Free Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg Page A

see. Although sometimes I remember that I talk too much and then I don’t say anything . Which is also bad. Though probably not as bad. Oh, look at this, logorrhea central, I’m sorry, take out my batteries.”
    He laughs, and leans over the table to kiss her forehead. “I love to hear you talk. And I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean.” He gestures to the front porch. “Want to go out and set a spell?”
    She nods happily. “Let’s wash the dishes first.”
    “No, no; you’re the guest. I’ll do it later.”
    She hesitates, then says, “I don’t want to be the guest. I want to help you clean up. Okay?”
    “Okay.” But something shifts in him. He’s nervous, saying it, and he thinks she hears it; and then he regrets that he has altered the mood in this way.
    Together, they clean up the kitchen, she pointedly silent, now, a dish towel tucked into her skirt band. They work well together, and he feels himself beginning to relax. He likes her a lot. He really likes her. A woman who talks too much and admits it, how refreshing. And it’s nice how much she talks, it’s a welcome relieffrom taciturn women who maintain that cool and blaming reserve. Irene was cold like that, at the end. A few days before she left, she sat stiffly on the sofa beside him, and he asked her, “Where do you go, when you’re here?” They’d been watching Meet the Press , a show they used to enjoy, and they’d even relished the commercials because that offered them time to talk excitedly about what they’d just heard. They were aligned politically, and it reinforced their closeness to carry on together about what they saw as gross errors of the government. Toward the end, Irene no longer talked with him during the commercials but instead continued to stare straight at the screen. They both did. They watched, with apparent interest, something in which neither of them had any interest at all. They sat unmoving, unspeaking, like mannequins, but their faces were absent even of the barely there expressions those storefront figures wore.
    On that day, when he asked her the question about where she went when she was there, she rolled her eyes and walked away, and he watched the rest of the show alone. He was aware of a familiar ache in his gut, and he realized everything in their marriage had come to either sadness or anger. He tried to think of when it all started, but he couldn’t point to a time. He tried to think of what the reason was, but there wasn’t one, really. It had just happened. It was an old story, and it had happened to them: a particular kind of erosion started, was inadequately treated, grew, and finally could not be treated.
    When John was in junior high school, he was in a play, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology . John’s role was that of Fletcher McGee, and his first lines were “She took my strength by minutes, she took my life by hours.” He was troubled by those lines, as he was by those of another character, Mabel Osborne (played by Jill Santos, a radiant brunette on whom John had a huge, hopeless crush). Mabel, speaking about a geranium plantedover her grave, says, “Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst, yet they do not bring water! They pass on, saying: ‘The geranium wants water.’ ” During the weeks of rehearsal, when John heard those lines over and over, he would wonder how people once in love could come to such things. If he could just get Jill Santos to notice him, he would marry her and they would never be like that. They would be so happy, and they would have a bunch of handsome children chasing each other across the front lawn, laughing. Later, when his marriage with Irene became so completely unraveled, he understood all too well about a neglected geranium. A thing like that becomes ugly pretty quickly, and then you just want it to finish dying so you can get rid of it.
    But Amy. Another good thing about Amy is how she dislikes travel, and would not badger him