Until the Real Thing Comes Along Read online

  More praise for Elizabeth Berg and Until the Real Thing Comes Along

  “Berg’s writing is to literature what Chopin’s études are to music—measured, delicate, and impossible to walk away from until they are completed.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Berg mingles the real angst of loving the wrong man with the popcorn-munching laughs of a TV sitcom.”

  —New Woman

  “Elizabeth Berg is one of those rare souls who can play with truths as if swinging across the void from one trapeze to another.”

  —JOAN GOULD

  “Berg knows the hearts of her characters intimately, showing them with compassion, humor, and an illuminating generosity.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A warm-hearted story that gently offers insight rather than answers, Until the Real Thing Comes Along would especially appeal to those who have survived loss and crisis.”

  —BookPage

  “Outstanding … A compilation of real-life characters, hope, and great writing that entertains and engages the mind … The writing in Until the Real Thing Comes Along is to-the-bone engaging, packed with witty insights and emotional detail you can sink your teeth into.”

  —Metrowest Daily News

  “Sparkling and witty … [A] poignant and clever tale … [Berg’s] smooth transitions between tragedies and joys are punctuated with lively humor…. [An] endearing search for domestic fulfillment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Engaging characters and realistic dialogue make Elizabeth Berg’s new novel a one-sitting book…. The author’s generous view of humanity is evident in her characters, who walk right off the page they are so well and truly drawn.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Flawless dialogue … Reading it is like eavesdropping on an intimate female chat.”

  —Showtime

  “Berg’s landscapes are those of the heart and soul, the journeys of her characters provisioned by a wise network of family and friends.”

  —Denver Post

  “True to reality rather than to the conventions of ‘women’s books,’ 1990s-style.”

  —The Washington Post

  “It’s curious that novels about marriage, children, and family are often labeled ‘women’s fiction,’ as if the other half of the human race were unconcerned with these matters. Perhaps someone like Patty, whose deepest longings make her feel like an anachronism in our careerist world, represents the sort of anxiety and ambivalence that is still so particular to women’s lives. Books like Until the Real Thing Comes Along offer a kind of working-through of such issues, and the possibility, if not the promise, of a happy ending.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH BERG

  Dream When You’re Feeling Blue

  The Handmaid and the Carpenter

  We Are All Welcome Here

  The Year of Pleasures

  The Art of Mending

  Say When

  True to Form

  Ordinary Life: Stories

  Never Change

  Open House

  Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True

  What We Keep

  Joy School

  The Pull of the Moon

  Range of Motion

  Talk Before Sleep

  Durable Goods

  Family Traditions

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by Elizabeth Berg

  Reading group guide copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Berg and The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Until the Real Thing Comes Along is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  Library of Congress Card Number: 00-190614

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76342-6

  This edition is published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  For Julie Marin

  and

  Jennifer Sarene

  and in memory of

  James Allen Gagner

  Acknowledgments

  My editor, Kate Medina, and my agent, Lisa Bankoff, have been with me from the start, and I am grateful.

  Thanks to Jessica Treadway, who read this book in manuscript with special intelligence and sensitivity.

  And deepest thanks—as always—to Jean-Isabel McNutt, whose skill and perseverance I so admire.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  A Reader’s Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  Prologue

  This is how you play the house game:

  Go for a drive to somewhere you’ve never been. At the point when the spirit moves you, start looking for your house. You can choose whatever you want, at any time; and once you choose it, it is yours. One caveat: after you’ve made a selection, you can’t change your mind. If you pick the white colonial with the pristine picket fence and then in the next block you see an even better colonial, it’s too late; you must stay with your first choice.

  I started playing this game as a little girl, and I still play it. And I always pick too early, so it almost always happens that a much grander choice comes along. I might be expected to feel regret at such a moment, but I never do. I can admit to the superiority of another house; I can admire it and see every way in which it is better than my first choice, but I am never sorry. I know a lot of people have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. I know a lot of people think it’s an odd characteristic, too, but I have to say it is something I like about myself. It is, in fact, what I like most.

  1

  I used to think that the best thing to do when you had the blues was to soak in a bathtub full of hot water, submerge yourself so that only the top half of your head was in the outer world. You could feel altered and protected. Weightless. You could feel mysterious, like a crocodile, who is bound up with the wisdom of the natural world and does not concern herself with the number of dates she has per month or the biological time clock. You could feel purified by the rising steam. Best of all, you could press a washrag across your chest, and it would feel like the hand of your mother when you were little and suffering from a cold, and she’d lay her
flat palm on you to draw the sickness out.

