Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page A

minutes without stopping. She did it, she kissed a really cute boy she'd been very much attracted to, but the kiss lost all its passion after about thirty seconds and became an act roughly equivalent to cleaning out one's ears. Why in the world would a museum feature such an exhibit? She starts to ask Midge that, but then decides to find out for herself. Somewhere inside her weary brain, a little light flickers, then holds. “I'll see you there,” she says.
    Helen takes a long shower, using a great variety of the products she has available due to the largesse of her daughter. What Helen truly believes is that she could use 409 to wash herself and her hair and it would be fine, but in the area of beauty products she is a hypocrite. As she is in many areas of her life. She wonders sometimes how many people live lives congruent with their deepest beliefs. She wonders how many people go running off to seminars intent on changing their lives, then come home and fall back into the exact same patterns. Most people, she suspects. That's why those seminars make so much money, people keep failing to achieve their lofty ideals. And what about the people who teach those seminars? They're just as hypocritical as anyone else, Helen is sure of it. She thinks of her mother, telling her once that she didn't believe in therapy because psychiatrists were the craziest people of all. Helen herself has doubts about the efficacy of therapy: she tried it once, years ago. But she didn't like the way she would wake up on appointment days feeling perfectly fine and then have to dredge up some discontent so as to justify the time and expense. She quit after only three sessions, saying that the reason she was leaving was that she was moving. “Oh?” the therapist said. “Where to?” “Cleveland,” Helen said, knowing nothing about the place and hoping the therapist didn't, either. Serene, that woman was called, unbelievably—Helen thought she must have given that name to herself on a mountaintop ceremony in California attended by other women therapists, all of them naked but for wildflower garlands, and not ashamed . It has always seemed to Helen that California is the place for outrageous acts of freedom, and only California. A bunch of naked therapists renaming themselves in Illinois? Never.
    She steps out of the shower and wraps a bath towel around herself. What to wear? What effort such a decision now seems to require!
    She selects a pair of black wool pants and a gray cashmere sweater. When she comes down into the kitchen to get her keys, she sees the red light blinking on the phone. Two messages; another call must have come in while she was in the shower. “Tessa,” Helen says, out loud. She likes to predict who the calls are from and she is often right. This has scored her points with Tessa, who still sort of believes her mother is psychic. Helen does little to disabuse her daughter of this notion; she thinks it offers her a kind of power she would not have otherwise.
    She is not psychic this time, though; the second call is from someone she doesn't know, saying she got Helen's number from Donna Barlow, a mutual friend who is also a writer, and that she wants to talk to Helen about teaching a very unique kind of writing workshop—Donna did it and just loved it, and thought Helen might enjoy it, too.
    Helen doesn't teach. She doesn't teach because she has no idea in the world how she does what she does and therefore doesn't feel qualified to instruct others in the practice. For her, writing just happens. Or used to. Writing is like falling in love, she's often said. Or deciding what to have for lunch. Who knows how a person does that? And for heaven's sake, how can you instruct someone else in how to do it? “Think of walking,” Helen has often said to audiences at book signings, speaking to people who asked the inevitable questions about the writing process. “Think of how you walk without thinking about it. That's how you need to