The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg Page B

brown eyes and even features. I used to have a good body, but now I suffered the usual humiliations of getting older. Steve looked like an All-American boy, even at his age.
    There was another and more important difference between my mother and my aunt. Where my mother was uptight, Aunt Fran was unfailingly relaxed and open. I had loved visiting her as a child. I used to ask her why she couldn’t be my mother. I’d concocted a fantasy whereby she in fact
was
my real mother; she just gave me to her sister because she had too many other children. But I preferred being around Aunt Fran. She let you crawl onto her lap, she read to you with clear enthusiasm, she told jokes, she let you eat cookies between meals, she sang loudly along with the radio, she helped you build sheet tents and cardboard forts, she asked you about your life because she really wanted to know the answers.
    Once, she’d been lying out in her lawn chair on a hot summer night, and her fourteen-year-old son and I were sitting in the grass on either side of her. We were drinking lemonade from aluminum tumblers with little terry-cloth wraps that kept your hand from getting too cold. We’d just finished brownies that Aunt Fran had whipped up on the spur of the moment: just like that, no problem, made from scratch, no recipe. “Tell me about the stars, Eric,” Aunt Fran had said. And he had, and she’d listened to him in wonder, her eyes wide and staring upward into the darkness above her.
    He had begun by saying, “Well, our sun is a star,” and Aunt Fran had gotten all excited and said, “Really? Really?” I’d listened to the rest of what Eric said, and the whole time I’d had a thought flitting around my brain like a moth repeatedly bumping into the light: This is what a family really is. This. This. This.
    Mostly, when you were around Aunt Fran, you enjoyed a buoyancy of spirit: There was nothing
wrong.
There had been a thickness in the atmosphere at our house, a vague and ongoing sense of something amiss. It was the kind of thing you didn’t particularly notice until you were away from it. But once, when I’d asked Aunt Fran yet again if I could live with her, she sat me down for a serious talk. I was seven, but she treated me as though I were an adult. She told me my mother loved me very much, even if it did not seem obvious to me. She told me my mother had had a difficult time with
their
mother. “It was like Mom was jealous of Barbara,” Aunt Fran had said. “And as far as she was concerned, Barbara couldn’t do anything right, not one thing. My mother was all right to me, but it was very bad, the way she treated Barbara. It broke her spirit. Your mother does the best she can. You have to realize that people have reasons for the way they behave. All I can say is it’s lucky your mother met your father. I don’t know what she would have done without him. I love her with all my heart, but I couldn’t save her like your father did.”
    It had been easy to believe my grandmother had been cruel to my mother; my memories of that grandmother were not good ones either. There had been about her a sense of constant disapproval. You could not touch her white porcelain poodle with the little puppies chained to it. You had to take your shoes off before you came into the house. If you drank from anything but a glass, you were a heathen. Once, in her bathroom, I’d seen a douche bag hanging from the shower rod. When I’d asked my grandmother what it was, she’d whisked it away angrily, saying, “What is the matter with you? What kind of person would ask about such things?”
    When I was around five, I’d been alone with her one day; I don’t remember why. But I’d come upon her when she was staring at herself in the mirror, and I was startled by the look of relaxed pleasure on her face. When she’d seen me, she turned around and regarded me with her usual expression, a half smile that was not really a smile. It was the forced pleasantry of the