Ordinary Life by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online

Someone honks a car horn three times. They are impatient. They mean business. Martha gets up onto her knees and pushes grass off herself. “Let’s go,” she says. “Let’s go somewhere.”
    Alan lies still, doesn’t move. “Nope. I’m not done.”
    Martha is wary, distressed, but here is all he says: “I used to think whenever the radio played a song, the performer was right there at the station. I thought the bands were just all lined up, waiting for their turns. I wondered how they could break down and set up so quickly.”
    Martha says, “I thought cats had no eyelids. I also thought the sexiest thing in the world to do was to put on a pair of high heels and dangle a cigarette from your lips, in front of a mirror. I did it quite a lot when I was nine.”
    They get up, and she sees that his sneakers are huge. She understands that there is much about him that is unfamiliar to her. They start walking toward the lake. They walk to keep from the bedroom, where things would only get more difficult.
    “Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back,” Martha says, avoiding all the lines on the sidewalk. Alan jumps up high and lands directly on one. Martha gasps, covers her mouth. “You are
bad
,” she says.
    He stares straight at her, his love surrounding him like an aura. “So are you,” he says.
    “So am I,” she agrees.

Caretaking

    I am five years old, lying outside on a blanket. The sun is springtime warm, there is a delicate breeze, and the combination is an opiate. I want to suck my thumb, though I have been told lately that I must not. But it is all that is missing to make the moment flawless, and so, with my head turned away from the house, I raise my arm up slowly to slide my thumb home. Ah. It tastes properly salty, and the cool smoothness of its surface is perfection. I sigh out my nose. I rub my tongue against the familiar bump of my thumbs knuckle, deeply content. I am almost given over into sleep when I hear my mother’s voice coming from the second-story bedroom window. “Uh-uh!” she calls. “Don’t suck your thumb!” It is a gentle, singsong reprimand. I am humiliated into wide-awakeness, and decide to abandon the blanket for something else, a place that suggests no carnal transgressions. But first I must know how my mother knew—how did she know I was sucking my thumb? I stand up to ask her. She is still leaning on her elbows out the window, admiring the day. She is wearing her housecleaning kerchief, and she looks beautiful. She has naturallycurly black hair, and always when she wears her kerchief a few strands of it escape and misbehave engagingly around her face. She wears red lipstick and no other makeup, and when she smiles she reveals two deep dimples that I envy so much that when I think of them I feel a little ill. I have tried to make some for myself, to no avail. I have corkscrewed my index fingers into the hated plain pads at the sides of my face at regular intervals during the day. I have taped marbles into them at night. No dimples yet. I trust that when I am older a reliable dimple-inducing method will come to me. For now, I put my hand on my hip and shade my eyes from the sun to yell up at my mother, “How did you know?”
    She smiles down at me with her terrible dimples. “What?” Her voice seems borne by the breeze, carries far, stays alive for a long time—it is just that kind of day, perfect for thumb sucking. Angered by a new surge of desire, I ask again, irritably, “How did you know?”
    “Oh,” she says. “Well, a pixie told me.”
    I look around uneasily. I don’t see any trace of her. “How did
she
know?”
    My mother has remembered her work, and she is pulling back into the house. “She watches you,” she tells me, and disappears.
    I sit on my blanket, disgruntled. I wonder if this pixie also knows what I am thinking. Oh, it can’t be.
    Last week when I came to see my mother, she was wearing a housecleaning kerchief as in the old days,