What We Keep (3 page)

Last summer, for a few fever-pitched weeks, I had entered into the business of making and selling pot holders. Mrs. O’Donnell was my first customer. She bought a couple of the rose-and-green ones—my favorite, as well—and then invited me in for Rice Krispies treats. After she’d given me an impromptu tour of her house, we sat down together at the kitchen table. Then we both seemed to realize we had nothing whatsoever to say. I noticed faint brown stains on her tablecloth, next to an embroidered picture of three gray kittens in a basket, whose blue eyes seemed sad to me, lost and pleading.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. O’Donnell finally said softly, looking up from her lap. I saw that her eyes were moist and that she had what appeared to be a bit of an infection in one of them.

I didn’t want the treat anymore. Pinkeye had broken out spectacularly last spring in my elementary school. I was one of the few spared, and I didn’t want to take any chances now. I looked around in a way I hoped didn’t seem desperate, and finally commented on a rooster clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It was a black rooster, tail feathers drooping forlornly, comb and wattle faded to a dusty pink. The round face of a clock was trapped forever in his center—he would never seduce hens, or exuberantly salute the morning. Though I knew full well he was plastic and never stood a chance for such things, I
nonetheless regretted for him this awful loss. The clock said 1:47, though the time was around ten-thirty.

“That’s really nice,” I said, smiling and nodding at the rooster.

“What is?”

I pointed behind her, and when she turned to look, I slipped the Rice Krispies treat into my shirt pocket.

“Would you like that clock?” Mrs. O’Donnell asked.

“Oh!” I said. “No, thank you; you keep it, I couldn’t take that.”

“To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I even had it. You’re welcome to it.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, after a pause, “Uh-huh.” Finally, “Thank you, that’s very nice of you, but really …” I so very much did not want that clock. I knew it would be sticky with old grease, that there would be nothing at all I could do with it, not even take it apart to have a look at its innards. I was very interested that summer in taking things apart. I cracked open rocks with my father’s hammer, rubbed gently the damp surfaces I found inside various pods I pulled from trees, ripped apart buds for the tight sight of embryonic flowers. I used a pearlhandled steak knife to saw open the high heels of a pair of party shoes my mother was throwing out, and on one brave day when no one else was home, unscrewed the back of the kitchen radio. I enjoyed several minutes of silent appreciation for the glowing tubes and copper wires I found there, adjusted the volume up and down ceaselessly, trying to see what
did
that.

Now I stared at the rooster clock, trying to imagine if there could be any single thing of value or interest to me in it. I had heard that there were jewels inside watches,
but I didn’t think anything like that lay inside that rooster; knew if I opened it I would notice nothing but perhaps a rising up of fine dust. I wanted to say clearly to Mrs. O’Donnell that I did not want the clock, but I wanted even more not to hurt her feelings. Therefore I remained silent, while long seconds passed. My stomach felt as though it were being wrung out; I curled and uncurled my toes slowly against the soles of my new flip-flops.

Finally, Mrs. O’Donnell smiled, closemouthed and vaguely regretful; I did the same. She nodded; I hesitated, then nodded, too. Then she said, “You know, you can take as many treats as you want, dear. But let me wrap them up for you. They’ll stain your shirt if you keep them in your pocket that way.”

Apart from that one visit, I never really talked to Mrs. O’Donnell. I didn’t particularly regret her moving. I understood that this meant anything could happen; a kid my age might move in, for example. She might be an only child and I could become her best friend and profit by the spoiling she got from her parents. And we needed younger kids on the block; Sharla and I were the only ones under sixteen. I enjoyed very much the sight of teenage goodnight kissing that went on, both in cars pulled up in front of houses as well as the more chaste variety that took place under yellow porch lights; I thrilled to the screeching sound of peel-outs performed by the neighborhood boys whenever their parents were away; I noted with interest and envy the outfits worn by girlfriends walking down the sidewalks together: neat upside-down V-cuts in pedal pushers, blouses with the collar turned up, white leather bucket purses slung over shoulders,
rabbits’ feet on a chain at the side. Those girls wore fat lines of eyeliner, Fire-and-Ice lipstick.

