Durable Goods by Elizabeth Berg Page B

sitting at my desk and my father came over to me, pressed my head into his stomach. I cried for him until he was finished with something deep and private inside. Then he left my room. I felt a terrible relief. I stood up and shivered, like I was shaking things off me.
    It is better when he doesn’t touch. We are used to it. Mostly when he offers you a kindness, you only feel bad, wondering how to hold yourself, how to be now. And wondering, too, about the other times.
    I n the morning, I forget for a minute about my miracle. But then, when I go into the bathroom, I remember and suck in air, happy-quick. I run back to bed, lie still with my eyes closed. I can get pregnant. I can have something its own self, and yet part of me, growing inside. Cells of all kinds, serious and dividing. Hair sprouting underwater. Fingers, and fingernails coming. An ear on each side of a new head, eyelids, moving legs and arms. This is too much! Why can I be pregnant already? At some time it must have made sense. At some time you were not in junior high at this age, but ready to be making your own dinner and rocking your babies to sleep.
    I get up, pour cereal into a bowl, turn on the television to a low volume. I like Saturday-morning television: the drama of Fury and Sky King; the jerk-back kind of watching you do when the Three Stooges are on. I also like Popeye, though why Olive Oyl chooses him over Bluto I do not understand. Those misshapen arms. Never mind that after some spinach they can become helpful things, like mallets. The rest of the time you have to look at them,and the tattoos do not help one bit. Bluto is better looking. His character is a little rough, but I believe that in the long run Olive would be better off with him.
    Once I told some GIs that Cherylanne and I watched Popeye. We were at the PX looking at records and they asked us which ones were the most popular. I said we didn’t know. “Don’t you watch American Bandstand?” one of them asked. He was grinning, flirting a little.
    “We like Popeye better,” I said.
    Cherylanne gasped slightly, then stormed out of the record area into Young Juniors. “Don’t you ever tell anyone that again!”
    “Why not? We do like Popeye better.”
    I saw her face change around with the beginnings of a few answers to me, but she didn’t pick any. She just walked away, left me fingering some pleated skirts. I didn’t understand how those skirts were made, how they kept those permanent dents. I looked at them for a while, on the outside and on the inside, stretched them in and out like an accordion, and then I went home.
    That was the end of Cherylanne watching cartoonswith me. It made me kind of sad, because I thought she still wanted to. There were these forces. They would grab her like canes grabbed cartoon dancers around the neck and pulled them off the stage. “This can be a very difficult time of life,” Cherylanne recently said. She was using her big lavender powder puff to perfume between her breasts. “Adolescence is studied by many famous people because it is so hard.” She sighed deeply, then noticed a chunk of mascara loose on one upper lash. She picked at it, holding her face perfect, until she got it.
    Then she started in with some lipstick. She stretched her mouth open, talked funny through it while she smeared on a creamy layer of Rose Petal Pink. “There are pamphlets at the guidance counselor’s if you want to read them,” she said. She closed her mouth, rubbed her lips together, looked at me. “If you want to know what you’re in for when you’re my age, I mean.” And then, generous, “Some are right for you even now.” She smacked her lips together hard, checked the mirror, stopped a smile just short of itself.
    A fter breakfast, I go over to Cherylanne’s. It is ten-thirty. My father and Diane are still sleeping. It’s good when this happens. I like to run the day for a while.
    No one answers when I call out. I stand for a while in the living