What We Keep (4 page)

“Wake up!” I heard Sharla say. I’d been dreaming a good dream. It concerned a group of fairies who, sorority-like, lived in a castle together. They woke up together, bumped wings as they jostled one another for position at the bathroom sink—equipped with gold fixtures in the shape of swans’ heads. When we were younger, it had been the habit of our mother to tell us to go to sleep quickly; that way, the fairies would come sooner to paint stars on our ceiling. I liked believing this was true, and incorporated the notion enough that I often had dreams about those fairies. They were blonde, with the exception of one raven-haired fairy, my favorite, who wore only red and had the look of possible evil in her eyes. The fairies always wore the same thing, sparkly gossamer gowns that tied around their middles with gold ribbon in a crisscross arrangement impossible to duplicate—I had often tried. The only difference between the fairies’ gowns was in the color. There was a pale apricot, a bright yellow, a dusky purple, and many shades of blue. And red, of course, a red so deep it neared black in the small valleys of the folds. The gowns trailed off at the end as though someone had set about erasing them from the bottom up, but then had gotten distracted and gone away. You could not see shoes, or feet; only the disappearing edges of a fantasy.

In my dream, I’d been given a large gold key to unlock the fairies’ closet door. It was a high, white cabinet, trimmed with gold. I opened the door, then stood before
a line of their gowns, the sparkles winking at me. I could not believe my nearness. I had just reached out a hand to touch them when Sharla got through to me.

“Let’s go!” she whispered harshly. “Why are you sleeping?”

This seemed a dumb question. I didn’t answer it. Instead, I sat up and straightened my T-shirt and underpants as though I were preparing to leave for work, which I suppose I was.

“You have to wear your robe,” Sharla said. She was wearing hers, and she handed me mine. It was a white quilted thing, with rhinestone buttons. It was just like Sharla’s, only smaller. We hated our robes. They were a gift from our grandmother, our mother’s mother, who always sent us clothes we hated. She did not understand us, we felt. And she would call us from her home in New York the day after we had received whatever she sent and we were expected to go on and on about it. “Did you notice the buttons?” she’d asked about the robe.

“They’re very pretty,” I’d responded dutifully. Actually, I did like the buttons. But not there. I wanted to use them for something else. Eyes in a voodoo doll I intended to make, for example. I needed someone else’s hair for that, though. I was waiting to cut Sharla’s when she was sleeping, but the occasion hadn’t presented itself, because so far, when she was sleeping, I was sleeping, too. I was waiting for her to get sick.

“Why do we have to wear robes?” I asked.

“Because it’s someone else’s house, dummy.”

“But it’s empty!”

“Be quiet, or we’ll get caught.” She cupped her hands around my ear, whispered into it, “You can’t be in your
underwear in someone else’s house. Just put your robe on. Let’s go.”

I was hungry, I realized suddenly. I wanted to eat something before I went to work. But Sharla, walking before me with her back ramrod straight, was going to be in no mood for dillydallying. Still, when we passed through the kitchen on the way to the front door, I opened a cupboard and grabbed the first thing I felt, which was a bag of marshmallows. A good choice, and a lucky one.

The moon was full and bright white; you could have read by it. I stowed this information away; next time, we would do that, bring out books and read by the light of the moon. They would need to be the right books, of course. Ones about witches, say, or magazine love stories with plenty of kissing scenes. You could find them in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, complete with illustrations. The women always had their red lips parted; the mens’ heads bowed low, moving toward the women in perpetuity. A wind was always blowing, so as to arrange the women’s hair in wild and irresistible styles.

Outside Mrs. O’Donnell’s door I felt a sudden rush of fear. “What if someone else is in there?” I asked. The door had been left open. For many hours. And though the moon was bright, the inside of the house was dark enough for misdeeds.

“Who would be in there?” Sharla asked, in the tired voice she reserved for telling me I was a moron. However, I noticed her hand stayed still on the doorknob.

“A hobo,” I said, and nearly saw him then, toothless and leering, sitting in a corner of Mrs. O’Donnell’s poor, empty bedroom. His handkerchief was off its stick and
lay open before him; he was unpacked, claiming the space as his own. He had BO. And in the slatted light that came through Mrs. O’Donnell’s left-behind venetian blinds, you could see a knife clenched in his hairy fist. I imagined the Swiss army variety like our father’s, only not as nice. Rusty. In the habit of opening windpipes rather than bottles of grape soda.

“There are no hobos in Clear Falls,” Sharla said.

“How do you know?”

“What is the matter with you? Don’t you want to do this?”

“Yes!” Maybe not.

“There is no one in there. It is an empty house that we get to explore for as long as we want.” She squinted at me. “What’s under your arm?”

“Marshmallows.”

At first, she looked as though she might yell at me again; but then she held out her hand. I gave her one; then, as she did not take her hand back, two more. She shoved them in her mouth, then opened the door. And there it was, the exact smell of Mrs. O’Donnell. A warm smell, like ironing, mixed with something like old orange peels. “Shhh!” Sharla said, closing the door behind me. She stood perfectly still, her head cocked, listening.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

I had gotten to her. She was making sure there wasn’t a hobo. My pride made me smile; I ate another marshmallow. We were a team, equal in importance, never mind the age difference.

Sharla turned to glare at me; apparently I was making noise eating.

“No one’s here,” I said loudly, in my marshmallow-thickened voice. “Tut-tut, chicken-butt.”

And then I led the way,
I
did, across the empty living room and into the center of the tiny dining room.

“This was the dining room,” I said solemnly.

“I know that.”

“You weren’t ever in here.”

“I was, too.”

“When?”

