if my father hadn’t been working; they loved the movies.
“Well, maybe the three of us will go tomorrow night,” Jasmine said. I supposed this was possible. My father seemed to genuinely like Jasmine. Only last week, he had spent an hour at her place fixing a drip in her kitchen sink; she had rewarded him with a new toolbox—both clasps were broken on his old one. And occasionally after dinner the three of them would sit in lawn chairs out in our yard and drink coffee together, swatting at the mosquitoes.
Jasmine bought our tickets, handed us each one. I hoped that the numbers on my stub would add up to twenty-one, which meant I could kiss my boyfriend. Or eighteen, which gave you the right to a hug. Under the right circumstances, a hug would surely lead to a kiss. I had gotten twenty-one twice before; the tickets were taped uselessly into my scrapbook. Now I added my numbers while we waited in line for popcorn. I had twenty. That meant somebody else had something. I looked to see if Sharla was adding her numbers up. No. Not Wayne, either.
“Want to go to the bathroom?” I asked Sharla.
“No.”
“Sure?”
She looked at me. “No!”
“Okay,” I said, and stood immobile beside her.
“Go,” she said. “We’ll wait.”
I looked over at Wayne, who was busy buying popcorn. “I just wanted to ask you something,