The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page B

are. You’ve always got your nose to the grindstone about something. Always.”
    “No, I don’t!”
    “Oh, don’t get so upset. It’s not a criticism. It’s just an observation. You’ve always been that way. Busy, busy, busy.” She tossed back her hair, now hanging in loose curls, and pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head. “It’s getting cloudy. Do you smell rain?”
    “No.” I did, actually, but my anger made me want to disagree with her. I was thinking about what she’d said:
Busy, busy busy.
Was I? I stretched out my legs. “So what are you going to talk to me and Steve about, Caroline?”
    “Not now.”
    “Just tell me what it’s
about.
”
    “I did tell you. I want to compare notes. I have a lot of bad memories, and I need to know, finally, whether . . .” She crossed her arms over herself, then crossed her legs. If she were a turtle, I thought, she’d pull her head in. But then she looked directly into my eyes. “This is what it is,” she said. “I just feel like I can’t get past some things until I talk this out with someone who was there when I was growing up.”
    I started to say something but didn’t. Instead, I nodded. Sort of.
    “I know,” Caroline said.
    “What?”
    “I know you think I’m a pain in the ass.”
    “Oh, it’s not that,” I said. “I just . . . well, frankly, Caroline, I worry about you. I mean, when does it ever just get easy for you? I wonder if you need to just stop thinking so much. Feeling so much.”
    “I don’t decide to feel what I do. It just comes. I wouldn’t mind not feeling so much, believe me.”
    I turned toward her, attempting a tone of compassionate reason. “But . . . can’t you decide what to do
with
it? Can’t you—?”
    “Laura, I’ve come to a point where I just have to know some things. That’s all. I can’t even work anymore. I’ve become obsessed with finding out what happened to me that made me so . . . well, I just feel like if I can find out some things, if I can validate them, I can finally head in a different direction. I won’t feel this terrible sense of . . .” She teared up. Then, tightfisted, she stared straight ahead. When she spoke again, her voice was angry. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t think you can understand what I’m talking about at all.”
    “Oh, come on, I—”
    “No. It’s not the same for you, Laura. We’re so different. We always have been. I love you, but we’re just . . . different.” She looked down at her hands. “I’ve been seeing a therapist. I started a few months ago; I’m going twice a week. At first I was getting nowhere. I’d walk out of there feeling guilty that I was spending a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour for nothing. Well, not for nothing. For trying to entertain a woman who was supposed to be helping me. But what finally happened is that I stopped goofing around and started doing some real work. It helps. Before I went, things had gotten really bad. I hadn’t even been able to get out of bed on some days, I just . . .” She looked over at me. “I couldn’t get out of bed.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I don’t tell you things like that. I don’t tell anybody in the family things like that! Do you? I mean, for one thing, I know when you feel bad, you don’t exactly get immobilized and lie in bed all day. You’d never do that. You’d leap up and make a cobbler.” She reached out to touch my hand. “I mean that in a complimentary way, okay? I really do.”
    She was right. I was more like Maggie, who, the last time she was sad, painted her garage and then, in a fit of good neighborliness, painted ours as well.
    “I couldn’t tell anybody I knew, really. So I started seeing this therapist and we got into some childhood stuff, and I remembered some things that were . . . I remembered some things that were pretty awful. And then all of a sudden I started to doubt myself. I started to think maybe I was making it up,