What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [60]
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it.” Not quite true. Not true at all, actually. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I think there may be some truth in what my friend is saying. For example, I know the exact moment that Sharla and I moved into a much closer relationship. It was that night when I lay silently beside her, listening to the sad noise of our parents coming apart.
My mother was gone on my birthday. Sharla made me a Duncan Hines white cake with chocolate frosting; she did not know how to make caramel-flavored. My father presented me with gifts he and my mother had gotten earlier: two Nancy Drew books, a very sophisticated chemistry set that I’d wanted for a very long time, stationery featuring the floating trappings of the teenager: telephone, address book, nail polish, rollers, 45s. Sharla gave me a huge-size box of colored pencils and a sketch book. I opened everything with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, then stacked the gifts neatly at the side of the table. Later, I would stack them neatly at the bottom of my closet and drape a pillowcase over the pile.
My father lay between our beds when we went to sleep that night, his arms a pillow behind his head. He kept his eyes closed while he talked. “There’s something wrong with your mother right now. But it’s temporary. It’s strictly temporary. But she’s so … upset right now, she just forgot it was your birthday, Ginny.”
“Oh,” I said.
He opened his eyes, looked at me. “It happens, that people can get that upset. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Or that they’ll never be right again. It’s like … you know, a gallbladder operation or something. Remember when Grandma needed her gallbladder out and she was in the hospital? Remember how sick she looked, how she couldn’t do anything?”
I nodded, squeezed the edge of my pillow. On a breezy day like we’d had today, my mother often would air the pillows, lay them across the windowsills, half in, half out.
“Well,” my father said, “Grandma got better really fast, right? And she came home, and everything was fine. But the whole time she was in the hospital, she forgot about everything that was going on at home.”
“Nothing was going on, though,” I said. Then at night, the pillows smelled so good. My mother called it God’s perfume, that’s what she said.
“Well.” My father smiled. “You don’t know that nothing was going on.”
“Not like a birthday or anything,” I said. And when my mother did the dishes, she took her wedding rings off and put them on the kitchen windowsill in a little bowl with pink roses on it, that’s all that bowl was for. Once, she let me wear the rings, instead of putting them in the bowl. When she had finished the dishes, I held my hand out, giving the rings back to her. “What have you got there?” she asked. I’d thought she was kidding. But she’d forgotten that she’d given them to me.
“I don’t think Grandma missed a birthday,” my father said. “But I’m sure she missed some things.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “She would have told me.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Mom is not in the hospital, Dad,” Sharla said. “She is with Jasmine. That is not a hospital.”
“She is on a little trip with Jasmine,” my father said carefully. “But she is getting well just the same as if she were in a hospital.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Sharla muttered.
My father sat up. “You really must try to understand, Sharla. Both of you. I know it’s hard. But you have to try. She’s your mother. She loves you very much, you two are the most important things in the world to her.”
We neither of us said anything. But a shared doubt