Read Online The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page B

afternoon, watching me as I gathered leaves. It occurred to me now that he might have thought I was doing a pathetic version of raking, hence his entrepreneurial overture. He was a slight boy, with shaggy black hair, wearing glasses and a faded blue flannel shirt. About nine or ten years old, I’d guessed. I wondered what he was doing up now. I looked out the window at his house. Dark.
    I went to the kitchen, opened one of the top drawers, and dropped the note in it. The drawer was otherwise empty, the surest sign that a house’s inhabitants really have left. Soon it would become the junk drawer, full of the usual tangle of scrap paper and pens, coupons, rubber bands, random buttons, plastic silverware, and take-out menus. I used to also fill our old junk drawer with pictures torn out of magazines and newspapers, an odd habit of mine. “Why do you
keep
these?” John had once asked, in a rare fit of exasperation. “Why don’t you either
do
something with them or throw them
away
?” “Leave them alone,” I’d told him. “You are not the keeper of the kitchen drawers. I am the keeper of the kitchen drawers. You are the keeper of the workroom drawers and the garage drawers. I don’t tell you to throw out bolts.” “Bolts have a
purpose,
” he’d said. “So do my pictures,” I’d told him. And when he’d said, “Oh? And what purpose is that?” I hadn’t answered him. That was one of the last times I’d had the luxury of ignoring him—his diagnosis had not yet arrived and unpacked its terrible valise.
    But a few days after John complained, I did remove the pictures. He’d been right—they were taking up too much room in the drawer. I pasted them into a small, suede-covered scrapbook, and when it became full, I started another. It became my habit to sit sometimes in the afternoon with a cup of tea, making up stories to fit the pictures. It was a different kind of writing, in a way; nothing I had to put to paper or turn over to a publisher or anyone else. It was imagination back to its purest and best form, unpolluted by thoughts of deadlines and reviews and sales figures and book tours. I liked the way the stories changed each time I flipped through the pages. I liked the way bits of dialogue would come into my head, strains of music, and I liked the way the pictures would sometimes expand in my mind so that rather than seeing just a yellow kitchen, I would see the living room next to it, then the street outside. And look, here came the woman whose kitchen it was, walking down the sidewalk with shopping bags knocking into her knees, smiling hello at a neighbor. Cheeks reddened by the wind. I had many of those scrapbooks by now, and I had unpacked them and stacked them by the chaise longue.
    John never knew I did that with the pictures. I suppose everyone must have his or her own private pleasures. Surely he had his. Trout fishing, that was one—I never went with him when he did that. And oftentimes, in the evening, he took a walk without me and smoked a cigar. Sometimes he disappeared when he listened to opera with his headphones. He would close his eyes, his face full of longing, and I would envy the diva who moved him that way.
    I sat at the kitchen table, hands folded in my lap. Overhead, the light hummed—something I’d not noticed in the daytime. Was that something I would need to get repaired? Whom did you call? An electrician? A handyman? A drop of water hung from the kitchen faucet, not quite heavy enough to fall. From the corner of my eye, I could see my face reflected in the window, and I could see the blackness beyond. This quiet was dense and annoying, just as too much noise was—I wanted to swat at it, to make it go away. I thought of putting on some music, but I didn’t know where the stereo or the radio was and I was too tired to unpack any more.
    But not tired enough to sleep. I’d need to be somnambulating before I went into the bedroom. Even in this new house, the bedroom was a