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

her.
    She goes back into the closet and opens the box closest to the door. On top, a pink elephant, an old stuffed animal that her daughter Elaine used to keep on her bed when she was a little girl and had named Mona Massengill. Mona wore pop-bead pearls around her neck and various outfits—clothes that Elaine had outgrown. Elaine wrapped scarves around Mona’s head; earrings dangled from her elephant ears. Sometimes, when Helen was tucking Elaine in at night, she asked what Mona had done that day. The answers varied but were really the same, because what Mona had always done was be a perfect mother. More specifically, Mona had let her children do what Helen dis-allowed. So Elaine might have said, in answer to Helen’s question, “Today Mona drove her children to school in a solid gold limousine.” This because Helen made her children walk the four blocks to school. Or “Today Mona and her kids went swimming at the country club.” Or “Today Mona gave her daughters fashion outfits because she doesn’t think they’re expensive at all and also she let them play with Barbies because she knows it will not hurt them.”
    Helen hates this elephant, actually. She is not pleased to 46
    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 find her lying at the top of the box in all her weird stuffed-animal self-righteousness. It is in Helen’s power to throw her away—no one would know. If they found out, Helen could claim mildew. Instead, she brings the elephant downstairs. No one is in the dining room yet, and she seats Mona at the head of the table and ties a napkin around her neck. Let her finally be seen as the idiotic thing she always was.
    And now here they all come, filing into the dining room, calling out “Hello!” to her as though she is some invited guest and they are welcoming her to her own table.
    And then Elaine sees Mona Massengill. “What’s this?” she asks, and Helen says, “That’s what I was looking for. That’s the surprise. You remember her?”
    A tick-tock of silence, and then Elaine moves over to gently touch the elephant, and she says, “Oh, yes, ” with a kind of longing that makes Helen’s back teeth ache.
    “It was just a joke!” Helen says. Elaine picks Mona up and sits her in the extra chair in the corner of the dining room. Helen has a mind to pick the elephant up by its trunk and swing it around her head, lasso style.
    But here is ten-year-old Rolf, pulling at Melissa’s skirt and saying, “Can we eat now?” Six-year-old Enya, wide-eyed in her little brown dress, her thumb in her mouth.
    Helen rushes over to kiss their soft cheeks and say, “ There’s my grandchildren!” and then everyone begins talking and they all take their places. Well, everyone but Earl and Helen, of course. The waitstaff. Earl goes into the kitchen.
    Helen stands at the table for a moment, looking around at all the faces. Who are these people?
    “Hey, Mom,” says Clayton, though Helen is not his mom and never will be. “Where are the gifts?”
    “What gifts?”
     
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    “ You know.” He winks at her.
    “There are no gifts this year,” she says. “You don’t any of you like them, and I’m not getting them anymore.”
    A general AWWWWWW!
    Well, they are making fun of her, of course. She smiles and goes into the kitchen to help Earl serve the whole un-grateful lot of them.
    Earl is at the stove, a dish towel tucked into his trousers, stirring the gravy. Helen sits down at the kitchen table and sighs.
    “What’s the matter, love?” He comes over with a tablespoon of gravy. “Here. Taste.”
    She waves him away. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
    “Come on; everything’s getting cold. I need you to taste it.”
    “No, you don’t. You don’t need me at all. No one does except Gertrude.”
    He looks at her, astonished. “Is that it?”
    Helen rests her chin on her hand and looks out the window.
    “Helen?”
    “What.”
    “Is that what’s