Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,137
We were going to the movies, I remember—something starring Joan Crawford. And he’d had a little mishap, I think he’d spilled water on himself, but anyway, his shirt was all wrinkled. Well, I said I’d iron it. And of course Grandma was all upset that a man would be taking a shirt off in her house, but he was very gentlemanly, he always was, and he went in the bathroom and he handed me his shirt through the crack in the door. I liked that he would give me his shirt like that. It seemed so personal. It seemed like he trusted me. And when I ironed it, I got this …” She looks at me, smiles. “Well, I guess you’re old enough to know this, now. My God, Sam. You’re forty-two years old!”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I just can’t believe it!”
“Well, believe it, it’s true. But what happened, when you ironed his shirt?”
“Oh. Well, I got this kind of … sexy feeling, you know? I remember I started with the sleeves, and I wanted them to be perfect, so I was ironing very carefully. And all of a sudden I felt so good, way down in my stomach. Then I ironed the top part, where his shoulders went, and … oh, Lord!” She closes her eyes, smiles. “Well. Anyway, I had the feeling that there was nothing I’d rather be doing at that moment than ironing this man’s shirt. And that’s when I knew. The man I love, I was thinking. And him just sitting there in the little bathroom in his undershirt, waiting for me to finish so he could put it on. Why, it just sent me!” She laughs out loud. “I know that, to you, this must sound very foolish.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I say. There is something in it, the simple act of doing a favor for the one you love. I remember returning a library book for a boy I was crazy about in high school. I liked thinking that his hands had been on the pages, and I liked handing the book to the librarian thinking, For you. From him. Through me.
The truth is, I like any evidence of love between people. I know there are those who thrive on living alone, but how? How, when they know that the cereal box will empty only when they finish it; when they walk into a house where, rather than the mixed evidence of life lived together, there is only the quiet imprint of one? I have brown hair, I am right-handed, I can curl my tongue, and I must have someone to love.
Veronica puts on her coat, and we head for the door. “Any prospects for a roommate yet?”
“One, finally. I’m going to interview him Saturday.”
“ ‘Him’?”
“It’s all right. He’s gay.”
“Oh my Lord.” She stops walking.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We’ll talk all about how terrible it is if I decide to let him move in. But I need someone, soon.”
I get into the car, think about how this morning, I stood in Lydia’s empty room, wondering who could live here now. I need someone who isn’t a mistake, as Lavender Blue turned out to be. The girl is profoundly depressed. Lately, she ventures out of her room only to eat and to go to the bathroom. When she offered last week to start teaching Japanese to Travis, something we’d initially agreed upon to help reduce the rent, I declined. I feared for his worldview, should he spend much time with her.
Recently, she told me that in her opinion, life was nothing but one major disappointment after the other. She’d leaned forward, hands wrapped around the cup of cocoa I made for her, thinking we were finally going to have a pleasant getting-to-know-you chat, just like Anna and the king’s children. Instead, the girl sat with her spiky blond hair and vacant eyes, staring over my shoulder and talking in a near-monotone. “It’s like when I was a little girl and I wanted so much to go on a pony ride. I kept asking my parents to take me on one. I thought I’d be wearing fringe and a cowgirl hat and the horse would be so clean and pretty—a palomino—and it would be prancing and all its decorations would be jingling and I’d be so tall and straight, holding the reins and galloping away. But then when I finally went it was just some sad old brown horse in this crummy field and a man in