Ordinary Life by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page A

covering her now silver hair. Her dress was buttoned one button off, and she was wearing only one slipper. I found the other one on top of the stove. My stomach lurched. “Mom,” I said, as gently as I could, “why is your slipper here?”
    She stared at it blankly. “Why, I don’t know.” A robin came into the tree near the kitchen window where we stood. My mother saw him and said, “Oh, look. Look at his fat orange breast.”
    We sat at the little kitchen table with the embroidered tablecloth and I asked what she’d had for breakfast. She traced a blue daisy with her fingertip and began to cry. “I don’t remember. Ask your father.” My father died four years ago. On his last day, he was fixing a stuck wheel on my son’s bicycle. He clutched his chest, my mother later told me, looking quite surprised. Then he stared at her, sitting in her lawn chair a few feet away from him, and, with a look of extreme clarity and love, neatly died. She dropped the peas she’d been shelling onto the ground and never let anyone pick them up. For a whole year after my father’s death, you could still find some, if you looked carefully enough.
    Now, I said what I’d imagined saying for nearly a year. I said, “Mom, I’m worried about your living here alone. I think you need other people around.”
    She gasped. “Oh, no. I don’t want to go to a nursing home. There are some things worse than dying, and that’s one of them.” She began to cry in earnest then, and clutched my hand with both of hers. “Oh, please,” she said, shaking her head and squeezing my hand so hard it hurt.
    Over her badly buttoned dress she was wearing a blue print apron featuring various types of kitchen paraphernalia. Spatulas, knives, wall clocks, and mixing bowls floated dreamlike across her bosom, down her back. She reached into the pocket for a wadded-up Kleenex. I wished hard for the first time in my life for a brother or a sister—this was too hard for one person. I went over to her and held her against me, and she stopped crying. We were both still, waiting. “Mom,” I said finally, to the delicate parton the top of her silver head. “Please just come home with me tonight. Stay over. Joey would love to see you—he got his first high school report card yesterday. We’ll have a nice dinner.”
    She twisted her wedding ring on her hand, and I hoped she wouldn’t say again to ask my father. She didn’t. She stood up and said she would get her purse and overnight bag. She seemed full of dignity and pleasant anticipation now—we might have been going to the opera. “Would you help me with my coat?” she asked when she reappeared in the kitchen. I said that I would, but asked if she would like to take her apron off first. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, looking down at herself and laughing. “Holy buckets.”
    I am seven, riding in the backseat of the car while we take a trip across country. It is summer, and it feels as though we will all be free of obligation forever. We drive until we are distracted by something, and then we stop. We eat in restaurants with place mats that are maps, with stars for cities. They tell us where we are, and we trace on them where we think we’ll go, though we are never definite. My father is irresponsible when it comes to filling up—it is my mother who always notices that we are almost out of gas. “Holy buckets, Fred,” she says. “Find a gas station, will you?” And we do, always just in time, and then while my father does the manly thing and stands by the car to chat with the attendant, my mother and I go to “freshen up,” as she calls it. In the almost airless, tiled bathroom, we deliberate in front of the vending machines. I am allowed one thing. Sometimes it is an Ace comb in a black plastic holder. In the finest places, there are things like tiny dolls in baskets, or twin Scottie dogs on a gold chain. I am also fond of little tubes of toothpaste.
    When I am tired, I stretch out on the