Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page A

even have to use deodorant?” L.D. asks.
    “Oh, come on, she’s great,” Ruth says. “You should see her apartment. It’s so … comfortable. She’s really learned how to enjoy living alone. I wish I’d learned how to do that.”
    “You’re learning now,” L.D. says. “Look at this: every night, a fucking party.”
    “Well,” Ruth sighs, “not a
fucking
party. Unfortunately.” She takes her Red Sox hat off the bedpost and puts it on her head. Then she gets out of bed to start gathering up the dirty dishes.
    “We’ll do that,” L.D. says. “You … meditate.”
    I wash the dishes, L.D. dries. We don’t have to guess anymore where things go; the place is beginning to feel like ours, too. The kitchen radio is turned on low to a country-and-western station. The stupidity of the lyrics is comforting.
    When we are done, L.D. hangs the dishtowelevenly over the rack. “Are you staying with her tonight?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Call me if … you need to.”
    “I will.”
    We go back to the bedroom and L.D. sits down beside Ruth. “Tonight, before you go to sleep,” she says, “I want you to think of all the things you want to do tomorrow.”
    “L.D.”
    “What?”
    “What
does
L.D. stand for?”
    I stand back respectfully, but stay in the room. I want to hear.
    “Someday,” L.D. says, “I’ll get drunk and tell you.”
    “Oh, you’re such a tease.”
    “No, I’m not,” L.D. says, and there is such honesty and innocence to her voice I want to hold her. The bedside lamplight is a rich golden color, and it is falling on her face in a way that makes it seem gilded. For a moment, L.D. looks to me like an angel. Another case of illusion only being the larger truth.

A fter L.D. leaves, Ruth and I look for something on television that might entertain us. This turns out to be too much of a challenge. “Want me to go get a movie?” I ask.
    “No.” She sighs, looks around her room. “Youknow, I never thought dying would be boring. Did you? I mean, I find myself getting to this place of readiness. It’s a kind of deep peace, that I never felt before. And so I lie there thinking, okay, I guess this is it, this is a good time, go ahead; and then the phone rings and it’s somebody wanting to steam clean my wall-to-wall carpeting, which of course I don’t even have. And I want to say, Oh, stop with this carpet nonsense. Listen to me. You’ve got to be careful. Say all you need to say, right away. You have no idea how fragile this all is!’ But of course all I say is ‘No thank you.’” She smiles. “Who would have thought it would be like this?”
    I am quiet for a moment, then say, “Know what I’m really glad about, though?”
    “What?”
    “That you get to be peaceful, sometimes.”
    “Oh, yeah, when I’m not terrified, I’m real peaceful. And you know what else? It’s such a rich thing. It’s so … good. And sometimes I think, God, my life has taken these awful turns, but they’re also sort of wonderful. I mean, the constant presence of you all—my friends …” Her eyes fill and I put my hand on her arm. She is talking too much. She’s too short of breath.
    “Rest a minute,” I say. “Stop talking.”
    “No,” she says. “Let me.” She turns to face me earnestly. “Sometimes I feel as if I want to stay sick so I can keep all this.”
    “Oh, God, don’t say that!”
    “I don’t want to die, but sometimes I wonder … Wouldn’t it be terribly anticlimactic if I went back to normal? I mean, for all of us?”

I am lying on Ruth’s sofa in one of those states where your body seems asleep but your mind has other ideas. I turn on the little lamp on the table, look at my watch. Three forty-seven. I sit up, look around, wish that I were home. Then I could go into Meggie’s room and watch her sleep, set myself right. I worried, when I was pregnant, that it would be so hard to be a mother, that it would drive me crazy to be needed so much. I never suspected that it would be I who