Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Page B

stood in the center of the room for a while, looking out the window, watching the clouds move across a full moon. There was the faint sound of someone on the phone next door, and nothing else. It was distressingly quiet in that apartment. Even the music I’d put on the radio seemed unable to penetrate a kind of bubble that had formed around me.
    I opened Ruth’s top dresser drawer. I felt guilty looking in it, but I suddenly needed to know something, though I didn’t know what. Ruth’s socks were rolled up and organized according to color. She had underpants stacked up in two piles, one pair directly on top of the other. There was a stack of the tiny cotton T-shirts she wore, folded precisely into fours. I thought, why are these like this? Who has time to do this? And then I realized that what I was seeing was not an obsessive kind of neatness, but loneliness. I got dressed, dried and put away the dishes I’d washed after dinner, and then I went home.
    Later that night, I lay beside Joe as he watched the news. We didn’t talk. But I knew everything had changed. I believe he knew, too.

N ot long afterward, on a bright spring day when Ruth and I were sitting out on her balcony, she said, “I’ve been living here for two years now.” Then, rather suddenly, “I want to go home.”
    “You want to go home?” I asked. “Is that what you said?”
    She nodded, staring straight ahead.
    “To Eric, you mean?”
    “Well, to Michael mostly, I think is what it is. You know, I miss making him breakfast, giving him snacks after school. I’m beside myself when he’s sick. Last time he had the flu, I called him a million times. I kept waking him up.”
    “Maybe he should live with you.”
    “I can’t afford a big enough place. And anyway, it’s more than that. I want … I miss the routine of three people, you know? Do you know how pathetic it is to do laundry for one? I used to think laundromats were interesting, even romantic. But now I think they’re only filthy.”
    “Well,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. Michael will be going to college next year. And think of what Eric was like, really. Do you want that again?”
    “He was good when I was sick. I never told you that. He brought me little flowers on my bed tray. And I … he wasn’t the only one at fault.”
    “I know. I know that.”
    “I want to go home,” she said again, her voicesimultaneously determined and beaten. “I don’t like living alone. I needed to live alone to find that out. Funny, huh?” She stood, walked over to the edge of her balcony and I had a crazy thought that she might jump.
    “Maybe you should talk to Eric,” I said. “Tell him.”
    “I did.” She leaned far over the balcony, and I started to get up, then stopped. “I put on some makeup and some great underwear and I went to see him and said I was sorry, that I thought I’d made a huge mistake and I wanted to try again. I said I understood a lot about what went wrong, that I thought we could fix it. I said we could learn to give each other happiness, that I’d come back next weekend, how about that, and I told him what I wanted to make for dinner that night. I even said we could go out and buy some new sheets together, to get
ready
, you know.”
    “Well,” I sighed. “I’ll miss this place. It’s so pretty. I love to come here.”
    She straightened up, turned around to face me. “Oh, I’m not going back. He has a girlfriend. The paralegal he’s been dating. He said they’re ‘informally engaged.’”
    “What? Are you kidding?”
    “Nope.”
    “Does Michael know?”
    “Not yet. When they tell him, it’ll be formal. They were thinking they’d wait till this summer, when Michael graduates. Then he can have time to think about things, spend some time with both of them together. He can get to know her real well, so they can be pals.” She sat down in her chair, leaned back and closedher eyes, pointed her chin toward the sun. “I think she’s about