Free What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg

“Could you get me another size in a slip? The one I have in here is way too big.”
    I looked around for the sales clerk, but she was busy helping someone else with girdles. “What do you need?” I asked, coming up to the curtain.
    “One minute, let me get this off,” Jasmine said, turning to remove the slip she had on. She did not close the curtain all the way back up, and I watched her standing there in a bra, panties, and nylons. She looked like the lingerie models in the Sears catalogue that I studied behind the closed bathroom door; but her figure was more spectacular, and disturbingly real. There was a small constellation of moles on one side of her back; her belly button was slightly elongated; the line of her tan stopped dramatically above soft-looking white breasts. She looked up, saw me watching, and smiled. I shut the curtain. When her hand came out holding the slip, I walked away quickly, blushing.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Sharla asked.
    “Nothing.” I handed the slip to her, told her to find asmaller size and bring it to Jasmine, that I was going over to look at toys for a minute.
    “Well, hurry up,” Sharla said, but it wasn’t really me she was talking to. And it wasn’t really toys I was going over to consider.
    Jasmine bought hula hoops for Sharla and me; Monroe’s had just gotten them in. And after we got home, Sharla and I spent a long time in the backyard learning how to use them. I was surprised to find that I was at last better at something than Sharla—and so was she. I got the hoop going around my waist almost right away, but Sharla’s kept falling down. After a short while, I could walk around with it spinning evenly, while Sharla had abandoned her waist and was trying to twirl the hoop on her arm. I thought this might be even harder; but Sharla was frustrated and in no mood for tips from me.
    Gypsy, Jasmine’s German shepherd, lay nearby. I took a break to allow Sharla time to catch up, and stretched out close beside the dog. I liked watching the slick black sides of her mouth move back and forth with her panting. Occasionally, a fly would hover around her and she would snap at it. I liked that, too. And if you scratched in the right place, her back leg would react wildly, while her dog face remained utterly impassive. I very much wanted a dog, but my mother would not permit it. Not a dog, not a cat; only a parakeet, which she said she could keep track of. I knew what she meant. A parakeet couldn’t mess up the house. It was the one thing I truly hated about my mother, her devotion to an orderly house. I couldn’t imagine why it meant so muchto her. It seemed to me that she could risk a little messiness in her life in order to gain real pleasure. But she always said, “You let one thing slip, and it all goes.”
    Once, I called my mother outside to watch Gypsy as she ate potato chips, but my mother was not persuaded to my point of view. “She’s drooling,” my mother said, and I said, “No, listen to the
crunch!
” She listened dutifully, then smiled blankly and went back inside.
    Jasmine had called my mother over to show off her purchases when we returned from shopping, and though my mother protested that she was in the middle of making dinner and couldn’t leave, she went anyway. At one point, I saw through Jasmine’s dining-room window that my mother was wearing the new white hat. I stopped twirling my hula hoop. “Look,” I told Sharla. I pointed to the window.
    Sharla looked, then turned away, scowling.
“She
doesn’t wear hats like that,” she said. I supposed I agreed, but I kept watching my mother until she took the hat off and laid it on the table before her. She had looked beautiful in it. And starkly unlike herself. Watching her, I’d felt the way that babies seemed to feel regarding themselves in a mirror: ah! Look! Something lovable, and familiar, and intriguing. But entirely separate.

I take out my credit card, use the plane phone to call home. No