What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [67]
I opened my mouth, took in a jerky gulp of air.
“Ginny, can you possibly understand? I feel I am finally telling the truth.”
Something interesting happened then; I watched it from above. Some switch got thrown and I did not care about anything happening before me. Outside, it was growing dark; my father would be coming home soon and we would resume our lives without her. He had learned to make angel cake; we could have it whenever we wanted. He put away clean laundry in our dresser drawers, only rarely making his tender little mistakes.
I started unloading my school books. “I have to do my homework now,” I said.
“Ginny,” my mother said. “Listen to me. I’m living with Jasmine, she and I—”
Jasmine! “I have so much history,” I said. “My teacher, Mr. Stoltz, he’s nuts. He thinks all we have in our lives is history.”
“I am living in New Mexico,” my mother said. “I have started art classes, my painting is becoming so … I … Ginny, don’t you see that it breaks my heart not to be living with you and Sharla? But I have finally begun to learn a kind of happiness that I thought I would never know! I have to get stronger in all this, I need to—”
“I want you to go now, please,” I said.
Sharla came up the stairs, went over to her bed, dumped her books out of her bag. “Get out,” she said, her voice deadly calm. “We don’t need you.”
I lay down, opened my history book, held it before my face.
I heard my mother start for the bedroom door. “I’ll write to you then,” she said. “I’ll try to tell you in a letter.”
“Good-BYYYYYYE,” Sharla said.
My mother leaned down to embrace me. She was crying, quietly; I hugged her without looking at her. Then she started toward Sharla, who looked up and said, “If you get near me, I’ll call the cops. I swear to God.”
My mother touched Sharla’s shoe, then left. I heard a car door slam, and I asked, “Did she drive here?”
“Who?” Sharla said.
“Mom.”
“Who?” she asked again.
“Mom!” I answered, and then I understood. We did homework for twenty minutes in complete silence, until our father got home. Then we went downstairs to meet him.
“Where is she?” he asked, taking his coat off.
And we told him. Gone again.
Only an hour left before we land. I pull my compact out of my purse, check my makeup, apply some lipstick. Then, staring at my face, I think about the fact that I am older than my mother was when I saw her last. I wonder what she looks like now.
The most recent photographs we have of our mother show her at thirty-five. The last time I looked at those photos was a few Thanksgivings ago, when Sharla and I had brought our families to our father’s house for the holiday. The men were watching football, the children playing in the newly installed rec room in the basement. Dinner was running a bit behind, and Georgia insisted she didn’t want any help, that at times like this she functioned better alone.
Sharla and I were up in our old bedroom talking about cars; her husband wanted to buy a classic, a blue-and-white ’55 Chevrolet. I said I thought that’s what we used to have, and Sharla said she thought we had a DeSoto. I said no, I was sure it was a Chevrolet. We went into the attic to get the scrapbooks to check—somewhere in there were pictures with the car in the background.
We settled down next to a big cardboard box full of scrapbooks, dug through photos of Sharla and me with our children, at our weddings, at our college graduations, at our high-school graduations. Finally we reached the period we were looking for and found photos of the car—I was right, it was a Chevrolet. We also found pictures of our mother, which we looked at together. We said very little about them, then or afterward.
I remember Sharla looked at one picture of our family taken by some grandparent or another. It was Thanksgiving, 1955, so many years ago. She looked at it for a long time. Then she passed it to me, saying, her voice a bit thick, “Huh. I guess she was really beautiful, wasn