What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [62]
“Well, I’m not writing her,” Sharla said. “I hate her. She’s crazy.”
“Sharla!” my father said sharply. But when she answered “What?” he did not say anything more. He put his hand to Sharla’s cheek, swallowed so hugely we all heard it. And then he walked away, went into the kitchen to make dinner.
We were eating much later these days—seven o’clock, even eight. Our father would come home from work and cook in his good clothes, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, a dishcloth tucked into the waistband of his pants. Tonight we were having steak again. Steak, baked potatoes, canned tomatoes, canned green beans, and very little conversation around our small table, that’s what we would be having. Sometimes he stopped at the bakery for dessert: half a cake. Butter cookies in the shape of leaves, in pastel colors of greens, yellows, and pinks. Sometimes Mrs. Five Operations would stop by with a pie, but it was only so she could gawk; eventually, we stopped answering the door when she came. Other neighbors seemed not to know what to do; they waved from their driveways, smiled tight smiles, and that was all. My father kept a pad by the phone on which to write down messages for my mother; by the time she had been gone for a week, they decreased dramatically. I stopped attending dance school; Sharla told the piano teacher not to come anymore.
We did not go anywhere, Sharla and I. We were ashamed to be seen. We spent days when my father was at work sitting in the backyard making daisy chains; pulling up fat blades of grass and sucking at their whitened ends; lying on the old quilt and charting the progress of the indifferent clouds across the sky. And we talked. By tacit agreement, we did not talk about our mother. We had become interested in ancient Egypt, and we talked mostly about that. We also looked in the woods for dead squirrels. We were going to try to preserve them, to mummify them. I believe we were both relieved not to find any. At night, we watched television with our father, or lay in bed to read books we found in the living-room bookcase: Reader’s Digest condensations, mostly.
One day a couple of weeks after our mother left, I went into the house to make Sharla’s and my lunch. It was my turn; I was going to make peanut-butter-and-fluff-marshmallow sandwiches and cut them into sliver-thin pieces. I took out the supplies, began making the sandwiches, and then stopped. I’d heard something upstairs, a woman’s voice, I was sure of it. “Mom?” I said. A rich silence, the air around me pleated with possibilities.
I started upstairs. My chest was tight with anticipation; I pressed my fist against my sternum. I walked slowly down the hall toward my mother’s bedroom, stopped just outside her open door. There were her bottles of perfume, grouped like gossiping friends on her dresser. There was the silver hairbrush her grandmother had given her, the framed photographs of Sharla and me, dusty now. I went over to her closet, yanked the door wide open. If she was in there, I would yell at her. I would not show her any respect. I would hit her, too, as hard as I could.
There was nothing but her clothes and the faint, faint smell of powder. I pushed my way to the back of the closet, moved some high heels out of the way, and sat down. I took in a huge, shuddering breath. Directly before me hung her green knit dress, my favorite. I squeezed the hem of it in my hand, and began to weep. I cried from deep in my belly for a long time, wiped the tears from my face with her knit dress, then her flowered one, then her brown skirt, then her matching cardigan sweater. And then I went downstairs and made the sandwiches and brought them outside.
“Well, it took you long enough,” Sharla said. We had a rule that the one making lunch was entitled to absolute privacy, so that no culinary