What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [9]
Martha blinks, nods slowly. “Well I hope they will be. I really do.” She heads back to her airplane suite. I know what she’s thinking: I’m too intense. My kids will end up totally neurotic. They’ll end up hating me. I know that’s what she’s thinking. But she’s wrong. My kids will end up knowing that they were the priority, that I did not sacrifice their well-being for the sake of some pipe dream, as my mother did. They will end up knowing they came first in my life, always. Of course I miss working. Of course I have days when I literally feel like pulling my hair out. But I stay home, so that my children know if they need me I’m there. I recognize the fact that the need is on my part, too. I see that.
I stare at the man across the aisle from me, asleep with his mouth open, gently snoring. Then I smooth my skirt beneath me, take in a deep breath, reenter that summer day so many years ago when Mrs. O’Donnell moved away.
It turned out I was wrong about our neighbor’s house being left absolutely empty. The curtains stayed. But they were open, and late in the afternoon, when the truck pulled away, Sharla and I looked through every window we could reach. Then we sat on Mrs. O’Donnell’s back steps, enjoying the mild disorientation of seeing our own yard from there. “She forgot her clothespins,” I told Sharla. They were lined up like mournful little soldiers on the gray rope line. I was feeling guilty, thinking we should have had a going-away party for her. But who, other than her cop nephew Leroy, could we have invited? And would that have constituted a party?
Mrs. O’Donnell had called Sharla and me over just before she left, and had given each of us a present wrapped in wrinkled paper. It was left over from Christmas, and featured scenes of Santa Claus that I thought made him look drunk.
We each got one earring of a pair. “This way, you’ll always keep in touch with each other,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “You’ll have to share, don’t you know?” We thanked her profusely and then Leroy came to drive her away. She was wearing a hat and gloves and new black shoes, and looked as dignified as I’d ever seen her. I felt terrible.
“Old Mrs. O’Donnell,” I said now. “Poor thing.” I screwed my earring on. It had pearls and rhinestones. I thought it was pretty, though I also recall thinking that it didn’t really go with anything I had.
“Maybe a window’s open and we could crawl in,” Sharla said, shoving her earring in her front pocket. She wasn’t interested in joining my little memorial service. She was interested in breaking and entering. It was the more appealing alternative; I took the earring off and started to put it in my front pocket, then switched to the back one—I had to be ever-alert to providing evidence for Sharla calling me a copycat.
We went around to all the windows again, tried to open them, found them locked. Then, liking the absurdity of it, I went to the front door and knocked loudly, and the door fell open.
I turned back to Sharla, openmouthed.
“Shut it!” she told me, looking quickly around. Then, whispering, “We’ll come back at midnight.”
I loved summer so much. My mother was fixing fried potatoes for dinner; I could smell them from here. Our feet were bare and dusty. I had a puffy mosquito bite behind my knee, and itching it gave me a kind of pleasure that made me close my eyes and lift my chin, like a dog well-scratched. We were going to Dairy Queen for dessert: Sharla and I favored the coated cones, my mother got elegant little butterscotch sundaes, and my father wolfed down entire banana splits. Grasshoppers leaped up and crisscrossed before us every day; at night the cicadas sang and the sticky June bugs clung to the back screen door. Homework was as foreign as the red eye of Mars. Plans fell into your lap, opened as naturally and exotically as the lotus flower. You could follow an impromptu notion through to its natural end, which is exactly what you were supposed to do with such fine gifts.
“Wake up!” I heard Sharla say. I’d been dreaming a good dream. It concerned a group of fairies who, sorority-like,