What We Keep

  “Well, I was just going to say that it seems one of the things you have to do in order to finally grow up is to let that what-my-parents-did-to-me stuff go.”

  I say nothing, watch my feet walking.

  “But it’s none of my business. Why don’t I just go back to wishing you luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  Martha slows her pace a bit. I quicken mine.

  When I arrive at the baggage claim, I see Sharla right away, dressed in jeans and a black sweater, a black suede jacket over her shoulders. She is wearing a belt with a huge silver buckle and fabulous-looking cowboy boots. She always looks as if she walked off of the pages of a magazine; I always look as though I am on the way to a meeting with the minister. It’s funny; I always thought Sharla would be the conservative one. But as we grew up, Sharla became the risk-taker, the wilder one.

  Now I scan her face, trying not to look anxious, but failing. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’m all right,” she says.

  I embrace her hard, say into her ear, “Oh, Sharla, I’m so sorry.”

  She pulls away from me. “Hey. It’s not for sure, remember? I’ll know on Friday.”

  “How can they do that? How can they say, ‘You might be terminally ill. We’ll let you know in a few days.’ How can they do that?”

  “Well, it’s complicated,” Sharla says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why don’t you get your bags. We’ll talk on the way.”

  I remember, all of a sudden, where we are, that we are here to see our mother. “Why am I not surprised that she didn’t bother to pick us up?”

  “I told her not to,” Sharla said. “I wanted some time with you first. To get ready.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe that was a good idea.” I see my small bag coming out, drag it off the belt.

  “That’s all you brought?” Sharla asks.

  “We’re only staying three days, right?”

  “Yeah, but …” She shrugs. “I’ve got more.” She points to a pile of floral French luggage; there are four pieces.

  “What did you bring?” I ask.

  “I was nervous.”

  “So, what, you’ve got bags full of tranquilizers?”

  “No, just one vial.”

  “Really?”

  “Just Valium.”

  “Can I have some?”

  She pulls a slim plastic bottle from her purse. “One?”

  “How many milligrams?”

  “Five.”

  “I’ll take two.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Okay, one. Oh, never mind. Forget it.”

  Sharla puts the vial back in her purse. Then she loads her bags onto a cart. “I’ve got a car waiting.” She pulls her sunglasses out of her pocket, puts them on. If she’s ill, she sure doesn’t look it.

  “Did you get a stretch limo?” I ask hopefully. “White?”

  “You’re so tacky.”

  “Well. That, or honest.”

  “Saying you want a white stretch is not honest, it’s tacky,” Sharla says. “Trust me.” She sighs. “Where’d you get that blouse?”

  The drive into Marin County is beautiful. Outside our windows is the breathtaking combination of sea and sky and land that you see in movies and think, Oh sure, show me where that is. But here it is.

  “I can’t believe I’m so old and have never been here before,” I say.

  Sharla looks at me over the top of her sunglasses.

  “I know, but you could come here and not see her. I’m not sure I’d recognize her if I did see her.”

  “I think you’d recognize her,” Sharla says, looking again out her window. Then, “God,” she says softly, in appreciation of the spectacular view of houses nestled into the hilltops. “How much does one of those houses on top of the hill go for?” she asks the driver.

  “Millions,” he says.

  “Yes,” Sharla says, “but how many millions?”

  “‘Spose I said only one million. Could you afford it then?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s the difference?”

  Sharla and I look at each other, squelch a giggle. Contrary to what we’ve been told, not everybody in California is in a good mood all the time.

  “Just curious,” Sharla says.

  “Well, it’s more than one million, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I see. Well. Thank you very much.” She settles back against the seat, looks over at me. “Thanks for coming, Ginny.” She is speaking very quietly, so Mr. Congeniality can’t hear us.

  “Well, of course I came.”

  “It’s maybe just a cyst.”

  “It’s on your ovary?”

  “Yeah. But maybe it’s just a cyst.”

