What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [5]
Just before dawn, when the sky lit up at the bottom with its hopeful shade of gray/pink, we would sneak back into the house. Now our beds were acceptable, and we would pull down the shades and sleep until around ten, then come tousle-headed and blinking into the kitchen for a breakfast of peanut-butter toast and orange juice. Except for those rare times when our mother wasn’t home—when she put on her gloves and hat and took the bus to the dentist’s, say. At those times, we would have miniature Coke floats, served in the thin, light-refracting champagne flutes our parents kept in the high cupboard over the refrigerator.
We had some thoughts about life that summer: it was a smooth and plodding thing, as comfortable as slippers. It was pleasantly predictable, widely safe. Without knowing exactly what our futures would hold, we nonetheless felt sure about the way to march toward them. Right was right. Wrong was wrong. The difference between the two was easy to see.
And then Jasmine Johnson moved in next door and set off reverberations in our minds and in our centers that would shape us more surely than anything else ever had, or would.
I was the one to see the moving van first. I came downstairs early one Tuesday, bent on finding a “dew nest.” This, according to my sister, was the morning home of the sacred Egyptian jewel spider, a delicate creature with a multicolored pattern on its back. Much prettier than your average spider. And capable of granting wishes. If you were so fortunate as to find one still in the nest, you put your hand over it, made a wish, kissed your fingertips, and, voilà, at the end of the day anything you desired would be yours. Anything. I half knew this was another one of my sister’s fanciful lies—she believed in benign forms of torture—but I got up early just to check. My mother was in the kitchen making breakfast, the radio turned on low to “keep her company.” Perry Como was singing one of his nice-guy songs and my mother hummed along shyly. She had a crush on Perry Como. She said that. It was all right; my father had a crush on Dinah Shore.
My mother was dressed in her beautiful yellow summer robe, the tie cinched evenly into a bow at the exact center of her waist, but her auburn hair was sticking up in the back, an occasional occurrence that I always hated seeing, since in my mind it suggested a kind of incompetence. It was an unruly cowlick, nearly impossible to tame—I knew this, having an identical cowlick of my own—but I did not forgive its presence on my mother. It did not go with the rest of her looks: her deep blue eyes, her thin, sculptured nose, her high cheekbones, her white, white skin—all signs, I was certain, of some distant link with royalty. She would not pursue the notion; I intended to do it for her when I grew up. “There!” I would say one day, presenting her with papers embossed with gold seals. “Oh, my,” she would say softly, handling the papers with a combination of wild joy and great delicacy. “Thank you, Ginny! I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. Thank you!”
“It’s all right,” I would say, wiping the tears from her old face. “At least you got to finally know.”
As for now, my mother looked up from the electric frying pan to ask, “Where are you off to?”
“Your hair’s sticking up,” I answered.
“I know,” she said, though she had not known. If she had, she would have fixed it. She put her hand to her head, pressed down, and I saw a hint of embarrassment, a rising up of pink to her cheeks. This was a tender thing; and I thought about crossing the room to hug her around the waist, to feel her hand with her loose wedding ring on the back of my head, cradling it, but I was getting older. And I had work to do. The spider had to be found still in the nest in order for its magic to work.
“I’m going out to look for something,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Do you want eggs?” my mother called after me. “Bacon?”
“No,” I told her. “I’m going back to bed.” Although as I stepped outside I realized I wasn’t tired anymore.