Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg Page B

the center of the table. “I brought six million muffins.”
    “I’ve gained five pounds from all this goddamn stress,” I said. “I can’t have any.”
    “Ten,” Helen says, pointing to her stomach. “All I can wear are sweat outfits anymore. But I don’t care. I’m making coffee and then I’m eating a lot.”
    Helen is Ruth’s oldest friend. They met in junior high school, were on the cheerleading squad together. Helen’s mother was part Cherokee, and the bones in Helen’s face are the kind your eyes can’t leave. She is one of the most unusually beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and also one of the least aware of her own loveliness. She works in a bookstore, sits on a stool behind the counter reading all day, and makes customers wait if she’s at a good part.
    When the coffee is done, we both take a chocolate-chip muffin. We are on our second when Ruth comes into the kitchen. “Hey,” I say. “Want some coffee? And a muffin?”
    “Sure,” she says, and sits down. She actually looks good, well rested, pink-cheeked. She has her hat on, her lumberjack shirt, kneesocks under her nightgown. She has washed her face and brushed her teeth: I can smell Listerine. We sit at the little table in the pale-yellow, winter-morning sun; and we eat and talk and laugh, and nobody says anything about illness or death or dying. It is so close to the old way. I have the sensation of both sitting at the table and floating above it.
    Helen is telling us about her new boyfriend. His name is Rudolph. He makes pizzas. But his real job is writing poetry. “He read me this weird one last night,”Helen said. “I couldn’t make sense out of it at all, and I knew he really wanted me to understand it.”
    “So what’d you tell him?” Ruth asks.
    “Oh, I just made myself get tears,” Helen says. “I can do it easy. Look.” She sits still for a moment, looks down, and when she looks up again, she does indeed have tears welling up magnificently in her eyes.
    “Wow,” Ruth says.
    “Naturally,” Helen says, “when I do that, I don’t have to say anything. He just thinks I’m moved beyond words.” She rolls her eyes, reaches for another muffin. “I don’t know how long I can keep this guy around. It’s kind of exhausting crying all the time.”
    There is a feeling of a beat being missed when she says this. We none of us acknowledge it. We want to keep going in the direction we were headed.
    There is another knock at the door, and Sarah comes in. “I just have a minute,” she says. She hands Ruth a slip of paper. “This is what I forgot to give you yesterday,” she says. “All of these are places where you can get buried for what you can afford.”
    I have been on an airplane twice where it suddenly lost altitude. It felt just like this.
    “Oh,” Ruth says. “Okay. Good. Thanks.” She puts her muffin down, looks at me. “Can you take me to see one of these before you go home?”
    I nod, feel two parallel lines of an ache start in my throat. If there is one thing I hate lately, it’s the present.
    While Ruth goes to get dressed, Helen says, “I’ll come with you guys if you want.”
    “I wish you hadn’t done this right now,” I tell Sarah. “We were finally not talking about death.”
    “Well, I’m sorry,” she says. “It has to be done. She asked me to help her. It really does have to be done.”
    Neither Helen nor I say anything.
    “I have to get to work,” Sarah says. “Tell her I’ll call her later.”
    After the door shuts, I say quietly, “No. I won’t tell her anything. Just leave her alone.”
    “God,” Helen says. “She’s relentless.”
    “Oh, she’s just … I mean, it does have to be done,” I say. “She’s the only one of all of us who’s taken care of the details of all this necessary … crap.”
    “I know,” Helen says. “But sometimes I hate her for it.”
    “Me, too.”
    Ruth comes into the kitchen, picks up the phone, and while Helen and I drink coffee, calls