  I take in a breath, steady myself. “When do they—”

  “You know what?” Sharla says. “For days, I’ve been talking about nothing but this with Jonathan. I’m sort of sick of it. I mean, if it is, it is, I’ll deal with it. I’d really like this time to be … free of that.”

  “You want to just lighten up a bit,” I say. “Forget about things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just … oh, you know, come and see your mother, who walked out of your life over thirty years ago, whom you’ve not seen since. A kind of spa, you might say.”

  Sharla smiles. “You know, I don’t know if she really did that or not. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I don’t know if you could say she really walked out.”

  “She left us.”

  Sharla begins to answer me, but then, as we start going up a steep hill on a heavily wooded road, she asks, “Is this Summit already?”

  “That’s what the sign says,” the driver mutters.

  “Hey!” I say, loudly, and Sharla nudges me with her boot.

  “No,” I tell her. And then, to the driver, “Hey!”

  He looks at me in the rearview. “Yes?”

  “Could you just … aren’t you supposed to be polite?”

  “Yeah. I’m not being polite enough?”

  I sigh, let it go. There are more important things to think about.

  “God. We’re there,” Sharla says.

  “But we didn’t talk about anything,” I say. “I don’t think I’m ready!”

  “Well, the scenery. I just wanted to see it. I thought it would take longer to get here.” The car pulls into a driveway. Number 330 is stenciled on the garage. The house is evidently out of sight, down the hill, as were many of the houses we passed. The driver puts the car into park, starts filling out some paperwork. I feel my hands tighten on my purse, take a huge breath.

  “Should we ask him to drive around for a while?” Sharla whispers. I look at the back of his head, the dejected slump of his shoulders.

  “No,” I say. And then it comes to me to give him a tip, just to see his face. Sharla signs for the bill, and I pull a twenty out of my purse, hand it over the seat.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “A tip.”

  “Included,” he says.

  “Extra,” I insist.

  His face softens, reluctantly. Then, “Sorry,” he says. “I’m not feeling well today. I’m sorry. ’Shouldn’t have come to work. But I need the money.” He laughs. “I’ll carry your bags in twice, okay?”

  “No, thanks,” we say together. And I know why. The moment is crowded enough already.

  It takes us two trips to bring the luggage down to the door of a beautiful, brown-shingled house with leaded glass windows. Flowers are everywhere—in window boxes, in scattered gardens. The landscape around the house is softly controlled, but still has a feeling of wildness. We can see the living room through one window; there is a piano there, some large, soft pieces of furniture, deep green; a Persian rug, many vases of flowers, a grandmother clock, paintings everywhere. I knock, we wait a breathless moment, and the door opens. And there she is. And Sharla is right, I would know her anywhere.

  I start to say something, then put my hands over my face. I feel her pulling
both of us toward her, saying syllables that are not words, that could not be, not if they were going to contain all that she is saying. A memory comes to me of my younger daughter, whom I overheard playacting with a friend the other day. “I am dying of a multitude of feelings,” she was saying, in what she calls her “opera voice.” She was wearing a number of scarves as veils, and her friend, who was supposed to pull them off one at a time, yanked at the top one, only to have them all fall down.

  * * *

  “I didn’t think I was going to cry like that,” Sharla says. We are lying in the guest room, taking a break before dinner, which our mother has insisted on preparing alone. Probably she wants to give us all some time to recover. “Did you?”

  “I thought I might,” I say. “I thought either that, or I’d start laughing.”

  Sharla looks at me, puzzled.

  “You know,” I say. “Like when you shouldn’t. Like at a funeral. So you do.”

  Sharla lies down on the bed, pulls her sweater up to expose her belly, pats it. “I’m hungry, are you?”

  “Yeah. It smells good, whatever it is.”

  “Something Italian, I think, lots of garlic.”

  “Let’s go taste,” I say.

  “In a minute.”

  “She’s still beautiful, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. I love her hair.”

