Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Page A

“Do you still want a party? I think we should talk about that.”
    “I still want everything,” Ruth says. “I just remembered. I still do. Where’s my wig? Where’s my boobs? Help me. I want to do my eyes, too.”
    L.D. is frowning, Sarah looks a little worried, Helen is beaming, and I’m confused. We’ve been talking codicils. We’ve been visiting graveyards. Now we’ve got to find Ruth’s mascara so she can get ready for a date.
    She goes into the bathroom to fill up the tub, andHelen and Sarah follow her, suggesting things they can do to help. Their sounds are soft and overlapping and full of a kind of subdued cheerfulness, like birds before they go to sleep. L.D. and I are sitting at the kitchen table, immobilized by irritation and astonishment respectively. L.D. tips her chair back on two legs, puts her hands behind her head. “Well. Maybe we should go buy her some protection. I saw some condoms in the drugstore the other day with fireworks on the box.” She moves a toothpick she’s been chewing on to the other side of her mouth, raises her eyebrows up and down.
    “Is this … real?” I ask.
    She shrugs. “What the hell difference does that make?”

O nce, a couple of years after Ruth had moved out, she went out of town to visit a friend, and I stayed in her apartment for a night. I told Joe it was to keep an eye on things, but I think he knew I wanted to try it on.
    At first, I loved it. I changed into one of Ruth’s beautiful silk robes, so smooth against my skin I could barely feel it. Then I turned the radio on to a classical station and made dinner for myself in her little blue-and-white kitchen—breast of chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, wild rice, green beans—all cooked in copper pans. For dessert I had a huge piece of apple pie with ice cream, eaten off a pottery plate. It was sopretty I had to keep picking it up to inspect it from all angles while I ate.
    Then I walked around looking at things. It was so calm, her apartment, so carefully thought out. I examined the artwork on the walls: watercolors of nasturtiums on a windowsill and one of a turtle, head raised expectantly and eyes revealing a kind of patient wisdom. On the bedroom wall was a large print that showed a group of women sleeping outside in a field, some of them with the tops of their dresses loosened to reveal their cleanly white breasts, their soft stomachs. Some of the women lay flat; some were on their sides, and their arms made pillows for themselves or hung relaxed at their sides, and their hands were idle and defenseless and beautiful. Looking at that print, you could feel the warmth of the pale-yellow sun on bare shoulders, you could smell the grass, you could know the exquisite relief of the passing breezes and the presence of other women who lay down with you. I knew that print was Ruth’s favorite, and it was mine, too. Once, when we were looking at it together, I said, “How can they do that? Don’t they have to go to the grocery store and get stuff for dinner?”
    “They feed each other,” Ruth said. “They don’t need a thing.”
    I turned on the television, then turned it off. I looked through the stack of tapes by the stereo: Mozart. George Strait. Glenn Gould and Glen Miller. The Rolling Stones. In the bathroom, I looked in the medicine chest and saw a neat line of aspirin and Tylenol and cough syrup. There was a box of invisible Band-Aids and a nail clipper and a prescription bottle half full of diuretics.What was that for, I wondered. Weight loss? Could she be so silly?
    There were several boxes of bubble bath on a shelf over the tub, and I picked one up to use, but found it empty. All of the others were too, all but one, which I suddenly felt I couldn’t use. It was an illusion of riches, all those boxes. I couldn’t take from her when in truth she had so little. I made my luxury be the hotness of the water, the depth of it.
    When I had finished bathing, I went back into her bedroom and