What We Keep Read online

  “Is later?” I asked.

  Sharla swallowed. “Liz Taylor,” she said. “I swear to God.”

  I looked. I saw the resemblance. For a moment, I wondered if it were true. But this couldn’t be Liz Taylor. I had seen Liz recently in Photoplay, and her hair was short. This woman’s black hair hung down to the middle of her back. And a silver/black German shepherd lay beside her. Liz would have poodles, I was sure of it. They all did, in Hollywood.

  My mother came into the room. “Stop spying!” she said, then came to the window herself. “Oh,” she said. “Well. My goodness.” And then, “Well, they certainly have some nice antiques. Oh, look at that, a brass bed. Wouldn’t I love to have that!”

  “When do we meet her?” I asked. Every light on my console was lit.

  “Well …” My mother’s brow furrowed; she wiped her hands absentmindedly on her apron. It was a new one, made out of a towel with blue and green geometric shapes.

  “I suppose we could invite them to supper,” she said. “They won’t have any time for cooking today. And I’ll make her a little coffee to put in the thermos right now. You girls can bring it to her.”

  “I’ll carry it,” Sharla said.

  I could never beat her. “Front seat/by the door/called it/no changes!” she’d say, before the words were fully out of my parents’ mouths that we were going somewhere in the car. What Sharla never thought about, though, was that the ride home was often longer. It could pay to bide your time, to hold out for a chance at winning something later that would be better than what was offered now.

  I hear the bong of the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign, look down, and see that mine is not secured. I have a thought to leave it unhooked, just to see if I get caught. But then a flight attendant appears, leans in toward me. “You need to fasten your seat belt,” she says quietly, as though to spare me from embarrassment.

  “I was,” I say, and the words sound petulant, as though they are coming from a child. “But thank you!” I add, too late; the attendant is several rows up. She’s moving quickly, trying to get to her own seat; the plane has begun to buck like a bronco.

  People laugh nervously—something about this seems pretend, even ridiculous—and then it is remarkably silent. I clutch the armrests, get mad at my mother all over again, because now she might be responsible for my death. But then the flight becomes abruptly smooth; people gradually begin conversing, and then we are all back to normal.

  The flight attendant starts down the aisle again, smiling. She’s quite overweight, especially for a flight attendant, and I like that. For one thing, it makes me think she’s a lot more capable than the thin ones. In the event of an emergency, give me somebody who can pick me up.

  For a brief time, Sharla wanted to be a flight attendant—“stewardesses,” they were called then. When she was a senior in high school, someone from the airlines came out to the house to meet her, sat beside her on the sofa in the living room with his closed briefcase on his lap. In the end, Sharla was judged not pretty enough, though it was presented to her in a much more tactful way in a letter she received a week later. Georgia and my father were incensed; I was secretly happy. I didn’t want Sharla to be flying away all the time; I didn’t want anyone going away. “She’s every bit as pretty as any stewardess I’ve ever seen!” my father said. I wasn’t sure. I’d flown only a couple of times, on family vacations, but the stewardesses I saw then were remarkably pretty: the kind of women you wanted to stare and stare at. It was the kind of beauty Jasmine Johnson had, though her beauty had a dark, pulling side that could make you uncomfortable, that could make you feel you were falling helplessly toward someplace you weren’t at all sure you wanted to go.

  I pull the window shade down a bit to block out some of the bright sun, see that we’re directly over the center of a huge lake. It’s so far down, that lake. I’ll bet it’s really deep. I think about the blackness of the deepest parts of the ocean, the sightless creatures that live there, and feel an internal slump of discouragement. I know those creatures don’t mind not seeing. But I mind for them. I want them to surface and see everything.

  “I’m Jasmine Johnson,” our new neighbor said, when Sharla and I presented ourselves with the thermos of coffee. Her voice was low and melodic; it reminded me of Peggy Lee singing “Fever.” “Please call me Jasmine,” she added, smiling.

  Jasmine! Her name was as exotic as her appearance—I visualized it written in gold, with ornate curlicues. When it came time to introduce myself, I used the formal “Virginia.” Sharla looked askance at me, but did not begin snorting and pointing at me, saying, “Nuh-uh, her name’s just Ginny!” which is what I’d feared. I was already embarrassed about the container the coffee was in; we’d used my plain lunch-box thermos because we couldn’t find the more elegant silver one we used on car trips. “I don’t see it anywhere,” my mother had said, her voice muffled because her head was stuck far inside one of the lower cabinets. Then, emerging and using her fingers to fluff back her mussed-up hair, “It’s too big anyway. She wouldn’t know what to do with all that coffee.”

  “We could have some with her,” I’d said, and earned a sharp poke in the ribs from Sharla.

  “You girls don’t drink coffee,” my mother had said, her lips a prim straight line. “Not until you are twenty-one.”