  It was completely gray now, but beautifully streaked. It was long; she wore it up in a bun. She was tan, a little too thin, perhaps. She wore dangling silver earrings with a green, arty T-shirt and loose, black tie pants. Her makeup was subtle: eyeliner, a bit of rust-colored lipstick.

  “She still seems so familiar, even though she’s so different,” I say. “I shouldn’t be surprised. But I am anyway. I guess I just didn’t know what to expect.”

  “If you’d just … met her,” Sharla says, “like at a party or something, wouldn’t you like her? I mean, doesn’t she seem like a pretty neat woman?”

  “Yeah. She turned out just fine.”

  Sharla laughs. “It feels like we’re talking about our children.”

  “Well, there always was that, you know? I think we always felt like we kind of had to take care of her.”

  “I guess,” Sharla says.

  I get up, walk over to the window. “It’s so beautiful here. Look at the view she has every day. She’s really done well for herself.”

  Sharla comes over to stand beside me, puts her arm around me. “Ginny.”

  “What?” I put my arm around her. This is the part where she is going to tell me she already knows the outcome of the biopsy, and that it’s not good.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  Here it is. “Yes?”

  “That cyst thing? It’s not what I told you.”

  I’ll put her in my living room so she’ll be close to everything. I’ll get someone to stay with her whenever I have to leave.

  Sharla sits on the wide windowsill, looks up at me. “It’s not me who’s sick. It’s her.”

  It takes a moment for my thoughts to reshuffle. Then, “What?” I say.

  “It’s her. It’s her who’s sick. Mom.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She called me.”

  I start to laugh, stop. “So … why didn’t you tell me?”

  She sighs. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  “Huh,” I say. It is the only word that can escape from the tangled goings-on in my mind.

  “Would you have?”

  I see the scene: the phone rings. I pick it up. Sharla says our mother is sick. Naturally I think she means Georgia. But then she says no, it’s our birth mother. You know, Mom. And if I am honest, I must admit that the first thought that would come to me would be, That’s her problem. Followed by, What am I supposed to do about it?

  When our father died, where was my mother? Nowhere in sight, that’s where. We wrote her about it, and heard nothing back. Of course, we did request that she not come to the funeral. We felt it would be too upsetting, on top of everything else.

  But if Sharla had told me about our mother, surely, after an initial reaction of numbness, I would have rallied to do the right thing. Which would be to come here.

  I start for the door.

  “Don’t,” Sharla says. “She wanted to make us dinner first. I wasn’t supposed to tell you until after. But I couldn’t wait anymore.”

  “I’m going out there.”

  “Don’t tell her I told you. Please.”

  I look at her face: pleading, even a bit frightened.

  “I won’t tell her,” I say. “I’ll just offer to help. I’ll say I was getting bored.”

  “All right,” Sharla says. “I’m going to pee. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  From the hall, I hear the pleasant banging of pots and pans. I enter the kitchen to see my mother standing at the sink with her back to me. She is humming softly to herself; she doesn’t know I’m here. But then she turns around quickly, gasps.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “No, it’s just … Well, I wanted to have dinner all ready, so we could sit down and really talk, without distractions. And I guess … I don’t know, I guess I’m a little nervous.”

  “Why don’t you let me help you?” I ask. “I want to play with your fancy stuff.” My mother has a kitchen right out of a decorating magazine: smaller, perhaps, but as well-equipped and as beautiful: professional-looking pans hanging from a cook’s rack, a subzero refrigerator, granite counters, a Garland stove, little sinks within sinks.

  She smiles, hands me a grater and a few peeled carrots.

  “For the sauce,” she says. “I’m making eggplant parmigiana; I put carrots in to sweeten it a bit. Also a little honey. Do you ever do that, Ginny?”

  And now something happens for which I have no explanation whatsoever: I feel my legs weaken, buckle beneath me, and suddenly I am sitting on the floor.

  My mother rushes over to me, and then Sharla, too, who has just come into the kitchen. “What happened?” my mother says. “What happened here?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, and start to get up. But then I feel a bit dizzy, so I sit back down. Well, I got almost no sleep last night; that’s all it is. The scotch I had on the plane, that’s what it is.

