Read Online The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online
Authors: Elizabeth Berg
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big orange ashtray we kept in the center of the table filled to overflowing. Sometimes I’d tried to smoke, too, but it never worked. If I inhaled, I’d have a fit of coughing. If I smoked without inhaling, I’d feel like an idiot. So I’d watched them, watched the lift of their chins and the whiteness of their throats as they blew straight up toward the ceiling, their long earrings dangling.
Also I’d helped drink the cheap bottles of Boone’s Farm wine we bought and I’d helped change the records on the turntable so that we would never be without music. Odetta, we’d listened to. Dylan. Marvin Gaye. Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi and Janis. Also Lou Rawls’s elevated version of “September Song” and Morgana King’s “How Insensitive.” Music had been more important then. We’d put on a record when we got up in the morning; we’d put on another to send us off to sleep. We played music to articulate our own wants and needs, to amplify our burgeoning political convictions. Musicians posed questions we didn’t know we had until we heard them asked. It was understood that if certain songs came on, everyone stopped talking, no hard feelings.
Maddy, Lorraine, and Susanna, those were their names. Maddy was Italian, beautifully complected (it was the olive oil, she insisted), and she was always doing something for you, though she would never let you do anything for her. She was an exquisite cook, even at twenty; she embroidered with great skill, and she was a serious mountain climber—she kept the scary equipment she used in pillowcases at the back of her closet. Susanna wanted to be an actress and was very dramatic about everything—“Oh my
God,
I’ve got a
run
!!!”
—
and she had a kind of charisma that makes me think she probably did make it in theater. And then there was the beautiful, black-haired Lorraine, who, despite her inherent snobbishness and her dark moods, was the one I liked best. Lorraine once poured a drink down the front of a woman’s dress, long before it had been done on film. She told the men she dated that her mother was a Hungarian Gypsy who had castrated her husband. This, strangely enough, seemed to attract them. Lorraine and I once gave our little Christmas tree a Viking funeral: On a railroad bridge, we set it on fire, all its ornaments still on it, and then we cast it into the Mississippi River. The idea, I think, was that a thing of such beauty should not suffer the indignity of being undone; let it go out in glory. I remember when Lorraine had proposed the idea, I’d said, “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” and she’d said, “Of course.”
We lived in a house full of the smells of shampoo and White Castle and patchouli oil. Necklaces hung from window latches and doorknobs and closet pulls, rings were cast off onto saucers. No one had anything so practical as a jewelry box. Books and record albums and clothes were piled everywhere, and the phone rang all the time, often in the middle of the night. Once, a boy named Dan had called at 4 A.M. to tell me I was his Suzanne, and then he sang the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s new song to me. I was honored. Dan’s roommate, Ron, had called me when their phone was first installed—neither of them had ever had his own phone, and they wanted me to call their number to make sure it worked. When I did, the phone rang thirteen times. Just as I was ready to hang up, Ron answered with a stoned “Hello?” “Why didn’t you
answer
?” I said, and he said, “We were
lis
tening.”
It was also Ron who once called me on a cold January night a little after midnight. I had just fallen asleep. “Come over,” he said. “Dan and I were just talking about you, and we want to see you.” I told him I had just gone to bed and I was tired; also, I had an eight o’clock class the next day. “Aw, come on,” he said. “What we were saying about you is that you are real people. If you’re real people, you’ll
Also I’d helped drink the cheap bottles of Boone’s Farm wine we bought and I’d helped change the records on the turntable so that we would never be without music. Odetta, we’d listened to. Dylan. Marvin Gaye. Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi and Janis. Also Lou Rawls’s elevated version of “September Song” and Morgana King’s “How Insensitive.” Music had been more important then. We’d put on a record when we got up in the morning; we’d put on another to send us off to sleep. We played music to articulate our own wants and needs, to amplify our burgeoning political convictions. Musicians posed questions we didn’t know we had until we heard them asked. It was understood that if certain songs came on, everyone stopped talking, no hard feelings.
Maddy, Lorraine, and Susanna, those were their names. Maddy was Italian, beautifully complected (it was the olive oil, she insisted), and she was always doing something for you, though she would never let you do anything for her. She was an exquisite cook, even at twenty; she embroidered with great skill, and she was a serious mountain climber—she kept the scary equipment she used in pillowcases at the back of her closet. Susanna wanted to be an actress and was very dramatic about everything—“Oh my
God,
I’ve got a
run
!!!”
—
and she had a kind of charisma that makes me think she probably did make it in theater. And then there was the beautiful, black-haired Lorraine, who, despite her inherent snobbishness and her dark moods, was the one I liked best. Lorraine once poured a drink down the front of a woman’s dress, long before it had been done on film. She told the men she dated that her mother was a Hungarian Gypsy who had castrated her husband. This, strangely enough, seemed to attract them. Lorraine and I once gave our little Christmas tree a Viking funeral: On a railroad bridge, we set it on fire, all its ornaments still on it, and then we cast it into the Mississippi River. The idea, I think, was that a thing of such beauty should not suffer the indignity of being undone; let it go out in glory. I remember when Lorraine had proposed the idea, I’d said, “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” and she’d said, “Of course.”
We lived in a house full of the smells of shampoo and White Castle and patchouli oil. Necklaces hung from window latches and doorknobs and closet pulls, rings were cast off onto saucers. No one had anything so practical as a jewelry box. Books and record albums and clothes were piled everywhere, and the phone rang all the time, often in the middle of the night. Once, a boy named Dan had called at 4 A.M. to tell me I was his Suzanne, and then he sang the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s new song to me. I was honored. Dan’s roommate, Ron, had called me when their phone was first installed—neither of them had ever had his own phone, and they wanted me to call their number to make sure it worked. When I did, the phone rang thirteen times. Just as I was ready to hang up, Ron answered with a stoned “Hello?” “Why didn’t you
answer
?” I said, and he said, “We were
lis
tening.”
It was also Ron who once called me on a cold January night a little after midnight. I had just fallen asleep. “Come over,” he said. “Dan and I were just talking about you, and we want to see you.” I told him I had just gone to bed and I was tired; also, I had an eight o’clock class the next day. “Aw, come on,” he said. “What we were saying about you is that you are real people. If you’re real people, you’ll
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