What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [68]
I looked at the picture, at the old monogrammed tablecloth, the sparkling dishes, the huge turkey, my father’s smile, Sharla’s and my neat braids—then, finally, at our mother. And she was beautiful.
“I didn’t notice, then, how pretty she was,” Sharla said. She was speaking quietly, as though we were in a chapel.
“Kids don’t.” I looked at the photo again, then said, “But look at how she’s sitting.”
“What? You mean at the end of the line?”
Our mother was seated at the end of the four of us. First came me, then Sharla, then our father, then our mother.
“No, I mean look how far away from the rest of us she is.” While the rest of us were touching shoulders, there were a good six inches between my father and my mother.
We looked again at the other photos. Whenever my mother was with Sharla or me, or both of us together, she was close to us, touching us. When it was the whole family, or just her and my father, there was that distance.
There is one movie of our family around that time. It was taken by a man who worked with my father, Joe Valsalvez. He’d bought a movie camera, was thrilled with it, and volunteered to film our family as a gift to my father. The footage of my mother shows her at the kitchen sink. Joe had crept up on her—I remember we all snuck up with him. In the film, she jumps, turns quickly toward us, then starts smiling and wiping at her face. “Onions,” she mouths, pointing into the sink. I remember she was answering my father, who had asked, with some embarrassment, why she was crying.
I remember Joe saying loudly, “Oh yeah, my wife, she peels onions, we got a flood! You gotta get a boat to get her out of the kitchen!”
I remember something else. It was not onions she was peeling. It was apples, for a pie. I had been in the kitchen with her shortly before Joe started filming. I had seen. We watched that movie only once, borrowed Joe’s equipment to do it. The black-and-white images rolled by, you heard the hum from the projector, the tiny clicks of the reel turning. You saw the dust moats float in the steady beam that was directed toward the screen. You saw my mother wipe her face with her apron, smile, and lie. I never called her on it, either. Not then.
In December, a month after we’d last seen her, our mother called around eight o’clock in the evening to tell us she was back in town. She spoke to all of us: first my father, then Sharla, then me. She was living alone in an apartment on Bradley Street, about three miles away from our house. Sharla and I often biked down that street; we thought it was populated only by old people; thought, in fact, that being old was a prerequisite for living there, since we had never seen any other kind of person for the entire three blocks that the street ran. We had always liked watching the residents: women in saggy-bosomed housedresses and loose-weave cardigans; men in pants that fit like elephant skin, their shirts buttoned up to the top, even on the warmest days. We made up lives for them: she was a former beauty queen who became an alcoholic; he was a banker who had lived in a mansion with ghosts.
You could see Bradley Street residents climbing slowly up their outside steps, carrying net bags with miniature loads of groceries: soup, Lipton tea, cans of tuna. You could see them marching purposefully down the sidewalk for their daily “constitutionals,” their canes tapping. In the winter, they sat before their front-room windows in dark upholstered armchairs beside equally dark draperies, watching for action on the street; in the summer, they came out to sit on their little screened porches and drink lemonade from tall, sweating glasses. Sometimes, especially when Sharla and I were younger, we would stop and talk for a while, sit cross-legged on this porch floor or that and share with the old folks the uninteresting cookies they seemed to favor.
I could not imagine my mother living on that street, but when it was my turn to talk to her, she assured me she was. “But where?” I asked, thinking I must have missed seeing something on that street, some dwelling