The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (31 page)

“You know what?” Alice says. “I can think of a million times you offered me comfort as a child. I’m going to make a list for you for your next birthday, would you like that?”

Rita presses her fingers to her mouth and nods; then, 240

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d realizing what she is doing, blurts out, “Yes! Yes, I would love that, Alice.”

“You in on this, Randy?” Alice asks.

“I . . . I’ll do something equivalent,” he says. And then,

“Hey, how are you anyway, Mom? How was Las Vegas?”

Again a voice asks for more money, and Rita puts in the little she has left. “It was wonderful,” she says. “And next I’m going to Paris!”

“Good for you!” Alice says, and Randy says, “It’s about time you started living it up! Hey, eat some snails there.

Eww.
”

“What a coincidence, that’s what we’re having for dinner,” Alice says, and then the connection is lost. Rita looks at her watch. She needs to go to the gate. She’ll call her kids back later. For now, she wants to hold what they’ve told her inside herself; she wants to unwrap it more.

At the gate, she sits down in the seat Herman has saved for her. “How’d it go?” he asks, and she nods, tearful.

“Told you,” he says.

She turns to face him fully. “If I go to Paris with you, will you eat snails with me?”

“Well, of course I’ll eat snails with you!” A beat and then, “Are they good?”

“
I
don’t know!” She laughs. Leans back in her seat.

Crosses her legs and e-x-h-a-l-e-s.

As a surprise, Herman has upgraded them to first class.

Rita sits in the wide seat and slips off her shoes. “Ahhh,”

she says.

“I only put us up here because there are fewer people to witness my cowardice if we encounter any turbulence,” he says. “If we start bucking around the sky again and I start weeping, remind me I’m a man, will you?”

S i n C i t y

241

But it is Rita who becomes misty-eyed on the ride home. It is not because of any turbulence; rather, it is because of a series of thoughts she has as she stares out the window at the land far below. From this vantage point, it always seem to her that the earth is being offered up by a benevolent force that understands nothing belongs to anyone unless it belongs to everyone. She presses her forehead against the glass. There is the sky, there are the clouds, there is the red setting sun, there are the fields plowed with such touching precision. She glances over at Herman, who, in sleep, looks boyish, and she resists the urge to pick up his hand and kiss it.

She thinks about being with him in Paris and sees them at an outdoor café just down the street from Notre-Dame, eating croissants after a night of very sweet—and also, my goodness,
surprising!—
intimacy. She is wearing a well-cut dress, beneath which is a bejeweled garter belt (here she begins to giggle and must put her hand to her mouth and stop, lest she awaken Herman), but yes, a garter belt and black silk stockings,
French
black silk stockings, a miracle of near-weightlessness in the hand, an elegant statement on a woman’s leg, and, as they are in enlightened Paris, an even more elegant statement for being on an older woman’s leg. She thinks about what Herman’s duplex might look like, if they might have goulash there one winter night and sit on the sofa watching old movies and holding hands. It is so possible, it seems as if it has already happened.

She thinks of her children, comforting her on the phone, when she had called to ask to comfort them, and then she thinks of a diorama she saw at a natural history museum not long ago: a cavewoman holding a baby and the hand of a toddler, the father with a club over his shoulder heading off for his job of finding food. Rita stared at 242

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d that scene, remembering the perfect weight of a baby, the feel of a toddler’s hand in her own, and wished time could hold still, so that she might have relished a little longer the sweetness of loving small children mixed with that fierce, unequivocal protectiveness. But time does not hold still, and Rita thinks now that it’s a blessing, she thinks that what it means is that your life is free to make or unmake every day. And then she thinks of a time she cut open a red pepper and stood studying the hundreds of seeds there, thinking that before her was the potential for creating many more red peppers—for free!—but what she was going to do was throw all the seeds away. It made her feel bad, it made her feel she was neglecting some essential message; but then she decided she was just premenstrual.

That’s how long ago this incident happened, but she remembers the moment vividly. The red flesh of the pepper, the tiny white seeds,
here you are.
She looks again at Herman, bathed in the pink light of dusk, a nice light for people their age, and smiles. Then she thinks of the people in her retirement center and sees them for the generous and good-hearted people that they are: love makes you love.

She will tell her next-door neighbor Elsie that she met a man, and Elsie will be so happy for her she’ll probably bake one of her sour-cherry coffee cakes to celebrate.

Rita closes her eyes and gently rests her head against Herman’s shoulder. She thinks of Oscar Wilde’s purported last words:
Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.
For her part, she hopes she might say, “Would you mind lifting the shade a bit? I want to see more.”

acknowledgments

Many thanks to Kate Medina, my editor, and Suzanne Gluck, my agent. They are stars in the industry, and it’s no wonder.

Thanks for your guidance and support.

I am lucky indeed to be published by Random House, where everyone seems to do their job with joy and extreme competence. Barbara Bachman, Susan Brown, Barbara Fil-lon, Gene Mydlowski, Beth Pearson, Abigail Plesser, Robin Rolewicz, and Jane von Mehren: thank you.

The following read some or all of these stories and offered kind and perceptive criticism: Amy Bloom, Veronica Chapa, Nancy Drew, Leah Hager, Alex Johnson, Judy Markey, Mary Mitchell, Pam Todd, Jessica Treadway, Michele Weldon, and Betsy Woodman.

A special thanks to Phyllis Florin, not only for being a terrific reader and writer, but for being a friend who can be counted on to always tell me the truth, even when it’s hard.

a b o u t t h e a u t h o r

Elizabeth Berg is the author of many novels, including the
New York Times
bestsellers
Dream When You’re Feeling Blue,
We Are All Welcome Here, The Year of Pleasures, The Art of
Mending, Say When , True to Form, Never Change,
and
Open
House,
which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000.

Durable Goods
and
Joy School
were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and
Talk Before Sleep
was short-listed for the ABBY

Award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Book-sellers Award for her work, she is the author of the nonfiction book
Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True.
She is also a playwright, having adapted her novel
The Pull of the
Moon
for the stage. She lives in Chicago, where she is at work on her next novel.