I also liked seeing the teens come back from town with bags from the record store holding the latest 45s; liked knowing they’d probably also been to the drugstore for vanilla Cokes and fries, after which they might have gone behind the store to sneak a smoke. But I would have traded all that happily for some kids our age. If ever we’d taken the risk of telling hard truths, Sharla and I might have admitted to each other that we were lonely.

After I spied the moving van, I ran back in the house and told my mother Mrs. O’Donnell was moving.

“Is it today?” my mother asked. She went to the window, looked out at the van.

“Oh, it is. Poor thing.” She returned to the stove, turned the bacon, drained some grease into an empty milk carton.

“How come you didn’t say anything?” I asked. “How come you didn’t tell me?”

“Well, I did. I’m sure I did.”

“Nuh-uh,” I said, which was my favorite expression. It was rakish, I thought. I recalled now, though, that my mother
had
told me. But it had been on a rainy day and I’d been reading, and I was close to the end of a chapter in a Nancy Drew book. Who could have expected me to hear anything when a pillow was being lowered onto Nancy’s face?

“How come you called her ‘poor thing’?” I asked.

“Oh.…” My mother laid the bacon out in neat rows on a paper towel.

“Can I have a piece, just one?” I now regretted saying
I didn’t want breakfast; the smell of the bacon rivaled my mother’s “My Sin.”

“Yes, I made some for you.”

Ah.

I took a piece of bacon, then sat at the kitchen table to eat it, one leg crossed over the other and swinging in order to maximize the flavor. “How come you said ‘poor thing’?”

My mother cracked eggs into the frying pan, then bent and squinted at the dial, adjusting it. I liked when she did this. She looked like a scientist.

“Oh, you know,” she said. She didn’t want to tell me. Which meant that I must persist.

“What?
”

“Well, she’s old and all alone. Having some … problems. She’s going to the nursing home.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know much about nursing homes, except that the residents I’d seen there mostly sat like rag dolls in wheelchairs, staring. They were the recipients of many construction-paper projects that we did in school and then reluctantly delivered—May baskets, glittery valentines, turkeys made from handprints, Santas with cotton-ball beards. And you died there, I knew that. I had a flash of regret that I hadn’t been kinder to Mrs. O’Donnell. It wouldn’t have been so hard.

“Who’s moving in?” I asked.

“I don’t know—We’ll see pretty soon, I guess. How many eggs do you want?”

“One,” I said. “No. Two.”

It was going to be a busy day; I wanted to be fortified. Everything Mrs. O’Donnell had in that house was about to be brought outside. Her ottoman and her scrapbooks.
All her pots and pans. Towels and rugs, the doilies she kept on her maple end tables. Her very bed. I would see everything she owned, carried by strong men in T-shirts up a ramp and into the dark mouth of the truck. When they left, the house would be empty. Not even a curtain. I shivered.

I
hear someone rummaging around beside me and open my eyes to see Martha, digging in the seat pocket. “My reading glasses,” she says. “I think I stuck them in here.” She reaches in farther, pulls them out, and holds them up triumphantly.

“You decided not to sleep?” I say.

“I
did
sleep! It felt like such a long time, but it was only fifteen minutes. I had a dream and everything. I dreamed I had a baby—a little girl. Actually, from what I hear, that’s a nightmare.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know, how mean girls are to their mothers.”

Something inside me stiffens. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Do you have girls?”

“Two, ten and twelve.”

“And they’re nice to you?”

“Well, they have their moments. But all kids do.”

“I don’t know,” Martha says. “I guess that incident in the cemetery reminded me of how hard girls can be on their mothers. I know I was—for the longest time, my mother just couldn’t do anything right. It’s like … Well, once I saw these two young women in an art museum, talking about a painting. One of them said, ‘It’s really
just the quality of differentness that I love so much here. I always want a little differentness in my art, don’t you?’ And the other woman said, ‘Oh God, yes. I want everything in my life to be unusual. Except things like, you know, my
mother
.’ And I thought, that’s true. I wouldn’t want my mother to be different, either. Yet I always despised her for being the same as everyone else.” She looks at me. “Your kids aren’t like that, thinking everything you do is wrong?”

“Not at all. We’re very close.”

“Huh,” she says, and I have the feeling she doesn’t believe me.

