The art of mending: a novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,3
and my mother ate it.
I never understood this about Caroline. Now I do. It’s all clear now: the times Caroline, as a small child, lay in the hall outside the bathroom door while my mother bathed. The presents she later bought for her with babysitting money: barrettes, scarves, lipsticks. Paperback books and velvet roses. “Brownnoser!” I once whispered after she’d given my mother a bottle of dime-store perfume. Caroline ignored me; she sat at the kitchen table where I was doing homework and began pulling books and papers out of her schoolbag. She was in sixth grade then, and I in eighth. “Brownnoser!” I said again, out loud.
“Laura,” my mother said, and I returned to my homework. There was a tiny smile on Caroline’s face, and I kicked her under the table. She did not kick me back; rather, she moved away to another chair and straightened with pinched-nose efficiency a stack of notebook paper that did not need straightening. She cocked her head slightly to the left and the right as she did it. I hated it. I glared at her between narrowed lids; I believed I could feel heat coming from my eyeballs. All this was to no avail; Caroline looked at her schoolwork only.
Then came a gift I remember particularly well, something given to my mother by Caroline the Christmas she was sixteen. It was the last gift opened that year, and it was a framed photograph, an 8-by-10. My mother stared at it briefly, murmured a low thanks, and started to put the picture back in the box.
“What is it?” I said. “Let me see!” I snatched it away. The picture was of Caroline wearing one of my mother’s slinky evening gowns, her hand on her hip. Caroline’s auburn hair, the same color as my mother’s, was styled in a twist like the one my mother always wore. Her makeup was heavily applied in a style exactly my mother’s own, and she stared unsmilingly into the camera. It was chilling, the look on Caroline’s face: the flat eyes, the hard line of mouth, the remove. I had never seen such a look. “What is this supposed to be?” I asked.
My brother took the photo from me and looked at it. He burst into laughter, the goofy adolescent-boy kind, and Caroline grabbed the picture from him and threw it onto the floor. “It isn’t for you,” she said. She turned to stare at my mother, who did not look back at her, and then left the room.
“Caroline!” my father called after her. “Come back here!” But she did not return. My father rose, as though to go after her. Then he saw the picture, and he sat back down.
This I understand now, too—as well as what my father meant that long-ago day at the fair, when what he was really asking was if I knew.
2
I WAS THE ONE WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO GET MARRIED first. I was the oldest, I was the one who was boy crazy, and I was the one with overly strong domestic leanings. I preferred putting a tray of Snickerdoodles in the oven to things like playing Capture the Flag or roller-skating or going swimming. I did like making joke phone calls, and lying in the grass staring up at the sky held a certain dreamy appeal. Occasionally I would play a board game, or jacks, or venture alone into the out-of-doors, where I would often be pleasantly surprised by what I found. But my mind was mainly on the world of homemaking and fake flesh; the biggest reward of a nature walk was that I could come back with a bouquet for the cardboard kitchen cupboard of my “house,” a generous corner of the basement I had appropriated at age five and had no intention of ever giving up. I had a rug remnant for my living room, and two folding chairs placed side by side and covered by a chenille bedspread served as a sofa. I had a photo of a television from the Sears catalog taped to the wall. The photo was absurdly small, of course, but my imagination was not. I had a good-sized cardboard box lying on its side to serve as a coffee table, and my mother’s discarded magazines were fanned out there in imitation of the way she arranged her own. Nearby, dolls lay sleeping in cribs or sitting in perpetual alertness in the rickety high chair.