What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [70]
“It smells like pee in here,” Sharla whispered. It was six-thirty in the evening; we were in the hallway of our mother’s apartment building. Our father had dropped us off, telling us he’d be back in an hour.
“That’s not pee,” I said.
“Cat pee, I mean.”
“It’s not cat pee, either. It’s medicine.”
“How do you know?” Sharla scoffed.
“I just do. It’s Vicks VapoRub.”
Sharla sniffed the air again. “Oh. Right. I hate that smell.”
I didn’t. My mother was a great believer in Vicks. Whenever we had colds, she would slather it on our chests at night. I grew to love the smell of it, even the stickiness, believing that it was a cure made manifest: so long as my pajama top adhered to my chest, something was working hard to bring me back to normal.
“What number is it again?” Sharla asked, but the answer was unnecessary; at that moment, our mother opened a door a few feet away.
She was dressed in one of her housedresses, the lemon yellow one, freshly ironed and stiff at the collar. Her hair was neatly styled; she wore red lipstick and small gold earrings. But her hands were clasped too tightly and she bit absentmindedly at her lip: she was not really put together at all. And when we got closer, I could see that her eyes were red-rimmed; she’d been crying. This annoyed me. Why did we have to come over if all she was going to do was cry?
She embraced me, then Sharla, then gestured toward her open door, saying, “Go right in.” And then quickly, laughing, “Well, I hardly need to say that, do I? This is your place, too.”
I felt my mouth open in outraged wonder. But I closed it again, said nothing. I didn’t have to, because Sharla said loudly, “What are you talking about?”
My mother put her finger to her lips, closed the door, leaned against it. “I just mean”—she smiled, waved her arm vaguely toward the small apartment—“that you are as welcome here as in your own house. It really is your place, too.”
Silence.
“Well,” she said, finally. “Come with me, let me show you something.”
Our mother led us down a small, dark hall to a bedroom at the back of the apartment. There were two twin beds there, with barely enough room to walk between them. There was a small dresser, leaning slightly to the left, but decorated beautifully with painted flowers. A small lamp was on the dresser, turned on, and the effect was cozy. On the wall was a small canvas, a painting of a chair in front of a window. It reminded me of the chair my mother sat in at home, but this chair had an ethereal glow, and in the window behind, winding around the wooden rails of a balcony, were flowers the likes of which I’d never seen: shapes like stars, like shells from the ocean. The leaves were veined with thread-thin lines the color of blood.
“Did you paint that?” I asked, my voice a tight bundle in my throat. But I already knew the answer.
“Yes,” she said. “And the dresser, too.” Then, more tentatively, “Do you like it?”
I shrugged. “I guess. What is that a painting of, anyway? Where is it?”
“It’s in my head,” she said. “My imagination.”
“We’re not going to sleep here,” Sharla said, suddenly.
“Well, not tonight,” my mother said.
“Not ever.”
My mother turned toward Sharla. “It’s just here,” she said. “I just wanted to show you that. You have a room here.” They stared at each other, neither softening. Finally, my mother said, “Now I’ll show you the rest of the place.”
“We saw it,” Sharla said. It was true: the place was small; we had seen everything on the way to our bedroom. Still, my mother led us on a determined tour. “This is the bathroom,” she said. I nodded. Sharla, still angry, would not look at the rag rug on the floor, the pink shower curtain, the bar of Ivory soap emitting the comforting, familiar smell.
“My bedroom,” she said, turning on the light and standing aside. It was smaller than ours, I saw; there was room for only a bed and small nightstand. There were books piled on top of the nightstand, thin ones, colored burgundy, navy, and mustard. The little kitchen,