  My mother takes the grater out of my hand. “Did you slip? Is the floor wet?”

  Sharla sits down beside me. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine!” I say. “I don’t know what happened! I was just all of a sudden on the floor!” I look around myself. “Which is not such a bad place to be. It’s nice down here. I like your tiles, Mom.”

  My mother sits down on the floor with us. “Mexican,” she says. “I like them much better than the Italian.”

  “Your whole house is so beautiful,” I say.

  “Thank you.”

  “You must make a fortune.”

  She smiles. “I do all right. Just in the last couple years, though.” She reaches up on the counter for the carrots I was going to grate, gives us each one. “Eat this,” she tells me. “Maybe you’re too hungry.”

  “Did you do all the paintings in here?” I ask.

  My mother takes a bite of her carrot. “All but three,” she says. “Some friends did the one in your room and two of the ones in the dining room.”

  “Huh,” I say. And then, “Mom, are you sick?”

  My mother looks quickly at Sharla, who looks murderously at me. Then Sharla says quietly, “I’m sorry. I had to tell her.”

  “Well,” my mother says. “Apparently so. But I’ve got a while before the train leaves the station. And I’m so glad you’re here.” She takes a deep breath, smiles. “Gosh. I don’t know how in the world we’ll say all we need to.”

  A long moment. Finally, I stand, reach for an open bottle of wine, bring it down to our impromptu social circle. I sniff it. “Is this any good?”

  My mother nods. “I’ll get some glasses.”

  “Don’t
bother.” I take a swig from the bottle, then pass it to her.

  She laughs, stares at me with a deep and clear affection. And then she takes a drink and passes the bottle to Sharla.

  I lean back against the cupboard. “We could just stay here for the evening,” I say.

  No one says anything for a long while. Birds twitter occasionally outside the kitchen windows. Otherwise, there is silence. We pass the bottle around the circle a few times, eat our carrots. Then Sharla says, “Well, I don’t know about you. But my ass is too old for this action.” She stands up. “Come on. Let’s go get comfortable.”

  I’ll just finish dinner,” my mother says.

  I turn off the flame under the saucepan. “Mom.”

  She laughs. “Okay.” She removes her apron, picks up the phone, and dials a number. “Henry? It’s Marion. I need a big order as soon as you can get it here.” Then, to us, “Do you both still like Chinese?”

  All around the TV room are tiny white boxes and empty wine bottles. Sharla has put her chopsticks in her hair to hold it off her neck; the effect is lovely. We are each lying on our own little sofa; the room has three of them, all out of floral chintz, arranged in a U-shape. In the background, the jazz station is playing softly.

  “I had to stay away from playgrounds for a long time,” my mother says. “I passed by one soon after I first left, and I just fell apart. Same thing with schools. Dime stores. And oh, the girls’ section of any department store!”

  Neither Sharla nor I speak. My eyes are closed. I’m a little bit dizzy again.

  “I used to … Well, this may sound odd. But what really brought me comfort was going to big university bookstores and looking at the physics books.”

  My eyes snap open at this. I can’t believe we both seek solace in science, and that we never new this about each other. You can’t get away from some things. You say you’re turning your back on someone, and you start off down a long road, and you walk so very far, and then you find out the road is just a big circle and you are back where you started. I laugh to myself, close my eyes again.

  “I didn’t really understand them,” my mother says, “but the illustrations were so graceful, and the writing seemed so wise and compassionate. Those books told me there was a logic to everything—maybe it was beyond my comprehension, but there was a logic, a reason for things happening. It made me see that humans are very small and insignificant; that all our triumphs and errors don’t really amount to much at all. There are times that notion can scare you, or depress you; but there are other times when thinking about it can help you sleep. Things like—well, I would read something like the first law of thermodynamics, and just find it enormously comforting. I still do. Think of it, the notion of nothing ever being lost, of it just changing form.”