Read Online Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page B

huh,” she would say, and wait a long time. “Yes!” she would say, nodding as though the person on the phone were there before her. It wasexciting. When I was little, I would get on her lap and look through her apron pockets while she was on the phone. I found Kleenex and safety pins, mostly, but sometimes something good: an earring. A shiny dime. Tickets from somewhere she’d been. She saved them all, proof of something.
    I am lying on the living room rug, staring at the radio, at the thin red line that finds the station. The radio is a big black rectangle with a long antenna, kept here on the floor, next to my father’s chair. It is always tuned to his station. I turn it on, hear the loud sound of the baseball announcers. They get so excited. I used to wonder if they were being hit, their surprised “Oh!”s sounding just like it. “Oh! Would you look at that! OH!” But they were just watching the game, telling how it was to see it. I turn the dial, get some fancy piano music. I listen with my eyes closed. This kind of music draws pictures in my head, takes me places, acts out wholestories. Diane doesn’t like it; she always makes me change the station. But when I grow up I will play it loud in my own house, open the windows wide.
    Once, when I was listening to his radio, my father came home. I sat up fast. You weren’t supposed to play his radio without asking. But he wasn’t mad. He sat down and asked me did I know how a radio worked. I told him that when I was little, I thought there were real people in there, swaying before their microphones. There were tiny girl singers in formais, little men in tuxedos, their eyebrows wrinkled from singing like Eddie Fisher. And there were little instruments: saxophones you could fit into matchboxes, pianos no wider than a quarter.
    He interrupted me. “You know better than that now, though, don’t you?”
    “Oh, yes,” I said.
    “So how do radios work?”
    “Well, I … I think there are tubes.”
    “Yes?”
    “And some electricity.”
    “Yes?”
    “You have to plug it in.”
    He laughed. And then he told me how radiosworked. I watched his mouth move, and his eyes, so close to me now, but different than usual. I was trying so hard to listen that I couldn’t. There was a bad hole in my brain. And so when he finished and asked me did I understand, I had to disappoint him. His face lost something. I could feel him pulling back in, like a turtle. I remember thinking that so much about him was unfair. And that starting right then, there was clean space inside me that let me know it was not all my fault. It’s like looking at the pictures of those artists who paint with millions of dots. You stand close for so long and see nothing. You stand back one time and say, Oh.
    D iane comes in, stops when she sees me. “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing,” I say. “Music.”
    She leans over to turn it off. “I hate that music! It’s for funerals.”
    I move to turn it back on, stop. Later.
    Dickie comes in the door, stops there.
    “Come on in,” I say. “He’s gone.”
    “Where?” Diane asks.
    I shrug. Diane looks at me, then at Dickie. “Come on,” she says. “You can come with us.”
    The air has gotten rare. I stand up, pull down my shirt, tighten my ponytail. “Where we going?”
    “To Dickie’s house. I’ll show you the puppies.” She turns to him. “All right?”
    He spreads his hands wide. “Okay with me.”
    I heard about someone the radio called up. They won something and they weren’t even listening. Sometimes all it takes is to be there. I have never even seen Dickie’s house. Of course, I have always wanted to. And I am going there right now, invited like a guest. Any jealous feelings I had about Cherylanne’s being on a date go down like water in the last suck of the drain.
    I t is pale green, Dickie’s house, and it has dark-green shutters. This surprises me: I thought only grandparents had shutters. The lawn ispatchy—bald here and