What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [64]
On the first day of school, I got my period. That was something, telling him rather than my mother. Asking him to get what I needed. That, perhaps more than anything, showed me how different things really were now. Say you walked into your own familiar house and the floor gave away beneath your feet. That would be close to what I felt. And tried to pretend I was not feeling. I mean, I just kept trying to walk where there was nothing to walk on. We all did.
* * *
On the third of November, we came home from school and found our mother sitting in our bedroom. I came into the room first, and I nearly screamed when I saw her. I did not, at first, quite recognize her. She had cut her hair into a feathered, caplike do, and she wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, something I’d never seen her in before. A red scarf was tied in her hair; the tails hung down past her collarbone.
“You scared me,” I said.
She held out her arms, smiled.
“You scared me,” I said again.
I heard Sharla on the steps, then felt her presence behind me. “What are you …” she started, and then simply turned and went back downstairs.
My mother lowered her arms, sat quietly.
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“No!”
“‘No,’ what, Ginny? Come here, for God’s sake.” She patted the bed beside her.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
She waited a long moment. Then, “I don’t know. At work, I expect. Isn’t he at work?”
“He quit,” I said. I loved this lie; it was better than a square of Hershey’s chocolate melting in my mouth.
She looked at me, said nothing. And then, “No, he did not,” she said.
“Uh-huh, he did so. He has a new job.”
“And what is that?”
“Administrator,” I said.
“Administrator! Where? Of what?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “How come you didn’t say you were coming? Where have you been?”
“Come here,” she said gently, and, hating myself, I went and let her hold me.
We sat in silence for a long while. I breathed in the familiar flesh smell of her, watched the shadows of leaves move in the small square of sunlight that came through the window and landed on her knee. At one point, I traced around the outline of that square, gently, wanting her not to move.
And she did not. She merely said, in a voice that let me know she was smiling, “You know what you once called sunlight?”
“No.”
“Sun night.”
I looked up at her. “Really?”
She nodded. “It was apt, really. You were a couple months short of two, and I was holding you in front of your window—right over there—before I put you to bed. I was swaying just a little, you used to really like that. There was a magnificent sunset that night. And you took your thumb out of your mouth and pointed out the window and said, ‘Sun night. ’Night, ’night.’”
I smiled, adoring my baby self.
“And you know what you used to call orange juice?”
I shook my head.
“Undies.”
I laughed.
“Yes, you did. And the best—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Sharla asked.
We hadn’t heard her come up, but there she was, standing in the doorway.
“Sharla,” my mother said, her voice low and soft.
Sharla stood immobile. I pulled away from my mother, moved down a bit on the bed. There was room for us all. Our mother was home now. She would repair everything in the way she always had: sunburned shoulders, saggy hems, darts to the heart from the careless ways of friends.
“Who told you you could come in here?” Sharla asked.
I laughed, involuntarily. That Sharla would suggest our mother needed permission to come into our bedroom!
And yet, “Well … no one,” my mother said, her voice small and culpable. I hated her acquiescing in this way. Why didn’t she take Sharla to task for her rude behavior?
“She can come in here,” I said.
“Not on my side, she can’t.” Sharla breezed over to her bed. She put a glass of milk down on the nightstand, omitting the coaster we were always supposed to use. I waited for my mother to say something. She did not.
“You need a coaster,” I said, but before the words were fully out of my mouth, Sharla said, “Shut up, baby! You baby!”
“Now, just a minute,” my mother began, and Sharla whirled