“We really are,” I say. “I was close to my mother, too, until she screwed up so bad. And I was
very
close to my stepmother.” I see her suddenly: Georgia, sitting at the side of my bed, taking down the hem of a dress I refused to part with and talking to me about a teacher who’d sent me to the principal. She wasn’t mad at me; she was mad at the teacher. She had a call in to him.

“I wonder if your daughters will change when they get older,” Martha says. “I hear when they hit the teen years, they can really—”

“They’ll be fine,” I say. “I waited a long time to have kids. My first was born at thirty-five. I wanted to be absolutely sure I was ready. I wanted to spend the time I needed with them. I quit work when I had them; I’m devoted to them. They know that. They’ll be fine.” My voice has gotten louder in my defensiveness; the people ahead of me turn slightly around, then away.

Martha blinks, nods slowly. “Well I hope they will be. I really do.” She heads back to her airplane suite. I know what she’s thinking: I’m too intense. My kids will end up
totally neurotic. They’ll end up hating me. I know that’s what she’s thinking. But she’s wrong. My kids will end up knowing that they were the priority, that I did not sacrifice their well-being for the sake of some pipe dream, as my mother did. They will end up knowing they came first in my life, always. Of course I miss working. Of course I have days when I literally feel like pulling my hair out. But I stay home, so that my children know if they need me I’m there. I recognize the fact that the need is on my part, too. I see that.

I stare at the man across the aisle from me, asleep with his mouth open, gently snoring. Then I smooth my skirt beneath me, take in a deep breath, reenter that summer day so many years ago when Mrs. O’Donnell moved away.

I
t turned out I was wrong about our neighbor’s house being left absolutely empty. The curtains stayed. But they were open, and late in the afternoon, when the truck pulled away, Sharla and I looked through every window we could reach. Then we sat on Mrs. O’Donnell’s back steps, enjoying the mild disorientation of seeing our own yard from there. “She forgot her clothespins,” I told Sharla. They were lined up like mournful little soldiers on the gray rope line. I was feeling guilty, thinking we should have had a going-away party for her. But who, other than her cop nephew Leroy, could we have invited? And would that have constituted a party?

Mrs. O’Donnell had called Sharla and me over just before she left, and had given each of us a present wrapped in wrinkled paper. It was left over from Christmas, and featured scenes of Santa Claus that I thought made him look drunk.

We each got one earring of a pair. “This way, you’ll always keep in touch with each other,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “You’ll have to share, don’t you know?” We thanked her profusely and then Leroy came to drive her away. She was wearing a hat and gloves and new black shoes, and looked as dignified as I’d ever seen her. I felt terrible.

“Old Mrs. O’Donnell,” I said now. “Poor thing.” I screwed my earring on. It had pearls and rhinestones. I thought it was pretty, though I also recall thinking that it didn’t really go with anything I had.

“Maybe a window’s open and we could crawl in,” Sharla said, shoving her earring in her front pocket. She wasn’t interested in joining my little memorial service. She was interested in breaking and entering. It was the more appealing alternative; I took the earring off and started to put it in my front pocket, then switched to the back one—I had to be ever-alert to providing evidence for Sharla calling me a copycat.

We went around to all the windows again, tried to open them, found them locked. Then, liking the absurdity of it, I went to the front door and knocked loudly, and the door fell open.

I turned back to Sharla, openmouthed.

“Shut it!” she told me, looking quickly around. Then, whispering, “We’ll come back at midnight.”

I loved summer so much. My mother was fixing fried potatoes for dinner; I could smell them from here. Our feet were bare and dusty. I had a puffy mosquito bite behind my knee, and itching it gave me a kind of pleasure that made me close my eyes and lift my chin, like a dog well-scratched. We were going to Dairy Queen for dessert: Sharla and I favored the coated cones, my mother got elegant little butterscotch sundaes, and my father wolfed down entire banana splits. Grasshoppers leaped up and crisscrossed before us every day; at night the cicadas sang and the sticky June bugs clung to the back screen door. Homework was as foreign as the red eye of Mars. Plans fell into your lap, opened as naturally and
exotically as the lotus flower. You could follow an impromptu notion through to its natural end, which is exactly what you were supposed to do with such fine gifts.