The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page A

clothes in their dry cleaner shrouds, at the things she can’t decide what to do with and so leaves here year after year. More and more ac-cumulating, all the time. Helen’s friend Winnie told her about a woman who went into every closet in her house and threw out everything she found except for four pair of pants, four blouses, her vacuum cleaner, and her scrapbooks. And she didn’t throw out the scrapbooks only because she thought she’d get in trouble with her children for not keeping them. She herself didn’t want to look at them anymore. They made her sad. She only wanted to think about the here and now. Not yesterday. And certainly not tomorrow.
    What’s in these boxes anyway? Helen can’t even imagine the contents of most of them. She slides one toward her and sees behind it a huge dust bunny. Is it a dust bunny? Helen moves closer to it, blows on it experimentally. Did it move? Her eyesight isn’t what it used to be. It could be a nest of some sort. Mice? Rats? Bats, do bats have nests?
    She comes quickly out of the closet, slams the door, and pauses for a moment—reflexively, really—to regard herself in the mirror over the dresser. Old woman. She is an old woman. She is aware suddenly of a crushing feeling, centered in her chest, centered right beneath her breastbone. A heart attack? Now she’ll have to go to the 44
    t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d ER, where no one will speak English on a holiday, for sure.
    She sits nervously on the edge of the guest bed and puts her fingers to her pulse. It’s fine, so far as she can tell. If your heartbeat is okay, can you be having a heart attack?
    Well, now the pain has gone away, anyway. Just like that.
    From under the bed comes a bedraggled Gertrude, her coat full of knots. It makes you feel a little ill to pet her now, all those bumps and lumps reminding you of tumors; even if they are only clumps of hair, they remind you of tumors. You can’t brush her anymore; she won’t have it.
    She bites you if you try to groom her, gentle Gertrude, the cat who used to act like a dog, following people around from room to room. Now she hides, comes out only to try to eat or use her litter box, and it’s getting harder for her to do either. And those baby-faced vets, last time Helen brought Gertrude to them for her stupid shots, which she probably didn’t even need anymore, “You might want to consider putting her down.” All they wanted was money. If they weren’t telling you to murder your pets, they were telling you to torture them. Give cats anesthesia so they could have their teeth brushed. They were animals! What next, nose jobs? Put Gertrude down! Maybe she isn’t the same, but she still has her place in their family, yes she does!
    Helen gently picks up the cat and lays her in her lap.
    “You’re just fine,” she says. “Aren’t you?” She strokes a small triangle at the top of the cat’s head where there are no lumps. “My beauty,” she says.
    A burst of laughter from downstairs. Helen stands and pulls down on her sweater, checks to see that her blouse is tucked in, rubs her lips together to even out her lipstick, assuming that she’s remembered to put it on. A few nights ago, she had a dream that she was outside in her ratty O v e r t h e H i l l a n d i n t o t h e Wo o d s 45
    bathrobe and pajamas, lost. Asking directions of the strangers she met on the street, explaining that she couldn’t be far, she had walked, so she couldn’t be too far, she kind of recognized things, she was just a little disori-ented. And the people looking at her so strangely. In the dream, she held a spatula, egg yolk dried at the edge in a thin yellow line.
    She really must go downstairs. But what can she bring to justify her having been up here for so long? She can’t go down empty-handed—if she does, she’ll have to say she couldn’t find “it” and they’ll all want to know what “it” is.
    No, she has to bring something along with