“Once when you were sick; I borrowed some soup from her. Mom sent me. She gave me a can of tomato soup.”

“I
ate
it?” I thought of Mrs. O’Donnell’s bumpy knuckles reaching in her cupboard for soup to give to me, shivered a little in regretful repulsion. It occurred to me that she would never make soup again. I wondered what she had done with the food left in her house on moving day. Maybe she’d given it to Leroy. Or set it out in her metal trash can, which now waited at the curb looking a bit splendid—such was the power of the moonlight.

“Let’s go look in her bedroom,” Sharla said.

I was going to say that nothing was there, but it wasn’t true. There
was
something there; there was something everywhere. There was a spirit in the house, a sad sense of someone newly gone. Each room had its own small, untold lament. The dining room missed its lace tablecloth and the turkey dinners Mrs. O’Donnell had served when her husband was alive. The kitchen tap dripped, looking for macaroni to rinse. The air in the bedroom would be rich with the leftovers from Mrs. O’Donnell’s dreams and her middle-of-the-night wakenings, those
times when she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, her thin hair wild about her glasses-less face, the ticking of her bedside clock suddenly loud. I was sure she’d sat like that. I was sure everyone did that, once they got old.

We climbed the stairs, walked down the hall past the bathroom, and Sharla pushed open the door to the empty square that had been Mrs. O’Donnell’s bedroom. I was right; the air here was charged. I felt the hairs on my arms lift; an invisible finger zipped up my spine. I looked at Sharla, wanting to ask if she felt all this, too, but her face was closed, impassive. She wasn’t colliding with memories of a life lived and now gone; she was simply looking around. The closet door was half open; the white curtains at the window hung still as stone. There were little white balls hanging from the edges of the curtains. “Look,” I told Sharla. “The surrey with the fringe on top.”

“What?”

“The curtains,” I said. “The surrey with the fringe on top.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

I ate a marshmallow, weighed the fairness of her remark.

Right.

“She slept so many nights here,” I said.

“I know.” Sharla’s voice was quiet and mournful. Now I was on the right track.

“She was so nice,” I sighed. Salt to the wound, an occasional specialty of mine.

“Not really,” Sharla said, her reverie broken.

“Uh-huh!”

“Oh, you’re just saying that because she’s gone.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Uh-huh
!”

“Be quiet,” I said. “The cops will come, and you’re only in your robe.”

Sharla went toward the bathroom; I started to follow, then went my own way, into the spare bedroom. Pink curtains here, ruffled edges. An outline on the floor of where the braided rug used to be, I remembered it. I felt Sharla come in behind me.

“What was this?” she asked.

“The guest room. There was a little bed, right here; it was brown wood, with a pink bedspread. And a plant was on the bedside stand, I think it was a sweet-potato plant. Or … I don’t know, maybe an African violet.”

How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything. Mrs. O’Donnell’s face would be a blur, surrounded by her perm. And then the memory of the perm itself … gone? The trajectory of this line of thought was making me nervous. I told myself the plant had definitely been an African violet; I made myself see the fuzzy white on the leaves, the slight tilt of them toward the sun. I saw one shy purple blossom bent toward the earth it lived in.

Sharla leaned against the wall. “The guest room, huh? She never had any guests.”

“I know.”

A troubled silence.

Then, “Want another marshmallow?” I asked.

“How can you eat at a time like this?”

“She would want us to,” I said, though I was not at all sure of this.

I left the guest room, went downstairs, and sat in the middle of the living-room floor. You could sit anywhere now; nothing was in the way of anything. I rather liked that.

Sharla came down soon afterward. We finished the marshmallows, then lay on the floor head to head, limbs stretched out like snow angels. “How would you decorate this room if it was your house?” Sharla asked.

My
house? My
house
? All of it—a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a back-porch stoop, a front door with a mail slot?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me neither.”

We sighed, exactly together, it seemed to me, and this was deeply comforting. I had a thought to take Sharla’s hand, but I knew she’d frown and lightly slap me away. We were deeply connected, Sharla and I, but very different. I was a cuddler; Sharla looked at an embrace as imprisonment. I could not touch her except to brush her hair, she liked that. In fact, she would pay me to do it. She would give me a Betty and Veronica comic book, or perhaps use of her charm bracelet for half an hour, though I had to wash and dry it before returning it to her. “You have a habit of being sticky,” she told me. And then, when shame filled my face, “It’s nothing
bad;
it’s just messy.”

Eventually, we rose and toured Mrs. O’Donnell’s empty house one more time—wordlessly agreeing to exclude the basement. Then we left, pulling the door shut behind us. We slept out in the yard for a while, then went in. Again, we hadn’t been missed. It was becoming boring, getting away with so much. Soon, we would need to up the ante.

* * *

When I awakened the next morning, I was seized by the fear that we had left fingerprints behind, unique lines of us captured in marshmallow dust. I thought we should sneak back in and get rid of the evidence. But it was too late. Outside my bedroom window I saw that another moving van had pulled up. And standing beside it was the raven-haired fairy of my dreams, only you could see her feet. They were wearing the highest heels I’d ever seen. Under the fullest skirt. Which was red, but softened by large white polka dots. Her short-sleeved sweater was all red, though, as was a scarf she had tied around her neck. Her belt was black patent leather, cinched tightly around her tiny waist.

Sharla was already up by the time I came downstairs, standing watching at the living-room window, eating a bowl of Cheerios and sliced peaches. “Look who’s moving in,” she said, her mouth full. And then she said something unintelligible.

“Is later?” I asked.

Sharla swallowed. “Liz
Tay
lor,” 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
spy
ing!” 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.