What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [69]
“Number forty-six,” she said. “Right in the middle of the block. It’s the building that always has red tulips in front every spring.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You know which one I mean?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t understand what was she doing there, why she was in that apartment and not in her house. And yet I did not exactly want her home anymore. I did not miss her in the old way: what had felt raw and urgent had changed into something dull and distant—and protected, like the soft essence of a mussel. In many ways she felt less like my mother than some faraway relative whose rare visits brought mostly a guilty discomfort.
I pulled at the phone cord, jiggled my foot restlessly, turned around to look for Sharla or my father. They had left the room.
“Will you come and see me tomorrow?” my mother asked.
I had no idea what to say. I wondered if she had asked my father and my sister, too, wondered what they had said.
Finally, “I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Well. Why don’t you think about it, all right? I’d like you and Sharla to come over after school. Just for a bit. So we can talk.”
I said nothing.
“Ginny?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear me?”
“I have to go,” I said.
She sighed. “All right. Put your father back on, will you?”
I laid the phone down, called him. He came into the room and picked up the receiver, but did not speak right away. Instead, he looked at me, trying to assess the expression on my face. I made myself crack the smallest of smiles to tell him I was all right. At that point he said hello, but he was still not present to my mother—I heard it in his voice: his mild, floating syllables, his ultimate disregard. He might have been talking to someone soliciting a subscription to an unwanted magazine.
I remembered him sweeping up a broken glass in the kitchen the day before, funneling the shards into the dustpan while his face was raised toward me, talking. The damage was forgotten before it was gone. I remembered, too, his receiving a phone call from a pleasant-voiced woman last night, and how content he had seemed afterward. “Who was that?” I’d asked. He’d put his hand on top of my head, tousled my hair lightly. “Friend,” he’d said, in a playful whisper.
I went to find Sharla.
She was standing in our bedroom, looking out the window, her hands in her back pockets. When I came in, she turned around and spoke angrily. “We have to go and see her, can you believe that?”
“Who said?”
“Dad.”
Actually, I was relieved.
I had read the first few letters my mother sent almost daily; then I began throwing them away unopened. They made no sense to me, what with their talk about her soul, her “growth,” the light of truth. And they frightened me. I wanted to relax into a new life that was working out well enough and that did not include her. Our father had lost the pain and bewilderment in his eyes; last Saturday, he had hummed the whole time he made breakfast, and he had made French toast, which he served with strawberries. Yet now I wanted very much to see my mother. It felt programmed into me, a reflex as unstoppable as a blink.
“We’ll be together when we see her,” I told Sharla. But it was more a question than a statement.
“Of course!” Sharla said. “Do you think he’d let us see her alone? She’s dangerous!”
I sat on my bed, scratched at the side of my neck, considered this. My mother had picked out the bedspread I was sitting on. I tried to envision her doing this, standing in Monroe’s and sorting through the selections, her pocketbook dangling from her arm. When a figure came into focus, I realized I was not seeing the woman who had last been in my bedroom, begging me to try to understand something. I was seeing someone else, someone who had disappeared from my life as surely as if she had drowned. At that moment, I understood that the person who had so carefully deliberated over this bedspread was never coming back; she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. I shivered, pulled my covers down, and got under them without removing my shoes. Sharla watched me, didn