  The problem with the bathtub method is that you have to keep fooling with the faucet to keep the water temperature right, and that breaks the healing spell. Besides that, as soon as you get out of the tub the solace disappears as quickly as the water, and you are left with only your annoying lobster self, staring blankly into the mirror.

  These days I believe that museums are the place to go to lose your sorrow. Fine-art museums with high ceilings and severe little boxes mounted on the wall to measure the level of humidity; rooms of furniture displayed so truly the people seem to have just stepped out for a minute; glass cases full of ancient pottery in the muted colors of old earth. There are mummies, wearing the ultimate in long-lasting eyeliner; old canvases that were held between the hands of Vermeer; new canvases with emphatic smears of paint. The cafés have pastry as artful as anything else in the building; gift shops are stocked with jewelry modeled after the kind worn by Renaissance women—the garnet-and-drop-pearl variety. I buy that kind of jewelry, in love with its romantic history and the sight of it against the black velvet. Then I bring it home and never wear it because it looks stupid with everything I have. But it is good to own anyway, for the pleasure of laying it on the bedspread and then sitting beside it, touching it.

  What I like most about museums is that the efforts of so many people remain so long after they are gone. They made their marks. If you are an artist, you can hope to achieve that. If you are not an artist, you believe that having children is the closest you’ll come.

  Well, that’s what I believe. And anyway, I have always preferred the company of children; I just like to be around them. Whenever my large family gets together on holidays, I sit at the kids’ card table. It’s so much more relaxing, what with the way the dishes are plastic, and manners of any kind optional. So much more interesting, too—no talk about current events, no holding forth by any overweight, overeducated aunt or uncle. There is talk only about things that are astonishing. Facts about the red ant, say, or the elaborate retelling of an unfortunate incident, such as the one where a kid vomited on the teacher’s desk.

  I always thought I’d have five or six children, and I have imagined so many lovely domestic scenes featuring me and my offspring. Here we are outside on a hot summer day, running through the sprinkler. The children wear bright fluorescent bathing suits in pink and green and yellow; I wear cutoffs and a T-shirt. There is fruit salad in the refrigerator. Later, I will let the older kids squirt whipped cream for the younger ones; then, if they pester me enough in the right way, I’ll let them squirt it into their mouths—and mine.

  Or here I am at the grocery store, my married hands unloading graham crackers and packages of American cheese that have already been broken into due to the eager appetite of the toddler in the carriage, who is dressed in tiny OshKosh overalls over a striped shirt. His fine hair, infused with gold and red, curls up slightly at the back of his neck. His swinging feet are chubby and bare; he has flung his sneakers and socks on top of the family-size pack of chicken breasts. His brothers and sisters are in school. Later in the afternoon, he will stand at the living-room window, watching for them to come home, squealing and bending his knees in a little joy dance when he sees them marching down the sidewalk toward him, swinging their lunch boxes in high, bright-colored arcs.

  I have imagined myself making dinner while my dark-haired daughter sits at the kitchen table. She is making me a picture of a house with window boxes, choosing crayons with slow care. She is wearing yellow turtle barrettes in her hair, and a bracelet she made from string. “Hey, Mommy,” she says, “do you want flowers on the ground, too?” Oh yes, I say. Sure. “Me too,” she says. We smile.

  I have imagined a fleshy constellation of small children and me, spread out and napping on my big bed while the newest baby sleeps in her crib. The pulled-down shades lift with the occasional breeze, then slap gently back against the windowsill. If you listen carefully, you can hear the small breathing sounds of the children, their soothing, syncopated rhythms. There is no other sound, not even from the birds; the afternoon is holding its finger to its lips. All the children have blankets and all of them are sucking their thumbs. All of them are read to every night after their baths. All of them think they are the favorite. None of them has ever had an illness of any kind, or ever will. (I mean, as long as I’m imagining.)

  What I never imagined was the truth: me at thirty-six years of age, lying around on top of my made bed on a beautiful winter afternoon with shades pulled for an entirely different reason, thinking, Why didn’t I marry Johnny Tranchilla? So he was shorter than I was. He was very handsome and very romantic. He had black curly hair and naturally red lips. He sent me a love note in the mail after our first date and he was only nineteen, how brave! His father was loaded. He wore Weejuns with no socks. I could have been happy. Then I go on through the rest of my short list, thinking of the men I might possibly have married. Ron Anderson, who became a mildly famous artist and now lives in a huge A-frame in the Rocky Mountains with his blonde wife, who is more beautiful than I’ll ever be but not as much fun, I can guarantee it. She would never have broken into the planetarium like I did with Ron, would never have entered into the famous mustard-and-catsup fight at D.J.’s diner at three in the morning.

