Elizabeth Berg - Durable Goods

Also by Elizabeth Berg

THE ART OF MENDING
SAY WHEN
TRUE TO FORM
NEVER CHANGE
ORDINARY LIFE
OPEN HOUSE
ESCAPING INTO THE OPEN: THE ART OF WRITING TRUE
UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG
WHAT WE KEEP
JOY SCHOOL
THE PULL OF THE MOON
RANGE OF MOTION
TALK BEFORE SLEEP
FAMILY TRADITIONS
THE YEAR OF PLEASURES
WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE
THE HANDMAID AND THE CARPENTER
DREAM WHEN YOURE FEELING BLUE

Praise for Durable Goods

A rich coming-of-age novel. Katies fresh yet wise voice evokes that tender passage from being a girl to being a grown-up.

The New York Times Book Review

Wrenching delicately nuanced Berg handles the elements with sensitivity rather than sentimentality.

Chicago Tribune

A gem with never a false moment Durable Goods renders a pitch-perfect image of one girls adolescence. On this small canvas Berg works miracles.

New Woman

Painfully vivid and refreshingly candid a sensitively told story of love, loss, and growth It has a message worth heeding.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

A little gem of a book.

R ICHARD B AUSCH , author of In the Night Season

FOR MY REAL FATHER

An acknowledgment page is a terrifying thing, because you are sure to forget someone you should have remembered. Nonetheless:

I want to thank Howard, Julie, and Jennifer for being my family and I want to thank Phyllis Uppman Florin for being my best friend. They give me the love that keeps the engine running.

I also want to thank these people for their support of me as a fiction writer: Sally Brady and the Wednesday morning group, Andre Dubus and the Thursday nighters, Mike Curtis, Jessica Treadway, Eileen Jordan, Stephanie Von Hirschberg, JoAnn Serling, Elizabeth Crow, Keith Bellows, Fay Sciarra, Nina the Tarot card reader, my agent Lisa Bankoff, and my editor, Rate Medina. They make me laugh, keep me inspired, buy me great meals, listen to my obsessing, and make me know that I am really lucky.

Most importantly, I want to thank you, the reader. I have always wanted to be in your hands. Lets go.

W ell, I have broken the toilet. I flushed, the water rose, then rose higher, too much. I stared at it, told it, No! slammed the lid down, then raised it back up again. Water still rising. Water still rising. I put the lid down, turned out the light, tiptoed out of the bathroom, across the hall, and into my bedroom, where I slid under my bed.

Now I hear the water hitting the bathroom floor. It goes on and on. Niagara Falls, where the honey-mooners go and do what they do. There is the heavy tread of his footsteps coming rapidly up the stairs. I hear him turn on the bathroom light and swear softly to himself. Katie! he yells. He comes into my room. I stop breathing. Katherine! I am stone. I am off the planet, a star, lovely and unnamed. He goes into my sisters room. What the hell did you do to the toilet?

I didnt do anything! she says. Im doing my homework! Katie probably did it!

Shes not even here, he says.

She is, too.

Oh, my heart, aching and loud.

He comes out into the hall, yells my name again. I close my eyes. Shes not here! he says. So dont tell me she did it! You did it! And by God, youll clean it up!

I didnt do it! she yells, and I hear him slap her, and I know that next he will drag her by the arm and point to the mess on the bathroom floor. Thats what I was avoiding. Thats why I am under the bed. I hear Diane start crying, hear her go downstairs for the mop and bucket, like he told her to do. I open my eyes, breathe. The next time I go to the PX I will buy Diane a Sugar Daddy. I look up at the springs in my mattress. Uniform and sensible. Close together in straight lines. Spiraling gracefully upward.

W e live in Texas on an army base, next to a parade ground. Every morning when I wake up I hear a drill sergeant yelling pieces of songs to the straight lines of men marching, marching, all stepping onto their left foot at the same time, all dressed exactly alike, all staring straight ahead and yell-singing back to him. Many of them have terrible complexions. They sound like yelping puppies when they sing, and I feel sorry for them in the same way I feel sorry for puppies: their pink bellies, the way they do not know what will happen to them. The faces on those men do not react; they only obey. It doesnt matter that the heat is awesome, that it rises up in shimmering waves like a live thing; it doesnt matter that later, when those men touch their car door handles, their fingers will burn or that their feet will sink slightly in the sun-softened asphalt of the parking lot. On the marching field, there are no trees. The mens skin will turn pink, then red, but they will not react. Once I saw a man collapse from the heat, fall neatly out of line, and lie still. None of the other men came to make a circle of concern around him. They just kept on marching, and in a while an army green truck pulled up next to the field and two men got out with a matching stretcher.

My best friend, Cherylanne, and I play with the heat. We take off our shoes and, at high noon, walk on blacktop. The one who gets farthest, wins. Also, we make sun tea; and occasionally we try to fry eggs on the sidewalk. They dont cook through. The white becomes solid at the edges only. We call Riff, the dog who lives down the block and is always loose, to come and eat the eggs from the sidewalk. He does a pretty good job, wagging his tail to beat the band the whole time. Then we hose the sidewalk off. And then we hose each other off, stun ourselves with the sudden cold.

Cherylanne is fourteen, and she is pretty. I am twelve and I am not, although Cherylanne said this is the awkward stage and I could just as likely get better. We watch.

Our houses are connected in a row of other houses, six units all in a brick rectangle. Cherylanne lives right next door to me. When we sit out on our front porches, we can nearly lean over and touch. Our fathers names and ranks are posted outside our doors, above our mailboxes. We have look-alike bushes in the front and the back.

Before we moved to Texas, my father came home with cowboy hats for all of us. This is not a joke, he said. Youll have to wear these down there. Its some serious heat. My mother was alive then and he put a hat on her first. It was white. He stepped back, regarded her while she held statue-still. Then he smiled and so did she. He never hit my mother. She was the place where he put his tenderness. And I knew she loved him in a way that was huge, but also that she was afraid of him. Otherwise, she would not have laughed when she was being most serious with him. And she would have stopped him sometimes, like when he lunged up at us at the dinner table. Once, Diane was eating corn when he hit the back of her head, and the corn all fell out of her mouth. At first, I thought it was her teeth. I saw my mother clench her napkin, raise her fist the slightest bit, then lower it. I could feel an invisible part of her reach out to touch Diane, then come to hold me, too.