What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [8]
My mother cracked eggs into the frying pan, then bent and squinted at the dial, adjusting it. I liked when she did this. She looked like a scientist.
“Oh, you know,” she said. She didn’t want to tell me. Which meant that I must persist.
“What?”
“Well, she’s old and all alone. Having some … problems. She’s going to the nursing home.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know much about nursing homes, except that the residents I’d seen there mostly sat like rag dolls in wheelchairs, staring. They were the recipients of many construction-paper projects that we did in school and then reluctantly delivered—May baskets, glittery valentines, turkeys made from handprints, Santas with cotton-ball beards. And you died there, I knew that. I had a flash of regret that I hadn’t been kinder to Mrs. O’Donnell. It wouldn’t have been so hard.
“Who’s moving in?” I asked.
“I don’t know—We’ll see pretty soon, I guess. How many eggs do you want?”
“One,” I said. “No. Two.”
It was going to be a busy day; I wanted to be fortified. Everything Mrs. O’Donnell had in that house was about to be brought outside. Her ottoman and her scrapbooks. All her pots and pans. Towels and rugs, the doilies she kept on her maple end tables. Her very bed. I would see everything she owned, carried by strong men in T-shirts up a ramp and into the dark mouth of the truck. When they left, the house would be empty. Not even a curtain. I shivered.
I hear someone rummaging around beside me and open my eyes to see Martha, digging in the seat pocket. “My reading glasses,” she says. “I think I stuck them in here.” She reaches in farther, pulls them out, and holds them up triumphantly.
“You decided not to sleep?” I say.
“I did sleep! It felt like such a long time, but it was only fifteen minutes. I had a dream and everything. I dreamed I had a baby—a little girl. Actually, from what I hear, that’s a nightmare.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know, how mean girls are to their mothers.”
Something inside me stiffens. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“Do you have girls?”
“Two, ten and twelve.”
“And they’re nice to you?”
“Well, they have their moments. But all kids do.”
“I don’t know,” Martha says. “I guess that incident in the cemetery reminded me of how hard girls can be on their mothers. I know I was—for the longest time, my mother just couldn’t do anything right. It’s like … Well, once I saw these two young women in an art museum, talking about a painting. One of them said, ‘It’s really just the quality of differentness that I love so much here. I always want a little differentness in my art, don’t you?’ And the other woman said, ‘Oh God, yes. I want everything in my life to be unusual. Except things like, you know, my mother.’ And I thought, that’s true. I wouldn’t want my mother to be different, either. Yet I always despised her for being the same as everyone else.” She looks at me. “Your kids aren’t like that, thinking everything you do is wrong?”
“Not at all. We’re very close.”
“Huh,” she says, and I have the feeling she doesn’t believe me.
“We really are,” I say. “I was close to my mother, too, until she screwed up so bad. And I was very close to my stepmother.” I see her suddenly: Georgia, sitting at the side of my bed, taking down the hem of a dress I refused to part with and talking to me about a teacher who’d sent me to the principal. She wasn’t mad at me; she was mad at the teacher. She had a call in to him.
“I wonder if your daughters will change when they get older,” Martha says. “I hear when they hit the teen years, they can really—”
“They’ll be fine,” I say. “I waited a long time to have kids. My first was born at thirty-five. I wanted to be absolutely sure I was ready. I wanted to spend the time I needed with them. I quit work when I had them; I’m devoted to them. They know that. They’ll be fine.” My voice has gotten louder in my defensiveness; the people ahead of me turn slightly around, then