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

because my mother said we weren’t going to use it anymore, we’d gotten old enough for adult aspirin. I’d wanted the comfort of the smell nearby, just in case. “Please come in,” I told Jasmine.
    She had changed out of her red outfit and into a blue one—a simple dress, deep pockets cut on the diagonal, cuffed short sleeves with white buttons at the ends, a white cardigan sweater over her shoulders. Her shoes were still high heels, I was happy to see. Blue ones. I hadn’t known they made those. Her hair was up in a fat French twist. She wore pearl earrings.
    “Mom!” I called. “Our guest is here!”
    My mother came into the room. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear the bell. I had the radio on, and what with the banging of all the pots and pans …” She held her hand out. “I’m Marion Eastman.”
    “Jasmine Johnson.” She shook my mother’s hand, smiled at her in a way I thought suggested some kind of familiarity. They might have been old friends who thought they had forgotten about each other, but no! now they were meeting again and they remembered everything. They remembered every thing. I saw that my mother was nervous, and this was interesting to me. I’d seen her nervous around men, but never around another woman.

I lean my head back against the airplane seat, stare at the ceiling. In pulling forth these memories from so long ago, I see how much I actually saw then. And how much I denied seeing. It’s a curious thing how that works, how elaborately and unconsciously careful we are to protect our most delicate parts. Instinctively, the spider spins the web; just as automatically, the human shields the heart.
    People always told me I was perceptive. From the time I started school, teachers would mention it on my report cards, on papers I wrote. For a while, I considered using what I was told was a talent to become a psychologist, even a psychiatrist. But I didn’t want to learn any more about human nature than I knew already. If I am completely honest, which I am trying very hard to be right now, I would say that it was not just that I decided my career would be my children. Rather it occurs to me that I did not pursue any profession having to do with psychology because if I understood more about how people work, how they are, I might understand my mother. And I did not want to understand my mother. If I understood her, I might have to forgive her. And at some critical time I became very much invested in not forgiving her—we all did. It became an underpinning in our reduced family, aneed, even; just as there seems to be a terrible need for family feuds to continue. In a way, it is as if your refusal to forgive is too much a part of you for you to lose it. Who would you be without it? Not yourself. Lost, somehow. Think of how people tend to pick the same chair to sit in over and over again. We are always trying to make sure we know where we are. Though we may long for adventure, we also cherish the familiar. We just do.

T he night after Jasmine came to dinner, Sharla and I lay on our quilt outside. Overhead, the sky was thick with clouds that were black and roiling. We were waiting for the lightning to come and scare us a little; then we’d go inside. So far, there had only been the low rumble of thunder, a sound more like a complaint than a threat. We were sharing the last piece of torte; the nearly empty plate lay exactly between us.
    “Do you think Mom likes Jasmine?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    I scooped some whipped cream onto my finger. “Does Dad?”
    “Yeah!
”
    “How do you know?”
    “How could you not know?” Sharla picked up the plate, licked it. Well, that was that; the torte was gone for sure now. Sharla’s tongue was long and lizardlike; she could touch her nose with it.
    “He liked her, all right; his eyeballs were practically bugging out of his head.”
    “Nuh-uh,” I said. She was disgusting, Sharla.
    “Uh
-huh.
”
    “He did not hardly even