  Well, not in front of her. But we drank coffee all right, every chance we got. Once, when our parents went out, we made and drank a whole pot. “Look how much it makes me pee!” Sharla had yelled in her hepped-up voice from behind the closed bathroom door. And I, waiting desperately for my own turn, had yelled back, “I know!”

  Every night after supper, when we did the dishes, Sharla and I finished the coffee that was left in our parents’ cups. We fought silently over who got my mother’s—she used more sugar. We never simply added sugar ourselves; I think we believed it would be pressing our luck. Suppose one of our parents walked in when we were stirring? My father would sit us down at the kitchen table for one of his low-voiced lectures about age-appropriate activities and then impose some irritating punishment like early bedtimes for a week, mostly for the benefit of our mother. She tended to enlarge small crimes and to take them personally. After we’d misbehaved, she would sit in the living room in her small blue velvet chair, looking out the window and periodically shaking her head. The day she caught us chicken-calling a teacher we particularly disliked, she actually wept a little. “Mom!” Sharla had said, and my mother had waved her hand in pouty dismissal. “You have no idea what this suggests about your upbringing,” she told us. “No idea.” We were made to call and apologize, while my mother stood nearby, supervising. Sharla went first, as usual, leaving me to cast about for something to say that was not too close to her apology. In the end, however, I copied her exactly. “Sorry, we didn’t really mean anything by it,” I said.

  “Oh, I know you didn’t,” Mrs. Mennafee said. “As I just told your sister, I used to make calls like that myself.” I had a thought to ask her to tell that to my mother, but instead I went with Sharla to sit for forty-five minutes in our bedroom, part two of our punishment. It wasn’t awful; I was in need of a nap anyway. We got out in time to watch The Mickey Mouse Club, a vast relief since I was in love with Jimmy. My only chance to get him was to communicate telepathically. I stared at his wavy, black-and-white image, saying over and over in my mind, “I love you; I am ready.” Sharla favored the goofy boys, with their too-big teeth; I knew a real man when I saw one, Jimmy’s mouse ears notwithstanding.

  Jasmine bent to accept the thermos of coffee from Sharla, and I smelled her perfume. I found it extraordinary that someone would wear perfume in the middle of the day, and on moving day besides. Once, in Monroe’s department store, I’d seen a small container of Chanel No. 5 that was called “purse size,” but I’d thought it was a kind of joke. Who would carry perfume in their purse? Here was someone who would.

  “Come on in,” Jasmine said, and we followed her into the house. There were boxes everywhere,
but she went without hesitation to one in the dining room, stripped the tape from it, reached in and pulled out one cup, then two more. She spaced them evenly on top of a smaller box, sat on the floor beside it, and then looked up at us expectantly.

  “We don’t drink coffee,” I said, and was elbowed again.

  “No?” Her black eyebrows were raised into pretty arches.

  “We do sometimes,” Sharla said. “When it’s a special occasion.”

  “Well, this certainly qualifies,” Jasmine said, and filled each cup. Then, holding hers up, “Here’s to new beginnings.”

  We sat on either side of her at our cardboard table, and lifted our cups to tap against one another. They were fancy flowered things, the kind of dishes my mother used at Thanksgiving and Christmas and would not let us carry unless it was one at a time. But Jasmine handled them as casually as though they were plastic bathroom cups. I noticed Sharla’s little finger was lifted ever so slightly; I did the same.

  “So,” Sharla said. “Do you have any kids?”

  Jasmine shook her head. “No, I’m not married.”

  My eyes widened.

  “You mean you’re going to live here all alone?” Sharla asked. My question exactly, though it would have taken a while for me to get around to asking it.

  Jasmine smiled. “Well, I won’t be lonely. I’ll have you two for friends, right?”

  “Right,” I said quickly.

  “Miss?” one of the movers called. “Coats. Where do you want them?”

  “Which ones?” Jasmine asked.

  The man read the writing on the box. “‘Winter,’ it says. ‘Minks.’ And … looks like … ‘P. lamb’?”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “In the basement, I guess.”

  Minks? Minks???? The things I had to talk to Sharla about were beginning to make my teeth ache. She felt the same; I could see it in the wildness of her eyes. As soon as Jasmine agreed to come to our house that night for dinner, we fled to our bedroom—this after we told our mother that the guest list numbered one, due to the fact that the new neighbor was not married. “Is that right?” my mother said. She cleared her throat, stared past us. Then she headed for her cookbook shelf.

  Sharla flopped on her bed, put her pillow over her stomach. I lay down, too, stuck my hand inside the waistband of my shorts, sighed in happy anticipation of the juicy talk we were about to have.

  “Quit!” Sharla said suddenly, nastily.

  “What?”

  “Get your hand out of your pants, you retard.”

  “I don’t have my hand in my pants.”

  She stared hard at the vicinity in question, shook her head rapidly from side to side to emphasize the fact that she was staring hard. It looked like her eyeballs were jiggling. I laughed.

