What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [81]
“I had to stay away from playgrounds for a long time,” my mother says. “I passed by one soon after I first left, and I just fell apart. Same thing with schools. Dime stores. And oh, the girls’ section of any department store!”
Neither Sharla nor I speak. My eyes are closed. I’m a little bit dizzy again.
“I used to … Well, this may sound odd. But what really brought me comfort was going to big university bookstores and looking at the physics books.”
My eyes snap open at this. I can’t believe we both seek solace in science, and that we never new this about each other. You can’t get away from some things. You say you’re turning your back on someone, and you start off down a long road, and you walk so very far, and then you find out the road is just a big circle and you are back where you started. I laugh to myself, close my eyes again.
“I didn’t really understand them,” my mother says, “but the illustrations were so graceful, and the writing seemed so wise and compassionate. Those books told me there was a logic to everything—maybe it was beyond my comprehension, but there was a logic, a reason for things happening. It made me see that humans are very small and insignificant; that all our triumphs and errors don’t really amount to much at all. There are times that notion can scare you, or depress you; but there are other times when thinking about it can help you sleep. Things like—well, I would read something like the first law of thermodynamics, and just find it enormously comforting. I still do. Think of it, the notion of nothing ever being lost, of it just changing form.”
“Is that the first law?” Sharla asks.
“That’s what it suggests.”
“What’s the second law?” I ask.
“Beats me,” my mother says. And then, “Is there a second?”
For some reason—the level of alcohol in our blood, perhaps—we find this all very funny, and we laugh long and loudly.
Then, “Mom?” I say. “Whatever happened to Jasmine Johnson?”
A rich silence. Then my mother says softly, “Oh, well, Jasmine and I lived together for two years. Then she had to move again, and I didn’t want to go with her.”
“Was her husband some gangster or something?” I say.
“Maybe. All I knew for sure was that he was someone very rich and powerful and that he liked to smack his wife around, keep her under his thumb. Jasmine knew he would never give her a divorce. So she just ran from him.”
“Her poor son,” I say. “God, he was cute, that Wayne.”
“You knew he was her son?” my mother asks.
“He told me.”
“Huh. That was dangerous.”
“I think he also knew that his mother was a lesbian,” I say. “But he was very cool about it. Which was quite a thing for those times.”
“What did you say?” my mother asks.
“That he knew. That Jasmine was a lesbian.”
“But she wasn’t.”
I sit up, look at her. “Come on, Mom.”
“She wasn’t! I knew her very, very well; and believe me, she was not. She was different from most women, yes; she was … a sensualist, she believed in people doing a lot more than they allowed themselves to do ordinarily; but no, she was not a lesbian.”
Sharla sits up now, too. Her eye makeup is smudged beneath one eye, her impromptu hairdo completely off kilter. “But Mom, you … Weren’t you and Jasmine—?”
And now my mother is sitting up, too. “Were we together? In that way?” She laughs. “Oh God, no!”
“I was sure you were,” Sharla says quietly. “I was sure you were. I told Dad you were!”
“Well,” my mother says. “I think he was very well aware of the fact that Jasmine’s sexual preference was for men.”
“What do you mean?” I say. My chest hurts. I am finding it hard to breathe.
My mother picks up a chopstick, threads it through her fingers. “He did sleep with her,” she says quietly.
I look at Sharla, who is staring wide-eyed at our mother. “Mom,” she says. “This is serious. It is so important that you tell us the truth now.”
My mother looks at Sharla with a fragile weariness. “Yes,” she says. “I know. Once everything