Open House (19 page)

35

“W
HY ARE YOU MAKING THINGS SO FANCY
?” T
RAVIS ASKS
. “Who’s coming?”

“Mom and Lydia.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you just do things regular, then?”

“Because
they’re
fancy.”

A horn honks outside. Travis doesn’t move.

“There’s Dad,” I say.

“I know.”

“Well . . . Are you ready?”

“Yeah. Are you having that cake you made for dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Is it King’s recipe?”

“Yes. I’ll save you some. Okay?”

The horn honks again. “Go, honey. Don’t keep him waiting.”

He lifts his duffel bag, shoulders it. “It’s more fun here.”

How should I feel about this? I’m glad. I’m sad. But I’m glad. And I know that sometimes the cake will be sitting on David’s counter, too.

I go to the door with Travis, kiss him good-bye, wave to David, hurry back to the kitchen.

I have just put in the bread to warm when the doorbell rings, and then I hear my mother yoo-hooing her way down the hall. I kiss her, then Lydia, then lead them to the lavishly decorated dining-room table, where they exclaim softly over everything. Travis is right. It is fun here.

W
E ARE SITTING
back in our chairs, satisfied, empty dessert plates before us. Lydia is talking about her oldest grandchild, who lives in Seattle and who visited her yesterday. “He’s almost forty, and do you know he still goes to see if I keep his little black plastic horse in my night stand? He left it at my house when he was just a little guy, maybe two or so, and I put it in my drawer to keep for him until the next time I saw him. But he liked that it was by my bed, and he told me to keep it there for him. Every time I’ve seen him since, he’s asked to see it. ‘Checking on the livestock,’ he calls it.”

This makes sense to me. I once spent hours in Veronica’s basement, looking through scrapbooks. I found drawings that Louise and I had done over the years, and I actually counted, making sure Louise didn’t have more in there than I did. We were exactly even. I suppose you always want someone to prize things about you.

I have a footlocker for Travis’s drawings, his schoolwork, art projects. Although he is hardly sentimental about it. He looked through it one day, then asked, “What do you keep all this junk for?”

“You might want it someday,” I told him.

“What for? It’s embarrassing!”

“It won’t be when you’re forty.”

“Yeah, right. Like I’ll be able to even
see
when I’m
forty
!”

I stared at him, open-mouthed, and he left the room.

“How’s married life, Lydia?” Veronica asks.

“Oh, we’re very happy. Thomas is a wonderful man. I feel lucky to have found him, and I’m so glad to have taken the chance all over again. Not a single regret.”

My mother smiles, looks down at her plate.

“You were very happy in your marriage, too, weren’t you?” Lydia asks my mother.

“We were. Sad to say, I think that’s a rare thing. I think most young people today are so focused on tomorrow they forget all about today. And I think they’re as afraid of happiness as they are of pain! Scared to say they care. Scared to take a chance. Scared to say they’re just as sentimental and full of human need as people always have been and always will be.”

“It’s true,” Lydia says, stirring her tea.

They are leaning toward each other, nodding, in complete agreement. I suppose I’m one of the “young people” they’re referring to. One of those scaredy-cats. But I did admit to my own needs, to my own sentimentality. And look where it got me.

“You know,” Veronica says, “I was over visiting a girlfriend the other day and her father was staying with her, this old geezer who used to be a farmer. Really nice old man. Blind now, but not a bit sorry for himself. He sat down with us and was telling us about life on the farm. Said he still dreamed about it, that in his dreams he could still see. Said he could ask for what he wanted to dream about, too, and oftentimes, it would happen.”

“Really!” Lydia says. “I’d love to be able to do that!”

