What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [57]
“Inside?”
“How about in the living room?” He was dressed in his Saturday clothes: khaki pants, a plaid, short-sleeved shirt open two buttons at the throat. His hands were in his pockets, as though seeking protection behind that thin fabric; he looked to me like a boy asking for his allowance early.
“I don’t know about having a picnic inside,” my mother said. “What would be the point?”
“Fun!” I said.
She nodded. Did not smile. Although her mouth moved slightly, as if she were trying to.
While she finished making lunch, the rest of us sat at the kitchen table, keeping her company. Sharla and I had a stack of magazines. We were “doing houses,” as we called it, cutting out things to put in our piles. If you saw a dress you liked, you put that in there and it was yours, hanging in the closet of your dreams. If you cut out a Cadillac convertible, it was parked in whatever garage you imagined (and Sharla once imagined a garage with a swimming pool in it). Today, I dropped a white cake with cherry-fluff frosting in my pile, then added a hat and coat ensemble, then an entire kitchen. Sharla was concentrating on furniture; thus far, she had a nubby green tweed sofa, a Sylvania television, and a club chair. My father watched us for a while, then took a magazine for himself and began cutting things out. He told us he was going to make a collage. We stopped our own work to watch him: he taped a pair of brown wing tips inside a DeSoto, taped a roast onto a Frigidaire dryer. He found a white picket fence and taped a woman behind it; next to that, he put the face of a fair-haired child looking out of a window.
My mother finished with the ham sandwiches and came over to watch my father, hands on her hips. Then she, too, sat down and began leafing through magazines. She cut out a pair of red high heels. Next she cut out the picture of a small bird, and, with great care, cut his wings off. These she affixed to the heel of the shoes. She stared at her creation, then sat back, her arms crossed.
“What have you got there, Marion?” my father asked.
My mother smiled, shrugged.
“Where are those shoes going?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Wherever it is, it’s fast,” my father said.
“Hey, Mom,” Sharla said. She held up a picture of an airplane. “Want this?”
“Oh, say, I could use that,” my father said. He reached across the table to take the airplane from Sharla, then asked my mother, “You don’t mind?”
“Take it, Steven,” she said. Then she sat quietly looking out the window at the storm, which continued to worsen.
When lunch was ready, we assembled ourselves on a quilt before the fireplace. No one talked. We listened instead to the natural symphony of wind and rain, to the reverberation of thunder so loud it seemed it might crack the earth.
By five o’clock that evening, we had lost our electrical power. It seemed to me that this was a real opportunity for a good time, though I was short on specific ideas. But my mother took a flashlight and started upstairs. She said she was going to read for a while, then go to sleep.
“But it’s still day!” I said.
“I’m tired.” She did not turn around to tell me this. I turned angrily to Sharla and my father, who were watching her go up the steps; and in their faces I saw that they each thought it was their fault, too. So I said nothing. Instead, I silently shared the burden.
Sharla and I stayed up until ten, playing Monopoly with our father. The lights had come back on at nine-thirty, for which I was a little sorry. I’d liked seeing the dice roll into shadowy corners of the game board, liked moving my marker with the flashlight ahead of it as though it were a car.
“Are you ever going to play hooky again?” Sharla asked my father.
He took his turn, landed on Chance, pulled a card. “I might,” he said. “I’m full of surprises.” And then, to me, the banker, “Fifty bucks, please.” He showed me the tax rebate card that entitled him to it.
“You’re not full of surprises.” I laughed, handed him the money.
“What do you mean?” He seemed offended.
“Nothing. Just … You don’t do surprising things. You’re … regular.