  There was Tim Connor, too, who was quiet and tender and reliable—not exciting, but one grows tired of that after one is, oh, say, ninety-five. Frank Olds became a neurosurgeon! I could have lived in material comfort instead of making dinners out of soda crackers and cottage cheese and repeatedly showing houses to people who will never buy any of them.

  The reason I didn’t marry any of the various men I might have is always the same: Ethan Allen Gaines. I fell in love with him in sixth grade, and I never, never stopped loving him, not even after we tried to have a serious relationship in our late twenties and failed, and he took me out to dinner to a very nice place to break off our engagement and told me it was because he was gay. “Oh, Ethan,” I said, “that’s okay, I’ll marry you anyway.” It was as inadvertent and embarrassing as a piece of meat flying out of my mouth. Ethan nodded, looked away. And then back at me. And I knew that was the end of that. Knew it in my head, anyway. The heart is always a different matter. I kept the ring. It lives in a box as beautiful as it is.

  “I told you,” my friend Elaine said the day after we broke up. “I told you! Who else would keep rolled-up towels on their bathroom sink?”

  “They were hand towels,” I said.

  “… And?”

  “A lot of people roll up their hand towels.”

  “Patty. It wasn’t just the towels.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know!”

  But I hadn’t known. I hadn’t let myself.

  Because consider this: once Ethan and I were at a lake and he rented a boat because I said I had never learned how to row. He told me what to do, made me get in alone, and watched from shore, shouting encouragement. I got stuck. I dropped an oar. Ethan was telling me how to come in with one oar, but I was just going around in circles. “I can’t do it!” I yelled. He put a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes, and yelled back, “Yes, you can!” But I couldn’t. And so he waded out to me in his beautiful new brown tweed pants and white sweater and pulled me in. And I sat, hanging onto both sides of the boat, watching the sun in his yellow hair and the moving muscles of his back. And when he got me in, we sat in the grass and he was wringing out his pants and sweater and dumping water from his shoes and I said I was so sorry, I knew how expensive those clothes were—they were from Anthony’s, a very exclusive men’s shop that served you Chivas in a cut-crystal glass while you fingered linens and silks. Ethan asked if I wanted to go shopping and I said sure, I’ll buy you some new clothes, but not from Anthony’s. He said no, I’ll buy an outfit for both of us. I said, I ruined your pants! Why would you buy me an outfit? And he said because you can’t row a boat.

  The day before that, we’d been to see a movie with an exqui
sitely sad ending, the kind that makes your insides feel made of glass. My throat ached when the lights came up; I wanted to just run out of there so I wouldn’t have to hear anything anyone said. Ethan’s face seemed full of what I felt, too. “Run,” he whispered, and we did. We ran to his car and slammed the doors and sat still, staring straight ahead and saying not one word. Then I looked over at him and he took my hand and said, “I know.”

  On the night Ethan told me he was gay, I said that admitting it must be a very liberating experience, that it must feel good. He said it did in many ways, but it hurt him that he had to hurt me. I said, well, we would always be best friends, wouldn’t we? He said of course.

  I didn’t cry until I came home and climbed into the bathtub. Then I sobbed for a good twenty minutes. And then I leaned back, laid the washrag over my chest, inhaled the steamy air, and thought about when Ethan had come over when I was sick, just a few weeks earlier. He’d made chicken soup and three kinds of Jell-O, brought with him a variety of cheeses and crackers and fruit. He’d treated me with a tenderness that was somehow too competent. I’d watched him, longing for him to come over to me, kneel down, knock over my ginger ale, ignore it, take my hand, and say, “If you ever die, I’ll kill myself.” But he didn’t do that. He ran his hand sweetly over my forehead, went to adjust the flame under the soup; then, frowning, flipped through the channels on the television. He covered me with a quilt he’d laundered, patted my feet affectionately, then made a phone call. I felt as though he were zipped into a self that was hiding the real him—I could get close, but not there. I had put it down to a normal kind of male reticence, the kind that has a woman sigh and put her hand on her hip and call a girlfriend. I had believed that with the trust and intimacy of marriage it would get better—he would open himself completely to me.

  But that night, with my engagement ring newly off my finger (though the stubborn indentation of it remained), I slid deeper into the water and thought about all the times Ethan and I had made love. Then I thought about those times again, and saw them true. I pulled the washrag up over my face. Beneath it, I think I was blushing.