What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [56]
We ate in silence. And then the cake was put in the refrigerator, the thirty-five having been clumsily changed into a thirty-six. My father used a fork to do it. He wasn’t careful enough; it didn’t really work.
There was one awful year when my husband forgot my birthday. Usually, he would serve me breakfast in bed—that was always one of the best presents. But this year he said nothing about my birthday all day. I wasn’t worried. It was a Saturday, and I kept waiting, thinking he had a surprise party planned. The kids didn’t mention my birthday either, but that wasn’t unusual—they were only four and six. Sharla called that afternoon when Mark was at the hardware store. She asked what he had given me and I said nothing yet, that I thought he had some big surprise planned. Then I asked if she knew what it was. “No,” she said, and I could tell she wasn’t lying, and it was then that it began to occur to me that he had forgotten. I didn’t tell her that, though, nor did I tell my father and Georgia when they called a few minutes later. They, too, asked me what Mark had gotten me. This time I did not smile and say I thought he had something planned. This time I felt like punching them for asking.
Mark remembered right before we went to bed. He felt terrible. He got dressed and went to an all-night grocery to get a card and a bouquet of flowers, and the next day he served me a spectacular breakfast in bed.
But what happened on my mother’s birthday, that was different. It was completely different.
The morning after the Tupperware party, I awakened feeling fine. I left Sharla sleeping and came into the kitchen to see my mother sitting at the kitchen table, a small book before her. “What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a book of poetry. By Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“Jasmine gave it to me for my birthday. That, and this.” She pointed to her neck, and I saw a thin gold chain, holding a locket.
“That’s pretty. What’s inside?” I knew already: photos of me and Sharla. I couldn’t wait to see.
“Nothing, yet.” My mother tightened her hand around the locket.
“You can use my school picture,” I said. “Part of me would fit.”
“Good,” she said. “Yes. I’ll do that.”
I sat opposite her, looked at the book she had open to somewhere in the middle. “Why did Jasmine get you a poetry book?”
She looked up. “I love poetry.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
She got up, went over to the refrigerator. “Do you want scrambled eggs?”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Something was.
“Nothing.”
A silence, thick and unrelenting. She stood waiting before the open refrigerator door, her back to me. “I’ll just have cereal,” I said, finally.
The next morning, our father stayed home from work. “For nothing,” he said. “For fun.”
He had never done this, and it astounded and delighted Sharla and me. It also frightened us. We looked at our mother for signs of life-threatening illness and found none. We looked at our father, at ourselves. All seemed well: skins were pink; eyes were clear; no one limped or coughed or moaned. All seemed well except that our father was staying home from work. It was like finding two yolks in an egg: a bonus, but an anomaly that made you a bit nervous.
My mother seemed suspicious at first, then guardedly happy. We all sat in the living room in our pajamas, thinking about what we might do. My mother wanted to go on a picnic, but outside thick gray clouds moved restlessly about, as though the sky had been set for a slow boil. It looked like we were in for yet another day of storms.
“It’ll clear up by noon,” she said. “I’ll make some potato salad.”
She started potatoes cooking, then went up to dress. By the time she came down, the rain had started. Fat drops splattered against the window, drummed at the gutters; the wind whipped the branches of the bushes and pulled blossoms off the flowers in the garden. She stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, immobile.
“Let’s have a picnic anyway,” my father said.
My mother looked at him.
“Inside, I mean.