Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Page A

close my eyes, and try to remember everything about the time Ruth wanted to help me make some pottery. You take what you can get. That is another one of the lessons here.

W e went to the studio she taught in one snowy Sunday afternoon. She shared it with a potter, and she’d told me I could sculpt while she painted. She turned the radio up loud to a rock station and brought out some off-white clay, put it in a mound before me. “Go ahead,” she said, patting it affectionately. Then she went to her easel, picked up her brush.
    “Go ahead what?” I asked. “I don’t know how to do anything.”
    “Make it up,” she said. “That’s what the first guys did.”
    I made a ball. “There.”
    She shrugged. “Okay.”
    “Well,
help
me,” I said.
    “What’s in you?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Jesus,” she said. “You’ve got to loosen up.”
    I sat still, waiting for inspiration. I hoped I’d recognize it if it did come. I felt nothing. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’m going to make a pot to piss in. Then I can never say I don’t have a pot to piss in.”
    “There you go!”
    She worked on her painting, while I created, for reasons unknown, a dog on a raft.
    At one point, she came to stand in front of me. “A dog? On a
raft?”
    I blushed.
    “I love it!” she said.
    I shrugged, smashed it down.
    “What did you do that for?” she asked, incredulous.
    “I don’t know. It was stupid.”
    She sat down across from me, took the clay, examined it. Nothing was left. “Somebody did something to you around this creativity thing, right?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Somebody got you all inhibited about doing anything creative.”
    “Oh, boy,” I said. “Art therapy. How much is this going to cost me?”
    “Can you remember anything that happened?” She was serious, staring intently at me.
    “Actually,” I said, “I do remember one thing. I think I was about five or six, and we were drawing in school, and I kept standing up to do it. I could work better that way. The teacher told me to sit down, but I kept forgetting—I was real excited. So she took my chair away, and then every time we had art after that, she took it again. I always had to stand, every time we had art. Of course it was highly amusing for everyone but me.”
    “See?” Ruth said. She handed me back the clay. “Take it all back. Get it back.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
    “Sure you do.”
    I made another dog on a raft. I showed Ruth and she put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me full on the mouth. There is a pure place in all of us that makes no judgments about anything, ever. That place recognizedwhat Ruth did as being absolutely right. The rest of me was nervous. I stepped back, blushing, and she laughed.
    She had my piece glazed and fired and, when I said I didn’t want it, she kept it. She tied a tiny bandanna around the dog’s neck, laid a baby Frisbee at his feet.
    Seeing that piece again now, I realize how much I need Ruth. She hears my unspoken sentences. My stomach contracts, and I feel the terrible sense of claustrophobia that comes from knowing there is nothing you can do about a situation that is intolerable but tolerate it. I let myself cry a little, quietly; and then, mercifully, I go to sleep.

I am awakened by a soft rapping at the door. It is Helen, asking in her high, little-girl voice, “Is she up?”
    “No,” I whisper, stepping back to let her in. I point to the kitchen and we go in there, shut the door to keep things quiet.
    “There’s a good couple inches of snow out there,” Helen says. “It’s so exciting!” She slides her coat and boots off. She is wearing two different-colored socks.
    “Nice look,” I say.
    “Oh, I’m like this all the time, lately,” Helen says, looking down at her socks. “I forget what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. I miss my exits on the freeway. Sometimes I even answer the phone and then forget I’m on it.” She puts a bag on