Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg Page A

nod. “What a bitch,” Diane says. She is seated before her dresser mirror, combing out her hair. “What a whore.”
    I shrug. “Are you going out?” I ask.
    She sighs. “Yes.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    She turns around, her eyes suddenly blank. She laughs, a small sound. “I don’t know.” She looks up at me. “I really don’t.”
    L ater, when I am alone, I take out the shoe box. I stare at my pajama bottoms. What secrets lie in us. What perfection. I touch the dried blood. What told me to do this? What was the first step? Hormones, I know, but what are they? Can you see them? And if not, how do they know? When I asked these questions during our special hygiene class, the gym teacher told me to stop acting up. “That is not what we are talking about now,” she said. “Keep your mind focused. You have the same problem inbasketball.” She was right. I am hardly ever focused. My mind is a slippery thing. Last time we played basketball, when the ball was thrown to me, I took off and ran with it like a football. It just made more sense to me at the moment.
    I fold up my pajama bottoms into a neat square. My mother gave them to me. They are too small, but I am running out of things she touched to put next to me. I slide under my bed, lay the pajamas across my chest, close my eyes. “I hate you,” I say. “Look what you are missing.”
    Her, on a half-circle kind of throne, little gold five-pointed stars floating around her head. She is wearing something blue that does not show the outline of her body. She glows. And she says back through healthy pink lips, “I miss you, too.”
    She used to tell me, when I went to bed at night, that I should hurry and fall asleep. That way, the fairies would come and paint stars on my ceiling faster. I wanted to see them. It irritated me that I had to be asleep before they came. But it did teach me one good thing: just stop looking, and the magic will come.
    I opened my eyes. “Where are you? Is that heaven?”
    Nothing.
    I slide out from under my bed, put my pajamas in the hamper. I stand by my window and look out at the dark parade ground. It has a fierce presence, even empty.
    Cherylanne is at the movies with Bill O’Connell. Diane is with Dickie. I have started my period and I am alone. I put a wide blue ribbon I saved from a birthday present into my hair. I climb into bed with a book. I lay my hand across my stomach, feel the outline of the belt. Just making sure. It’s always that way with the biggest things: they never feel real. You have to keep on checking them forever.
    H e comes into my room later that night, turns on the light. He is holding my pajama bottoms in his hand.
    “Are these yours?”
    I swallow, nod. Diane does the laundry. Did she tell him?
    He looks around the room, sighs, then looks at me. “You know about this?”
    “Yes.”
    “How?”
    “School.”
    “All right.” He starts to leave the room, then turns back. “You soak bloody things in cold water. I guess they didn’t tell you that, huh?”
    “No.”
    “Well, now you know.”
    “Okay. Thank you.”
    “All right.” He turns out the light. I hear his steps going downstairs.
    Here is the thing: other ways are unfamiliar and, in a way, they only hurt. A month ago, when his father died, he burst into my room, stood still for a moment, then said, “Your grandpa died.”
    “Oh,” I said. My grandfather held himself unto himself. I never sat on his lap. He never smiled. When I saw him, he would ask how old I was, and I would tell him; and he would shake his head, asthough he were a little angry. That would be our conversation. He would lean forward onto his cane, groan a little, adjust his upper half, then settle back into himself, staring straight ahead. I didn’t love that grandfather. And the fact of his dying made no difference to me. But I knew I needed to react and so I made myself cry. I put my hands over my face and thought of a book I’d read recently where the dog died. I was