  She sat up, angry. “You think that’s funny? To pick at your butt?”

  “I’m not!” I said, angry myself now. “My shorts are too tight! I just put my hand here to relax my waist!”

  “Well, that’s not how it looks.” Sharla lay back down, stared at the ceiling. “It looks like a retard. I hope you don’t do that in school.”

  “I’m sure.”

  We waited together for silence to restore our moods. Finally, “I dreamed I was a bachelor in my Maidenform bra,” I ventured.

  Sharla raised one leg into the air, turned her ankle this way and that. She kept threatening to get an ankle bracelet, even though my mother disallowed them, calling them cheap-looking. “Bachelorette,” she said. “Huh. We have never had one of those on this street.”

  “Ha!” I said. “We have never had one in this neighborhood. Probably not in this whole town!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Name one time you ever heard of one.”

  Sharla thought. “There could be one in the town,” she said finally. She began picking at the edges of her pillow. I liked how she did this; it made the pillow seem more than it was. I felt the urge to do it myself, but suppressed it. Then Sharla said, “But probably not, this is not the town for bachelorettes.”

  “What is?”

  “They like New York City and gay Paree.”

  “Did you hear what that moving man said? She has a mink coat!”

  “I know!” Sharla said. “And she was soooooo casual about it, like oh yawn, how boring, fur coats.”

  “Well, that is the sign of a truly rich person,” I said. “They are always casual about things like that.”

  “How do you know? What do you know about rich people?”

  “Never mind, I just know some things,” I said, with such authority that Sharla didn’t argue—I did read much more than she did. Instead, she said, “I wonder if she has a boyfriend.”

  “Ho, not one. More like a million of them.”

  Silence. I could see Sharla imagining such a thing. I imagined it as well, created in my mind a long line of men snaking down the sidewalk outside Jasmine’s house, all of them dressed in tuxedos, all with black hair slicked back wetly. They carried bouquets of flowers, fancy candy, black velvet boxes holding dazzling pieces of jewelry. They looked neither to the left nor to the right. They were selectively blind, focused only on their desire.

  Sharla turned onto her side, pushed her hair back from her face, then over one eye. “If she takes the bedroom Mrs. O’Donnell used, we’ll be able to see it from the bathroom.”

  “I know.”

  “Want to go look and see if we can tell yet?”

  We vied for position at the bathroom window, keeping our heads low. And suddenly there Jasmine was, standing with her back to us, showing the men where to put a huge dresser. It was placed opposite the brass bed.

  “I think she has good taste,” I whispered.

  “I know.”

  “I wonder why she chose that house.”

  “Beats me.”

  Jasmine turned around then, looked out of her window right into ours, and we were caught. Sharla ducked down, but I stayed where I was, red-faced. Jasmine smiled, then waved. I waved back.

  “Get down; get down!” Sharla whispered, between clenched teeth.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “She sees us. She doesn’t care.”

  From downstairs came the scent of butter melting. My mother was making something special.

  “Girls?” she called up.

  We went out into the hall, called down to answer her.

  “Would you run over to Sullivan’s and get me some mushrooms? See if he has some fresh ones.”

  It was Bella Vista chicken, then. Probably she’d make her Viennese torte cake, too, and ring the plate with fresh flowers before she served it. She only did things like this when company came. If she did it for our family, our father and Sharla made gentle fun of her. I actually liked my mother’s creativity in such matters, but did not want to admit it, in case Sharla and my father were right.

  I imagined we’d be eating in the dining room, and when we came downstairs, I saw it was so. The heavy, cream-colored tablecloth already lay on the table, the one my parents got as a wedding gift. Their initials were monogrammed at one end, edges linked together. Normally, my mother put those initials at the hostess end, closest to the kitchen. Today, though, they were facing out. They were what you saw as soon as you entered the room.

  A few rows ahead of me, I hear two children, a brother and sister, about eight or nine years old, talking. The girl says, “I love it when we get so high and we’re out of the world.”

  “We’re not out of the world,” the boy says.

  A long pause. Then the girl says, “Glen. Yes, we are. We are in the sky.”

  “No, stupid,” Glen says. “When you are in outer space, you are out of the world.”

  “So? Space is sky, isn’t it?”

  Glen thinks. So do I.

  I love listening to conversations between children. I often change seats on a bus or an airplane to be near them. Right after takeoff, I heard this same girl say, “When we get up real high, I’m going to open a window and see where we reall
y are.” And Glen, pointing at the blocklike illustration on the flight-attendant call button, observed, “Boy. They don’t draw good.”

  My idea of hell is to be stuck on a long flight in front of loud-talking businessmen holding an impromptu airmeeting, each trying to outdo the other using the mind-numbing vocabulary of the profit-oriented. “Why must you talk about this?” I always want to ask them. “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter at all?” Of course it does matter; it just doesn’t matter to me. I married a man who teaches 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 many lovely 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.