What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page A

English at a small college. We are not rich, but when my husband talks to me about his job, my eyes don’t glaze over.
    I wonder now what my mother must have felt when my father talked about his work—he was a small businessman. She never had that glazed-eye expression, but she never offered much in the way of response, either: a smile, perhaps. A light touch to the back of his collar before she rose from the table for more green beans.
    She was different from other mothers, in many ways. On the plus side, her artistic abilities made her able to assist wonderfully well with certain kinds of homework. She helped me with colored pencil drawings of wild-flowers, and birds, and maps; and she made perfect finishing touches to a papier-mâché human heart that I entered in a science fair. Once she helped me too much with an art project I was given to do over a long weekend when I was in fifth grade. It was a watercolor of a Mexican woman making bread that ended up on permanent display in the entryway of our school. It must have been obvious that it was not really my work, but the teacher loved the painting so much she did nothing but give me an A+ for it, and then make arrangements for it to be seen by everyone who walked into the school. My name was in small print at the corner of the painting. The art teacher’s name was put below the painting, in print significantly larger.
    The woman in that painting was wearing a long, faded blue dress, belted by a red and yellow woven tie. Her feet were bare against large, uneven tiles. She wore fat braids tied with fraying pieces of string. There were manylovely things about that painting: young as I was, I appreciated the quality of light, the richness in the colors. But what was most intriguing was the woman’s face. You could not really see it; her gaze was directed down into the wooden bread bowl and slightly away. Yet somehow you knew exactly what that face looked like. You knew because of the slump of the shoulders, the resignation in the hands that worked at less than they were capable of. My mother could do that, render a strong feeling with a few strokes of a Number 2 pencil. It was a gift that always surprised people; it made us proud.
    On the negative side, you often had the feeling that something dark and uneasy was going on with my mother; but she would not acknowledge it, nor allow anyone else to. After Jasmine moved in, that internal storm grew fiercer and fiercer in my mother, eventually leading her to make a decision that must have felt inevitable, if astoundingly painful. I wonder how much of that pain she predicted, and how much of it was a black surprise. I didn’t much care, then, about the pain there was for her in leaving. Even now, if the truth be told, I am mainly just curious.

O n the night Jasmine first came to our house for dinner, the doorbell rang promptly at six o’clock. I opened it to see her standing there, holding a bottle of wine. A thin strand of lavender ribbon tied blue flowers onto the neck of the bottle. Those flowers grew all over Mrs. O’Donnell’s backyard, though now it occurred to me that it was Jasmine’s yard. I couldn’t remember Mrs. O’Donnell ever picking them, though.
    “Thank you for coming,” I said. “What lovely flowers. Shall I put them in water?” These were exact lines from a movie I’d recently seen. I loved how well they worked for me now
    “Pardon?”
    “The flowers. Want them in water?”
    She looked at them. “Oh! Oh no, they’re just for decoration.”
    “Well.” I shrugged. It seemed a sin to use flowers that way, to pick them and then just let them die. Of course a greater sin would be to communicate my disapproval of anything a guest did.
    But Jasmine guessed my thoughts. “Unless you’d
like
to save them,” she said. “It might be nice, actually.”
    “I have an aspirin bottle. We can use that.” I’d stashed an empty bottle of orange-flavored children’s aspirin inmy nightstand drawer,