“Well, me, too. You can imagine! I’d be with my husband every night! Anyway, this guy said that he’d asked his dreams to let him see his wife again, and sure enough, it happened. He saw a time after they were first married. They were out on the front porch, thinking of all they were going to do, just sitting on the wooden steps, holding hands, the sun going down, talking about how they’d have babies till the plumbing quit. He said the lilacs were out, and the smell was so sweet it could bring a dead man back to life. His wife let her hair out of its bun, shook it all loose. And she looked over and smiled at him, and he said, ‘Lord, she was so pretty and she was my wife.’ Well, my friend and I just couldn’t say a word, all choked up. Just seeing him, all those years ago, thinking life was longer than it is. But you know, he said that at least he knew right then that it was a good moment. Said mostly you don’t know, in this life, you don’t know when it’s happening. You look back later and say, Oh! Well now,
that
was a good
time
! But he said he knew it then. Said he knew it lots of times. He said, ‘Yes, sir. I’ve been blessed.’ ”

“Well, that’s just how I feel,” Lydia says.

My mother looks at me and I nod. I know that despite everything she lost, she feels the same way. And wants me to, as well.

I see us, suddenly, as though from above, three women sitting around a dining-room table, our mother’s hands folded in our laps, our lipstick faded from our mouths. All around us clocks ticking, stars shining. They used to be my age, and I will soon be theirs. They have never forgotten the reason to love.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

I look at my watch, start to speak. “Go,” my mother says.

36

N
O ONE ANSWERS WHEN
I
KNOCK AT HIS DOOR.
I
TRY IT, FIND
it open, and put my head in. “King?” And then, louder, “
King?
”

“Sam?” I hear back, faintly. “Wait just a second. I’m in the bathtub.”

I take off my coat and my boots, undress as I walk down the hall, enter the bathroom naked. He is standing on the bath mat, a towel wrapped around him. “Oh. Hello,” he says. “Wow. Nice outfit.”

“Get back in the bathtub,” I say. And when he does, I climb in, too. I lean against his chest, watch water cascade over the side. “Oops,” I say lazily. It’s pretty, the sight of the brief little waterfall.

“Is the water too hot?” King asks.

“No, this is just how I like it.”

He picks up the soap, and I watch his big hands in front of me, lathering up, then rubbing across my breasts, my stomach. “King?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think you could love me?”

His hands stop moving. “You mean . . . now?”

“No, I meant . . . generally.”

He sighs, and for a moment I feel as though my insides are shrinking, folding in on themselves. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s too soon. But then I hear him say, “Oh, Sam. What else would I do with you but love you forever?”

I sit so still I can hear him breathing, and he is breathing very quietly. I think of a conversation I had with Edward recently. I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was standing over me, trying out some fancy hairdo. He was saying how similar King and I were, that it was no wonder we liked each other so much. “I mean, you were both running around with your helmets on backward,” he said, “living lives that were totally oblivious. Thank God you met each other so you could wake
up
!”

“I wasn’t oblivious,” I said, and Edward said, “Oh, come on, can’t you see the difference in yourself?”

“Well,” I said. “I know how to change a furnace filter now, if that’s what you mean. I can unstick a garbage disposal.”

“Oh, I think it’s a bit more than that,” he said.

So it is.

I lean in closer to King, close my eyes, and suddenly I am a little girl again, sitting on the grass outside my house one hot summer day, resting after a solitary game of hopscotch. There are Johnny-jump-ups growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk; the clouds are circus animals; there is lemonade in the refrigerator; my shorts are a fine, faded red. My father is due home at any moment, and I like to watch him get out of the car and take long strides toward me, his face full of loving intention. I run to him, and he lifts me up. And then, together, we go inside, toward whatever else might follow. We are full of faith, blessed by it. I remember, now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E
LIZABETH
B
ERG
’
S
novels
Durable Goods
and
Joy School
were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year.
Talk Before Sleep
was an ABBY finalist and a
New York Times
bestseller.
The Pull of the
Moon, Range of Motion, What We Keep,
and
Until
the Real Thing Comes Along
were national bestsellers. In 1997, Berg won the NEBA award in fiction. She lives in Massachusetts.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH BERG

Until the Real Thing Comes Along
What We Keep
Joy School
The Pull of the Moon
Range of Motion
Talk Before Sleep
Durable Goods

This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in it are inventions of the author and do not depict any real persons or events.

Copyright ©
2000
by Elizabeth Berg

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Berg, Elizabeth.
Open house: a novel / Elizabeth Berg.
p.       cm.
I
. Divorced women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E6996 064  2000
813'.54—dc21       99-54258

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-0-375-50587-4

v3.0